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linda christiansen-ruffman
Women’s Community Gifting
A Feminist Key to an Alternative Paradigm
This paper explores the connections between the theoretical and empirical un-
derstanding of women’s community work that I have developed over thirty years
of feminist research, analysis and activism and the other scholarly literature,
especially Genevieve Vaughan’s thinking about the gift paradigm. It is written
with a growing conviction that a radically different world is necessary and that
feminist insights hold a key to a viable alternative.
I was on my way to a meeting to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary
of an historic event in Canada.1 An emergency gathering of Canadian women
on Valentine’s Day weekend in 1981 had successfully led to women’s inclusion in
the 1982 constitutional guarantees of the new Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms.2 In 2006, we were going to Ottawa to reflect on what might be called
women’s community work or women’s community gifting. As my husband drove
me to the plane for this second Valentine’s Day meeting in the nation’s capital,
he exclaimed, “Someone should send the Canadian government a bill for your
valuable contribution!”
This statement clearly shows that he recognizes the value of women’s local and
global community work, the mainly unpaid contribution of women to improving
their surrounding communities (locally to globally), making them more liveable,
equitable, and just, and, in this case, contributing to political change in Canada
at the constitutional level. But should we be sending a bill for our unpaid work?
Is it in women’s interest—and society’s public interest—to commodify women’s
community work and reduce it to monetary value?
Even if I agreed with my husband that sending the government a bill would
make an important political point, what would be on the invoice? What would
we count and on what basis would we make each of the economic calculations?
Would we count only our transportation costs? All our “out of pocket” expenses?
Our time there? Our time preparing and afterwards—and whose time and at what
price? Would we count only the 1,400 women who jammed into the room on
Parliament Hill in 1981? What about all those many women who contributed
to the “Butterfly Coalition” that did the organising and local community work
across the country which was essential to our success? Do we reimburse and count
(as valuable economic activity) only those who bought the butterflies to display
on lawns and windows? What about the time involved in mounting them into
some form of display, planning that display, and what about those who made
their own butterflies and spread the word to others? And what about the many
hours doing the analysis, communicating with other women, and lobbying the
politicians and other decision-makers? And how much of that? How would we
calculate a value of this work: on the basis of what monetary principles and with
what calculation of interest? And so far we have only included the time of the
meeting until the present. But the event would not have been successful without
the many meetings around kitchen tables, park playgrounds, office cafeterias
and at women’s caucuses, groups, and other gathering places leading to 1981!
And what about all the other unpaid work of women that has such social and
public benefit? Should not women’s helping, caring, and problem-solving work
in communities also be counted? If we are serious about an economic reckoning,
in addition to the women’s community work, should we not also calculate other
unpaid women’s work in families? And why does work necessary to sustain life,
such as mothering and women’s community work, not count as valuable in today’s
“work world,” while work associated with premature death, such as weaponry
and militarism, has value in the market economy?
In this paper I will outline the intellectual stages through which I came to
recognise women’s gift-giving community work, to question the translation of this
work into the dominant monetary measures, and both the difficulties and need
to develop an alternative feminist approach and paradigm. Here I will be using
a scholarly approach that is, at the same time, socio-historical, experiential, and
analytic. Its multi-levelled and holistic feminist social analysis draws from: (1) my
own retrospective reflection as a feminist sociologist within the academy, work-
ing in professional associations at the local, regional, national, and international
levels; (2) the inductive tradition of participant observation and of C. Wright
Mills’ (1961) “sociological imagination,” combining history and biography; (3)
the results of praxis as. what might now be called. a feminist action researcher
for social change within the academy; and (4) the results of praxis as a com-
munity-based feminist and activist on issues related to progressive social change
for “community development” based on principles of equality, social justice,
environmental and economic justice, and peace. It also draws analytically from
the sociology of knowledge.
I began my work in this area with a new empirical focus on women without any
adequate concepts or assumptions. Theories imported from “male-stream thinking”
could lead to publications but not to recognizing or valuing women and women’s
contributions. New insights led first to the questioning of old assumptions and
to the discovery of women. Then it led to more complex understanding of the
mechanisms of patriarchal syndromes within scholarship and to a deeper recognition
of women. Eventually it also led to participating in, and working to rebuild from
within, a feminist movement that is advocating radical social transformation and a
feminist scholarly and societal paradigm shift. Along the way, this journey brought
me to an appreciation of women, community activism, and women’s politics, of
the women’s movement and feminist movement, of alternative ideas about wealth
and, most importantly here, of women’s community work. Drawing on ideas of
Genevieve Vaughan’s theorising of the gift economy, what I have call women’s
community work becomes “women’s community gifting,” a type of activity which
is outside of the paradigm of exchange and monetary calculations.
In addition to the idea of Women’s Community Work, the paper uses two
other major concepts, feminism and paradigm, which are now present in most
textbooks such as W. Lawrence Neuman (2006). Feminism has many definitions,
and I use a concept of feminism which is holistic, multi-faceted, change-oriented
and transformative. It includes: (1) a focus on the diversity of women’s experiences
across the globe and across patriarchally-constructed differences; (2) a critique
of patriarchy in all its layers and manifestations and the need for fundamental
change; (3) an articulation of the collective vision and principles to which we
aspire; and (4) the affirmation of a strong and diverse women’s movement to lead
our societies and cultures into change beyond the patriarchal paradigm which
exploits and enslaves all living things (see Sen and Grown, 1987; Miles, 1996;
Christiansen-Ruffman, 1998; Antrobus, 2004).
The concept of a paradigm is associated with Thomas Kuhn (1962), and W.
Lawrence Neuman (2006) defines a paradigm as “a general organizing framework
for theory and research that includes basic assumptions, key issues, models of
quality research and methods for seeking answers” (81). Other scholars of the
sociology of knowledge have also written about radical shifts in the zeitgeist
or paradigms of global cultures over time and space as well as on interrelation-
ships between scholarly and societal paradigms, despite allegedly naive notions
of “objectivity” that some scientists still claim.3 The journey I describe indi-
cates clearly that the dominant paradigms in scholarship and social life do not
recognize or value women’s community work. Many of the characteristics of
paradigm challenge are reminiscent of descriptions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A feminist paradigm
would eliminate the existing patricentric syndrome and its patriarchal assump-
tions of knowledge and its values of hierarchy, dominance, and competition.
Feminist values would replace the ancient patriarchal values based on tribalism,
violence, and control, replacing them with a worldview which honours, respects,
and protects all life, especially biodiversity and social diversity on this planet. A
paradigm change would not occur if men were simply replaced by women in the
current system. A changed paradigm would transform ideas and assumptions
of hierarchy and of “power over” into circles and spirals that convey “power
with” and “power to.”
This paper identifies some of the difficulties of seeing through and beyond
existing paradigms and assumptions. It draws on my research and scholarly
writing on women and community in the 1970s and 1980s in the light of new
conceptual distinctions Genevieve Vaughan (1997, 2004) offers in her work on
gift giving, or community gifting according to need, not exchange. Her ideas are
based on a theory developed from her perspective as a mother. A women’s focus
and knowledge is now in danger of being buried again by the misogyny and new
forms of patriarchy which is part of militarism, religious fundamentalism, post-
modernist “meism,” and neo-liberal globalization, with its individualism and
economic fundamentalism. At this critical juncture of the future of the earth’s
living beings and of humanity, it has been reassuring to realize that the future
may be in our midst. Vaughan helped me to understand that features of the
transformed alternative futures that I had been struggling to imagine are, in fact,
here “in the now.” Vaughan’s recognition of the powerful, extensive contemporary
presence of a gifting paradigm and my own long knowledge and appreciation of
the importance of what I now call women’s community “gifting” enhances the
possibilities of radically different paradigmatic possibilities.
“What’s Important About Women?” Discovering Women in Community
Work
Initially I had problems even seeing women’s community work, even though
it interested me. My focus was “citizen participation,” and I was interested in
conceiving of women as citizens. This desire to “discover,” “see,” or “conceive”
of women was a characteristic of the times.4 Women were absent in scholarly
knowledge and in higher education; it was not exceptional that there were no
women in Sociology on the graduate faculty at Columbia University when I
was doing my Ph.D. As a young researcher in the early 1970s, I was living in
Canada and studying citizen participation in Halifax, Nova Scotia while also
working on my Ph.D. dissertation on newcomers in that provincial capital. For a
paper presentation in March 1972, I asked a women colleague, Patricia Loiselle
(now Connelly), to work with me because she had a different sociological train-
ing. It was an unsuccessful attempt to find something interesting for a paper
on women relevant to my research on citizen participation. The sociological
literature forced me—and us—into what I considered to be the boring scholar-
ship of counting people to find “who participates.” Comparing women to men
using male standards did not allow us to see anything of interest to women, and
patriarchal culture at that time had made women’s culture invisible. We wrote
the paper, but it was not a satisfying intellectual experience.
Two years later, Pat Connelly and I wrote a paper completely and explicitly focused
on women. It was a huge improvement because we addressed women’s actions and
women’s perceptions of women’s liberation. In the paper we combined the scholarship
of two well-known sociologists, applying C. Wright Mills’ (1961) conceptualization,
“private troubles and public issues,” to our data and creating a sociological typology
reminiscent of the style of Robert Merton (1957). Even in that paper, which was
entirely focused on women and based on qualitative interviews with women, however,
we were conceptually crossing the theoretical approaches of two male theorists and
not fully embracing alternative assumptions in a way that would lead us (and others)
to build an alternative feminist scholarship.
