http://shesamarxist.wordpress.com/2010/ ... from-moms/She get it from her Mama! What We Need to Learn about Revolutionary Leadership from MomsPosted: November 18, 2010 | Author: Sycorax Warning: this blog may be controversial. Assuming anyone out there is reading, which may not be the case. Who knows. Are you there God? It’s me, Marxist Feminist! The topic of this blog is leadership.
Yes leadership. Specifically, in this blog I will argue that we can discern leadership styles based on gender and that leadership from womyn is necessary and critical to revolutionary organization and struggle in general.
I call it Mom leadership. I’ll explain.
Mom leadership: not a feature of biology, but a skill set produced by a gendered division of labor in society.I am not an essentialist. This means that I do not believe that biology is destiny, i.e. that the genitalia you were born with determine your gender presentation. In fact, I would go a step further to even argue that biological sex as we understand it is largely socially constructed as well, to fit the gender binary system.
That said, how can I make sweeping generalizations about ‘Moms’ or ‘female leadership’ styles? Well easy. For one thing, I don’t purport that my generalizations are laws that hold firm for every case, they are just observations of trends or similarities that can tell us something about the way the system works. These trends are not functions of nature, they are socially conditioned.
This fits in with my understanding of gender roles as being heavily, or perhaps entirely determined by your place within the social division of labor. Selma James first wrote about this concept in
Sex, Race and Class. She writes:
Our identity, our social roles, the way we are seen, appears to be disconnected from our capitalist functions. To be liberated from them (or through them) appears to be independent from our liberation from capitalist wage slavery. In my view, identity-caste-is the very substance of class.
Here is the “strange place” where we found the key to the relation of class to caste written down most succinctly. Here is where the international division of labour is posed as power relationships within the working class. It is Volume I of Marx’s Capital.
Manufacture . . . develops a hierarchy of labour powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages. If, on the one hand, the individual labourers are appropriated and annexed for life by a limited function; on the other hand, the various operations of the hierarchy are parceled out among the labourers according to both their natural and their acquired capabilities. (Moscow 1958, p. 349)
In two sentences is laid out the deep material connection between racism, sexism, national chauvinism and the chauvinism of the generations who are working for wages against children and old age pensioners who are wageless, who are dependents.
A hierarchy of labour powers and scale of wages to correspond. Racism and sexism training us to develop and acquire certain capabilities at the expense of all others. Then these acquired capabilities are taken to be our nature and fix our functions for life, and fix also the quality of our mutual relations. So planting cane or tea is not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for men and beating children is not violence.So in other words, we are womyn to the extent that we were socialized to do certain kinds of work in society, to inhabit certain roles. Womyn within capitalism have been historically pushed into the ‘personal’ or ‘non-productive’ or ‘unwaged’ or ‘domestic’ realm. This does not mean womyn have not worked outside the home, indeed most womyn
especially working class womyn of color around the world have worked outside the home, even within the U.S.
This does not change the fact that when capitalism created its ‘free-waged’ worker, it created work as a place separate from the home, and in doing so, there was a cemented division between waged work and unwaged work, domestic and public work, etc. Womyn within capitalism are socialized to do care work, to be nurturers, caretakers, i.e., mothers to some extent. We are expected to do the work of taking care of children, of elderly, of the sick, etc.
The gendered division of labor makes it so that men are punished for showing feelings, expressing fear, worry or empathy with those who are weak. Womyn are punished if they are not emotionally and sexually available, etc. Womyn are often held responsible for the emotions and the actions of the people around them. Men often view womyn as their only source of emotional support or intimacy because, in a homophobic society, heterosexual relationships are the only place men can have their emotional needs met.
Many of us womyn grew up playing with dolls and believing that we were born to be Mothers. That was our destiny. Though we were told that we would have a natural mothering instinct, we didn’t. Though we were told that being a mother comes naturally, and that is therefore unskilled labor, its not.
An incredible amount of training is given to young girls from the day they are wrapped with a pink towel in the hospital. In chapter 14 of capital volume 1, Marx talks about how because workers tend to live together there tends to be a kind of training that happens within social circles that to the outside eye does not appear to be skills training.
Nonetheless, the job of being a mother requires a great amount of skill—it takes empathy, patience, a heightened sensitivity to feelings and the well being of others. Mothers and womyn in general are usually forced by necessity to cooperate with people in their lives, both because of the sheer amount of work, as well as because cooperation lessens the potential for censure from those who womyn may depend on for safety. Womyn learn the language of emotions, and are carefully trained to express ourselves, our desires, our wants, etc. Ever watch little girls on the playground? They argue over relationships. Who is best friends with whom? Boys compete on the basis of pure strength. Womyn deal in relationships. Not because of a vagina, or chromosome or anything else ‘biological’ but because as soon as you are identified as a girl you are being trained to do this kind of work.
