Women as Infrastructure

     Historically women have been repressed to stay within the private sphere, ‘behind-the-scenes’ so to speak, as the public sphere was initially intended only to be accessible to men. This was true well into the twentieth century, but as women today in the twenty-first century continue to strive for equity and equality, the quest for accessibility is an on-going project. Part of the historic inaccessibility to the public sphere was due to the lack of occupations and opportunities available to women, as women were mostly relegated to the role of caregiver. Caregiver could be taken literally, to denote mother and/or house-wife, but for working-class women caregiver could also denote domestic-mimicking occupations such as housekeepers, cleaners, child-care workers, servers, etc. (i.e. domestic labor).

     I will emphasis that this essay is not to be considered an ethnographic sweep of all women, and I go don’t want to come across as deliberately leaving out vast amounts of the female population. So to preface my essay, I will admit that I am generalizing and discussing, in socio-economic terms, working-class and middle-class women of western cultures. Needless to say, there are hierarchies of admission and accessibility within the population that I refer to as “women”. Factors that impact this hierarchy include race, ethnicity, and sexuality. These factors add more layers of nuance to the dynamics of public/private accessibility, occupation opportunities and one’s relationship to ‘home’, which will not be thoroughly delved into in this paper. I would direct an interested reader to Kimberle Crenshaw’s article Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex where she makes a very important point, which should be kept in mind when reading my essay:

 

    “Because ideological and descriptive definitions of patriarchy are usually premised upon white female experiences, feminists and others informed by feminist literature may make the mistake of assuming that since the role of Black women in the family and in other Black institutions does not always resemble the familiar manifestations of patriarchy in the white community, Black women are somehow exempt from patriarchal norms. For example, Black women have traditionally worked outside the home in numbers far exceeding the labor participation rate of white women. An analysis of patriarchy that highlights the history of white women's exclusion from the workplace might permit the inference that Black women have not been burdened by this particular gender-based expectation.” (Crenshaw, 156)

Architecture by nature offers a polarized response to accessibility, an either/or structure: admission or discharge, inclusion or exclusion, invitation or trespass. In regards to thinking about the historic role of women in relation to the accessibility of public and private architecture, one could conclude that women have been generally and predominantly barred from access, especially in regards to cultural producing institutions such as universities, government buildings and religious buildings. In lieu of women’s inaccessibility to the public sphere, women have been repressed to stay home or ‘behind-the-scenes’ where their voices remain unheard, their influence unfelt, and their presence ignored. 

In Mark Wigely’s essay Untitled: The Housing of Gender from the book of collected essays entitled Sexuality & Space (editor Beatriz Colomina), Wigely defines his intellectual concern and objective as the want to “trace some of the relationships between the role of gender in the discourse of space and the role of space in the discourse of gender…the interrelationships between how the question of gender is housed and the role of gender in housing. (Wigley, 329). In sharing his concern, this paper seeks to set up perimeters of discussion around gender and accessibility within public and private spaces. Within my argument I will embed examples from history, and move swiftly forwards through time. Again, this paper is not intended to be a full sweep of history, although I will use history to observe changes in relationships between women, the home, and accessibility to public/private spaces. In doing so, I draw my own conclusions based on the intentions set forth explicitly by the patriarchal society which I am a part of and (as a woman) can implicitly feel. My logical strategy of reduction is born out of a process of elimination, as I navigate though the choppy seas of power and influence.

To structure this argument, I will begin at the locations of cultural and societal norm-production. We can start with the institution of the university, and extend that line of power and persuasion to other institutions of cultural production. Louis Althusser calls these institutions of cultural production ideological State apparatuses. Althusser distinguishes between ideological State apparatuses (ISAs) and the “(repressive) State Apparatus” (the SA) which includes “the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc. (Althusser, 79). The key difference between ISAs and the SA is that ISAs use ideology as enforcement where as the SA use violence. Importantly though Althusser adds that although ISAs function “predominantly by ideology, [they] also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (Althusser, 81). Historically both ISAs and the SA have been dominated by men who have used their power to repress women. I will be specifically discussing ISAs however, as it is through ideology that belief around hierarchy and accessibility is created, embodied, and actively reenforced.

