Analysis of differences between women and men, shows that they do not depend on biology, for the most part, but on a cumulative process of learning, reinforced by attitudes and myths as to what is "natural" for the sexes, and by very powerful stereotypes presented constantly in all the mass media. Nevertheless, these differences are very real, leading to very marked female and male personality types suited to a social world in which economic and political power and accomplishment are largely the prerogative of males, and nurturance, emotional sensitivity and early upbringing of children largely that of females. Because one's gender is so deeply part of one's personality, it is very hard for us to realise the various ways it has been socially moulded, and because women have been trained to make themselves responsible for others , hard to realize the degree to which our problems arise from others or from situations themselves and not our own inadequacies. This is the reason for consciousness raising, and personal experience-based groups.

In any known historical society, women are less and less frequent the nearer to the centre of political and economic power; less frequent, the higher the authority position in any organization; men are less frequent the closer any activity is to non-authoritative, supportive and caring behaviour for others, and the more activity is related to family maintenance and the upbringing of young children. Since social and public values are set by those in political and economic power, for the most part, women's activities, and corresponding personality characteristics are valued lower than men's, in terms of economic reward, status and healthiness. A self-perpetuating circle is thus nicely created.

It all operates irrespective of class, though it is affected by class. Definitions of class themselves depend on the occupational world which is the primary area for most men, a secondary area for the majority of women. A middle class woman may enjoy material conditions better than those of many working class men, but she is subordinate to middle class men, and she will tend to be patronised by both. However, for the middle class woman, the psychological conditions of oppression may be self-experienced as most important, while for a working class woman the material ones may initially seem in the forefront. But in many cases we are our own policewomen, middle class or working class.

Explanations of Women's Oppression

How do we account for such a universal and far reaching difference, between women and men leading the sexes to experience the same world in different ways, if it is not due to biology? To say that it is due to the way we are brought up is true, but it only rephrases the question - why are humans brought up as they are in respect to sex? Socialists have given very little attention to such questions until the pressure of the current women's liberation movement began to force the issue to their attention. Most socialist theorists have been male, in a superior power position, defined the world and operated in it in a male way. In order to get much of value, we have to use other sources, or re-appraise and re-work what they have proposed. The same applies to academics.

The first and most general kind of "explanation" is one I would like to label Utopian, because of its generality and the moral tone of its solutions, which are also paternalistic. It says, and often very well - men take advantage of women, and therefore, try to keep things as they are. This is a moral disgrace and shows a low level of civilization, since civilized people do not exploit a position of strength over weaker ones. Charles Fourier and John Stuart Mill take this kind of view. Many women also have addressed appeals to men to be more civilized, and do so, daily and everywhere. But they don't say why the moral disgrace occurs.

Marx and Engels tried to say why. They argued that the oppression of women began historically with the development of private property accumulation, leading to patrilineal descent and the requirement of female monogamy co-existing with a sector of female prostitution. This view is dependent on a concept of a sexual division of labour which predates female oppression, in which men naturally concerned themselves with larger scale production, and were thus in a position to accumulate property as production developed (see classical marxist theory for how). Their views on sex relations are by no means as worked out as most marxists would have us believe (see the separate notes), but they accept that the area of reproduction (domestic labour to reproduce workers and children) is a subordinated one, and largely drudgery. They therefore proposed the abolition of private domestic labour and the integration of women into production as creating the main conditions for female equality. Such a programme has partly been put into effect in the Soviet Union, and is being attempted in China. Many socialist feminists accept this kind of view, with its corollary that the abolition of private property is the condition for the liberation of women, and many feminists accept it partly - c.f. Anne Oakley and Evelyn Sullerot, who both argue vehemently that the solution lies in women entering productive work. Anne Oakley goes farther however, and demands that men do women's work; but the reasons she gives for this are in terms of obvious reciprocity - if A does B's work, B should do A's. Marxists in practice, do not, by and large, accept this argument, and usually have a very biologistic view of sex differences in regard to fitness for child care; vide Soviet literature about women.

Shulamith Firestone, one of the most brilliant and widely read of feminist theorists, argues that female subordination lies in the kind of sexual division of labour described above, and that the basis for this is biological. The only hope of solution, therefore lies in the development of a technology which removes the necessity for women to be reproducers, in tha same way as it has removed the necessity for them to be breast feeders. While her arguments are extremely persuasive in some respects and her reworking of Freud Interesting, It seems that It is not the fact of being able to bear children, but the social Implications of It that are significant. I also feel she has a really naive faith In a male controlled technology to act In the Interests of women. In different social conditions the ability to bear children might be regarded as a privilege... Perhaps.