In political organizations there is always leadership. Unfortunately most often it is male leadership. I liken this to what I call ‘Dad’ leadership, because men are often not socialized to talk about emotions, identify emotions like fear, sadness, pain, etc., I have observed a great number of men who are quite incapable of articulating or expressing these emotions. Many men in political circles especially, are quite uncomfortable discussing emotions, and are much more comfortable competing in the realm of political theory—something womyn are not socialized to do. The fact that ‘dad’ leadership remains hegemonic ensures that political organizations, formal and informal, usually mirror capitalist social relations in that they feature a double standard, a split between interpersonal values and political values.
Therefore, I think men tend to exert a type of ‘father leadership’, in the negative sense of a traditional father – emotionally removed, not a listener, etc. Fathers are authority figures. They don’t start off asking you what you want to be, who you really are deep inside, what makes you happy, etc. They start off telling you what you are going to have to do if you are to avoid punishment. This is the kind of leadership or management that we see in the public realm of work. The boss or manager who considers you as a worker and not as a person, who is interested in your skills and ability and who doesn’t really care about the person behind them. The authority figure is a top down leader. He does not place you in context, or really care about what you are dealing with. He expects you to be strong, to perform, to do away with weakness. Father leaders rarely take great pains to listen to those around them, to consider their ideas. The values that go along with this leadership consider personal issues to be non-political and views conflicts stemming from personal issues as deeply threatening.
Dad leadership is not skilled at noticing the subtleties of relationships between people in the room. Womyn on the other hand, often report being extremely conscious of the energy and emotion of every person in the room. Womyn have been trained as caretakers and as people who are responsible for the needs and well being of others. This necessitates a finely tuned ear/eye to the needs and feelings of others. It also requires a great deal of anticipation, the ability to anticipate the feelings and mood of people around us. Mothers push us. They expect a lot from us, just as Fathers do, but they
combine expectations with support and unconditional love. We know that they will love us even if we fail, but that they believe in our ability and are going to be there along the way.
In my experience, the womyn leadership types I have met are powerful because they have mastered the ability to both be sensitive, cooperative and also strong in guidance. They lead from a place of love, of knowledge, of having listened and put oneself in the other’s place. They empathize easily. They debate to get somewhere, versus to assert oneself or power. These are qualities of a caretaking Mom. Mothers are finely attuned to the feelings of their children, often noticing the slightest most subtle shifts in happiness, in interest, etc. They listen carefully. Dads on the other hand, rarely know you or develop a relationship with you. They lead from a place of blindness, from a place of ignorance about what you are dealing with. They often exert a ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ kind of ethic.
Apparently studies have supported this with evidence. I read a book in the library recently, whose name I can’t remember but I will try to get a hold of it again. It said that there are definitely discernible gendered styles of leadership. It supported my suspicion that womyn’ styled leadership tended to be more cooperative, communal and inclusive. However, it also noted another interesting finding: that even when womyn are in positions of leadership, if the leadership outside of them is overwhelmingly male, then the differences disappear and womyn are forced to hew within the hegemonic masculine leadership style that exists as a precedent. Interesting idea, which probably has some truth to it.
Before I get flack for upholding Moms as phenomenal wonderbeings, I want to emphasize that I am describing one trait among many. As we know, nobody is really any one gender. Gender is not coherent in any of us. We all encompass a spectrum of gendered behaviors and ways of being. All of us are feminine and masculine, and everything in between, sometimes at once, sometimes differently depending who is around us, etc.
There are definite limitations to the way womyn are socialized as well. There are definite limitations to the way Mothers are socialized. The division of labor is just that, it’s one piece of the larger pie of human society, and thus when we discuss any part of the gendered division of labor, we are discussing one piece of what might be a fully human person if we were to put it all together. For example, there are many aspects to the mother or female socialization that are lacking, for example, as I mentioned womyn are rarely encouraged to be scholars or academics especially in political circles. There are so few womyn marxists or political theorists that are famous. More often men are encouraged to be intellectual, and they are viewed that way, as legitimate political agents with important things to say. The fact that men tend to politic and compete with other men just furthers this division and ensures the tendency for womyn to do the care work within an organization versus the intellectual strategizing done by a few bookish radicals at the top (usually men!). Many womyn have been taught not to express their ideas or compete healthily. Womyn often learn that open competition or power grabs are unseemly and womyn are very often really cruelly criticized or censured when they are loud authoritative voices on theoretical issues. People often react to a woman asserting her opinion authoritatively in a strong way. Womyn are expected to compete in passive ways, such as in for approval from men or from one another based on looks – a kind of competition that involves someone’s appraisal of passive qualities, versus political debating which requires you to assert yourself. In fact, the more a woman can appear naturally beautiful, the more valuable she is. Her power in the realm of physical beauty is supposed to be a fact of nature, not a strenuous endeavor.