Mark Wigely notes that:

    “[the] displacement of sexuality occurs within every department of the university, even, if not especially, those in which it appears to         be addressed in the most rigorous terms. Through the intricate and oblique operations of each disciplinary apparatus, sexuality is privatized without being housed. Institutional practices transform it into some kind of object that appears to be controllable inasmuch as it can be hidden inside or excluded. (Wigley, 328.)”

Using the vocabulary Wigley sets forth, sexuality becomes objectified within university discourses and then excluded and hidden. As Wigley is an Architectural theorist, he is concerned with ‘space’, both as the place of discourse and exchangeability of ideas, but also the physical space of the university itself. He goes on to say “the question of sexuality must be as much about the space of the discourse as with what can be said within that space. (Wigley, 329). I believe the articulations set forth by Wigley around the (in)accessibility to the space of discourse and the physical space of the university itself are shared with Donna Harraway in her essay Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. As noted in the subtitle to her essay, Harraway is specifically describing the “partial perspectives” within the academic institutionalized scientific discourse. 

In the essay, Haraway articulates her theory of schism between an imagined male-scientist-“they” versus an imagined embodied-feminist-“we” as having “a kind of invisible conspiracy” between the two. Specifically the “masculine scientists and philosophers” happily concede to the idea that the “embodied others… are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view, and so an inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias…” (Harraway, 575).

If thinking about the word pollute as the ancient greeks did, the disqualifying and polluting bias Haraway describes would mean “no more than things out of place.” (Wigley, 337). 

When discussing the illusion of absolute objectivity, or the “god-trick,” Haraway says that science “is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one’s manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power (Harraway, 577)”. Continuing with this logic, if the placement of disqualifying and polluting bias is to be kept out of the pristine sanctuary of strict masculine rhetoric (i.e. ideological State apparatuses), then what other spaces would remain permissible for the embodied other, the “we”, to inhabit? By process of elimination I conclude that the remaining place for her to work and dwell, if not in the university, government buildings, and other cultural producing places, would be to remain invisible, ‘behind-the-scenes’, where she is “privatized without being housed.”

Metaphorically, women then could be considered the infrastructure of mankind. Women are the essential support system of society, however tucked away and rendered invisible. The evidence of inaccessibility to public spaces can be seen today in the existing architecture of public buildings and the facilities they offer (or do not offer) to women. For a historical example, in Victorian Britain most public  restroom facilities were for men only, which impeded on the ability of women to move freely within the public sphere. (Elphick). This exclusion from the most basic need of relief in the public sphere would act to greatly hinder women’s ability to partake in public life for any significant amount of time. Additionally, and more contemporarily, at the Capitol in Washington D.C., it took until 2011 for female House of Representatives to have a female restroom created which is located right off the Senate floor. Previously they had to use one in a completely separate area of the building. (Linderman). I use restroom availability as a signifier to expose the intention of (in)accessibility and the gendering of public space.

This (in)accessibility has an additional dark side which Rosalyn Deutsch refers to as “agoraphobia” in her book Evictions. She claims that:

 “From a sociological perspective, agoraphobia is primarily an affliction of women. In city streets and squares, where men have greater rights, women devise strategies to avoid the threats that present themselves in public spaces. The phobic woman may try to define, and stay within, what she considers a zone of safety. She invents ‘cover stories’: explanations for her actions that, as one sociologist writes, ‘do not reveal that she is what she is, a person afraid of public spaces.’” (Deutsch, 325) 

