The Origins and Transformations of Conservative Gender Regimes in Germany and Japan

Abstract

In this article, we extend Walby’s analysis of gender transformations to theorize gender relations in conservative modernizations. We draw insights from a historical comparison of gender inequalities in Germany and Japan, to draw a distinction between conservative authoritarian and conservative democratic gender regimes, and their transformations. Conservative gender regimes, we argue, constitute the domestic as a public sphere and transform through social and family policies, which reinforce a gendered division of labor. The concept of conservative gender regimes, we argue, is relevant for analyzing transformations in other European and non-European world regions.

Introduction

Walby’s theory of gender regimes integrates a historical conceptualization of the transition from domestic to public gender regimes¹ with a comparative theory of varieties of gender regimes, distinguishing between two ideal types of public gender regime: neoliberal and social democratic² (Walby 1997, 2009, 2011). The Anglophone countries exemplify real cases of neoliberal gender regimes, where the transition from domestic to public incorporates women into a liberal market political economy, while Sweden and the Nordic countries with their explicit gender-equality policies constitute social–democratic gender regimes with state provision of welfare and care. Gender regime transformations in other countries are either not as far advanced (less public, more domestic) or situated along a continuum between the two types of public gender regimes, with some domains (e.g., politics and civil society) more social–democratic, and others (most often the economy) under stronger market liberalization pressures.

While real cases are likely to be messier than ideal types, we agree with Moghadem (2020) that Walby’s theory draws on a narrow range of mainly European democratic modernizations and ignores conservative modernizations in Europe and other world regions. Nonetheless, we argue that Walby’s theorization of gender regimes as complex systems spanning politics, the economy, civil society, and violence can be productively extended to include what Moore (1966) called conservative modernizations. In conceptualizing conservative gender regimes, we engage in an empirical reconsideration from a gender perspective of the two main cases of conservative modernization in the work of Moore (1966), Germany and Japan. In a broad-stroke historical analysis, we focus on changes in the legal constitution and social political status of the patriarchal family in distinguishing conservative gender regimes historically and in their contemporary transformations.

In the first part of this article, we draw on Moore’s (1966) theory of three paths of modernization to theorize conservative gender regimes. The conservative modernizations of the German and Japanese domestic gender regimes are analyzed in the second section. In the third section, we consider continuities in these conservative gender regimes and argue that there are two critical junctures in their transformation: first, in the immediate postwar democratization of Germany and Japan; and second, from the second wave of feminist movements in the early 1970s onward. We discuss recent political measures to support women’s employment and improve fertility rates through family policies, which we argue are the cornerstone of conservative public gender regimes. In the conclusion, we argue that extending Walby’s historical and comparative typology to a third type of conservative gender regime contributes to developing a broader historical and comparative analysis of gender transformations in the modern world.

Gendering Conservative Modernizations

The second wave of comparative historical sociological research from the late 1960s onward challenged the universalism of modernization theory, by analyzing the social origins of differences in modernization outcomes. Yet the second wave largely ignored gendered consequences of modernization. As Adams, Clemens, and Orloff (2005, 46) note, “Women and the work they do—care giving, housekeeping, sexual labor, varying modes of political activity … have been troublesome categories for sociological analyses of modernity” that instead have focused on “the gendered (masculine) character of the central sociological subjects of modernity—citizens, workers, soldiers.” Before a “third wave” of comparative (and feminist) historical sociology began to challenge these readings in the 1980s onward, most theories of comparative modernizations assumed women as absent from the “core constituents of modernity—markets, public spheres, states.” One of the important contributions of feminist scholarship about modernity, of which Walby’s work is a leading example, is to show how the division between the public sphere of (male) markets and citizens, and the private (female) sphere of family and home “is very much a modern creation, not the residue of women’s incomplete modernization” (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005, 47). We suggest that exactly how this division is variably constituted is a major factor in distinguishing the modernization of conservative gender regimes from their democratic counterparts.