In 1975, as part of a government-sponsored initiative for International Women’s
Year, I led a team of five women from my university. We conducted research
and wrote a report entitled Women’s Concerns about the Quality of Life in Halifax
(Christiansen-Ruffman, Hafter, Chao, Katz and Ralston 1975). The study used
a multi-method research approach, and in retrospect, I am impressed with the
data and presence of women in that study. At the time, and with a few excep-
tions, however, it still did not foster an appreciation or help me to see women’s
community work in Halifax in a full and conceptually different way. I was still
influenced by society’s and scholarship’s patricentric focus—which did not allow
us to conceive of women as fully autonomous individuals but always within the
shadow of men’s priorities. What I noticed women doing did not seem to be
interesting or important or on the “public” agenda. The possible exception was,
interestingly, the case of women who were fighting for the protection of their
neighbourhoods against the development industry at that time. In one of the
only quotes from a male in that report, the developer attributes power to these
community activist housewives and to the presence of children, not as priorities
but as functional. He is quoted as saying:
The majority of these groups and the people involved in them are decent, honest
and well meaning people. They are concerned first with their own homes, their
property values and they are concerned with their community and the quality
of life in the area. The problem that we as developers face is that laced through
these well meaning honest citizens there are ... the punks and the maoists and the
members of the New Left, the bleeding hears and the radicals, the malcontents
who operate in whipping up the pressure groups. Sometimes the groups are led
by housewives who are looking for a cause and using community involvement
as their main social activity to release their frustration. And you know what they
say—you learn the wrath of a women’s scorn—and I can tell you, you get three
or four of these ladies from a neighbourhood and they will effectively organise,
sign petitions, whip up the school children, berate the newspapers with letters
and they do a very effective job. And this is their life. They are imbued with a
cause! They think they mean well; they have a tremendous power and they are
very much a cause or a cost factor in the development process. (Christiansen-
Ruffman et al. 1975: 35)
My Ph.D. education as a sociologist at Columbia University, an institution
which claimed to be the greatest university anywhere for sociologists, had not
taught me to see the world fully, to recognize women, to value women and to
value myself and my ideas. I realized even at the time that it was not only the
result of that particular university but of the patriarchal nature of knowledge. It
was a systemic fault. It took a few years and experiences with Labrador women,
however, for me to recognize a major reason why I could not even begin to “make
sense” of women’s community work: women were present in scholarly thinking
only insofar as they were functional to men. Scholarly training had socialized me
into this colonised thinking.
“If It Weren’t for the Women, There would be No Community....”
Recognizing Women’s Community Work
I could not escape seeing women in Labrador communities when I went there as
part of a several year research evaluation study of the Community Employment
Strategy (CES) with a consulting firm. At first, however, the women there ap-
peared to be the stereotypical “traditional” women, uninvolved in the “important”
politics of life. They stayed at the back of the hall in the kitchen rather than at the
meeting—or sat on one side of the room, apart from the men. In my “modern”
but misogynist “sophistication,” on my first trip to Labrador, I assumed that the
men in Labrador were the important ones and discounted the women. After more
research in these communities, however, I had to reassess this initial perception.
I returned again after CES was finished in order to learn more.
The women of Labrador taught me to see and to appreciate women’s community
work. They taught me to see that women were, in fact, creating the community.
“If it weren’t for the women, there would no community,” they confidently told
me. And I realized that they were correct about their important role, despite the
“gloss of patriarchy” on the “surfaces” of Labrador cultures. Years later I read a
description which conveys the strength of women’s community work by Janice
Lawrence of Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, a self-declared “farmer, farm worker, farm
wife, farm mother, agricultural activist and community builder.” She is quoted
by Jo Leath (2001) as comparing “the contribution of rural women to thread in
a quilt; present in every inch of the greater community and strong enough to
hold it all together”(2).
In 1979, the community strength of Labrador women led me to respond to
a call for papers for the annual meting of the Canadian Research Institute for
the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) in Edmonton (see Christiansen-Ruff-
man 1980) on women as persons. Implicitly thinking of women in Labrador, I
defined “personhood” as the extent to which an individual’s contribution to the
community is recognized by that community as important. The personhood of
women was analyzed along three dimensions: the extent to which women’s ac-
tivities contribute necessary resources to the community and to the family unit;
the extent to which women exercise control over resources in the household and
community, and the extent to which women are respected in the household and
community. Using these dimensions, I found that many women in rural Labrador
had more personhood at this time than women in urban Halifax.5 This finding
challenged a number of assumptions which were (and remain) deeply embedded
in contemporary societies and in scholarship. The paper brought together evidence
to contradict the following three propositions:
1) Women in rural areas, often called “traditional women” and characterized
by relatively rigid sex role segregation, are relatively deprived of personhood
compared to their more sophisticated urban counterparts.
2) Progress toward personhood is gradually being made as communities
become more urban and industrialized.
3) Women in rural communities and generally in Atlantic Canada are con-
servative and are not innovative or politically active in community life.
All three of these propositions were not supported. Each of them was found
to be misleading in the context of Atlantic Canada even though it was based on
popular conceptions and scholarship. The evidence challenged taken-for-granted
assumptions in North American scholarship and life at that time, especially
about stereotypical women as well as the currently present belief in linearity and
unilinear “progress.”6
The insights from Labrador women and from the community women in Nova
Scotia started me on a whole new course of unlearning and learning, both as a
scholar and as a person. This educational process really began after I had a Ph.D!
At the time, it was easier to see myself as a sociologist than as a woman, despite
the women’s movement, because of the levels of societal hatred of women, or
misogyny, which I had absorbed. I gradually realized how colonized many of us
were—at some level not even recognizing ourselves as women, even as we were
engaged in the women’s movement. I cast my lot with women once I recognized
that there was nothing that I could conceive of doing at the time that would
change the fact that I am a woman and would be treated as such. I reasoned that,
given the current state of discrimination against women, my only hope was to
be part of those making changes with other women. As a social being, I realized
that I had to work with others to create alternatives for ourselves, to reformulate
our social relationships as more equitable and respectful, and to work for a more
equitable, just, environmentally friendly and peaceful new world.
At the time it is not surprising that I was having trouble focusing on women.
Women were absent, ignored, or disparaged in both scholarly and everyday life. As
I discovered women, I also discovered more fully women’s absence in the scholarly
literature and in policy. I found, for example, that in Charest’s (1973) discussions
of development policy in a rural area of Quebec near Labrador, women were so
non-existent that only a mention of birth rate and one sentence on inheritance
even implies their presence. Yet in small communities adjacent to those studied
by Charest, I could not ignore the central role being played by women in the
community as well as in its “development.”
The almost unconscious treatment of women as invisible by Charest contrasts
with that of many anthropologists who did see “sex roles” or what we now call
“gender” and characterised these communities as male dominant. The sociologist
Ralph Matthews (1976) also saw the communities in this way and used a series
of arguments to explain why he did not include any women in his survey sample
of rural Newfoundland communities which had resisted resettlement. A woman
in Labrador was so incensed with this treatment of Labrador women that she
pulled me away from a dinner table when she discovered that I was a sociologist;
she wanted to expose me immediately to his discriminatory and invalid reasoning
(see my later detailed analysis Christiansen-Ruffman 1985). Matthews (1976)
had omitted all women from his sample because he claimed that women were
not community leaders in Newfoundland/Labrador or heads of households. Yet,
in one of the three communities he studied as case studies, he documents the
importance of a particular woman community leader in preventing the relocation
of this community.
In the mid-1970s the male standpoint was completely dominant, creating
knowledge that was elitist and oppressive to the community and to women.
Scholarly paradigms did not allow us to see the world of women or women’s cul-
ture in its deeper, more complete ways. Women scholars began to understand the
ways in which that knowledge needed to change in order for us to begin to look
at each other and think with each other, together. We began to interrogate and
question the assumptions on which knowledge was constructed within the existing
paradigm. Most importantly, we began to see glimpses of alternatives in women’s
cultures. Interactions between individual academics, especially those influenced by
women’s movements, allowed for this challenge of patriarchal paradigms and the
development of research agenda that was by women, for women, about women,
and with women. In Canada a great deal of this thinking led to and then was
facilitated by the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women
(CRIAW) which held annual conferences starting (unofficially) in 1976 with a
Halifax conference and which was committed to bridging the academic/activ-
ist/community divides.
Women’s Politics and Women’s Community Work: Trying to Understand a
Third Part of the Puzzle7
In the 1980s, as I worked with other feminist scholars and community activists to
discover a world where women’s culture and values were central and to reconceive
of politics and cultures through women’s eyes, I began to see women’s community
work as a third part of the puzzle. Scholars had used dichotomies for many years
to identify production versus reproduction, wage labour versus domestic labour,
public versus private, and work versus leisure. These dichotomous analytic concepts,
however, ignored, undervalued, and rendered as virtually invisible the important
features of community life which many women understood in Labrador and Nova
Scotian fishing and farming communities, namely women’s public unpaid work.
More importantly, through reading and talking with other women, I discovered
that this feature of life was not limited to these geographic areas but present in
most parts of the world.
