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SOME NOTES ON THE RELATIONS OF CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY

Zillah Eisenstein

This article attempts to clarify socialist feminism’s method of analysis. This involves a refocusing and redefinition, by feminism, of the historical Marxian approach. Radical feminist theory can be used to redirect the Marxian method toward understanding the structure of women’s oppression, particularly in terms of the sex-class structure, the family, and the hierarchical sexual division of labor and society.¹ One growing school of socialist feminists has been trying to do just this.² This integration is based upon a commitment to the transformation of the Marxist method through feminist analysis.³ The transformed Marxist method recognizes the previously unrecognized sexual spheres of power and the feminist questions require a new understanding of the specific historical processes of power. Juliet Mitchell fails to understand this systhesis when she suggests “we should ask the feminist questions but try to come up with some Marxist answers.”⁴ This implies a dichotomy between feminism and Marxist analysis, which stunts the analysis of socialist feminism.⁵

Refocusing the Marxist method (as well as its content) via feminism necessitates a reordering of priorities, particularly the question of consciousness in relation to the conditions of society. Questions of consciousness become a part of the discussion of the social reality. Reality itself comes to encompass the relations of class and sex and race. The relations between the private (personal) and public (political) become a major focus having particular consequence for the relations defining sexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. Along with this comes a focus on the importance of ideology. Thus, the dialectic will be self-consciously extended to the relations between consciousness, ideology, and social reality. This new way of viewing things—that society’s ideas and people’s consciousness are part of the objective social reality and that they operate out of the relations of sex, class, and race—is a product of the feminist assault on the inadequacies of the left, both in theory and practice.

The refocused Marxist methodology means using the theory of social relations to express the relations of capitalist patriarchy.⁶ Although this methodology is elucidated through the notion of class society and class conflict in Marx’s writing, it is possible to distinguish the theory of social relations from the content given it in existing Marxist analysis. It is important and possible to utilize the method while incorporating and yet moving beyond class analysis. Class analysis is necessary to our understanding but it is not sufficient for our purposes.

Marxist analysis is directed to the study of power. We can use its tools to understand any particular expression of power. That the tools have not been sufficiently used to do so is not an indictment of the analysis but of those who have used it. Marx used his theory of social relations—understanding “things” in their concrete connections—to understand the relations of power in society. Although his analysis was explicated through a discussion of class conflict, his method of analyzing social relations can be used to examine patriarchal struggle as well. This is different, however, from saying we can use the Marxist theory of social relations to answer feminist questions. This would put us back with Firestone’s analysis of a materialist history based on biology. Rather, we must use the transformed method to understand the points of contact between patriarchal and class history and to explicate the dialectic between sex and class, sex and race, race and class, and sex, race, and class.

It is impossible to develop an analysis of woman’s oppression which has a clear political purpose and strategy unless we deal with reality as it exists. The problem with radical feminism is that it has tried to do this by abstracting sex from other relations of power in society.⁷ It is not that radical feminists are unaware of these other relations of power, but they disconnect them. Class and race struggles are necessary for the understanding of patriarchal history; they are not separate histories in practice, although history is often written as if they were. Unless these relations are taken into account, male supremacy is viewed as a disconnected thing, not a process or power relation.

Much of the leftist analysis that spawned radical feminism did not take the commitments of the Marxist method seriously enough to transform it in necessary ways. It refused to continue to probe the question of power in its fullest material and ideological sense. Uniting radical feminism, class analysis, and the transformed Marxist methodology we now must focus upon the processes which define patriarchal and liberal ideology and social existence.

Developing Socialist Feminist Questions

A good starting point for a theory of woman’s oppression is with the questions why and how women are oppressed. Juliet Mitchell, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, states:

It seems to me that “why did it happen” and “historically when” are both false questions. The questions that should, I think, be asked in place of these are: how does it take place in our society? … in other words, we can start by asking how does it happen now?⁸

It may be true that the question, “Why did it happen?” is a false question; even if we could find out why it happened then, that might not explain why it happens now; nevertheless, it is still important to ask “Why does it happen now?” Beyond this, to fully elucidate how it happens now one must ask why sexual hierarchy and oppression are maintained. Why and how are connected questions. Either taken in isolation gives us only part of the answer. The question of how directs us to the immediate relations defining existing power arrangements, to the process of oppression. The question of why directs us to these same relations but necessitates our dealing with the existence of patriarchal history as a real force. In this sense both questions are necessary. They elucidate each other by interrelating the specific and yet universal dimensions of male supremacy.

