FEMALE-HEADED HOUSEHOLDS AND SCIENCE:
OBJECTIFICATION OR HUMANISATION.
Paper for Women's Worlds 99 , 7th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, June 20-26
1999 Tromsø Norway. (1)
© Grietje Lof 1999
University of Amsterdam
Ph.D. Study Centre for Women
Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185
1012 DK Amsterdam The Netherlands
E-mail: g_lof@dds.nl
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The title of my paper is: Female-headed households and Science: objectification or
humanisation.
As the title already suggests: I do not study female-headed households but I study
the ones who study female-headed households. Or more specific: the philosophy
and history of science, the epistemology, of research about female-headed
households.
I will start with a few introducing sentences about the first general results of my research. After that two important definitions will be explained: 'female-headed
households' and 'objectification' and I will spend a few words to my research
question. At last some premature findings will be discussed.
For this research I have surveyed 324 scholarly texts about female-headed
households. 134 of these texts were published in the Journal of Marriage and the
Family, a wellknown journal.
Table 1. Amount and percentage of the scholarly texts about female-headed households per way of
publication.
| Way of publication |
Amount |
Percent |
| Book |
76 |
23,5% |
| Paper |
10 |
3,1% |
| Article JM&F |
134 |
41,4% |
| Article Volume |
97 |
29,9% |
| Article Journal |
7 |
2,2% |
| Total |
324 |
100% |
It is an historical study containing the period 1946 up to and including 1995.
The first publication was in 1954, a study about unmarried mothers. (2)
As you can see in table 2, the amount of published texts about female-headed
households increased from the sixties, with a small regression in the period 1971-1975. In the year 1995 the amount of published texts was even more (37) than in
the period 1976-1980 (30). Most texts were about category IV, one-parent
families, but also a lot of attention was paid to widows and divorced women.
Table 2. The amount of scholarly texts about female-headed households per category female-headeds
households per 5-year period.
Categories: I: Widows; II: Unmarried Mothers; III: Divorced Women; IV: One-parent families/Female-headed households.
| JAAR |
CAT.1 |
CAT.II |
CAT.111 |
CAT.IV |
N |
| 1946-1950 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
| 1951-1955 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
| 1956-1960 |
1 |
1 |
3 |
2 |
7 |
| 1961-1965 |
1 |
5 |
0 |
3 |
9 |
| 1966-1970 |
8 |
8 |
0 |
7 |
23 |
| 1971-1975 |
3 |
4 |
8 |
4 |
19 |
| 1976-1980 |
5 |
7 |
10 |
8 |
30 |
| 1981-1985 |
12 |
2 |
19 |
17 |
50 |
| 1986-1990 |
22 |
9 |
23 |
30 |
84 |
| 1991-1995 |
31 |
7 |
15 |
48 |
101 |
| TOTAAL |
83 |
44 |
78 |
119 |
324 |
About 71% of the studies are about female-headed households in the United
States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In some cases, 44 texts, there
was no geographic indication given.
Table 3. Amount and percentage of publications to continent.
| CONTINENT |
AMOUNT |
PERCENT |
| U.S.A. + Canada |
142 |
43.8% |
| Latin-America |
4 |
1.2% |
| Europe |
86 |
26.5% |
| Africa |
19 |
5.9% |
| Asia |
10 |
3.1% |
| Middle-East/North Africa |
7 |
2.2% |
| Australia |
3 |
0.9% |
| Global |
9 |
2.8% |
| No data about regio |
44 |
13.6% |
| Total |
324 |
100% |
The main theme which is studied, as you can see in table 4, are socio-economic
subjects, 31%. In most of the cases the socio-economic position, income, is
studied. But there are also texts about the way female-headed households budget.
Also important are the more social or psychological studies which deal about the
support systems female-headed households have, the relationship with their
children and the effect of divorce or death of a parent on children, mourning
processes, remarriage and sexual behaviour and relationships.
