Then life is full of new life

The Ripple Effect

One hard thing
just seems to follow another ...

"Care, Justice & Gender", Chapter 1.

Chapter 1

Feminism and the Family

When I first encountered Harriet, she had arrived in my office seeking couples therapy. She was a frightened woman wearing a brave smile, profoundly torn between her desire to be a good wife and mother, and yet, also, her need to be a writer: how to be for others and for herself. And maybe, I thought to myself, her problem is that she really believes that she should be voicing her desires in reverse order. Her culture, the world in which she lived, had handed her the script of motherhood and how to be the perfect wife. But where was it written that she was more than these roles? What had become of the page on which she was to write the story of her own life, the script that would describe that excess of herself that was so much more than these roles? At the very heart of her problem was the conflict of how to care for others and care for herself, in a way that ensured that everyone’s needs were fulfilled.
The impetus for her call to me last year - just one more wife taking care of the relationship by initiating therapy in a time of marital distress - was the arrival of her husband, home after a day’s work in his publishing company, looking for her article in the next edition of his journal: “Where is that piece for the ‘Souvenir’ which I promised the editor I would get from you? You only have one day left to finish it and I must have it before tomorrow.” Harriet said that she asked him, with a testiness produced by sleep deprivation, how she could be expected to produce when all she had done was reproduce. Here she was, still nursing one teething baby, minding two toddlers just able to walk, and the washing piling up around her. She said the best response her well-meaning husband could manage was, “Look, the housework will still be there tomorrow and there is no end to the babies teeth as far as I can see... You have Mina to help you in the house now. And, I don’t know what your genius is for if it’s not to help you out of a scrape. Why don’t you just sit down at the kitchen table with your laptop and you can supervise Mina at the same time. You’ll get enough moments here and there to get the article done”. With a wry smile, Harriet tells me she tried. With the baby on her lap and the laptop on the table ...
This isn’t a case study in the usual sense, but a modern rendering of the first version, produced in 1838 by the twenty-seven-year-old, Harriet Beecher Stowe, which actually continues like this:
“In ten minutes she was seated (the baby in her lap); a table
with flour, rolling-pin, ginger and lard on one side, a dresser
with eggs, pork, and beans, and various cooking utensils on
the other, near her an oven heating...
“....Mina, you may do what I told you, while I write a few
minutes til it is time to mould up the bread. Where is the ink-stand?
“Here it is, on top of the tea-kettle.”
[Interruptions]
“Come, come, you see how it is ... We must give up the writing
for today.”
“No, no; you can dictate as easily as you can write. Come, I can
set the baby in this clothes-basket and give him some mischief or
other to keep him quiet; you shall dictate and I shall write. Now ...
what shall I write next?”
“Mina, pour a little milk into this pearlash ....and etc”
This was the original Stowe, trying to make light of her attempts to write and simultaneously trying to fulfil her duties as wife and mother. Another child and two years later she had a near-breakdown. It was twelve more years before she produced her classic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was finally published in magazine serial instalments, much of it written at the kitchen table, as she wrote in bursts between housework and child rearing.
What is really worrying about this story is that for our modern day Harriet, facing the identical conflict over a century and a half later, the same tension persists. There has been a veritable flood of books written, some tragic and some comic, all asking the same question: How is a woman to balance her home and her work life? How can she care for herself and for others without someone missing out?
The answer to why this problem persists over the centuries is found in the family, what we like to call ‘the basic unit of society’. It is here that we learn, each generation teaching the next, what it is to be a good wife and husband, a good mother and father, what qualities, virtues, and responsibilities are expected of each of us in these roles. Father provides the food and mother cooks it. He mows the lawn and she cleans the carpets. Big boys never cry and little girls always sympathize. It is here, in this institution, that gender, how we learn what constitutes our feminine and masculine identities, is formed and reformed. Most importantly, we are taught that these identities are never to be confused. Each sex is handed a script that informs us that we are radically different from the other. As we follow this script we are constructed in opposition to the other.
While women are still tormented by the seemingly irreconcilable tensions that caused the near mental breakdown of Harriet Beecher Stowe, there have been changes. The questions have persisted but the environment in which they are asked is now a very different one. The contours of family life have radically shifted since women entered the world of paid work. And feminism has been demanding these changes and theorizing them at the same time. Whether feminism is the cause or the effect of a different version of family life, the issues it raises are at the heart of the family. What is beyond question is that it has succeeded in producing a very different set of variables out of which we seek to craft a solution.

