Utopian visions that produced distinctly dystopic projects are rightly associated with the catastrophically violent and repressive first half of twentieth-century European history— “the age of extremes” in Eric Hobsbawm's apt phrase.Footnote ¹ National Socialism, fascism, communism, and European colonialism represented totalizing, highly ideological visions of how politics and economics, society and culture should be dramatically reorganized. Each of these projects deployed gendered rhetorics and representations; each was explicitly preoccupied with redefining masculinity and femininity, marriage and family, domesticity and sexuality. Each sought to subordinate individuals to an overarching social project, integrating some, excluding others, always elaborating complex hierarchies of gender, race, and culture.

However much fascism, communism, and imperialism differed in their ideologies, aims, and effects, each grappled with how to rethink and reorder the discursive and material interconnections among work, sexuality, family, and maternity, and each was committed to elaborating a detailed vision of the gender order that was desired. National Socialism proclaimed the virtues of militarized masculinity and of Kinder, Küche, Kirche. It sought to return women—or “Aryan” women—to traditional homes and families while purging the Volksgemeinschaft of those deemed racially or socially unfit.Footnote ² Italian fascism attempted to raise the birthrate and valorize motherhood while protecting women from pernicious cosmopolitan, especially American, influences.Footnote ³ Both rhetorically rejected modern gender roles in favor of rural simplicity; fecund motherhood; and hierarchical, sharply divided gendered roles. Colonial regimes sought to elaborate and enforce monogamous marriage, bourgeois domesticity, and proper child-rearing practices among colonizers, as these were the forms of sexuality and domesticity held to define Europeans and simultaneously legitimate European rule, while maximizing the sexual and social distance between male colonizers and the colonized.Footnote ⁴ Finally, Soviet communism promised to liberate women via entry into productive labor and extensive state aid for child care and housework, and it initially predicted a withering away of the family.Footnote ⁵

In the realm of gender, these totalizing projects found it easier to achieve their negative goals—excluding those deemed racially inferior or sexually deviant, outlawing “mixed” marriages, murdering women and children as well as men, eliminating traditional laws on divorce and illegitimacy—than to build the desired new order. The traditional male-dominated, large family could not be restored, as Nazism learned, but nor could the family be eliminated, as the Soviets discovered. Neither the inducements of family allowances and motherhood medals nor the prohibitions against abortion and birth control raised the birthrate as both fascist and communist regimes desired. Efforts to discipline sexuality in the interests of war or socialism or a colonial racial order did partially reshape attitudes and practices, but as often foundered on uncertainty about what sexual behaviors and regulations would serve the desired political ends and on the inability of even the most interventionist regime to control the private sphere fully.Footnote ⁶

The costs of these failed utopian projects and of “the General Crisis and Thirty Years' War of the twentieth century”Footnote ⁷ of which they were effect and cause, were borne most unequally—by the victims of the Holocaust and the Gulag in Europe, by people of color throughout the colonial world. A staggering fifty-five to sixty million died in World War II, roughly forty million of them in Europe, and the majority were civilians. In Europe alone six million Jews and more than twenty-seven million Russians died, and at war's end there were an estimated thirty million refugees and displaced persons.Footnote ⁸ In 1945 the European landscape was marked by poverty, hunger, displacement, and foreign occupation, and public and private crises mirrored each other. There were broken families and failed or heavily compromised states, political discord and moral confusion, an individual and collective refusal to face the past, and great uncertainty about the future.Footnote ⁹ In all these respects, the victors seemed scarcely better off than the defeated. This was ironically “the hour of women” when wives, mothers, and single women were assigned disproportionate responsibility for rebuilding a world shattered by utopian projects, which, to be sure, many women had strongly supported.Footnote ¹⁰

The second half of the European twentieth century is, by most accounts, dramatically different from the first and often narrated “in a self-congratulatory, even lyrical key.”Footnote ¹¹ The revolutionary upheavals, labor agitation, and right-wing paramilitary squads that had threatened old regimes and fragile new democracies and crippled capitalist economies after World War I found no echo after 1945.Footnote ¹² Fascist visions for reordering the global economic and political order had been definitively defeated; the Soviet Union, devastated by its fight against Hitler, was greatly weakened, and European colonial empires were tottering. As Mark Mazower noted, “The exhausting, murderous experience of total war—the culmination of nearly a century of imperial and national struggles inside and outside the continent—led to a growing weariness with ideological politics.”Footnote ¹³ This was not an auspicious time for grand visions and global projects—except in the United States.Footnote ¹⁴

The second half of the twentieth century in western Europe has come to be associated not with utopian projects or totalizing ideologies but rather with sober political liberalism, economic modernization, and social democratic welfare states. Human rights on the one hand and consumer culture on the other were the guiding ideas of the postwar order. The United States played a pivotal role in elaborating this new vision of international cooperation, open markets, individual rights, and nonideological politics, and the U.S. provided vital material aid to build a new form of consumerist democratic capitalism.Footnote ¹⁵ Whether America intruded into Europe or was invited, whether its values and practices were imposed or emulated, whether Americanism was appealing or appalling varied by country, class, generation, and gender, but everywhere in western Europe hegemonic America was the model of modernity with which Europeans had to deal.Footnote ¹⁶ In eastern Europe, the utopian elements of early communism had long since been replaced by the productivism, repression, and terror, and cultural and gender conservatism of Stalinism.Footnote ¹⁷ After Stalin's death in 1953 both domestic policy and foreign relations were more erratic. Khrushchev's greater openness and cultural thaw, for example, were accompanied by repression of the Hungarian Revolution and confrontation with the U.S. over Soviet missiles in Cuba.Footnote ¹⁸ Brezhnev's more repressive policies at home paralleled détente abroad. Throughout, however, a sober focus on economic recovery and expansion persisted; the heroic age of building communism was over, and a key domestic aim was to create an alternative form of consumer socialism.