A major contribution of Walby’s work is how it theorizes gendered modernizations as historical formations. In a “first” modernity of domestic patriarchy, women are situated in a private (family) sphere of (unpaid) domestic labor, reinforced by legal codes granting husbands control over wives within and outside the home, and which exclude women from a public sphere of men’s political and economic activity, enforced through the social tolerance of gender violence. The transition to a “second” modernity of public gender regimes is constituted through increasing education and employment of women, their expanding representation in political parties and democratic political institutions, with effects on policies for improving gender equality, ending violence against women, and supporting the social citizenship of women independently from marriage and family formation (Walby 1997, 2009; see also Orloff 2009). These large processes of gender transformations are also highly relevant for analyzing changes in the gender regimes of conservative modernizations.

We draw the basic contours of conservative modernizations from Moore’s The Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), in which he distinguishes three paths to modernity: a liberal, democratic path, and two forms of nonliberal modernization, conservative and communist. Each of these paths is distinguished by strong continuities in the social structures of traditional and modern social organizations. Here, we focus on the democratic and conservative paths.³ The driving forces of democratic modernization in Moore’s account are the rise of a bourgeoisie with a degree of independence from the crown, freedom of contract, and the commercialization of agricultural production, exemplified by England and France but also covering the postbellum United States and seen as emerging in India. Notably, Moore neither claimed that democratic modernization was unique to Europe nor that all European countries followed this path. Moore’s theory and analysis of the conservative path thus crossed world regions, treating the modernizations of Germany and Japan as similar cases.

Conservative modernization in Moore’s account is characterized first by what it lacks—a politically independent bourgeoisie and the freedom of contract. Imperial constitutional reforms under the Meiji and German empires in the late nineteenth century reinforced traditional obligations, by neglecting guarantees of individual rights common to democratic modernizations. Moreover, both modernizations were undertaken as imperial projects of national unification, colonization, warfare, state-led development of heavy industry, and the mobilization of common peoples for all of these pursuits. Traditional elite families, including but not limited to the monarchies, restored their status and traditional obligations of their subjects through modernizations “from above” to create a nation of workers and soldiers, who could be mobilized for industrial and military pursuits. The authoritarian logic of conservative modernization, Moore argues, explains the rise of fascism and totalitarian rule.

What Moore leaves out is how the conservative modernizers mobilized wives and mothers for nationalistic and militaristic pursuits. Moore’s theory of modernization is characteristic of “second wave” comparative historical sociology (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005) in its neglect of gender dimensions of modernization. A key factor, we argue, lies in how conservative modernizers legally codified the patriarchal family to both subordinate wives to husbands and male descendants and to constitute the family in the interest of the authoritarian state. We draw on feminist scholarship and the social history of German and Japanese modernization to show that conservative modernization located the family in the public rather than a private sphere.

The Origins of Conservative Gender Regimes

The colloquial designations of the German Imperial and Meiji governments drew explicitly on ideologies of patriarchal authority and a semantic of anational family: in the German Empire, the Vaterland; in Japan, the Chinese characters for nation state , kokka, can also be read literally as the national family or national household (sometimes, or doubly explicit, as the family state, , kazoku kokka, Uno 1993). Neither of the constitutions enacted by Imperial Germany (enacted in 1871, in force until 1919) and the Meiji rulers (enacted in 1890 and in force until 1947) included a catalog of individual rights (Huber 1988; Tsujimura 2008). In both constitutional monarchies, civil laws were enacted, but much later, after considerable debate, and included family codes which formalized the legal status of the patriarchal family. The German Civil Law was passed after more than two decades of deliberations in 1896 and enacted in 1900. The family code in Book Four⁴ stipulated full legal rights of husbands over wives in marriage, and required wives to operate the private household on behalf of their husband and to take their husband’s name in marriage. Debates over the Japanese civil code were equally protracted, with a first version submitted in 1878 and the final version enacted twenty years later in 1898 (Garon 1987, 34). In Book I, Chapter I, section II of the Meiji Civil Code,⁵ an equivalence was drawn between “quasi-incompetent persons” dependent on a curator for legal matters and wives who were likewise dependent on their husbands. Paragraph 14 of the code additionally subordinated wives to their husbands in decisions regarding any of their activities. For the first time, commoners were required to file family registers.⁶ The family codes of both constitutional monarchies did not permit wives to live separately from their husbands, except under conditions of military or colonial duty of the husbands.