The Family - a new construction
Where the notion of what we meant by ‘family’ was once fixed it is now fluid. We have couples of the same or opposite sex, with or without children, sometimes married and sometimes not. These couples separate and re-form with others into the blended family where one parent brings his or her children into a new union, often with a partner who already has children. The single parent family - nearly nine out of ten of them in Ireland headed by a woman - has so increased in numbers as to be no longer an occasional phenomenon but an accepted form of family life.
The reasons why we now form partnerships have also changed, evidenced not least by the use of the word ‘partner’. The focus on the part of both men and women has shifted from ‘marriage’ to ‘relationship’. Once, we envisioned two radically separated spheres, the public one, reserved for men only and the private one, to which women were confined within a patriarchal system which understood that a woman’s place was in the home. The combined forces of our governments, our churches, and our employers all supported this ideal. States passed all the necessary legislation that enshrined the ensuing division of labour. Employers expected that every worker would have a ‘wife’ at home. Where once marriage was too often based on contract, property considerations, social position, and legitimate procreation, young people now require that it be rooted in love, companionship and sexual pleasure. Indeed, it may now be said that a loving and mutually satisfying intimacy is considered the rationale and ultimate goal for marriage.
As we exchange spouses for partners, the change in terminology generates new expectations. A partner is to provide us not only with sexual fidelity but also with a very personal commitment to emotional accessibility, to open and honest communication, to time being spent together, and to a sharing of all the tasks of daily life. Men must learn the new skill of being willing and able to talk about their emotions. Women have always been socialized to exchange life’s really important information. They know how to discuss emotional problems with other women (what men have called ‘gossiping’), but now, for the first time, it is women who have become the providers of what is considered the foundational and most important aspect of marriage.
We also assume equality, to the extent that we no longer deem it necessary to articulate the reasons for it. And we assume it, especially with respect to that of which we do not like to speak in the same breath as love - power. Within the modern partnership, women have gained power and voice because they have gone to work and earned money. With money come options and room to manoeuvre both physically and psychologically.
It is the number of women entering the workforce that has also radically reshaped the contours of family life. For example, in 1986, 53% of Irish families were of the traditional and idealized type, comprising a father at work and a mother at home caring for the children. Ten years later the number had fallen to 39%, and today the figure is 24%. In the United States of America, in 2002, females aged 16 years and older comprised 46.6% of the workforce. It is truly extraordinary that some groups in our society can keep trumpeting the phrase ‘family values’ without adverting to the fact that for just over three quarters of our families, the notion of ‘family’ has undergone a radical shift of meaning. Family values are clearly no longer limited to the traditional structure.
If the number of women entering the workforce has put pressure on the idealized category of motherhood, lone parenthood has presented an equally large challenge to traditional notions of the family within the Western world. For example, in the United States, in the period 1978-1996, the number of babies born to unmarried women doubled. Although this dramatic rate of increase has slowed in recent years 32% of all U.S. births are still to unmarried women. Similarly, births outside of marriage have increased over the ten years leading up to 2003 from 30% to 40% in England and Wales. In the Ireland of 1980, 5% of births occurred outside marriage but by 1996 this figure had risen to 25% and today it stands at 31%. It is surely noteworthy then, that a third of the families in this state can be comprised of women and children only, with no husband present. Although there may be a male partner in some homes, this statistic is still prior to taking account of separation, divorce and widowhood.
Women now want a real relationship that allows them more time to be with their partners, and because they are working, and because they know they will have primary or sole care of the children after separation, they are also having fewer children. At present we are failing to reproduce ourselves. It is self-evident that women’s responsibility for child care is dramatically reduced by a decline in family size. She now has the means to control her fertility and many choose this option.
If a woman does not enjoy the relationship she had hoped for, she now has the means to leave it, and again many do so. Irrespective of the economic background of the mother or the duration of the marriage, more women are choosing to be lone parents. Ten years ago, the AIM (Action, Information and Motivation) Family Services figures showed that 80% of this Irish agency’s clients who sought separation were women who were likely to be middle class, in their forties, in paid employment and with at least one child, although more than half of them had three or more children. While three quarters of these women had been married for more than ten years, nearly half of them had been married for more than twenty years. These women, who were now choosing to separate, had been a very married group.
