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ОглавлениеDEVELOPING A THEORY OF CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY AND SOCIALIST FEMINISM
Zillah Eisenstein
Introduction
Radical feminists and male leftists, in confusing socialist women and socialist feminists, fail to recognize the political distinction between being a woman and being a feminist. But the difference between socialist women and socialist feminists needs to be articulated if the ties between radical feminism and socialist feminists are to be understood. Although there are socialist women who are committed to understanding and changing the system of capitalism, socialist feminists are committed to understanding the system of power deriving from capitalist patriarchy. I choose this phrase, capitalist patriarchy, to emphasize the mutually reinforcing dialectical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual structuring. Understanding this interdependence of capitalism and patriarchy is essential to the socialist feminist political analysis. Although patriarchy (as male supremacy) existed before capitalism, and continues in postcapitalist societies, it is their present relationship that must be understood if the structure of oppression is to be changed. In this sense socialist feminism moves beyond singular Marxist analysis and isolated radical feminist theory.
Power is dealt with in a dichotomous way by socialist women and radical feminists: it is seen as deriving from either one’s economic class position or one’s sex. The critique of power rooted in the male/female distinction focuses most often on patriarchy. The critique of power rooted in the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction focuses on capitalism. One either sees the social relations of production or the social relations of reproduction,1 domestic or wage labor, the private or public realms, the family or the economy, ideology or material conditions, the sexual division of labor or capitalist class relations as oppressive. Even though most women are implicated on both sides of these dichotomies, woman is dealt with as though she were not. Such a conceptual picture of woman hampers the understanding of the complexity of her oppression. Dichotomy wins out over reality. I will attempt here to replace this dichotomous thinking with a dialectical approach.2
The synthesis of radical feminism and Marxist analysis is a necessary first step in formulating a cohesive socialist feminist political theory, one that does not merely add together these two theories of power but sees them as interrelated through the sexual division of labor. To define capitalist patriarchy as the source of the problem is at the same time to suggest that socialist feminism is the answer. My discussion uses Marxist class analysis as the thesis, radical feminist patriarchal analysis as the antithesis, and from the two evolves the synthesis of socialist feminism.
Thesis: Woman as Class
1. Marx: Revolutionary Ontology and Women’s Liberation
The importance of Marxist analysis to the study of women’s oppression is twofold. First, it provides a class analysis necessary for the study of power. Second, it provides a method of analysis which is historical and dialectical. Although the dialectic (as method) is most often used by Marxists to study class and class conflict, it can also be used to analyze the patriarchal relations governing women’s existence and hence women’s revolutionary potential. One can do this because Marxist analysis provides the tools for understanding all power relations; there is nothing about the dialectical and historical method that limits it to understanding class relations. I will use Marx’s analysis of class conflict, but I will also extract his method and apply it to some dimensions of power relations to which he was not sensitive. In this sense I am using Marx’s method to expand our present understanding of material relations in capitalism to material relations in capitalist patriarchy.
These relations are illuminated by Marx’s theories of exploitation and alienation. Since there has already been much discussion among socialist women and socialist feminists about the importance of the theory of exploitation to understanding woman’s oppression, I will mention this only briefly.3 I will focus on the importance of Marx’s dialectical revolutionary ontology as it is presented in his theory of alienation. Although his substantive discussion of alienation applies to women workers in the labor force and in qualified ways to nonpaid domestic workers as housewives, I am particularly interested in his method of analysis. By not reducing the analysis to class and class conflict as expressed in the theory of exploitation, the dialectical method present in the theory of alienation can be extended to the particular revolutionary potential of women. Essentially this means that although the theory of alienation is inclusive of exploitation it should not be reduced to it.4
The theory of alienation and its commitment to “species life” in communist society is necessary to understanding the revolutionary capacity of human beings.5 “Species beings” are those beings who ultimately reach their human potential for creative labor, social consciousness, and social living through the struggle against capitalist society, and who fully internalize these capacities in communist society. This basic ontological structure defines one’s existence alongside one’s essence. Reality for Marx is thus more than mere existence. It embodies within it a movement toward human essence. This is not a totally abstract human essence but rather an essence we can understand in historical contexts. “Species being” is the conception of what is possible for people in an unalienated society; it exists only as essence in capitalist society.
Without this conception human beings would be viewed as exploited in capitalist relations, but they would not necessarily be understood as potentially revolutionary. Exploitation, without this concept in the theory of alienation, would leave us with an exploited person. But because of the potential of species life in the individual, the exploited worker is also the potential revolutionary. Without the potential of species life we would have Aristotle’s happy slaves, not Marx’s revolutionary proletariat. And this potential exists in men and women, regardless of their position in the class structure or their relationship to exploitation. The actualizing of this potential, however, is differentiated according to one’s class.
With his theory of alienation, Marx is critically probing the nature of capitalism. By capitalism, Marx and Engels referred to the entire process of commodity production. In examining the exploitation inherent in this process, Marx developed his theory of power. Power or powerlessness derives from a person’s class position; hence oppression is a result of capitalist organization and is based in a lack of power and control. Through productive labor capitalist society exploits the worker who creates surplus value for the bourgeoisie. The surplus labor, which is inherent in profit, is derived from the difference between the actual and necessary labor time of the worker.
Productive labor, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage-labor which, exchanged against the valuable part of capital (the part of the capital that is spent on wages), reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labor-power), but in addition produces surplus-value for the capitalist … only that wage labor is production which produces capital.6
The class structure, which manifests itself in social, political, and cultural forms as well, is economic at its base. Society is divided into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The basis of separation and conflict between the two is the relation each one has to the modes of production; hence the proletariat’s exploitation, in which surplus value is extracted from their productive labor, is their oppression.
This Marxist indictment of capitalist relations is subsumed into a revolutionary ontology of social and human existence. It posits within each individual a dialectic between essence and existence which is manifested as revolutionary consciousness in society. Both the criticism of class existence as alienating and exploitative and the revolutionary ontology of the theory make Marxist analysis critical to developing a feminist theory which incorporates but moves beyond a theory of class consciousness.
When extended to women, this revolutionary ontology suggests that the possibility of freedom exists alongside exploitation and oppression, since woman is potentially more than what she is. Woman is structured by what she is today—and this defines real possibilities for tomorrow; but what she is today does not determine the outer limits of her capacities or potentialities. This is of course true for the alienated worker. While a worker is cut off from his/her creative abilities s/he is still potentially a creative being. This contradiction between existence and essence lies, therefore, at the base of the revolutionary proletariat as well as the revolutionary woman. One’s class position defines consciousness for Marx, but, if we utilize the revolutionary ontological method, it need not be limited to this. If we wish to say that a woman is defined in terms of her sex as well, patriarchal relations define her consciousness and have implications for her revolutionary potential as a result. By locating revolutionary potential as it reflects conflicts between people’s real conditions (existence) and possibilities (essence), we can understand how patriarchal relations inhibit the development of human essence. In this sense, the conception of species life points to the revolutionary potential of men and women.
