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MORAL CLAIMS IN THE
AGE OF SPECTACLES
Shaping the Social Imaginary

BRIAN M. LOWE
Moral Claims in the Age of Spectacles
 Brian M. Lowe

Moral Claims
in the Age of
Spectacles
Shaping the Social Imaginary
Brian M. Lowe
Sociology
SUNY College at Oneonta
Oneonta, New York, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-50240-7    ISBN 978-1-137-50241-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50241-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944717

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher
remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional
affiliations.

Cover illustration: © CSA Images / GettyImages

Cover design by Henry Petrides

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
For Ethan
 Acknowledgments

This is a book about intersections between mediated representations and

their production, dissemination and evolution, social scientific under-
standings of morality, social and political problems associated with differ-
ing and often conflicting forms of moral understandings, and the
discernable social and political ramifications of these interactions. Despite
the fact that the research trajectory on which this book is based doesn’t fall
gently into one or more easily recognizable academic categories, I was
very lucky to find a number of interested and supportive friends and col-
leagues who helped me as I endeavored to tease out how these different
parts fit together.
This project was buoyed by a number of thoughtful and generous indi-
viduals. A significant inspiration for this project was Stephen Duncombe’s
wonderful book Dream: Re-Imagining Politics in an Age of Fantasy
(2007). I was so taken by its thesis—that many of the aspects of popular
culture often derided for being distractions from “real” concerns could
become vehicles for addressing them—that I constructed an undergradu-
ate course examining how “spectacle” could both pacify and provoke. I
was greatly heartened when I reached out to him about my research and
found him to be very supportive and encouraging. I remain thankful for
his kind attention. I am also very grateful that my friend and colleague
Doug Marshall was willing to discuss spectacle and propaganda with me,
and was kind enough to invite me to share some of these ideas with his
students and colleagues at the University of South Alabama.
I have also been very fortunate to have colleagues from different aca-
demic fields assist me in developing some of the ideas presented here. In

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

terms of social scientific understandings of morality, I am grateful for the

commentary and insights I received from Steven Hitlin, Stephen Vaisey,
Jonathan Haidt and Dustin Eirdosh. I have also had engaging conversa-
tions about spectacles and how to study them at a number of academic
conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Sociological
Association and the Eastern Sociological Society. My colleague Richard
Barberio helped me formulate some of these ideas through our joint proj-
ect on “branding” that took us to the annual meetings of the American
Political Science Association and the Northeast Political Science
Association. Some of these ideas in earlier incarnations also received cri-
tique and exposure when appearing in edited volumes, including
Experiencing Animal Minds (2012) (edited by Julie A. Smith and Robert
W. Mitchell) and Animals and War (2013) (edited by Ryan Hediger) and
in the Albany Government Law Review (2016).
At my own institution, SUNY College at Oneonta, I have been very
fortunate to have a number of friends and colleagues help me think
through some of the ideas presented here. In particular, my conversations
with Jim Greenberg about technology, “Big Data” and other manifesta-
tions of a society increasingly dominated by information technology have
been invaluable. The references here to the 1985 film Back to the Future
are entirely due to him. Jim and I were part of a “Big Data” team that
furthered my appreciation of how representations in social media can have
actual consequences, even if these representations and communications
only exist in a virtual context. I also greatly benefitted from discussions
with my friends and colleagues Alexander Thomas and Gregory Fulkerson
about “rural representations” and how contemporary understandings of
rural life in America have been severely impacted by depictions of the rural
in film and television. Similar conversations with Daniel Payne and Kathryn
Finin also encouraged me to contemplate the interactions between literary
depictions of dystopia and contemporary anxieties. I am grateful for other
opportunities at SUNY Oneonta, including the Siegfried and Alden
Lecture series, which allowed me to discuss these ideas, and for colleagues
such as Eileen McClafferty, JoAnne Murphy, Marilyn Babcock, Bill
Wilkerson and Chilton Reynolds who expressed interest in these ideas and
this manuscript as it took shape.
At Palgrave, I must thank several individuals who helped this project to
fruition. I am grateful that Burke Gerstenschlager initially contacted me at
a meeting of the American Sociological Association and subsequently
aided me in nurturing a book prospectus. Lani Oshima also assisted in the
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
   ix

development of this project (including an unexpected detour to “Pork

World”). Mireille Yanow, Alexis Nelson and Kyra Saniewski also helped
me push forward on this project, and I am grateful for their kind attention
and efforts on my behalf.
Most importantly, I must thank my family for enduring talk of spectacles
and spectacular events without complaining—justly—that their rights to
avoid cruel and unusual conversations were being violated. In particular,
my lovely wife Elaine has endured a sporadic migration of books and films
related to spectacular morality into our home with (mostly) good humor
and understanding. As this book outlines a form of developing moral
understanding that has recently become dominant in the United States—
for better and for worse—I dedicate this book to my son Ethan, who must
live in this unfolding reality. While there is much within the spectacular to
raise anxiety, if there are some like Ethan within it as well, I will have hope
that the spectacular will be bent to noble purposes.
 Contents