It was startling to find these common features of women’s cultures because
they were identified neither in the relevant scholarly literature nor in public dis-
course, especially in the urban communities I knew. In the 1980s I embarked on
a lengthy search of scholarly literatures in an attempt to discover women’s politics
and women’s community work in both its empirical treatment and its scholarly
conceptualization. Leslie Brown and I wrote a paper (Brown and Christiansen-
Ruffman 1985) after a thorough search for accounts of women’s community work,
caring work, volunteer work and political work (broadly conceived). Surprisingly,
one of the most complete accounts was not recent but Mary Ritter Beard’s 1915
study, Women’s Work in Municipalities. This book describes in detail women’s
activities which changed social life in such areas as education, public health,
corrections, civic improvement and racial assimilation. Subsequently the book’s
conceptualization of women’s work in municipalities has been rendered invisible,
both empirically and conceptually. As Marilyn Gittell and Teresa Shtob (1980)
describe, historical writers of the Progressive Era tend to ignore women’s work
contributions or include it in with reform work in general. Nevertheless, scat-
tered references to women’s community work remain. For example, Susan Mann
Trofimenkoff (1984) has discussed the role of women in organizing and providing
volunteer relief for the victims of the Halifax explosion in 1917, and Leo Johnson
(1974) describes the role of aristocratic women as (volunteer) managers of the
welfare system of Ontario in the early 1800s.
Another independently developing literature relevant to women’s community
work (including women’s networking activities) is the still growing body of schol-
arship on women as caregivers. As Hilary Graham (1983) writes:
caring is thus experienced as an unspecific and unspecifiable kind of labour,
the contours of which shift constantly. Since it aims, like so much women’s
work, ‘to make cohesive what is often fragmentary and disintegrating’, it is
only visible when it is not done.... A conception of caring-as-women’s-work
clearly advances our thinking in a number of ways. We can appreciate its
economic and ideological nature, as a labour which, although essential for
survival, is invisible, devalued and privatised. (26-7)
Leslie Brown and I saw this burgeoning literature as interesting for several
reasons. Some of this literature recognizes that it is often inappropriate to treat
caring as a commodity on the same conceptual level as shopping, cooking, working
and cleaning. Secondly, the idea and praxis of caring does not easily lend itself to
a dichotomous conceptualization, but more easily to a continuum—caring has
public as well as private components. Thirdly, the literature on caregivers calls our
attention to some of the overriding similarities of caregiving within communities,
mediating between communities and family, and within the family itself. It also
focuses our attention on women as nodal points in family and community.
If we extend the idea of women as caregivers to women’s community work, this
highlights the work women do such as writing letters/sending gifts to absent family
and friends, organizing annual neighbourhood or block parties (while trying to
achieve the “right” mix of people), caring for an elderly or incapacitated friend,
taking a casserole to a bereaved acquaintance, getting “the girls” together to smooth
over conflicts between husbands or children or workers, acting as the family’s
delegate to the school, the local church, the public library or recreational centre,
the doctor or school counsellor. Clearly these activities require conceptualization
and, we would argue, must be seen as part of women’s work and as incorporating
a community work component. The reflections of an Italian community worker,
recorded by David Kertzer (1982), remind us that these discoveries, while “new”
to the academic literature, are incorporated into the strategies of many women
activists. This Italian woman stresses the importance of a locally based women’s
group which “... keeps the women a little organised, a little prepared for certain
activities, as long as they aren’t directed to just one single party” (57). That she
feels these networks are effective is clear as she asserts, “There isn’t much prejudice
around here against the immigrants, because we have always conducted local
educational campaigns” (58).
Although Brown and Christiansen-Ruffman (1985) discovered evidence of
women’s community work described by scholars in many places over time, this
1984-5 review of the literature also confirmed that key dimensions of women’s
work have been and remain invisible to both the public and the scholarly com-
munity. We found that women’s community work was sometimes invisible by
definition, sometimes by implication, and other times semi-visible and not con-
ceived as work. When women’s work was included, it tended to be undervalued,
subordinated, or functional to male work. Brown and I also found episodic,
often idiosyncratic statements about particular examples of women’s community
work, often described as volunteer activities or the work of “housewives.” For
example, Meg Luxton (1980) writes, “Housewives have always been active in
their communities demanding a whole range of things that make life easier and
better—schools, hospitals, paved roads and street lighting, parks and recreation
centres. Periodically they organize around issues that are of specific interest to
women” (212-213). She points out that such activities change the relations of
women to their work and their families. Luxton does not, however, analyze these
activities as aspects of women’s work itself. Conceptually women’s community
work remains invisible in spite of the acknowledgement of its empirical presence.
Indeed, the scholarly literature at this time was characterized by loose theoreti-
cal concepts which uneasily embrace some aspects of this work while omitting
others. This lack of theorizing about women’s unpaid community work probably
accounts for the fact that empirical studies collect data on women’s community
work but then ignore the data in analysis. For example, Richard Berk and Sarah
Fenstermaker Berk (1979) collected time budget data on visiting, church involve-
ments, neighbouring and volunteer work which were unanalyzed although data
on time driving to and from work were included in the analysis.
This examination of women’s community work enabled Leslie Brown and me
to search the literature for new empirical examples and to describe features of
this work. Though occasionally present, these descriptive accounts were rarely
highlighted or analyzed. Neither the longer term focus on women’s volunteer
work nor the more recent feminist focus on caring work nor the other sub-types
of community work have developed their own theoretical traditions with their
own conceptual questions. This is not surprising because these features of women’s
community work are not consistent with the dominant paradigms. Although this
detailed review of the literature needs updating, my on-going reading suggests that
the theoretical invisibility of women community work remains. Indeed, a recent
survey of the social capital literature confirms this (Bezanson 2006).8
In the 1985 paper, Brown and I argued that the sociology of work literature
and our understanding of women’s community work could benefit from starting
with a conceptualization of work as the expenditure of energy. Such a suggestion
is reminiscent of physics. A sociological definition of energy expenditure however,
would not only focus on physical energy but also on mental energy, social energy
and emotional energy and the activities produced. Work would be conceived
as the expenditure of social, emotional, mental and physical energy relevant to
responsibilities, obligations or values. Interestingly, such a sociological definition
of the potential energy and social energy underpinning the concept of work is
not inconsistent with the Webster dictionary definition of work as an “activity in
which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something”; It “may imply
activity of body or mind ... or it may apply to the effort or to what is produced
by that effort”; it “may apply to any purposeful activity whether remunerative
or not.”
Community Work: Toward Alternative Interpretations
Brown and Christiansen-Ruffman (1985) concluded that the proposed all-em-
bracing, non-institutionalized definition of work was important but not the full
theoretical story. In the process of discovery and definition of women’s commu-
nity work, we had also come to a fuller understanding of the fact that women’s
community work does not fit comfortably into existing theoretical assumptions.
Unanswered questions emerged. We encountered difficulties incorporating
processes such as networking, mediating, caring, and transforming into a neat
set of categories. Could we really draw boundaries between paid, domestic, and
community work? We found that components of women’s community work are
related to other types of women’s paid and unpaid work. Figure 1 of the paper
pictured women’s community work at the core of and interlocking with other
types of women’s work: community-building/ change work, liaison/ mediating;
maintaining household; individual care/ nurturing; reproduction/ socialization;
production for use/ subsistence; production for exchange/ formal economy; pro-
duction for exchange/ informal economy; volunteering (social, service, political
organizations). We were also led to question the extent to which volunteer work
still has the characteristics of women’s community work or has it been transformed?
Moreover, we confronted the problem that in showing women’s community work
to be valuable, there is a tendency to conceptually harness and change apparent
caring work into the service of contemporary patricentric institutions.
To fully incorporate women, we had to start from different assumptions.9
Therefore, we concluded our extensive review of the literature by raising theo-
retical questions and suggesting the need to develop a whole new puzzle, solidly
grounded in women’s work experience.
The alternative, transformed conceptualization of women’s community work
cuts across, permeates throughout and in fact is at the core of the work women
do on the job, in the home, and in the community. In this transformed concep-
tualization, women’s community work (public, unpaid work) is networking or
the production and reproduction of community. Women’s community-building
work takes place in the family, in the kinship group, in the neighbourhood, in
the work place, and in various arenas within the larger society. The building and
nurturing of networks, associations, and interpersonal relationships is, we argue,
as much a work activity as the activities or transactions (social and economic
consequences) made possible by these processes. Women expend energy, which
must be replenished, in carrying out this work. This work does take time, although
it is difficult to locate in time-budget analysis.
The 1985 paper focuses on a specific example of women’s creative community
work in bringing a feminist lecture series to Halifax. The women involved were
all university professors and membership on this committee as active community
participants was also part of their paid work. The series had previously featured
mainly male speakers on topics such as “The Crisis of Modern Man as Seen by
Some Contemporary French Writers” and “Man/Animal Communication: Pitfalls
and Opportunities.” In 1984 the series was entitled “Feminist Visions” and featured
Marge Piercy, Sheila Rowbotham and Mary Daly. A capacity audience of over
1,000 people attended each session and the series was one of the most popular
in the eleven-year history of the lecture series. The work of the all-woman com-
mittee was positively recognized by some members of the university community
and by the feminist community, but the usual dinner of thanks to the organizers
of the series never materialized. Moreover, such work is not really “counted” in
university promotion, pay, or reward structures.