The social relations defining the potential for woman’s revolutionary consciousness are more complex than Marx understood them to be. Marx never questioned the hierarchical sexual ordering of society. He did not see that this further set of relations made species life unavailable to women, and hence that its actualization could not come about through the dismantling of the class system alone. Nevertheless, his writings on women are important because of his commitment to uncover the tensions between species life and capitalist alienated forms of social experience for both men and women.
There are partial statements on the family and women’s exploitation in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Capital. Marx states his position on the bourgeois family in The Communist Manifesto, where he sees the family relation as having been reduced to a mere money relation.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain…. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and then children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.7
The relations of private property become the mode of exchange. The development of these bourgeois priorities transforms social relations in the family, and, as Marx makes clear in The German Ideology, the family, which is seen as the only truly social relationship, becomes a subordinate need.8 The concerns of private property and possession pervade man-woman relations. In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx writes: “The species relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce. The woman is bought and sold.”9 The mentality of “having” twists species relationships into those of ownership and domination, and marriage into prostitution. And so in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx writes:
Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the animal form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property…. Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s subjective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community.10
Marx saw women’s problems as arising from their status as mere instruments of reproduction, and thus he saw the solution in the socialist revolution. In the Manifesto he wrote that “the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution, both public and private.”11 The bourgeois family is seen in Marx’s writings as an instrument of capitalist society, with no dimensions particular unto itself. Woman’s oppression is her exploitation in a class society through bourgeois marriage and the family. Woman is perceived as just another victim, undistinguished from the proletariat in general, of the pernicious class division of labor. The sexual division of labor as the sexual definition of roles, purposes, activities, etc., had no unique existence for Marx. He had little or no sense of woman’s biological reproduction or maternal functions as critical in creating a division of labor within the family. As a result, Marx perceived the exploitation of men and women as deriving from the same source and assumed that their oppression could be understood in the same structural terms. Revolutionary consciousness is limited to understanding the class relation of exploitation.
There is no reason to doubt, however, that in communist society (where all are to achieve species existence) life would still be structured by a sexual division of labor which would entail different life options for men and women. Sex roles would preassign tasks to women which would necessitate continued alienation and isolation. Essence and existence would still not be one. Marx did not understand that the sexual division of labor in society organizes noncreative and isolating work particularly for women. The destruction of capitalism and capitalist exploitation by itself does not insure species existence, i.e., creative work, social community, and critical consciousness for women.
2. Women’s Exploitation Throughout History
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the division of labor in early precapitalist society in familial terms. The first division of labor is the “natural” division of labor in the family through the sex act. The act of child-breeding begins the division of labor.12 It is through this act that the first appearance of property arises within the family. For Marx and Engels, this is when wife and child become the slaves of the husband.
This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour power of others. Division of labour and private property are moreover identical expressions….13
Here are seeds of an early, albeit a crude, insight into the nature of sexual division of labor, although there is no discussion of it as such. What weakens and finally limits the insight is that, for Marx and Engels, this division of labor deriving from the sex act is coincidental and identical with the birth of private property—hence, “division of labor and private property are moreover identical expressions.”14 The division of labor has no specific quality of its own, and property arising from a division of labor in the act of procreation is not differentiatied from property arising from the relations of capital. Reproduction and production are seen as one, as they come to be analyzed in relation to the capitalist division of labor in society. There is no notion here that inequalities might arise from the sex act itself. Although reproduction is acknowledged as the first source of the division of labor, it never receives any specific examination. The German Ideology presents, then, a skeletal analysis of women’s condition as it changes through material conditions.
The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour imposed by the family. The social structure is therefore limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains; below them the members of the tribe; finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually.15
The division of labor “imposed by the family” is here spoken of as natural, and whether this means “necessary” or “good,” it is a division which was accepted by Marx and Engels. Here, then, the division of labor in the family is not viewed as reflective of the economic society which defines and surrounds it—as it is in the later Communist Manifesto—but rather at this early historical stage Marx and Engels see the family structuring the society and its division of labor. Marx and Engels’ analysis of the family continues: “there develops the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or ‘naturally’ by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc.”16
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels repeated the theme developed in The German Ideology: the “first division of labour is that between man and woman for child-breeding.”17 The first class antagonism thus arises with the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, but what this antagonism is based on is never made clear.18 Engels’ claim is that the first class antagonism accompanies (arises with) the antagonism between man and woman. One would not think that the antagonism referred to was one of class. Yet he ultimately spoke of the conflict between man and woman as class conflict; the man represents the bourgeoisie within the family, the wife represents the proletariat.19 But the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are positions of power deriving from a relation to the economic means of production, not to the sex act of reproduction. By categorizing men and women as classes, the relations of reproduction are subsumed under the relations of production. It is contradictory that Engels acknowledges male-female relations within the family as defining the division of labor in society and yet completely subsumes them under categories of analysis related to reproduction. He offers no explanation that could resolve this dilemma because it stands outside the terms of his analysis.
We have seen that Engels acknowledges that the division of labor emanates from the family to the society. Yet the categories of analysis explaining the slavery of the woman in the family derive entirely from the relations of production. The family comes to be defined by the historical economic modes; it does not itself take part in defining the economy as well as the society, and it is no longer spoken of as a source of the division of labor coincident with economic relations. Economic existence comes to determine the family.20 Hence, Engels forgot his own analysis of the “first division of labour” and assumed that the family will disintegrate with the elimination of capitalism instead of analyzing how the family itself comes to support an economic mode. Although he acknowledges the problem of woman’s existence within the private domestic sphere—outside and opposed to social production—he sees this as reflecting the relations of production rooted in private property. Woman’s activity in reproduction (which limits her activity in production) is not seen as problematic.
The family has become a microcosm of the political economy for Engels: “It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.”21 The man is the bourgeoisie, the woman, the proletariat. What is most interesting is that Engels does not use the categories of male as bourgeoisie and female as proletariat outside of the family. There people are assigned class positions according to their relations to the means of production, not their sex. He uses different criteria inside and outside the family to define membership within a class. If these categories were built on like bases of power, the same units of analysis would be applicable both in and out of the family. And if one wants to say that ultimately the usage of proletariat/bourgeoisie by Engels within the family is economic, there are evidently still other considerations involved. If this were not so, then he would not have (1) class divisions in the family as bourgeoisie-male/proletariat-female, and (2) class divisions in society in terms of ownership-nonownership of the means of production. Even though, for him, these ultimately mean the same thing, what do they reflect initially about the relations of the family and capitalism? It would seem that these considerations have to do with power emanating from the sexual differences between men and women in their relations to reproduction. This, however, was not grasped by Engels.