Conservatism in the public realm found parallels in the private sphere, and there were few projects to transform marriage and family radically. Indeed, after World War II there was a retreat into the family across Europe. Subsequently, people moved in and out of families more rapidly but the institution itself was stabilized through laws, public policies, and cultural campaigns. This was as true of countries where the worker-mother was the norm—eastern Europe and France—as where the nonworking housewife was valorized.Footnote ¹⁹ Europeans east and west had learned to mistrust totalizing visions, to turn away from seductive utopian projects, to prefer the private to the social or political, even as most enjoyed a plethora of social democratic social policies. In the east, to be sure, there were dramatic efforts to overthrow communist regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but more common were ongoing efforts to reform real existing socialism or retreat into a private sphere of political quiescence or more rarely dissent. In the west the focus was on rights, not revolution; on law, not social transformation; on the individual, not the state.

This metanarrative of the bad first half of the twentieth century and the better second half, of totalitarian ideologies defeated by liberalism, of utopia versus human rights, certainly captures key elements of Europe's recent past. Its depiction of the post-1945 decades needs to be complicated, however, by critically examining the discourses and projects that have dominated the last sixty years in Europe and America and that were themselves utopian models.Footnote ²⁰ (It is impossible to discuss this period in European history without America, whose presence as ally or enemy, as model to emulate or avoid, as the world's dominant economic and military power made it a constant, and often dominant, influence on European debates and developments.) There are three visions I want to explore: Americanism or the discourses and practices, institutions, and values of the U.S. model of consumerist democratic capitalism, the guiding ideology of post-World War II America; human rights with its focus on the delineation and protection of the civil and political rights of the individual; and market fundamentalism, which refers not only to neoliberal economics, but also more broadly to the belief that all areas of politics, society, culture, and knowledge can and should succumb to market logic. The first two became prominent during and after World War II and have persisted to the present, with Americanism enjoying its greatest influence in the first postwar decades while human-rights discourse blossomed in the late 1940s and flourished again from the 1970s on. The third, a rather subterranean vision in both the interwar years and first postwar ones,Footnote ²¹ emerged to challenge and in Britain and the United States, substantially transform the postwar social democratic, Keynesian order. Although the 2008–09 global economic crisis has called market fundamentalism into question, its proponents have by no means admitted error. Nor have many of the public policies, disciplinary paradigms, and individual habits of mind that are informed by market fundamentalism been weakened.Footnote ²²

Americanism, human rights, and market fundamentalism are not usually discussed, let alone criticized, together. Each defines individual and social improvement in distinctive ways; each depicts and genders the individual in particular, although not necessarily incompatible, terms. Each offers different spaces for contestation and differential possibilities for achieving progressive ends. To link these three visions is admittedly provocative, but it is not perverse, for they share many characteristics, and over the past half century, they have cumulatively promoted individualization, commodification, and marketization, while marginalizing the social.

Americanism, human rights, and market fundamentalism have made sweeping claims to improve society, politics, and individual well-being. Proponents of these projects proclaimed the end of ideology (except of course in the Soviet Union, where it was held to be very much alive) and saw themselves as being anti-ideological. Yet, during the Cold War and after they engaged in vigorous ideological competition with communism, and at various times with anticolonial nationalism, Keynesianism, the welfare state, and cultural relativism as well. Americanism, human rights, and market fundamentalism have presented themselves as self-evident truths, as common sense. Yet in their claim to unqualified universalism, their exclusive focus on the individual at the expense of the social, and their single-minded preoccupation with consumption and consumer choice in the case of Americanism, with law in the case of human rights, and with pervasive deregulation, commodification, and instrumental rationality in the case of market fundamentalism, they are indeed utopian in the sense of being impossibly ideal schemes for social improvement.

Each discourse posits a particular kind of normative individual. For Americanism it is the economically productive male head of the family, accompanied by his wife as consumer citizen. For human-rights discourse it is the rights-bearing individual, usually imagined as the rational, propertied male head of the family in need of protection from a potentially repressive state.Footnote ²³ For market fundamentalism, it is the rational, self-maximizing actor, coded male by virtue of his instrumental rationality, aggressive self-interest maximization, and devaluation of the relational and nonquantifiable. Each vision constructs what can legitimately be demanded, achieved, and even imagined. All of these discourses have profoundly shaped gender relations in public and private. All claimed to have universal validity and have been invoked and deployed in varied ways around the globe. All thus present women in Europe as well as in the non-Euro-American world with the challenge of inserting themselves into male-centered discourses to claim rights, choice, empowerment, and economic security. What then have been the promise and limitations of Americanism, human rights, and market fundamentalism for women? What does an examination of them reveal about women's agency and about the gendered operations of power, economic, political, and discursive?

