[In this book, writes reviewer Sharma, the authors argue that
despite supposed equality, women in all classes of society are
economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers,
and brothers.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE GENDER OF CAPITAL  
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Khushbu Sharma
August 16, 2023
LSE Review of Books
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_ In this book, writes reviewer Sharma, the authors argue that
despite supposed equality, women in all classes of society are
economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers,
and brothers. _

,

 

_The Gender of Capital
How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality_
Céline Bessière
Sibylle Gollac
Translated by Juliette Rogers
Harvard University Press
ISBN 9780674271791

_“I left everything to my wife: the children, the debts, the
headaches.”_ – quoted from an interview in The Gender of Capital,
p. 131.

The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world and raised many critical
questions for academics and social scientists to consider. One such
question – which has long preoccupied economists to political
scientists but started receiving a renewed attention post-pandemic –
is that of globally increasing wealth inequality. Feminist
interventions into this question have repeatedly shown that this
inequality is not just classist but also gendered in nature, rooted in
women’s oppression. Vicky Pryce’s _Women Vs Capitalism: Why
Can’t We Have It All in a Free Market Economy,_
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in 2019, threw into relief how the capitalist economic system
strategises to maintain and even accentuate the wealth inequality
between men and women. 

_The Gender of Capital _seeks to politicise the institution of the
family and its underlying relations, which hitherto were considered
privately sacred

In a pre-pandemic report
[[link removed]], Esteban
Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser reveal the extreme economic inequalities
between men and women on a global scale. In terms of wage gaps,
control over household resources and earned income as well as
ownership of land and assets, women consistently fare worse than
men.  The 2022 report
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published by Oxfam International on Wealth Inequality made it
explicitly clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has further aggravated the
wealth and financial inequality between men and women. Bessière and
Gollac’s _The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth
Inequality_ comes as an important intervention into this discourse.
It seeks to politicise the institution of the family and its
underlying relations, which hitherto were considered privately sacred
by both liberal economists and mainstream sociologists. The
inspiration for such a task is drawn from materialist and Marxist
feminism which traces the roots of exploitation under capitalism to
the unpaid and invisibilised labour within the household. 

The book employs a mixed-methods approach, combining ethnography,
archival resources, interviews and available statistical material to
reach its conclusions. Male and female members of families who
underwent or are undergoing estate and inheritance distribution,
couples separated and in the process of separation, notaires, lawyers,
law firm owners, real-estate agents, magistrates ⁠– several sets
of people are interviewed in depth in order to establish “how the
reproduction of the social order is rooted in the family”(xiii). 
It is firmly based in, but not limited to, French social relations and
political economy. France is a well functioning democracy with the
state playing a significant role in its market economy. French society
places great significance to the institution of family within which
the sexual division of labour is pronounced, even if women are working
as paid employees outside their homes. As the preface notes, the
authors want the book to transcend its immediate context and initiate
fruitful conversations “between distinct subfields and
methodological orientations, and between different national
settings” (xiv).

The existing and ever-widening wealth inequalities and accumulation of
capital are rooted in gender oppression

By focusing on two primary matters of asset distribution through
inheritance and cases of separation and divorce, Bessière and Gollac
present three major arguments. Firstly, the Personal is Political!’,
the  slogan which gained currency during second-wave feminism in the
West and has been used as a useful conceptual resource to argue that,
for women, all life choices are mired in gendered norms, expectations,
perceptions and stereotypes. The second argument emphasises the
contradictory presence of political and legal institutions in
women’s lives. Although the principle of equality between men and
women in terms of their economic rights and privileges has been
formally established, in practice, legal norms favour the dominant
group (men)’s monetary security. This distinction between “law on
the books” and “law in action” has proved useful in identifying
how underlying structures of inequality that disadvantage women are
masked under rhetorical claims of formal equality. Lastly, they argue
that the existing and ever-widening wealth inequalities and
accumulation of capital are rooted in gender oppression. Class
privilege reproduces itself through the exploitation of women’s
labour. These arguments are substantiated throughout the book’s
seven chapters.

One of the basic premises of the book is to debunk the grand myth that
the nature of families has undergone major transformation

One of the basic premises of the book is to debunk the grand myth that
the nature of families has undergone major transformation in the wake
of growing capitalist sensibilities and changing economic relations.
This myth claims that the economic interdependence among family
members has reduced considerably and what defines families today is
bonds based on care and love. Bessière and Gollac challenge this
narrative, seeking to define the family as essentially an economic
institution. 

Women typically end up poorer than their male counterparts after the
division of inherited property and separation through divorce are
settled

Women typically end up poorer than their male counterparts after the
division of inherited property and separation through divorce are
settled. This process of impoverishment is aided by the legal and
institutional mechanisms which settle such matters. As the authors
claim, “The formal neutrality of principles does not prevent
inequalities between men and women from persisting or even developing
when the law is put to use. We conducted research in notaires’
offices to get a grasp of the law in practice, as a process, to show
that the meaning and effectiveness of law exists solely in its
implementation, and with no intention of contrasting a “pure” side
of law inscribed in the Civil Code and an “impure” side in
practice.” (108)

To substantiate Bessière and Gollac’s claim about the universality
of their argument, I can apply the authors’ arguments to the context
of my home country, India. Despite vast cultural differences and a
huge geographic divide, India and France share a lot in common in
terms of the gendered roots of wealth inequality in both countries. In
a related commentary on the relationship between law and women in
India, Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman’s _Subversive Sites_
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uses the concept of “familial ideology” to show how legal systems
which claim to be premised upon equal rights in fact perpetuate,
solidify and cement unequal relations, and transport them from the
domestic into the legal sphere. _The Gender of Capital _reinforces
these arguments with greater force and more substantial evidence. 

This work advances inequality studies by using case studies of
families and interviews with both male and female members. This
approach unravels the intricacies of intra-family wealth inequality
which remains obscured by the dominant modes of measuring
inequalities. Though the French Civil Code of 1804 legally established
an equal property and inheritance regime for all heirs, irrespective
of their gender and order of birth, such case studies reveal that male
inheritors acquire most of the professional assets. These include the
ownership of businesses, firms and companies or any income-generating
endowment whose economic value would not stagnate over time. Men in
most cases tend to leave fixed assets like houses for their sisters or
wives as their share of the property while retaining the possession of
wealth multiplying assets. Through professional assets, further wealth
can be accumulated, an opportunity which female inheritors are more
often denied.

The book leaves us with several questions and possibilities for newer
kinds of engagement with the idea of inequality itself

The language of economics tends to overwhelm the readers who don’t
have a background in the discipline. One of the best aspects of this
text is its accessibility to the reader. The authors effortlessly
interweave qualitative and quantitative data; they elucidate
statistics through engaging prose, and balance this by including
personal narratives and interviews with a variety of people, which
humanises their arguments. The book leaves us with several questions
and possibilities for newer kinds of engagement with the idea of
inequality itself. As the world grapples with the violence unleashed
by neoliberal economic forces, this book is a reminder that capital is
gendered, and no significant gains can be made in tackling material
inequality without addressing inequality among the sexes. 

_Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position
of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics
and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission
if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate
link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE
Review of Books._

Khushbu Sharma is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Political
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research
lies at the intersection of politics, sociology, and gender studies.
Her preliminary interest lies in Intersectionality studies, caste and
gender studies, and higher education. She can be found on twitter as
@Khushbu68906378 and on Instagram as @khushbu_321.

 

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