Most of the time Engels works from the simple equation that oppression equals exploitation. Even though Engels recognized that the family conceals domestic slavery, he believed at the same time that there were no differences (in kind) between domestic slavery and the wage-slavery of the husband. They both were derived from capitalism: “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large social scale and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.”22 The real equality of women would come with the end of exploitation by capital and the transference of private housework to public industry. But given his lack of understanding of the sexual division of labor, even public domestic work would, for Engels, most probably remain woman’s work.
In conclusion, the analysis sketched by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, and then further developed by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, reveals their belief that the family, at least historically, structured the division of labor in society, and that this division of labor reflects the division of labor in the sex act. Initially, the family structure defined the structure of society.
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a two-fold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.23
This perception is lost, however, in the discussion of the family in capitalist society, for here the family comes to be viewed as just another part of the superstructure, totally reflective of class society, and relations of reproduction become subsumed under the relations of production. The point is not that the family doesn’t reflect society, but that through both its patriarchal structure and patriarchal ideology the family and the need for reproduction also structure society. This reciprocal relationship, between family and society, production and reproduction, defines the life of women. The study of women’s oppression, then, must deal with both sexual and economic material conditions if we are to understand oppression, rather than merely understand economic exploitation. The historical materialist method must be extended to incorporate women’s relations to the sexual division of labor and society as producer and reproducer as well as to incorporate the ideological24 formulation of this relationship. Only then will her existence be understood in its true complexity and will species life be available to her too.
Antithesis: Woman as Sex
1. Patriarchy and the Radical Feminists
Although the beginnings of radical feminism are usually considered to coincide with the beginnings of the recent women’s liberation movement—around 1969–1970—radical feminism in fact has important historical ties to the liberal feminism25 of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Taylor Mill, women who spoke of sexual politics long before Kate Millett. These women understood in their own fragmented way that men have power as men in a society organized into “sexual spheres.” But while they spoke of power in caste terms, they were only beginning to understand the structure of power enforced upon them through the sexual division of labor and society. The claims of these feminists remained reformist because they did not make the necessary connections between sexual oppression, the sexual division of labor, and the economic class structure.
Radical feminism today has a much more sophisticated understanding of sexual power than did these feminist forebears and has thus been able to replace the struggle for the vote and for legal reform with the revolutionary demand for the destruction of patriarchy. It is the biological family, the hierarchical sexual division of society, and sex roles themselves which must be fundamentally reorganized. The sexual division of labor and society expresses the most basic hierarchical division in our society between masculine and feminine roles. It is the basic mechanism of control for patriarchal culture. It designates the fact that roles, purposes, activity, one’s labor, are determined sexually. It expresses the very notion that the biological distinction, male/female, is used to distinguish social functions and individual power.26
Radical feminists have not only found the analysis of Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Taylor incomplete, but they have, in much the same way, found the politics and theories of today’s left insufficient: existing radical analyses of society also fail to relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system. Sexual, not economic, power seemed to be central to any larger and meaningful revolutionary analysis. These women were not satisfied with the Marxist definition of power, or with the equation between women’s oppression and exploitation. Economic class did not seem to be at the center of their lives.27 History was perceived as patriarchal, and its struggles have been struggles between the sexes. The battle lines are drawn between men and women, rather than between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the determining relations are of reproduction, not production.
For radical feminists patriarchy is defined as a sexual system of power in which the male possesses superior power and economic privilege. Patriarchy is the male hierarchical ordering of society. Although the legal-institutional base of patriarchy was more explicit in the past, the basic relations of power remain intact today. The patriarchal system is preserved, via marriage and the family, through the sexual division of labor and society. Patriarchy is rooted in biology rather than in economics or history. Manifested through male force and control, the roots of patriarchy are located in women’s reproductive selves. Woman’s position in this power hierarchy is defined not in terms of the economic class structure but in terms of the patriarchal organization of society.
Through this analysis, radical feminists bridge the dichotomy between the personal and the public. Sex as the personal becomes political as well, and women share their position of oppression because of the very sexual politics of the society. The structuring of society through the sexual division limits the activities, work, desires, and aspirations of women. “Sex is a status category with political implications.”28
2. Shulamith Firestone: Sexual Dialectics
In her book Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, Shulamith Firestone offered a paradigmatic expression of radical feminism. The specific oppression that women experience, she argued, is directly related to their unique biology. Woman’s reproductive function is inherently central to her oppression; thus, too, is the biological family. According to Firestone, “the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based.”29 Men and women are anatomically different and hence not equally privileged. The domination of one group by another is then derived from this biological male/female distinction.30 (Although there has been change and development since 1970 among radical feminists, as can be seen in Robin Morgan’s new book Going Too Far, the unifying thread among them is the concept of sex class as primary to understanding the relation of power.)
Firestone’s presentation of the idea of a sex class obviously departs from the classical Marxist meaning of class as an economic category denoting a relationship to the means of production. Woman, as a sex, is a class; man is the other and opposing class. This novel idea began the long and important process of trying to articulate the dynamic of sexual power. However, in trying to answer and reject the economic theory of power, as presented by Marxists, she artificially separates the sexual and economic spheres, replacing capitalism with patriarchy as the oppressive system. She fails to move further through an additive or synthesizing perspective because she chooses to deal with sexuality as the key oppression of modern times rather than to view oppression as a more complex reality. It is not that Firestone does not see economic oppression as problematic for women but that she does not view it as the key source of oppression. The either/or formulations about woman’s situation stunt the analysis, so that she cannot deal with the complex mix of woman’s existence. Dichotomy wins out over woman’s complexity. Thus, much as Marxist analysis is not extended to the specificity of women’s oppression, Firestone’s version of radical feminism cannot understand the full reality or historical specificity of our economic existence. Patriarchy remains a generalized ahistorical power structure.
In this framework the feminist revolution involves the elimination of male privilege through the elimination of sexual distinction itself and the destruction of the biological family as the basic form of social organization. Woman will then be freed from her oppressive biology, the economic independence of women and children will be created, and sexual freedoms not yet realized will develop.