Americanism

Let us begin with Americanism, the discourse and images that present America as the most powerful and desirable model of economic, social, and cultural development, a model of modernity that is appealing to many, appalling to others. We begin there because Europe's fascination with America, Europe's selective appropriation and modification of things American, and European anti-Americanism existed throughout the twentieth century, although they were strongest in the decades after World War II. Of equal importance, America and Americans were present in Europe in unprecedented ways in the decades after 1945. Businessmen and trade unionists, military personnel and officials of foundations, politicians and social scientists came to staff the occupation and the ongoing U.S. military presence, to implement the Marshall Plan, to participate in educational and technical exchanges, and to make money. All came from a prosperous and optimistic America to a devastated Europe, preached the gospel of economic growth as a panacea, and promised that “you can be like us.”Footnote ²⁴ They brought goods as well as ideas. Hollywood films and rock 'n' roll, kitchen appliances and televisions, cars and functional modern homes—all came to Europe from the U.S. or were coded American, whatever their provenance.Footnote ²⁵ All spread a message about the bounty and potential political benefits of a new model of Fordist mass production and mass consumption, facilitated by high wages for skilled male workers. This American model carried with it new versions of family and marriage and new definitions of identity and citizenship. Three aspects of Americanism were particularly influential for women and gender: household consumer durables, privatized everyday life, and consumer citizenship. They were central to the totalizing vision the U.S. was promoting; they reinforced western European desires to focus on economic recovery, modernization, and family stability; and they presented eastern European socialist states with a model they strove to emulate in modified and recontextualized forms.

Household consumer durables—washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electric stoves, and a host of lesser appliances—arrived in western Europe first as a promise and then as a reality. Many Europeans came to embrace the American equation of modern domesticity with consumer durables and packaged food. Indeed, modernity was to be produced by means of the housewife's rational purchase and use of consumer durables to promote efficient housewifery. But the technologically modern home and the consuming housewife were legitimated in the eyes of business and politics before they were realized in practice, for in the early 1950s, the United States purchased three-quarters of the appliances produced in the world. That changed dramatically in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the late l950s, electric stoves and vacuums were ceasing to be luxury items in West Germany and many families had purchased new furniture, but only one in twenty households had a refrigerator as opposed to one in two in the U.S. and Switzerland. In 1963 nearly two-thirds of Dutch and Belgium households had washing machines, while nearly half of Swiss and British households and roughly one-third of West German, French, and Austrian ones did. Only a scant eight percent of Italian households had one, indicating the delayed onset of consumer society there. The Dutch had the highest percentage of vacuums as well, exceeding the seventy-nine-percent U.S. level, while West Germany and Britain came close to it. West Germany led in refrigerators with fifty-eight percent of households owning one. This put Germany well ahead of France, Britain, and Italy in the competition for that much coveted item.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the spread of cars, TVs, and kitchen appliances as well as new housing with indoor plumbing and central heating meant that “for the first time in history, ease and comfort were now within the reach of most people in [western] Europe.”Footnote ²⁷

These new appliances marked less an individualization than a familialization of consumption. Consumer durables from cars to TVs and washing machines were purchased for the use of the family and most often within the home. The iconic image was of the family gathered around the TV in a living room with modern functional furniture, the husband/father relaxing, with children sitting at his feet, while the wife/mother served the family food prepared in her appliance-filled kitchen. Consumer goods promised not just abundance, although that was certainly there. Think of the 1958 Brussels world's fair, where the United States' answer to Sputnik and Soviet technology was an exhibit filled to the brim with appliances, gadgets, stylish clothes, cosmetics, and prepared foods. Or recall the U.S. exhibit at Sokolniki Park Moscow a year later, where the $250,000 RCA kitchen provided the venue for Nixon and Khrushchev to debate whose vision of the modern home provided the best measure of their regime's civilizational worth.Footnote ²⁸ And this was just one of innumerable U.S. government and business cosponsored exhibitions of American-style kitchens and supermarkets staged in Europe and across the globe.Footnote ²⁹

Consumer durables promised new forms of domesticity and femininity. Although men also engaged in new forms of consumption, especially involving motorcycles, cars, and televisions, mass consumption was coded female. Women were the principle purchasers and users of new household consumer durables through which they created a commodified form of domesticity that displayed national and class particularities and striking transnational similarities. In western Europe and the U.S., market researchers, sociologists, and domestic science educators instructed women on nationally specific forms of rationalized, disciplined, proper consumption.Footnote ³⁰ In each country consumption patterns were shaped by differing levels of economic development and cultural particularities. But everywhere consumer durables promised to improve standards of housewifery and to make housework less arduous, although not necessary to save time spent on domestic tasks. They promised to transform the shabbily dressed and stressed interwar housewife into the young, fashionable, and excessively cheery homemaker that appeared in innumerable, virtually interchangeable ads on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ³¹ In western Europe and the U.S., the new woman as modern housewife was to be consumer savvy and proud of her domestic accomplishments. She embodied a carefree modernity in which technology, so threatening in its military and nuclear guises, appeared benign and progressive. The emblematic form of sociability in this consumerist vision was the Tupperware house party, popular not only in America but across Europe as well.Footnote ³² There housewives sold the technologically latest plastic goods—plastic being the quintessential modern product in the postwar world—to one another within the confines of the home in an endless cycle of producing consumption and consuming production.