It is not clear to me what Is the basis of Kate Millet's concept of Patriarchy but it seems to rest on similar assumptions to those of Susan Brownmlller, for whom the underlying basis of female subordination is male strength and aggression. The key to male dominance lies in superior force, and for Brownmlller the rapist is the symbol, and guardian of male superiority. This Is again, largely a biological explanation, and I am reluctant to accept It, though sometimes, when feeling depressed, I get driven back to It. If the explanation of female subordination Is biological, a very powerful counter socialization programme would be needed, and it is difficult to see men implementing that.

Some socialist feminists have helped us by looking further Into what women actually do. Juliet Mitchell, a socialist-feminist, also sees female oppression as originating in male aggression but she locates oppression in four "structures" of social organization: socialization, reproduction, sexuality and production.

Isabel Larguia and John Dumoulin divide women's work Into three aspects:

1. biological reproduction
2. education and care of children, the sick and old people
3. replacement of labour power

This kind of analysis is important, I think, because it focuses attention on the significance of women's activity, which most marxists have tended to dismiss. When one begins to analyse what women actually do, it becomes more and more difficult to locate It within marxist theories of production relations, as the lengthy polemics in New Left Review and elsewhere as to whether women actually produce value or not show. While these analyses help us to focus on reproduction as a real area of social life, they are merely, as they stand, a form of categorization rather than an explanatory model.

Another Way of Looking at Women's Oppression

(a) The Social Division of Labour

Maybe a slightly different approach is worth exploring, centring on the implications of a social-sexual division of labour. There are different ways of categorizing human behaviour, but suppose we start from the observation that there are two major clusters of human activity - that concerned with the upbringing of people, their relationships, (I'm going to call this reproduction later on), and that concerned with the production of things. The two are obviously necessary to each other In some basic way - without people, no production, without production, no people, but not morally equivalent, one might think, as one Is tempted to believe that production should be for people, not people for production.

It seems to me adequate to explain women's connection with the first In a historical way as a very easy confusion of the fact that women give birth and women lactate (usually each child suckles for several years In underdeveloped societies) with other kinds of caring. Thus It is an easy extension though not a logical one, from biology into social practice and a basic sexual-social division of labour. There isn't a need to explain this further - it is the reverse which needs explanation, as in a few, very few societies studied by anthropologists. It appears that men take primary responsibilities for children. We need to look at these studies carefully. In most societies women also take part in production, sometimes contributing more than men in both production and reproduction. Where women play a significant part in social production, one would predict, with some qualifications that they have a higher social status then where they don't, though nowhere do they ever have equal status.

(b) Basic Psychological Implications of the Sexual Division of Labour

The major implication of the sexual division of labour is that the young male and female are brought up by women and to a much lesser extent by men, whose activities are socially and physically more distant to children-. Recently, women in the movement have turned to psychology to find explanations of female behaviour, but they've got very hung up on quite classical freudlan ways of looking at it, using concepts like penis envy. As a result they are way off beam, as these theories are very bad and extremely phallocentric, (e.g. Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism and the Patriarchy Papers). However, if we accept that childhood experiences have an important formative Influence on character, in the fact that primary figures in the lives of both women and men are female, whether In underdeveloped stateless societies, feudal monarchies, capitalist systems, or the socialist states, one has a basic upbringing constant, which would seem to be worth thinking hard about. Nancy Chodorow, In two articles, one In Woman, Culture and Society, and the other In Woman in Sexist Society suggests the following propositions. The primary emotional identifications of both boys and girls are with their mother, or mothering group, almost universally female. Male figures are less immediate, less emotionally involving. For a boy to identify as a male is a problem therefore. He must break from his attachment to the world of women, and make a clear differentiation of himself from that world. But the male world is more distant, and his identification with it can only be on a more imitative than affectional basis. He has to repress the affectional ties that bind him to the world of women, and because of the relative distance of men, his main means of early identification with them (encouraged for the most part by mothers) can only be by rejection of the female culture into which he has been born and which nurtures him. A girl, on the other hand, doesn't need to break the affectional ties with the mother. Her early upbringing is more a process of identification with women than with abstracted learning. She develops a personality more suited to affectional relationships, without as clear a sense of the difference between self and others, creating a sense of responsibility for what happens to others. If this view is correct, and much evidence, from initiation ceremonies in undeveloped societies, to contemporary surveys of young boys attitudes to things "feminine" supports it, we have a universal basis for misogyny in men, which would be directly responsible for universal oppression of women, and a predisposition to over-assume responsibility for others In women. I think that Chodorow's two articles, which are not easy to read, and rather academic in form, are as important as anything written on the subject of women's oppression.

