Patriarchy Modified

In his thoughtful critique of Filmer's Patriarcha, John Locke proclaimed that men not only had the right to choose their rulers but also to replace them anytime they wished. His Treatises of Civil Government became the founda­tion of liberal political theory, helping justify virtually every democratic revolution that was to come.

Locke offered an attractive model to the English, who seemed unable to follow Hobbes's advice to stick with one sovereign through thick and thin. Charles II provided the stability his influential countrymen demanded, but his brother, James II, was a devout Catholic stubbornly reluctant to cooper­ate with Parliament. A powerful opposition hoped to place his Protestant daughter Mary, wife of the Dutch ruler William of Orange, on the throne. In the year Locke's Treatises were published, 1688, they succeeded. James II fled the country in a bloodless and therefore glorious revolution. The notion of monarchy based on divine right receded as democracy gained force.

As a dissident, Locke had been forced into exile in Holland between 1683 and 1689. He published his Treatises on Government anonymously, concentrat­ing much of his effort on a critique of Filmer's most patriarchal principles.¹⁹ ‘‘Honour thy father,” he maintained, did not dictate political power. Sons owed their fathers obedience until they came of age. Past that point, they owed only respect and love. Like Filmer, Locke believed in a certain parallel between the family and the state. He hoped to reform both by giving sons more independence from their fathers.

Locke also challenged Filmer's depiction of women as guilty descendants of Eve, departing from the opinions of many of his peers.²⁰ He defended maternal authority. He asserted that men and women had similar mental capacities and should receive similar educations.

Still, he carefully defended male authority, extolling the natural character of a wife's subjection to her husband, ‘‘the power that every husband hath to order the things of private concernment to his family, as proprietor of the goods and land there, and to have his will take place before that of his wife in all things of their common concernment.''²² He explained that husbands had dominion over wives not because they had greater faculties of reason but simply because they were the ‘‘abler and the stronger''.²³ It was an odd argument for someone who despised the claim that abler and stronger men should have dominion over weaker ones.

Why should a husband's authority within the home create an obstacle to women's political representation? Locke simply avoided the question. Some of his political allies were less diplomatic. James Tyrell rebutted Filmer's claim that the enfranchisement of men would lead to the enfranchisement of women by labeling it a reductio ad absurdum:

There never was any government where all the promiscuous rabble of women and children had votes, as not being capable of it, yet it does not for all that prove that all legal civil government does not owe its origin to the consent of the people, since the fathers of families, or freemen at their own dispose, were really and indeed are all the people that needed to have votes.²⁴

Locke's defense of male property rights followed much the same pattern as his defense of male voting rights. He despised restrictions on so-called usury, and published a book in 1691 arguing that interest rates should be left to the forces of supply and demand.²⁵ The right to trade in markets was based, in his view, on rights to ownership. Individuals owned themselves and should therefore own the products of their labor.

Locke's theory of self ownership, however, was limited. He believed that men had a right not only to their own labor, but that of their hired servants. He proposed a constitution for the state of South Carolina giving freemen absolute control over slaves.²⁶

What about women's incentives to work? In some of his writing, Locke hinted that women should enjoy at least limited property rights.²⁷ But he considered the question of little relevance to the primary aspect of women's work, the provision of domestic services for family members.²⁸ Principles of ownership could not easily be applied to this form of labor. They certainly could not be applied to motherhood. If children are the product of mothers' labor, they should own their children and whatever they in turn produce. But this implies that children do not own themselves or the products of their own labor.

The solution to this conundrum lies in the assumption that care and nurturance are not forms of labor. Reproduction is not production. Domestic services lie outside the economy, in the realm of natural, god-given instincts. Locke took great pains to explain that parents should not be considered producers of their own children, but vehicles for God's procreative will. Indeed, he invoked religion to challenge Filmer's primary justification of paternal authority: ‘‘I made thee, therefore I will rule over thee.'' Locke insisted that fathers did not actually make their sons.

God in his infinite wisdom has put strong desires of Copulation into the Constitution of Men, thereby to continue the race of Mankind, which he doth most commonly without the intention, and often against the Consent and Will of the Begetter. And indeed those who desire and design Children, are but the occasions of their being, and when they design and wish to beget them, do little more towards their making, than Ducalion and his Wife in the Fable did towards the making of Mankind, by throwing Pebbles over their Heads.²⁹

Perhaps Locke wanted to reserve property rights for those forms of labor that required rational design and concerted effort.

them, but children only to themselves?

Locke emphasized that mothers harbored and nourished their children, who therefore owed obedience to both parents until they reached maturity. Indeed, he argued that the rules of monogamous marriage served children’s interests.³¹ Still, he pictured childcare as the fulfillment of a natural pro­clivity rather than a form of work, God having ‘‘woven into the Principles of Humane Nature such a tenderness for their Off-spring’’.³² No need,

then, to worry about incentives, rights, or recompense in the reproductive realm.

The economic devaluation of family care supported the early liberal defense of male superiority. What women produce is not sold in the market, and therefore has no exchange value. Men, in addition to being stronger, provide the superior productive contribution.³³ Locke believed that individ­ual rights and private property were male prerogatives because he believed that only men made choices and responded to incentives. If this view reflected his social reality, it also shaped it: men should lay claim to natural rights, but women should remain subject to divine responsibilities. This prescription was greeted almost immediately by protests that would, in retrospect, be labeled feminist.