REVIEW

GENDER, THE FAMILY AND HISTORY

Judith Butler

Linda Nicholson’s Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age
of the Family is a broad-ranging and provocative book which raises extremely
significant questions regarding the historicity of both Marxist and Liberal
theoretical vocabularies. In particular, Nicholson’s work challenges the
formulation of the public/private distinction in both Marxist and Liberal
discourses from an explicitly feminist point of view, and also suggests a way in
which feminist theory itself might make itself more plausible through an
appropriation of a more explicitly historical methodology. Although the
emergence of modern feminism within the last two centuries of United States
history remains her major historical focus, Nicholson’s book is not a
conventional “history” of feminist theory. In some ways, her book traces or
“narrates” key shifts in theoretical discourse that emerge within a critical
re-evaluation of the public/private distinction; it is a narrative history of
discourse, as it were, which locates the feminist theoretical contribution as
both a consequence and significant revision of Lockean and Marxian efforts to
distinguish and interrelate the family, the economy, and to delimit the proper
domain of the political. Her argument – or „narrative“ – concludes with a
critical re-evaluation of the reifying tendencies of pre-feminist social theory and
with a prescription to feminist theory to avoid the ahistoricity of some of its
paternal forebearers. She also proposes that feminist theorists make construc-
tive political use of those dimensions of Hegelian and Marxist social theory
which interpret the discourse of social explanation as a manifestation and
reflection of the very historical conditions which form its theoretical focus. In
short, Nicholson offers a feminist hermeneutics, one whose critical potential
consists in the exposure of ideologically reified patriarchal concepts and whose
self-critical potential consists in the methodological mindfulness of the
historicity of its own terms.
Although the stated intention of the text is to examine the presuppositions
and consequences of social theory in terms of its sometimes unacknowledged
historicity, it remains ambiguous on some key historical problems. For
instance, Nicholson refers her reader to the “early modern period” and
sometimes to the “age of industrialization” or “the age of the family”, an
historical period, she maintains, which gave rise to both classical Liberal social
theory (mainly Locke) and Marxian social theory. Although the “early modern”
category belongs to a periodization of European history, and Nicholson herself
makes use of the category to explain the emergence of European social theory, it
is also used to designate the general historical situation from which American

Review of Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. Columbia
University Press, New York, 1986.
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feminist theory emerges. This last claim, however, is never historically sub-
stantiated, and the historical relevance of European social theory to the
diversity of American feminist political theory and practice is never
fully established. Indeed, one might well question whether the theoreti-
cal roots of 19th century liberal feminism ought to be located in Locke‘s
Second Treatise on Civil Government, or whether the complex and diverse
character of 19th century feminist theory might better be explained in terms
of American populism, religious and economic movements, the enfranchise-
ment of the Black population after the Civil War, changing work patterns
accompanying the growth of cities, and other concrete social and political
transformations.
Nicholson in some ways sidesteps the problem of establishing an historical
linkage between European social theory and American feminist theory by
maintaining that her work is less interested in explanation than in constructing
a plausible narrative. And the narrative she tells does not begin at a single
historical point in time only to move unilinearly to an antecedent point. The
advantage of a narrative with multiple points of beginning appears to be that it
provides (a) for the implication of the narrator in the historical situation that is
being narrated and (b) that it maintains the complexity of historical relations
that are not reducible to a ‘single cause’. Nicholson’s repeated points that
various conceptual ‘givens’ of liberal social analysis – the ontology of self-
interested individuals, the separation of family from economy, the separation
of economics from politics, the distinction between private and public
life – are reifications that conceal their historical formation and, hence, their
historical contingency. Nicholson‘s efforts to employ a plurivocal narrative
strategy, however, ought not to preclude a critical understanding of how these
various narratives relate to one another and whether there is warrant for
assuming that each thread of the narrative expresses some dimension of the
self-same socio-historical reality. But for all the emphasis on historicity, the
text somehow loses sight of history, and it is unclear what particular set of
circumstances, events, practices and institutions “the age of the family” is
meant to designate.
In her chapter on “Gender and Modernity: Reinterpreting the Family, the
State, and the Economy”, Nicholson makes clear that a radical historical
reflection on the presuppositions of social theory, especially on its false and
ideological distinctions, has been only partially exemplified by the 19th
century Hegelian and Marxist tradition and by the twentieth century school of
critical theory. Missing from these rich and often radical reflections on the
presuppositions of Liberalism is an explicit account of “gender”, specifically
of the “relations between women and men” (105). An historical reflection on the
family, especially as it becomes associated with domestic work and naturalized
relations of domination between the sexes, Nicholson thinks has potentially
emancipatory consequences, and here again the exposure of reified social
structures is promoted as the primary task of a feminist analysis.
Her analysis of the emergence of the “family” as a privatized and naturalized
social structure is especially rich, although it is not always clear whether
Nicholson wants to equate “gender” with “the family” or with “relations
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between women and men”. The term “gender” in Nicholson’s analysis

