Abstract
“The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but democracy.” (Kincade, 2012, p. 276)
Elizabeth Kincade draws this conclusion—that democracy is the opposite of patriarchy—based on her review of Carol Gilligan’s (2011) Joining the Resistance. In a political era in which neoliberal capitalism increasingly threatens our (never more than partial) democracies—a partiality now thrown into relief by the 2016 U.S. presidential election—many feminist social workers fear that our work and any progress we have made toward social justice, and the participatory democracy it requires, are more than ever endangered. Thus, we feel ever more compelled to “join the resistance.” This editorial considers the complicated question of how to resist, drawing on an example of local policy advocacy that challenges the care/justice divide, while questioning the problematics of plutocracy masquerading as democracy and the neoliberal co-optation of feminism.
Our application of Kincade’s powerful statement engages with conceptualizations of democracy as a necessary aspect of a just society; as described by Iris Marion Young (1990), “social justice…requires not the melting away of differences, but institutions that promote reproduction of and respect for group differences without oppression” (p. 47). At this political moment, many of us feel that we have moved farther away from this goal than we were just a year ago. We observed the racist sentiments of right-wing White supremacists given legitimacy by media and government leaders. President Trump has, among other social justice atrocities, laid blame for the death of a Charlottesville protestor not only on the racist domestic terrorist who killed her but also on the peaceful protestors joining her to demonstrate. Within the academic community, the right wing has increased efforts to monitor and blacklist professors who participate in critical, intersectional, and equity-focused scholarship. These and many other disheartening events may tempt us the feminist social work academics to retreat, to lay low, to keep our heads down. However, our scholarship and advocacy must continue. The question is not whether but how to proceed.
Thus, this editorial draws and builds on “Feminism in These Dangerous Times” (2017), the first Affilia editorial under the new U.S. political regime, which was also Yoosun Park, Stéphanie Wahab, and Rupaleem Bhuyan’s first editorial as Affilia’s editors in chief. In this compelling and thoughtful articulation of the challenges we face and means to address them via feminist scholarship, they focused on the value of feminist scholarship as practice, the necessity of questioning our certainties, and the importance of generating critical feminist social work research. Our editorial highlights opportunities and considerations for connecting feminist scholarship to political engagement, for engaging in the process of critical reflection and action termed praxis. To illustrate, we draw on our own experiences. We use an example of local policy work—specifically the creation, organizing of support for, and passage of a city ordinance in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1 , to implement the principles of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Through this discussion, we consider how feminist perspectives can help us to reclaim the social justice focus of social work while we support and care for those who are ever more marginalized under the new regime.
The Pittsburgh CEDAW Ordinance
The United States is one of only six countries yet to ratify CEDAW. Adopted by the UN in 1979, CEDAW was signed by President Carter in 1980; however, it has never come to a vote in the U.S. Senate, a step required for its ratification. In response to the refusal of the Senate to consider the ratification of CEDAW, the U.S. Cities for CEDAW campaign began in the 1990s, aiming to implement CEDAW at the local level, raise awareness about the utility of a human rights framework, and build support for U.S. ratification of CEDAW. Pittsburgh’s effort to enact local CEDAW legislation began in late 2015, with the recognition of the devastating local impact of gender discrimination. For example, The gender pay gap in southwestern Pennsylvania is 70 cents paid to women for every dollar paid to men (vs. 80 cents per dollar paid to men nationally). Our county (Allegheny) also has had the highest number of intimate partner homicides of any Pennsylvania county for the past 3 years. There is also clear evidence that women lack basic representation in our government. Although 51% of Pennsylvanians are women, fewer than 20% of the seats in our state legislature are held by women (Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2017). All 20 members of the U.S. congressional delegation from Pennsylvania are men, all but one White, and only 1 out of 23 state legislators from our county is a woman, just elected in 2016. As of 2015, only 9% of the Pennsylvania legislature were people of color (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2015). Lack of numerical representation is a clear indicator that the neoliberal rhetoric suggesting we are a postfeminist, postracial society is quite obviously false. As social workers, we consider such beliefs a barrier undermining all social justice efforts.