Table 4. The main theme of the publication, in absolute numbers and percentages.
| THEME |
AMOUNT |
PERCENT |
| Socio-economic |
101 |
31.2% |
| Social |
60 |
18.5% |
| Parent-Child Relations |
37 |
11.4% |
| Social-psychological |
27 |
8.3% |
| Demographic |
23 |
7.1% |
| Support systems |
19 |
5.9% |
| Historical |
16 |
4.9% |
| Literature search |
11 |
3.4% |
| Legal |
10 |
3.1% |
| Literature (literary) |
6 |
1.9% |
| Social work |
3 |
0.9% |
| Political |
2 |
0.6% |
| Incidental |
9 |
2.8% |
| Total |
324 |
100% |
Female-headed households.
With the expression 'female-headed households' I mean women with children who
are widowed, unmarried mothers or caretakers, and women who are divorced or
separated. In Dutch I can use the term 'gescheiden' which includes women who
divorced from a marital as well as from a non-marital relationship.
It is a broad description, not limited to households only consisting of women and
children, or limited to the age of children or heterosexual relationships.For instance:
Some Dutch studies like van Gelder define female-headed households by
the age of the children, 18 years. (3) The age of majority in the Netherlands
and also the moment the child allowance of the welfare benefits stops! The
problem is that motherhood or caretaking does not stop when the youngest
child reaches the age of 18. My critic is that while van Gelder uses a formal
concept to define female-headed households, at the same time he ignores
their experiences and their everyday existence.
Another example: limiting the expression female-headed households to
households only consisting of a woman with her children also means
ignoring. In this case the problems women face when they become female-headed households and the often creative and innovatory solutions they develop. A lot of young unmarried mothers do not have the money to start
a household of their own. Just separated women are confronted with
housing problems and in some civilizations widowed or divorced women
are expected to return to the house of their son/daughter or their
father/mother or start a levirate. The problems these women face, are problems related to their position, to their being or becoming a female-headed
household. We cannot close our eyes, for while doing that, we do not only
ignore important parts of their lives but by ignoring we neutralize existing
hierarchical systems without changing them.
A last example: nearly all of the texts about widows do not define the
concept widow. It is supposed so common that a widow is a woman whose
husband had died with whom she had a heterosexual marital relationship.
But what about women who had a marital relationship with another
women, or a homosexual marital relationship, or women who have more
than one husband and just one of them died, or women living together and
whose partner died? In no one of the studies these women are mentioned or
studied and it looks like they do not exist. But when their partner dies, they
mourn and are confronted with personal and economic losses.
What comes out of these examples is a kind of reductionism which is related to one
of the claims of objectivism, namely universalism. To avoid some kind of misunderstanding: this kind of reductionism does not correspond to limiting the
population of research. Van Gelder uses a universal definition of female-headed
households and after that he defines the population of research. My remarks are
about those universal concepts and not the defined population of research. These
are two different things.
Objectification.
I will explain now what I mean in my study with the concept 'objectification'.
First of all: I do not like the term 'objectification'. The reason for this is that it
covers two explanations in one word.
1. The German concept used by Habermas called 'Verding-lichung' which is a very
well concept, I think, for it means what it is: the methodological and theoretical
process whereby living elements like plants, animals and human beings are viewed
and treated like dead material without a soul, a will, desires, emotions or even
rational capacities. It are not the objects of study who are dead materials but it is
the one who studies who transforms the object of study into dead material, who
defines them as dead material.
Take for instance the following hypothesis:
Improving welfare benefits causes a growth of female-headed households caused
by unmarried motherhood and divorce.
It looks logic: women who are having a bad marriage will have the opportunity to
leave it without risking too much poverty. Women who became pregnant will have
the possibility to keep their child and build a home of themselves.
