Brodie, Janine

English

Journals @ The Mount

sions and other benefits acquired by those in the "workforce" . These women must depend totally on the man who supports them and i f he leaves or dies they are left in a precarious situtation. Women and the Constitution discusses all of these questions and many more. These are all directly or indirectly related to the constitution and the current power structures in Canada. It shows why women have not been able to operate fully as equal partners in our Canadian society and strives to encourage women to become more activist as it relates to their rights and to the governments that are making decisions which affect their lives. The book contains a wealth of information which wi l l be valuable not only to Canadian women but very revealing to many Canadian men who may not be fully aware o f the difficulties on the path to true equality. C . Beckton Dalhousie Universi ty W o m e n , P o w e r and Po l i t i c s . Margaret Sta-cey and M a r i o n Price. London: Tavistock Publi-cations, 1981. Pp. 208. Stacey and Price pursue two goals in Women, Power and Politics. The first is to provide a descriptive account of the evolution of the social and political status of western women, particularly since the rise of capitalism. Here the authors succeed in compil ing a useful and often revealing summary of the development of gender relations in Br i ta in in particular and western society more generally. The second apparent goal of this volume is to, in their words, "develop a distinctive feminist theoretical pos i t ion" which links changes in political economy to the nature of the family and ultimately to the balance of political power between the genders. Most people concerned with the interdependence of gender-based, eco-nomic and political subjugation, undoubtedly are familiar with the numerous conceptual dilemmas posed by such a theoretical under-taking. Unfortunately, the approach developed in this volume is unconvincing. The book begins with a promising chapter concerning the study of women, power, and politics. The authors draw innovatively on numerous sources to demonstrate that main-stream political science, especially the behav-ioural-pluralist approach, has been too narrow in its conceptualization of political power and too formal in its focus to explain (let alone to ask the right questions about) the political status of women in western societies. As an alternative to traditional approaches, Stacey and Price adopt the concepts of public and private domains so that the impact of familial institutions is included in the study of women and politics. Few can take issue with the in-clusion of informal power relationships in the study of politics or with the authors' hypothesis that the institution of the family and the ideologies which support it effectively exclude women from the public sphere. The authors, however, grasp the notions of public and private domains to pose a rhetorical question which guides their research in subsequent chapters: " H o w can it possibly have come about in so short a period of time that so many women have become involved in poli t ics?" Stacey and Price essentially turn the familiar question of " w h y so few women in poli t ics" on its head. Thei r reasons for doing so eminate from the distinction between public and pr i -vate domains. Extending their analysis back to the R o m a n period, they argue that "women shared power with men until the state was separated from the household, when it [the state] became the private domain of m e n . " In other words, the balance of power between women and men was dramatically altered with the transition from feudal to capitalist relations of production. In the feudal period, the authors argue, women had power within familial, economic and religious spheres. Aristocratic women assumed managerial roles "especially in their husband's absence, " nuns managed production units, single women supported themselves and the married worked along side their husbands. W i t h the evolution of wage-labour, however, women were displaced from their feudal role. The rise of capitalism and its concomitant, the bourgeois family, meant that women were isolated within the home, non-persons in the eyes of society and the state, while men gained the credentials for full entry into the politics of liberal democracies. For males, capitalist social relations meant an em-phasis on individualism and civil rights, par-ticularly the right to private property. These, in turn, eventually accorded them political rights to participate in government. In con-trast, capitalism subsumed women under the male head of the household. W o m e n were not " fu l l members of the communi ty . " Thus, Stacey and Price interpret the post-feudal history of women as a struggle to achieve some independence as women and to exercise some power as individuals in their own right. Women's advancement to this end in the last two hundred years is the basis for the authors' optimism about women's progress in politics. Few can deny that the isolation of women in the private sphere has and continues to be a major impediment to their full integration into the politics of capitalism. Nevertheless, in reading this book, one constantly is confused by what the authors exactly mean by the term "power" , whether the distinctions between the feudal and capitalist periods are as pronounced as the authors suggest and ultimately, the relationship between gender and politics. One suspects that Stacey and Price exaggerate women's power in the feudal order. Granted women were not isolated in the private sphere as prescribed by the ideology of the bourgeois family. They maintained their own and con-tributed to the household's management and subsistence. But does this constitute power? The fact that wife-beating was sanctioned by canon-law and that women exercised virtually no politial power would seem to refute this notion. If not, what does power mean? More -over, i f power simply means participation in the economic life of a period, surely a great many women under capitalism have "power" . The recurring question arising from this analysis is whether it is necessary to place so much emphasis on the consequences for women of the transition from feudalism to ca-pitalism. Do ing so implies that the gender biases in the distribution of political power can be reduced to modes of economic organization. Another interpretation is that each mode of organization has placed women in different, but, nonetheless, politically subordinate roles. In fact, the evidence compiled in this book could equally support the argument that gen-der is one basis for political power which cross-cuts both time and space. F r o m this per-spective, one is tempted to respond to Stacey and Price with an equally rhetorical question: Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Janine Brodie Queen's University Female Power and M a l e D o m i n a n c e : O n the Or ig ins of Sexual Inequa l i ty . Peggy Reeves Sanday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. 295. We are currently r iding on the crest of a breaking wave of materials about women in other cultures, a wave swollen by the work of anthropologists and other scholars interested in redressing the gender balance of cultural 

Women, Power and Politics. Margaret Stacey and Marion Price.

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Women, Power and Politics. Margaret Stacey and Marion Price.

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