denotes a set of relations, the social structure of the family, and the general
relation between the private/domestic and the public. But this kind of broad
historical and institutional approach to gender suffers from generalization,
and the concrete and varied experiences of gender across class and color lines
is almost entirely overlooked. Moreover, within modernity gender may well
be properly understood as a function of the family, itself an historically
emergent social structure, but to make this claim concrete, it would seem that
some more subtle and specific theory of gender acquisition is required.
Although Nicholson makes use of Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women:
Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” she does not acknowledge the
feminist reappropriation of psychoanalysis that Rubin suggests. Rubin’s
question, how it is that a female being is transformed into the social
phenomenon of “woman,” requires an analysis that not only demarcates the
relevant historical institutions, like the family, that condition gender, but also
elucidates the mechanisms of their concrete application, i.e. the ways in which
those institutions leave their marks on bodies, the way they constitute
gendered identities.
Nicholson’s review of Nancy Chodorow’s theory of motherhood establishes
her own position on the relation between the psychological and the social. She
very clearly refutes Chodorow’s efforts to explain social structures exclusively in
terms of their psychological origins. Nicholson argues that one cannot seek re-
course to a psychological “origin” which is not already socially constituted, espec-
ially if the psychoanalytic theory that Chodorow accepts in revised form takes the
family for granted as a primary and ahistorical social given. In Nicholson’s
words: “ . . . our concept of mothering refers not only to the fact of biological
mothers being responsible for the care of their young but also to the case
where this relationship is interpreted as significant, and where the quality of
the relationship is seen as constitutive of the character of the young.” The
problem that Nicholson identifies in psychological theories such as
Chodorow’s is that they very often promote reified conceptions of what
constitutes childhood, the mother-child relation and, indeed, the family. But
if this is the main reason to be skeptical of psychological theories, and
psychoanalytic ones in particular, then perhaps Nicholson would not object to
a psychoanalytic effort to explain the process of gender acquisition which
explicitly affirms the historicity of family relations . If that is so, I would
suggest that the incorporation of such a theory into her present work would
contribute a needed concreteness and specificity to her analysis of the relation
between gender and modernity.
Nicholson’s text is at its best in its critical or negative function; it reminds
us of the “limits of social theory” when its constitutive categories are treated as
part of a natural ontology, immutable and de-historicized. In this anti-reifying
mode, the text exposes some of the historical ground of “modern feminism,”
although that concept remains forbiddingly large. And it reveals this ground
through a subtle reading of Locke and Marx which shows the contrivance of a
public/private distinction, the related and false distinction between the
economy and reproductive work, and the peculiarly modern conception of the
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nuclear family as the primary social unit. Although Nicholson uses a Marxist
view of reification to dispute some Liberal assumptions regarding the
charcterization of the economy and the family as pre-political, she also turns
this critical method against Marxism itself which, she maintains, inadequately
described the relation of the family, sexuality and gender to political life. She
even warns feminists against engaging in reifications of patriarchy as the first
and fundamental cause of women’s oppression, but the question necessarily
arises whether Nicholson has a notion of a true or undistorted description of
historical experience. She makes clear that “objective” (10) explanation is not of
interest to her, and that a plurivocal narrative (my description of her method)
better expresses the hermeneutical problem of narrating the constitutive
history of one’s own political point of view; she seerns nevertheless to
subscribe to a notion of a ‘truer’ social ontology than the ones she discerns in
classical Liberal and Marxist texts.
Nicholson’s method of critique is to reveal a set of accepted theoretical
distinctions as historically constructed and, to that extent, contingent; but she
also assumes a set of “interrelations” that constitute a social ontology
which preexist these constructions: “ . . . the separation of the family and
the economy, like the separation of the family and the state, needs to be
comprehended as occurring within history. Since what we now perceive as
separate spheres have common origins and interrelated histories, we should
expect to find important connections between them (122).” Generally
considered, there are true and false descriptions of social reality, true being
those which acknowledge the interconnectedness of these spheres, and false
being those which reify the distinctions, treating spheres of life only
analytically separable as if they were ontologically distinct. Nicholson makes
a number of very fine historical and anthropological points to support her
claim that these various distinctions are not only contrived, but peculiarly
“modern,” and that they serve the purpose of concealing the interrelatedness
of these social institutions through a fragmenting and false conception of
social reality. She cites Karl Polanyi, who argues that the market only
becomes conceived as an autonomous system under the conditions of
capitalism, and also cites a number of scholars on the ancient Greek oikos who
argue forcefully that the distinctions between the family, the household, and
the economy were not comprehensible within that historical context. In effect,
it appears that “the modern period,” which is taken to be synonymous with
the rise of capitalism and “industrialization,” is in some sense responsible for
creating the theoretical distinctions that are pervasively taken for ontological
truths, but the sense in which they are responsible is not wholly clarified.
What is the theory of periodization to which Nicholson subscribes and
what precisely is her claim about the ‘modernity’ of theoretical
distinctions and separations which come to structure the way in which social
and historical reality appears? It seems right to assert that these various
distinctions are peculiarly modern constructs, and there is no doubt that
Nicholson’s radical historical reflection on the presuppositions of Liberal
social theory is necessary and sound. And yet, the relation between these
theoretical distinctions and the historical ground that they both reflect and
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constitute is not fully explained in Nicholson’s text. At some points it appears

