Early Frankfurt School saw women’s emancipation as entailing new forms of dependence.

Evidence

For example, simply to oppose a matriarchal principle in Bachofen’s sense to the current patriarchal society would be to ignore the subtle transformation of the woman’s role in modern life. As Strindberg and Ibsen had illustrated in their plays, so Horkheimer argued, the emancipation of women in bourgeois society proved less of a liberation than once assumed. Women in most cases had adapted to the system and become a conservative force through their total dependence on their husbands. In fact, children learned to obey the prevailing order at their mother’s knee, despite the potential for an alternative social system implicit in the traditional matriarchal ethic of warmth, acceptance, and love. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 415

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly related to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — Horkheimer’s claim that bourgeois ‘emancipation’ of women produced new dependence parallels that essay’s argument that moral panics over dress encode deeper identity/class politics; also connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ themes of women’s constrained roles.