We believe that feminist theories and practices can help us fight for an institutional paradigm that will embrace and meet the complex experiences and needs of women and other oppressed groups. The successful passage of Pittsburgh CEDAW legislation in December 2016 made Pittsburgh just the sixth U.S. city to pass a CEDAW ordinance. This ordinance mandates the creation of a Gender Equity Commission, with a paid executive director and 13 volunteer members to be drawn from various constituencies (detailed in the ordinance), and requires the execution of a gender analysis to examine and describe “discrimination against all women, including intersectional discrimination and including trans women, and to identify gender equity problems in the City of Pittsburgh” with a focus on economic inequity, education, violence against women and girls, and health care (Pittsburgh City Ordinance 2016-0905, 2016, p. 4). Social workers were deeply involved in the organizing around and advocacy for the ordinance, initially in the testimony and presentations that helped it pass, and serving on the hiring committee for the executive director of the Gender Equity Commission that supports its implementation. The Gender Equity Commission will “advise…in the development of an action plan to address equity disparities identified by the Gender Analysis” and will be responsible for overseeing the implementation and monitoring of the action plan (Pittsburgh City Ordinance 2016-0905, 2016, p. 4). As of this writing, a woman of color has been hired as the executive director of the Gender Equity Commission, and the next steps are beginning.
Feminist Social Workers’ Role in Participatory Democracy: Providing Care While Pursuing Social Justice
Within a patriarchal framework, care is a feminine ethic. Within a democratic framework, care is a human ethic. (Gilligan, 2011, p. 22)
The current U.S. administration, as Park, Wahab, and Bhuyan’s (2017) note, did not create the misogynist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic attitudes currently on display, though it certainly has helped to foster an environment accepting of their expression and is currently working to enshrine, or re-enshrine, them in public policy. The Pittsburgh CEDAW effort highlights how inequitable representation can make the needs of women, people of color, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, and other marginalized groups experiencing violence and discrimination invisible, as well as obscure the efforts of those working to meet these needs, leaving the voices of the “impartial” unchallenged. In other words, the pathway to the recent expressions of racist and sexist sentiments many progressive Whites and cis-gendered advocates hoped were eliminated by the Civil, Women’s, and Gay Rights movements is directly tied to the lack of representation of women, trans, and people of color in political leadership.
In such an environment, especially, we believe it is necessary to highlight the importance and value of the care work we do as social workers and simultaneously challenge the notion of care work as a woman’s domain. Many social workers provide necessary care to communities and individuals by addressing the immediate needs of people experiencing marginalization. As we know well, moreover, most of those doing care work—social workers as well as child care, personal care, and other service workers—are women. By describing how the devaluing of care work is a product of patriarchy, Gilligan’s work has been enormously influential. At the same time, in her classic book In a Different Voice, Gilligan (1982) problematically contrasts care and justice as two different standards of moral reasoning. Young (1990, p. 121) reveals how the juxtaposition of care and justice is a false divide, explaining that: challenging the traditional opposition between public and private that aligns it with oppositions between universality and particularity, reason and affectivity, implies challenging a conception of justice that opposes it to care.…As a virtue, justice cannot stand opposed to personal need, feeling, and desire, but names the institutional conditions that enable people to meet their needs and express their desires.
Challenging this care/justice binary is a means of challenging neoliberal feminism and the false divide within social work of micro and macro practice, which feminist social work shows us are inextricably linked. We will often be most effective in supporting individuals when we engage them in consciousness-raising that allows them to see the sociopolitical roots of what sometimes seem like (and society tells them are) personal failings. At the same time, our social change work will only succeed when we are able to meet people where they are; micro-level social work skills are enormously useful in this regard. At this bleak moment in our history, we find solace, strength, and encouragement in the work of feminist scholars and activists, be they published academics, die-hard activists, or the newly engaged feminists we frequently encounter in our own teaching, learning, and activism.