The problem, however, is that woman’s body becomes the defining criteria of her existence. It also becomes the central focus in terms of freedom from her reproductive biology. This is a negative definition of freedom—freedom from—where what we need is a positive model of human development—freedom to develop the integration of mind and body. While clearly sexuality is the unique oppression of woman, this does not mean that it encompasses the totality of her situation or that it can express the full dimensions of human potentiality. It says what is different about women, but it doesn’t connect woman to the general structure of power. It cannot explain the complexity of power relationships in our society.
There are further problems. Firestone intends to present a synthesis of Marx and Freud. She attempts to do so, however, by negating the social and historical framework of Marx, by treating woman’s biology as an atemporal static condition. But inequality is inequality only in a social context, while Firestone thinks of it in terms of nature. Women’s and men’s bodies differ biologically, but to call this an inequality is to impose a social assessment on a biological difference.31 She acknowledges that one cannot justify a discriminatory sex class system in terms of its origin in nature, but one cannot explain it in such terms either.32 Firestone thus in effect accepts the patriarchal ideology of our own culture, when what is needed is an analysis of how woman’s sexuality has been interpreted differently throughout history.
For example, although sex roles existed in feudal society they were experienced differently than in advanced capitalist society because economic and sexual material life were different. Although the nuclear family is precapitalist as well as capitalist, it is actualized in different forms in different societies. To know there are universal elements to women’s oppression is important, but it has limited meaning when the specificity of our existence is relegated to the universal. All history may be patriarchal, but this does not mean that the differences between historical periods is not important. It is the specifics which elucidate the general meaning of patriarchal existence. Patriarchy, in this sense, should be understood not merely as a biological system but a political one with a specific history.
Firestone’s asocial, ahistorical framework becomes particularly limiting when she discusses technology. It is her view that technology will free woman from her body, through contraception and extrauterine reproduction. Technology is therefore the key to woman’s liberation. But although contraception has freed women in important ways, the question remains whether birth control, abortion rights, and so on, will ever be allowed to develop to the degree that would allow woman’s role as reproducer to become irrelevant to her social position. Firestone’s analysis loses its plausibility when we understand that technology is an intrinsic dimension of a society’s power structure. Male ruling-class needs define technological developments; without a change of those in power (and hence of those who define the purposes of technology), technology is an unlikely liberator.33
The thrust of Firestone’s analysis is to isolate sex oppression from the economic class organization of society although she realizes herself that economic suffering contributes to woman’s oppression at least as much as any female ills.34 She does note that a woman, even when well educated, will not earn as much money as a man. A woman also suffers from this lack of money when she decides to care for children. This in itself should invalidate a totally biological argument for the basis of a revolution needed in the family. Firestone speaks of wanting to relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, but she fails to do this. Even if we accept the idea that economic oppression was a basic defense of sexual oppression historically, today the two systems support each other. They are mutually dependent. This relationship only gets distorted when one tries to define it in causal and dichotomized terms. The effect of this dichotomization is the theoretical assertion that sexual oppression is the primary oppression. I do not know what you do with this position politically in a society which superexploits its women within the general context of unemployment and inflation. To say that sexual oppression is primary is to sever the real connections of everyday life. Is this not what Marx did himself by focusing on class exploitation as the primary contradiction? Social reality complicates these theoretical abstractions. It was a consciousness of the incompleteness of the “primary contradiction” syndrome that spawned radical feminism in the first place. Is it not ironic to be plagued by this very same inadequacy once again? Both Shulamith Firestone and, most recently, Robin Morgan have asserted their rejection of Marxist oversimplication of political reality. We need not replace it with radical feminist one-dimensionality. If a commitment to restructuring sexual and class existence is needed then we also need a theory that integrates both.
The connections and relationships between the sexual class system and the economic class system remain undefined in the writings of radical feminism. Power is dealt with in terms of half the dichotomy. It is sexually based; capitalism does not appear within the theoretical analysis to define a woman’s access to power. Similarly, interactions between patriarchy as a system of power and woman’s biology are also kept separate. Instead of seeing a historical formulation of woman’s oppression, we are presented with biological determinism. The final outcome of this dichotomization is to sever the relationship between these conditions and their supporting ideologies. As a result, neither Marxists nor radical feminists deal with the interrelationships between ideas and real conditions sufficiently. If reality becomes segmented, it is not surprising that ideological representations of that reality become severed from the reality as well.
Synthesis: Social Feminism
1. Exploitation and Oppression
Marxist analysis seeks a historical explanation of existing power relationships in terms of economic class relations, and radical feminism deals with the biological reality of power. Socialist feminism, on the other hand, analyzes power in terms of its class origins and its patriarchal roots. In such an analysis, capitalism and patriarchy are neither autonomous systems nor identical: they are, in their present form, mutually dependent. The focus upon the autonomous racial dimensions of power and oppression, although integral to a socialist feminist analysis, falls outside this discussion. As can be seen from the discussion of oppression below, race is viewed as a key factor in defining power, but my discussion focuses only on the relations between sex and class as a first step in moving toward the more inclusive analysis of race.
For socialist feminists, oppression and exploitation are not equivalent concepts, for women or for members of minority races, as they were for Marx and Engels. Exploitation speaks to the economic reality of capitalist class relations for men and women, whereas oppression refers to women and minorities defined within patriarchal, racist, and capitalist relations. Exploitation is what happens to men and women workers in the labor force; woman’s oppression occurs from her exploitation as a wage-laborer but also occurs from the relations that define her existence in the patriarchal sexual hierarchy—as mother, domestic laborer, and consumer. Racial oppression locates her within the racist division of society alongside her exploitation and sexual oppression. Oppression is inclusive of exploitation but reflects a more complex reality. Power—or the converse, oppression—derives from sex, race, and class, and this is manifested through both the material and ideological dimensions of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. Oppression reflects the hierarchical relations of the sexual and racial division of labor and society.
My discussion will be limited to understanding the mutual dependence of capitalism and patriarchy as they are presently practiced in what I have chosen to call capitalist patriarchy. The historical development of capitalist patriarchy can be dated from the mid-eighteenth century in England and the mid-nineteenth century in America. Both of these periods reflect the developing relationship between patriarchy and the new industrial capitalism. Capitalist patriarchy, by definition, breaks through the dichotomies of class and sex, private and public spheres, domestic and wage labor, family and economy, personal and political, and ideology and material conditions.
