In the dissertation’s final chapter, ‘Tactics, strategies, ends and means: foci for
change and their implications’, I insist:
Solutions to the problem of women run the gamut from what R.D. Laing has
termed the individual pirouette of change and repentance to take-over of the
machinery of the state. The questions involved in examining the political
strategies of the women’s movement and their foreseeable consequences are
many. The analyst must relate proposals for change back to the causes assigned
as the source of women’s dilemma. There should be a logical relation between
the image of what precisely is wrong, and where, and the prescriptions put
forth to alter the situation and implement desirable change. As Waltz puts it:
‘Is the image adequate, or has the analyst simply seized upon the most
spectacular cause or the one he thinks most susceptible to manipulation and
ignored other causes of equal or greater importance?’ Corollary questions
suggested by Waltz include whether or not the final proposals can be imple-
mented and how attempts to implement them will affect other goals. I will
relate these questions back to the four foci most commonly pinpointed as the
source or sources of the problem of women in contemporary society, namely,
(a) woman herself or man himself, (b) the relations between women and men,
(c) various subsystems intermediary between the individual and macro-level
structures, and (d) the macro-system itself or economic and political structures.
In exploring the ways feminists have looked at the problem, I will attempt to
determine whether their proposals for change bear a logical relation to the
arena cited as the chief sources of the problem. It is obvious that one’s
proposals for what is necessary to give women equality will differ depending
upon whether one locates the trouble in capitalist society, the family, or male
chauvinism.^7In ways I had forgotten, I had adopted Waltz’s structural analysis to my own
purposes, with this difference: his structural analysis pitches itself to interstate
relations and the presumption of an anarchic sphere within which those relations
occur, with no final arbiter to disputes between and among states, save a resort to
self-help on the part of states, whereas my structural approach ended, more or less,
at the boundaries of states. When I talked about system I was referring to the
domestic political arena. I concluded that women’s inequality was overdetermined,
that cause and consequence, the political and the personal, percolated in and through
the social system, thus ‘any image for change frozen at a level of complexity beneath
the system is perforce inadequate’.^8 But it was also clear that one could not safely
ignore levels beneath the level of the state.
Let us move to the present moment. As taken up by several generations of
students of international relations, the conceptual money is placed on the structural
or systemic level. But not so fast – or so I shall argue. There is wiggle room in
Waltz’s classic work. This wiggle room exists alongside rather air-tight formulations
that privilege the systemic level. Sorting this out is an important task and it bears
Woman, the state, and war 179