The Entangling Net of Conditional Love

Specific traits compatible with the subordinate role are idealized and subordinates are exhorted to strive for the ideal. The more successful a subordinate is in achieving the idealized traits that have been assigned to her group, the more lovable and sought-after she becomes. Within the institutionalized structure of the intergroup relationship, a subordinate's best chance of success in life is

to excel in manifesting the traits and behaviors that have been designated for her group.

In this context, stereotypes about the subordinate group are in part meant as existential declarations and in part as ideals that subordinates should strive to attain. Thus, popular conceptions of the attributes of subordinates are a fusion of existential beliefs and moral strictures. The specific traits that are attached to subordinates are compatible with the tasks that are required of them in the expropriative exchange and with their subservient position in that exchange. The concept of "feminine" delineates a bundle of attributes that includes warmth, emotional and physical weakness and vulnerability, submissiveness, deference, dependence, and loyalty (Bell and Newby 1976; Rubin 1983; Cancian 1985, 1987). The inculcation of these traits in women is useful in itself, but it also makes women more vulnerable to a system of control based on conditional love. As Cancian has argued, women are rendered more dependent on male affection and protection by defining such traits as intrinsically feminine (Cancian 1985, 1987). In the antebellum South, slaves too were described and idealized as weak, dependent, deferential, loyal, and loving.

Subordinates who manifest the specified traits of their group are rewarded with love, affection, and praise. But subordinates who deviate from the stereotype are branded as "unfeminine" or as troublemakers, for which they may be punished, rebuked, ostracized, or ridiculed. The connection of these rules to the legitimation of the inequality between groups is brought out well by Bledsoe, in his Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1856):

There is no form of human excellence before which we bow with profounder deference than that which appears in a delicate woman, . . . and there is no deformity of human character from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature, and clamourous for the vocation and rights of men. (Bledsoe 1856, 224, quoted in Myrdal 1944, 1074)

By specifying and idealizing the traits of subordinates, members of the dominant group put themselves in the enviable position of being able to define what subordinates' needs are. This permits them to cast their own role as one of magnanimously providing for subordinates' needs. Dominant-group members are thus spared the unpleasantness of withholding something from subordinates that they themselves value—after all, subordinates have different needs than they do. This then clears the way for them to define their relationship with subordinates as one of charming complementarity and mutual obligation:

Slavery is the duty and obligation of the slave to labor for the mutual benefit of both master and slave, under a warrant to the slave of protection,

and a comfortable subsistence, under all circumstances. The person of the slave is not property, no matter what the fictions of the law may say; but the right to his labor is property and may be transferred like any other property, or as the right to the services of a minor or an apprentice may be transferred. Nor is the labor of the slave solely for the benefit of the master, but for the benefit of all concerned; for himself, to repay the advances made for his support in childhood, for present subsistence, and for guardianship and protection, and to accumulate a fund for sickness, disability, and old age. The master, as the head of the system, has a right to the obedience and labor of the slave, but the slave has also his mutual rights in the master; the right of protection, the right of counsel and guidance, the right of subsistence, the right of care and attention in sickness and old age. He also has a right in his master as the sole arbiter in all his wrongs and difficulties, and as a merciful judge and dispenser of law to award the penalty of his misdeeds. Such is American slavery, or as Mr. Henry Hughes happily terms it, "Warranteeism." (Elliott 1860, vii; see Genovese 1974 for numerous other examples of slaveholders' reconception of their expropriation of black labor as "a duty and a burden")

The relational basis of the inequality is thus cast in happier terms as a mutual interdependence between groups rather than as an expropriation of resources from one group to another.

Subordinates are unable to buffer themselves from the conditional love that is thus proffered by their betters. As long as the conditions are not violated, individual subordinates may engage in the reciprocal warmth of affectionate relationships with individuals from the dominant group. But if an individual subordinate should violate the terms of the affection, he or she cuts off that source of love or affection without having any other organized source of interpersonal gratification available. Because the daily practice of the relationship is individualized and intimate, subordinates either return the love offered them by members of the dominant group, within the terms specified, or face probable exclusion from organized social life.

The more completely the dominant group can penetrate the day-to-day lives of subordinates, the more tightly it constrains the calculable options of subordinates as well as the visibility and subjective plausibility of alternative options. An implicit understanding based on conditional love is much more satisfactory to the dominant group than an explicit contract. The implicit arrangement raises the costs of noncompliance for subordinates. At the same time, it removes the specter of noncompliance from the explicit day-to-day communications between groups.