Fully Automated Luxury Sex War

Gender discourse as displacement activity

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If I’ve been slow responding to the “Great Feminisation” discourse kick-started by Helen Andrews’ punchy NatCon speech and subsequent Compact article, this isn’t because I have nothing to say on the topic. I made a similar argument here in 2022, where I pointed to the rising representation of women in tertiary education, and borrowed from Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction thesis to wonder what the overproduction specifically of female elites might look like.

Drawing, as Andrews also does, on Joyce Benenson’s work exploring the evolutionary dimension of normative differences in conflict styles between the sexes, I

argued that this might well produce what appears to be a politics of moral censoriousness, power struggles conducted through social ostracism and dogpiling, and assorted other phenomena we’ve come to designate as “woke”- while in fact being what Andrews pithily calls “an epiphenomenon of feminisation”.

So having made a version of this argument myself, I am broadly in agreement with Andrews that there is something to the idea that organisations that skew female take on a different sensibility. But since I wrote that essay in 2022, I’ve also come to think this insight on its own is not enough to explain the phenomena in question. And there’s a similar problem with the explanation Andrews puts forward for how this happened, namely “feminisation” is not naturally occurring, but occurred because anti-discrimination law put a thumb on the scale:

Feminisation is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.

The issue with this is not that it is descriptively inaccurate, but that it’s a bit like saying “rain is caused by water falling out of the sky”. It’s true, as far as it goes, but doesn’t tell us why it’s happening. For that, I’m afraid, we need to add a dimension that’s still a bit of a fringe interest on the Right: materialist analysis, and especially the history and future of automation in the workplace. It’s long been a thesis of mine that feminism and industralisation were born together. But while I’ve tended to focus, in making this argument, on the impact of industrialisation on women at home, these changes also radically altered working life for employed women - not to mention, over time, the kinds of work women were able to do. And when we employ this lens to look at labour relations, automation, and “feminisation” as aspects of the same process, it’s clear that so-called “feminisation” is really one stage in a much larger process, whose driver is less moral than economic and technological.

If we then follow that analysis through, it becomes clear that extrapolating “feminisation” into the future as a civilisational doom-scenario runs the risk of missing the wood for the trees. For while we’re all getting our knickers in a twist about workplace norms and the ontology of sex differences, the larger technological and economic trajectory within which “feminisation” came into being will go on grinding ahead, in new iterations. As this progresses, I think it likely that a dynamic which advantaged women over the post-war era will eventually drive an anti-feminisation backlash. But unless we refocus on what actually matters, the more likely scenario still is a backswing that’s not feminised, or anti-feminised, but straightforwardly anti-human.

To ground this, let’s revisit a classic text from first-wave feminism: Eleanor Rathbone’s On The Remuneration of Women’s Services (1917). I encourage anyone interested in the deep links between industrial and feminist histories to read this fascinating paper. In it Rathbone discusses the social impact of mass male conscription for the war, in terms of two of its dimensions: firstly, the financial support offered by government for the millions of mothers left behind with children, and abruptly deprived of the family’s wage-earner. And, secondly, “dilution”, which is to say the adaptation of manufacturing workplaces to make use of relatively unskilled women, because so many male factory workers had gone to the war.

For a description of “dilution” let’s turn to another woman from the same period: the Victorian/Edwardian novelist and anti-suffragist Mary Augusta Ward. In The War On All Fronts: England’s Effort, a pamphlet written in 1916 in the hope of inspiring America to join the war, Ward describes the process of simplifying manufacturing work so as to open its execution to those less physically strong or skilled:

Dilution means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity, much engineering work, generally reckoned as ‘skilled’ work, and reserved to ‘skilled’ workmen by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from the others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or semiskilled worker. By so dividing them up and using superior labor with economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further, and the inferior, or untrained, labor can then be brought into work where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact, it never has been used.

So the aim was to deskill work so women could do it while the men fought at the front. But as Rathbone observes, it wasn’t long before the labour-arbitrage dimension of this practice became difficult to avoid. Trade unions resisted “dilution” - not unreasonably, they smelled a rat - and only assented to the changes on the promise that they would be temporary. But despite these assurances, Rathbone predicted in 1917 that when the war ended those women who didn’t want to be turfed back out into their homes again would find a staunch ally in factory-owners “who, having tasted the advantages of a great reserve of cheap, docile, and very effective labour are obviously not going to let themselves be deprived of it without a struggle”.

For Rathbone, “dilution” was necessary as a wartime expedient. But, she argued, it both took mothers away from raising children, which is (at least in peacetime) overall to the detriment of national wellbeing. And, she pointed out, its effect was also to depress workers’ wages across the board, by replacing skilled jobs with unskilled ones. Capitalists would fight tooth and nail to keep it, as would some women; her proposed solution was to improve the incentives for women to return to the home, by retaining a version of the “separation allowance” paid to mothers when their husbands went to war. In effect, she proposed putting things back the way they were before the war, by paying mothers to exit the workplace, thus properly valuing both their caregiving work and also de-diluting the skilled industrial roles previously performed by male factory workers.

Of course as history records, this isn’t what happened. Having discovered that manufacturing costs could be lowered by de-skilling the tasks and giving them to women, factory owners were never going to place themselves back at the mercy of skilled engineers. Instead those jobs were, over time, further de-skilled and replaced by Taylorised, simplified, more automated ones that could be performed by increasingly interchangeable humans, now of either sex.

After the Second World War the same process happened again, this time replacing Taylorised “workers” of either sex with still cheaper immigrants. And here, again, if factory-owners allied with feminists in the “dilution” battle, the same dynamic was once again observable with race activists: when migrant workers went on strike at Courtaulds in Preston, in 1965, campaigners encouraged them to frame the issue as about discrimination. But seen from the perspective of British workers, it was less about race than wage depression - much as was the case with debates over “dilution” and claims about sex discrimination.