So it seems that women have now reached the point where they are refusing to be tied by their own apron strings, not just in Ireland but across Europe, America and all of the ‘western’ world. THE family is not what it was. Women require equality in their relationships, they now work for money too, and if their relationship is not satisfactory they often leave. This all sounds as if women have ‘arrived’, that the feminist search for the Golden Age has succeeded, and all is well in the land. But is it? What are the realities for women, both physical and psychological, that lurk behind the statistics?
Looking across the centuries, Harriet believes that she can and should write, but fears that only guilt, even self-loathing, will result if she sees herself, or is seen by others, to neglect her duties as wife and even more profoundly, as mother. As the psychologist, Jean Baker Miller has pointed out such perceived selfishness may well lead to the destruction of the relationship she holds most dear. Women know that when a relationship is damaged it can more easily be abandoned, yet they will endure a great deal to avoid the guilt of feeling responsible for the break-up of a marriage. In fact, as Carol Gilligan has phrased it, she will forgo ‘relationship’, for the sake of ‘relationships’. That is to say, she will not tell her truth, she will forgo real intimacy, if she fears that it will cause trouble or even the dissolution of her marriage or partnership. Women become Janus-like, looking in two directions at once. Not feeling free to articulate their experience produces a deep sense of ambivalence which frequently leads to depression and sometimes even to mental breakdown.
The partner of a woman like Harriet sits in my office, stunned at the realization that his marriage has gone to straw. He believes that his wife has great talent, he is truly proud of it and encourages her to develop it. But he still believes that she is primarily responsible for the home and child-rearing. He does not want to do half her work, women’s work, so that she is freed to live as he does. In persistently refusing to do housework, he is failing to give her what she, somewhat sadly, would have described as ‘emotional support’. He also believes that she is better at it than he is, and in that he is right; she has had a great deal more practice.
There is a much talk abroad about the New Man but is he a visible reality or a mirage created by the backlash against feminism? According to a study undertaken for the Irish Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform in 2005, 71% of Irish men do no cooking/food preparation and 81% do no cleaning/laundry on a weekday, and these figures change little on the weekend. In contrast, over two thirds of women spend time on these activities on weekdays and weekends. On weekdays, women spend almost five times longer on caring activities than men. At the weekends women’s employment time declines but women’s unpaid work and caring time remains virtually unchanged. This leads to women having significantly less leisure time than men. Women working part-time (less than 30 hours per week) spend more time on a combination of paid work plus domestic work and caring than either women or men who work full-time. Finally, the report concludes: “We have also shown that women, carers and those with young children spend a greater proportion of their day doing multiple activities at once. Those with children are also more likely to feel rushed and stressed during the day”.. A conclusion that could have been written by Harriet Beecher Stowe herself. It seems that we need to treat with caution the appearance of some fathers taking their children to the park or pushing a stroller on the street. In public, we see the New Man but within the privacy of the house he quickly disappears.
Men should feel that they are facing the same problems. They allow their fatherhood to be reduced to begetting and providing, missing out on a great deal of joy with their children and continually running the risk of losing the partner they say they love. But men don’t seem to mind too much about the home, and, in fact, think it is a good thing for mothers to be the ones in charge of the moral nursery of our society. They complain about being seen as a “walking wallet” but take little evasive action. Harriet’s husband provides some paid help in the form of Mina, but he does not send his wife to the study while taking responsibility in an on-going way for what are assumed to be her duties.
Stowe has described the fundamental tension experienced by many working mothers who find their way into my office. A woman knows that if she stays within the home, she avoids challenging the traditional understanding of marriage and the family and causes less stress for herself in not requesting help from her partner with housework and chid care. Yet, few families today can afford what is now seen as the luxury of having the woman remain a full-time housewife. In the main, in our relatively affluent culture, women in committed relationships are mothers, housekeepers and paid workers. Most of these women choose part-time employment as a way to supplement the family income. Many have chosen to return to this form of work having found the strain of being a ‘super-mum’ with two full-time jobs, an intolerable and unmanageable burden. Of course, if she has no children, then it would appear somewhat easier to maintain the professed equality and mutuality that the couple agreed upon before the marriage. Nonetheless, as the 2005 Irish study shows, most women in this country can still state that even before the arrival of children they are expected to be primarily responsible for the cleaning, washing, shopping and cooking for their male partners.