Under Tokugawa rule (1603–1868), the Japanese emperor was an unimportant figure, but his reinstatement through the Meiji rulers was a well-orchestrated symbolic measure for mobilizing the nation for colonial and military pursuits by explicitly calling on Confucian patriarchal ideology (Gluck 1985), with the emperor as the father, the empress as his subordinated wife and mother of the nation, and all subjects as children (Ueno 2009). The gender of the children mattered, however, for how they were expected to serve the nation, with boys destined to be workers and soldiers, and girls assigned the task of protecting the homeland and serving the national family (Muta 2006, 191). The institutionalization of family registers through the family code in civil law documented the place of every person within a descendant family hierarchy. The oldest male was entered as the head of the household, and wives, upon marriage, were removed from the registers of their families of origin and added to the husbands’ descendant register. Entries also followed for children born to or adopted by the family. Within this administration of conjugal and descendant ties, no possibility existed for recognizing civil unions, children born out of wedlock, or single motherhood, which were not uncommon for commoners in Tokugawa Japan (Fuess 2004).

In the context of an imperial state, which Garon (2003) describes as curtailing any activity in civil society not sanctioned by it, the family in Meiji Japan was constituted as a state-sanctioned public institution, under which women were obligated to serve their husbands’ families, while all families were obliged to serve the national family state (Ueno 2009). Ueno (2009, 65–88) recounts how Confucian ideology was reinvented to justify the patriarchal civil code and to propagate the descendant family as a national and modern institution, which until then was only practiced among the samurai and their lords. The idea of filial piety, she recounts, potentially undermined loyalty to the national family, since the biological family might take precedence. The Meiji reformers reversed this order, placing loyalty to the emperor as the father of the national family before all other forms of filial piety (Emon 1992, 280 cited in Ueno 2009, 88), to establish what Ito (Ito 1982, cited in Ueno 2009, 65) called the “pseudo-family state ideology” of Japan. The public obligations of women in families became especially evident with imperial expansion and military mobilization, as the Meiji and later rulers pushed “ahead with the organization of the female population” and mobilized their service to the nationon the “home front,” by setting up a number of official women’s associations (Ueno 2004). With the aggression in the Pacific in 1942, women played an explicitly public role in the national domestic sphere in associations such as the Greater Japan Women’s Association for National Defense (Ueno 2004, 16).

The German civil law, like its Japanese counterpart, was passed under imperial rule decades after the constitution. The deliberations and compilation were undertaken by successive committees composed of parliamentarians, jurists, and government officials, who eventually presented a draft which passed twenty-three years later in 1896 (enacted in 1900). Social democratic members of the imperial parliament opposed clauses on labor and marriage, the former upholding the fiction of the equality of workers and employers in the exchange of labor, and the later codifying the subordination of wives to husbands in marriage. The Social Democratic Party in Germany explicitly affirmed its support for gender equality in the 1891 Erfurter Program, and its parliamentarians voted against the civil law in 1896. The proletarian wing of the women’s movement, under the leadership of Clara Zetkin, had long opposed the family code in drafts of the law (Gerhard 2008), but Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws meant that the movement could only agitate clandestinely. With its left-wing forced underground, in the absence of women’s suffrage and with women blocked from national political office, the German civil code was deliberated and passed without the political participation of women.

The German conservative gender regime began to diverge from its Japanese counterpart with the military defeat of Germany in World War I, and the series of events ensuing, including the abdication of the Kaiser, the November Revolution, and the transition to a democratic republic proclaimed in Weimar. The 1919 Weimar constitution replaced the imperial constitution and granted women equal rights in all spheres of life. The right of women to vote was enacted in the same year, in preparation for national elections, in which 300 women entered as candidates, with thirty-seven elected, to comprise 9 percent of a parliament now ruled by social democrats.