1 Emergence of Spectacles  1

2 Spectacular Theory 29

3 Building Spectacles Through Bricolage 71

4 Spectacles of Power and the Power of Spectacles113

5 Spectacular Locations145

6 Spectacular Representations185

7 Spectacular Animals227

8 Conclusion265

9 Coda: The Election of Donald J. Trump as Spectacle285

Bibliography 303

Index317

xi
 Introduction

This Project Began with Superman

In May 1995, American actor Christopher Reeve—best known for playing
the title role in Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman—was severely
injured in an equestrian accident in Culpeper, Virginia. He was subse-
quently airlifted via “Pegasus” to the University of Virginia Hospital, where
he was operated on by neurosurgeon Dr. John Jane. Reeve convalesced at
the University of Virginia, and began fundraising and advocating for
research around spinal cord injury and paralysis, the consequence of his
accident that had left him a quadriplegic. In the months and years follow-
ing, Reeve would raise millions of dollars for spinal cord injury research and
facilitate collaborations with existing organizations, including the Paralyzed
Veterans of America and the Rick Hansen Foundation. These efforts would
ultimately outlive both Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana in the form of
the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. I know some of this because I
was an indirect observer through my wife Elaine, who became involved in
organizing a conference for scientists studying spinal cord injuries and neu-
rological regeneration while working in the Neuroscience Department at
the University of Virginia. Through her descriptions and news reports
about the conference, it became evident that “star power” was real: together
with Reeve, these groups generated donations and public attention far
beyond the levels they had prior to Reeve joining them. Beyond finding all
of this exciting, I also found it somewhat perplexing. As a Sociology gradu-
ate student studying social movements, it was not easy to explain the
“added value” that Reeve brought. His presence and efforts seemed to

xiii
xiv Introduction

accelerate the rate of funding for research that could lead to treatments for
paralysis. Existing theories, such as Resource Mobilization and Frame
Analysis, did not adequately account for the role of prominent people in
enhancing a movement—especially when the person was not prominent in
terms of scientific research. Moreover, how did Reeve’s public appearances
serve to elevate the cause of finding a treatment for paralysis into “the right
thing to do”—a moral cause?
In 1996, Reeve delivered a speech at the 68th Academy Awards cere-
mony that seemed to capture something of this capacity for “star power”
not simply to direct attention, but to make a compelling moral case, as
described by Andre Soares:

Reeve then briefly spoke about “the power of film to present painful but
important issues to the public,” remembering how impressed he had been
with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which got him thinking about “the
madness of nuclear destruction,” and with Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant
Ones, which “taught us about race relations.”
He also praised “motion pictures that have courageously put social
issues ahead of box office success,” naming more recent titles such as Oliver
Stone’s Platoon, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, and George Miller’s
Lorenzo’s Oil. “They’ve enlightened us, they’ve challenged us, and they’ve
given us the opportunity to learn.”
Following a montage that included several Movies with a Message, among
them John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of
the Night, Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, and
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Reeve added: “Hollywood needs to do
more. Let’s continue to take risks. Let’s tackle the issues. In many ways our
film community can do it better than anyone else. There is no challenge,
artistic or otherwise, that we can’t meet. (“Christopher Reeve ‘Superman’
Movies and Surprise Oscar Ceremony Speech’ by Andre Soares, Alt Film
Guide, http://www.altfg.com/film/christopher-reeve-superman/)

Reeve was identifying what psychologist Paul Rozin (1997) termed mor-
alization: the capacity for something to become imbued with moral sig-
nificance. In Reeve’s case, he was arguing that film, like other art forms,
could not only focus attention on “the issues” but infuse those issues with
moral significance. Scholars of social movements, such as Charles Tilly and
James M. Jasper, have argued that social movements have been making
moralization efforts for centuries, including attempting to transform the
moral standing of practices such as slavery, the legal standing and treatment
 Introduction 
   xv

of women, the place of alcohol and related phenomena (especially drunk

driving), and more recently the treatment of nonhuman animals and the
environment. Reeve’s efforts to promote fruitful research into spinal cord
injuries and treatments was an effort to both raise funds and demonstrate
the significance of spinal cord injury research. As with any organization
that receives donations, there must always be an effort to keep the issue or
concern in the forefront of the public consciousness, lest it be eclipsed by
other issues. One way to do this is through moralization: if finding a cure
for paralysis, or ending the suffering of captive orcas, or ending unwar-
ranted police violence, holds moral significance and is therefore “the right
thing to do,” then much of the goal of remaining prominent in the pub-
lic’s attention is achieved. But what about the implication of Reeve’s asser-
tion that movies—and by extension television and other forms of popular
cultural expression—could bring moral attention to “the issues”?
Some social scientists have categorized the influence of mediated popu-
lar culture on the wider society as “spectacle.” While the term spectacle
itself dates back to the Middle Ages, what could be regarded as spectacles
have existed for centuries: from the gladiatorial games of the Roman
Empire, to the coronation of monarchs, to religious processions and pub-
lic feast days. All of these historical cases exemplify powerful elites attempt-
ing to use spectacle in order to reinforce their legitimacy. In modernity,
the discussion of spectacle arguably begins with the work of Guy Debord
in The Society of the Spectacle (1995) and Comments on The Society of the
Spectacle (2002). In brief, Debord expressed concern that modern societ-
ies were becoming dominated by “spectacles” that encouraged us to act
like passive observers and not engage in efforts to alter society, instead
lulled into complacency through “the permanent opium war” that was
being waged on our perceptions. For this reason Debord and other
Situationists (scholars with deep Marxist roots) attempted to disrupt spec-
tacles such as films by adding nonsensical sounds or dialogue, so that audi-
ences would be forced to recognize that the film was only a film and not
to be mistaken for reality. Debord was not alone in recognizing the poten-
tial for celebrity status to alter society’s perceptions of those who were
primarily “famous for being famous.” Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 The Image
anticipates the capacity for mediated images of persons and events to tran-
scend what otherwise would have been recognized as significant. Boorstin
identified “pseudo-events” as those that are self-referential (such as the
opening of a casino) rather than signifying something beyond the event
(such as recognizing the passage of legislation and the potential conse-
quences of that act).
xvi Introduction

