Women at the Heart of the World

Motherhood problematized Mary Harrington’s concept of her own personhood. With the arrival of her baby, Harrington was immersed in a physical and emotional bond to a being outside of herself who suddenly determined her existence. The radicality of this bond obliterated her sense of being an autonomous individual as she witnessed her personhood emerge in its fullness in the context of a deeply embedded relationship between herself and her daughter.

But this Damascus moment came as a culmination rather than a shock. For the past ten years, Harrington had been a defector from “progress theology,” or the paradigm arguing that the world was moving from worse to better due to the rise of individual liberty and equality mediated by technological and economic advances. Central to this vision is the symbol of feminism. In her book Feminism Against Progress, Harrington, however, is not offering a typical conservative tally of the evils of feminism. Indeed, she herself identifies a feminist as one who “cares about women’s interests and thinks these are often sidelined.” As a “reactionary feminist,” Harrington looks to demonstrate how the conditions of personhood outlined by progressivism are actually incapable of embracing women as they are. This inability is not because of progressivism’s problem with women in particular but rather due to its baseline definition of a person as an autonomous individual. While “reactionary feminism” is a battle cry for women, at the heart of her movement is the demand that women reclaim their status as a symbol which embraces and mediates the fullness of what it means to be a human person.

Feminism is a central plank in progressive theology, functioning as a microcosmic version of the progressive tale of personal emergence. Women are non-persons because they are oppressed by the patriarchy, but can achieve full dignity through the liberating mechanisms of feminism. Harrington recasts the emergence of feminism, however, as a battle between two diametrically opposed visions of personhood which developed with the industrial era: the embedded vs. the progressive.

The image of perfected feminism is not a woman free to act like a man, but a sexless “person” free to enact his will without the constraints of embodiment.

The former, Harrington argues, existed ubiquitously in pre-industrial societies and viewed the person as formed from a matrix of given, non-fungible relationships: individual to community, parent—especially mother—to child, one sex to the other, and “self” to the body. In the pre-industrial concept of personhood, these relationships were seen as the enabling conditions for self-realization, both individual and communal. Marriage eloquently imaged this reality as a system of interdependence between complementary sexes which mutually contributed to a singular whole which Harrington describes as a virtual commons. In taking on responsibility for this joint project, the home as commons became the locus of personhood wherein each member contributed and thus fully realized their embodied, and therefore, sexed, selves in relation to the other and to the greater whole to which they contributed.

Industrialization challenged the embedded vision of the person, reconceptualizing him according to the new concept of private property exemplified by the Enclosure Acts: just as land was “freed up” for capitalism, so was man. One’s personal value was determined by one’s capacity to meet and benefit from the ever-shifting demands of the market economy. Thus, freedom was redefined as fungibility rather than the development of one’s nature, and relational contexts such as class, location, and even body became obstacles to overcome for the sake of realizing one’s personhood through participation in the market.

The market model of personhood disenfranchised those who could not embody its ideals. The condition of women, bound to the shadow work of care which was invisible to the new commons of the industrialized economy, and physically vulnerable to the demands of reproduction, became conspicuous. The “woman’s sphere” was privatized, separated from the real world of the commons which, as Harrington points out, began to function more and more as a “machine,” indiscriminately determining the existence of its participants; the “man’s sphere” became where personhood was possible, and this personhood was defined by the exigencies of the market. The inability to integrate women into the paradigm of industrial personhood posed a twofold problem for the progressive model: first, keeping women “bound” left a massive portion of labor potential untapped by the market; second, the explicit exclusion of half the population from a system predicated on universal liberty and equality undermined those very values. It was within these intolerable circumstances that the feminist movement was born. Harrington describes how, at the outset, feminism, though concerned primarily with female experience, was centered around the question of personhood in the way it was divided into two camps: feminists of care, who defended the dignity of women according to the pre-industrial model, and the feminists of freedom, who sought to integrate women into the progressive vision of personhood through the process of disembedding, that is, emancipating the individual from the network of relationships which define him.