Despite the wave of liberal and social democratic reforms, the social democratic majority in the first Weimar parliament, and persistent demands for change by the proletarian women’s movement, little changed in the civil law, including the family code. The social democratic movement had split in 1914 over whether to support the imperialist war, and with Zetkin aligning with the pacifists, and later splitting to found the German Communist Party, gender politics within the socialist movement became increasingly divisive. While the Social Democratic Party in government had the political influence to reform the family code, they saw the newly established constitutional equality as sufficient and turned instead to improve labor rights (Gerhard 2012). The legal contradiction thus created between the constitutional guarantee of equal rights and wives’ subjection to husbands’ authority in family law would persist into the 1970s in the Federal Republic.

The rise of authoritarianism in the 1930s and the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich in 1933 marked the end of women’s political rights and a reinstatement of the public obligation of wives and mothers to support remilitarization and national socialist interests as part of their domestic roles. The ideology of national socialism appointed women the task of the “frugal economization” of household, and in preparing the “fighting unit—household” for the military effort. As the social historian of the family, Sieder argued, “The national economic meaning of household labor was emphasized”(Sieder 1987, 234⁷). Sieder cites the national socialists’ “Women’s Handbook”:

As leaders of their households, women make as much of a contribution to the national economy as any other employed person. They are subject to the same law of service, to the new code of labor, which understands the value of human labor not only in relation to their own benefit, but over and above this, to the service of the entire Volk. (Frauenbuch cited in Sieder 1987, 234–35)

The 1930s in Germany marked the end of the brief period of democratization, and the German and Japanese conservative gender regimes began to converge.⁸ The national socialist regime began again to instrumentalize women’s national domestic roles, with a new emphasis on their contributions in bearing and raising children for the Vaterland (Koonz 1987; Pine 1997). Filial piety redefined as loyalty to the family state played a similar role in the rise of Japanese fascism and its instrumentalization of women’s reproductive capacities (Ueno 2004). In both countries, the public nature of women’s domestic roles contributed to their mobilization for military conquests, while their public voice was tightly restricted through exclusion from higher education, political office, and professional life.

Conservative authoritarian gender regimes stand in contrast to Walby’s (1990, 1997) concept of domestic gender regimes as private patriarchies because of their public meaning and role in the mobilization of the domestic sphere for the family nation. At this point, our concept of patriarchal family also diverges from Therborn’s, whose analysis of the historical development of the patriarchal family had similarly situated it in the private domestic sphere. Therborn insists that “patriarchy … not be cut loose from the family and made synonymous with the subordination, discrimination, or social disadvantages of women in general” (emphasis added, Therborn 2004, 8). We argue, contra Therborn, that the patriarchal family in conservative modernizations, is cut loose from the household, to produce a social order that subordinates women to men in the nation.⁹

From Conservative Authoritarian to Conservative Democratic Gender Regimes

Conservative modernizations are top-down transformations of traditional forms of authority, which unlike democratic modernizations, adapt rather than transform traditional social structures. As the previous section showed, the adaptation of gender hierarchies was a central part of these social structural transfers. The stability of conservative authoritarian gender regimes is tied to the continued legitimacy of authoritarian rule and the suppression of challenges to its gender hierarchy. In both of our empirical cases, the military defeat marked the ultimate end of conservative gender regimes. Their democratization under the control of foreign occupations did little, however, to reform the foundation of gender hierarchies in family law. In the first part of this section, we return to the empirical cases, to analyze the meaning of military defeat and early democratization efforts for the transformation of the conservative authoritarian to a conservative democratic gender regime, that in reference to Walby, we regard as a type of domestic gender regime. The women’s movement and international pressure began to erode the legal foundations of men’s control over women in the family and to address the link between the confinement of women and the domestic sphere, domestic violence, and sexual harassment at work. The second part of this section turns to the contemporary transition from conservative democratic private to public gender regimes in Germany and Japan.

