1. Transformations: Gender, Reproduction, and Contemporary Society
Lecture 3:
Who Owns Women’s Bodies? Who Needs Children?

2. Structure Origins of claim to own one’s body
Links between claim and social theory
Reproduction and biological difference
Other stakeholders in women’s reproductive bodies
Pro-natalism
Anti-natalism
Which women?
Conclusions

3. A Woman’s Right to Choose
Slogans of the 1970s women’s movement
Political demands for reproductive rights
Framed within discourse of modern individualism

4. The Right to Own One’s Body
A claim with a history
Rests on new concept of ‘the self’ in 18th century Europe
‘Possessive Individualism’ (Macpherson, 1962)
Separates self from body, where self becomes owner
Owner has sole rights over body
Imagined subject is male
Commodification of labour replaces
feudalism
Macpherson interested in role PI played
in capitalism and unequal property relations

5. Example and Limits
‘To be free is to be an individual - in the first instance, an owner of one's own person and capacities, but also what one acquires through the use of one's capacities. To be free is to be an owner. Freedom is defined in terms of independence from others, and one is independent only when one has the right to use one's property, including one's abilities, as one chooses.’
Carens, Joseph (ed.) (1993) Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C.B. Macpherson, Albany, New York: State University of New York, p. 2
What rights did employers have over worker’s bodies?
Did male citizens owe rights over their body to the state in times of war?
Were slave contracts valid?
What about women?

6. Social & Sexual Contracts
Carole Pateman: women did not own their own body
and capacities
These freedoms were for citizens only
(Propertied) men had formed a social contract with the
state, accepting to live under the rule of law in exchange for
protection of rights
This contract is between men only, women are framed as all that men must master
Original social contract relies on a sexual
contract establishing patriarchal rights over
women’s bodies and property
Sexual contract privatized, obscured

7. Richardson’s Pamela Concept of PI created the terms for
women to claim rights over their bodies
Eg. Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela
Widower Mr ‘B’ seeks to claim sexual
rights over Pamela, a servant
Pamela resists via discourse of PI
Pamela hides her writings on her person
Richardson puts then
revolutionary claims in
Pamela’s mouth
Mr ‘B’ reforms in the end to
respect Pamela’s rights over
her body and her writings

8. Reproduction and Biological Difference
Equality vs Difference
Biological gender differences generally played down
But key in human reproduction: women’s bodies play major role and their reproductive capacity is a scarcer resource
Men’s reproductive bodies more dispensable than women’s
Even though men aged 30s+ are scarcer than women
Elstain argues in Women and War (1987) that women should be excluded from combat roles because: ‘The bodies of young females are not expendable: they are what re-creates and holds forth the promise of a future’.
Biological difference results in competing claims for control over women’s reproductive bodies, between a woman herself and society/ other stakeholders in reproduction

9. Stakeholders in Children: Activity
Are children a private good (or bad) or a social one? Consider the following statements:
Falling birth rates means fewer tax-payers and threatens the capacity of the welfare state to pay living pensions.
She chose to have the child, so she is responsible for it.
Higher rate tax-payers just don’t need child benefit, it’s a waste of tax- payers money.
Universal child benefit is symbolic as well as material, acknowledging the work of having and raising children in our society and the benefits of children to us all.
 Talk briefly to your neighbour about how the statements construct children.

10. Why do we need children? Avoid species extinction
At the national level children determine:
labour force
taxation
military power
cultural reproduction
At the community level children:
maintain viability
maintain asset base
maintain political position
For working classes children:
- are economic resource, labour
Brenner and Ramas (1987) Rethinking Women’s Oppression
For elite classes children: - inherit property
- continue family name
Fertility Rates
UK = blue
France = orange
USA = green

11. Pro-natalism Financial incentives Banning abortion Time incentives
Family/Community level (Browner)
Husband’s preference for large family predominates
Cultural norms stigmatize women having few or no children
Religious opposition to certain contraception and to abortion
State Level (King)
Carrots
Sticks
Financial incentives
Time incentives
Service incentives
Propaganda
Banning abortion
Unavailability of contraception
Financial penalties

12. A Woman’s Duty?
Singapore: well-educated women are not fulfilling their function of having families
Romania: one of the most important duties of women, mothers and educators is to devote themselves to the raising of new generations in the spirit of ardent patriotism
Israel: Any Jewish woman who, as far as it depends on her, does not bring into the world at least four healthy children is shirking her duty to the nation, like a solder who evades military service.
Women’s bodies constructed as state property
Increasingly unacceptable, so see shift from sticks to carrots

13. Which Women?
Nationalist and religious discourses may generate racist and eugenicist controls to try to ensure:
- women don’t reproduce with ‘wrong’ type of man
- ‘wrong’ type of women don’t reproduce at all
Ethnic nationalism: shared ancestry
Only women from national ethnic group encouraged to reproduce, with
men of same ethnicity
Cultural nationalism: shared civic and cultural commitment
All nationals encouraged to reproduce; migration
Disabled women have been seen as ‘unfit’ mothers:
- Assumed to be asexual
- Assumed would have children with disability
- Assumed would be ‘bad’ parents

14. Anti-Natalism State attempts to limit number of children
Works in interests of reproductive rights where contraception and abortion services available
May be coercive eg. China’s one-child policy
Sticks
Propaganda
Surveillance
Financial penalties
Social sanctions
Compulsory sterilization

15. Conclusions
Women’s unique capacity to reproduce makes women vulnerable to the appropriation of their reproductive power by others
Possessive individualism provides a language for women to claim rights over their reproductive bodies
These claims are contested because various groups need children
Struggles to possess and control reproductive capacity are socially, historically and geographically contextual
‘If all women have the right to choose not to bear a child, then all women must also have the right to choose to bear children’ (Kallianes and Rubenfeld)