Abstract
Sylvia Walby’s Globalization and Inequalities is a tour de force that spans social theory and empirical research, seeks to persuade readers of the explanatory powers of complexity theory for the global era and places gender firmly at the centre of the analysis. Sociologists wedded to world-systems theory or the world polity framework may not be entirely convinced, but those who have been disappointed with post-structuralism and seek a return to a more rigorous analytical framework will find Walby’s book seductive. In reclaiming systems analysis, Walby shows how it is possible to integrate multiple sites of inequality – class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality – into a sophisticated framework that presents four main institutional domains (economy, polity, civil society and violence) and counterposes two contemporary forms of modernity: neoliberalism and social democracy. And in an alternative to feminist intersectionality, though somewhat close to theorizing by US feminist sociologists Judith Lorber and Barbara Risman, Walby insists that gender does not necessarily map onto, or align with, class; rather, it has its own logic and causal power.
For Walby, modernity entails free wage labour, state monopoly over means of violence, subjectivity, individuation and, more recently, democracy and human rights. The modernization of gender relations entails women’s free wage labour, presence in parliament and educational attainment and the legality of abortion. These aspects of a public gender regime, she argues, cluster together. And what determines a modern gender regime? It is the combination of development and path dependence, including the intersection and co-evolution of the gender regime with other regimes of inequality and systems of social relations (see p. 262). And there are at least two forms of modern gender regimes, at least in the capitalist West: the neoliberal and the social democratic.
While I am not persuaded by some concepts and arguments (e.g. ‘fitness landscape’, violence as a social system, sexualities as part of civil society) and find some of the tables difficult to decipher, hers is an elegant theoretical architecture and I am especially gratified by the spirited defence of large-scale theorizing and meta-narratives and her critique of theorizing that dismisses structure in favour of individual agency.
In what remains of my review, I will focus on an area that is of interest to both Walby and myself – women’s employment and its relationship to modernity, gender equality and empowerment – to illustrate the broad relevance of her work.
To paraphrase Engels, women’s involvement in productive labour is key to women’s larger social participation and especially to their involvement in political society. Engels regarded domestic/reproductive labour as part of social reproduction and therefore embedded in the economy, but what was liberating was women’s involvement in gainful employment. This proposition has not been fully embraced by all feminist scholars or activists, many of whom point to the exploitative conditions under which women work (as though men did not work under exploitative conditions and as though labour actions, legislative reforms and social movement activism were not responses to such conditions for both male and female workers). Here some feminists might inadvertently side with conservative thinkers and policy-makers, for whom women’s role is to care for their families. Such a discourse was found in the Irish Republic of the 1930s (see Walby’s discussion, p. 390) and the anti-feminist movement in the 1970s USA, as well as in the Islamic Republic of Iran and many contemporary Islamist movements. In contrast, Walby rightly points out that ‘when care-work is the basis of a person’s livelihood it is associated with economic inequality, even though it may be highly valued’ (p. 105). What is more, employed women are most likely to become ‘the new champions of social democracy’, as Walby asserts throughout the book and especially in the concluding chapters.
This prospect, in fact, has been central to my own research on patterns and trends in women’s employment in the Middle East and North Africa. Since the early 1990s, I have tried to demonstrate that female employment in the region has been constrained by the oil economy, limited industrialization and a patriarchal gender contract inscribed in Muslim Family Law (Moghadam, 2013). While it is true that many women in the region’s Muslim-majority countries support conservative religious movements and states, this preference may have a material basis in that economic opportunities are not available to many citizens and especially not to women. In other words, in the absence of good jobs and social policies for women, marriage and religion may be women’s primary source of financial and moral security. Indeed, this has been confirmed in a quantitative study by Lisa Blaydes and Drew Linzer, who found that support for fundamentalism was lower among employed and educated women (Blaydes and Linzer, 2008).
More recently, my argument has been that since a key component of the (neo-)patriarchal authoritarian state has been the exclusion of women from decision-making, then the incorporation of women in the body politic (including parliamentary and cabinet representation) would facilitate and accelerate the transition to a broad democratic polity in the region. Using Walby’s terminology, the modernization of gender relations requires the incorporation of women in the economy and the polity – which in turn creates a larger constituency for a turn toward social democracy. In the context of the Arab Spring and especially in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco – the countries that have initiated a democratic transition in a relatively non-violent manner, though Egypt less so than Tunisia and Morocco – the successful transition from authoritarianism to (social?) democracy will be entirely dependent upon the participation and rights of women and the transformation of gender relations.
Sylvia Walby’s impressive study of complex inequalities in our globalized world offers not only a new set of concepts, propositions and empirical evidence, but a vision of the future based on a commitment to equality and justice. For that, we are in her debt.