There is an implication of her work that she does not develop. Given the sexual division of labour which we have argued is universal, any development of the productive forces in society (i.e. when men find their identity) would distort the relations between productive and "reproductive" activity, and male devaluations of female activity would become more pronounced, as they would be structurally incorporated into the developing social relations. For instance, in a slave society, slavery is not only a system of social relations in which man exploits man, but a male system, in which the psychological characteristics of maleness deriving from the basic sexual division of labour become part of the way the system is run and develops. The female characteristics of caring are not incorporated into the system because men dominate its power structure. From this point, one can develop an analysis similar to that of marxism, but with the difference that, recognizing the central contradiction between women and men in society, the relations between reproduction and production - it doesn't accept the criteria of production as the totally determining ones. Instead it always holds as a central question how production interacts with reproduction, to which is given slightly more significance.

(c) Social Development

Perhaps anyway, there is a historical stage when there is the possibility of large scale accumulations of things produced over and above need, i.e. with the development of settled agriculture. Men predominate in the area of production; they control a surplus, and develop relations of control and authority over that surplus and its distribution that lead to the development of state forms, and all the consequent historical societies which the marxists have analysed. The relations of production come to dominate the relations of reproduction, given the sexual division of labour - men dominate women, so the values of the productive system have priority over those of reproduction in the minds and characters of the producers, and women, essential but subordinate, reproduce oppositional and subordinated culture. Following this line of argument our society is seen to be divided not only into classes based on the sale, administration and purchase of labour power, (workers, middle class and capitalists), but also on reproduction and production (women and men). Marx and Engels, as men, saw mainly the significance of the relations of production (which had over developed exceedingly complex forms) and hardly began to explore the implications of the other division. In consequence their solutions and those of socialist societies and theorists since, have attempted to subordinate still further reproduction to production relationships, or liberate women by making them into men!

We might distinguish another stage of social development in the growth of the nuclear family with capitalism. Although Anne Oakley seems quite wrong to equate women's real oppression with the rise of capitalism, the privatisation of women's domestic labour in the home is a historical feature never before found in history,as previously a really sharp division between the location of reproduction and production doesn't exist; families are of several generations, and women carry on some petty production or even household industry. With the onset of capitalism, a woman is less and less a part of a collective sex-divided family group. Her activity in the home tends to become invisible, as for much of the time there is no one else except children there to see it. As life becomes directly dependent on wage earning, she becomes a dependent of an earner. But her labour has a value in the system of production (without producers no production). From the point of view of the buyer of labour power, she exists to enable workers to present themselves for work (with reasonable willingness) to bring up new generations of workers, and give them the necessary love and care without which they are too mucked up to perform efficiently. Before, after, but always subordinately to these tasks, she sells her labour power too. Indeed the capitalist pays her husband the cost (with a social component) of the replacement of his labour power, and gains the use of the labour power which produces more than it costs to replace. No one extols the virtues of womanliness and the sanctity of the family more than capitalists and their apologists. All this has been well analysed.

Solutions?

Clearly capitalism is only part of our problem; which is the division of labour itself, the distortion of the production/reproduction relationship. It is not merely for women to become producers, while socialising reproductive work which is still carried on by women anyway; women just take on a double labour, and they are never the best producers, politicians, what have you, because men are totally specialized for the job. Men have to become reproducers, in every sense except biological in order for men not to need to reject women, and the gross imbalance of resources of material and human effort between production and reproduction has to be corrected. Then women can become equivalently producers, and not feel it is a secondary role, or feel guilty about neglecting their homes, children, husbands. Men will not then feel a subtle reduction in their manhood when they understand and develop their feelings and caring qualities in relation to others. It might be a nice kind of human world.

Carol Riddell

Notes

Nancy Chodorow's articles appears in Women in Sexist Society, edited by Vivian Gonnick and Barbara Moran, 1971, and in Women, Culture and Society edited by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 1974.

Thanks to Naomi Frisch for her criticisms.

End note: An expansion of the critique of Engles and classical marxist views on women's oppression. (These comments assume the reader's familiarity with The Origin of the Family).

