Sexuality After Industrialism

The gender wars within evangelicalism seem intractable, and often stale. Complementarians who strongly defend the fundamental differences between the sexes and the respective roles that correspond to them informed by Scripture and nature are opposed by egalitarians who argue that the former’s supposedly “biblical” vision is in fact idiosyncratic within the Christian tradition and contingent on certain historical circumstances, and therefore irrelevant to a different context. There is a largely untapped resource which could bring some fresh life to these debates. It is found in the provocative book Gender by the category-defying figure Ivan Illich. 

An eccentric thinker, Illich’s family (including his Jewish mother) fled the Nazis in Austria, he later earned a doctorate in medieval studies and then studied philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, served as a parish priest and community organizer, and was eventually defrocked after coming under the ire of the Vatican for his attacks on the Catholic Church for its complicity in Western colonialism under the guise of third-world “development.” A penetrating social critic, Illich was championed by leftist intellectuals in the 1970s for his political views, which included attacks on mass institutionalization in Deschooling Society (1971) and Tools for Conviviality (1973).

These works are united by a common critique of modern technologies and social arrangements as displacing vernacular skills, services, and mores, and thereby undermining freedom, self-reliance, and dignity. Illich extended this line of thinking to the topic of gender in his book of that title in 1982, and lost favor with many of his admirers as a result. Even today, his Wikipedia page includes no discussion of this important work. Its argument deserves a wider hearing among evangelicals.

Illich forces us to reconsider the very foundation of our gender debates. Targeting the sexual revolution or feminist ideology is not radical enough. For Illich, the original gender catastrophe was the destruction of the productive household by the industrial revolution. An industrial society, Illich argues, separates the sphere of production from that of consumption, and in doing so pits men and women against each other. In the early stages of the industrial era, men left the home to do societally valued work while women remained at home, which was now regarded as a sphere of consumption, and afforded less dignity and prestige. This new arrangement severed men and women from what had been for ages their intertwined economic roles, and it replaced those roles with something bleaker: a relation of breadwinner and dependent. Eventually, women fought to be liberated from the sphere of consumption and the status of dependent in order to enter the sphere of production.

Industrialization, Illich argues, did not merely change where men and women worked—it changed what they were. It rendered the sexes economic competitors rather than partners, imposing an ideology of unisex sameness that persists to this day. The final result is a society that despises difference and insists on turning both men and women into cogs in the vast machine of GDP growth. This, explains Illich, generates rivalry between the groups. The mutual dependence characteristic of subsistence economies, wherein the household was the center of economic productivity, is replaced by competition, envy, and resentment. The two sexes enter the same fields to compete for the same jobs. The industrial model wasn’t just an economic shift but a metaphysical one, erasing the very concept of gender in favor of homo oeconomicus—economic neuters, stripped of gender for the sake of work.

Illich’s argument is a corrective to the nostalgia of some conservatives. He is no advocate of  static gender roles à la 1950s America. His concept of “ambiguous complementarity” acknowledges that though sex distinctions are real and consequential, their social expressions vary across cultures. Hence his coinage “vernacular gender.” Gender, he insists, is a dynamic interplay shaped by material conditions but grounded in biological reality. This flexibility makes his insights valuable for evangelicals: His framework affirms complementarity without turning it into a procrustean legalism that universalizes a particular cultural moment.

And yet, Illich misses something crucial. His analysis of industrialization’s role in erasing gender neglects to account for contraception—arguably the single most consequential technological enabler of unisex ideology. The pill, abortion, and sterilization have effected the chemical and surgical erasure of sexual difference, ensuring that women can be just as economically exploitable as men. Illich sidesteps this fact, and even offers a weak defense of abortion as a means of keeping state power out of women’s wombs. In reality, abortion is the market’s ultimate mechanism for ensuring that women remain frictionless economic units, unburdened by fertility. This is a point that Christopher Lasch captures in his important essay, “The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs”: 

Mainstream feminism is now concerned almost exclusively with a single goal—to “empower” women to enter business and the professions on an equal footing with men. Even its obsession with the abortion issue has to be seen in this light. Since the biology of reproduction is the most dramatic difference between men and women and the most important source, it appears, of women’s industrial inequality, it is necessary to neutralize this “disability” by giving women absolute rights over the embryo. The assertion of “reproductive rights” removes the last obstacle to women’s absorption into the workforce.

