While I am all for gender liberation, and discourses of, one of my concerns with with the work coming out of Integral Life on this topic.. .is that the Integral discourse on gender liberation misses two things.

Firstly, it predominantly appears to reject and dismiss feminist discourses - and without recognition of the multiple schools, stages and voices of feminist labels them, as one 'feminism' ( my PhD thesis on Integral Feminism attends to this). Rather than including and transcending feminisms limits... and limits they do have.

Secondly, and relatedly, Integral discourse appears to fail to understand that feminist discourses are by definition the study of women. They do not generally purport to be the study of men and gender in general. To complain that they  do not do so is akin to complaining that studies of racism do not include study of animal liberation - they are simply different discourses.

I am certainly all for an Integral Gender discourse, where Integral studies of the faces and stages of masculinist discourses come into dialogue with Integral studies of the faces and stages of feminist discourses ... but without genuinely including (and transcending) the limits of both we are sadly not yet near.

GENDER STRATIFICATION: COERCION AND VOLUNTARISM

Wilber draws on Janet Chafetz's sociological theory in Sex and Advantage (1984) as evidence for his theory of the co-creative nature of male and female roles in prehistory. Peggy Wright responds to Wilber particularly on this point. She writes that while “Wilber asserts that men and women have co-created their social structures at every stage of human development … Chafetz … states that there comes a point when women as a group are no longer equal co-creators of their conditions” (Wright 1998, 229).

Chafetz’ later work on “the maintenance and reproduction of gender systems”, in Gender Equity: An Integrated Theory of Stability and Change, ventures beyond the limits of Wilber’s co-creative gender theory (Chafetz 1990, 14). She distinguishes two separate, yet deeply interrelated, forces of gender inequity which she terms ‘coercive’ and ‘voluntaristic’ and in doing so discusses the manner in which worldviews set limits for socio-cultural participation.

Chafetz presents coercive theories as focused on “men’s ability to maintain their advantages over women by dint of superior power resources: economic, political, ideological” and voluntaristic theories as the examination of “how women come to make choices that inadvertently contribute to their own disadvantage and devaluation” (Chafetz 1990, 19). She notes that coercive forces tend to operate on a macro-level, through social structures and economic systems, where voluntaristic forces are micro-level “and stress the processes by which males and females internalise gender-normative ways of being and behaving” (Chafetz 1990, 19).

From her research she asserts the following propositions: in gender-stratified societies male advantage in macro-level division of labor sees a higher distribution of men in “the composition of social elites”, thus social definitions follow that value more highly “attributes associated with maleness” (Chafetz 1990, 60). These values legitimate “a gender-based system of unequal opportunities and rewards” in which resources, power and opportunities to work (outside the home) accrue to men, and the work done by women (in the home) is devalued (Chafetz 1990, 60).

Voluntaristic processes are set in motion as a result of these macro-structural forces of disadvantage. Chafetz observes that according to Exchange Theory “the partner who has less access to valued resources balances the exchange by offering deference to, or compliance with, the requests of the provider of resources” (Chafetz 1990, 23). In terms of “agrarian, pastoral and industrial societies” in which women are marginalised from the ownership of essential resources, Chafetz writes that women are required to provide services “to their husbands … other family members … the physical household and the objects it contains” (Chafetz 1990, 47) in exchange for access to the primary resources men control, but, unlike economic debts, the time of discharge of this social debt is never clear (Chafetz 1990, 23). Chafetz presents this micro-structural process as an example of the manner in which women inadvertently “come to want to do that which they would be constrained to do anyway” (Chafetz 1990, 24) and thus contribute to the process of their own “disadvantage and devaluation” (Chafetz 1990, 19).

Habermas marked woman as the bearer of symbolic reproduction, highlighting the key mode through which woman has enacted the voluntaristic process of gender stratification. In a conventional society such as Chafetz refers to above, typical of the western Mental-Rational epoch, woman has overseen the micro-level construction of male and female gendered subjects through their role as the primary care giver to children (Fraser 1993, 117). In this role women have had significant influence over the generational transmission of gendered behaviour to the children in her care, as particularly explored in Chodorow’s work on the ‘reproduction of mothering’. Wilber’s co-creative argument has validity when examined in this context but, as noted, his theory fails to address the broader context in which voluntaristic processes are framed by coercive ones.

A REBUTTAL TO CO-CREATIVE THEORY
To recapitulate, Wilber’s key claims amount to the following: women have not been oppressed as much as captive to the limits of human development, biology and the ‘expediency’ through which her nurturance of infants was extended to the general domus. Overall, he concludes that woman has been an equal party to co-creating the intersubjective patterns that determined her constrained life conditions.

As noted, Wilber’s argument is in part reflective of his evolutionary theory of developmental capacity. According to the developmental model, there are limits to the behaviours and interpersonal capacities available at each stage. Wilber insists that these limits require acknowledgement. He writes that “forms of oppression and subjugation … have to be judged, not against today’s structures of consciousness, but against what could have been otherwise at a given previous structure” (Wilber 1995, 163). While there is certainly merit to this argument, it needs to be contextualised within a broader picture. In Wilber’s analysis of co-creativity, he stresses the voluntaristic nature of women’s participation in the construction of a gender system while minimising the coercive. Chafetz’ analysis clearly demonstrates that the coercive nature of macro-structural forces placed significant constraints on women that left them with few options other than to participate in the voluntaristic processes that reinforced their disadvantage.

In response to Wilber’s assertion that the movement of women into the public sphere could not have occurred earlier “under any given circumstances” (Wilber 1995, 163), let us ponder the circumstances of the period under discussion. Historically the social reification of cultural views on gender had serious ramifications for women, by determining who is a social subject and in what manner. Chafetz highlights the fact that “when gender norms gain the status of law, they take on a far more powerful role in reinforcing the gender system status quo than when they remain informal. They become part of the coercive forces that maintain the gender system” (Chafetz 1990, 69).

Laws introduced in the Mythic-Agrarian stage distinguished a male public sphere from a female private sphere in terms of citizenship and cultural participation. These conditions were maintained until the early twentieth century. Thus for extensive periods of the Mythic-Agrarian and Mental-Rational stages women were without access to citizenship or public office, were excluded from social and religious authority, marginalised from full participation in public culture, and access to education, the work place and the arts. Rendered through law an occupant of the private domain only, women were actively incapacitated from determining their own conditions of being in the world. In this period where woman was marginalised, actively discouraged and often outlawed from exploring and culturally expressing essential aspects of her being, when she was not a public subject, how could she at this point equally ‘co-create’ her conditions of being in the world?