The Soviet Union was not immune from the appeals of domestic consumption. As it sought to solve its acute housing shortage, it replaced communal apartments with prefab apartment blocks in which single family units had their own kitchens. The new home was imagined, and gradually realized, with plumbing, electricity, a refrigerator, and a TV, followed by other appliances later (but the family car was nowhere in sight). While many communists feared that such homes would create petty bourgeois attitudes and behaviors, Khrushchev envisioned that the new housewife would move into the “technological-scientific revolution” of the world of production by rationally using new appliances in her functionally arranged home.Footnote ³³

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) followed suit, at varied speeds and with varying degrees of enthusiasm to be sure, but all imitated the Soviet variant of the individual, technologically modern kitchen. In the GDR, for example, the turn toward domestic consumption was more grudging; the party leadership did not view either consumption or the home as priorities, for the factory and production were the privileged sites of social transformation. In the wake of the 1953 uprising in East Germany and under constant pressure from women, however, the regime was forced to try to expand consumer durables as well as “the 1,000 little things” from sewing needles to shoe laces that were essential to a minimally functional everyday life. Women failed in their efforts to play a role in shaping the design and production of appliances, but they were increasingly able to consume them. Whereas in 1960 only six percent of homes had washing machines and refrigerators, by 1970 more than fifty percent did; two out of three homes had televisions. From the 1970s on, Honecker was more open to domestically oriented consumption, even though expanding it required shifting resources away from heavy industry and borrowing extensively from the west.Footnote ³⁴ However different the end goals pursued east and west, the starting point was the same. Women were to modernize themselves via the rationalized consumption of household consumer durables and the rationalized practice of domesticity.

Americanism's vision of a consumer utopia was to be realized by women, but only within the safe confines of reconfigured families that had clear gender roles but were not simply recreations of past patriarchal, class-specific households. The postwar family across Europe and America was nuclear, as it had long been, and generally small. Women, especially in Britain, West Germany, Italy, and the U.S., were urged to devote themselves to quality mothering, even as companionate marriage and sexual fulfillment became normative. The home was women's realm, but increasingly that of husbands and children as well, for there was a new emphasis on the family-centered consumption of leisure. Television was central here, but so, too, were sports and the rise of the family vacation. In the postwar decades, the new domesticity and family life developed in functional modern apartments and single family homes with clearly demarcated and gendered spaces, for millions of such dwellings, whose austere functionalism now seems so drab and oppressive, were built all across Europe. These new spaces both promoted the family-centered consumption of entertainment and women's isolated use of appliances. They represented the realization of the interwar vision of thoroughly rationalized domesticity with the added benefit of previously unimagined commodities and technology.Footnote ³⁵ The focus on the family, home, and consumption also marked a privatization of the everyday that impoverished the social and left little room for the political.

Or rather, and this is the third key gendered aspect of Americanism, politics and consumption were conflated. Consumer choice was posited simultaneously as the best preparation for democracy and as the fulfillment of democratic citizenship for women. The housewife consumer citizen, aided by market research and expert instruction, would contribute to the democratic capitalist economy above all by wisely choosing everything from vacuum cleaners to laundry soap; her husband would operate in the larger political arena. In Lizabeth Cohen's formulation, the American model was a “consumer's republic” in which family-centered mass consumption and consumer choice would produce optimal economic outcomes and individual happiness and would simultaneously be the criteria according to which the state would be judged.Footnote ³⁶ This American concept of consumer citizenship was not embraced wholeheartedly in Europe, even as European consumption expanded remarkably in both quantitative and qualitative terms, for the exclusive focus on the market and the individual conflicted with European conceptions of social citizenship, existing class hierarchies, and more ideological political parties. In West Germany, for example, citizenship came to be ideologically associated with wealth creation, according to Erica Carter, and women's role as consumers was posited as central to the growth and rationalization of the economy and hence to women's public agency and citizenship. For Victoria de Grazia, “The European citizen-consumers . . . were hybrids . . . for they turned uneasily between state and market, between the security promised by the European welfare state and the freedoms promised by American consumer culture.”Footnote ³⁷

The appeals of Americanism in the postwar decades were many. It represented abundance after depression, war, and austerity; it valorized the security of home after unprecedented death, dislocation, and destruction. It offered an escape from problematic pasts and threatening presents into an ostensibly apolitical consumerist future that, if successful, would stabilize and legitimize a variety of European regimes, east and west. It offered western Europe a chance to be America's junior partner in its “empire by invitation.”Footnote ³⁸ It promised empowerment through female consumer citizenship. Not least, Americanism offered a way to reconfigure and stabilize gender relations. For women it offered formal equality, material abundance, and an easing of domestic burdens without any substantial and controversial reconfiguration of conventional domestic gender roles. Men helped out more, but women remained primarily responsible for housework and child care.

In eastern Europe, the challenge of Americanism spurred governments to try to develop a distinctly modern, yet alternative and more egalitarian socialist consumer culture.Footnote ³⁹ Supplying consumer durables, although economically challenging, seemed less threatening than allowing the consumption of American mass culture with its potentially subversive and definitely escapist and individualistic character.Footnote ⁴⁰ Consumer domesticity could be either a reward for political loyalty and participation or a space in which to escape from the claims and intrusions of the regime. In the socialist east, household technology promised women help in juggling the triple burden of waged work, housework, and child care, and participation in party or state activities.Footnote ⁴¹

In the first three postwar decades, Americanism's gendered consumerist vision was accompanied by commitments of varied strength to social policy and social rights on both sides of the Atlantic and across Europe. The experience of depression, fascism, and war on the one hand and America's promise of a New Deal for the world on the other meant that the individualism and familism of consumer culture were moderated by recognition of the importance of the social and of the state's responsibility to ensure economic stability and social welfare. To be sure, in both the minimalist American welfare state and the moderate to maximalist western European ones, social rights were tied to families more than individuals, women's benefits frequently came through husbands, and women were second-class social citizens. While benefits that enabled women to combine work and family increased greatly in some countries, such as Sweden and France, they remained minimal in others, such as West Germany and the Netherlands, and were means tested and stingy in the U.S. In communist countries social benefits were determined by the state's productive and reproductive goals more than women's needs. Nonetheless, there were benefits, rights, and a safety net, however full of holes, for the market alone was not considered capable of solving all problems.