In my experience, the arrival of the first child immediately heralds an almost universally unquestioned return to more traditional, gender stereotypical behaviours by both parents. Women find it difficult, if not impossible, to insist that housework be shared equally - generation after generation. The cycle they inhabit is a pernicious one: unpaid female work in the home continually reinforces women’s lesser value within a society where income is the indicator of worth. Being of lesser value makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to insist on an equal division of labour. Far too frequently, men respond with “but everything I do is for the family” and yet, as they let equality slip away, they continually risk losing what it is they profess to value.

Feminism - equal but different?
Second wave feminism of the 60s and 70s wanted to change the rigid division of labour between men and women. Women were now educated to the same level as men and they no longer wanted to stay at home and endure the drudgery and mindlessness of housework so well described by Betty Friedan in her Feminine Mystique (1963). At that time, the feminist manifesto was a gloriously uncomplicated one - at least in theory. It sought equality. Women would enter the public world of paid work, they would have the satisfaction of a job well done and the gratification of the status and income that went with it. Simultaneously, as she disengaged from the home, he would participate in this cultural revolution by taking responsibility for his share of domestic life. After all, we could now speak about equality and equality means equal rights and equal duties.
What was sought, unequivocally, was radical social transformation. We know now that this did not happen. If women are mentally depleted when confined to the home, or physically exhausted by adding paid employment to housework, one could ask if the feminist movement has benefited women in Ireland and elsewhere. With minimal creche facilities, inadequate parental leave and, most impacting of all, no increase in the amount of housework undertaken by their partners, it can be surmised that employed women will be engaged in two jobs, one of which is poorly paid relative to men’s wages and one that is unpaid, and both of which are therefore accorded lesser status.
The question of status is an important one for our mental health, in the sense that we understand it to mean self-esteem. Each of us enters a relationship in the belief and hope that it will help us to become our best possible selves. Mary is a bank official at management level, earning an excellent salary. She has a husband and two teenage sons. Although she loves her job, she comes home tired after a full day at her desk, emails, phone calls, meetings, and staff with personal problems in and out of the office. But she enjoys the challenge, the stimulation, the companionship, and lunch time with friends. Driving through an hour of traffic snarl, she opens the front door to be greeted by sports bags full of dirty clothes left in the hall, dishes in the sink and work tops littered with the left overs of snack-making. Nobody had bothered to take up and put away the pile of clean clothes she had left at the bottom of the stairs. Her husband, Brian, owns his own furniture business and his hours are erratic. He arrives home usually late, but never early; Mary actually suspects he stays away as long as possible to avoid the initial mess and the struggle with homework. He arrives most evenings just about in time for the dinner that she has cooked. By 7pm she is really angry:
I am so fed up when he walks in the door, I’m sure I’m not worth
coming home to. I know I scowl and look at my watch. ... what
annoys me most about all of this is the unfairness of it all. No,
what annoys me most is that I can’t say how unfair it is. If I say
nothing, I fume inside. If I say anything there is a row, and probably
the silent treatment for the rest of the night. He always says something
like, “I had a late customer, and I can’t afford to turn them away”. But
I am always behind at work, under pressure there, but I can’t ignore
the boys. So, I say nothing ... I can be quiet and keep doing it but I think I’m getting depressed, I feel I’m exhausted and I know I’m fed up.
Mary had done her best. She had achieved the goal set for her by the ‘equality’ feminist. Her success at work means that she is one of the statistics that have been compiled of women in senior management. She is cited as evidence that women have arrived. Because of her, people say the glass ceiling is getting thinner.
But Mary, a typical case of a woman feeling she cannot speak her mind, afraid of being called a nag, has paid a high price for her ‘equality’: she has given up ‘relationship’ for the sake of ‘relationships’. What Mary has done is engage in the classic manoeuvre of equality feminism - she has become part of the existing scheme of things. The task of the equality, or liberal, feminist was to demand equal admittance to a sphere previously marked out for elite males and to dominant institutions, which were viewed critically only to the extent to which they excluded women (and elite women especially). In effect, she was saying, ‘there is nothing wrong with the corporate way of life, I don’t want to change any of the rules of the game, just give me a power suit and let me be a player’.