The Transformation from Conservative Authoritarian to Conservative Democratic Gender Regimes

The democratic transformations of the German and Japanese fascist regimes in the immediate postwar years were orchestrated by foreign occupation powers, with the U.S. forces playing a dominant role in the Western German regions and throughout the Japanese archipelago. In the German case, the Weimar constitution provided a template for reinstating the fundamental rights rescinded by the fascist regime, while in Japan, the occupation forces took a more direct role in constitutional and legal reforms. In both cases, the new postwar constitutions guaranteed women equal rights, women were enfranchised again in Germany, and for the first time in Japan, and in both cases, family laws within the civil codes were amended (Gerhard 2012; Koikari 2002). The dominance of the United States as a foreign occupying power was mitigated by the territorial separation of occupying powers in Germany (into American, British, French, and Russian zones), but the tensions, which would culminate in the cold war, gave the United States the upper hand in Western Germany and Japan in opposing communist, left social democratic movements, and with these, the more critical and proletarian feminist movements. The left-feminist opposition to the legal anchoring of women’s roles in the family was ignored, the bourgeoise women’s movements satisfied themselves with the instatement of women’s political citizenship (Gerhard 2010; Uno 1993), and the labor movement supported a reproductive bargain embedding the status of male breadwinner and housewife and the gendered division of labor in social policy (Gerhard 2012; Gottfried 2016; on East Germany, see Schneider 2004).

Women entered the first postwar parliaments in both countries. In Japan, their electoral success was striking and would not be matched again in a national election until 2005.¹⁰ In the first postwar elections, however, the siege of conservative liberal parties tipped the political balance toward forces reluctant to change many aspects of male privilege, which, in turn, limited the reforms of family law, and left issues of gendered violence in the demilitarization of both countries unaddressed (Gerhard 2010; Uno 1993). In Japan, the clauses subordinating wives to husbands and extending husbands’ rights to determine the affairs of their wives were eliminated. Rather than entering the family register of their husband’s family, couples were given the choice to create their own family register, in an attempt to institutionalize a more liberal form of the modern small family (Fueto 1957; Toshitani and Searight 1994; Wilde 2001). This stipulated that couples decide on one common family name (which, in most cases, was the husband’s name). Moreover, the domestic role of women was reinstated in a new way, by clauses granting protections for women in their roles as mothers (Uno 1993). The amendment to West German family law followed a similar pattern, yet restricted the paid employment of women through a marriage bar requiring wives to gain the written permission of their husbands before they could engage in wage labor (Gerhard 2008). In both cases, family law shaped the primary responsibility of women in unpaid domestic labor and childrearing.

These changes transformed the patriarchal family from a public to a private and protected sphere. In Germany, Gerhard (2008) views the immediate postwar period as the normalization of the family as a Kleinfamilie (literally, small family). Koikari (2002) sees the immediate postwar period in Japan as the Americanization of women’s domestic roles. Despite their support for the constitutional equality of women, the American occupying forces never intended to alter the gendered division of labor. As General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Japan, stated, women’s enfranchisement would enable politics to benefit from “the noble influence of womanhood and the home, which has done so much to further American stability and progress” (The Records of the U.S. Occupation to Japan, cited in Koikari 2002, 29).

Restrictions such as marriage bars are characteristic of all domestic gender regimes, and in Germany and Japan, as elsewhere, they served as social mechanisms to control women economically and sexually, embedded in a social structure of gendered violence (Walby 1990, 57 and 128; Walby 2020). In fact, if we only look at the legal formation of the family, the gendered division of labor, and the absence of laws addressing violence against women, the evidence suggests that conservative gender regimes lost their distinctiveness through this period of democratization and privatization of the domestic.