The implementation of CEDAW provides an opportunity to accomplish a political project that connects justice and care and is informed by the work of feminist scholars and activists. By examining gender discrimination and violence and analyzing the mechanisms through which city policy and social conditions support them, the CEDAW effort constructively violates a number of key tools of the neoliberal and distributive justice paradigms. First, it expressly challenges the idea of impartiality. Young (1990) holds up impartiality as the political implementation of the “dispassionate investigator” (Jaggar, 1989, p. 158) where the (masculine) politician (from the dominant, White culture) can separate his own needs from the average needs of “others.” Feminist scholars have long determined such an internal separation between positionality and self-benefiting policy making impossible. Rather, this separation benefits homogeneity while making invisible both valuable diversity and the structural tools of oppressive difference, including racism, sexism, and classism. An effort, such as our local CEDAW legislation, that sets out to explore difference expressly, will be better informed than the so-called “impartial” politics and has the potential to lead to more just social policy. Second, CEDAW efforts helpfully threaten the public/private divide by using a political (i.e., public) project to examine the experiences of women not only in the workplace but also in their homes and families (i.e., private). Third, by examining women’s lives in Pittsburgh with an awareness of hardships caused by institutional and structural racism and heteronormativity, CEDAW leaders endeavor to effectively implement the feminist method of intersectionality. Finally, CEDAW efforts are an exemplar of the interdependence of micro–macro practices. In a climate where neoliberal policies often result in social workers focusing on individual change to the exclusion of changing the unjust social environment, CEDAW’s politicization of care recognizes that the individual needs of women must be addressed through both micro- and macro-level interventions. These methods align with feminist practice that focuses on collective advocacy for structural and community change. Additionally, though local CEDAW legislation alone will not create a truly representational democracy in our nation, or state, or probably even Pittsburgh, it nevertheless seeks to recognize difference and empower the women whose lives it aims to improve. In this way, our CEDAW efforts present a microcosm of a participatory democracy.
Troubling Neoliberal Feminism Through Political Engagement
Social justice is an ideology and an action. (Reflection from a student in a feminist social work course)
Park et al. (2017) note that many feminist social work scholars call their work “feminist” without explaining what makes it so or engaging with feminist theorizing and debates. By not explicating what we mean by feminism, we risk its co-optation. We note, therefore, that the feminism undertaken by the local adoption of CEDAW, the ordinance created through the collaborative work of a grassroots coalition, is explicitly intersectional, nonbinary, and inclusive. It mandates, as a first step, a gender analysis that considers intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, immigration status, parental status, language, ability, and age, and the ways in which these identities function in the mechanisms that allow discrimination to persist in our city. It also defines “women” as “all persons who identify with the sex category woman, whether or not assigned to that category at birth” and delineates that “gender equity” includes “the redress of discriminatory practices and establishment of conditions enabling all persons identifying as transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming to achieve full equality” (Pittsburgh City Ordinance 2016-0905, 2016, p. 2).
The co-optation of feminism by neoliberalism is particularly troubling problematic for feminist social work (Goodkind, 2009). Empowerment is perhaps the best example of this. In its original sense, empowerment was arguably the feminist method, a melding of micro and macro that involved the development of critical consciousness, growing confidence in one’s abilities and actions, and connection with others, which enabled people to enact change at the personal, interpersonal, and political levels (Gutierrez & Lewis, 1999). Changes at these levels are interdependent, meaning that personal and interpersonal changes are necessary steps in the process toward achieving broader social changes, at the same time that the development of critical consciousness constitutes a necessary step in changing one’s views of oneself.
However, popular empowerment discourse is not the kind of empowerment originally conceived of by feminist social workers aiming for collective social change (Bay-Cheng, 2012). Rather, empowerment has become a buzzword within and outside of social work that is often vaguely defined and is, at times, used in extremely problematic ways—for instance, within the juvenile justice system in ways that focus on “empowering” girls to be compliant inmates and independent. Rather, empowerment has become a buzzword within and outside of social work that is often vaguely defined and is, at times, used in extremely problematic ways. For instance, within the juvenile justice system programs that train girls to be compliant inmates and independent adults do not empower them but instead set up a culture where girls are blamed for their own marginalization (Goodkind, 2009). This version of empowerment has been enabled by what has variously been called choice feminism, postfeminism, or commercialized feminism, that is, a neoliberal co-optation of feminist principles and goals (Goodkind, 2009; Ferguson, 2010). In these versions of feminism, exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) Lean In, external barriers and constraints are minimized or ignored and girls and women are told they can achieve whatever they want, as long as they speak up and believe in themselves. However, such ideas are antithetical to the collective efforts for social change advocated by other versions of feminism.