The trajectory of Debord’s work was amplified by French sociologist

Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1994). In this work,
Baudrillard argues that we are increasingly “seduced” by the simulacra and
simulations created through mass media, preferring the “hyperreality” of
these images and representations to less attractive and more nuanced real-
ity. This thesis was popularized in The Matrix (1999), a film written and
directed by the Wachowski brothers, who required that the film cast read
Simulacra and Simulation. (The book itself makes a brief appearance early
in the film, both to show audiences the title and to demonstrate the cam-
ouflaging nature of simulations: the book has been hollowed out in order
to store illicit software.) The film (the first in a popular trilogy) is about
simulation and hyperreality: the main character, Thomas Anderson (played
by Keanu Reeves), appears to be a software engineer living in an unnamed
city (although all the streets and intersections named in The Matrix are in
Chicago) whose alternate identity is the hacker “Neo”. The film follows
“Neo” as he discovers that his entire existence has actually been within a
computer-generated simulation intended to keep him, and the rest of
humanity, as passive sources of energy for sentient machines that now
dominate Earth following a cataclysmic war. “Neo” is liberated by a small
group of free humans who fight the machines both in the ugly, dirty and
very dangerous Earth of the future and by slipping back into “the
matrix”—the simulated world of the late twentieth century—in order to
disrupt the machines and to try to rescue other humans who have pene-
trated the simulation. The analogy is clear: the computer simulation holds
humanity captive partly because it is simply more appealing than the dirty,
corroded reality that we see on the Nebuchadnezzar, the craft that “Neo”
is taken to after his rescue. (The illusion is so gripping that Cypher, another
crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar, betrays his companions in exchange
for the promise of being returned to the Matrix, so that he can live a life
of illusory luxury.)
In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
(2009), Chris Hedges takes the case against spectacle even further, argu-
ing that spectacle has discouraged literacy and critical thought, leaving the
United States beset with distractions that conceal the growing injustices in
the country and images that promote continuous consumption and the
acquisition of wealth. A similar argument is made in Democracy Incorporated
(2008), in which Wolin proposes the existence of “inverted totalitarian-
ism.” The authoritarian totalitarianism of the twentieth century—such as
the fascist “cults of personality” around Hitler and Mussolini—have been
 Introduction 
   xvii

supplanted by a spectacle that conceals the persons who actually wield

power, making the current spectacle look all the more inevitable. More
recently, in Notes on the Death of Culture (2015), Mario Vargas Llosa
argues that we have entered the “Civilization of the Spectacle”: “What do
we mean by civilization of the spectacle? The civilization of a world in
which pride of place, in terms of a scale of values, is given to entertain-
ment, and where having a good time, escaping boredom, is the universal
passion” (Llosa 2015: 23–24). While not as apocalyptic as Hedges, Llosa
follows a familiar trajectory: contemporary culture has become dominated
by the frivolous and the distracting, leaving us increasingly unable to grap-
ple with serious and weighty issues. These thinkers would all seem to chal-
lenge Reeves in his hope that popular culture could be harnessed for loftier
purposes.
A somewhat different perspective comes from the works of Murray
Edelman and Douglas Kellner. In Constructing the Political Spectacle
(1988), Edelman suggests that most spectacles generate political quies-
cence and are created by elites for that purpose. However, occasionally the
spectacle fails, leaving room for defiance: the prisoner in court looks too
dignified to be guilty, or the political newcomer seizes the agenda. Similarly
ambivalent, Douglas Kellner in Media Spectacle (2003) recognizes mass
media’s ability to distract—and potentially how that distraction can serve
as a vehicle for more subversive narratives. For example, the (first) trial of
O.J. Simpson in 1995 received more minutes of television coverage on the
main American television networks than did the siege of Sarajevo in the
collapsing Yugoslavia. Clearly, the siege and killings that would later be
known as “ethnic cleansing” were infinitely more important than one
murder trial of a former professional football player turned actor. However,
Kellner argues that the trials also served as a vehicle for introducing con-
versations about the role of money in the criminal justice system: could a
middle-class man be acquitted with the physical evidence arrayed against
him, as it was in the case of Simpson? Similarly, a nationwide discussion of
domestic violence emerged from the case as well, emphasizing the often
ignored reality that most murdered women die at the hands of their inti-
mates. Neither Edelman nor Kellner are celebrating spectacle, but they
recognize that, sometimes, it can be bent to serve purposes other than
those of its creators.
The most optimistic vision of spectacle appears in Stephen Duncombe’s
Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (2007).
Duncombe’s argument is that, rather than fearing or loathing the spectacle,
xviii Introduction

political progressives should embrace it. Duncombe contends that progres-

sives harbor an imagined history (more about the social imaginary and ima-
ginal in Chap. 2) about the supposed antithesis of the spectacle, empiricism:
“Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are
based in a fantasy of the past, or rather past fantasy” (Duncombe 2007: 5).
This fantasy is of a golden age of reasoned empiricism during which argu-
ments rose and fell solely based on the power of the evidence marshaled to
defend them. Instead, Duncombe argues that we should acknowledge how
narratives and spectacles have driven compelling arguments in the past, and
will continue to do so in the future: “Spectacle is our way of making sense
of the world. Truth and power belong to those who tell the better story”
(Duncombe 2007: 8). Rather than bemoan the fact that Western societies
are saturated with spectacles, progressives should embrace and attempt to
deploy them to make evidence more compelling and empirically based nar-
ratives more tangible. Duncombe would support Reeve’s exhortation to
use film and popular cultural narratives to push social and political change—
what Duncombe calls “ethical spectacles” (Duncombe 2007: 17).

Case Study: Entertainment and Politics Merge

One of the difficulties in studying spectacles in contemporary Western
societies is appreciating how they have become comparatively so ubiqui-
tous, even since Debord considered The Society of the Spectacle in 1967.
The blending of fictional narratives, compelling images and evidence
becomes difficult to contemplate, especially when they seem to violate
previous divisions between (for example) “hard” and “soft” news. In the
spirit of spectacle, perhaps it’s easier to begin with, appropriately, a scene
from a movie:

Doc: So tell me, future boy, who’s President of the United States in
1985?
Marty: Ronald Reagan.
Doc: Ronald Reagan, the actor? Then who’s vice president, Jerry
Lewis? I suppose Jane Wymann is the first lady … I got enough
practical jokes for one evening. Good night, future boy.