The how and why of woman’s oppression has not been integrated in feminist theory. Radical feminism has asked why women are oppressed rather than how the process of power functions. Shulamith Firestone’s answer was that woman’s reproductive function is inherently central to her oppression. “The sexual imbalance of power is biologically based.”⁹ Women are defined as reproducers, as a sex class. How women are oppressed is less clearly articulated, and it was Ti Grace Atkinson who began to discuss this. In Atkinson’s concept, sex class becomes a political construct. Women are not oppressed because of the biological fact of reproduction, but are oppressed by men who define this reproductive “capacity” as a function. “The truth is that childbearing isn’t the function of women. The function of childbearing is the function of men oppressing women.”¹⁰ It is society that collapses women’s purpose with her biological capacity. Sex class is not biological oppression, it is cultural oppression. The agent of oppression is the cultural and political definition of human sexuality as “heterosexuality.” The institutions of family and marriage, and the protective legal and cultural systems which enforce heterosexuality, are the bases of the political repression of women.

Although radical feminists ask why women are oppressed and are now beginning to ask how this comes about, they most often treat history as one piece—as patriarchal history. Although this brings great richness to the radical feminist analysis, by presenting a unifying history for women, we need to understand the particular forms of patriarchy in different historical periods. Otherwise we are left with an abstract rather than concrete history. For instance, patriarchy has had different and yet similar expressions in feudalism and in capitalism. The expression of women’s oppression is distinct though related in these two time periods. As Marc Bloch has noted:

The sentimental importance with which the epic [feudal] invested the relations of the maternal uncle and his nephew is but one of the expressions of a system in which the ties of relationship through women were nearly as important as those of paternal consanguinity. One proof of this is the clear evidence from the practices of name giving.¹¹

Children could take the name of either father or mother. There seem to have been no fixed rules about this and as a result the family seems to have been unstable as generations switched names. According to Bloch it was this very instability which feudal relations had to address. With the development of capitalism, and its necessarily new forms of economic relations, the family came to be defined more as the source of cultural and social stability. The family calmed the days of early competitive capitalism,¹² whereas feudal relations themselves compensated for the unstable family order.

We must take into account two processes. One is history defined in terms of class—feudal, capitalist, socialist. The other is patriarchal history as it is structured by and structures these periods. For instance, motherhood, housewifery, and the family need to be understood as expressions of patriarchy at various historical moments because they are defined and structured differently in precapitalist and capitalist societies. These historical moments, however, are also part of an historically and culturally continuous reality, which doesn’t become concrete and real until it is understood in its particular form. Otherwise it becomes an abstraction and as such, a distorted generalized notion. This is not to disclaim the importance of understanding that patriarchy has an existence which cuts through different class history. Although patriarchy takes on specific qualities at specific moments, it cannot be understood fully, divorced from its universal existence. The universal elucidates the specifics and the specifics give reality to the universal.

If it is true that all social change begins with the leftovers of the previous society, then we must learn exactly what maintains patriarchal hierarchy. Today’s matrix of power exists through the particular constraints that capitalism can use to maintain the sexual hierarchy, but at the same time, the relations of capitalist patriarchy derive in part from precapitalist patriarchy, most specifically, feudal patriarchy. Any understanding of the relations of patriarchy has to treat them in their particular historical frame and any statement of the universal or unifying elements becomes an abstraction, albeit a necessary level of abstraction if we are to understand the unifying elements of patriarchal history. Both the specificity and universality of the relations of power must be defined to encompass the particular dynamic of male supremacy.

It is important, in a capitalist society, to understand both the enduring likenesses and differences between feudal patriarchy and capitalist patriarchy. The likenesses are important if we are to try to ensure that they do not continue in a new society. If the capitalist relations of patriarchy are connected to precapitalist forms, we need to challenge the precapitalist elements that are maintained in capitalist society. A ready example is the sexual division of labor. It has been maintained in capitalism and defined in a capitalist context while not specifically deriving from capitalist needs. The maintenance of these precapitalist forms constructs patriarchal history for us. For structuring life in the transition from capitalist patriarchy to feminist socialism, we need a theory of the revolutionary family which no longer accepts the birthmarks of the patriarchal family and sexual hierarchy.¹³