The constant tension in Mary’s life, so familiar to the working wife and mother, and the partner who feels unjustly accused, provides a good example of the moral dilemma faced by ‘equality’ feminism: how to enter the world of men without becoming a second class male? Mary has been adopted into what the philosopher, Val Plumwood, refers to as ‘the master model of humanity’ where reason alone is singled out as the defining characteristic of what it is to be human. In this understanding of human identity our emotions are seen as inferior, indeed dangerous in that they obscure, even corrupt, otherwise objective and impartial processes of rational thought. As will emerge from the historical survey of western thought in Chapter 2, the ‘higher’ part of human nature, reason, has always been associated with men. Women have been aligned with the body and the emotions, the ‘lower’ attributes of humanity. As a result, the dominant forms of western culture have been constructed, at least in part, through the control, devaluation and exclusion of the feminine, the emotions and hence the natural. In defining what it is to be ‘human’, half of what is actually human has been left out. The ‘rational’ excuse for coming home late offered by Mary’s husband is inadequate because it privileges his rights, or ignores the feelings of care for her and his sons that he might otherwise profess to hold.
There are many problems with this model, and we will return to them. For now it is sufficient to say that women like Mary are entering a male, rationally determined world, where feelings, experience and empathy are devalued, if not excluded. But in doing so, such women are being silently co-opted into this master model of the human. They are therefore disempowered from challenging the very source of women’s oppression, namely a truncated and impoverished notion of what constitutes a fully rounded human being. Indeed, by failing to challenge this definition of the ‘human’, they are simply adding their numbers to a now wider dominating class. Both sexes will suffer because they are forced to leave at the door the feminine aspects of their human potential in order to enter a world where the values and ethos are shaped solely by these twin features of rationality and exclusion.
The truth that is resonating inside Mary is not a happy one. Deep within, she knows two things. First, her work life is not all that it could be. With more support at home, her overall sense of well-being would be greater and she would be more energized and productive, in line for promotion. Second, her home life is suffering. She is angry at the “unfairness” of having to be responsible for much more than her fair share of housework and parenting. While she is trying to give whatever resources remain with her to her boys, her relationship with her husband is deteriorating. She does not feel like having sex with someone who is not helping her enough. Leaving has occurred to her but it is not what she wants.
Not too surprisingly, Mary returns to say:
I have approached my team leader and asked him if I can job share.
There is a scheme in place, the Bank has a work/life balance
programme and most of the women are doing it. I know a couple
of them that I think would be interested. ... I didn’t say this to you
before but I job-shared a few years ago. It wasn’t great ...whatever
effect or control I had at home seemed to slip away ... I wasn’t as
respected by any of them as much anymore. I was just dumb, stay
at home mum. But I haven’t got any choice, life at home is just
getting to be impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that I’m tired
and cross and they’re right, I am.
Most women who enter the work force do it on a part-time basis and they do it for reasons very similar to those given by Mary. They might not phrase it like Charles Leadbeater but they know what he means when he describes the dual-earner family as a ‘controlled experiment in chaos’. The ‘work-until-you-drop’ ethics and the ‘produce-at-all-cost’ politics of the market economy pay lip service to what human relationships depend upon for their existence - love labour. While both men and women are working longer and longer hours, this love labour, the caring work that takes place within the home, and across generations, for both grandparents and children, is primarily being done by women.
The prevalence of this stressful balancing act has produced a web site entitled www.familyfriendly.ie that aims to provide helpful hints on how to manage a ‘work-life balance’. The phrase contains several odd assumptions but for now let us simply critique it as being gender neutral. It presumes that we can talk about “parents” as if men and women shared this task. It does not understand that we inhabit gendered bodies, that women and men inhabit very different self-understandings and realities in the dailiness of their lives. It speaks to the untruth that men and women have the same problem with the balancing act. It also presumes that balance is possible. But because women do most of the caring work at home, and often fail to achieve the desired balance, the internalized problem becomes ‘I have failed’. Which is why they find themselves, like Mary, becoming depressed.
Mary will now be spending more time at home. We might even say that instead of becoming more like a man she is now going to revert to becoming more like a woman. This leads us to a discussion of the other major strand of feminist thought which espouses the notion of sexual difference. ‘Difference’ feminism operates with a more complex theory. In this context, difference is not an homogenous term. Some difference feminists celebrate the supposedly natural or innate virtues of women which they claim will make for a better society. Not just married women with children but all women are valorized for their distinctive approach to nurture and to emotion, for the virtues of care and self-sacrifice, and to moral choice, especially in the area of pacifism. This group of feminist thinkers argue that the real task is to resist and replace what they view as a deformed masculine culture. As a result, they do not want to be assimilated into this culture but rather wish to resist and replace it.