This incredulous exchange is from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film Back to

the Future, during a scene in which Marty McFly (played by Michael
J. Fox) attempts to convince “Doc” Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd)
 Introduction 
   xix

that he has just time traveled into 1955 in a DeLorean-encased time

machine that Brown will build and test in 1985. Brown’s initial skepti-
cism, apparently propelled more by the thought that an actor could
become president than the possibility of time travel, is dispelled when
Marty shows him the DeLorean time machine and a videotape of Doc and
Marty on the night of Marty’s departure. Viewing the tape, Doc holds the
video camera and exclaims, “This is truly amazing, a portable television
studio. No wonder your president has to be an actor, he’s gotta look good
on television.”
Unlike the “Doc” Brown of 1955, twenty-first-century Americans are
comparatively blasé about the entanglements between film and television
actors and politics. John McTiernan’s 1987 Predator featured two actors
who would become governors: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of
California from 2003 to 2011) and Jesse Ventura (Governor of Minnesota
from 1999 to 2003). Saturday Night Live alumnus Al Franken won a con-
tentious election in 2008 for the United States Senate and was re-elected
in 2014. Beyond actors holding elected offices, the connections between
prominent figures in the mediated performing arts (film, television and
music) and public perceptions of social and political problems has expanded
dramatically since the American actor Danny Kaye became the first celeb-
rity Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations in 1954. For example,
the June 2014 summit against wartime rape that was attended by represen-
tatives from 117 countries was co-hosted by British Foreign Secretary
William Hague and American film actress Angelina Jolie (“Angelina Jolie
and William Hague launch fight against wartime rape,” Barney Henderson,
The Guardian, June 10, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/10889171/Angelina-Jolie-and-William-Hague-launch-fight-
against-­­wartime-rape.html). The creation of the Satellite Sentinel Project
in 2010 by activist John Prendergast and American film and television
actor and director George Clooney has provided satellite imagery of the
Darfur region in South Sudan in the hopes of documenting, and ideally
deterring, alleged human rights violations and genocide in that area. These
efforts have included generating media coverage of the conflicts in South
Sudan, including a February 2015 New York Times op-ed (“George
Clooney on Sudan’s Rape of Darfur,” by George Clooney, John Prendergast
and Akshaya Kumar, The New York Times, February 26, 2015, A27).
Such entanglements are not limited to politics. Transcending the bound-
aries between mediated personas and collective action, the 2014 ALS
Association “Ice-Bucket Challenge”—in which participants poured ice
xx Introduction

water over themselves to simulate the sensations of amyotrophic lateral

sclerosis (ALS), recording the event and disseminating the video on social
media—raised an estimated US$114 million in 2014 for the ALS Association
to fund research for a disease better known for one of its early victims,
New York Yankee Hall of Fame baseball player Lou Gehrig (http://www.
alsa.org/). This campaign was unexpectedly successful, perhaps because it
created an empathetic and sensory experience for both audiences and par-
ticipants for what those afflicted with ALS actually experience.
This Introduction was written in the wake of one of the most compel-
ling examples of spectacle to date: the election of Donald. J. Trump as
President of the United States. Trump began his improbable campaign as
a Republican candidate with no formal political experience, but with a
great deal of notoriety based on his well-positioned presence for decades
in popular culture through television programs, books, tabloid newspapers
and films. Outside of business media, Trump was a recurrent figure in film
and television (credited by IMDb with nineteen appearances as an “actor”
in film and television), notwithstanding his involvement in both The
Apprentice (which began airing in 2004) and Celebrity Apprentice (which
first aired in 2010). Trump also harnessed printed media, publishing eight
books between 1987 and 2011 (notably, all of them about his business
experience or his political beliefs). Additionally, Trump has religiously
attached his surname to luxury apartment buildings, casinos, golf courses
and resorts, as well as a myriad of products including (labeled) clothing
and even (briefly) steaks and wine. Trump even attempted to create a so-
called “Trump University” that lacked a physical campus (and became the
subject of a 25 million dollar (U.S.) lawsuit that Trump settled with the
Attorney General of New York State). Beyond these physical and mediated
manifestations of Trump, he has been a voracious Twitter user, acquiring
an estimated nearly 14 million followers by Election Day 2016 (https://
twitter.com/realdonaldtrump?lang=en). (His opponent, former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, had nearly 11 million Twitter followers by
Election Day 2016, having joined Twitter in April 2013) (https://twitter.
com/HillaryClinton)). Despite campaigning against sixteen other
Republican presidential aspirants, by May 2016 only Trump remained.
This was despite the fact that the Republican Party machinery attempted
to deflect his rise throughout the primaries. Contrary to long-held Political
Science orthodoxies, such as those posed in The Party Decides (2008)
(stating that political party insiders maintain significant, if concealed, influ-
ence over the selection of party nominees), Trump seized the Republican
 Introduction 
   xxi

