Women, Success, and Civil Society: Submission to, or Subversion of, the Achievement Principle
Women, Success, and Civil Society: Submission to, or Subversion of, the Achievement Principle

Summary/Abstract: I attempt to analyze the phenomenon of so-called «success-avoidance» neither in terms of the psychological mechanism of “fear of success,” as described by a number of sociologists and social-psychologists from the late 1960’s onward, nor in light of the semi-conscious conformity of women to gender-role expectations, but — as far as these aspects can be separated — through the complex and ambiguous impact of those life experiences of women that produce historically specific forms of their relative “disinterestedness” in the socially prescribed and normatively fixed forms of success (or, perhaps, these lead to a different definition of success by women?). Needless to say, I am not trying to deny the explanatory value of the gender-role expectation model, nor, even less, to underestimate the obvious and often very obtrusive external barriers to success for women. By expanding our perspective, however, we can hopefully arrive not only at a more elaborate, and therefore more adequate, explanation of the “success-avoidance” phenomenon, but also at the formulation of a “strategic” alternative for the women’s movement, which can be expressed as the dilemma between submission to, or subversion of, the “achievement principle,” as it functions in contemporary industrial societies.

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