The feminist and social process that led to the success was not rewarded although
it took effort and energy to realize and had a number of positive implications for
the university and beyond. The proposal was a collective effort among women
faculty and had to be of a high quality to be selected in competition with other
proposals. Unlike other years, the feminist organizers paid creative attention to
lectures as a learning process and held pre-lecture sessions to introduce the speaker’s
ideas so that audience members would be more knowledgeable and would gain
more from the series.
In planning these sessions and later in organizing small seminars with the invited
speakers or in sharing time with them over meals, the committee involved not
only their own members but those from other universities in Nova Scotia and
from the non-university community in Atlantic Canada. Institutional barriers
between universities and elitist barriers between the university and “non-university
community” were minimized. The needs and interests of the diverse women’s
community were melded with those of the speakers. For example, in the case of
the feminist separatist, Mary Daly, a special time was set aside for her to meet
with the Nova Scotia lesbian community. Also the typical “by-invitation-only”
reception was replaced by a general invitation to the audience to join in refresh-
ments in the art gallery, in the same building as the lecture hall.
The work of the university feminists in this case shows clearly that feminist
work, like women’s work is not “just a job” but an effort which creates results by
mobilizing, enhancing and renewing networks, and by maximizing community
involvement. It requires considerable energy expenditure on work which has been
invisible. This example of women’s community work cuts across institutional
boundaries and permeates women’s paid work activities.
Women’s community work is also embedded in the “private” work of women.
Whether picking up litter and child-minding during a picnic, helping children
to meet friends and learn to play with others, caring for her family’s nutritional
needs, mediating between family and friend’s institutions such as school, we see
the thread of community work. In fact, women’s community may be conceived as
being at the core of all women’s work activities as they are conceived along a public
to private continuum which challenges those very concepts and rigid boundaries
created by male institutional imaginaries, dichotomies and hierarchies.
Rather than organize our thinking in dualisms and dichotomies of “public”
and “private” work of women, we saw women’s valuable community-building
and maintaining work as embedded in the relationships and activities of living.
The new puzzle illustrated women’s way of “making a living” in relation to oth-
ers. Through caring, provisioning, sheltering, socialization, network building
and maintaining, communication and organizing, women create communities
necessary to sustain social life.
Moreover, women’s community work contributions with their emphasis on
mutual caring and the building of community are a reflection and expression of
women’s culture as it has developed historically. The type of work that is women’s
work cannot be reduced to commodities because the process and product cannot be
separated as they are within the more institutionalized, patriarchal social arrange-
ments. As many studies have shown, and as Myra Marx Feree (1985) emphasizes,
women “stubbornly” tend to doubt that the demands of the market place should
take priority in determining where one lives, how one arranges one’s schedule,
and the extent of non-paid commitments in one’s life. Women’s relationships
are an inseparable part of mutually contingent and inter-related life processes.
Moreover, women are nodal points in family, neighbourhood, and community
networks that take many forms among the diverse cultures of the world. Even
within similar cultures, there is a wide diversity of ways in which women engage
with their surroundings and these life processes.
Wealth: A Fuller Meaning10
What is wealth? How does one value life or women’s community work which
might be considered invaluable? How does one appreciate something that is
pervasive, invisible and that we hardly understand? Rachel Kahn-Hut, Arlene
Kaplan Daniels, and Richard Colvard (1982), in an introduction to a section of
their edited book, Women and Work: Problems and Perspectives, focus on “Invisible
Work: Unacknowledged Contributions” and point out:
... the actual importance of much of the work women do, not only in maintain-
ing a family and a home but also in establishing community life, facilitating
interaction within and between families and throughout communities, has
still not even been systematically studied. In our society, for example, the work
of volunteers is given lip service as honorific, but little attention is really paid
to how the society would function in its absence. Women assume most of the
responsibility for providing linkages between home and school.... Women
raise money for the church, welfare, the elderly, and for children’s activities,
and provide staffing. But the value of that work in our cash-nexus economy
and the worth of those who do it are left ambiguous. Like other currently
conventional forms of women’s work, such as writing family letters, it may
be praised but it seldom has exchange value in market terms. (97)
The above quote is interesting here because it suggests two analytic ways to
assess the value of women’s community work. The most usual way to assess wealth
is to translate women’s community work into the dominant monied system of
evaluation, as my husband had also suggested. Although the calculation requires
arbitrary and problematic assumptions as the opening of this essay suggests, for
some analytic and political purposes, and with the caveats mentioned above, we
may want to highlight the positive economic potential of women’s community
work. In the example of the lecture series, one might wish to calculate what the
university would have had to pay for the public relations benefits and community
understanding which was generated by that series: how much high-priced public
relations staff time? How many management consultants would generate the
same result? Note, however, that such a question leads to another—how does one
measure the wealth generation of an increased social vitality, of a more informed
citizenry, or higher trust levels, and what are the costs of a society focused only on
control rather than empowering each other? Have we not outlived the usefulness
of the monied economy as the indicator of wealth in life?
These issues are urgent for everyone in society to consider now. As the world
has adopted more economically fundamentalist values and as women themselves
are more likely to apply economic reasoning as they move more fully into the paid
labour force and mainstream institutions and into exchange-based negotiations
with others in their lives, will the rich and varied aspects of women’s work be lost?
If it is, what are the consequences for everyone in the society and all of life? Is the
measure of wealth, based solely on the value of monetized exchange, even valid? Is
not the idea of exchange itself a big part of the problem? Must community work
be reduced to market criteria (and according to whose criteria?) to be valuable?
What about substantive, quality of life criteria? Perhaps the dystopias of writers
such as George Orwell are, as much as anything, worlds in which women’s work
is no longer done.
The second way of assessing the value of women’s community work is by the
removal design. Effectively, by asking how society would function in the absence
of the work of volunteers in the quote above, Kahn-Hut, Daniels and Colvard
(1982) are suggesting this analytic device. If we take away all of women’s com-
munity work, as well as all of the unpaid work women do, how would the society
function? When women get angry enough, it might be an interesting experiment
to start with a series of rotating “strikes”—or to start first with-holding women’s
work for a minute, then for two, then for four, and continue at an accelerat-
ing rate. Beginning with an hour or a day, of course, would have a much more
immediate impact. In the interim, we could begin to think into the future and
to use the removal design to “think through” what communities would be like
without women’s unpaid work and to suggest changes. In such an exercise which
was focused also on policies to eliminate poverty and the production of a special
issue of Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme (Armstrong et al. 2004) on
Benefiting Women? Women’s Labour Rights, Canadian feminist thinkers/activists
produced the “Pictou Statement” which is a feminist argument for the need for
a Guaranteed Living Income.11
Both of these approaches for assessing value show significant differences between
what women and some men value through their community work and what is
valued by the existing patriarchal paradigm with its measure of money. For a
feminist alternative perspective and as the author of a paper re-examining wealth
presented in 1985 (Christiansen-Ruffman 1987), I turned to the humanities and
literature on the one hand, and to women’s organizations on the other hand, to gain
insight into conceptualizations of wealth from the standpoint of women. Women’s
negative attitude to the patriarchal concept of wealth—as money accompanied by
greed, corruption, and human slavery—is contained in a brief section of a poem
by Peggy Antrobus (1983), a feminist from the Caribbean:
Wealth has always been our greatest enemy;
The price of skin,
The currency of betrayal of our kin.
An alternative feminist vision of wealth, one to which Antrobus would subscribe
rather than critique, is contained in a play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will marry when
I want) from Kenya:12
Development will come from our unity.
Unity is our strength and our wealth.
A day will surely come when
If a bean falls to the ground
It’ll be split equally among us.
(Thiong’o 1982: 130)
This second, broad definition conceives of wealth as multi-dimensional. It is not
limited to economic wealth, commoditized wealth, and monetary wealth. Instead,
wealth encompasses all that is valuable.
My examination of women’s “development” projects locally and around the
globe in the early 1980s indicates a broad variety of types of projects: In Canada
there were information generating projects (for example, providing health infor-
mation and/or women’s rights information in Toronto); change-oriented projects
(for example, successfully advocating for the participation of women in planning a
Halifax maternity hospital and preventing its effective demise); income-generating
projects (for example, craft production, and building and operating a museum in
southern Labrador); and service-oriented projects (for example, women’s initia-
tion of a transit system, a battered women’s shelter, and a women’s drop-in centre
in Whitehorse, Yukon). These projects all create wealth from the perspective of
the community and the women who undertook them, even though only one of
these ways of wealth-generation is consistent with economically fundamentalist
approaches which have spread like cancer since the 1980s.13
An examination of almost any project in slightly more detail indicates the
multifaceted nature of most women’s projects. For example, the mainly service-
oriented project in Whitehorse produced several forms of wealth in the community
as women identified their problems of isolation and planned a local transit system
to serve their needs. The project provided not only a much needed community
service but also employment opportunities for women. Moreover, workers’ “shifts”
were especially designed to minimize conflicts with family responsibilities and
thus contributed a new cultural definition of job possibilities. Bus schedules and
routes were geared to the needs of women and families. In this instance, wealth
was created in the community not only by the service, subsequently taken over
by the municipality, but also by networks and organizations including a Status
of Women group, a Women’s Centre and, in conjunction with other networks
and organizations, a Transition Home for Women in need of temporary shelter.