Party nomination. After a contentious primary against Senator Bernie

Sanders of Vermont, Secretary Clinton had the support of the Democratic
Party, but that advantage did not overwhelm Trump’s deployment of
spectacle. Even public events with the musical power couple Beyoncé and
Jay Z could not produce the voter turnout that Clinton needed to win the
Electoral College (although Clinton did win the popular vote.) In sum,
Trump’s cultivated persona resonated within mediated spectacles to such
a degree that he overcame Republican resistance and a concerted effort by
the Democratic Party to win the 2016 presidential campaign.
This book is not strictly about political spectacles, but it does consider
how spectacles infused with moral perceptions and emotions can produce
political outcomes—whether it is Trump’s appearances in popular culture
that serve to make him a viable candidate, or appeals from celebrities that
are embraced by political leaders, such as in 2014 when United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon designated American actor Leonardo
DiCaprio as a United Nations Messenger of Peace (specifically related to
Climate Change) (http://www.un.org/climatechange/summit/2014/09/
secretary-general-designates-leonardo-di-caprio-un-messenger-peace/).
This book suggests, in fact, that the line between mediated representations
and political outcomes is thin and permeable. For example, programs such
as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report entertained
audiences with often biting satire that required a level of political knowl-
edge in order to understand the jokes. Both programs were awarded
Emmys as well as Peabody Awards—the latter typically reserved for jour-
nalists. The Colbert Report won two Peabodys for revealing the arguably
ridiculous nature of Super PACs. While the subject matter included both
politics and entertainment, both programs also expressed a significant
amount of moral indignation, such as when Colbert compared the struc-
ture of Super PACs to money-laundering with his guest, former Federal
Election Commission Chair Trevor Potter, who did not disagree with the
analogy. Just as Reeve had intended for the film, in this case politically
informed comedy addressed and explained a complex, confusing and
potentially massively boring subject and made it funny.

Historical Precedents
One of the central themes of this project is the emergence of what I call
“spectacular morality.” While it is especially palpable today, like most socio-
logical processes it has historical precedents and antecedents. As the means
xxii Introduction

of cultural and artistic production become less attached to oligopolistic and

powerful economic actors (through the capacity to express ideas in writing,
film and most recently video without necessarily requiring a patron or a
venue for the dissemination of these mediated representations) the forms of
spectacular morality increase. These relationships are often complex and
difficult to discern as popular cultural expressions or as the promotion of
moral or ethical ideals. For example, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of
the Hollywood Ten, who was blacklisted for both his supposed Communist
relationships and his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American
Activities Committee, expressed some of his political and social views
through his screenplays for films such as Spartacus. However, as Ceplair
and Trumbo (2015) argue, “Trumbo was, at heart, a political person who
also happened to write movie scripts” (Ceplair and Trumbo 2015: 6). In a
similar vein, Lichter, Baumgartner and Morris (2015) observe that
American politics has been influenced by political comedy that sometimes
brings discernable political action, as in the case of The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart and its scathing attacks on Congress for allowing funding for the
medical benefits of 9/11 responders to end. The Daily Show repeatedly
emphasized that the first responders who selflessly worked in the ruins of
the Twin Towers subsequently came to suffer a myriad of health problems
due to their exposure to the toxic mixture of combustible materials at the
site of the attacks. The Daily Show deliberately shamed Congress into action,
partly through bringing some of the responders onto the program in a
spectacular effort to make their suffering tangible. As Darren Samuelsohn
of Politico reported in 2015, the actions of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show
have been credited with restoring such funding for first responders:

For his final show of 2010, Stewart criticized the Senate Republicans fili-
bustering a bill to set up the health program for the 9/11 first responders
and survivors and who began experiencing a range of medical problems,
from cancer to lung disease and post-traumatic stress disorder. Four of those
post-9/11 workers suffering from serious illnesses were guests on the show.
Many advocates still credit Stewart with making the whole thing happen.
After the segment aired, the Senate in the closing hours of its 2010 lame
duck session ultimately approved a compromise five-year, $4.2 billion bill by
a unanimous voice vote. House Democratic leaders about to relinquish their
majority with the next Congress had to summon a couple of lawmakers back
to Washington for the vote on final passage, which came about a week after
Stewart’s segment aired.
“We call him the Christmas miracle of 2010,” said Scott Chernoff, a retired
officer from the New York Police Department who was at the World Trade
 Introduction 
   xxiii

Center site on Sept. 11 and then spent about 300 hours working security at
Ground Zero in its aftermath. (“Jon Stewart’s Next Act: Lobbyist?” by Darren
Samuelsohn, Politico, July 31, 2015, http://www.politico.com/agenda/
story/2015/07/jon-stewarts-next-act-lobbyist-000179#ixzz3uQEU5csz)

Empathy and moral outrage, coupled with comedy, on a cable television

show helped sway Congress when traditional lobbying apparently failed.
These cases point to the existence of spectacular morality: how medi-
ated representations can communicate moral claims, understandings and
emotions such as empathy and outrage. Another theme of this book is
what Rubin (2015) termed the “co-causal” relationship between specta-
cles and the potential for some kind of moralization in the wider society.
Rubin uses the concept of co-causality to examine the relationships
between form of government and morality. He posits that following the
“fall” of Rome until the year 1000, most of Western Europe was domi-
nated by “the morality of honor” in which one’s reputation (especially
for elite adult males) was tied to one’s prowess in battle and loyalty to
superiors—which was commensurate with the highly localized fiefdoms
and social networks of that time. Similarly, the morality of higher pur-
poses—with both the religious connotation of serving God and later
serving the realm through one’s monarch—emerged alongside central-
ized nation-­­states with public property. Rubin contends that a new form
of morality—self-fulfillment—has emerged alongside the growth of gov-
ernment and the expansion of individual rights. One question that this
project hopes to illuminate is: what are the relationships between certain
social formations and certain kinds of spectacles? In contemporary
Western societies, where any laptop can serve as a venue for viewing a
video and increasingly for producing one, will we still see the fragmenta-
tion predicted by postmodernists as it becomes increasingly easy for indi-
viduals to form groups based on their “spectacular preferences,” regardless
of geographic location? Or will spectacles come to serve unifying pur-
poses, as in 1985 when over one billion people (mostly Westerners)
watched the televised broadcast of “Live Aid,” an extended performance
by the most prominent and famous popular musical performers raising
money for famine relief in Ethiopia, and both contributed donations and
pressured Western governments to do the same?
Another theme of this project is the premise that spectacles, once cre-
ated, are to some degree out of the control of their creators. As this book
documents, there are many examples of spectacles having untoward or
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of
Concerning Women
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Concerning Women

Author: Suzanne La Follette

Release date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68226]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Albert & Charles Boni,

1926

Credits: MWS, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

CONCERNING WOMEN ***
 Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious typographic errors have been

corrected.