that ‘distinctions’ and ‘constructs’ are causally occasioned by some prior
historical ground, and that they serve as epiphenomenal theoretical reflections
of actual, historical divisions of labour and a general compartmentalization of
the social world. At other points, however, these distinctions appear to
generate social phenomena such that the ‘theoretical’ distinctions of Liberal
social theory are constitutive principles of social life itself. In the former case,
classical Liberalism expresses a prior and distinct process of capitalism which,
through the division of labour and the reification of social spheres, is primarily
responsible for the fragmentation of social and political life. This materialism
appears to be in tension, however, with the hermeneutical idealism of the
latter position. In the latter case, classical Liberalism is a theory rife with false
descriptions of social reality which is itself responsible for the false structuring
of the social world. Here the theory of Liberalism is less epiphenomenal that
causative. This dual function of theory is not necessarily problematic, but the
precise relation between the causative and expressive functions of theory need
to be more clearly spelled out, especially if we are to understand how
Nicholson hopes to reconcile the Marxian method of ideology-critique with a
hermeneutical approach to social theory. The problem arises when we try to
explain the relation of theory to that historical ground which is “outside”;
while the Marxist theory of reification suggests that there is a “truer” social
world which is systematically concealed by Liberal political vocabulary, the
hermeneutic position suggests that the theoretical description of social reality
is itself constitutive of that reality, and that recourse to a pre-discursive
“outside” or “before” is never unmediated by theory itself. Can there be a
hermeneutical Marxism? This is the question that Nicholson’s text implicitly
raises, although the full answer is not given within the confines of this work.
The tension between hermeneutics and Marxism becomes especially acute
when we ask, what makes a Liberal description of social reality false? If the
description is false because it falsely ontologizes certain distinctions and
separations, then does it follow that a true description would be one that reveals
the interrelatedness of those social spheres that Liberalism maintains are
separate? And is it the case that historically these spheres were and are
interrelated, or is this perhaps a presumption of the ontological interrelated-
ness of social spheres that is transhistorical in some sense? If Nicholson wants
to argue that capitalism is itself a systematic totality which tacitly organizes
and unifies the social spheres that Liberalism considers ontologically discrete,
then she might well make this point, but she doesn’t. And yet there appears an
operative presupposition in her own work which suggests that “the truth is the
whole,” an Hegelian conceit of a social totality that raises yet another set of
problems. Indeed, it is unclear whether the insistence that truth is a function
of interrelatedness does not rest upon a romantic theory of social totality that
not only does not exist, but perhaps never did. And though Nicholson
explicitly renounces “totalizing” theory, she may not have fully resisted that
particularly Hegelian-Marxist mode of reification that instates a totalizing
interrelatedness at a theoretical level where none may be said truly to exist.
I certainly do not meant to call into question the very rich and convincing
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historical and anthropological arguments that Nicholson provides in support

of her claims that ‘the individual,’ ‘the family’, ‘the economy,’ and the
distinction between public and private are both historically constructed and
historically specific and that they emerge in the historical transition which
signals the breakdown of kinship relations and the rise of capitalism. My
question emerges only after those arguments are accepted: given that these
distinctions are relative to the “modern period,” and given also that we can
agree on some common meaning for this rather large construct of historical
periodization, what precisely is the obfuscating reifying moment of these
distinctions? If it is the case, as Nicholson herself seems to suggest, that these
distinctions in some sense constitute the social reality they intend to describe,
then does it not appear to follow that fragmentation has perhaps become the
‘truth’ of social reality? And if our own historical position as reflecting agents is
conditioned by this fragmented reality, then what recourse do we have to a
social reality which might be said to precede or potentially follow this state of
contemporary divisions? What keeps the historical reflection on reifications
from reinstating reification at a more subtle level of theorizing, i.e. within the
self-avowed act of historical reflection itself? The question is in some ways the
conventional problem of hermeneutics: how does the agent of historical
reflection avoid implication in the very historical structures that she intends to
reveal? Does the act of exposing these structures in their historicity remain
mired in the selfsame structures and, if so, in what does its emancipatory
potential consist?
Nicholson affirms that “without any reflection on our practice and on the
history which preceded it, we are led unthinkingly to replicate it (207).” And yet
what is to guarantee that thinking historically is the same as thinking
critically? Only in the social context in which all descriptive falsity is
attributable to the reification of historical distinctions as immutable
ontological distinctions, does historical reflection per se appear equivalent to
critical thinking. That historical reflection is qualified as a mode of concep-
tualizing which replaces contrived distinctions with systematic interrelations
suggests that an ahistorical construct operates as the implicit normative
guideline for historical thinking itself. If the tacit ideal of this theoretical
program is a social ontology of interrelatedness, then this theory might well be
subject to the very charge of reification that Nicholson directs against her
theoretical opponents.