Thesisizing

Hmm. . . I should look up the original Greek for thesis and make the verb form that way but I'll save that fascinating information for the next post.

I'm in thesis-land for the weekend. I'm writing my thesis on the non-fiction works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Most people know her from her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is far and away the best piece of fiction she ever wrote, but hardly anybody reads her non-fiction anymore. I'm interested in placing her in the Pragmatist tradition alongside Dewey, James, DuBois and company. She is often claimed as a sociologist but she called herself a philosopher and due to her total lack of quoted statistics, I am inclined to think that she designated herself correctly. Those sociologists: they claim Durkheim and DuBois and Weber and almost any philosopher from 1850 on who wrote about social philosophy. Very naughty of them to poach so.

Gilman's major non-fiction work is "Women and Economics." In this book she puts forward the still startling idea that women have a right to specialized labor outside the home. A right, not a privilege. She supported universal kindergarten, early childhood education, and daycare. She, having been deprived of it herself, said that women must have the same opportunities for formal education as men and then the same employment prospects. She very strongly emphasized the importance of the nature of the work over the amount of pay.

Gilman thought it immoral that anyone should have to do work that they were not suited for because they needed more money. She thought it immoral that women were kept in the home to cater to the needs of its habituants exclusively, conducting endless undifferentiated labor (i.e. switching from cleaning to mending to teaching to cooking and back and forth all the day long.) Women, she thought, had as much right to be a part of the world, voting and working, as men did because they were human also. Too much emphasis had been placed on sex characteristics rather than human characteristics and we had forgotten that women were human before they were women.

This resulted in an excess of romanticism, poor female physiology, prostitution, disease (venereal) and the immolation of half of the world's abilities on the altar of the idea of home. To replace what Gilman considered to be an archaic idea of the home, she proposed the construction of apartment buildings with communal gardens, day care centers, exercise centers, restaurants and apartments with no kitchens. She thought that the kitchenless home would be a healthier place, freeing women from the labor of preparing food or having to fix two dinners, one for children and one for the husband, and also make the home easier to clean. Everyone must have a room of his or her own: privacy was essential to humanity and women, in particular, had been too long denied any such sanctuary.

Gilman was sufficiently well known in her time that several such apartment buildings were actually constructed and a few still exist in the Northeast. Her ideas were similar to those of Melusina Fay Peirce, a philosopher in her own right married to Charles S. Peirce the pragmatist philosopher, but she was more radical in that she suggested that women should be allowed to have the same kinds of work as men while Peirce took women out of the home to work co-operatively but also to work at women's labor (sewing, cooking and so on.)* Both put forward the idea of sharing the labor of the household communally in order to save expense and women's time.

I could go on and on, which I suppose means that I have done my research and that is a good, but I shall stop here for now and in the next post or so I'm going to dig in to the problem of work with reference to Gilman, having been inspired by this post of Kate's on the Agonies and the Ecstasies.

*See "Co-operative Housekeeping," Peirce, Mrs. Charles S. It's out of print but can be found on Google books. A fascinating read.

Pajamas, Bipolar Disorder and Capitalism

I want to know when I’ll have things together again. I’m entirely useless in December: it takes me quite a while to get over being away for Thanksgiving. That whole process is hampered by my knowing that I’m going away again in three weeks. Then I go away again, act surly around my family and come home full of woe.

Now that I’ve been back for seven days (really? that many already?) I’m starting to feel settled in again. I am looking forward to getting back to a real schedule with school and work and church. That’s the main difficulty with going away. I get jogged out of my routine and then the bipolar disorder gets the upper hand and I forget how to get dressed and eat and sleep, which rather gets in the way of doing anything at all.

Worrying about staying on top of things has me thinking. I’m not good at it. I do best in a well-worn rut, so I’ve been running around trying to make mine a little deeper before school starts. Some of the things I’m trying to get under control are reasonable and unequivocally good for me like eating and not wearing my pajamas all day and sleeping. Others I wonder about. They seem to be concessions to capitalism and, though they are often taken to be innate to human nature, I’m not sure that they are.

I worry about this because I live in capitalism. I don’t know whether I’m against it or not: at the moment, I’m just trying to figure out how to live in it. We tend to accept capitalism as an objective fact but to me it appears instantiated in history, crafted by human theory and a not entirely predictable force in the shape of the world. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to fit very well into the social structures capitalism has created. I’m not the only who doesn’t fit into the current ideal of human being that modern capitalisms require. Nuns don’t, for example, and neither do various of the disabled, nor certain criminals. Nor do lottery players and inheritance beneficiaries: they’re after money not tied to their own labor. But all these people still exist and it seems worthwhile to theorize capitalisms that might include them and include me.

One aspect of modern capitalism that seems worth exploring in this light is our collective concern with time. We have bound time and work together in such a way that their meanings have significantly altered. If we look back to John Locke’s Second Treatise*, we will see that he identifies ownership and by extension tradability and value with mixing one’s labor with the material world. Time, except that labor must pass in its duration, does not enter into the value of work as a sufficient component. The specialization of skills, the usefulness of the finished product, does. What happened that we are now fixated on forty hours a week as a valuation of labor? Can we have an economy such that individuals can have control over their labor rather than the other way around?

Attempts at answers will be found in the next post.

* “. . .every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, italics his. Quoted from page 19 of the 1980 Hackett edition, C.B. Macpherson, editor.