Even when combined with Keynesianism and social democratic welfare states, Americanism, however seductive in many respects, was a singularly limited vision. For women it offered a constricted language of suburbanized domesticity and consumer citizenship in which to make claims for recognition and rights. It effaced the many who did not fit this domestic role or aspire to do so. Americanism valorized the family, building on legitimate desires for emotional and physical security, but foreclosed criticism of its most oppressive aspects. It privatized everyday life and promised that identity, creativity, and pleasure were to be found in and through private consumption. As a result, the social was impoverished, even where social rights existed.

In the postwar decades Americanism required the creation of ever new desires and “needs” that could only be satisfied by ever expanding production and consumption. That remains its prerequisite and promise to this day. Western Europe and Japan were able to emulate this American model but did so in modified forms that entailed more social protection, less pervasive commodification, and more modest levels of consumption. In the two decades since 1989 postcommunist eastern Europe has embraced the neoliberal variant of Americanism with mixed results. Long-desired consumer durables and American mass cultural products are readily available, although very unequally distributed; social protections have been eliminated; and high levels of unemployment, pronatalism, and invocations of traditional family values have pushed women, often against their will, out of the workforce and into a devalued private sphere.Footnote ⁴²

The spread of Americanism first to western Europe and Japan, then to eastern Europe and parts of the non-Euro-American world has provoked three sorts of debates. The first involves how much economic unevenness, social inequality, and precariousness is politically possible and morally justifiable in the pursuit of Americanism's model of consumption. The second revolves around conflicting judgments about the social character and moral consequences of Americanized mass consumption. Is there only one distinctly American model of consumerist modernity, or are there many? Has the second half of the twentieth century witnessed American economic and cultural imperialism or the proliferation of hybrid forms of consumption and cultural production? Has Americanism encouraged false needs and manipulated people into wasteful consumption, or has it opened the way for self-fashioning and identity creation in a realm of free choice?Footnote ⁴³

The third debate centers on the possibility of a universal emulation of the economic values and practices that the United States has sought to spread through aid programs, cultural diplomacy, and private investment throughout the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ However one might judge the desirability of economic Americanism, the possibility of global consumption on an American scale has likely reached both its economic and environmental limits. For the more than one billion people, the majority of whom are women, now surviving on $1 a day or less, Americanism is clearly not a possible model of consumption, domesticity, or gender.Footnote ⁴⁵ And even if economically feasible, a global emulation of that American model would be environmentally catastrophic. The advanced industrial economies have already wrought environmental havoc on an unprecedented scale by their consumption patterns and the domestic and outsourced production that supports them. Were countries such as China and India to consume on a similar per capita scale, questions of global warming and sustainability would be multiplied.Footnote ⁴⁶ But it is precisely the utopian vision of endless consumption of ever new goods to fulfill as yet unimagined needs that lies at the heart of Americanism. West Europeans have been more aware of these environmental issues than Americans, but only on the margins of public debate has there been a thoroughgoing critique of Americanism's consumerist model of utopia and the gendered assumptions on which it is grounded.

Human Rights

Americanism is also associated with human-rights discourse, but the materialism of consumerism often sits uneasily next to the ethics and law of rights talk. Like consumerism, human-rights discourse holds out a universal promise of security and empowerment to which women as well as men can lay claim. It insists that the individual's unalienable rights stand above the laws and policies of particular states. Whereas Americanism has focused on the individual in private, human-rights discourse initially looked primarily at the public realm. Its normative rights-bearing individual was implicitly coded male, in keeping with a long tradition of western political thought.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like Americanism, human rights in practice privileged and protected male-defined family and cultural rights.

Human rights were not invented in the post-World War II era, but the modern human-rights regime was instantiated then.Footnote ⁴⁸ The impetus to strengthening international law and international institutions came from both the United States and European states determined to prevent a repetition of the crises, rights violations, and hideous crimes of the interwar and war years. According to Elizabeth Borgwardt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1941 enumeration of the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech and religion and freedom from fear and want—along with the subsequent Anglo-American Atlantic Charter, which incorporated them, provided foundational elements of the emerging human-rights order. Rather than speaking of peoples or nations, as previous efforts to delineate international rights had done, the Atlantic Charter spoke of “all the men in all the lands,” thereby highlighting individual rights in addition to group ones. These new rights were to apply within as well as across national borders. In the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms speech, priority was given to civil and political rights, but both documents gestured toward economic and social ones.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although rhetorically powerful, the Atlantic Charter was a declaration of principles whose meanings were open to multiple interpretations, whose legal status was unclear, and whose enforcement mechanisms were nil. It was, according to Churchill “not a law—it is a star.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The instantiation of these new ideas about human rights was an international rather than merely an American or Anglo-American effort. The new rights regime was constructed both as part of the new United Nations and in response to the Holocaust and war crimes. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in 1948, used gender-neutral language—“all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights;” “all members of the human family” have equal and inalienable rights to the four freedoms. Its thirty articles enumerated a comprehensive array of political, legal, and socio-economic rights, but the vast majority concerned the public civil and political sphere. Full civil and political rights regardless of “race, color, sex, language, or religion”; equal recognition before the law; and freedom of religion, speech, organization, and movement were all guaranteed. Slavery, servitude, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention were prohibited. The concluding articles stated that “everyone” had the right to social security, to work and at equal pay for equal work, to education, and to an adequate standard of living for “himself and his family” with special assistance for mothers and children. Only Article 16, which elaborated the right to marry with the free and full consent of the intending spouses and to equal rights within marriage, addressed the private sphere exclusively.Footnote ⁵¹ However impressive its scope, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like the Atlantic Charter, was a statement of principles and desired standards, a “beacon” rather than a document akin to the U.S. Bill of Rights. It lacked legal status and enforcement mechanisms. Moreover, in the wake of genocide and war crimes, the public focus was primarily on state violence and rights violations, to which women as well as men were, of course, subject, and not on violence and the violation or lack of women's rights within the home and family, stemming from culture, economics, or religion.Footnote ⁵²