Recasting the feminist plight in terms of personhood paradigms allows Harrington to see the particular questions which dominate cultural discourse today as symptomatic not of an incorrect view of women in particular but of the human person in general. Feminism is not so much about women themselves, but the sign of a bio-libertarian anthropology. The image of perfected feminism is not a woman free to act like a man, but a sexless “person” free to enact his will without the constraints of embodiment. Harrington argues then that progressivism has evolved beyond women, perfecting itself in what Harrington calls “cyborg theology” and “meat Lego gnosticism” which presents the perfected man as totally liberated from the “arbitrary” restraints upon his true, disembodied self. Such developments highlight the internal contradiction of the progressive model: though predicated on the realization of the autonomous individual, the person is actually radically severed from the natural bonds which used to form him to the point that he ultimately disassociates even from himself. Such a paradigm can only culminate in “depersonalization,” leaving the individual severed from all defining relationships and thus completely determined by the machine of the market model.

For this reason, the typical conservative solution to contemporary ills—that society return to the 19th-century “separate-spheres” vision of sex relations—would only perpetuate the original poison. The problem will not be solved by rethinking sexual difference in an isolated manner but by considering the way in which it serves the function of mediating man’s relationship with his given reality in bonds of love from which can emerge the fullness of man’s personhood.

Harrington’s recast allows her to transcend the tired stalemate between conservatives and liberal feminists by intuiting the deeper stakes of feminism’s own concerns without sacrificing the particularity of sex difference and its natural division of labor. Harrington catches sight of a new whole, a new commons, which could be strong enough to support men and women as individuals with the full flourishing of their differences without sacrificing a life-giving, substantial and joyful unity between them. The paradigm of this new commons would enable both men and women to participate in sexually differentiated tasks without limiting the dignity of either by relegating them to impersonal shadow work. With an eye to relationality as the basis of personhood, Harrington offers a constructive—not conservative—solution to rethink how men and women can form interdependent bonds with each other and slowly heal the bonds on all levels of our experience of reality that have been severed by the liquifying solvents of progressivism: “reactionary feminism” is a call to marry early, strengthen sex-specific communal bonds, and “rewild” our relation to sex and our own bodies by refusing the Pill. In short, men and women must see each other as partners in the creation of a stable common ground which can facilitate not only their own personal development with all the realities of their embodied, and therefore, non-fungible roles, but likewise can sustain the expansion of personhood based on the strength of the already life-giving power of their own relational bond.

While Harrington’s vision for reactionary feminism is a reintegration with nature, it seems that she has not quite integrated the role of freedom. She often speaks of resisting the progressive paradigm as being willing to “limit” our freedom or “take a freedom haircut.” This is particularly the case regarding our attitude toward technology. It could be said that the principle determining freedom could be found in her conception of natural bonds within which personhood emerges. However, characterizing such bonds as “limits” seems a disservice to the conception of freedom on offer in the pre-industrial model by perpetuating the progressive evaluation that relational bonds are indeed oppressive. In this case, talk to “re-establish” limits that have already been overcome appears intolerable and arbitrary to the modern mind. It would be helpful to counter modernity’s tendency to oppose nature and freedom and recognize the pre-industrial assumption that freedom actually springs from the full realization of one’s nature. Indeed, such an understanding is already implicit in Harrington’s work.

While much of this review highlights the holistic character of Harrington’s project, I would be remiss to neglect the particulars. This remains a work about women. At the heart of Harrington’s reactionary feminism is the insight that any worldview is made or broken by its vision of the feminine. Just as feminism formed the central plank in the advent of progressivism, so women will form the symbol defining the world Harrington wishes to see us create. While Harrington would probably not endorse a “girl boss” in the way this image is foisted upon the contemporary imagination, it seems that she believes the fate of the world does actually rest upon women’s shoulders.