Vol. 13 No. 2 (February 2003)
PRIVATIZATION, LAW, AND THE CHALLENGE TO FEMINISM by Brenda Cossman and Judy Fudge (Editors). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 493pp. Cloth. $75.00. ISBN: 0802036996. Paper. $35.00. ISBN: 0802085091.
Reviewed by Adelaide H. Villmoare, Department of Political Science, Vassar College. Email: Villmoare@Vassar.edu.
This volume edited by law professors from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University and the Law School at the University of Toronto is comprised of eight original articles that arose from a collaborative project at the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall. Addressing issues in Canada arising out of the move from the Keynesian welfare state to a neo-liberal form of governance, the book pays special attention to the meaning of this change for women in a variety of areas of political economy. While the editors and writers – all associated with one of these two law schools – come to the subject with feminist interests, some of the articles attend more fully to feminist issues and the role of law than others. But all of them focus firmly on the disproportionate costs to women of privatization in a neo-liberal state.
The excellent introduction by Cossman and Fudge articulates key themes of privatization, gender, and law, and the conclusion proposes feminist political projects for the future. They argue that the neo-liberal state has a “distinctively gendered impact” that is “fraught with contradictions” (p.6); they believe law plays a crucial role in this restructuring and in resistance to it. One of their thematic feminist observations, reiterated in several of the articles, is that with the restructuring of production and reproduction comes a “simultaneous intensification and erosion of gender.” The political visibility of gender difference is reduced (women and men are formally equal in the market) just as racialized inequalities intensify under privatization and new forms of regulation (pp. 24-25). Law is a coercive and discursive field within which these changes and struggles against them occur. Cossman and Fudge’s feminist political economic approach moves lucidly through dense terrain that should command the attention of all those concerned about work, families, social welfare, repression, and the very meanings of gender, class, citizenship, responsibility, and democratic politics and law in contemporary capitalism.
Incorporating eight articles, the book is divided into three sections: “Reproducing the Market,” “Reproducing the Social Body,” and “The Self-Reliant Citizen: Social Health and Public Order.” The three chapters of the first section consider the gendered aspects of tax law, a history of women working in the civil service, and privatization of pensions in Canada. In the first, Lisa Philipps demonstrates that tax policy increasingly honors a “market model of citizenship” where the good citizen is the economically independent person not in need of government assistance (p.52). Through income tax cuts, tax relief for unpaid caregiving work, and a greater tax break for charitable donations, the state regulates society so that women are seen as both “gender neutral market workers and primary caregivers who can take up the slack for degraded public services” (p.83). Next Judy Fudge evaluates feminist equality strategies in the face of retrenchment of the federal public service work force. Just as substantive equality became an accepted value in government work in Canada and the proportion of women working in public sector jobs grew, “wage controls and privatization strategies” resulted in the deterioration of norms and conditions of employment (p. 122). Equality here meant that both women’s and men’s work in the government got worse as the push for privatization succeeded. In the third article Mary Condon shows how nominal gender-neutrality in the reprivatization of pension risk actually intensifies substantive inequality and results in disadvantages to women. In its emphasis on individualized risk and movement away from redistribution, a policy that depends increasingly on the market presents difficult strategic issues for feminists. Can feminists press for a reconfiguration of a welfare state to pursue gender equity, or must they contend with the ascendant pro market forces and seek to “invigorate wider discourses of accountability” within the market (p.162)? Together these three articles speak to the neo-liberal ideal of the gender-neutral market citizen that leaves feminists seeking alternate discourses to counter the model and the political forces driving it to promote substantive equality.