CONCERNING
WOMEN
 CONCERNING
WOMEN

by

SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE

ALBERT & CHARLES BONI

NEW YORK 1926

Copyright, 1926, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

To
Ellen Winsor
and
Rebecca Winsor Evans
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Beginnings of Emancipation 1
II Woman’s Status, Past and Present 19
III Institutional Marriage and Its Economic Aspects 56
IV Woman and Marriage 93
V The Economic Position of Women 157
VI What is to be Done 207
VII Signs of Promise 270

CONCERNING
WOMEN

Let there be, then, no coercion established in society, and the

common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper
places.
Mary Wollstonecraft.
 CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF EMANCIPATION

It will be foolish to assume that women are free, until books about
them shall have ceased to have more than an antiquarian interest.
All such books, including this one, imply by their existence that
women may be regarded as a class in society; that they have in
common certain characteristics, conditions or disabilities which,
predominating over their individual variations, warrant grouping them
on the basis of sex. No such assumption about men would be
thinkable. Certain masculine qualities, so-called, may be singled out
by amateur psychologists and opposed to certain feminine qualities,
so-called; but from books about the sphere of man, the rights of
man, the intelligence of man, the psychology of man, the soul of
man, our shelves are mercifully free. Such books may one day
appear, but when they do it will mean that society has passed from
its present state through a state of sex-equality and into a state of
female domination. In that day, in place of the edifying spectacle of
men proclaiming that woman is useful only as a bearer of children,
society may behold the equally edifying spectacle of women
proclaiming that man is useful only as a begetter of children; since it
seems to be characteristic of the dominant sex to regard the other
sex chiefly as a source of pleasure and as a means of reproduction.
It seems also to be characteristic of the dominant sex—I judge from
the world’s experience during the domination of men—to regard itself
as humanity, and the other sex as a class of somewhat lower beings
created by Providence for its convenience and enjoyment; just as it
is characteristic of a dominant class, such as an aristocracy, to
regard the lower classes as being created solely for the purpose of
supporting its power and doing its will. When once a social order is
well established, no matter what injustice it involves, those who
occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to believe that
it is the only possible and reasonable order, and imposing their
belief, by force if necessary, on those whom circumstances have
placed in their power. There is nothing more innately human than the
tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has
been divinely ordained.
Thus among the Hebrews the subordination of woman gave rise to
the notion that she was fashioned out of man’s rib. She was the
result of a divine afterthought, the sexus sequior of the ancients and
more recently of Schopenhauer, “inferior in every respect to the first.”
Since the Divine Artist had had good practice in creating Adam, it
might logically have been expected that His second sex would turn
out even better than His first; we must therefore lay His failure to the
somewhat sketchy nature of the materials He chose to work with.
This Hebrew myth of the creation of woman has had considerable
effect on her status in the era known as Christian. Being “only a
supernumerary bone,” as Bossuet reminded her, she could naturally
not aspire to a position of equality with man. She must remember her
origin, and be humble and subservient as befitted a mere rib.
She was humble and subservient, as a matter of fact, for an
incredibly long time; so long that there exists a general suspicion
even at the present day that there is something in her nature which
makes her want to be subject to man and to live as it were at second
hand. This thought would be even more alarming than it is, perhaps,
if it were not true that men themselves have stood for a good deal of
subjection during the world’s known history. Chattel slavery and
serfdom were abolished from the civilized world only at about the
time that the subjection of women began to be modified; and men
still endure, not only with resignation but with positive cheerfulness,
a high degree of industrial and political slavery. The man who is
entirely dependent for his livelihood upon the will of an employer is
an industrial slave, and the man who may be drafted into an army
and made to fight and perhaps die for a cause in which he can have
no possible interest is the slave of the State; yet one can not see that
this proves Aristotle’s assumption that there are free natures and
slave natures, any more than the subjection of women proves that
they want to be subjected. What the slavery of men, as of women,
implies is the existence of an economic and social order that is
inimical to their interests as human beings; and it implies nothing
more than this.
Nor does the opposition to the emancipation of women which still
finds expression in this country and in Europe, prove anything more
than that superstitious addiction to custom of which I have already
spoken. Those anxious critics who protest that women have got
more freedom than is good for Society make the mistake of
supposing that Society can exist only if its organization remains
unchanged. The same conservatism has opposed all the
revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the social order to the
breakdown of old forms and their replacement by new ones. Yet
when the need for such adaptations ceases, the growth of the social
organism ceases with it, and we have such a spectacle of arrested
development as the civilization of India presents. Society, in so far as
it has become organic, is governed by the same rules as any other
organism: the condition of its health is growth, and growth is change.
Certainly the present tendency of woman to assume a position of
equality with man involves, and will continue even more to involve,
profound psychic and material readjustments. But to assume that
such readjustments will injure or destroy Society is to adopt toward
Society an attitude of philosophical realism, to attribute to it a
personality, to suppose that it is equally capable of destruction with
the individual, and that it may in some mystical way derive benefit
from the sacrifice of the individual’s best interests. But what is
Society save an aggregation of individuals, half male, half female?
Where you have a handful of people forming a community, there you
have Society; and if the individuals are enlightened and humane it
may be called a civilized Society, if they are ignorant and brutal it will
be uncivilized. To assume that its “interests” may be promoted by the
enslavement of one-half its members, is unreasonable. One may be
permitted the doubtful assumption that this enslavement promotes
the welfare of the other half of Society, but it is obvious that it can not
promote the welfare of the whole, unless we assume that slavery is
beneficial to the slave (the classic assumption, indeed, where the
slaves have been women). When we consider the political
organization known as the State, we have a different matter. The
State always represents the organized interest of a dominant class;
therefore the subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the
State, and their emancipation may be opposed as a danger to the
State.
It is evident from the very nature of the State[1] that its interests are
opposed to those of Society; and while the complete emancipation of
women, as I shall show later, would undoubtedly imply the
