Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy,
Amsterdam 1994, dissertation University of Amsterdam INTRODUCTION
5
conduct of everybody concerned; while minority women are treated like Cinderellas, minority
men lead the lives of crown princes.
20
Thus the sex-neutrality of the concept 'numbers' limits
even its potential for description of behavior. It can only be applied to organizations in which
men form a majority, only as long as it is complemented with explicitly sex-defined feminist
concepts and experiences which are no elements of the concept itself. Yet even then it
cannot serve to explain why the position of the male minority member is the reverse of that
of the female one.
When they try to explain the differences in the effects of sex-neutral social 'laws' on the
positions of women and men feminist sociologists often take recourse to other sex-neutral
concepts, such as the concept of 'status'. If one takes the fact that men have a higher status
than women for granted,
21
the 'law of numbers' can be formulated in a sex-defined way:
since men have a higher status than women, their minority position and the attendant
visibility result in positive attention for them from the low-status women.
22
When formulated
in this way, however, this law is not social at all: the phenomenon that men have a higher
'status' than women cannot be understood rationally and thus appears to be unchangeable.
Universalist concepts cannot explain social relations between women and men in modern
democratic society, since those concepts are based on a separation of 'public' life from sex-
defined 'private' life. Only the second option - to employ sex-defined concepts - can provide
an insight into the masculinist character of 'public' domination. If sex-neutral concepts, such
as 'organization' or 'status' are translated in sex-defined ones, the connection between the
possession of a male member and the membership of bureaucratic fraternities can be
rationally understood.
To transform the concept 'bureaucracy' into a sex-defined concept it has to be connected
with the concepts social theory makes use of to understand the relations of private life. Only
by overcoming the separation of public and private life can 'bureaucracy' be understood as a
set of social relations between women and men; these relations can then be shown to be
defined by the contradiction between formal equality - which, being the foundation of the
relations between men, forbids men to exclude women or other persons defined as lacking
the correct masculine characteristics from these relations - and the patriarchal private
relations between men and women or other non-persons.
The separation of public and private life in modern society, however, is 'a real
mystification'
23
: it is not only an ideology supported and reinforced by science, but it is a
historical characteristic of the institutions of modern society itself. In order to be able to
analyze modern relations between women and men the history of the 'institutions' which
define their lives has to be investigated.
24
20
See Ott (1985).
21
See Sullerot (1968) I, Ch. I.
22
Ott (1985) p. 29, 157.
23
Marx uses this term to characterize the labor contract: 'The perpetual renewal of the purchase-sale relationship
does nothing but meditate the continuity of the specific relation of dependency, by gicing to it the mystified
appearance of a transaction, a contract between commodity owners endowed with equal rights and seemingly
free one in the face of the other', see Un chapitre inédit du Capital, Union Générale d'Editions, Paris, 1971, p.
263, cited by Larrain (1983), p. 157. See on Marx' way of representing the relation between illusion and reality
under capitalism Van Erp (1982).
24
Virginia Woolf, who in A Room of One's Own (1929) had denounced the study of women as useless, was the
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