But in some articles the hypothesis was used more mechanical: improve condition
1 and women will leave condition 2 for 1. A kind of stimulus-respons reaction
ignoring the context and the conditions which make that women make the choices
they do. Such kind of hypothesis suggests that women react as things, as a machine
but not as human beings with bad relationships and who love their children and
what happens is that the specific and emotional conditions for female-headed
householdship are ignored and replaced by a dead model.
This example is not exactly what I have found in the texts but some articles in the
Journal of Marriage and the Family about this subject came very near.
2. The term objectification is also used in a different context: considering
something from an objective view; a view which itself is not influenced by feelings
or prejudices and just limited to facts. Objectification does not a priori view living
creatures as dead material. It debars the subjective element of the one who
considers but not, and this is the difference, the subjective elements of the object
of study. This is a process much more wellknown to us as social scientists. I do not
have to give examples.
Often the concept 'rationality' is used as a synonym for objectification and
sometimes it is but I warn you, sometimes it is not. The meaning and the
relationship of the concepts 'objectification' and 'rationality' vary through time and
to philosophical interpretation. We have to realize that these concepts are not
statical but integrated into dynamic subjective processes, human processes. When
analyzing them we have to pay attention to the context in which it is used or
situated and also the paradoxes which they include.
For instance:
The founding fathers of logical positivism the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle)
proceeded from the idea that problems which could not be studied by scientific
methods of collecting facts and analyzing them by logic, were fiction established by
inaccurate ways of reasoning. What they denied was the subjective element of the
one who studies and the fact that their theory was just as subjective like other
theories. They objectificated their own position as scientists and they also used the
process of Verdinglichung when denying this process in themselves: they made
themselves 'superior' to the subjective in themselves and by doing this transformed
themselves into objects.
When I was studying the literature about rationality my attention was attracted by
the partition of the subjective and the objective and the relationship with sexuality
and class divisions. Through history the groups who defined themselves superior to
other groups like women, slaves, labor class, black people, people from third world
countries, and so on, those elitarist oriented groups used rationality, an
objectivated kind of rationality, to legitimate their superior position: it were always
the poor who were emotional and they were poor because they were emotional,
and lustful! And this last thing is very interesting for sexuality seems to be
something inferior and in the wake of this, in some periods (not always), unmarried
mothers, instead of the unlegal fathers!
But to come back were I was, the paradox within objectivism: The problems which
could not be analyzed by objectificated methods and theories were swept away as
trash, fiction. And here I have a problem for what is fiction: the objectificated view
itself or what the objectifists call fiction?
Trying to solve this problem in my study I used the theory of Kunneman called 'the
filther of truth'. (4) With this metaphor he means a process, and I will translate his
definition freely, whereby in Western societies academic structures of problem
solving function as an enormous funnel: all the problems are collected into the
broad entrance and while in, channelled in such a way, that at the way out, there
only will be rational academic-founded solutions. Inside the funnel is a filther which
transforms and only allows passage to the dimensions which are open to
objectification and reduces the normative, expressive and esthetical dimensions as
an irrational inconvertable residue. (5)
What happens? The one who objectificates denies his own subjective process and
claims his or her hypothesis or model to be a neutral one. The subjective aspects
which are of course related to it, are negotiated, and by doing that, kept out of the
academic discussion (discourse). This means that the claim of objectivism
undermines itself by its own ignorance of subjectivism: it takes the edges of its
arguments.
In my study I will try to answer the question if there is such a process, called filther
of truth, functioning in scholarly texts about female-headed households, and more
important, how it functions. Does it vary through time or to the subject, or the
group which is searched, the regio which is studied, and so on. And, if such a
process can be made visible and brought back into the academic discussion, what
does this mean for the field of study of female-headed households? What happens
when women are transformed into objects? What is the effect on female-headed
households when academic researchers call themselves or their study 'objective'
and profess to be rational while at the meantime they legitimate stereotypes,
subjective presuppositions or personal frustrations? What then does it mean
'scientific truth'? Will it be fiction or just another truth like relativists suggest, or an
unconscious way of distinction (I refer to Bourdieu), or is it a way of legitimizing
some kind of power-relations (I refer to the ideas of Bader about ideology). (6)
I cannot and do not want to answer all these questions here and at this moment
also because the research is not yet finished, but I will give some prematurely
findings.
