Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
127
estate which was the military opponent of the nobility and also its partner in political
negotiations.
It is a well-known fact, however, that in the Medieval cities married women, in spite of their
importance in craft and market activities and the juridical effects of this importance, were
increasingly domesticated
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: more and more they were educated to be specialized
housewives instead of business women, 'ménagières' instead of 'managers'. This means
that they were trained to provide beside goods and services, also 'love', that particular
modern combination of general availability, vicarious identification and individualized
attention, for the masculine members of their household. Women and female children now
come to be the most important working household dependents, the male children often being
away to be educated elsewhere. Some of the production tasks of the household are taken
over by the market, but new products, especially services, are being created in it all the time.
Neither Weber nor Weber-Schnitger mention this contradictory development of emancipation
and domestication of women, nor can it be deduced from Weber's analysis of the dissolution
of the household and its partial transformation into an enterprise. It is the opposite of the
individualization process of male dependents in a large entrepreneurial household as Weber
describes it. In the male dependents, contractual accounting develops individual needs and
wants further; in the female dependents, individual needs and wants are dissolved. A
housewife has to be permanently available for the satisfaction of those needs and wants of
masculine family members which cannot be gratified by money;
88
in the long run she will
become 'individualized' - in the sense of: isolated from other women - by denying her own
needs and interests, since she comes to live the life of her husband, father or brother
vicariously as an extension of his personality.
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Bourgeois men to an increasing degree lead the contradictory lives of individualized
patriarchs. The burgher patriarch rules as the possessor (proprietor or tenant) of house and
yard; like the feudal vassal or patrimonial free subject he needs legitimation of his
dominance. Therefore he cannot uproot all patrimonial domination and legitimacy; on the
contrary, he has to support it actively. The process of individualization created by the market
thus could not develop further without a further development of market production and a
further development of patriarchy.
87
See for similar developments in the modern non-Western world Rogers (1980).
88
Pateman (1988) p. 128 considers the housewife a servant, whose 'subjection' a s a w o m a n is an essential
element of the 'sexual contract'; see also p. 134/5. According to her the concept of 'property' is not appropriate to
characterize this relation: 'A master requires a service, but he also requires that the service is delivered by a
person, a self, not merely a piece of (disembodied) property.' Weber's concept of marriage as a 'status contract'
however, could be used to understand how the wife can be a piece of property as well as, by her marriage-
defined share in the quality of the husband, a special kind of person; then the inner contradictions in the position
of 'the housewife', which were an important base especially for the feminist movement of the sixties and
seventies, could be explained more satisfactorily than by speaking of 'the patriarchal construction of "men" and
"women". See also Ch 1,2, n. 32.
89
The English literature of the 19th century has documented this phenomenon extensively; in particular
Trollope's series of Phineas Finn novels gives a marvelous analysis of the ambivalence in the position of upper
class women, who, being excluded from the masculine status groups, have to satisfy their 'needs and wants'
through a vicarious identification with one of its members.
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