Beginning Notes on the Social Relations of Power

Let us begin with the question of how and why women are exploited and oppressed in capitalist patriarchy.¹⁴ We focus on these questions because understanding women’s oppression requires examining the power structures existing in our society. These are the capitalist class structure, the hierarchical order of the masculine and feminine worlds of patriarchy, and the racial division of labor which is practiced in a particular form in capitalism but with precapitalist roots in slavery. Capitalist patriarchy as an hierarchical, exploitative, oppressive system requires racial oppression alongside sexual and class oppression. Women share an oppression with each other; but what they share as sexual oppression is differentiated along class and racial lines in the same way that patriarchal history has always differentiated humanity according to class and race. Clearly, the black woman of American slave society experienced patriarchical oppression, but this experience was complicated by the other power structures to which she was subjected. As a laborer she was allowed no feminine “fragility,” as a woman she was “raped” into submission,¹⁵ and as a slave she endured a subhuman status. Instead of seeing sex or class, or race or class, or sex or race, we need to see the process and relations of power. If we direct ourselves to the process of power we can begin to learn how and why we are oppressed, which is the first step in changing our oppression.

None of the processes in which a woman engages can be understood separate from the relations of the society, which she embodies and which are reflected in the ideology of society. For instance, the act of giving birth to a child is only termed an act of motherhood if it reflects the relations of marriage and the family. Otherwise the very same act can be termed adultery, and the child is “illegitimate” or a “bastard.” The term “mother” may have a significantly different meaning when different relations are involved—as in “unwed mother.” It depends on what relations are embodied in the act. Similarly, what is defined as sexual love and marital bliss in one set of relations is prostitution in another, rape in still another. What one woman does in the home of another, or what she does when hired by a man is seen as domestic work and is paid, but what a woman does as wife or mother in her own home is considered a labor of love, is not defined as work by the society, and is not done for direct wages.

Thus the social relations of society define the particular activity a woman engages in at a given moment. Outside these relations “woman” becomes an abstraction. A moment cannot be understood outside the relations of power which shape it and the ideology which defines, protects, and maintains it. In describing these moments, understanding the ideology of a society becomes crucial because the social relations of capitalist patriarchy are maintained through the ideologies of liberalism, male supremacy, and racism. Here one finds the interpretation of any particular moment that is necessary to the maintenance of capitalist patriarchy.

The Relations of the Family

The family is a series of relations which define women’s activities both internal and external to it. Because the family is a structure of relationships which connect individuals to the economy, the family is a social, economic, political, and cultural unit of a society. It is historical in its formation, not a simple biological unit. Like women’s roles, the family is not “natural”; it reflects particular relations of the society, particular needs to be filled.

What are some of the relations that define the family? First, woman is a reproducer of children who become workers for the economy and members of the society. She also socializes these children for their roles in the work world and the society as a whole. She labors to feed, clothe, and care for these children, and for her husband. In these capacities, the mother is a domestic laborer within the economy and a nurturer of the social world as well.¹⁶

Second, within her role in the family woman is a consumer. Consumption is the other side of production.¹⁷ She buys the things the family needs and the economy has to sell. She cares for these goods—by laundering a new dress or preparing a meal. As a consumer, woman is working to select, prepare, and maintain the goods. A woman is importantly intertwined with the economy and society. She is doing what is absolutely necessary for the economy—consuming.

Although motherhood includes the activities we have called domestic labor, it should not be reduced to them. Motherhood should be understood as a more complex reality than domestic labor within the relations of capital—rather, as a patriarchal institution not reducible to any class reality. Domestic labor and housewifery may be the specific capitalist patriarchal statement of motherhood,¹⁸ but we must be careful not to lose the connection to the pre-existing historical notion of mother and all this concept reflects about the relations of male supremacy.

These relations within the family devalue women in the marketplace when they seek employment. In 1970, only 7 percent of American women (as opposed to 40 percent of American men) earned more than $10,000 a year. Stated differently, 93 percent of the American women who worked earned less than $10,000.¹⁹ Woman’s labor in the home becomes a liability for finding jobs for pay outside the home. She is paid less in the labor force because of the relations which tie her to the family. Her labor is defined as free or cheap.

We can already see that women are ghettoized in the labor force and that their work there does not challenge the male supremacist organization of society. The influx of women into the lowest ranks of the labor force reflects the patriarchal necessity of male hierarchy for the society at large. Male supremacy is maintained through class hierarchy. This inflexibility is most clearly seen in the contradiction in women’s lives—the double day of work. Woman is both worker and mother.