1. Universalism.
An important element of objectification is universalism. I have already mentioned it
before, the concept widow was supposed to be so common that it was not defined.
I have also found this for the categories divorced women and unmarried mothers.
What we see here is a kind of what I call 'silent universalims': the concepts are so
universal wellknown that they do not need any definition. As we have seen before
this results in what I call reductionism.
One of the prematurely findings will be that universalism results in reductionism.
There is no difference through time or to the subject of research, but there is an
exception: the concept of female-headed households which was defined in nearly
every study.
Maybe this has to do with the fact that female-headed household is a term
integrating several categories like widows, divorced women and unmarried
mothers. Or maybe this has to do with the fact that it is a more modern concept and the old
terms like mothers alone, broken families, incomplete families, were under discussion. The old terms were more 'distinctive' than the term female-headed
household. Distinctive in the way that it expressed the being different from 'normal
two-parent unbroken father-mother families'. Except critical and feminist studies
and some anthropological studies, all the texts used the idea of the traditional
father-mother-children family as the so-called cornerstone of society. Female-headed households were viewed as contrary to the usual.
What we see here is the following:
Universalism can result in reductionism when the different positions and situations
of women all over the world are ignored. Universalism not only functions through
universal defined concepts but also by supposing something to be common, that
will say by 'silent concepts'. Unspoken terms. And universal concepts are not a
priori objective but can include normative and dominant ideas established by
distinction and maybe also relations of power.
2. Carelessness.
The second finding is that the older more positivistic studies used well-defined
concepts to formulate their hypothesis. Unlike what Kunneman states, by using
these well-defined concepts they bring them into the academic discourse. When the
positivistic influence decreased the well-defining of concepts in nearly all the studies, decreased too, except critical and feminist studies. We see a growing carelessness what results in the possibility that subjective elemtns which are
objectificated, have more room to enter the model of research but unlike the older
studies, they were more uncontrolled, closed out of the discourse. They were not
visible, written down. Silent.
I have no explanation for this change at the moment. But it is very interesting that
while most of us live with the idea that after the scientific revolution of Kuhn and
Feyerabend we are freed from the strict positivist dogma's, objectivism still exists
but at a more uncontrolled and careless way. I cannot image that this is a positive
development for it can for instance open the doors for academic arrogance.
3. Rational-choice models
A third remarkable finding is the fact that while women are viewed as irrational,
emotional beings. nearly all the articles about welfare and the growth of female-headed households used a rational-choice model. The moment women seem to
meet welfare they are convinced to be rational, calculating and absolutely not those
emotional caring creatures as so many think we are. Women are portraited as
purely economic calculating, leaving their husbands for welfare, getting pregnant
to obtain welfare.
This remarkable U-turn had nothing to do with women themselves: women have
always been emotional and rational, caring and calculating. In this respect there is
no difference with men. It had to do with the perspective scientists had about women. Scientists who
claimed to be objective and meanwhile objectify their objects of research, Verdinglichung.
What is the reason for this change?
One of the first possible explanations is the fact that socio-economic studies often
use models of rational-choice, and sometimes also sociologists use it. But this
explanation does not satisfy for there are also socio-economic studies which do not
use these models. And why are these models not used to explain the economic
position of widows or of female-headed households who have a paid job. Studies
about the feminisation of poverty also do not use these models, mostly I suppose
because it are feminist studies which criticize established perspectives of science.
I suppose the change had something to do with the fact that women who are on
welfare come out of the invisible private level and processes of caretaking, caring
becomes a bad paid affair of the government, the public level. There was not much
information about the financing of the researches and if there was, there is no
information about the funding conditions and the influence of the fundraisers. But
some of the researches were funded by governmental departments.