These, in turn, acted to increase options for women and to make the community
a wealthier place, both at the time and for subsequent generations. In the course
of establishing these services, women as individuals gained training, education,
skills, insights and ideas, self-confidence, human energy, and increased their human
individual resources as well. The community acquired material wealth through
new resources such as childcare, transit, and shared labour as well as income and
jobs. At many levels, and in mutually generating ways, this community-oriented
project provided a full array of gifting activities and generated a wealth of social
and cultural resources such as feelings of belonging, caring, networking; education
and alternative ideas about of paid-work time and ways in which the community
is organized. It also served to develop consciousness of women within individuals,
families and communities.
A second project illustration comes from Jamaica and Honor Ford-Smith’s (1980)
description of the feminist popular theatre group of women from the ghetto of
Kingston. Eleven women employed as street cleaners by the government came together
to form Sistren. They used “drama as a means to explore and analyze the events and
forces which make up their lives; and later, through theatre, share this experience
with other groups” (19). The work in building networks, linkages, understanding
of common everyday oppressions and problems of everyday life has added wealth
to these women and to the working class community of women and has helped
pressure for change. As Ford-Smith points out, “By confronting what has been
considered taboo, indecent or irrelevant we have begun to make a recorded refusal
of the ways in which our lives are thwarted and restricted” (14). Such individual
and collective analysis and its subsequent public presentation and discussion add
social and cultural wealth; they are important prerequisites if the world is to embark
on alternative courses of development. See also Ford-Smith (1986).
Challenges to the Patriarchal Wealth Paradigm
Major challenges to patriarchal scholarship and policy and to its reflections in
contemporary societies are raised by taking seriously women’s projects which
create wealth (see Christiansen-Ruffman 1987). The main challenge is that the
formal institution of the economy is built on assumptions that discriminate pro-
foundly against women. What is termed “women’s unpaid work” in the monetary
economy, by definition, has no value, and this lack of value is socialized into
gendered roles and into individual self-esteem and shapes social interaction. The
current concept of “rational man” acting in his own self-interests is antithetical
to women’s community work as well as to mothering. This profound exploitation
of women was described in a marvellous article by Claudia von Werlhof (1984),
who argues that the housewife rather than the free wage earner is prototypical of
capitalist exploitation. She points out that 80 percent to 90 percent of the world’s
population resembles the housewife more than the proletarian. She also gives
great importance to a study of housework, claiming that “if we have understood
housework, then we have understood everything.... Women are always ‘the ones
below’. But only from below, hence at the bottom of the cask, can the whole be
seen as the whole. Nothing is more important—actually nothing is more vitally
necessary—than to support this tendency of analysis ‘from below’” (131).
Maria Mies (1998) describes “the Iceberg Economy.” The part that the world
sees and economists study is above the water. The remaining 90 percent of the
economy, contributed largely by women and subsistence communities, is invis-
ible. Genevieve Vaughan (1997) articulates the ways in which the gift economy
supports the mainstream economy and, indeed, how that mainstream monied
economy is parasitic on the gift.
Women’s community work and mothering challenge the validity of money as
a measure of wealth. Moreover, the negative implications of simply extending the
existing monetary measures of value to include the informal, (mainly) invisible
creation and distribution of goods and services as practiced by women are amply
illustrated in Arlie Hochschild’s work The Managed Heart: Commercialization
of Human Feeling (1983). She demonstrates the dangers of making feelings part
of what an employer purchases as part of labour power. Instead, feminist scholars
would argue the need for other, women-centred conceptual bases. A focus on
women’s community work may facilitate this development, and to the extent that
it does, therein lies the theoretical and societal importance of women’s community
work. This type of analysis also helps to question contemporary ways in which
women’s community work is hindered, changed, co-opted, made impossible or
invisibilised by large institutionalised structures aimed at controlling life, includ-
ing patriarchal capitalism or bureaucratized socialism.
Women’s full inclusion in contemporary calculations of wealth violates too
many of the patricentric assumptions implicit in scholarship and policy.14 For
example, neither economists nor time budget scholars who calculate women’s un-
paid work activities use assumptions which treat seriously the 24 hours a day and
365 days a year responsibility of mothers for children. Discussions of this problem
with economists, even those who are women and identify as feminists, usually
end with their saying something like: “But if you did that, the numbers would
not work”; “It would mess things up!” or “Our methodologies [for time budget
studies] have gotten better [because women are more apt to multi-task]: we now
count three simultaneous activities.” It has become clear that the assumptions of
contemporary economics and of scholarship and policy do not work for women.
It is time for feminists to articulate what different assumptions are necessary and
to develop further the feminist alternative.
Implications for a Feminist Conception of Wealth15
Analysis of women’s culture, women’s organizations and women’s activities indi-
cates that women’s conception of wealth is fundamentally different from the usual
patricentric and monied concept of wealth. Components of women’s material
wealth, social and cultural wealth, and human resource wealth cannot simply be
added to economic wealth as easily handled minor and superficial additions. The
multifaceted components comprising women’s concept of wealth radically affect
the assumptions embedded in the existing patriarchal concept and transform
the concept itself in a number of fundamental ways. Qualitatively, it becomes a
different concept, because it is multifaceted rather than one-dimensional and it
is people-centred and relational.
The patriarchally-based monetary concept of wealth rests on assumptions that
everything important may be translated into an impersonal and amoral means
of exchange (called money), that everything may be reduced to one dimension,
the so-called “bottom line,” that everything that matters may be placed along a
scale of value, that the more money that one has, the more wealthy one is, and
that people have an insatiable desire for money.
Women’s projects and thinking about wealth reflect a culture in which wealth
is determined according to human-oriented assumptions. The many different
components of wealth are not reducible to a common denominator and do not
operate on the patriarchal principles of reductionism, insatiability, commodifica-
tion, and unilinear thinking. The calculus that women routinely use takes into
account the innate value of human beings and is not oriented toward insatiable
accumulation. From woman’s point of view, for example, having 10 or 100 or
1,000 times the amount of necessary food is not an indicator of wealth and, in
fact, overabundance itself would create further costs and a further burden of labour.
Parts of women’s wealth calculus, therefore, do not follow the traditional arithmetic
rules. Moreover, bottom lines change based on circumstances and are relational
rather than absolute. At the present time, wealth for women might be conceived
not as presence of commodities but as the absence of the forms of oppression:
poverty, hunger, unfilled basic needs, and scarcity. Wealth, for example, might be
considered absence of the threats of violence to women and men, children and
seniors, and the ability of all peoples to develop their human potential.
The concept of human potential that is central to women’s concept of wealth
is almost totally absent from traditional concepts of wealth and standards of liv-
ing. As the economist Raymond W. Goldsmith (1968) points out concerning the
GNP, human resources “are omitted because human beings are not considered part
of the national wealth unless they can be appropriated. Where slavery exists, the
market value of slaves, which in part reflects their training, constitutes a separate
category of national wealth” (52). It is perhaps symptomatic of patriarchy that
the concept of standard of living is based on an assumption which only includes
human potential if it is enslaved.
Women’s concept of wealth is also distinguished by its collective and relational
orientation. Women engage in the creation and definition of the moral order
and hence are oriented to and help to create the collectivity. This orientation to
the collectivity involves a commitment of caring and responsibility for others, of
making qualitative distinctions, and of contextualising. Women expend energy by
networking and creating spiritual, social, and cultural resources; hence, the calculus
of women’s wealth creation is more likely to involve sharing and maximizing the
payoff and potential for all.
Patriarchal concepts are unable to comprehend and fully embrace women’s
community work because it is not commodified. As Brown and Christiansen-
Ruffman (1985) have argued, the products of women’s community work cannot
be separated as they might be within the more institutionalized patriarchal social
arrangements. A key feature is that of the network relations themselves. In essence,
women’s community work is networking or the production and reproduction
of community, and women’s community work produces wealth through which
women and others are empowered. Unlike exploitative concepts of wealth, where
profit is gained by exploiting the labour of others rather than working together
for the collective good, all parties gain: the calculus is very different.
Superficially, both the GNP and standard of living are also used as measures of
the collectivity or the group. However, as is indicated by an example from Paul A.
Samuelson and Anthony Scott (1980), two housewives could add $10,000 to the
GNP by exchanging jobs and each paying $5,000 for the other’s labour. As this
example shows, the traditional concept of wealth is not based on activities within
a collectivity. Instead, it is based on artificially formulated monetary principles and
an aggregated self-interested individualism. Concepts such as the GNP in fact mask
the collective good and principles of equity by aggregating individuals. Because
of such assumptions, what looks like development may be an illusion and in fact
hide collective deterioration. For example, Sylvia Hale (1985) makes reference
to an observation by Irene Tinker about India that “the introduction of grinding
mills and oil presses have [sic] been estimated to have raised the national income
by nine times the value of jobs lost, but this new technology benefited directly
only the large farmers, and the owners of the rice mills. Women, meanwhile, lost
their jobs as millers, and could not afford the new rice” (qtd. in Hale 1985: 25).
Poverty increased even though “wealth” (measured in patriarchal ways) increased.
The averaging feature of the GNP and the current practices of development do
not focus attention on increasing inequalities. They mask individual exploitation
and the absolute and relative decreases in the poor’s standard of living and ability
to participate actively in creating a new social order. They are unable to tap the
collectivity, the collective good, or the benefit of equal sharing.
