The Myth of Empowerment by Dana Becker

Author:Dana Becker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814799253
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2005-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

power in the lower case

As has been mentioned previously, in the self-in-relation model, power and empowerment are viewed as nonhierarchical and noncompetitive. In Toward a New Psychology of Women, Miller defined power as “the capacity to implement,” or “self-directed effectiveness,” and she stressed the particular importance of putting into play “the abilities women have already.” Miller saw the possibility of bringing “womanly qualities” to power: “women can bring more power to power by using it when needed and not using it as a poor substitute for other things—like cooperation. … The goal is … a new integration of the whole area of effective power and womanly strengths as we are seeking to define them.” Women have power, Miller asserted; they only need to “implement” that power and the new abilities that they “are developing.” Ideally, she maintained, power should not be “for oneself” or “over others.” She made a distinction “between the ability to influence others and the power to control and restrict them [my italics]. … Women need the power to advance their own development, but they do not ‘need’ the power to limit the development of others.”100 Such was the allergy to the idea of putting one’s own needs ahead of the needs of others—ahead of relationship—that Miller felt compelled to caution women against avoiding the use of power on their own behalf. Womanly “influence,” as we have noted, has been long celebrated; indeed, it was the sole power afforded to women within the cult of true womanhood. If the republican liberal ideal of individual sovereignty for which Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought in 1892 is based on the masculine model of “power over,”101 is the nineteenth-century power of “relationality” to be restored to take its place in the new millennium?

In the Stone Center model, women’s desire should be solely relational; it is feared that if desire is individual, it may open a Pandora’s box of ills the patriarchal society has known so well. As Judith Jordan warns, “violent relationships [are] based on competition of need and the necessity for establishing hierarchies of dominance, entitlement, and power.”102 Of course the emphasis upon caretaking—in some cases to the point of self-abnegation—in the socialization of many girls dramatically reduces the possibility that they will elect to act in their self-interest rather than in the interest of others. Possessive individualism is not so easily dispensed with. As we discussed in chapter 5, the ideas of self-ownership and the realization of one’s potential have formed part of our cultural legacy for centuries. It is easier to see how, in Miller’s parlance, women could use “power to advance their development” without wielding power over others than it is to see how they could “advance their own development” without being for themselves.

When Miller asks whether “tradition made it difficult to conceive of the possibility that freedom and maximum use of our resources—our initiative, our intellect, our powers—can occur within a context that requires simultaneous responsibility for the care and growth of others and of the

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