What are the relations which define a woman as mother in the first place? What defines the patriarchal organization of labor? In other words, why are women oppressed as women? The answer often given is that a woman’s biology distinguishes her from a man. But even though a woman’s relation to reproduction may have initially defined her as the exchange object rather than man,²⁰ the history of male supremacy and its particular relation to capitalism reflects a series of relations which are not now limited to this unique characteristic. There are a whole series of relations that exist as a result of this definition of woman as reproducer that cannot be “reduced” to their origin. Both cultural and political relations have been defined and redefined to maintain the hierarchy of sexual relations. The initial reason for the hierarchy—perhaps a fear of woman’s reproductive capacity, given the lack of biological knowledge of just what it entailed—no longer exists as such. But society still needs a sexual hierarchy because of the way its relations have been structured since then.

If the distinguishing biological characteristic between men and women is woman’s reproductive capacity, then we need to see why and how it is used as part of male supremacist relations, which have constructed a more troublesome system of inequality than the initial source. This is not to understate the importance of understanding woman’s biological self as a reproducer, but it is to say that this understanding must entail the political relations which define it at any moment. The relations of production and reproduction, not an abstracted notion of biology, define the relationship woman has to herself and society as a reproductive being. To focus on the fact that woman as reproducer is the universal crosscultural characteristic of male supremacy and therefore the source of the problem is to formulate the problem incorrectly. Looking at this same reality—the control of women by reproduction—does not focus sufficiently on the relations defining reproduction in the society. It is not reproduction itself that is the problem but the relations which define and reinforce it.

Patriarchy has been sustained through the sexual division of labor and society which has been based on a cultural, social, economic usage of woman’s body as a vessel of reproduction. Women were exchanged as gifts for what they could bear. Inequalities arose from the mechanism used to celebrate and/or control woman’s position as reproducer.²¹ Although the systems of exchange have changed, the relations which they produced became part and are still a part (although redefined) of patriarchal history. Because women were often given and were not the givers, because they had no control over the arrangements surrounding their lives, because they often found themselves in new surroundings and ignorant of the ways of the community, women came to experience the exchange system as a system of relations which excluded them from decisions, purposive activity, and control. This exists, although in somewhat different form, in capitalist patriarchal society. Women marry, lose their names, move to new communities when their husbands’ jobs necessitate it, feel lonely, and, find it difficult to meet people. And even though the majority of women in lower economic groups work in the labor force, men are treated with priority. Lesbians and other women who choose not to identify closely with a man and conform to the heterosexual norm of marriage, family, and housewife are even more isolated and ostracized. These relations express the priority given men. They define a certain control over the woman’s life.

When one looks at relations of reproduction, what one really focuses upon is a system of hierarchical control and ordering which all existing societies have needed and used. Patriarchy as male supremacy has supplied this order, even while the economic organizations of societies change. This is not to imply that patriarchal systems of control have not changed, but they have changed while maintaining their male supremacist structure and without altering the basic impact of male supremacy. During the change from feudalism to capitalism, however, the basic economic class structure and its control system does change.

Because patriarchy is a system of power, it is incomplete to say that men are the oppressors without explaining that they are oppressors because they embody the relations of patriarchy. To speak of individual men as “things,” rather than as reflecting the relations of power is to conceive of male power in abstract rather than concrete form. A man as a biological being, were he to exist outside patriarchal relations, would be a hollow shell. In patriarchal history, it is his biology that identifies him with the relations of power. Although some wish to say that men’s power is expressed on an individual level through physical strength, I think that this is a true but very limited notion of the power men have in the system of patriarchy. It is rather the relations of sexual hierarchy that allow men to express their power. They have internalized the relations and act upon them daily. A man’s sexual power is not within his individual being alone. To destroy patriarchal relations we must destroy the structures of sexual, racial, and class hierarchy partially maintained through the sexual division of labor. If we change the social relations of power, men have to change, because they will no longer have their hierarchical base.

Any of the particular oppressions experienced by women in capitalist patriarchy exhibit relations of the society. As things, they are completely neutral. Abstracted from reality there is nothing innately oppressive about contraception, pregnancy, abortion, childrearing, or affectionate familial relations. However, they all express a very particular oppression for women in this society. If contraceptive methods were devised for both men and women, with a real concern for our health rather than profits, and if abortion was not laden with patriarchal values and did not cost more money than it should, contraception and abortion would be different experiences.²² If men and women believed that childrearing was a social responsibility, rather than a woman’s responsibility, if we did not believe that childhood affection was dependent on privacy rather than intimacy, the “relations” of childrearing would be significantly different. If being pregnant did not involve a woman in patriarchal medical care, if it did not mean having to deal with the relations defining private health care, if it did not mean the loss of pay and the incurrence of financial obligations, and if it meant bringing life into a socialist feminist society, the act of childbirth would take on a wholly different meaning.

