Marianne Weber
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marianneweberlatest20201.pptxMarianne Schnitger Weber (1870-1954)
Feminist Sociology
Marriane & Max
Marianne's work on sociological theory had been forgotten in the US and most of Europe until about 20 years ago.
During her lifetime Marianne Weber achieved recognition not only for her academic sociological work but also for her political work.
She was married to Max Weber and they shared a long, loving and respectful marriage. True to her theoretical orientaton, her relationship was a reflexively obvious part of her academic writing and research.
Accomplishments
First woman member of parliament for Baden Germany in 1920, and the president of the Federation of German Women's Organizations.
Marianne Weber's sociology emerges today as an almost archetypal representative of the practice of feminist sociology: it has as its central problematic the fundamental feminist principle of describing and explaining society from the standpoint of women and using those descriptions and explanations to analyze how to change society in the direction of greater justice.
Marianne Weber's life took a bad turn and was put on hold when Max suddenly died of pneumonia. She suffered through four years of depression before becoming active again in society. Work helped her and she prepared ten volumes of Max' writings for publication. Between 1923 and 1926 she completed her most famous biography of Max Weber.
In 1924, Weber accepted an Honorary Doctorate from Heidelberg for her scholarship on women and the editing of Max's work. She also re-established the weekly salon.
Marianne Weber's work is being only slowly recovered and studied; her sociology in general and her analysis of social change in particular are informed by and respond to the ideas of Marx (Weber 1900), and of her husband Max.
Her feminism led her to reject Max’s stance in value neutrality, to offer a different interpretation of the significance of Protestantism and capitalism by focusing on the lived experience of women and families and she posited that ideas are only an equal footing with materiality and human agency.
Marianne Weber's central theoretical project was creating a sociology from the standpoint of women. Three concerns informed her sociological theory:
the need for female autonomy,
the significance of women's work in the production of culture,
and the situated and unique standpoint of women.
1870-1954
84 years
She was particularly concerned with how well social institutions enabled or constrained women to realize these three issues. For example, Marianne Weber's study of marriage found that while men achieve greater autonomy and self-fulfillment through conventional marriage, women do not.
She also critiqued Simmel's notion that men and women occupied different culture spheres: the objective male world of public achievement and the personal female world of inner self-development. Marianne Weber argued that men and women are equally capable to participate in objective culture and that his distinction failed to explain women's work in the household and historically women’s work in production.
She also suggested that women participate in a third dimension of cultural production — what she called the "middle ground of immediate daily life”– let’s explore his concept now in a bit of detail
Middle ground of CUlture
Fun Examples of the Middle Ground Of CUlture
Madea (Tyler Perry== Let them Go)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPzXwNVc9g&list=PLFm9pxoY22GC0HxFChmCbMI3kllHiOYOQ
Major Elements/Themes
Women’s Social Experience is the starting point and major theme in her work.
Patriarchy and male domination of social worlds influence women’s experience.
male dominated discourses in science, law, politics etc.
division of labor has connection to history and domination
autonomy and value of women are deeply connected to socio-historical patterns and social relations.
Marriage shapes women’s existence
Marriage and history of marriage as patriarchal arrangement
Patriarchal forms of marriage distort relationships
and alienate
Marriage is a complex and ongoing negotiation of
power and intimacy– funny weird film clip example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DZy6Calces
Historical phases of marriage
‘primitive patriarchy’ (male domination in marriage women under male authority—in religions polygamy sanctioned—even after monogamy become legal norm);
statutory monogamy (Greeks and Romans legally recognized), later religious shifts led to Christian reforms in marriage as an institution—men and women both held to strict moral code—sex sinful/marriage its only place.