What better way to challenge the neoliberal co-optation of feminism than to engage in collective efforts to develop supportive social policies that can enable all of us to thrive? Yet, under a neoliberal version of feminism, the implementation of local CEDAW legislation might play out in a way that does little to further social justice efforts. It could find gender inequity to be a result of women’s failure to comply with the rules of business and community. Such conclusions would smack of victim-blaming rhetoric enabled by both neoliberal feminism and neoliberal social work. As critical social workers have argued, social work has become complicit in neoliberal governmental regimes, by holding clients accountable for social inequities by focusing only on micro-level change, by implementing (often under duress) business (specifically profit)-oriented models that limit choice and further marginalize clients, and by devaluing care through poor compensation of frontline social workers (Ferguson & Lavalette, 2006).
By critically applying feminist theories and methods in political engagement, social workers can counter the devastating effects of neoliberal capitalism on the most marginalized among us. Through such a lens, CEDAW legislation can instead be implemented to counter the negative consequences of neoliberal feminism specifically for women and girls as well as for all those instructed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. A critical gender analysis can be the first step in a political project that expressly rejects paternalistic “impartiality” and the public–private divide that juxtaposes care with justice.
Conclusion: Uncertainty and Critical Self-reflection
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. (Audre Lorde, 1984, pp. 132–133)
Young (1990, p. 116) explains how participatory democracy necessarily includes members of diverse groups: If we give up the ideal of impartiality, there remains no moral justification for undemocratic processes of decision-making concerning collective action. Instead of a fictional contract, we require real participatory structures in which actual people, with their geographical, ethnic, gender, and occupational differences, assert their perspectives on social issues within institutions that encourage the representation of their distinct voices.
As White, middle-class, heterosexual, nonimmigrant, cis women social workers, we recognize that we will not adequately understand the experiences of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia of many of the people for whom we advocate justice. Feminism has been justifiably criticized for representing the interests of women with a similar standpoint to ours and for excluding women with a multiplicity of other experiences of oppression. Young reminds us that we may not ever completely understand another’s experiences, but we can certainly honor and respect them and create a society in which we do not try to erase difference but value it. Young also reminds us that there is no substitute for the messy democratic process and that we must continue to engage in the complicated work of coalition building, listening, discussion, and compromise (see also, Young, 1994, for more on how to acknowledge and combat gender oppression without essentializing women). Mindful of those who are always asked to yield, the compromise must be asked of the more privileged among us, and we must listen and participate with cultural humility (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998), which means not assuming we know or understand another’s perspective and engaging in an ongoing process of critical self-reflection.
In Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sara Ahmed writes, “There is no guarantee that in struggling for justice we ourselves will be just. We have to hesitate, to temper the strength of our tendencies with doubt, to waver when we are sure, or even because we are sure” (pp. 6–7). It can be difficult to give ourselves permission to not be certain, but we believe acknowledging and accounting for the complexity of our challenges is the only way we will be able to meaningfully address them. Recognizing our positionality, Sara as a faculty member and Kess as a doctoral student, we are glad to write this together and to engage in this care and social justice work embedded in the feminist social work community. We invite you to join us by critically reflecting on what feminism means to you, starting or continuing conversations with those with difference experiences and perspectives from you, engaging politically, submitting your critical feminist scholarship to Affilia, and cultivating the next generation of feminist scholar/activists.
In conclusion, we find the pursuit of participatory democracy exemplified by Pittsburgh’s CEDAW legislation to be one way to work toward a more just society. The pursuit of justice has always been a long and challenging road. Under the current U.S. political regime, the personal consequences of its pursuit seem potentially more risky. However, the neoliberal depoliticization of social work, of care, and of the individual experience, have contributed to an environment that has allowed for the mainstreaming of hate and injustice. Social workers, as care workers, are as much beneficiaries as champions of any gains in the politicization of care. We, together with our clients and communities, must work to reconnect care and justice and, in so doing, create a society in which all have the support and opportunities needed to thrive.