The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR OLD, unemployed single mother in West Virginia became pregnant as a result of date rape. Due to recent cuts in federal funding, "Meg" had trouble locating an abortion clinic but finally found one four hours away in Charleston. She was told that she was 17 weeks pregnant, and that the clinic performed abortions only up to 16 weeks, so she was referred to a clinic in Cincinnati which would perform an abortion up to 19 1/2 weeks for a cost of $850. When she went there 1 1/2 weeks later, however, she was told that she was actually 21 weeks pregnant and referred to a clinic in Dayton that would perform the abortion for $1,675. She refinanced her car, sold her VCR, borrowed money, and went to Dayton. There she learned that she was a high-risk patient because of an earlier cesarean delivery and would therefore have to go to Wichita, where the procedure would cost $2,500. "I just didn't think I could manage that," she says. "Now that I know I have to have it, I'm trying to get used to the idea . . . I'm not thinking about adoption, because I've never understood people having a baby just to give it away. So I've been thinking a lot about trying to love this baby the way I love my daughter."1 Can we say that this woman has freely chosen her role as mother?

Susan is beaten by her husband and is admitted to a hospital. This is the second time she has been severely beaten this year. An advocate from the local battered women's shelter visits her and gives her information about the resources they have, as well as information about pressing charges and prosecuting her husband for assault. Susan is angry at her husband, and very frightened of him, but she is reluctant to press charges with the police because she doesn't want to put her children through such an ordeal. Her husband, meanwhile, sends her a dozen bouquets of lovely flowers and comes to the hospital with lavish gifts and profuse apologies, declaring his love and promising never to hit her again. The battered-women's advocate tells her that she should not believe him, that he will do it again, but Susan decides to return to him. She says that he has apologized and that she forgives him; that he is basically a good person and has promised to change; that he loves her and is a good father; that she loves him; that it was partly her fault anyway. Is she free if she returns to her husband?

In the novel Mrs. Bridge, the title character is a woman who seems to subordinate herself completely to her husband. She defers to him, is extremely self-deprecating, rarely ventures a political opinion, and has so effectively effaced herself that at the end of the novel, she risks freezing to death while trapped in her car because she won't yell for help; the implication is that she doesn't want to disturb anyone and simply waits passively, until her husband gets home to rescue her. She doesn't appear to be holding these views out of fear or coercion. Her husband is somewhat overbearing but not violent; he doesn't overtly seek to control her, he clearly loves her, and demonstrates his consideration and respect for her in various ways. Is Mrs. Bridge free or not?2

When Greta got married, her husband and she agreed that she would quit her job as a secretary so that they could raise a family. Greta's mother always worked when she was a child, and Greta has always believed it is better for children to have a full-time mother. She had three kids over the course of the next seven years. Shortly after the birth of the third child, her husband left her. It turns out he was having an affair, but he told Greta that he felt smothered by the routine of their domestic life and all the kids. Although she eventually was able to file for divorce, she was never able to collect child support or win any other financial settlement from her husband, and so she was forced to find a job. But her former secretarial skills were sorely out of date, so the only jobs she could obtain were barely above minimum wage. After paying for child care and transportation, she has less money than she would receive on welfare. Greta grew up in a family that always scorned those on public assistance, however; and her mother, who is horrified by the prospect of her daughter's becoming "one of those welfare mothers," argues that Greta brought this on herself by quitting her job when she got married. She will, after all, receive a raise every six months if she continues to work. Greta knows that economic security is years away at this rate, and she feels trapped by her situation. Is she trapped, or is her mother right that freedom requires taking responsibility for one's choices?

