Intersectionality in the Gendered Division of Labor -Jemma

 I generally really liked this reading, and thought Okin did a great job exploring both how justice in the family is necessary for creating larger societal justice (and vice versa), as well as how the justice as fairness framework can be understood to pose the elimination of gender as a prerequisite for a completely just society. However, I want to call out a passage in which Okin unnecessarily minimizes the importance of race, class, and intersectionality on psychological development. This minimization limits Okin’s perspective to that of a white feminist, and leaves some of the implications of gender and its intersection with other identities unexplored.

Okin brings up the supreme importance of gender, as opposed to other social identities, in influencing our psychological developments is when she writes” “The formative influence of the female parenting on small children, especially, seems to suggest that sex difference is even more likely to affect one’s thinking about justice in a gendered society than, for example, racial difference in a society in which race has social significance, or class difference in a class society” (107). Because we live in a gendered and racialized society with classes, Okin is effectively claiming that sex differences have the largest effect on our conception of justice. Making this claim about the relative importance of gender over other social identities seems unnecessary: in a justice as fairness framework, we presumably have room to address every root of injustice, not just the most pressing one. More importantly, however, Okin’s attempt to rank these sources of societal injustice negates the fact that many of them overlap. For example, Black and Native American children are far more likely to live in a single-parent family than white or Asian children; furthermore, single parents are more likely to live in poverty than married couples are (https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-well-being-in-single-parent-families?gclid=Cj0KCQjww4-hBhCtARIsAC9gR3Z7-P6JBq7qLQoEmzSrbeIdV-7gEKqH3NJd6tJ26Poxg7XzX_KADxEaAsznEALw_wcB). Therefore, when we consider “the formative influence of female parenting,” we are implicitly considering the formative influence of race and class, because one’s racial and class identities contribute to how likely they are to experience an exclusively female upbringing. Okin says that “Only children who are early mothered and fathered can develop fully the psychological and moral capacities that currently seem to be unevenly distributed between the sexes” (107). It seems that children in a single-parent family home would miss out on this type of dual-parenting even more significantly than a child who had one stay-at-home parent and one parent who worked outside the home. Subsequently, poor children, Black children, and Native American children are therefore most impacted by gendered divisions in our society. By failing to note this intersection explicitly and minimizing the importance of class and race in her discussion of gender, Okin misses out on some of the most importance implications of the gendered division of labor.

Later in the reading, Okin does point at the disproportionate burden of certain types of undesirable labor––such as childcare––on women of color. She says “For good reason, then, Walzer does not accept the low-paid and low-status domestic labor of disadvantaged women––in our society, almost always women of color, often in search of legal immigrant status––as a solution to the problem of more advantaged women” (115). However, while Okin writes about that fact that the gendered division of labor is cyclical, I wish she had expanded more on the idea of the gendered-and-racialized division of labor also being cyclical. This expansion would have allowed for a fuller discussion on the implications of gender in our society––namely, how it fuels and is fueled by the constructs of class and race.