The anticipated violence of the embodied and feminine other keeps women afraid to traverse through the spaces in which the masculine “actor” reign superior, even if this superiority comes from a lack of the fear of threats alone. Deutsch notes how this “masculinism is a position of social authority.” (Deutsch, 312). Bringing a through-line in thinking from Harraway’s description of the perceived polluting bias of women in the realm of scientific discourse, I can connect it with an aspect of the ‘agoraphobia’ of women that Deutsch lays out.  Focusing on art and public space Deutsch admits “it is true…that women were ‘denied citizenship, and denied it absolutely in the republic’ of taste as well as in the political republic because they were believed incapable of generalizing from particulars and therefore of exercising public vision.” (Evictions, 312). Again, there is an explicit bias forced upon the consciousness of women in order to diminish her potential power and viability. Where does this expected polluting bias, finite point of view and inability to generalize from particulars come from?

To make a second comparison, Donna Harraway’s twentieth century definition of the embodied and feminine other and the fifteenth century description of the nature of women from renaissance architect Leon Alberti, thoroughly described by Mark Wigley in his essay Untitled, have unsettling similarities. Alberti justifies the segregation of women to the confines of the home by saying “women…are almost all timid by nature, soft, slow, and therefore more useful when they sit still and watch over things. It is as though nature thus provided for our well-being, arranging for men to bring things home and for women to guard them.” (Wigley, 334). Using Alberti’s language to draw conclusions, Wigley describes how women’s self-control thrives only within the constraint of external forces and that “unable to control herself, she must be controlled by being bounded.” (Wigley, 335-6) Universally, one very successful way of bounding women was through marriage, where a woman would become the wife of a husband, and legally subservient to him. Marriage, in Wigley’s essay is “understood as the domestication of a wild animal, [instituted] to effect this control.” (Wigley, 336)

Looking at the lineage of husbandry and practice of oikos, it is notable the point out the shared history. When describing the evolution of the physical structure of the house in his book At Home, Bill Bryson points out that “every member of the household, including servants, retainers, dowager widows, and anyone else with a continuing attachment, was considered family—they were literally familiar, to use the word in it’s original sense… The head of the household was the husband— a compound term meaning literally “householder” or “house owner.” His role as manager and provider was so central that the practice of land management become known as husbandry.” (Bryson, 59). In his essay What is an Apparatus, Giorgio Agamben describes the etymological evolution of the term apparatus starting with the Greek term oikonomia which “signifies the administration of the oikos (the home) and, more generally, management.” (Agamben, 8) One can easily see a parallel between the terms and their use of describing the management of the homestead, being concerned both with the management of the physical structure itself and the management of the occupants within. 

Moreover, if the role of the other, Haraway’s embodied feminine other—i.e. women—and thus a woman’s respective space of occupation and inhabitation is supposed to encompass the realm of the private, interior spaces, then naturally the masculine counterpart are entitled to occupy and dominate over public spaces. Thus it could be summarized that the popular ideological constructions which act as the fundamental apparatuses of societal behavior, created in “distinct and specialized institutions” (Althusser), by the privileged disembodied “partial perspectives” (Harraway) are created by men and for men. And the literal architecture of these spaces privilege “the social authority of the masculine” perspectives in and of themselves. This idea is bound to be a key influencer in the relationship that women have to home and domestic labor. 

To turn the discussion inward, or inside, I will now summarize the home and it’s potential meanings for women. Home has many definitions. The definition changes through time and within different cultures and subcultures, race & ethnicities, sexualities, socio-economic privileges or limitations, etc. Admittedly, the concept of home is complicated. For some it remains something close to ideal: “the human being’s first world…enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house” (Bachelard, 7) for others “a dysfunctional family [home] is one that is consistently unable to provide a safe nurturing environment” (hooks, 18-19). Home could be thought of as an apparatus of domination, or a “third realm” beyond the simple separation of public and private. However, between all the various dichotomies of the meaning of home, I believe Rachael M. Scicluna defines it broadly in her exciting ethnographical study of lesbians residing in the UK entitled Home and Sexuality, the ‘Other’ Side of the Kitchen. She says “the meaning of home is not static. It is polyvalent, temporal, and emerges out of different flows of power. In general, its meaning rests on a dialectic relationship between the symbolic and the real, the individual and the collective, and the public and the private.” (Scicluna, 6) 

The word domestic comes from the word domas “which archeologist Ian Hodder defines more expansively as the nexus of attributes, activities and contexts associated with the experience of home.” (Johung, 21). Hodder describes the process of domas as the “transformation of the wild into the cultural.” Interesting to see the use of the word wild being again present, this time in regards to a process of refining culture rather than the process of refining the ‘wild’ nature of the woman. 