From a philosophical perspective, the problem with this way of thinking is that it smacks of reverse chauvinism. This time around the female is seen to be superior to the male, the feminine to the masculine. It is a way of thinking that runs the risk of becoming what it dislikes because in the end it can only achieve the replacement of one form of exclusion with another. One dominating class will now be replaced with another, once again providing a definition of humanity which can only be viewed as incomplete because it denigrates and excludes the opposite sex.
Another, less radical group of difference feminists believe that women have learned different skills, have acquired different ways of knowing and engage in different methods of moral decision making. They agree that women are good at nurturing and the emotions, that they do practice the virtues of care and self-sacrifice, but the salient point is that these virtues and practices have been learned and developed by women in their relationships and work within the home - they are not born with them. They see women’s knowledge and experience as a resource that should be tapped for the good of all humanity. They believe that women are different from men but equal to them. While this group also rejects being assimilated into a masculine model of humanity, it does seek to reform the culture of a patriarchal society by the addition of the traditional feminine virtues.
Although the brand of feminist thinking that requires radical change in society has never achieved the same degree of purchase on the public imagination as the second group that I have discussed, they should not be too quickly dismissed as a ‘lunatic fringe’. Without them, and their courage to break new ground, there would have been no furrow within which a more moderate and reforming feminism could have planted its seed. Oppression that is endemic within a society requires that a bright light to be shone on it before it can become visible at all.
In this chapter, I have been examining the changing understanding of the notion of the family and the ways in which various forms of feminist thinking have contributed to those changes. To date, the contributions of feminist thought and activism have been of inestimable value in improving the conditions in which women live, while also pointing the way towards a form of social organization that can only benefit both sexes.
From the ‘equality’ feminists, women have gained entrance to the public world of affairs. It is agreed that women, being just as rational as men belong in the public sphere of commerce and industry, law and medicine, government and public service, where they can now rightfully claim their equal share of the responsibility and benefits that are found there.
From the ‘difference’ feminists, we have come to understand that women, through the centuries of being oppressively relegated to the private sphere of the home and child rearing, have nurtured and developed the value and the virtue of care, that which is essential to sustain the emotional life of all relationships.
However, that being said, the more basic, and the more troubling question still remains: To what extent have these changes led to a better and more just appreciation of the roles of women and men within the declared context of mutually sustaining and equal relationships? The statistics that pertain to Ireland and Europe, that are mirrored around the world from the United States to Australia, strongly suggest that while indeed much has changed for the better not all has been gain. In many cases, women’s frustrations have been doubled as the hopes that liberation from static and traditional roles would bring have been largely unfulfilled. The double burden of home and work and/or the ‘glass ceiling’ has seen many women retreat to the commitment of full time housewife and mother.

Ecofeminism as Interdependence
It would seem that a reliance on the ‘rational’ aspect of the person, on justice and rights alone, however necessary as a first step towards emancipation, do not have sufficient transformative power to lead us to an understanding of what it might mean to be fully human. For a more complete understanding of the human person, we need to turn to the work of ecofeminist philosophers. They assert that women and men are both equally rational and equally linked to nature, that is to the emotions and to the virtue of care. With the ‘equality’ feminists, they agree that women are the same as men in their ability to reason. With the ‘difference’ feminists they agree that, within the private sphere, women have learned and practised a different set of virtues. We can therefore conclude by constructing the equation: Equality Feminism + Difference Feminism = Ecofeminism.
It is ecofeminist philosophy, as we will see in more detail in later chapters, that accords equal value to the concept of nature, that is, in this context, to the body and to its emotions. As a result, they insist that we must continually analyse this concept, in both its public and its private applications, so that both parts of the human person, the rational and the emotional, can be brought to bear on the construction of an inclusive, and this time complete, model of humanity.
To live well with each other, we must learn to think with our feelings. To fully honour our families and fellow citizens, we must learn to treat them with feeling-care as well as with thinking-justice. The impulse to care is arguably a human phenomenon but in the next chapter we will explore how it came to pass that, to the detriment of both sexes, this ostensibly human activity is still understood as an almost exclusively female function.