destruction of the State, since it must accrue from the emancipation
of other subject classes, their emancipation, far from destroying
Society, must be of inestimable benefit to it. Those critics, and there
are many, who argue that women must submit to restrictions upon
their freedom for the good of the State, as well as those advocates of
woman’s rights who argue that women must be emancipated for the
good of the State, simply fail to make this vital distinction between
the State and Society; and their failure to do so is one of the potent
reasons why the nonsense that has been written about women is
limited only by the literature of the subject.
Feminist and anti-feminist arguments from this standpoint centre in
the function of childbearing; therefore it should be noted that the
emphasis which is placed on this function by the interest of the State
is quite different from the emphasis that would be placed upon it by
the interest of Society; for the interest of the State is numerical, while
the interest of Society is qualitative. The State requires as many
subjects as possible, both as labour-motors and as fighters. The
interest of Society, on the other hand, is the interest of civilization: if
a community is to be wholesome and intelligent, it is necessary not
that the individuals who compose it shall be as numerous as
possible, but that they shall be as wholesome and intelligent as
possible. In general, the interest of the State is promoted by the
number of its subjects; that of Society by the quality of its members.
The interest of the State in this respect has been most concisely
expressed by Nietzsche. “Man,” said he, “shall be trained for war,
and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly”, and if
one accept his premises he is exactly right. But there have been
many writers on women who have not accepted his premises—not at
least without qualification—and who have yet failed to observe the
antithesis between the interest which the State has, and the interest
which Society has, in the question of population. Hence, mingled
with the voices of those critics who have demanded the subjection of
woman for the sake of children, have been the voices of other critics
demanding her emancipation for the sake of children: and both these
schools of critics have overlooked her claim to freedom on her own
behalf. It is for the sake of humanity, and not for the sake of children,
that women ought to have equal status with men. That children will
gain enormously by the change is true; but this is beside the issue,
which is justice.
The argument that woman must be free for the sake of the race, is
an argument of expediency; as nine-tenths of the arguments against
her legal subjection have been, and indeed had to be. Unfortunately,
humanity is likely to turn a deaf ear to the claims of justice, especially
when they conflict with established abuses, unless these claims are
backed by the claims of expediency plus a good measure of
necessity. Adventitious circumstances have made the social
recognition of woman’s claims a necessity, and their political
recognition a matter of expediency. Otherwise she would have to
wait much longer for the establishment of her rights as man’s equal
than now appears likely. In the Western world her battle is very
largely won; full equality, social, industrial and legal, seems to be
only a matter of time and tactics. This she owes to the great political
and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century.
The conscious movement towards freedom for women may be said
to have originated in the great emancipatory movement which found
expression in the American and French revolutions. The
revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they
poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old
bottle of privilege for some; and it soured. But they did succeed in
creating political forms which admitted, in theory at least, the
principle of equality. Their chief contribution to progress was that
they dramatically and powerfully impressed the idea of liberty upon
the minds of men, and thus altered the whole course of human
thought. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A Vindication of the Rights of
Women,” revolutionary though it seemed in its day, was a perfectly
natural and logical application of this idea of liberty to the situation of
her sex. This remarkable book may be said to have marked the
beginning of the conscious movement towards the emancipation of
women.
The unconscious movement was the outgrowth of the revolution in
industry, brought about by the introduction of the machine. Women
had always been industrial workers, but their work, after the break-
up of the gilds, was for the most part carried on at home. When the
factory supplanted the family as the producing unit in society, the
environment of women was altered; and the change affected not
only those women who followed industry to the factories, but also
those who remained housewives, for where these had before been
required to perform, or at least to superintend, a large amount of
productive work, they now found their function, as the family became
a consuming unit, reduced to the superintendence of expenditures
and the operation of the household machinery—a labour which was
increasingly lightened by the progress of invention. With domestic
conditions so changed, what was more natural than that the
daughters should go into the factory; or, if the family were well-to-do,
into the schools, which were forced reluctantly to open their doors to
women? And what was more natural than that women, as their
minds were developed through education, should perceive the
injustice and humiliation of their position, and organize to defend
their right to recognition as human beings? “If we dared,” says
Stendhal, “we would give girls the education of a slave.... Arm a man
and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so
perverse as to turn his arms against you as soon as he can.”
Women in the factories and shops; women in the schools—from this
it was only a moment to their invasion of the professions, and not a
very long time until they would be invading every field that had been
held the special province of men. This is the great unconscious and
unorganized woman’s movement which has aroused such fear and
resentment among people who saw it without understanding it.
The organized movement may be regarded simply as an attempt to
get this changing relation of women to their environment translated
into the kind of law that the eighteenth century had taught the world
to regard as just: law based on the theory of equal rights for all
human beings. The opposition that the movement encountered
offers ample testimony to the fact that “acceptance in principle” is
more than a mere subterfuge of diplomats and politicians. The
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resolutely clung to the theory of
equality, and as resolutely opposed its logical application. This is not
surprising; most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights,
make their own mental reservations about the proper application of
the word “human.” Women had hardly been regarded as human in
mediaeval Europe; they were considered something a little more
from the chivalrous point of view, and something a little less from the
more common, workaday standpoint. The shadow of this old
superstition still clouded the minds of men: therefore it is hardly
surprising that the egalitarians of the French Revolution excluded
women from equal political and legal rights with men; and that the
young American republic which had adopted the Declaration of
Independence, continued to sanction the slavery of negroes and the
subjection of women. How firmly rooted this superstition was, may
be seen in the following irresistibly funny excerpt from the writings of
that great American advocate of freedom, the author of the
Declaration, Thomas Jefferson.

Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants

should meet together to transact all their business, there would
yet be excluded from their deliberations (1) infants until arrived
at years of discretion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation
of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in
the public meetings of men. (3) Slaves.

Thus does superstition cast out logic. Nor does superstition die
easily. The masculine assumption, usually quite unconscious, that
women are unfit for freedom, bids fair to persevere as stubbornly as
the feminine assumption that marriage offers a legitimate and
established mode of extortion.[2]
If the conscious feminists bore the brunt of the resentment aroused
by woman’s changing relation to the world about her, it was because
their opponents did them the honour of believing that they were
responsible for the change. It was a strangely incurious attitude that
permitted such an assumption to be held; for it really takes a very
feeble exercise of intelligence to perceive that a handful of feminist
agitators could hardly coax millions of women into industry—under
conditions often extremely disadvantageous—into business, the
schools and the professions. I believe the cause of this
incuriousness lay in the very fear aroused by these changes and the
social revaluations which they implied; fear for a relation between the
sexes which, having been established for so long, seemed the only
reasonable, or indeed possible, relation. Filled as they were with this
fear of change, which is one of the strongest human emotions, the
opponents of woman’s emancipation were incapable of objectivity.
Their intellectual curiosity was paralyzed. This accounts, perhaps, for
the utterances of two such eminent philosophers as Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. They came to the subject strongly prejudiced: the
idea of any claims on behalf of women filled them with disgust;
therefore, as one may take a certain malicious pleasure in observing,
their thought on the subject was hampered by that “weakness of the
reasoning faculty” which Schopenhauer found characteristic of
women. If, when discussing woman, they had not been as “childish,
frivolous and short-sighted” as they believed women to be, they
might, along with lesser minds, have arrived at some understanding
of a subject which has always been thought much more mysterious
and baffling than it really is. The woman of their day may have been
the poor creature they pronounced her to be, but if she was, the
obvious question was, Why? Was she a poor creature by nature, or
because of centuries of adaptation to a certain kind of life? This
question neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche took the trouble to
ask. They weighed her as she was—or as they thought she was—
and arrived at the sage conclusion that the West had much to learn
from the Orient concerning the proper attitude toward her.

It would be a very desirable thing [says Schopenhauer] if this

Number Two of the human race were in Europe also relegated
 to their natural place [which he conceives to be the harem of a
polygamous household] and an end put to this lady-nuisance,
which not only moves all Asia to laughter but would have been
ridiculed by Greece and Rome as well.

Nietzsche, in the same vein, remarks that

a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has

also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and
harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of
woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a
possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for
service and accomplishing her mission therein.

Such a view of the “weaker sex” of course proves nothing about

women, but it proves a good deal about the effect that their
subjection has had on the minds of men. It is a significant fact that
both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were Germans, and that in their
day the status of women was lower in Germany than in any other
important country of the Western World, except Italy.
The corruption of both sexes that results from the subjection of one,
has been too convincingly dealt with by other writers to need
discussion here. What I should like to emphasize is the futility of
approaching the so-called “woman question” with any sort of pre-
conceived notion concerning the nature of woman, or her sphere, or
her duty to the State or to Society; and above all, of approaching it
with the idea—the idea that obsesses all reformers—that she is a
more or less passive creature about whom something either ought or
ought not to be done, or, for that matter, about whom something can
be done. What she should and can do for herself is a different
matter; and to that question I intend to address myself before I leave
this subject.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of
the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise
on the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is
sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to
perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class
and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization of
a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its
economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when
the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State
is an organization controlled by this class through its control of
wealth, for the purpose of protecting ownership against the
propertyless classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning
class. The State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except
those of the owning class.
[2] I shall take up this question later; but I might remark that this point
is well illustrated by a suit recently brought in the State of New York.
The former wife of a wealthy man, whom he had divorced twenty
years before, brought action against him for separation and
maintenance. When asked why she had waited twenty years before
questioning the validity of the divorce and her husband’s subsequent
remarriage, her lawyer stated that she had never been in need of
money before, but that she had been swindled out of the money
settled upon her by her husband at the time of the divorce. The
italics are mine; and no comment, I think, is needed.
 CHAPTER II
WOMAN’S STATUS, PAST AND PRESENT

I
Woman tends to assume a position of equality with man only where
the idea of property in human beings has not yet arisen or where it
has disappeared: that is to say, only in extremely primitive or highly
civilized communities. In all the intermediate stages of civilization,
woman is in some degree regarded as a purchasable commodity.
Her status varies widely among different peoples: there are primitive
tribes where she holds a position of comparative independence; and
there are civilized peoples, on the other hand, among whom she is
virtually a slave. But always there is present the idea of
subordination to a male owner, husband, father or brother, even
though it may survive only in ceremonial observances, e.g., in the
ritual practice of “giving in marriage,” or in certain legal disabilities,
such, for instance, as the law entitling a man to his wife’s services
without remuneration.
The subjection of women, then, bears a close intrinsic resemblance
to both chattel slavery and industrial slavery, in that its basis is
economic. As soon as civilization advances to the point of a
rudimentary organization of agriculture and industry, woman
becomes valuable as a labour-motor and a potential producer of
children who will become labour-motors and fighters. Her economic
value, or chattel-value, then, is a commodity for which her family
may demand payment; and hence, apparently, arises the custom of
exacting a bride-price from the man who wishes to marry her. Once
established, this custom of barter in marriage strikes root so deeply
that the woman who has brought no bride-price is often regarded
with scorn and her children considered illegitimate; and the idea of
male ownership that accompanies it becomes so pronounced that it