‘statutorily protected male supremecy (institutionalized)’ Protestant reformation shifts to asceticism in all things (even marriage)—more emphasis on sexuality as dirty/evil, however, this had unintended consequence of allowing for ‘unions’ not anticipated to form between men and women—see readings and quote from W. Penn (Quaker). Autonomy is introduced as a possibility in protestant reformation ideals leads to women being freed form male authority and placed under their own conscience and God’s authority through that conscience. So, women’s subordination becomes institutionalized practice—legally bound, and strategically and ideologically manipulated by structures of power and authority– we see situations of ‘statutorily protected male supremecy’—power struggle in marriage and society between the sexes; She says beware ‘willful subordination’ (societal framing and patriarchy framing) Patriarchally oriented husbands control wives, children;
Now, she says, marriage relationships have potential to achieve and strive for comradeship of spouses. Autonomous and egalitarian relationships. There is going to be a struggle, and it is difficult to continue allowing both partners autonomy in marriage. But, it is the way to go as it is the only option for respecting their individual humanity and creating deep, lasting relationships.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV1tiEDvkkw Before Sunset Trilogy—three films that trace a marriage across time.
And it isn’t just straight marriages—they all have macrosocial framing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBwht54TDOI
Human Interaction and Negotiation
Men and women’s relationships have macrosocial framing!
Macrosocial framing shapes and constrains the relationships men and women can have
Intimacy and autonomy constrained
Women’s sexuality - erotic expression for both mean and women is important- however, patriarchy constrains women’s sexuality https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hsimp=yhs-att_001&hspart=att&p=diane+ladd+and+laura+dern+rambling+rose+youtube#id=6&vid=896e3fcb71fc85fadba2736dec23b53d&action=click
Money and power (connected to moral adulthood).
Women’s work and history of that work is a cultural production and is reproduced in social interaction and social organizations.
Objective and Personal culture Simmel says women’s traits make them good at personal and men good at objective. NOPE says Weber!
Human work is human work! Women can do objective and personal culture and so can men!
Class, Education, Age and Ideology
Statuses/positions in society influence your life chances, outcomes and perceptions.
Women in feminist movement are typically elites and generalize their experiences (wrongly) to all women.
Most work for all people is hard, fragmented and unfulfilling—work is not the end/all answer for women (or men).
The less powerful can’t CONSENT—challenges Max’s typology of authority and domination—makes the victimization look like agreement. Power makes consent problematic.
Autonomy constrained for less powerful, less educated, less aware.
Marianne Weber Authority and Autonomy in Marriage
Domination
Not always so overt—she argues that domination can also be a situated relational vantage point.
Domination—a power relation whose most active feature is the denial of the subordinate‘s subjectivity. That is, the subordinate's capacity for and right to agency, moral autonomy and spontaneous sociability. Has situational and historically rooted positions that advantage and disadvantage.
Here Viola Davis in her role of Rose in the film Fences https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr2=piv-web&p=fences+viola+davis&hspart=att&hsimp=yhs-att_001#id=2&vid=6d625246e13dd0f587ee462da0c098c7&action=view
Sources of domination in the world lie in structures and ethics
Social Structures and Patterns of Social Relation
a. sexual-economic relation –where sex-relation is also an economic relation"
b. the practice of gender, that is, of socially assigning behaviors to individuals on basis of perceived biological sex
c. patriarchal marriage form of marriage in which law, custom and religion grant the husband authority over the wife, denying her autonomy (and, thus, limiting the possibility of intimacy between husband and wife)–
d. marital relation under patriarchy asks wife to abdicate most basic principle of humanness: that each must heed the command in every other human to become an end in one’s self, that no person may regard a fellow human being as simply the means to his/her own personal ends.
e. stratification by class, ethnicity, gender violates principle of equity
equity principle that "no group of people are of so much less importance than another, that a valuable side of life pertaining to them should be sacrificed for the other"
She also debated the position that the only path to gender equality was through women leaving the household and becoming wage earners. According to Weber, this solution did not take into account the various standpoints of females, whether they be homemakers or factory workers. Weber believed that the patriarchal household rather than the capitalist workplace needed to be reformed.
