Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
126
bourgeois will no longer be an entrepreneur as a patriarch, but an entrepreneur and a
patriarch.
As I stated in my first chapter, the separation of public and private life is reified in Weber's
universalist method; 'value-free' sociology suggests that this separation is universal, eternal,
natural and total, instead of historical and partial, restricted in place and time; therefore the
private sphere of the relations between women and men and the substantive economic
rationality they are based on are seen as irrational and therefore excluded from rational
understanding.
10. Excursus on the situation of city women: the contradictory development of emancipation
and domestication
As I stated before, Weber only deals with the emancipation of sons from the patriarchal
entrepreneurial household. He does not describe the emancipation of women - wives and
daughters - from it.
82
Nor can a description of their emancipation be found in EuM, to which
Weber contributed the text about the dissolution of the household
83
. However, Weber-
Schnitger asserted that where trade exists, patriarchy is always checked. In her view the
woman who is active in commerce and crafts is always and everywhere an exception to the
rules which defined the exclusion of women from personality rights and juridical competence
in marriage. Not only sons and slaves, but also wives can receive a quasi-property from the
patriarch to trade with; they can also derive a partial juridical competence from city
regulations which serve to protect the interests of creditors.
84
The money economy thus can
bring about a partial liberation of wives from the patriarchal appropriation by which 'husband
and wife are one and the husband is the one'
85
.
The money economy dissolves social relations; the position of married women in market
relations is uncertain and ambiguous. Although city regulations can allow them to trade in
certain - mostly local - products, they will never become 'socii', 'Rechtsgenossen', comrades
in law. As I said earlier, according to Weber-Schnitger this exclusion was caused by the
military character of the Germanic law.
Even when bourgeois institutions developed further, a woman - even an adult unmarried one
- could not go to law without a man representing her in the juridical process. Juridical
personality and juridical competence of married women remained exceptional; as a rule
women could not acquire membership of any fraternity, coniuratio, union or guild, these
groups being also military in origin. Well-known exceptions - not treated by the Webers -
were the crafts where women guilds existed and those where widows could inherit their
husband's position as guild-master
86
. The craft guilds, though, did not belong to the burgher
medieval in origin.' From Roman law only the rational form was taken; see further Ch. 8,5.
82
When in his treatment of patrimonialism he recapitulates his analysis of the disintegration of the household, he
mentions that 'women, children and slaves acquired personal and financial rights of their own', see ES p. 1010,
WG p. 583; but then it is too late to include the emancipation of women into the analysis.
83
EuM p. 66 ff.
84
See for Dutch legal history in general J.C. Overvoorde (1891).
85
EuM p. 250.
86
See Power (1975) p. 56.
 |
 |
 |