Some weeks before this conference, there was a discussion in Amsterdam,
concerning a study about the problem scientists have while balancing between the
aims of what is called pure science and the aims of subsidizers. (7) One of the
problems is that we all need the money and we all want to do research without
interference but, and the authors of the study concluded it very carefully, in most
cases especially concerning Dutch government departments, there was interference
and research questions and results had to be changed in some or each way. I do not
have the information to conclude the same in case of the mentioned studies about
welfare and the growth of female-headed households but I think we have to keep
in mind this can be a factor of importance.
At least what is coming out of it is the fact that the traditional image of women is
limited to the profits it provides.
4. Some last remarks.
I want to finish with some last remarks:
Yes there is a filther of truth functioning. It functions through universalism, as well as in a direct observable way as in the
unspoken silent way. It results in a kind of reductionism which is not free of
distinction and normative elements.
It also functions through the presuppositions which are transformed into
definitions, hypothesis, variables and models of research while at the same time
these presuppositions are not discussed or intended to be discussed. I even found a
study where the results of study were interpreted at such a way the
presuppositions, which were tested untrue, were transformed in true statements.
Remarkable is that such studies do not use interviews but data collected by large
databases open for research, such as the Central Bureau for Statistics.
It also functions through the presentation of the study, the retoric element. For
instance a study whereby the amount of black unmarried mothers was presented at
such a way that it looked much bigger tthan the amount of white unmarried
mothers, while in reality there was not much difference. Of course we can explain
it as a way of presenting, we all use retoric. But analyzing the text I found more
and more normative elements which expressed the perspective of the researcher
instead of the reality of female-headed households.
Yes, there is a filther of truth functioning but it is more complex as Kunneman
states: for instance the growing carelessness in defining concepts I mentioned, or
the use of models of rational choice in studies about welfare.
The consequences for female-headed households are that their specific position,
their reality can be ignored and replaced by an academic imaginary truth. A consequence which is also negative to the process of the development of knowledge, for
science itself.
1. .With thanks to the Stichting Fonds Doctor Catharine van
Tussenbroek (Nell Ongerboer Fonds) who funded my participation.
2. S.B. Edlin: The unmarried mother in our society. A frank and constructive approach to an age-old
problem. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. 1954.
3. K. van Gelder: Een-oudergezinnen in cijfers. Den Haag: Nimawo. 1984.
Idem: Alleen zorgen: een onderzoek naar het functioneren van eenoudergezinnen.
Den Haag: Nimawo. 1987.
4. Harry Kunneman: De waarheidstrechter. Een communicatietheoretisch perspectief op wetenschap en
samenleving. Meppel: Boom. 1986.
5. Kunneman: 1986. p.10:
"Wetenschappelijke probleemoplossingspatronen functioneren in westerse maatschappijen als een gigantische trechter,
een waarheidstrechter. Om welk probleem het ook gaat, deze trechter staat klaar om ze in zijn brede opening op te
vangen en zodanig te kanaliseren dat er een rationele, wetenschappelijk verantwoorde oplossing uit de trechter te
voorschijn komt. Maar de waarheidstrechter kanaliseert niet alleen, hij transformeert tegelijkertijd de problemen die hij
verwerkt. In de trechter bevindt zich namelijk een filter dat slechts de objectiveerbare aspecten van problemen doorlaat
en normatieve, expressieve en esthetische aspecten tot een irrationele onverwerkbare rest reduceert."
6. Pierre Bourdieu: Practical reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1998.
V.M. Bader: Collectief handelen. Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff. 1991. pp.188-189.
7. André J.F. Köbben; Henk Tromp: De onwelkome boodschap, of hoe de vrijheid van wetenschap bedreigd
wordt. Amsterdam: Mets. 1999.
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