We draw on feminist welfare studies to argue, to the contrary, that the distinctiveness of conservative gender regimes became rooted in another domain of public law in the postwar period, namely social welfare. Drawing on feminist theories (Langan and Ostner 1991; Lewis 1992; Orloff 1993; Osawa 2011; Sainsbury 1996), two factors distinguish welfare politics in conservative democratic welfare regimes: first, the extension of most favorable social protections to male breadwinner family households; and second, the principle of subsidiarity which, in contrast to liberal market and social democratic welfare states, situates the family (rather than the market or the state) as responsible for social provision in times of need. Together, these aspects of social policy established the family (rather than its individual members) as the unit for social benefit claims, with the state as a provider of last resort. While social insurance coverage is extended to dependent family members through the male breadwinner, social provision “is the business of the family, in providing for the everyday as well as extraordinary needs that arise (of children, spouses, the ill, disabled, or elderly persons)” (Langan and Ostner 1991, 310). “Typically, this principle [of subsidiarity] assumes a division of labor, in which one person is available on a relatively continual basis for family care work, and another … is oriented on a relatively continual basis toward earning income and the corresponding social securities.” The reproductive bargain (Gottfried 2016) that emerges from this principle takes the form of a social exchange between the benefit claims derived from marriage to a male breadwinner and the domestic and care labor provided by dependent wives.

The underlying assumption of the reproductive bargain—that women are protected by their spouses, rather than the state—informed an active refusal on the legislature and conservative parties to acknowledge spousal violence as a legal issue until the end of the twentieth century.

From the Domestic to the Public Conservative Gender Regime

Walby (1990, 1997, 2009) suggests a periodization of transitions to public gender regimes which begins with the increasing enrollments of women in higher education, increasing employment rates, and a concomitant emergence of the second wave of feminism evident in the advanced economies from the early 1970s onward. These changes and movements were clearly present in Germany and Japan as well, where the second-wave women’s movements tied the confinement of women to family roles to the refusal of governments to intervene to stop domestic violence and rape in marriage (Buckley 1994; von Hodenberg 2018). The German women’s movement, through the political opportunities made available by a more open and competitive party system (or what Walby (2009, 2011), this section, refers to as the depth of democracy), and social political orientations well to the left of those in Japan, achieved a number of legal changes destabilizing the traditional conjugal family and the liberalization of sexuality, including the equal treatment of children born outside of legal marriages (1970), the decriminalization of homosexuality (1969), reform of divorce law and the enforcement of equal treatment in inheritance law (1977), and the removal of a provision in the family code, which had required wives to have the permission of their husbands to engage in paid employment (1977) (Gerhard 2008). While these legal changes to marriage and the family loosened the domestic hold on women, under the long reign of Christian Democratic governments under Helmut Kohl (1982–1998), changes in parental leave policies and the introduction of long-term care insurance reinforced the role of women as providing family care, while the criminalization of rape in marriage was resisted until pressures mounted to pass and enact a law in 1997.

In Japan, the nearly unbroken rule of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, its neglect of female candidates, and weak opposition parties left the women’s movement with few resources for influencing legislative changes. Japan’s ratification in 1985 of the UN Treaty to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) lead to the enactment of the first Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) in 1986, but without sanctions for discriminatory behavior by employers,¹¹ and without a law criminalizing domestic violence. While in the brief period from the mid-1980s until the Japanese bubble economy burst in 1991, women gained a foothold in regular employment in the private sector, support for working mothers, in particular, is largely absent (Nemoto 2016). Thus, for many women, the decision to work means postponing or evading marriage and children altogether (Nemoto 2019). By the late 1990s, under pressure from the UN and due to a brief opening in domestic politics for enacting better protections for working women, sexual harassment was addressed in a revision to the EEOL and a law was enacted to criminalize domestic violence (Kano 2015). Spousal rape in Japan, however, is not criminalized (Shoji 2003), and as the “Me Too” movement has shown in Japan, sexual harassment and rape continue to be treated as minor infringements rather than as acts of male violence (Hasunuma and Shin 2019).

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the conservative gender regimes in both countries are best described as in transition from domestic to public gender regimes, but this is not a linear process. Social policy reforms under conservative liberal democratic (Nakasone) and Christian democratic (Kohl) governments in the last decades of the twentieth century reinforced conservative social policies, for example, in the enactment of pension rights for dependent wives (Japan) and mothers (Germany) (Gerhard 2008; Shire 2008). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Gottfried and O’Reilly (2002) recounted how in both Western Germany⁶ and Japan, conservative social policies and gender-segmented labor markets were still upholding the strong male breadwinner models.

