Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy,
Amsterdam 1994, dissertation University of Amsterdam INTRODUCTION
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'capabilities' as men
4
, that they possess 'toutes les facultés intellectuelles'
5
, do not lack
'competence' or 'quality'
6
; in general, that they do not differ in any important respect from
men
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; they keep hoping that once they have argued these facts conclusively, universalist
rules will be applied to women in equal measure.
Universalist democracy presents women with a paradox. Western-type societies rule the
world by their power of organization: enormous numbers of people become encapsulated in
coherent social 'systems', in which many of them have the positions of autonomous
'members'. Many more, however, are excluded from such positions - though often no formal
difference between insiders and outsiders has been established; neither do the excluded
have any effective recourse against their exclusion: formal equality has been granted them
and it is considered their own responsibility to implement it.
Abstract universalism denies the sex- and color-defined character of modern domination.
This is why all kinds of feminists have attacked the early modern separation of a 'personal' or
'private' sphere which is ruled by 'nature', 'passions', 'drives', 'instincts', or other biological
forces on the one hand, from a rational, universalist 'political' or 'public' sphere on the other
one; for this separation serves to create exceptions to the rule that rational claims to freedom
and equality are universally valid.
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'Universalism' can be defined as a characteristic of specific historical rule systems which
have been established by men to confer to all men the inalienable rights of free and equal
brothers and to exclude women, whose labor, by the same rules, has been defined as
property or potential property of men. The power potential of formal democracy as a form of
social organization lies in its inclusiveness: for the first time in history all men are potential
members of those groups which organize the division of riches and labor; therefore they are
motivated to fight for entrance in and willing to comply with demands for loyalty and
obedience.
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4
Seneca Falls Declaration in Schneir ed. (1972) p. 82.
5
Olympe de Gouges, Les Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, 1791, cited in Albistur et Armogathe (1977) p.
229.
6
the terms used in the Netherlands to explain why the women candidate again and again had to be rejected, see
Verhaar (1992).
7
Kanter (1977) p. 261: 'Something has been holding women back. That something was usually assumed to be
located in the differences between men and women as individuals: the training for different worlds; the nature of
sexual relationships, which make women unable to compete with men and men unable to aggress against
women; the "tracks" they were put on in school or at play; and even, in the most biologically reductionist version
of the argument, "natural" dispositions of the sexes. (...). Whether one leans toward the more social or the more
biological side of the argument, both add up to an assumption that the factors producing inequities at work are
somehow carried inside the individual person.' See on theories trying to establish significant biological differences
between women and men Sayers (1982). Some feminists have introduced a concept of 'gender' to separate a
'cultural' from a 'biological' sex identity; this separation, however, is again based on the idea that 'nature' is a
force which shapes human beings independently of their historical relations. See for a recent summary of the
discussion on 'gender' Orobio de Castro (1993); on the relation between essentialism and 'deconstructionism' or
'post-structuralism' Fuss (1990); and on the connections of the sex-gender opposition to the nature-mind
opposition below Ch. 1 no 2 n. 32.
8
In the formulation of Pateman (1988), p. 223: 'Freedom is enjoyed by all 'individuals', a category that,
potentially, pertains to everyone, men and women, white and black alike. In the fullness of time, any historical,
accidental exceptions to the principle of freedom will be removed.'
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In Geschiedenis van de Vrouwentoekomst (1980) Marijke Ekelschot and I called modern society a
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