Illich is improved upon by Lasch here, demonstrating how Mammon and Moloch link up in abortion. 

Related to his strange view on abortion is the relativistic danger in Illich’s vernacular framing. How far should Christians let cultural variability stretch? No Christian should endorse its expansion to permit abortion. And here one must challenge a particular line of argumentation Illich offers. He posits that the medieval church is partly to blame for the loss of gender. One reason Illich presents is that once marriage came to be seen as a sacrament, and thus under ecclesiastical regulation, the church undermined vernacular modes of relation between the sexes by promoting “catholic” codes. Illich criticizes what he sees as the church’s shift from regulating orthodox faith to regulating catholic behavior. There might be something to this, in that the church may determine too much about the behavior of and relations between men and women, yet the church must still apply Scripture to those domains. The Bible is clearly relevant to abortion: Thou shalt not murder. No vernacular permits violation of this teaching. Illich’s opposition to the catholicizing of codes needs correction here.

Moreover, there is one obvious point on which Illich’s description of industrial-era competition between the sexes requires an update: its assumption that men always come out on top. This was true, as a rule, in the early industrial era up through the late twentieth century, but things are more complex today. Though men continue to dominate executive positions, women now outnumber men in higher education and numerous industries, and they increasingly outperform men in white-collar sectors and middle management.

In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington updates Illich’s framework, recognizing that we are now dealing with the consequences of a market that has not only neutered gender distinctions but, in many cases, actively disadvantages men. While Harrington is at her best puncturing the myth of interchangeable egalitarianism and acknowledging ineradicable sex differences and unavoidable asymmetries related to our material bodies, she offers few specifics about complementary roles appropriate for our context or the cultural, political, and economic mechanisms which would most effectively promote and support them. 

If Illich is correct to say that industrialization has brought about gender-erasure, what can we do about it? Illich himself was frustratingly coy about solutions. It is for us to come up with some, as we observe the dire results.

First, we must reintegrate home and work—not by returning to pre-industrial economic models (good luck convincing many people to start hand-weaving their own textiles), but by using digital technologies and decentralized work structures to create new models of productive households, along the lines of what Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano have recently dubbed the “third oikos.” On this point, both Lasch and Harrington are somewhat helpful. So too is Pope John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio, when he argues that “society should create and develop conditions for working in the home.”

Recently authors like Rory Groves and C. R. Wiley have attempted to sketch out ways to retrieve the productive household in the conditions of our time. They both emphasize learning durable skills (such as carpentry, crafting, etc.) that can be performed in the home. But most fundamentally, at least for Wiley, we need a shift in perspective on the home—from a place of consumption and relaxation, to one of production and learning—from merely recreational to also creational. There are all sorts of home-based businesses one can consider, especially given new digital technology, which can be repurposed to restore economic interdependence between the sexes as they build a life together. And for those who remain employed by others, we need to push for more flexible work-from-home policies as family policies. This should be all the more imaginable after the COVID era.

Second, we must restore the cultural value of unpaid work. There is nothing less liberating than a society in which every ounce of human activity must be monetized to be considered worthwhile. The work of raising children, running households, and communal care is invaluable—even if it doesn’t contribute to corporate profit and taxable income. We must fight the ideology that insists that only market work is real work. Lasch offered a powerful challenge to such market-dominated thinking, “together with the careerism it fosters.” He goes on to say that a true feminist movement would respect “the achievements of women in the past and would not disparage housework, motherhood, or unpaid civic and neighborly services. It would not make a paycheck the only symbol of accomplishment.” Similarly, in “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Wendell Berry confronted forms of false feminism that implicitly promoted the idea that “employment outside the home” is inherently more valuable than “employment at home.” Work at home, including work that is largely invisible to the market, is tremendously valuable, and we should find ways to recognize and honor that without having to translate into monetary terms.

Finally, we must pursue maternalist policies that make it easier for mothers to stay home with their young children. The Christian tradition, especially in light of the great disruptions of the industrial revolution and the social questions raised thereby, is consistent in emphasizing the mother’s center of gravity in the home with young children. This point is littered throughout Catholic Social Teaching from the late 19th century to the present. Here are but two examples, from Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II.