Attention to the gendered dimension of human rights and to the social, economic, and cultural rights of central importance for securing women's equality came only slowly. The early decades of the Cold War, decolonization, and the emergence of Third-World states made the U.S. and western Europe less interested in the social and economic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration.Footnote ⁵³ Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union embarked on ambitious development and modernization projects in the Third World, their concern was primarily with recruiting political allies, not ensuring rights, with enhancing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and trade, not with gender equality via development.Footnote ⁵⁴ The 1968 United Nations Human Rights Conference did not rectify the gender blindness of the new human-rights regime, but subsequent initiatives from the UN Commission on the Status of Women did. In 1967 the General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, but the reporting of violations was voluntary and, in practice, minimal.

In 1975 the UN proclaimed the “Decade of Women: Equality, Development, and Peace,” during which international women's conferences were held in Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing. Pushed by the emergence of a global women's movement, the UN in 1979 passed the legally binding Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which had been called for at the 1975 Mexico City Women's Conference and which replaced the ineffectual Declaration.Footnote ⁵⁵ Stressing legal and reproductive rights and recognizing the social and cultural traditions limiting women's rights, CEDAW prohibited not only legal, economic, and social discrimination against women in politics, education, employment, and marriage, but also committed governments to take positive measures to promote women's full development and advancement.Footnote ⁵⁶ It noted that women suffer most in conditions of poverty and stressed their centrality to familial and societal development. Violence against women was not mentioned.

Only beginning in the late 1980s was gender violence defined as a distinct human-rights violation. A 1990 Declaration of the UN Economic and Social Council condemned physical, sexual, and psychological violence against women; recognized that it was rooted in women's unequal social and familial positions; and urged states to work to prevent and punish such violence. The 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights recognized women's right to health, education, and family planning and to protection from state-sponsored violence, such as rape in wartime. Bosnia was very much on people's minds. The 1995 Beijing women's conference coined the slogan that now dominates the international women's movement: “women's rights are human rights” and stressed the issue of gender-based violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ This is a record of admirable, if slow, accomplishment. Human rights have become “the preeminent global language of social justice in the world,”Footnote ⁵⁸ and women's human rights—political, social, familial, and sexual—are an integral part of them.

These achievements notwithstanding, the vision of attaining women's equality and empowerment through the regime of human rights is utopian. We cannot dispense with rights discourse and the conventions and declarations in which it is enshrined, but to rely on them alone is inadequate for several reasons. First, as Joan Scott among others has reminded us, the prototypical rights-bearing individual has been coded male. Women are thereby forced to grapple repeatedly with the paradox of claiming rights on the grounds of the irrelevance of sexual difference and expanding the definition of rights because of their sexual difference. Women's human-rights activists today face the same challenges that Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft did more than two centuries ago.Footnote ⁵⁹

Of equal importance, rights discourse has always focused on the public more than the private and on the legal and political more than the economic and social. From 1789 to T. S. Marshall and beyond, legal and political rights have taken precedence over economic and social as well as familial and sexual ones. To be sure, many women's rights activists in the non-Euro-American world have insisted that especially for women the two types of rights are inextricably linked and of equal importance. Yet, although the social rights of women are increasingly acknowledged, they are in practice often ignored. And that is not just the case for rural women in the global south. Think about eastern Europe post-1989, where legal and political rights benefited women, but neoliberal free market policies eroded any social and economic rights and many reproductive ones as well. Or recall Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, which feminists throughout the l990s rightly excoriated as a horrific violator of women's human rights. Once the Taliban was overthrown, enforcing women's rights to education, jobs, and protection from bodily harm has taken second place to U.S. and NATO military goals, international development concerns, and the proclaimed hope of NGOs that working with traditional patriarchal Afghan culture will gradually encourage improvements in women's situation.