Furthermore, Women’s and Gender Studies professor M.C. Santana describes how:

 “in the latter part of the nineteenth century women in the United States strived to be true by following the definition of womanhood at the time. Women tried to be pious, chaste, domestic, and subservient. Historian Welter (1966) defines womanhood and places women on the verge of perfection when she explains that any sensible woman would follow the four pillars of true womanhood (piety, chastity, domesticity, and subservience)….This inherited behavior for respectable women lingered into the twentieth century. Albeit women had many advances, including the right to vote in 1920 with the 19th Amendment, they continued to occupy most of the private spaces.” (Santana)

Where does the urge to segregate women to the realm of the domestic come from, and how is it that it seems to have been an archaic urge from time immemorial? For example  in the ancient domesticated home-spaces of Lepeski Vir located in eastern Serbia, which date back to approximately 12,000 B.C.E., there is evidence of “gendered” spaces around the central “nurturing and protective” domus interiors of the archaic buildings of that neolithic settlement, in the form of “the placement of female figurines and the burial of women and children directly under the [home] structure.” (Johung, 22). During the period of time of approximately 12,000 years ago, which is called the Neolithic Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution, humanity turned from foragers into farmers “transitioning from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one.” (Blakemore). 

In the bestselling book Sapiens by Israeli History Professor Yuval Noah Harari, he asks the question “what’s so good about men?” and states that “at least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women. (Harari, 152). Indeed Harari is making a bleak statement, backed by his own immense historical research. When generalizing the role of women in society throughout histories he goes on to articulate that “qualities considered masculine are more valued than those considered feminine… Fewer resources are invested in the health and education of women; they have fewer economic opportunities, less political power, and less freedom of movement. Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal. (Harari, 153).

Working our way forward through time to the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, home has become more and more “smart”, which adds an extra layer of nuance to this discussion. In the 1920s architect Le Corbusier famously stated in his book Toward an Architecture that “a house is a machine for living in.” Taken literally, this “machine” is the apparatus in which we physically inhabit. His statement has become increasingly a reality, as the impetus of the 21st century home is to turn it into a “smart-home” (also called home automation), or a place in which artificial intelligence facilitates in the execution of everyday tasks. The systems of home automation are dependent on internet access in order to function, which places the home in a vulnerable position in regards to surveillance. 

The billion dollar smart-home industry works by conveniently gathering data from people, attained by their smart devices such as smart speakers or smart mirrors, and then streamlining their programing in order to offer a tailored experience. Incidentally, these smart devices gather much more data from a person than they would ever need for controlling a room’s temperature or reordering an Amazon Prime Pantry item. In essence, the home is becoming a data-producing factory for the corporations of Silicon Valley to capitalize upon. This urge to automize began in the early 20th century with household appliances, which were  considered revolutionary, as they freed up time and seemingly allowed for more leisure (specifically for women). 

Interestingly up until the Industrial Revolution a lot of work was done from the home, or what Architect Frances Holliss would call a “workhomes”. Today, the “workhouse” has fallen out of our vernacular, as it is much more the expectation that a person, particularly a male person, does not do any paid work from home.  “Until the Industrial Revolution, [dual-use] buildings were called ‘house’, with subsets of ‘longhouse’, ‘manor house’, ‘ale house’, ‘bath-house’, ‘bakehouse’, ‘fire-house’, etc. In the twentieth century, however, the term ‘house’ came to mean a building in which unpaid domestic, rather than paid productive, work took place and which provided a base from which people could ‘go out to work’ to earn their living.” (Holliss 1). 

From these observations, I conclude that although domestic duties are not lucrative to the person doing them, such as the stay-at-home mother who doesn’t earn anything financially by performing that role, at the same time technology companies are making incredible amounts of financial gains by collecting data from the people who perform those domestic labor/stay-at-home roles. The distribution of wealth favors the technology companies that collect the data, whereas the person relinquishing the data sees none of the financial benefits she is directly producing. 

In conclusion and to make this discussion relevant to our current moment in time, during the 2020 pandemic of Covid-19, four times the amount of women dropped out of the labor force than their male counterparts. In the United States “between August and September [2020], 865,000 women dropped out of the labor force, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics September jobs report. In the same time period, just 216,000 men exited the workforce” (Vesoulis). This high number is due to many factors. Firstly, a lot of the lower paid domestic labor occupations, which are typically held by women, have been hit the hardest during the lock down and stay-at-home orders. An other factor may be a deliberate economic decision, for example if a woman is in hetero-partnership with a male who makes more money than they do, and there are children to look after, it makes financial sense for the male to go back to work and earn the higher salary. 

It is evident that the type of work that stay-at-home women do is not deemed economically significant by culture at large. In addition, “those jarring numbers [of unemployed women] can be attributed to the type of jobs that women often hold. Female-dominated industries, including healthcare, education, elder care, service, and hospitality, have been among the hardest hit by the COVID-induced recession” (Vesoulis). We are in a precarious moment where it is important to rethink the ideological State apparatuses that indoctrinate societal views on women’s perspectives and the worth of women’s domestic labor. In 2021 we will see the first female vice-president in the United States of America, so change is slowly, but surely happening. However, in order to continue in the progress of allowing accessibility to women into cultural producing roles, it is important to stay vigilant and recognize that there is still a long way to go until the infrastructure of society is shared between both males and females equally. 

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is an Apparatus.” "What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, by Giorgio Agamben, Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 1–23. 

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, by Louis Althusser, 1971. 

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Penguin Classics, 2014. 

Blakemore, Erin. “What Was the Neolithic Revolution?” Culture, 5 Apr. 2019, www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/topics/reference/neolithic-agricultural-revolution/. 

Bryson, Bill. At Home: a Short History of Private Life. Anchor Books, New York, 2010. 

Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8.         http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Deutsche, Rosalyn. “Agoraphobia.” Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, by Rosalyn Deutsche, MIT Press, 1998, pp. 269–376. 

Elphick, Claudia. “The History of Women's Public Toilets in Britain.” Historic UK, www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/History-of-Womens-Public-Toilets-in-Britain/. 

Harari, Yuval Noah. “There Is No Justice in History.” Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, Harper Perennial, 2018, pp. 133–159. 

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–14599. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3178066. Accessed 17 Dec. 2020.

Holliss, Frances. Beyond Live - Work: the Architecture of Home-Based Work. Routledge, 2015. 

Hooks, Bell. Belonging: a Culture of Place. Routledge, 2019. 

Johung, Jennifer. Replacing Home: from Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012. 

Linderman, Juliet. “How Women in Congress Have Fought for Equal Treatment within the Halls of Capitol Hill.” The Christian Science Monitor, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 Nov. 2017, www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2017/1103/How-women-in-Congress-have-fought-for-equal-treatment-within-the-halls-of-Capitol-Hill. 

Santana, María Cristina. “From Empowerment to Domesticity: The Case of Rosie the Riveter and the WWII Campaign.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 12 Dec. 2016, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2016.00016/full. 

Scicluna, Rachael M. HOME AND SEXUALITY: the Other Side of the Kitchen. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 

Vesoulis, Abby. “Women's COVID-Fueled Exodus From the Workforce Hurts Us All.” Time, Time, 17 Oct. 2020, time.com/5900583/women-workforce-economy-covid/. 

Wigley, Mark. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender.” Sexuality & Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992, pp. 326–389.