Charlene, a lesbian, is an attorney with an extremely conservative Wall Street firm that has never had a woman partner. Charlene wants very badly to become a partner. Accordingly, she is not open about her sexuality. Her lover, Sally, believes this is a mistake, not only tactically, but from the perspective of personal cost as well. Though Charlene declares that their relationship is more important to her than anything, she has become so fearful about colleagues finding out about it that she and Sally have virtually stopped going out of the house together; and the stress is affecting not only Charlene's health but the relationship as well. Sally is beginning to contemplate "outing" Charlene. She believes that this would liberate Charlene from her fears, her anxiety, her extra stress, and save the relationship. Is she right?3

These scenarios are not particularly special or unusual; they are common examples of the everyday dilemmas many women (and some men) face. And precisely because of their familiarity, many of us probably have immediate, perhaps even gut-level, reactions to them. For instance, most people would probably say--at least initially--that the pregnant woman is unfree4 and that Sally is wrong. The other stories might give us more pause. It is difficult, for instance, to imagine that a victim of domestic violence really knows what she is doing when she "chooses" to return to her abuser; Greta could not know that her husband would abandon her; and Mrs. Bridge might seem rather hopelessly repressed to many but quite normal to others. I want to suggest, however, that there is really no simple answer to the question of freedom in any of these cases.

This complexity is partly due to the amazing ambiguity of the term "freedom" in its popular usage, not to mention the vast disagreements among political philosophers over the meaning of the term, as well as over individual instances of "freedom" and "unfreedom." But it is also partly due to the fact that the dominant discourse of freedom in philosophy and political theory--which founds as well as reflects popular, everyday conceptions--is inadequate to fully encompass this complexity. Moreover, it is a central contention of this book that feminism--which many might assume would maintain that the women in all four stories are unfree--highlights both this complexity and this inadequacy.

A MASCULINIST THEORY OF FREEDOM?

Implicit in these introductory questions is the more fundamental issue of what the term freedom means. This is a central bone of contention among liberty theorists;5 but most, if not all, conceptions of liberty have at their heart the ability of the self to make choices and act on them. The contested terrain, therefore, generally covers differences about what constitutes the process and activity of choosing and what constitutes the product, or an "actual" choice. Theorists disagree also on what constitutes a "restraint on" or "barrier to" choice, what prevents certain options from being made available, or what prevents me from taking a particular choice that is normally available. Many of these questions--and indeed, much freedom theory--are arguably "semantic" rather than normative; that is, concerned with distinguishing freedom from other terms, such as equality, justice, and obligation, or with the features that constitute a "restraint" (as opposed to an "inability"). Subsidiary to and implicit in these debates, however, though often not addressed, is the more normative and political question of what or who the "self" is that makes these choices; in other words, what constitutes the "choosing subject" of liberty.

While definitions and conceptions of freedom can be quite varied, ranging from neo-Hobbesian descriptivist accounts of behavior to the most value-laden prescriptive accounts of actions,6 most formulations still divide along the lines offered by Isaiah Berlin in his famous 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," of "negative" and "positive" liberty.7 According to Berlin, negative liberty consists in an absence of external constraints. The individual is free to the extent that she is not restrained by external forces, primarily viewed as law, physical force, and other overt coercion. So, for instance, if I wanted to leave the house but my husband broke my leg to prevent me, he would be restricting my freedom. "By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference, the wider my freedom."8 Berlin's general notion that restraints come from outside the self, they are alien to the self, or "other," is an important basic feature of negative liberty; specifically, other humans' direct (or, in some cases, indirect) participation "in frustrating my wishes" is the relevant criterion in determining restraint.9 pAnd these "wishes," or desires, preferences, interests, and needs which I must be able to pursue unimpeded if I am to be free, are seen as coming from me and from me alone. Desires in negative liberty do not necessarily need to be "brute," that is, immediate, physical, and compelling, as some theorists have maintained.10 Although brute desire is an important concept in negative liberty, desire can just as easily be seen as long term, well thought out, and rational. The point for negative liberty, however, is that whether the desires are long term or immediate, "brute" or "rational," what matters is that they are desires that the agent has formulated by herself. That is, a desire may be formed in reaction to external stimuli--I may want to leave the house because I can no longer stand listening to the televised football game my husband is watching in the next room--but this desire is mine, say the negative libertarians, and I am responsible for acting on or resisting it.