Women's rights as human rights and especially gender-based violence as a violation of human rights were latecomers to the rights agenda and are all too easily pushed aside when other rights are given priority or political considerations encourage concessions to culturally discriminatory practices. To be sure, invoking rights is a powerful language in which to make demands and get women's issues on governmental agendas. This was done during the transition in South Africa, for example, but gaining legitimacy for women's rights demands is not equivalent to actually achieving them.Footnote ⁶⁰ The European Union has developed serious gender equity guidelines, but implementing them in the culturally and politically diverse national contexts of EU member states has proven challenging. As Anika Keinz's article suggests, rights talk can be deployed by both sides in arguments over gender equality and gay rights. While Polish feminists and gay activists invoke universal rights discourse and EU legislation to demand tolerance and equality, conservative Catholic Poles insist on their rights as a democratic majority to restrict homosexuality and proscribe certain gender identities in accord with their cultural values.Footnote ⁶¹

Human-rights discourse promises to make visible the previously hidden wrongs done to women. Over the last two decades it has defined the globally shared condition of women primarily in terms of the female body in pain—coerced, veiled, mutilated, and raped. This violence is appalling, but by making it the defining characteristic of women, the international women's movement essentializes and homogenizes women. It puts women in the privileged but passive position of victim and assumes that women everywhere see veiling or clitoridectomy as the principal cause of their oppression, rather than poverty and lack of education or all these factors together.Footnote ⁶²

As Inderpal Grewal has forcefully argued, American and European feminists use human rights not only to call for global equality but also to construct themselves as free, while women elsewhere are seen as victims of patriarchal culture. We have choice—that favored slogan of American consumer culture—while they are oppressed. In a neo-colonial manner, women's rights are seen as an issue for women in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.Footnote ⁶³ Honor killings are rightly labeled a violation of women's human rights, but death through battering in the U.S. is rarely talked about in those terms. The current western focus on Muslim cultures continues a long tradition of concern with issues such as suttee, footbinding, clitoridectomy, and dowry murder. However well intentioned they are, western women often position themselves as rescuers, saving brown and black women from brown and black men.Footnote ⁶⁴ All too often, European nations and the U.S. use real rights violations as a pretext for military intervention that may or may not be labeled humanitarian and that often further erodes women's human rights. See Iraq.

Human-rights discourse posits an open network of NGOs fostering international dialogue outside the nation-state. Yet, that embryonic international civil society reflects global economic and political power inequalities that privilege Europe and the U.S. Participation in women's NGOs requires learning to speak the language of human rights—and preferably in English. Progress and compliance are increasingly evaluated in quantitative terms, by indicators devised by experts, mainly from the global north; local, contextualized knowledge and unquantifiable judgments are increasingly marginalized in the new “audit culture.”Footnote ⁶⁵ These new forms of technical expertise disadvantage women, especially in the global south.

Despite its institutional support, ethical appeal, and quasi-law status, human-rights discourse cannot enforce its own principles. It can make problems transparent but, as Sally Engle Merry has noted, it “represents a discourse available for framing problems rather than a system of law for preventing them” and is “deeply dependent on continued activism by local groups as well as by transnational NGOs, governments, and UN bodies.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Since governments all too readily ignore women's human rights, such local activism is especially important. Many countries, for example, signed CEDAW with reservations, and the global hegemon, the U.S., has refused to sign at all.

Temma Kaplan, a historian and impassioned proponent of women's human-rights activism, holds out the hope that women can “redefine human rights to mean universal social transformation.”Footnote ⁶⁷ That is a daunting task. At the moment, women's oppression is often analyzed as structural and systemic but the solutions offered are individual. Social movements exist on the grassroots level, but are much weaker nationally and internationally. Human-rights discourse gained its power and persuasiveness first after World War II and then again in the 1970s and post-1989 as part of a critique of social utopias and collective projects of any sort. But until attention is paid to the social as well as the legal, to collective as well as individual action, the gender equality envisioned by human-rights discourse will remain a utopian dream. Never has the importance of bringing back the social been greater than the current moment, for the growing prominence of women's human-rights discourse has been accompanied by the triumph of market fundamentalism, with deeply detrimental consequences, especially for women in developing countries, in post-communist eastern Europe, and in the U.S.

Market Fundamentalism

Over the past thirty years, there have been fundamental transformations in the global economy, state structures, cultural values, and social science theories. Some encompass these changes and challenges under the rubric of globalization; others prefer neoliberalism. Perhaps most useful is market fundamentalism, that quasi-religious faith that “natural” unregulated markets and the unimpeded pursuit of individual self-interest will promote a common good.

The 2008–09 global economic crisis brought financial meltdowns and skyrocketing unemployment, housing foreclosures, and rising poverty rates in the global north as well as the global south. While the glittering image of the unencumbered market has been tarnished and governments debate the desirability and size of stimulus packages, it remains unclear just how substantial the expansion of economic regulation and social policy will be. Claims that Keynes is back and market fundamentalism is dead seem premature. Let us then examine this highly ideological, totalistic project, which was the twentieth century's last utopian vision.

Market fundamentalism refers in part to the transformation of the global economy and economic policy in the wake of the 1970s crises. Its principles—free markets, free trade, free investment, and pervasive commodification—were laid out decades earlier by economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Only in the last three decades has it become the rallying cry that accompanied and legitimated deregulation within and between nations. Commodification was expanded to include not only goods, services, and financial instruments but also everything from intellectual property and carbon offsets to basic necessities such as water. A massive wave of privatization occurred in western Europe and the United States from the 1970s on and in former communist countries at breakneck speed post 1989. Across the global south, neoliberal policies were imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, private lenders, UN development agencies, and governments in North America and Europe as the price that had to be paid to deal with the debt crisis and receive aid. In the name of ideology or necessity, social rights have been under attack, and everywhere but in the privileged enclaves of western Europe, welfare states are a mere shadow of their former selves. Structural adjustment, as this assault on the state sector and social rights is called when applied to the developing world, has made health care, education, and housing much less available and much more expensive.Footnote ⁶⁸ The social has been abandoned for the economic; the economy has become disembedded from society, just as it was in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, in Margaret Thatcher's infamous phrase, there is no society. There are only individuals and families.Footnote ⁷⁰