Women’s life courses changed nonetheless in the wake of the feminist challenges to policies reinforcing women’s domestic role, and gains made in education and employment, evident also in declining marriage rates, postponing marriage and childbirth, a rise in single households among young adults, and the registration of two of the lowest fertility rates among the industrialized economies. Conservative social politics turned, as a consequence, to a new wave of family policies, designed to support working women, not for the sake of gender equality, but rather in the hope that women would bear more children (Henninger, Wimbauer, and Dobrowski 2008; Mätzke and Ostner 2011). Family policy rather than family codes is the cornerstone of the conservative democratic type as these gender regimes transition from a domestic to a public form. In Germany and Japan, recent family policies include a social insurance scheme for long-term elderly care, state financial support for expanding childcare facilities, and the addition of father’s months in parental leaves. In Germany, care for children above the age of three has largely been socialized on the model of social democratic gender regimes, while in Japan, political solutions have centered on subsidizing the expansion of private daycare facilities (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen 2011). In both countries, however, under-three care coverage is low. Germany met European Union targets for under-three care only by expanding a segment of day mothers (Tagesmutter) who take children into their private homes, suggesting a commercialization of the domestic sphere, rather than its socialization. In both countries, long-term elder care insurance has not led to a sufficient expansion of local care facilities, with primary care still provided by family members, supplemented by in-home ambulatory care services in Germany (Shire 2015), and by local daycare facilities, which return care-needy citizens back to the private household at the end of the day in Japan. In these ways, family policies, even when they finance market or public services, have reinforced the family household as the locus of care, and reinforced the role of wives, mothers, and in eldercare, daughters, as those who provide for young and elderly family members. State support of the family household as the locus of care (rather than the market or public facilities) is what distinguishes conservative democratic from neoliberal and social democratic types of public gender regimes.

Conclusion

We extend Walby’s historical comparative typology of gender regimes, to a third type of conservative gender regime, to theorize the conservative modernizations of gender relations in contrast to the democratic modernizations, which have been the focus of Walby’s work. Gender relations in conservative modernizations are distinguished by weak individual rights, a gender hierarchy created through the legal codification of the patriarchal family, and the constitution of the family in the public rather than as a private domestic sphere. Tracing the development of the same two main cases analyzed in Moore’s (1966) original work on conservative modernizations, we correct the gender blindness of Moore’s analysis by focusing on the central importance of the patriarchal family for the mobilization of the population in the origins of dictatorship. With the end of totalitarian rule, we argue that democratization privatizes the patriarchal family and re-embeds the household in a web of social protections and institutions which define the family as the unit of social claims, benefits, and provision, and men as breadwinners and women as their dependents. Walby rejects the concept of male breadwinners to characterize gender regimes. While we follow her logic for neoliberal and social democratic gender regimes, the social political status of the family household as the subsidiary unit of social protection and provision in the conservative type leads us to use the concept of male breadwinner to express this specificity.

With the partial successes of the women’s movement in challenging the gendered division of labor and domestic violence, and the expansion of women’s education and employment, the strongly gendered division of labor characterizing conservative gender regimes begins to erode, yielding changes in marriage patterns and declining fertility. To the extent that polities become concerned about declining labor supplies and low fertility, public policy shifts from keeping women in the home, to supporting a balance of domestic provision and paid labor. Gender equality goals, however, do not generally inform recent sets of family policies.

The concept of conservative gender regimes moves Walby’s focus beyond a narrow range of European and Anglophone democratic modernizations, and alongside the two cases discussed here, captures gender dynamics in other regions, notably Southern Europe and Latin America where Catholic family doctrine has shaped the patriarchal constitution of the family (see Lombardo and Alfonso 2020 on Spain), in other Asian countries where modernizers evoke Confucian ideologies of patriarchal gender hierarchies, and in Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asia, where Sharialaw similarly subordinates women to men, making men’s violence a family matter. Both and Kocabicak (2020) note the parallels between the legal foundation of the patriarchal family and its transformation for the Maghreb and Turkey.