The patriarchal concept of wealth is unable to comprehend the collective value
of resources. For example, as Goldsmith (1968) points out “natural resources
... are excluded [from calculations of national wealth] insofar as they cannot be
separately appropriated or sold, as is the case with sunshine and precipitation”
(52). During the 1970s the environmental movement focused attention on the
wealth of having access to clean air, sunshine, and pure rather than polluted acid
rain. Women’s concept of wealth is associated with safe and uncontaminated
collective environment.
Women’s concept of wealth also considers as extremely valuable the public
services and community infrastructure which help both to ease women’s burdens
and to enrich women’s lives. In fact, social and community infrastructure tends to
be doubly utilized by women both in their own well-being and in their caring for
others. To the extent that women do a good job caring, the need for infrastruc-
tural support becomes even more invisible to the male decision-makers. Recently
throughout the world, governments have been cutting back on social services. As
DAWN (1985) points out, “Reduced access to human services such as health,
literacy, transport etc. affect women in two ways, first by reducing women’s own
access to these services, and second, by their having to fill the gap of providing
them to others (e.g., children, the aged, infirm or unemployed) because of their
traditional roles” (9).
Neo-Patriarchal Attack on Women’s Community Work
The period of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in countries of the economic
South and of “restructuring” and “privatization” in countries of the economic
North have been difficult for women because it has resulted in reduced human
services. The policies cut back on public and social institutions and focus increas-
ingly on economic growth and trade. The scholarly literature on the impact on
women of these policies shows that SAPs have “sapped” women’s energies and
added an increasing burden to the community work needed for family survival16
(see Antrobus et al. 2002). While political leaders of western countries such as
Canada’s conservative Prime Minister Mulroney were interviewed and jubilantly
described the withdrawal of food subsidies in countries of the economic South
and former Soviet Union, women’s interests everywhere were being harmed by
these neo-patriarchal policies which made women’s lives around the world so
much more difficult.
In Canada, and especially in Nova Scotia, these neo-conservative/ neo-reform/
neo-liberal policies are dismantling the welfare state, undermining rural livelihoods
and restructuring the political, economic, and social fabric of Canada. For sev-
eral years the governmental “spin” took the rhetorical form of an urgent need to
tackle the debt and deficit. This governmental “spin” was aided by an increasingly
concentrated corporate media and had the effect of dismissing other competing
values such as equality, the environment, and socio-economic justice.17 Values of
individualism, competitiveness, greed, and other economic values trumped oth-
ers. Words associated with political rights such as “citizen” became “customer”
and “consumer.” Women were dismissed as “special interest groups” while the
powerful corporate special interest groups and the government increasingly led by
public relations interests were able to “spin” their issues without being challenged
or identified as the real beneficiaries of these changed values.
The restructuring throughout this period has not been all spin, and it has
been accelerating for some time.18 The mid-1990s saw massive cutbacks in social
programming and a down-sized Canadian government, creating crises in social
programs which some Canadians fear was a deliberate way of privatizing these
services. Unemployment Insurance, a government supported program to provide
a safety net to workers, was also massively cut back and restructured at exactly the
time when workers needed support. Higher education was also under siege, and
when monies were given back to higher education several years later, the nature
of the funding was entirely different; it focused on scholarships for individuals
rather than funding for the university system.
Feminist research in Nova Scotia during the 1990s on women in fishing com-
munities and the work of Nova Scotia Women’s FishNet provided insights into
the ways that the strong social fabric which had supported fishing communities
for centuries was being ripped apart by a series of government policies and an
environmental crisis of fish stock depletion (see Catano et al. 2004; Christiansen-
Ruffman 2004, 2002, 1995). The policies were favourable to large corporations
and not to small owner-operated boats. Corporate interests and government at-
tempted to implement policies such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs) that
were known elsewhere to have shifted fish from being part of “the Commons.”
Moreover, the policy approach of the government to conservation of the cod
stocks was to prohibit the inshore fishers from their livelihood and even from
catching fish such as cod for their own subsistence. On the other hand, the large
and increasingly concentrated corporate fishery, which used more environmen-
tally-destructive technologies and fished further offshore, continued to catch cod
as part of a “by-catch” when they were licensed to catch other new species. Fresh
cod continued to be sold in the supermarkets despite the “cod moratorium.”
The particular policy choices being implemented were quite literally making
people sick, breaking morale because they were considered unfair, and also dev-
astating the social relationships among women and within families and commu-
nities. The networks on which women’s community work had been created and
sustained were being torn apart, sometimes with the help of government policies
and corporate manipulations; a way to create dissent and to split apart families
and communities was to offer “deals” of licenses or fish quota to specific individu-
als or corporations if they agreed to new policies or favoured conditions. Other
times networks were torn apart because of the power of the economy and the lack
of alternatives: community members were forced to close their store because of
lower revenues, compelled to leave for work elsewhere, or did not have enough
gas money to drive an elderly person to the store for groceries or to the doctors or
to pay for a school trip. At the same time that fishing communities were in crisis,
the provincial government was cutting back on social programs and was closing
down rural health and education facilities, substantially interrupting the networks
and support systems on which rural peoples had been relying. The shadow of the
economy was so strong that all of the webs and networks supporting the well-being
of community members and community wealth were being silently destroyed,
without raising a policy alarm. Chains of events hit simultaneously and seriously
affected well-being in coastal communities. Rural communities were especially
hard hit with loss of both public and private services for transportation, health,
and education. Women’s community work was out of favour, unappreciated and
undersupplied at the same time as it was even more desperately needed. Neo-
liberal corporate/ neoconservative/ neo-reform agenda brought values associated
with rampant consumerism to communities with essentially no money, further
depressing community members who could no longer participate in social life, and
introducing significant class differentials into relatively equalitarian communities.
Moreover, this new agenda imposed an economically fundamentalist value system
that intensified an already dominant economic agenda and further marginalized
the region and rendered women’s community work even more invisible.
As a feminist sociologist, I was particularly dismayed by the overlapping and
destructive social processes which I feared might have long-term consequences. I
still hope I was not witnessing the social creation of profound impoverishment,
a form of destruction of the social viability of these communities that could have
negative consequences on future generations. Although these communities were
previously on the margins and certainly not rich in monetary terms, they were
socially, individually and morally strong, vibrant and more independent before
the restructuring. They were very far from the profound, dysfunctional impov-
erishment which I had experienced in parts of Appalachia in the United States
and in some inner city ghettos.
The ingredients of this new impoverishment included the destruction of the
social support systems of these communities. Moreover, independent individuals
were being deskilled and demoralized. These individuals included not only the
men and women who caught fish in boats on the sea but also the “women who
were the captains of the shore crew.” They had managed the small family business
by handling repairs and buying new equipment, keeping the books, monitoring
the boat for safety, and knowing the rules and regulations from government agen-
cies. The restructuring of the fisheries deskilled these women of the shore crew
who no longer could keep up with the rapidly changing rules and regulations.
They were robbed of their self-esteem at the same time as the government policies
robbed their families and communities of their ways of making a living. They were
robbed of compensation for being put out of work because in many cases their
work on the shore crew was not recognized as “work,” even for women who put
bait on many hooks of the “trawl.” Not only were they not eligible for financial
compensation, but they were not eligible for training programs and some jobs.
At the same time as fishing families were told that they could no longer continue
to do the only work they knew, the downloading of governmental responsibility
onto individuals and user pay mentality was abolishing their social entitlements.
It was also eliminating the public and community institutions on which women
relied as part of their community work. I think it took less than six months be-
fore the media began to blame the “lazy” fishers—who had just been banned by
government regulations from using their boats.19 Surprisingly, these processes of
community destruction and social devastation remain largely unnamed.
From Women’s Community Work to Community Gifting
For many years, women’s groups and feminist scholars have been expressing the
need for new paradigms and alternatives.20 While neo-patriarchal forces in the
last decade in Canada and globally have sapped energy from women and women’s
movements, they also have made it even clearer that alternatives are urgently needed.
The neo-liberal policies are clearly unsustainable for both the planet and its hu-
man societies, encouraging destructive behaviours, exacerbating gaps between rich
and poor within and between countries, diminishing social and bio-diversity, and
threatening the ecosystem. The “Wise Women’s Workshop” in Norway in 2001
was a response to the growing urgency about both the neo-patriarchal resurgence
and the need to think together with other feminist scholars (see Linda Christian-
sen-Ruffman, Paola Melchiori and Berit ¬s, 2006). We attempted to understand
the times and to envisage alternatives. In lengthy discussions about alternative
economies, I was introduced to the work of Genevieve Vaughan, the implications
of the exchange basis of the economy, and especially the false dichotomy of equal
and unequal exchanges that masked the problematic nature of exchange itself. It
is a tremendous intellectual shift to recognize that difference.
Discussions at the “Wise Women’s Workshop” and subsequent meetings made
clearer and more realistic the possibilities of putting forward alternatives based on
women’s current ways of living in a gifting way. Therefore, rather than envisioning
a future without a past or present, we could build upon existing hidden women’s
cultures and economies which bring forward matriarchal cultures from the past
into the present. It was liberating and comforting to envision alternatives and
inspiration in our own lives and those living on the margins of the contemporary
madness. We discussed rural women’s community work in different cultures, In-
digenous survival cultures, and the ways in which Aboriginal peoples have lived
in contingent inter-relationship with the natural world, respecting nature and its
gifts. It is a major achievement to figure out that women’s peaceful, caring ways of
being in this world, rather than some other magic, invented solution, is a major
key to thinking into the future.
