Mary Harrington on the Family

Late July, The Wall Street Journal published five short pieces under the title, “Have We Ruined Sex?” Among the five pieces was one by Mary Harrington. In her contribution she argues that the sexual revolution has mainly benefitted the “entrepreneurial class.” Since this appeared not in The Nation but WSJ, I was amused, so I decided to read her (2023) Feminism Against Progress.

Feminism Against Progress is reactionary, but it cites Karl Polanyi approvingly and also rails against Adam Smith and Hayek; the political right is indeed transforming. (Harrington spoke at this year’s National Conservatism Conference.) As the mention of Polanyi hints at, Harrington’s sensibility is, in many ways, a culturally traditional, social democratic left (and I was not surprised to find a piece of hers on the SDP blog here.) I expect Keith Starmer’s Labour party (which is by no means liberal in sensibility) to find use for her downstream.

Before I continue. Harrington is a critic of what she calls “bio-libertarianism” or “Meat Lego gnosticism” which she associates with the idea that in the market, “our bodies can be reassembled at will.” (Harrington is no fan of Firestone; and any feminist, techno-optimism.) Unsurprisingly, she is also a participant in the culture wars over transgender rights that (primarily) in the UK has split feminism quite dramatically. My regular readers know I am diametrically opposed to her views on this topic; here I explore a different issue: her views on the family.

It is quite natural, given Harrington’s occasional invocation of socio-biology, and rather sex-essentialist views, not to mention her embrace of a reactionary self-identification, to expect that Harrington advocates for the so-called “nuclear family.” Stateseside the ‘nuclear family’ is much beloved by ethno-Christian-nationalists which also defend women’s subordination to men. This is not, in fact, Harrington’s position.

A few months ago, I noted that in chapter 4 of his (2022) book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony defended a distinction between this nuclear family and what Hazony calls the “traditional family.” The traditional family is conceived as a multi-generational enterprise in which family and business are a joint concern. Hazony is explicit in rejecting the suburban single family dwelling model because he de facto accepts Friedan’s critique of it as a site of isolation and mental impoverishment. (I don’t think he mentions Friedan in his book.)

Harrington echoes Hazony’s position. However, Harrington is rather critical of Friedan because she thinks that Friedan instantiates the preference of ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’ — which Harrington thinks primarily benefits the wealthy women who embrace lean-in feminism — over social embeddedness and against motherhood. After contrasting Friedan with Germaine Greer, Harrington writes,

[T]hey share the same basic template for personhood: the autonomous one, who becomes a person in the manner envisaged by Rousseau: that is to say, in a world where some unspecified other does all the dull, sticky drudgery that keeps the world of freedom and selfhood turning. Second-wave feminism definitively rejected women’s obligation to bear the publicly unrecognised persistence of dependence and burden of care, within a market society predicated on disavowing these features of our common social life even as it eagerly extracts value from the subjects nurturedby that care.—(p. 48)

Harrington here sounds like a subaltern critic of white feminism. There are more such comments sprinkled throughout the book. But while Harrington is definitely interested in what is known as an ethic of care (and she views Rousseau as corrupting what care should be), Harrington’s book is not itself much interested in those unspecified others, and does not develop or articulate a program on their behalf. I don’t mean this sarcastically, but she is much more concerned with traditional male working/middle class social culture (see chapter 8, “Let Men Be”) and female “solidarity” (p. 172) with it, than poor women’s care-work or struggles.

As noted Harrington echoes Hazony but with a communal nostalgia to the middle ages:

Some conservatives dream of abolishing second-wave feminism, which is to say returning to a pre-1960s understanding of marriage, and with it the ‘traditional’ relation between men and women. This is usually understood to mean the sex roles typical of the industrial model, in which women serve as principal domestic consumers, while relying on their husband’s goodwill and good character to offset the loss of agency this implies under the order of ‘economic sex’. In other words: we should keep everything the same, except what women do.…

But the weakness of these proposals isn’t that they’re unworkable, or even that they’re ‘traditional’, but that they’re not traditional enough. For most of history, men and women worked together, in a productive household, and this is the model reactionary feminism should aim to retrieve. In any case, half a century into the cyborg era, there’s little prospect of reviving the industrial-era housewife as the principal template for sex roles – and there’s no need, because for knowledge workers at least the sharp split between ‘home’ and ‘work’ that drove the emergence of such roles is blurring again. And the blurring of that divide in turn opens up new possibilities, hinting at a way of viewing lifelong solidarity between the sexes that owes more to the 1450s than the 1950s. It does so by bringing at least some work back into the home, and in the process ramping up the kind of interdependence that can underpin long-term pragmatic solidarity.—(pp. 179-180, emphasis added)

Here her use of ‘solidarity’ doesn’t mean concern for and joint action with the global or immigrant/refugee downtrodden (whose interests are, perhaps, not well served by this model); it means mutual concern within the (middle-class aspirational) family. I added emphasis because the glorification of the 1450s is a mark of the impact of Polanyi’s views on Harrington. (I view Polanyi’s account of medieval social embeddedness as a romantic fiction, but as we all know from such fiction political movements are made.)

Now, Harrington’s notion of pragmatic solidarity between the sexes is explicitly a rejection of romantic union. (The chapter from which I just quoted is called “Abolishing Big Romance.”) Rather, it involves embrace of the “productive household.” This household is based on mutual recognition of pragmatic solidarity and the commitment that is a consequence of it. It valorizes work, care for children, and long-range planning.

While Hazony and Harrington have broadly similar account of the family, there is a modest difference of emphasis between Harrington and Hazony. Hazony really thinks of the productive household as multi-generational and having common enterprise(s) housed in multi-generational dwellings (compounds, neighborhoods). Harrington by contrast is clearly conceiving of smaller, more focused families.

More important, for Harrington the productive household need not be thought of as a single enterprise. Rather, the “productive household” is one in which the partners are “home-based,” but potentially have multiple income streams. (p. 180) What’s crucial for Harrington, however, is that the members of the household view their home as the foundation for work and family in joint projects of (what one of her informants calls) meaning making.

It’s worth noting that in her book, Harrington does not discuss the many policies that would follow from this vision of the home. But it’s not hard to imagine that it would lead to different kind of home-building programs, infrastructure programs, tax policies (etc.) by the state. Harrington herself is pretty clear that she hopes it will revitalize many smaller commuter towns and cities. As I said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Harrington’s program will be adopted by political parties that wish to cater to middle classes who are worried about the speed of progress.

One final thought on all of this. There is nothing in the nature of the ‘productive household’ that has to make it heteronormative. However Harrington explicitly defends marriage as an institution in terms of males and females coupling and reproducing; but she also claims that her reactionary feminism is “contextual and relational.” (p. 167) In the contexts where ‘gay marriage’ has become normalized, it follows that for Harrington the ‘productive household’ need not be exclusively hetero-normative.

In future posts, I explore Harrington’s account of the sexual revolution. To be continued.

• A slightly different version of this post was published earlier at digressionsimpressions.