As we have seen, Marx and Engels saw man’s oppression as a result of his exploited position as worker in capitalist society. They assumed that woman’s oppression paralleled this. They equated the two when they suggested that domestic slavery was the same, in nature and essence, as wage-slavery. Marx and Engels acknowledged that woman was exploited as a member of the proletariat if she worked in the labor force; if she was relegated to domestic slavery she was seen as a nonwage slave. Capitalism was seen to exploit women, but there was no conception of how patriarchy and capitalism together defined women’s oppression. Today, especially with the insights of radical feminism, we see that not only is the equation of exploitation and oppression problematic, but that if we use Marx’s own categorization of productive labor as wage labor, domestic slaves are not exploited in the same way as wage slaves. They would have to be paid a wage for this to be true.
The reduction of oppression to exploitation, within Marxist analysis, rests upon equating the economic class structure with the structure of power in society. To the socialist feminist, woman’s oppression is rooted in more than her class position (her exploitation); one must address her position within patriarchy—both structurally and ideologically—as well. It is the particular relation and operation of the hierarchical sexual ordering of society within the class structure or the understanding of the class structure within the sexual ordering of society which focuses upon human activity in capitalist patriarchy. They exist together and cannot be understood when falsely isolated. In dealing with these questions, one must break down the division between material existence (economic or sexual) and ideology, because the sexual division of labor and society, which lays the basis for patriarchy as we know it, has both material form (sex roles themselves) and ideological reality (the stereotypes, myths, and ideas which define these roles). They exist in an internal web.
If women’s existence is defined by capitalism and patriarchy through their ruling ideologies and institutions, then an understanding of capitalism alone (or patriarchy in isolation) will not deal with the problem of women’s oppression. As Juliet Mitchell has written, “the overthrow of the capitalist economy and the political challenge that effects this do not in themselves mean a transformation of patriarchal ideology.”35 The overthrow does not necessitate the destruction of patriarchal institutions either. Although practiced differently in each place, the sexual division of labor exists in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in China. The histories of these societies have been different, and limitations in the struggle against patriarchy have been defined in terms of the particularities of their cultures. There has been real progress in women’s lives, particularly in China and Cuba. But it would be inaccurate to say that a sexual division of labor and society does not exist in these countries. Only recently in Cuba has the sexual division of labor been tackled as a particular problem for the revolution. Patriarchy is crosscultural, then, by definition, though it is actualized differently in different societies via the institutionalizing of sexual hierarchy. The contours of sex roles may differ societally but power has and does reside with the male.
Both radical feminists and socialist feminists agree that patriarchy precedes capitalism, whereas Marxists believe that patriarchy arose with capitalism. Patriarchy today, the power of the male through sexual roles in capitalism, is institutionalized in the nuclear family.36 Mitchell ties this to the “law of the prehistoric murdered father.”37 In finding the certain root of patriarchy in this mythic crime among men at the dawn of our life as a social group, Mitchell risks discussing patriarchy more in terms of the ideology patriarchy produces, rather than in connecting it to its material formulation in the confrontation between man and woman. She roots the Oedipus complex in the universal patriarchal culture. However, culture is defined for her in terms of an exchange system which primarily exists in ideological form today. For Mitchell, patriarchy precedes capitalism through the universal existence of the Oedipus complex. I contend, however, that patriarchy precedes capitalism through the existence of the sexual ordering of society which derives from ideological and political interpretations of biological difference. In other words, men have chosen to interpret and politically use the fact that women are the reproducers of humanity. From this fact of reproduction and men’s political control of it, the relations of reproduction have arisen in a particular formulation of woman’s oppression. A patriarchal culture is carried over from one historical period to another to protect the sexual hierarchy of society; today the sexual division of society is based on real differences that have accrued from years of ideological pressure. Material conditions define necessary ideologies, and ideologies in their turn have impact on reality and alter reality. There is a two-way flow: women are products of their social history, and yet women can shape their own lives as well.
For socialist feminists, historical materialism is not defined in terms of the relations of production without understanding its connection to the relations that arise from woman’s sexuality—relations of reproduction.38 And the ideological formulations of these relations are key. An understanding of feminist materialism must direct us to understanding the particular existence of women in capitalist patriarchal society. The general approaches of both Marxists in terms of class and radical feminists in terms of sex obfuscate the reality of power relations in women’s lives.
2. Pioneers in Feminist Materialism: de Beauvoir and Mitchell
Simone de Beauvoir confronts the interrelationship between sexuality and history in The Second Sex. While for her “the division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history,”39 nevertheless she says “we must view the facts of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social, and psychological context.”40 She understood that women were defined by men and as such cast in the role of the “other,” but she also realizes that the sexual monism of Freud and the economic monism of Engels are inappropriate for the full analysis of woman’s oppression.41 De Beauvoir’s initial insights were further developed by Juliet Mitchell, who offered in Woman’s Estate a rigorous criticism of classical socialist theory, criticizing it for locating woman’s oppression too narrowly in the family.42 She rejected the reduction of woman’s problem to her inability to work,43 which stresses her simple subordination to the institutions of private property44 and class exploitation.
Instead, woman’s powerlessness in capitalist society is rooted in four basic structures, those of production, reproduction, sexuality, and socialization of children. Woman’s biological capacity defines her social and economic purpose. Motherhood has set up the family as a historical necessity, and the family has become the woman’s world. Hence, woman is excluded from production and public life, resulting in sexual inequality.
The family under capitalism reinforces woman’s oppressive condition. The family supports capitalism by providing a way for calm to be maintained amidst the disruption that is very much a part of capitalism. The family supports capitalism economically by providing a productive labor force and supplying a market for massive consumption.45 The family also performs an ideological role by cultivating the belief in individualism, freedom, and equality basic to the belief structure of society, although they are at odds with social and economic reality.46 Mitchell concludes that by focusing on the destruction of the family alone, woman’s situation will not necessarily be substantially altered. For Mitchell “socialism would properly mean not the abolition of the family but the diversification of the socially acknowledged relationships which are forcibly and rigidly compressed into it.”47
The importance of Mitchell’s analysis lies in the fact that she focuses on the powerlessness that women experience because they are reproductive beings, sexual beings, working individuals, and socializers of children—in all the dimensions of their activities. She makes it clear that woman’s oppression is based in part on the support the family gives the capitalist system. Power is seen as a complex reality. We are still left, however, with the need to clarify the relationship of the family and the political economy in capitalist patriarchal society. What Mitchell has supplied us with is an understanding of the family in capitalist society.
3. The Sexual Division of Labor and Society in Capitalist Patriarchy: Toward a New Feminist Theory
One of the problems in trying to analyze the interconnections of patriarchy and capitalism is that our language treats the family and the economy as separate systems. The sexual hierarchical division of labor cuts through these two, however. Patriarchy and capitalism operate within the sexual division of labor and society rather than within the family. A sexual division of labor and society that defines people’s activity, purposes, goals, desires, and dreams according to their biological sex, is at the base of patriarchy and capitalism. It divides men and women into their respective hierarchical sex roles and structures their related duties in the family domain and within the economy.