To celebrate new insights, emphasize the idea of process, and suggest a new
paradigm, I decided to change the name of the central concept from women’s
community work to women’s community gifting. The idea of gifting better
represents the visionary and alternative assumptions at the core of women’s com-
munity activities. It may well be that that women’s community work might be its
name, bound within strictures of the old paradigm and gifting might be a way to
release the creativity of women’s community work in the new paradigm. I look
forward to “thinking into this concept” in the future and have just started to do
so in this paper. I invite others to participate in thinking through the alternative
assumptions and conceptualisations which may be useful in further specifying
the shape of the new gifting paradigm.
Conclusion
The escalating impoverishment of individual lives and threats to life itself, which
are results of new forms of patriarchy, needs to be assessed. This patriarchal world
is based on an outmoded system of elitist and abstracted logic. Its measures are
false and no longer valid. Money is misleading as a measure of wealth and devel-
opment. Militarization as a measure of security is not only wrong but dangerous.
Patriarchal thinking that leaves human beings, life, and relationships simply as
abstract categories to be controlled or ignored is inadequate for a civilized world.
Our scholarship needs revamping. Our religious systems, which breed violence
and hatred, guilt and sacrifice, are logically based in slavery rather than liberation
of spirit and potential. These outmoded patriarchal ideas and myths have taken
us and our societies beyond their “limits to growth.” We have become lost in
Orwellian double speak, or “spin.” In this world where the measures of wealth,
security and well-being have been increasingly translated into their antitheses, it is
time for a radical change. A radical transformation is possible only if we recognize
that the old patriarchal paradigm has outlived its years and that we must live into
a new approach and paradigm.
This paper has analyzed the history of the emergence of the idea of women’s
community work as a feminist alternative paradigm. The emergence of any new
paradigm, according to Kuhn (1962) has always met with resistance. Thus, per-
haps we should not be surprised at the more recent reinvisibilization of women’s
community work; deepening shadows have again been cast upon it by new forms
of patriarchy that have been escalating over the last fifteen years. But I detect a
shift. During the period of new forms of patriarchy and patriarchal intensification,
surprisingly, the patriarchal inroads were not taken seriously. Perhaps because they
did not appear to be gendered. This is now changed. The old paradigm is so full
of holes and inconsistencies that its failures to explain and come up with solutions
can no longer be ignored. More and more individuals, including Canadians such
as Stephen Lewis and James Robert Brown (2001) are vocally recognizing the im-
portance of women’s leadership. Lewis noticed the important women’s community
work of the grandmothers in Africa when he was the United Nations Envoy for
HIV/AIDS in Africa until 2007. Brown credits feminist scholarly leadership in
shifts towards a new scientific paradigm.
This analysis of women’s community gifting shows both the necessity and the
potential of a feminist and women-centred approach to create a more humane
world for all living beings. It also directs us to the alternative assumptions on
which we might recognize wealth and value. The grandmothers of this world still
know the importance of women’s community work, and we could learn by listen-
ing to their wisdom of living life. The young women have declared “the women
are angry campaign and will not accept cutbacks and push-backs.”21 Personally,
I can think of no better alternative to seeking solutions to world problems than
listening to the wisdom of women who are trying to work with non-patriarchal
assumptions. What if each of us, in our own spheres, takes up this approach
and learns to live with and into these different assumptions? Applying women’s
community gifting to everyday relations with each other and with the world is
probably the best way of creating that radically different world, a world full of
new possibilities and hope for all.
Linda Christiansen-Ruffman (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of Sociology
at Saint Mary’s University. She served as a President of both the Canadian Sociology
and Anthropology Association and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advance-
ment of Women as well as their Atlantic counterparts. She has chaired the Research
Committee on Women in Society of the International Sociological Association (ISA)
and been a member of the ISA executive committee and its representative to the United
Nations in New York. In the 1970s she began to conduct local research and to teach,
write, and organize some of the “early” research by, for, about, and with women. She
became part of the feminist challenge to unlearn biased theoretical and methodological
assumptions of disciplines and to invent new ways. She chaired the Taskforce on the
Elimination of Sexist Bias in Research of the Social Science Federation of Canada.
Her scholarship on feminist theory, methodology, sociology of knowledge and women’s
movements (local and global) has benefited greatly from feminist praxis. She has helped
to found many organizations, committees and caucuses including graduate women’s
studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia Women’s FishNet, FAFIA (Canada’s Feminist Alliance
for International Action) and the International Feminist University.
Notes
1
This paper incorporates a comment from Alan Ruffman about women’s valuable
work of constitution building into a paper, co-presentated at the November, 2004
282
linda christiansen-ruffman
Las Vegas conference with Angela Miles. The paper was called “Women’s Giving: A
New Frame for Feminist Policy Demands” and the conference, “A Radically Different
Worldview is Possible: The Gift Economy Inside and Outside Patriarchal Capitalism,”
was organized by Genevieve Vaughan. Thanks go to Gen for bringing together such
interesting feminist thinkers from all other the world, for her feminist generosity and
for her fresh and sophisticated feminist intellectual insights. Special thanks also go to
Angela Miles, Azza Anis, Luciana Ricciutelli and Genevieve Vaughan for their help
with the writing of this paper.
2
In 1981 the Prime Minister of Canada was intent on repatriating Canada’s Con-
stitution from Great Britain and including a Charter of Rights and Freedoms in it.
A conference had been planned by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status
of Women to focus on Women and the Constitution. When that conference was
abruptly cancelled by the (male) Minister for the Status of Women, the head of the
Advisory Council resigned publicly, creating a focus for intense women’s activism,
including a hurriedly organized Valentine’s Day conference, which led to the inser-
tion of women’s equality rights into the Constitution. See Penney Kome (1983) for
a detailed account of the activities, especially as they relate to Ottawa.
Despite the Constitutional victory, feminists recognized that the work was not over.
See the results of the Wilson Task Force in the 1990s for an accounting of discrimina-
tion against women within the legal profession and the articles in Faraday, Denike
and Stephenson (2006) for the ways in which Canadian women, especially those
associated with the legal profession, have worked within and outside the Supreme
Court at Making Equality Rights Real: Securing Substantive Equality Under the
Charter (to use their book’s title).
3
See Jill Vickers (1989) and Margaret Benston (1989) for a critique of objectivity as it
was naively practiced in positivism. Their accounts do not make the naive assumption
that certain elements of both are not possible in scholarship. Moreover, Benston also
makes a useful distinction between what she calls “objectivity” and “pseudo-objectiv-
ity.”
4
This desire to “discover,” “see,” or “conceive” of women was partly influenced by my
personal biography and partly by the growing women’s movement during my graduate
student days (see Christiansen-Ruffman 1998; Christiansen-Ruffman, Melchiori and
‰s 2006).
5
Methods employed in this research were participant observation and interviews. In Labrador
I used the same or similar questions, research instruments and sampling techniques as
used in the 1975 Halifax study to allow for comparison. The paper’s conclusion mentions
a suggested historical process and required strategy: “the decreasing personhood which
accompanies increases in societal scale and the development of capitalism has given rise
to conditions which so undermine the status of women that concerted efforts are needed
to institutionalize personhood in society.”
6
A retrospective analysis of the Labrador case study illustrates the tremendous power of
societal assumptions, namely ethnocentrism, sexism and unilinearity. Even though I
organized courses explicitly to challenge ethnocentric attitudes, had conducted research
in Africa with a women professor and studied anthropology, nevertheless. this case
study illustrates that as a researcher and a young feminist scholar in the mid 1970s, to
some extent I shared the taken-for-granted ethnocentric view of progress, especially as a
“modern” woman in my first meetings with the stereotypically “traditional” women in
Labrador. The comparative research perspective led to the framing of my 1979 paper and
allowed me to challenge the dominant social science (and societal) view of linearity.
7
The paper, “Women’s Community Work: A Third Part of the Puzzle,” was written
with Leslie Brown from Mount Saint Vincent University. She was also a member of the
executive of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women in Nova
Scotia (CRIAW-NS) and an expert on cooperatives. After presentation at the conference
“Women and the Invisible Economy” at Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia
University February 21-23, 1985, it was revised for publication in a book of selected
papers from the conference, edited by Suzanne Peters, the conference organizer. Like
many feminist books and other work outside of paradigms, ths book was widely circulated
but never published. (See Spender 1981b and Morgan cited in Christiansen-Ruffman
1985 for an analysis of the difficulties faced by feminist scholars from the gatekeepers
of publishing who tend to support existing, mainstream paradigms.) In this section and
the next, I draw heavily on the argument and quote the 1985 paper extensively (but not
formally as I would a publication). The reader should therefore consider much of these
two sections as being co-written written with Leslie Brown although I am responsible
for its current framing.
8
As suggested previously, however, feminist empirical recognition of women’s unpaid
work does not necessarily lead to a search for an alternative paradigm. Bezanson (2006)
is arguing for “applications of a social reproduction perspective to social capital-based
policy” (438).