Engels' Origin of the Family is said to provide a scientific basis for understanding the "woman question". On re-reading, Engels' classic work is less impressive. For instance, where all cousins are regarded as common children of both parents, there is no reason a priori to assume an even more primitive family form - the "hawaiian" family could be a transitional grouping between matriliny and patriliny as far as I can see. There seems no ground for Engels' statement that where a particular system of consanguinity exists, an extinct form of the family corresponding to it once existed. Also, there is no reason why a form of group marriage as outlined or hypothesized by Morgan should mean a different treatment for women than a monogamous system. It might be equally in the hands of men. Engels' conception of total promiscuity is the vaguest speculation imagineable, "If we eliminate from the most primitive forms of the family known to us the conceptions of incest that are associated with them... we arrive at a form of sexual intercourse which can only be described as promiscuous". There is no reason I can see for such an assumption. And even if there were, the position of women would not necessarily be improved by it. Engels ignores this, and does not realise the implications of saying, a little later on, "Even when women are abducted, which is frequently the case, and in some areas the rule, the class law is scrupulously observed." Big deal. Engels assumes that there is a sexual division of labour existing from the dawn of human history and quite predating monogamous marriage forms. He also asserts that primitive male jealousy exists in primates. Modern anthropological studies suggest that clan or gens systems of the kind outlined among the Iroqois and other societies serve as regulation systems of social control where a state does not exist, and that in such systems, women can be seen as collective rather than individual possessions of a group of men, while having a matrilineal marriage system. Even where individual pairing or preference does not exist (and this does not seem to be anywhere exactly the case), jealousy is not necessarily removed, but may simply be projected on to an out group - another clan. Women may be the collective property of one group. To be collective property is not much better than to be individual property, as the decisions are not women's. It is therefore not established that the responsibility for oppression lies solely with the monogamous marriage system.

Engels states in his introduction that "the propagation of the species", is with material production, "the determining factor in history". This is exciting, but he gives no supporting evidence in the least, and, in my copy, the Russian editor pulls him up for this deviation from marxist orthodoxy. Anthropological research shows that historically, the family is closely dependent on relations of production for its form. Engels strongly asserts that the sexual division of labour which exists at all times has no relation to the status of women. He is making a point against the position of the lady of leisure of the Victorian middle but in doing so loses or denies the main point. In fact it seems clear that, if Engels is right in assuming an initial division of labour, which largely assigns to women the "propagation of the species" (or the production and reproduction of the labour force), this aspect of social life will have an important part in determining the lives of women. The focus of Engels' investigations should have been the implications of the sexual division of labour itself, not a highly speculative reconstruction of possible stages of family life. Engels does not investigate the sexual division of labour at all, and because he does not, the possibility of a classical marxist basis for understanding the position of women is lost. For him, the overthrow of mother-right (actually matrilineal kinship) constitutes the world historical defeat of the female sex. Before that she has been predominant in the house, but perhaps the house itself was a subordinated place; it seems more likely that woman's status has been rather closely related to her contribution to social production as a whole since this is the field in which men's existence is centred, and where their value judgements are formed. But even where women play an important role, it is dubious whether it makes them equal in status to men, or equal in decision making as to social action in the community. Engels links monogamy to a great increase in male productive capacity as opposed to female, but his main focus is the effect of monogamy itself.

Alongside the analysis, but never integrated into it, go a series of moral statements proposing women's equality, attacking homosexuality, and asserting a solution, which, he says, rests on the productive capacity of women. Only if all are producers is there a possibility of female emancipation. I'm sure this is partially correct, but it does not derive from a clear line of argument in the text, and it is only partially correct.

Given all this, little is left of a scientific basis in marxism for the understanding of women's oppression, as there are only fragments elsewhere. Bebel's Women Under Socialism is a substantial work, very popular in its time. It adds to Engels further moral exhortation, documents injustice in capitalism in some detail, and discredits biologically based views of female inferiority. Theoretically I don't find it goes farther than Engels.

These works apart, classical marxist views of women seem to rest on:

a) moral exhortation to men. This line is taken directly and almost word for word from the early Utopian socialist, Fourier "Social progress can be measured exactly by the position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included)" (Marx). "The position of women is the most graphic and telling indicator for evaluating a social regime and state policy" (Trotsky). "The status of women makes clear in the most striking fashion the difference between bourgeois and socialist democracy" (Lenin). Compare with Fourier. "In the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation".