Considering women's experience

Conclusion

All views of power, as Lukes points out, are both contested and ideological. The view I present here was developed through efforts to construct a theory of power grounded in the central themes of feminist research, especially its focus on the social construction of reality. The most salient realities addressed in this context are the ethics and social structure of obligation, relationship, and care, especially as these affect differential identities, social rankings, and asymmetries in power. These inequalities are socially constructed. They stabilize power contests of the past in prescribed relationships of the present.

Though power differentials between women and men have a long history, the particular configuration we find in the contemporary United States was shaped in large part through the social and ideological transformations of the nineteenth century, when market relationships, economic and social, were ascendant. Exaggerations of that transformation, which presume older social orders were overtaken by a new order modelled on the market, are not only analyses but ideologies as well. They serve the market and those men whose success is focused there; but they render invisible much of women's experience. The theory presented here proposes a tripartite approach as a corrective to single-order market-based theories. I argue that power has different characteristics in the three orders.

Briefly, power in the exchange order is individualistic and competitive. Power in the placing order is derived by incumbents from the social places they fill. Here is where the definition of social types critically structures power differentials and where care, service, and deference are made obligatory. Power in the pooling order is collective, the capacity of a multitude to act as one.

This examination of power in its three guises suggests some avenues that syntheses of theories of power might take. For example, conceptions of power that stress its competitive and oppositional aspects focus on the exchange order, while conceptions that stress the communal aspects of power focus on the pooling order and its capacity to generate power through consensus. In addition, the several discussions of resources for power tend to combine resources generated and used in all three orders. Much analytical clarity might be gained by separating out the different ways in which resources are generated, used, and transferred from one social order to another. Finally, several implications that can only be suggested here follow from this view of power. Because it focuses attention on the placing order, a sector generally neglected in sociology, it can make us attentive to the powers of the weak and the claims of future generations on current ones. Because those claims are made most heavily against women, they account in large part for women's higher rates of poverty and their disadvantages against men in the world of exchange. But, more important, because this social order is neglected in practice as well as in theory, its powers, especially its powers of social control, are eroding, leaving the claims of those who need care to go unheeded. The growing isolation of the elderly is one case in point. Poverty rates among children, which are fast approaching the one-quarter mark in the United States, present another.

These can be interpreted at least partly as the society's increasing incapacity to enforce obligations of protection and care. More than the other two social orders, the placing order answers a society's need for a succession of generations by empowering the young, the infirm, and the aged with claims. In the nineteenth century, societies solved the problems of disintegration in the placing sector associated with an ascendant market by assigning claims for care almost exclusively to women, backing up those claims with powerful normative sanctions, and leaving men free to compete in the market. Now that the sanctions have lost their sting and the market is attracting women, too, a reallocation of claims amounting to a restructuring of the placing sector - especially its service ranks - is necessary.

If the market with its freedoms was the major social accomplishment of the nineteenth century, an egalitarian redistribution of obligations and responsibilities might be the twentieth century's answer to contemporary difficulties in caring. There are other possibilities. One is a further weakening of the claims that succor the weak, with disastrous results for future generations. Another is the imposition of claims upon some new group - biologically adult but socially stunted by definition, as women have been. Currently the women's movement and its counter movement are struggling to determine the future construction of reality.