This statement of the mutual dependence of patriarchy and capitalism not only assumes the malleability of patriarchy to the needs of capital but assumes the malleability of capital to the needs of patriarchy. When one states that capitalism needs patriarchy in order to operate efficiently one is really noting that male supremacy, as a system of sexual hierarchy, supplies capitalism (and systems previous to it) with the necessary order and control. This patriarchal system of control is thus necessary to the smooth functioning of the society and the economic system and hence should not be undermined. This argument is to underscore the importance of the system of cultural, social, economic, and political control that emanates from the system of male supremacy. To the extent the concern with profit and the concern with societal control are inextricably connected (but cannot be reduced to each other), patriarchy and capitalism become an integral process; specific elements of each system are necessitated by the other.
Capitalism uses patriarchy and patriarchy is defined by the needs of capital. This statement does not undermine the above claim that at the same time one system uses the other, it must organize around the needs of the other in order to protect the specific quality of the other. Otherwise the other system will lose its specific character and with it its unique value. To state this as simply as possible one could say that: patriarchy (as male supremacy) provides the sexual hierarchical ordering of society for political control and as a political system cannot be reduced to its economic structure; while capitalism as an economic class system driven by the pursuit of profit feeds off the patriarchal ordering. Together they form the political economy of the society, not merely one or another, but a particular blend of the two. There are problems with this oversimplified statement. It severs relations which exist within both spheres. For instance, capitalism has a set of controls which emanate directly from the economic class relations of society and their organization in the workplace. And it seems to assume a harmony between the two systems at all points. As we move further into advanced capitalism, we can see how uneasy this relationship is becoming. As women increasingly enter the labor force, some of the control of patriarchal familial relations seems to be undermined—the double day becomes more obvious. But the ghettoization of women within the labor force at the same time maintains a system of hierarchical control of women, both sexually and economically, which leaves the sexual hierarchy of the society intact. Deference to patriarchal hierarchy and control is shown in the very fact that the search for cheap labor has not led to a full integration of women into all parts of the labor force. Although women’s labor is cheaper, the system of control which maintains both the necessary order of the society and with it the cheapness of women’s labor must be protected by segregating women in the labor force. Nevertheless, the justification for woman’s double day and unequal wages is less well-protected today.
It is important to note the discrepancy between patriarchal ideology and the reality of women’s lives. Although all women are defined as mothers (and nonworkers), almost 45 percent of the women in the United States—38.6 millon—work in the paid labor force, and almost all labor in the home. Nearly a quarter of all working women are single; 19 percent are either widowed, divorced, or separated: and another 26 percent are married to men who earn less than $10,000 a year.48 However, because women are not defined as workers within the ruling ideology, women are not paid for their labor or are paid less than men. The sexual definition of woman as mother either keeps her in the home doing unpaid labor or enables her to be hired at a lower wage because of her defined sexual inferiority. Given unemployment rates, women either do not find jobs at all or are paid at an even lower rate. The sexual division of labor and society remains intact even with women in the paid economy. Ideology adjusts to this by defining women as working mothers. And the two jobs get done for less than the price of one.
All of the processes involved in domestic work help in the perpetuation of the existing society. (1) Women stabilize patriarchal structures (the family, housewife, mother, etc.) by fulfilling these roles. (2) Simultaneously, women are reproducing new workers, for both the paid and unpaid labor force. They care for the men and children of the society. (3) They work as well in the labor force for lesser wages. (4) They stabilize the economy through their role as consumers. If the other side of production is consumption, the other side of capitalism is patriarchy.
Although this sexual division of labor and society antedates capitalism, it has been increasingly institutionalized and specifically defined in terms of the nuclear family because of the needs of advanced capitalism. It now has much more form and structure than it did in precapitalist societies.49 In precapitalist society, men, women, and children worked together in the home, the farm, or on the land to produce the goods necessary for their lives. Women were procreators and child-rearers, but the organization of work limited the impact of this sexual role distinction. With the rise of industrial capitalism, men were brought out of the home and into the wage-labor economy. Women became relegated to the home and were increasingly viewed by men as nonproductive although many worked in the factories. They came to be seen solely in terms of sex roles. Although women were mothers before industrial capitalism, this was not an exclusive role; whereas, with industrial capitalism, women became housewives. “The housewife emerged, alongside the proletariat—the two characteristic laborers of developed capitalist society.”50 The work that women continued to perform in the home was not conceived of as work. Productive labor was defined as wage labor, labor which produces surplus value—capital.
The conditions of production in society then, define and shape production, reproduction, and consumption in the family. So, too, the family mode of production, reproduction, and consumption affects commodity production. They work together to define the political economy. Within a capitalist patriarchal economy—where profit, which necessitates a system of political order and control, is the basic priority of the ruling class—the sexual division of labor and society serves a specific purpose. It stabilizes the society through the family while it organizes a realm of work, domestic labor, for which there is no pay (housewives), or limited pay (paid houseworkers), or unequal pay (in the paid labor force). This last category shows the ultimate effect on women of the sexual division of labor within the class structure. Their position as a paid worker is defined in terms of being a woman, which is a direct reflection of the hierarchical sexual divisions in a society organized around the profit motive.
The bourgeoisie as a class profits from the basic arrangement of women’s work, while all individual men benefit in terms of labor done for them in the home. For men, regardless of class, benefit (although differentially) from the system of privileges they acquire within patriarchal society. The system of privileges could not be organized as such if the ideology and structures of male hierarchy were not basic to the society. It is this hierarchy which protects the sexual division of labor and society along with the artificial needs that have been created through the class system.
The ruling class desire to preserve the family reflects its commitment to a division of labor that not only secures it the greatest profit but that also hierarchically orders the society culturally and politically. Once the sexual division of labor is challenged, particularly in terms of its connection to the capitalist order, one of the basic forms of the organization of work (especially affecting the home, but with wide ramifications for the entire society) will be challenged. This challenge endangers a free labor pool, which infiltrates almost all aspects of living, and a cheap labor pool, as well as the fundamental social and political organization of the society, which is sexual hierarchy itself. The very order and control which derive from the arrangements of power implied in the sexual hierarchy of society will be destroyed.
If we understand that there are basically two kinds of work in capitalist society—wage labor and domestic labor—we can see that we must alter the way we think about workers. What we must do is begin to understand what class means for women. We must not just reexamine the way women have been fit into class categories. We must redefine the categories themselves. We need to define classes in terms of woman’s complex reality and her consciousness of that reality.