9
Feminist ideas of starting from different assumptions and developing new paradigms were
part of the feminist intellectual climate at that time. The spirit was evident, for example, in
the title of Dale Spender (1981a)’s edited book, Men’s Studies Modified. Scholarship, policy,
and everyday life were all considered deeply problematic, and feminist scholars repeatedly
tried to peel back the layers of patriarchy and to discover patriarchal mechanisms. In the
late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, conferences of the Canadian Research Institute for
the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) could be counted upon for new insights into the
nature of patriarchal knowledge, and in 1984 I presented a paper concerned about the
extent to which we were doing a critique and the limited scope for going beyond what I
called the inherited biases within feminism, explicitly the patricentric syndrome and the
dichotomous either/or syndrome (see Christiansen-Ruffman 1989). In the early 1990s I
also added the abstraction syndrome, the tendency of patricentric thought to focus and
embellish the most abstract and generalizable ideas without respect to context. While
such an assumption might work better in natural sciences than in social sciences, over
time the decontextualisation of abstractions has also been challenged in the so-called
natural “scientific” world, thanks to theories of relativity and “chaos.”
10
This initial quote and some of the arguments in this section are also contained in the
1985 paper with Brown on women’s community work. This section, however, draws
most heavily from a paper which I wrote and presented to the Association for Women in
Development (AWID) meetings in April 1985. It rethinks wealth from a feminist point
of view and was greeted with considerable excitement (see Christiansen-Ruffman 1987).
In that paper I question some of the assumptions underlying the monetary system and
“development” which have been brought to public attention by Marilyn Waring (1988).
Thinking through that paper helped to convince me that it is not useful, in the long run,
to translate women’s work into a crumbling, exploitative, controlling and unsustainable
monetary system. The intensified individualism and economic fundamentalism since
then as well as critiques of the money system (see Kennedy 1995) and exchange (see
Vaughan 1997, 2004) have supported that decision and brought me back to that paper.
In many ways my paper on wealth is an example of what I have called “autonomous
feminist theorizing (see Christiansen-Ruffman 1989), using “women’s common sense,”
different assumptions and definitions, feminist analysis and grounded theory to think
the world afresh.
11
See, also, Angela Miles’s article in this volume, and in particular, page 371 for the text
of the statement.
12
As Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1982) points out, the play describes “the double oppression of
women. As suppliers of labor in colonies and neo-colonies, they are exploited; and as
women they suffer under the weight of male prejudices in both feudalism and imperial-
ism.” He also points to “the need to look for both causes and solutions in the social system
of how wealth is produced, controlled and shared out” (119). The play was put on by
the people’s theatre at Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre, Limuru,
Kenya, but it was stopped by Kenyan authorities after ten performances. A second play
by the Kamiriithu Theatre was denied a license because the government claimed that,
“women were being misled into cultural activities that had nothing to do with develop-
ment” (Thiong’o 1982: 128). The theatre was seen as teaching politics under the cover
of culture. Application for a licence was a procedure introduced in British colonies as
a method of vetting and censoring natural cultural expression (Thiong’o 1982: 124).
The potential importance of this type of activity for women and development is perhaps
underscored by patriarchy’s violent response, which, in this case, involved the physical
destruction of the theatre building.
13
Unlike Buvinic (1984), this analysis of development projects does not consider them
“misbehaving” when they deal with items related to women’s community welfare.
14
One important bias implicit in much of patricentric thinking is the institutional bias. In
my case, it became especially apparent through a feminist study of politics. I eventually
developed an alternative, non-institutional women’s definition of politics Its broad, non-
institutionalized conception of politics (including a dichotomy broad versus narrow and
a discussion of a closeted women’s political culture) was required to explain the empirical
facts that women were political actors even when they were not part of male-defined
political institutions. These insights eventually became part of an analysis of women’s
community work. Once one began to see women’s politics, patricentric views and
interpretations appeared particularly biased. See, for example, Christiansen-Ruffman’s
(1982) critique. As Leslie Brown and I began to explore women’s community work, we
encountered a similar institutionalized definition. The definition of work needs to be
taken out of its institutional context for work, not only for women but for everyone in
this new century. Indeed all concepts need to be de-institutionalized and reconceptual-
ized to rid them of their antiquated patriarchal bases at the same time as the antiquated
and biased assumptions on which all disciplines rest need to be reconceived.
15
A version of this entire section was previously entitled “Implications for a Conception
of Wealth” in the Michigan Working Paper (Christiansen-Ruffman 1987).
16
A comprehensive review of the literature on SAPS and restructuring policies and their
general effects on women was conducted with Srabani Maitra for (Christiansen-Ruffman
2001). It found that the overwhelming majority of the studies found negative impacts.
The few articles that mentioned some positive benefits tended to focus on the positive
benefit to women from women’s movement mobilizations in protest to the policies.
17
See Christiansen-Ruffman (1995) for a description of these processes. Although I did
not use the word “spin” for the onset of the economic fundamentalism which pervaded
public discourse over a decade ago, the concept of spin helps to “make (sociological)
sense” of the processes involved at that time (Spin Cycles, “Sunday Morning (third hour),”
February 2007, Canadian Broadcasting System).
18
There is considerable debate about restructuring and globalization: whether or not they
are new and when the processes began. Generally I agree with Antrobus (2004) that 1980
marks an important date with the emergence of conservative governments in Britain and
the United States and the so-called “Washington Consensus,” a shift in macro-economic
development policies which introduced Structural Adjustment Policies. In Canada, even
before that period, some serious cutbacks to social programs began in the mid- to late-
1970s with the introduction of food banks as “a temporary measure” because interest
rates were in the double digits and accelerating inflation was feared. This threat to human
entitlements in Canada has intensified with more recent financial and socio-structural
cutbacks such as the repeal of the Canada Assistance Plan. The Canada Social Transfer
currently has no standards or guarantees for human entitlements. Major shifts in Canada’
macro-economic policies began in the late 1980s with the Free Trade agreements, and
in 1995 with the cutbacks to social programs. The website of the Feminist Alliance for
International Action (FAFIA) hosts an interesting economic analysis of these cutbacks
by Armine Yalnizian (2005). Of particular interest is the argument that the cutbacks
in social programs were not necessary and that the debt and deficit would have been
reduced in a few years because of falling interest rates and debt financing. See also FAFIA’s
presentation to the United Nations Committee reviewing Canada’s compliance with the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and its
focus on the ways in which women’s lives were worsened by these government policies
which created poverty.
19
As I write this, another example of policies that violate Canada’s social and economic
obligations to fishing families is on the news. Earlier this year, the union of a fish plant
went on strike, then the plant owners decided to close the plant for good. The workers
now seem to have been abandoned with no legal recourse and no clear source of funds
to sustain themselves in this crisis. Instead of acting like a safety net, the federal govern-
ment announced it would take the case of court, continuing the limbo into which these
children, women and men are being pushed. A gifting community approach would
first support those individuals in need and then work out later how the bill is to be paid
among various levels of government and other institutions.
20
Ideas of transformational changes such as Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) idea of a scholarly
paradigm shift and the vision of radical feminist alternatives have captured the analytic
attention of many feminist scholars. They have often started from different interests
and such diverse fields as development (e.g., Jain 1983; DAWN 1985; Sen and Grown
1987); feminist methodologies (e.g., Mies 1983; Maguire 1987; Smith, 1987; Benston
1989); the environment (e.g., Mies and Shiva, 1993); human rights (e.g., Kumar,
1998); mothering (e.g., O’Brien 1981; Vaughan 1997); politics (eg., Miles 1996;
Ricciutelli, Miles and McFadden 2004); and peace (e.g., Franklin 2006). They all
share a vision of an alternative social world and their work is based on assumptions
which share many values associated with women’s community gifting. Patricia Madoo
Lengermannn and Gillian Niebrugge (c1998/2007) in an analysis of fifteen women
founders in sociology and social theory from 1830 to 1930 argue that these women
founders were not invisible in their times but were actively written out of North
American sociological history (especially pp. 1-21). They also found a remarkable
similarity among all of these fifteen women theorists: “[T]he women founders created
a range of theories. But those theories all share a moral commitment to the idea that
sociology should and could work for the alleviation of socially produced human pain.
The ethical duty of the sociologist is to seek sound scientific knowledge, to refuse to
make that knowledge an end in itself, to speak for the disempowered, and to advocate
social reform.... [I]n key respects the sociology of the women founders is guided by
rules similar to those of contempoprary feminist scholarship that theory and research
should be empirically grounded and empowering of the disempowered, that the cor-
rect relationship between researcher and subject is one of mutuality of recognition,
that the social theorist should reflexively monitor herself as a socially located actor,
and that social analysis should build from situated accounts to a general and critical
theory of society” (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007: 19). The characteristics of
these early thinkers as analyzed have a striking similarity to those scholars I used as
examples above. Further research will examine the extent to which they share similar
foundational assumptions with each other and with women’s community gifting.
21
The campaign, created by young women, is at www.thewomenareangry.org. It was
established in response to measures taken by a “new” (minority) conservative govern-
ment in Canada. Although Canada ratified the Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1981, in Fall, 2006 it
banned the words “equality,” “advocacy,” and “research” from the mandate of Status
of Women Canada and made cuts to staff and budget. The government’s tactics have
motivated women’s actions and a renewed women’s movement may be emerging in
Canada, which is also part of women’s community work. See Temma Kaplan (1982),
Peggy Antrobus (2004), and Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela Miles and Margaret H.
McFadden (2004) and the many other books and articles on the change-making com-
munity gifting of women’s movements around the world. This change-making work
is important not only for women but for the society and community as a whole.
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