Similarly, the desire in question must be conscious: I must know that I have it. Certainly, desires may be responses to unconscious feelings--perhaps my aversion to televised football stems from repressed childhood memories of fear of my father, who would yell angrily at the television as his team lost yet again--but the relevant point for negative freedom is that I want it, and that I know I want it, not why I want it. Thus, negative liberty draws clear-cut lines between inner and outer, subject and object, self and other. This kind of freedom, as Taylor puts it, is "toughminded," because of the strict notions of individual responsibility and accountability that it finds conceptually necessary to "choice."11 It is also "tough-minded," however, in the way it starkly differentiates between freedom and various other political concepts, such as equality and justice. As Berlin says, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience."12 Thus, negative liberty defines itself in opposition to concepts such as obligation and authority; these things, while perhaps necessary to human society, or even to individuals' pursuit of their desires and possibly even to greater freedom in the future, are nonetheless limitations on freedom. As John Rawls argued, while equality, or wealth, or other factors may affect the "worth" of an individual's liberty by enhancing or inhibiting her ability to pursue opportunities, these factors are distinct and separate from the liberty itself, which is measured by the absence of external restraints, such as laws.13 The central question for negative liberty, according to Berlin, is "What is the area within which the subject--a person or group of persons--is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?"14 For this reason, Taylor calls negative liberty an "opportunity concept": the significant factor in determining whether I am free is that no other person or thing is actually preventing me from doing what I want, nothing or no one is barring me from taking advantage of opportunities that I could otherwise pursue but for this restraint.15 Berlin similarly says that "Freedom is the opportunity to act, not action itself."16 What is important is that I be allowed to make choices, rather than that I make a particular choice. Freedom is "constituted by the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice."17

Thus, Berlin holds that freedom is determined by "the number of doors open to me"; the more doors that are open, regardless of whether I go through any of them, or even want to go through any of them, the freer I am. Berlin does concede that "the extent to which [doors] are open," as well as the relative importance of these various doors and paths, are relevant to freedom; but given the necessarily subjective dimensions of such evaluations, "the number of doors" is ultimately determinative. Freedom is thus in an important sense quantitative on the negative-liberty model, even quantifiably measurable.18 More importantly, freedom operates from an "objective" rather than subjective notion of choice. Recognizing the "adaptive preference" phenomenon--that when faced with a limited range of options, I can increase my freedom by simply accommodating my desires to availability--Berlin insists that freedom requires "a range of objectively open possibilities, whether these are desired or not."19 Freedom "consists in the absence of obstacles not merely to my actual, but to my potential choices . . . it is the actual doors that are open that determine the extent of someone's freedom, and not his own preferences."20 The presence of options themselves, objectively defined, is key to freedom; I may not want many, or even any, of the alternatives available, but I am nevertheless freer than if there was only one option. If choice is paramount in the definition of freedom, then the more choices I have, the freer I am.

Defining freedom in the objective terms of available options rather than the subjective expression of desire is supported by many contemporary theorists, such as Stanley Benn, W. L. Weinstein, Joel Feinberg and Christine Swanton,21 because it allows us to circumvent the fact that subjective desire is almost always contingent on social circumstances. For instance, one could not claim that an African slave was free simply because she said she did not want to leave the plantation, because this desire could be seen as the final effects of colonization. But at the same time, this "available options" conception is somewhat counterintuitive: if there are only two options, one of which is the one I want, I would seem to be less free than if what I want is not available at all amidst dozens of other options. Accordingly, other negative-liberty theorists, such as Richard Flathman, Robert Nozick, and William Parent, reject this account and insist on the relevance of the more traditional, Hobbesian notion of being able to make the choice I want.22 But even for the latter theorists, such ability presupposes coherence between subjective desire and objective circumstance--I cannot have what I want if it is unavailable--so they favor the availability of more rather than fewer options.