Presently class categories are primarily male-defined, and a woman is assigned to a class on the basis of her husband’s relation to the means of production; woman is not viewed as an autonomous being. According to what criteria is a woman termed middle-class? What does it mean to say that a middle-class woman’s life is “easier” than a working-class woman’s life when her status is significantly different from that of a middle-class male? What of the woman who earns no money at all (as houseworker) and is called middle-class because her husband is? Does she have the same freedom, autonomy, or control over her life as her husband, who earns his own way? How does her position compare to that of a single woman with a low-paying job?
Clearly a man who is labeled upper- or middle-class (whatever, precisely, that may mean) has more money, power, security, and freedom of choice than his female counterpart. Most women are wives and mothers, dependent wholly or in part on a man’s support, and what the Man giveth, he can take away.51
I do not mean by these questions to imply that class labels are meaningless, or that class privilege does not exist among women, or that housewives (houseworkers) are a class of their own. I do mean to say, however, that we will not know what our real class differences are until we deal with what our real likenesses are as women. I am suggesting that we must develop a vocabulary and conceptual tools which deal with the question of differential power among women in terms of their relation to men and the class structure, production and reproduction, domestic and wage labor, private and public realms, etc. Only then will we see what effect this has on our understanding for organizing women. We need to understand our likenesses and differences if we are to be able to work together to change this society. Although our differences divide us, our likeness cuts through to somewhat redefine these conflicts.
A feminist class analysis must begin with distinctions drawn among women in terms of the work they do within the economy as a whole — distinctions among working women outside the home (professional versus nonprofessional), among houseworkers (houseworkers who do not work outside the home and women who are houseworkers and also work outside), welfare women, unemployed women, and wealthy women who do not work at all. These class distinctions need to be further defined in terms of race and marital status. We then need to study how women in each of these categories share experiences with other categories of women in the activities of reproduction, childrearing, sexuality, consumption, maintenance of home. What we will discover in this exploratory feminist class analysis is a complicated and varied pattern, whose multigrid conceptualization mirrors the complexity of sex and class differentials in the reality of women’s life and experience.
This model would direct attention to class differences within the context of the basic relationship between the sexual hierarchy of society and capitalism. Hopefully, the socialist feminist analysis can continue to explore the relationships between these systems, which in essence are not separate systems. Such a feminist class analysis will deal with the different economic realities of women but will show them to be defined largely within the context of patriarchal and capitalist needs. Women as women share like economic status and yet are divided through the family structure to experience real economic class differences. Such an examination should seek to realize woman’s potential for living in social community, rather than in isolated homes; her potential for creative work, rather than alienating or mindless work; her potential for critical consciousness as opposed to false consciousness; and, her potential for uninhibited sexuality arising from new conceptions of sexuality.
4. Some Notes on Strategy
What does all of the preceding imply about a strategy for revolution? First, the existing conceptions of a potentially revolutionary proletariat are inadequate for the goals of socialist feminism. Second, there are serious questions whether the potential defined in classical Marxist terms would ever become real in the United States. And, although I think the development of theory and strategy should be interrelated, I see them as somewhat separate activities. Theory allows you to think about new possibilities. Strategy grows out of the possibilities.
This discussion has been devoted to developing socialist feminist theory and I am hesitant to develop statements of strategy from it. Strategy will have to be fully articulated from attempts to use theory. When one tries to define strategy abstractly from new and developing statements of theory, the tendency to impose existing revolutionary strategies on reality is too great. Existing formulations of strategy tend to limit and distort new possibilities for organizing for revolutionary change.
The importance of socialist feminist strategy, to the extent that it exists, is that it grows out of the daily struggles of women in production, reproduction, and consumption. The potential for revolutionary consciousness derives from the fact that women are being squeezed both at home and on the job. Women are working in the labor force for less, and they are maintaining the family system with less. This is the base from which consciousness can develop. Women need to organize political action and develop political consciousness about their oppression on the basis of an understanding of how this connects to the capitalist division of labor. As Nancy Hartsock says: “the power of feminism grows out of contact with everyday life. The significance of contemporary feminism is in the reinvention of a mode of analysis which has the power to comprehend and thereby transform everyday life.”52
We must, however, ask whose everyday life we are speaking about. Although there are real differences between women’s everyday lives, there are also points of contact that provide a basis for cross-class organizing. While the differences must be acknowledged (and provide political priorities), the feminist struggle begins from the commonality that derives from the particular roles women share in patriarchy.
Many socialist feminists were radical feminists first. They felt their oppression as women and then, as they came to understand the role of capitalism in this system of oppression, they became committed to socialism as well. Similarly, more and more houseworkers are coming to understand that their daily lives are part of a much larger system. Women working outside the home, both professional and nonprofessional, bear the pressures and anxieties about being competent mothers and caretakers of the home and are becoming conscious of their double day of work.
Male leftists and socialist women often say that women as women cannot be organized because of their isolation in the home and their commitment to their husbands’ class. Although cross-class organizing is not possible on all issues because of class conflict among women, it is possible around issues of abortion, health care, rape, child care. Cross-class organizing is worth a serious try if we deal consciously with our class differences and set up priorities in terms of them instead of trying to ignore them. At the same time, the lives of women are remarkably similar given patriarchal controls. We just need to be more conscious of how this works and then structure our political action in terms of it. A strategy to reach all women has never been tried. That its implementation will be difficult goes without saying. But a beginning is already in process as women try to take some control over their lives.
Notes
1. Sheila Rowbotham, in Women, Resistance, and Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1972), makes clear that both the social relations of production and reproduction need to be dealt with in any revolutionary theory.
2. For our purposes dialectics help us focus on the processes of power. Hence, in order to understand power one needs to analyze the relations that define power rather than treating power as an abstract thing. Any moment embodies the relations of power that define it. The only way to understand what the moment is, is to understand it as a reflection of the processes involved in it. By definition, this requires one to see moments as part of other moments rather than as cut off from each other. Seeing things in separation from each other, as part of either/or options, is the dichotomous thinking of positivism. By trying to understand the elements defining the synthesis of power as it is embodied in any particular moment, one is forced to come to terms with the conflict embodied within it, and hence the dialectical processes of power. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973) and Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
3. For this discussion see 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 (Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press, Ltd.); Ira Gerstein, “Domestic Work and Capitalism” and Lise Vogel, “The Earthly Family” in Radical America 7 (July-October 1973); Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism,” New Left Review 83 (January-February 1973); B. Magas, Margaret Coulson, H. Wainwright, “The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism—a Critique” and Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labour,” New Left Review 89 (January-February 1975), and, for the latter, in this volume.