First, from Pius XII:

Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father's low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children. (Quadragesimo Anno, 71)

Then John Paul II:

[T]he true advancement of women requires that clear recognition be given to the value of their maternal and family role, by comparison with all other public roles and all other professions. … Therefore the Church can and should help modern society by tirelessly insisting that the work of women in the home be recognized and respected by all in its irreplaceable value. (Familiaris Consortio, 23)

Such sentiments are echoed in the Reformed tradition, especially the great Neo-Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck who, alongside Abraham Kuyper, sought to help Reformed Christianity address such modern social problems. In Bavinck’s The Christian Family he argues that mothers center their world in the home and “the family is the focal point of her labor”--this is where her primary “vocation” lies. For the most part, mothers desire to raise the children they have birthed, argues Bavinck. This is because this is built into the female constitution. Bavinck explains that modern society obscures this reality, but he believes that no matter how society develops, it is good to support mothers in devoting their primary energy to raising their children. 

These teachings beckon a maternalist agenda, which will entail confronting the economic and ideological forces that push all adults, regardless of sex, into the same labor conditions. Even state-sponsored day-care is insufficient here, since it, as Tim Carney has recently argued in Family Unfriendly, “subsidizes work” rather than supporting family care. Such a solution, Lasch explains, continues to prop up the two-income norm that discriminates against parents who seek to take a more active role in raising their children, not to mention the contribution this makes to spiraling costs for housing, education, etc. The maternalist reformers of the early twentieth century had it right: family wages that favored fathers, mother’s pensions for those without spousal support, and policies that privileged the stability of the household over the relentless demands of the marketplace. The goal of such policies was to prevent mothers from being pushed into paid labor and separated from their children. Though I am not arguing that all women should stay in the home, I do dream of a culture and economy that does not pressure mothers of young children into the out-of-home workplace. John Paul II was of the same mind:

It will redound to the credit of society to make it possible for a mother-without inhibiting her freedom, without psychological or practical discrimination, and without penalizing her as compared with other women-to devote herself to taking care of her children and educating them in accordance with their needs, which vary with age. Having to abandon these tasks in order to take up paid work outside the home is wrong from the point of view of the good of society and of the family when it contradicts or hinders these primary goals of the mission of a mother. … The true advancement of women requires that labour should be structured in such a way that women do not have to pay for their advancement by abandoning what is specific to them and at the expense of the family, in which women as mothers have an irreplaceable role. (Laborem Exercens, 19)

Again:

While it must be recognized that women have the same right as men to perform various public functions, society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers are not in practice compelled to work outside the home, and that their families can live and prosper in a dignified way even when they themselves devote their full time to their own family. Furthermore, the mentality which honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the family must be overcome. This requires that men should truly esteem and love women with total respect for their personal dignity, and that society should create and develop conditions favoring work in the home. (Familiaris Consortio, 23)

Resistance to such proposals is partly ideological. But Illich flags another ground of opposition: Any countering of the industrial forces that erase gender will require economic shrinkage. (A full discussion of this effect would need to account for a new and lucrative category of technological development: medical interventions to change one’s sex). Illich even argues that “[n]egative growth is necessary.” I will leave it for economists to debate that point, and whether it remains as true in today’s digitized economy as in Illich’s time. I would like to conclude with a challenge: Suppose the economy would be less productive, and our societies less prosperous in monetary terms, as the price of our regaining harmony between men and women. Would it be worth it? Economic growth for its own sake and at all costs is inhuman. It is the logic of cancer, not of a healthy human society.

Illich offers evangelicals a powerful set of conceptual tools for defending sex difference against market-driven androgyny. Though certain points require updating or correction, his fundamental argument is essential. Gender is not an arbitrary social construct, nor a uniform prescription; it is a reality-based distinction that shapes human society in myriad ways, even as society shapes it, for good and ill. If the left has abandoned Illich, so be it. It’s time for conservatives, especially evangelicals, to reclaim and refine his insights for our time. We can deploy them against the logic of industrial modernity, which continues to erase gender and enlist us all in the battle of the sexes—a losing battle for both sides.