Emphasis on the patriarchal experience in capitalist patriarchy reveals, therefore, the relations of power in any particular moment in society. Since life activity in this society is always in process, in process through power relations, we must try to understand the process rather than isolated moments. To understand the process is to understand the way the process may be changed.

Notes

1. See the literature of radical feminism: Ti Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links, 1974); Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1970); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970); Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970) and Monster (New York: Vintage, 1972); Red Stockings, Feminist Revolution (New York: Red Stockings, Inc., 1975).

2. I am particularly interested in defining the newer and politically more complex portion of socialist feminism rather than any particular sectarian line. This is the position least well articulated at the Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, summer, 1975: that woman’s oppression reflects the problem of capitalism and patriarchy. Radical feminism and Marxist analysis are both viewed as necessary elements in the theory.

3. I am indebted to correspondence with Marla Erlien for clarification of this point.

4. Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 99.

5. Firestone’s analysis is limited by this structural dichotomy. She says she will develop a “materialist history” (Marxist method) based on sex itself (feminist question). In the end she is unable to construct this history because of this dichotomy. Her substitution of sexual oppression for class oppression distorts reality. It limits the possibilities of developing a “real materialism” based on sex and class. See Firestone, Dialectic of Sex. Also see Mitchell’s discussion of Firestone in Woman’s Estate.

6. See Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973) and Capital, vols. 1 and 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).

7. At the same moment that radical feminism suffers from abstraction by dealing insufficiently with economic class reality it is responsible for explicating the “personal” sexual experience, and in this way remedies the earlier abstraction of the Marxist method. For a discussion of this see Nancy Hartsock, “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Quest 2, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 67–80, and this volume.

8. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 364–65.

9. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 9.

10. Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, p. 5.

11. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 137. See also Oliver Cox, Caste, Class and Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959) and Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (New York: Harvest Books, 1933).

12. See Linda Gordon, Families (a New England Free Press pamphlet); A. Gordon, M. J. Buhle, N. Schrom, “Women in American Society,” Radical America 5 (July-August 1971); Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (Clifton, N. J.: Augustus Kelly, 1969); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (a Socialist Revolution pamphlet).

13. See literature on how socialist countries treat the particularly patriarchal elements of their society: “Women in Transition, Cuba Review 4, no. 2 (September 1974); Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1974); Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1972); “Women in Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Dhofar, China and Japan,” Red Rag, no. 9 (June 1975); Judith Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows: The Significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 2, no. 43 (1975) and in this volume; Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); Linda Gordon, The Fourth Mountain: Women in China (a New England Free Press pamphlet).

14. See Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973); Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

15. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1 and 2 (reprinted from Black Scholar, December 1971).

16. See the varied discussions of women’s domestic labor: Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation (a New England Free Press pamphlet); Peggy Morton, “Women’s Work Is Never Done,” in Women Unite (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1972); Mariarosa dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” and Selma James, “A Woman’s Place” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (a Falling Wall Press, Ltd. pamphlet, 1972); Ira Gerstein, “Domestic Work and Capitalism” and Lise Vogel, “The Earthly Family,” Radical America 7 (July-October 1973); Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism,” New Left Review 83 (January-February 1973), with postscript in Red Pamphlet, no. 8 (Britain: IMG pub.); B. Magas, H. Wainwright, Maragaret Coulson, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism—A Critique” and Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labor,” New Left Review 89 (January-February 1975), and, for the latter, this volume.

17. See “Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970) for a discussion of the relationship between production and consumption. See also Amy Bridges and Batya Weinbaum, “The Other Side of the Paycheck,” in this volume.

18. See Ann Oakley, Woman’s Work (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

19. Karen Lindsey, “Do Women Have Class?” Liberation 20, no. 2 (January-February 1977): 18.

20. I am very much indebted here to the discussion of Rubin, “Traffic in Women.”

21. See Rubin, “Traffic in Women”; Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; and Miriam Kramnick, “Ideology of Motherhood: Images and Myths,” paper delivered at Cornell Women’s Studies Program, 14 November 1975.

22. Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).