4. I do not think the dichotomized view of the early “Hegelian Marx” and the later “materialist Marx” is a helpful distinction. Rather, I think the theories of alienation and exploitation are integrated throughout Marx’s work although they are given different priority in specific writings. The Grundrisse stands as persuasive proof of this position. See Marx, Grundrisse and David McLellan’s discussion of the importance of the Grundrisse in Karl Marx, His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
5. For a discussion of species being, see Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964); The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947); “On the Jewish Question,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Kurt Guddat and Lloyd Easton (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). See also Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); and Ollman, Alienation.
6. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), p. 152. See also Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Gateway Press, 1954), pp. 48–49.
8. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 17.
9. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” p. 246.
10. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 133.
11. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 50.
12. Friedrich Engels, The Early Development of the Family (a Free Press pamphlet), p. 65. The selection is also the first two chapters of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942).
13. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, pp. 21, 22.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 9.
16. Ibid., p. 20.
17. Engels, Origin of the Family, p. 65. Engels’ analysis in Origin of the Family differentiates three historical periods—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—in which he traces the evolution of the family.
18. Ibid., p. 66.
19. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto.
20. See Eli Zaretsky, “Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life,” Socialist Revolution 13–14 (January-April 1973): 69–125 and 15 (May-June 1973): 19–71 for a discussion of the historical and economic changes in the family.
21. Engels, Origin of the Family, p. 57.
22. F. Engels in The Woman Question (New York: International Publishers, 1951), p. 11.
23. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed. Eleanor Leacock (New York: International Publishers. 1972), pp. 71–72.
24. Ideology is used in this paper to refer to the ruling ideas of the society. (See Marx and Engels, German Ideology.) It is seen as a distortion of reality, protective of existing power arrangements. More specifically, ideology is used to refer to the ideas that protect both male and capitalist power arrangements. Although material conditions often do create the conditions for certain ideologies, ideology and material conditions are in a dialectical relationship. They are both involved in partially defining the other. For instance, the “idea” that women are weak and passive is both a distortion of women’s capacities and a partial description of reality—a reality defined by the ruling ideology.
25. The definition of liberal feminism applies to the reformist understanding of the sexual division of labor. It is a theory which reflects a criticism of the limitations of sex roles but does not comprehend the connection between sex roles and the sexual division of labor and capitalism. Limited by the historical boundaries of the time, early liberal feminists were unable to decipher the capitalist male power structure and instead applauded values which trapped them further in it. They were bound not only by the material conditions of the time (lack of birth control, etc.) but also by a liberal ideology which presented segmented, individualistic conceptions of power.
26. For classical versions of the sexual division of labor see J. S. Mill, On the Subjection of Women (New York: Fawcett, 1971) and J. J. Rousseau, Emile (London: J. J. Dent & Sons, 1911).
27. Although radical feminism is often called bourgeois by male leftists and socialist women, I think this is simplistic. First, radical feminism itself cuts across class lines in its caste analysis and in this sense is meant to relate to the reality of all women. Hence, in terms of priorities, the theory does not distinguish between working class and bourgeois women, recognizing the inadequacy of such distinctions. Further, the theory has been developed by many women who would be termed “working class.” It is inaccurate to say that radical feminists are bourgeois women. The “bourgeois” woman has not really been identified yet in terms of a class analysis specifically pertaining to women.
28. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 24.
29. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 9.
30. Ibid., p. 8.
31. Some people may say that to be stronger is to be more equal, or that inequality exists biologically because men are stronger than women. But this is not Firestone’s argument. She argues that it is woman’s reproductive role that is at the root of her inequality. Historically, pregnancy made women physically vulnerable, but this is less true today. Firestone does not restrict her thesis to history; she offers it as contemporary analysis.
32. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, p. 10.
33. It is important to know whether technological changes and innovations in birth control methods are tied only to concerns with population control in an era of overpopulation or if they reflect fundamental changes in the way women are viewed in this society. It matters whether women are still viewed as baby machines or not, because these views could come to define technological progress in birth control as nonprogressive.
34. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, p. 8.
35. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 414. Within the women’s movement today there is a varied dialogue in progress on the dimensions and meaning of socialist feminism, and the appropriate questions are still being formulated.
36. Sheila Rowbotham, in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), p. 17, defines patriarchal authority as “based on control over the woman’s productive capacity and over her person.” Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, pp. 407–8, sees patriarchy as defining women as exchange objects based on the exploitation of their role as propagators. Hence, she states, p. 416, that “it is not a question of changing (or ending) who has or how one has babies. It is a question of overthrowing patriarchy.”
37. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism.
38. See Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution, for the usage of this model of historical materialism in the study of history.
39. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam, 1952), p. xix.
40. Ibid., p. 33.
41. Ibid., p. 54.
42. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution (a Free Press pamphlet) and Woman’s Estate (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
43. Mitchell, Longest Revolution, p. 4. It has been pointed out that Mitchell herself did not fully understand women’s essential role in society as workers. She termed them a marginal or reserve labor force rather than viewing them as necessary to the economy, as domestic laborers as well as wage laborers.
44. Ibid., p. 6.
45. Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, p. 155.
46. Ibid., p. 156.
47. Mitchell, Longest Revolution, p. 28. It is interesting to note that Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, p. 374, focuses on the relationship between families as key to understanding women in patriarchal culture. The relationship between families distinguishes human society from other primate groups. “The legally controlled exchange of women is the primary factor that distinguishes mankind from all other primates, from a cultural standpoint,” p. 372. Hence, it is socially necessary for the kinship structure to have exogamous exchange. The psychology of patriarchy that Mitchell constructs is based on the relations of the kinship structure.
48. Newsweek, 6 December 1976, p. 69.
49. See Linda Gordon, Families (a Free Press pamphlet); A. Gordon, M. J. Buhle, N. Schram, “Women in American Society,” Radical America 5 (July-August 1971); Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975); R. Baxandall, L. Gordon, S. Reverby, America’s Working Women (New York: Vintage, 1976); Zaretsky, “Capitalism.”
50. Zaretsky, “Capitalism,” p. 114.
51. Ellen Willis, “Economic Reality and the Limits of Feminism,” Ms. 1 (June 1973): 110.
52. Nancy Hartsock, “Feminist Theory and the Development of Revolutionary Strategy” (Johns Hopkins University, unpublished paper), p. 19, and in this book. Portions of this paper appear as “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Quest 2, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 67–79.
This is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in The Insurgent Sociologist 7, no. 3 (Spring 1977). The article was first delivered as a paper in the spring of 1975 at Cornell University’s women studies weekly seminar.