We all have things to learn from one another, based on the ways we’ve been socialized. This is the political project. We need to find ways to humanize ourselves by rejecting the alienating division of labor that places us in one area of work and tells us we were born to do that kind of work. The gender binary socializes us all to have really one-dimensional characters and to violently suppress anything that does not fit into the narrow frame of the gender system. It is our job to undo that damage. Men especially need to learn from womyn leaders, and be lead from them. But this cannot come from womyn pleading with men to listen, womyn must train one another to be leaders and create an alternate culture that can contend with the existing one. To build the kind of support and community network we need to have in political and radical spaces, we will need the ‘mother’ ethic to become hegemonic.
I think this is critical because there are definitely traits in womyn’s socialization owing to their position within the division of labor which make them especially good communists. I am completely comfortable making that generalization. I think being afraid to affirm the feminine or to admit there is a ‘feminine’ style, is silly. I think we have a lot to learn from Moms and from womyn, based on how society socializes us to be caretakers. If we want to live in a society where people take care of each other, not just as workers, or students, but as holistic people with personal lives that are political and public and historical, then we had better learn how to stop dealing with people in ways that recreate capitalist social relations and the public private split. We better become better friends and better listeners. We need womyn at the forefront. We need Moms.
Too often in activist or revolutionary organizing, there is a lack of support for people in the personal or interpersonal sense. People are expected to deal with their own family issues, emotional scars, financial challenges, etc. We want people to join us and we talk about community, but our own activist communities minefields underlain with deep personal strife, fucked up social relations, rape, abuse between activists and radicals, unresolved family and mental health issues, you name it. However these problems remain unpoliticized, and often there is no support for people who have them. It is survival of the fittest in the activist world, even today. It is a measure of the masculine culture within organizing spaces that there are so few activist mothers in the struggle, or womyn elders. Womyn burn out being responsible for children, their significant others (even those who claim to be feminists) and a myriad of other relationships and people in their lives.
I think that in order to build a strong and vibrant communist left we need a culture of interpersonal support, love and acceptance. We need to each take a page from the Mother figures in our lives, the positive womyn who we may even take for granted. Every organization has womyn who play loving nurturing roles behind the scenes, and who hold the act together beneath the ‘serious’ politics. Its time to acknowledge that we are people first, revolutionaries and activists second. This means that we can be as political as ever but if we are dealing with real shit and have no support network we are not going to continue to be effective political activists.
I think the only way we will really incorporate the positive aspects of mom-age within our radical spaces will be through the conscious cultivation of such a culture. We will need to become conscious of the positive mom-age skills we have as womyn, and we will need to stand behind them as critical skills, values and ethics that are not secondary to our political organizing, but must be the medium through which our political message resonates. We will also need to organize as queer and womyn-identified individuals, to reinforce the value of our skills, to cultivate them, to help develop other womyn as leaders, and to create a hegemonic pole that can pose a direct challenge to ‘dad’ styles of impersonal leadership.
I’ve come to realize over the past few months the truth of the idea that revolutionaries are like Christians in that people judge us by our lives and the way we live them. People judge our politics by the way we live our lives, the way we treat and value people. People need community and they often get involved not just because they are attracted to a political line, but because they see something healing, calm, positive and accepting in a political community. People need to know that if they make decisions that go against the dictates of capitalist life – careerism, individualism, popular culture, etc., that there will be a community of people around them, who love them, who are a source of genuine friendship, emotional strength, and who are steeped in a tradition of mutual aid and cooperation. A community of people who take care of one another, not just as long as we agree on the same political ideals, but because we believe that we need to model the social relations we wish to have in the new society, ourselves.
A Note on leadership:
Many friends and comrades of mine treat leadership like an evil taboo. Personally, I identify as an anti-authoritarian anti-hierarchy Marxist feminist, so I appreciate the sentiment. However, in my opinion leadership is not a four letter word, it’s a reality.
Inequality in our society exists, and that includes within our social milieus, our political organizations, our communities, etc. Leaders exist in any setting. My definition of a leader is someone who has a lot of social influence or power, someone whom people look to for guidance.
Feminists were some of the first people to tackle this issue from an anti-hierarchical orientation. A paper entitled ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’ does a good job of addressing the tendency amongst horizontalists to ignore existing inequalities within groups, which ends up perpetuating invisible structures of power that dictate who ends up doing what in the overall division of labor.
For example, even in anarchist milieus there are usually a few people whose influence weighs heaviest. These people may have no formal recognition as leaders but they are de facto leaders, and their opinions exert hegemonic influence capable of marginalizing dissenters. Acknowledging leadership inequalities and working consciously to train one another is the only way to equalize the existing terrain.
