The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [67]
But if we could factor out the exploitation, something else would still remain: there are labors that do not pay because they, or the ends to which they are directed, require built-in constraints on profiteering, exploitation, and—more subtly— the application of comparative value with which the market is by nature at ease. There are two points here, one having to do with the nature of the work, the other with the commitment of the worker. “Female” tasks—social work and soul work— cannot be undertaken on a pure cost-benefit basis because their products are not commodities, not things we easily price or willingly alienate. Furthermore, those who assume these labors automatically inhibit their ability to “sell themselves” at the moment they answer their calling. Gift labor requires the kind of emotional or spiritual commitment that precludes its own marketing. Businessmen rightly point out that a man who cannot threaten to quit his job has no leverage when demanding a higher salary. But some tasks cannot be undertaken in such an adversarial spirit. Few jobs are pure gift labors, of course—although a nurse is committed to healing, she is also an actor in the marketplace—but any portion of gift labor in a job will tend to pull it out of the market and make it a less lucrative—and a “female”—profession.
But, you ask, if we really valued these gift labors, couldn’t we pay them well? Couldn’t we pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers, pay the cellist in the orchestra as we pay the advertising executive in the box seat? Yes, we could. We could—we should—reward gift labors where we value them. My point here is simply that where we do so we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been “made” the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group. The costs and benefits of tasks whose procedures are adversarial and whose ends are easily quantified can be expressed through a market system. The costs and rewards of gift labors cannot. The cleric’s larder will always be filled with gifts; artists will never “make” money.
We must therefore distinguish the necessary feminist demand for “equal pay for equal work” from the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift labors into market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price. There is a place for volunteer labor, for mutual aid, for in-house work, for healings that require sympathetic contact or a cohesive support group, for strengthening the bonds of kinship, for intellectual community, for creative idleness, for the slow maturation of talent, for the creation and preservation and dissemination of culture, and so on. To quit the confines of our current system of gender means not to introduce market value into these labors but to recognize that they are not “female” but human tasks. And to break the system that oppresses women, we need not convert all gift labor to cash work; we need, rather, to admit women to the “male,” money-making jobs while at the same time including supposedly “female” tasks and forms of exchange in our sense of possible masculinity.
Let me close on a historical note. Ann Douglas has written an interesting book on the feminization of American culture during the nineteenth century. In 1838, she tells us, an American Unitarian minister, Charles Follen, had a vision in which he saw a band of singing Sunday school children enter his church and displace a group of stern Pilgrim Fathers. In the course of the nineteenth century, Douglas contends, an old association between masculinity and spiritual power was broken; spiritual life became