The second section includes a chapter on political constructions of family and one on immigration. Brenda Cossman analyzes contradictory visions of family through neo-conservative (what in the US might be labeled New Right and Christian right) and neo-liberal discussions on welfare and family policy. She demonstrates how values of economic self-reliance (neo-liberal) and the desire for traditional family (neo-conservative) are replacing commitments to social responsibility. The family and individuals take care of themselves without state assistance, but the nature of that family differs, with women as traditional caregivers in one vision and as market citizens in the other. Furthering the analysis of the political and economic impact of a market vision, Audrey Macklin describes how the “state acts as an agent for the market” in assuring a proper labor force for economic growth through immigration policy. Under neo-liberalism the state delegates more authority to the private sector to select temporary (immigrant) workers, for instance, especially for high skilled work while it more carefully polices the lower end of the labor market. The laws “are designed to extract as much as possible from migrants (in the form of labour and taxes) while minimizing investment in their integration or claims to public benefits” (p. 260). Richly researched, both these articles analyze issues directly relevant to women, especially the most economically and socially vulnerable women, but neither does so in a manner that engages much feminist law and society literature.
Two of the articles in the third section consider health care and policy, and the third is a study of child prostitution. Joan M. Gilmour tackles the “reprivatization and commodification” (p. 268) of health care that had once enjoyed significant public funding and services. Under reprivatization, for example, women’s access to abortion services, often politically contentious, has been limited, and debate about it curtailed—the government has tried to “remove health care [including abortion] from the realm of contestation” (p. 292). She believes that feminists might use Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in litigation and political mobilization to keep debate in the public purview (p. 306). Roxanne Mykitiuk carries forward this section’s attention to health’s “being regulated as a commodity rather than a public good” (p. 333) when she explores genetics, state support for the biotechnology sector, and privatization. She envisions the not too distant future when genetic testing will be a hallmark of responsible behavior and good citizenship (pp. 348-349). The responsible citizen will “choose” genetic screening to assure good health. Women’s pregnant bodies especially will become a site for a new form of discipline, as pressure builds for such screenings. Also interested in the ways in which control over females intensifies under neo-liberal changes, Dianne L. Martin investigates child prostitution. Reregulation, not deregulation, occurs as shelters and halfway houses for adolescents close and Children’s Aid Societies’ budgets are cut (p. 361). The result is a higher caseload for the criminal justice system. Children, in the streets on their own at higher than ever rates, are increasingly demonized in public rhetoric, and police are delegated wider powers to detain children under eighteen (p. 382). Speaking to the commodification of health care and the elaboration of criminal justice powers, these articles address the book’s primary themes: privatization, the pull of market ideology, and control. Broad government restructuring and the attendant value changes, that create a focus upon private, individual responsibility, need to be understood in relation to women and societal structures that perpetuate gendered substantive inequalities.
While all the chapters are infused with feminist sensibilities, they do not really delve into feminist legal analyses. Cossman’s piece, for instance, demonstrates familiarity with feminist views of construction of family (e.g. gay and lesbian families are families) and the impact of welfare policy on women and families, but her analysis is much more involved with the neo-liberal and neo-conservative discourse than with feminist theory or perspectives on law. There is obviously nothing per se wrong with this approach, but the reader should be aware that this book is not primarily about legal theories, litigation, and feminism.
The articles represent quite extensive research and some generation of original data (e.g. Martin’s interviews with social workers and volunteer street workers). Carefully written, they explore political economy literature and give the reader a clear picture of critical issues facing women in Canada under the forces of neo-liberal and neo-conservative politics. The overall picture is one of huge challenges to women and men who care about social responsibility, feminism, and the politics of substantive equality. Most of the strategies offered are those of resistance to the onslaught of the forces of privatization and restructuring of government. In the conclusion Fudge and Cossman recognize the nature of the challenge to feminist strategies and suggest that litigation is one tool in this resistance; as they write, “the defence of equality in law may function as a brake against the logic of privatization within feminism” (p. 408). But such a tool must be part of a larger imagining about social reproduction and citizenship (p. 417) and a “rebuilding of politics” (p. 419). This book puts forth a serious challenge to those dedicated to recaptivating politics with egalitarian, feminist visions and practicalities.
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Copyright 2003 by the author,
Adelaide H. Villmoare.