In their real type contemporary formations, conservative gender regimes are not laggard domestic gender regimes, nor are they hybrids of other types; although traces of neoliberal dynamics are evident in the Japanese case, social democratic reforms characterize some policy domains in Germany. (Likewise, traces of conservatism turn up in neoliberal gender regimes.) Unfortunately, authoritarian modernizations are far more common in the world than the democratic developments which have yielded Walby’s two ideal types. Thus, we view the further study of conservative gender regimes as an important contribution to a more encompassing theory of the varieties of gender regimes in Europe and beyond, and for informing feminist politics within these regimes.

Karen Shire is Professor of Comparative Sociology and Japanese Society at the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and Director of the Essener College for Gender Research. She was previously Guest Professor at the Institute of Global Leadership, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo. Her research is about employment transformations and social inequalities in European and Asian comparison. She is the co-editor of Transnationalization of Work (in German, Springer, 2018) and co-author of Flexibility and Employment (in German, Juventa 2015). Her recent work focusses on the gender dimension of human trafficking, welfare markets, and the making of cross-border labor markets.

Kumiko Nemoto is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Studies at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. She was previously Associate Professor at Western Kentucky University in the US. Her research focuses on gender, including masculinities, sexuality, work, management, and organizations. She is the author of two books, Too Few Women at the Top: The Persistence of Inequality in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2016) and Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire among Asian American/White Couples (Rutgers University Press, 2009). Her current research is a comparative study of women’s advancement in management in Norway and Japan.

Footnotes

1

In her earlier work (Walby 1990), the domestic and the public gender regimes were conceptualized as private and public patriarchy. From her later work (Walby 1997 onward), she uses “gender regime” in place of patriarchy, “domestic gender regime” in place of private patriarchy, and “public gender regime” in place of public patriarchy (arguing that the terms mean the same thing).

2

The distinction between types of public gender regimes enters Walby’s work later (Walby 2009, 2011).

3

In a similar manner, Moore’s third path, the communist modernization, also offers a basis for a more historical analysis of gender regimes in the Soviet Union and other formerly communist countries, now undergoing market transformations.

4

Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. Vom 18. August 1896. 1. Fassung – Reichsgesetzblatt 1896, S. 195, Nr. 21, ausgegeben am 24. 08. 1896, in Kraft seit 01. 01. 1900), available at http://www.koeblergerhard.de/Fontes/BGBDR18961900.htm (accessed July 29, 2019).

5

The Civil Code of Japan. Translated by Ludwig Loenholm. Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1898, available at https://archive.org/details/cu31924069576704/page/n11 (accessed July 29, 2019).

6

Registers existed for commoners in the Edo era preceding the Meiji period, but these typically recorded births and deaths for groups of five households (Fuess 2004; Ueno 2009).

7

All translations by the authors.

8

The national socialist regime replaced the law on marriage with its own family law, outlawing marriage with Jews, but also adding clauses of posthumous marriages with deceased soldiers.

9

It should also be noted that Therborn defines patriarchy in its literal sense as the authority of fathers over children. Only in as far as the “[p]owerful fathers are also husbands” does he consider it “logical and practical to extend the notion of patriarchy to the power of husbands (Therborn 2004, 8).

10

McArthur warned the thirty-nine female delegates elected not to form a women’s bloc and not to sacrifice their domestic roles for the sake of political participation (Koikari 2002, 24).

11

See the data bank of UN state reports on Japan at https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/TBSearch.aspx?Lang=en&TreatyID=3&DocTypeID=29 (accessed April 6, 2020).

Acknowledgments

This paper was initially prepared for the Workshop Varieties of Gender Regimes held on June 7, 2019 in London, co-organized by the Violence and Society Centre, City, University of London and the Essen College for Gender Research, University Duisburg-Essen. The workshop was supported by the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to Sylvia Walby, and the Violence and Society Centre, City, University of London.