The dominance of markets in the economy is paralleled by the dominance of market models in politics and the social sciences. All behavior, public and private, is said to be explicable in terms of rational actors attempting to maximize their utilities or interests—whether those interests are making money, choosing a political leader, or engaging in armed conflict. Economic efficiency is the measure of all programs and institutions, and rational choice theory has come to dominate political science as well as, of course, economics.Footnote ⁷¹ The language of markets permeates all realms. We speak of human capital (and not skills, preferences, or capabilities), social capital (and not class or community), cultural capital (and not values or shared knowledge and ways of life). Instead of being urged to participate, people are told to become stakeholders. Instead of committing themselves to a vision or project or choice, they “own” it.Footnote ⁷² The discourse begins and ends with the individual in a world of endless markets and unlimited, ostensibly free choice, coordinated only by the invisible hand.

What does all this have to do with women and gender? A great deal and little of it good. Structural adjustment policies in developing countries, for example, greatly increase the costs of daily and generational reproduction for which women are responsible by privatizing land and resources on which women depend, by eliminating state services and subsidies, and by cutting jobs. This lessens the chances that girls and women will get education and health care and increases infant and maternal mortality.Footnote ⁷³ In eastern Europe since the transition, women have disproportionately lost jobs as well as their social safety net, and poverty has become heavily feminized.Footnote ⁷⁴ Across the globe, human capital has become the measure of market worth but women are viewed as having less than men. Ostensibly women choose to invest less in developing their own human capital, preferring to devote more time to housework and child care, and hence they deserve their lower pay and more limited options. Everywhere women are less able to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the new neoliberal order. Some argue that microcredit projects in the form of small loans to the poorest of the poor have helped many women, who are the primary recipients, not only in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but also in poor parts of Europe and the U.S.Footnote ⁷⁵ Others question the benefits, for microcredit loans slot women in on the bottom rungs of the new neoliberal economy; they may provide some security but reinforce traditional gender roles and enhance women's family responsibilities. They are regarded as an alternative to state aid, social rights, and collective action, rather than as a complement to them.Footnote ⁷⁶

If the economic and social—or antisocial—policies integral to market fundamentalism hurt many women, so, too, does the new model of individualism and family life. On the one hand, the normative individual is now the rational actor, pursuing his self-interest, taking risks, and pursuing power in a single-minded, disciplined manner. Unencumbered by feminine emotions or foolish concerns for community or society, the new man, in the prescriptions of neoconservative American and British thinkers and many in post-communist eastern Europe and more conservative western Europeans as well, is courageous and virile, an assertive leader in public and in the reconfigured family. Such families, whether affluent or impoverished, should be nuclear, self-sufficient in caring for the old and young, and have distinctive and hierarchical gender roles. According to American neoconservative Irving Kristol, they should not rely on aid from “feminine-maternalistic” welfare states, which impede economic growth, limit military expenditures, and do their “best to emasculate the spirit of nationalist patriotism in all nations of Europe.” A state should do for its citizens what fathers should do for their children, i.e., make them “grow up to be self-reliant, self-supporting, and able to cope with a recalcitrant world.”Footnote ⁷⁷ For women in the first and formerly second worlds, this breathtakingly masculinist and patriarchal vision leaves them little power, agency, or opportunity and greatly increases caring labor. For women in the developing world the necessity of family self-sufficiency often requires women to leave their families in pursuit of jobs a country or a continent away.

Market fundamentalism claims to be a scientifically based and realistic program. In Thatcher's oft repeated claim, “there is no alternative.” Karl Polanyi, writing on the eve of the half century we have been discussing, judged the self-adjusting market differently. Looking back over nineteenth-century efforts to build an economy disembedded from society, he termed it “a stark utopia” that “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For British conservative John Gray, writing on the eve of the twenty-first century, “the Utopia of the global free market has not incurred a human cost in the way that communism did,” yet “over time it may come to rival it in the suffering it inflicts.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The current global economic crisis provides an opportunity to avoid that fate, but avoidance will not come easily. A simple return to American New Deal solutions or postwar European Keynesianism and welfare states will not solve the problems of national economies and a global order that are differently configured than during the 1930s or the 1950s and 1960s. Nor should we romanticize what those often incompletely realized projects achieved. They were replete with exclusions and discriminations on the basis of race and gender.Footnote ⁸⁰ Women were not seen as workers in need of unemployment aid, old age pensions, and labor regulation. The current emphasis on “shovel ready” projects threatens to repeat this pattern. But critically assessing the achievements and failings of responses to earlier crises is not enough. We must reject market fundamentalism, and we must acknowledge the ways in which Americanism and human-rights discourse contributed to its rise. All three visions have cumulatively promoted commodification and individualization while progressively marginalizing the social in any form. All three dismiss the social as the space and subject of dangerously utopian projects; all focus on the individual while rejecting the collective. All have proven to be impossibly ideal schemes for social improvement.

If we are to discover alternatives, we need to think beyond the alleged binaries of individual versus society, individual versus collective, the economy versus the state. As Amartya Sen has reminded us, “Individual freedom is quintessentially a social product.” Only when substantive freedoms—what Sen and Martha Nussbaum call capabilities—are realized within society can the individual “choose a life she or he has reason to value.”Footnote ⁸¹