Engendered Efficiency Definition: The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland

This will be my 2nd post in these two days. As productive as it might be, I hope that this will last longer, if not forever, (finger crossed!). Actually, what I will share is not what I read today. It was a piece that I read yesterday. In the coming days, I will also be situated with books in my bag and will have no option but to read them. So, I will have more to share.

I will share Irene van Staveren's text, which is also taken from toward a feminist philosophy of economics. Van Staveren is also a famous scholar within feminist school of thought. The title of the text is "Charlotte Perkins Gilman on efficiency". In this piece, van Staveren introduces Charlotte Perkins Gilman and elaborates Gilman's works in the feminist-contextualized argument. As an American writer, Gilman has written various kind of articles, books and novels. She is also particularly known for her feminist fiction, in which she implicitly challenges the embedded patriarchal values in American society. Van Staveren examines two fictions written by Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland, and connects it to mainstream definition of efficiency.

Neoclassical reference for efficiency definition lies on the theory developed by Vilfredo Pareto, so-called Pareto efficiency. The basic interpretation of efficiency according to Pareto is if allocation makes someone better off without making the other worse off. According to feminist theorists, this explication is gender bias. Among others are: firstly, unpaid production (which is largely done by women) is not taken into account in the allocation calculation, which ironically shows the waste of human resources; secondly, the interpretation is established based on male stereotype of independent agents, who is perceived as selfish and do not care of others' wellbeing as long as it does not affect them.

Now here comes the two Gilman's fictions. The first one, The Yellow Wallpaper, tells a story of a young couple with a baby renting a house during the summer holidays. The story introduces the wife, who suffers from depression, and the husband, who is a physician. The husband advises his wife to take rest cure and hires a nurse for the baby.  Unfortunately, the rest cure does not help the depressive wife. Instead of doing nothing, she actually wants to do something outside the house. Gilman impresses the reader that keeping the woman inside the house is actually not helping her, instead, making her suffer more. This is the thing that is not understood by the husband. In this way, Gilman attempts to show that not only do women lack of humanness by being excluded from the labour market (shown by the even more depressive the woman is), but also men lack of humanness by being excluded from caring in the home (shown by the rest cure advise of the husband to his wife, despite the fact that he is physician). The story ends with the woman's cruel fate, which begins with her vision at night in the pattern of wallpaper, in which a female figure tries to get out. For van Staveren, the story is a metaphor that shows two things. First, gender division of labour leads to waste of human resources in the labour markte and in the household production. Second, such gender division of labour brings abour adverse effect to women's self realization. According to van Steveren, The Yellow Wallpaper portrays that efficiency (as defined by Pareto) is not a morally neutral concept, that is, a concept that does not only lead to sub-optiman level of production due to waste of human resources, but also loss of humanness.

The second fiction, Herland, illustrates different life for women, an imagined country without men. The story tells three American men discover a country where only women live. Expecting that the country will be undeveloped, the men are surprised to find how highly developed the country is. What is even to their surprise is that competition as well as market does not take in the country. The men are very curious how the country could function without such things. I will below quote the interesting conversations between these men and women of Herland regarding competition:

"No, indeed!" he said hastily. "No one, I mean, man or woman, would work without incentive. Competition is the - the motor power, you see."
"It is not with us," they explained gently, "so it is hard for us to understand. Do you mean, for instance, that with you no mother would work for her children without the stimulus of competition?"

Unlike men's world, marked by work/leisure trade-off, Herland's economy is not constructed as a dichotomy between market and home, but as a well-functioning arrangement of community production. In Herland, there is no individual household production and, therefore, the Herlanders always think in terms of their community and carry out production cooperatively, in which each group of women conduct specialized tasks. The story demonstrates how nonmarket production can be efficient when it is carried out outside individual households and without the separation of gender division of labour between household and market production. In sum, the community-based cooperative production, specialized labor and intrinsically motivated workers, make the trade-off between efficiency of market production and inefficiency of home production become obsolete.