north america: usa
By JANE FLAX
graphics by Sylvia Wallace
In the past three years, a tendency has emerged called socialist feminism. Many feminists have argued that it is the most progressive position in feminism today*
Socialist feminism is not a precise term. Those who consider themselves socialist feminists include female socialists, women who consider imperialism to be the primary contradiction, socialists who see feminism as a way of organizing women into the class struggle, and women who see patriarchy** and class as equal and (to varying degrees) independent sources of women's oppression. The minimum area of agreement seems to be that Marxism has something to teach us about the sources and maintenance of women's oppression and about ways to overcome it. On a theoretical level, this assumption has led to attempts to integrate feminism into Marxism or to reconceptualize one in terms of the other.
Feminists have received strong criticism from both male and female Leftists for "dividing the working class," making bourgeois "personal" issues central to political struggle, and so on.
Perhaps the turn to Marxism is to some extent an attempt on the part of feminists to show that they too can do "real" political work and "real" theory. It may be a way of showing that it is "correct" to organize women because they do produce surplus value (through housework), or at least reproduce labor-power which is the precondition for extracting surplus value. Alternatively, since women constitute an expanding segment of the working class, they can now be seen as significant in the organization of a socialist movement (as workers). Or, socialist-feminism allows women to argue that feminism, because it focuses on process, is a valuable tool for building revolutionary organizations or revolutionizing the working class.
All these positions implicitly assume that women's lives in and of themselves have little or no revolutionary potential, that women's experience only becomes meaningful when it is related to the class struggle, and that patriarchy is not a relatively autonomous historical force which also determines the character of social relations and human history. In short, socialist feminism suggests that feminists have raised interesting questions and developed forms of organization which must now be integrated into ongoing class struggle.
These issues are considered subordinate to class struggle and have not been taken seriously as a fundamental challenge to the way Marxists understand politics and political change. The real question is whether we accept Marxism as the correct (if flawed) paradigm for comprehending women's oppression or instead call for the development of a new mode of analysis. What, if anything, can Marxism as it stands now teach us about women's oppression, and what is the utility of the Marxist method for feminist analysis?
Problems of Orthodox Marxism
A careful examination of Engels' writing can point up the weaknesses of orthodox Marxist theory***in regard to the analysis of women's oppression. I will not restate Engels' argument in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, but rather I will list seven basic problems with his argument and discuss how these problems are related to the general nature of a Marxist approach. Furthermore, I will show that Engels' own theory can be fully comprehended only by integrating an analysis of patriarchy with his work. By relying solely on a history of changes in the mode of production, Engels ignores the specific history of women.
First, Engels takes a sexual division of labor for granted. He assumes that labor has always been divided on the basis of sex and that women have always done household labor. He provides no explanation for why this is the case, and moreover, does not do justice to the fantastic variety of the content of work done by women and men; as recent anthropological work shows, childcare seems to be the only type of work women do almost universally A more concrete analysis of the sexual division of labor in different societies would have highlighted one crucial fact: whatever women do is considered less valuable than whatever men do. The orthodox Marxist approach has not explained this fact. Nor does Engels explore the consequences for men, women, and children of the primary responsibility for childcare falling on women.
Second, Engels argues that wealth was owned by the gens and that the gens was matriarchal. But then, how can he argue that cattle became private property of men because they were "heads" of these families?* According to more recent anthropological work, agriculture and herding developed about the same time, so that the development of private property in cattle could not in itself be such a radical transformation that it would lead to the overthrow of mother-right (if it ever existed).
*The most visible organizational manifestation of this tendency was the Socialist Feminist Conference held at Antioch College in July, 1975, and attended by 1600 women. See Socialist Revolution, V:4 U975), and Quest, 11:2 (1975) for reports and criticisms of the conference as well as position papers on socialist feminism. See also Socialist Revolution, IV: 1 (J974) for additional articles on socialist feminism.
'Patriarchy means here a system of power relations whereby men dominate women.
***The term "orthodox," here means a simplistic, or mechanistic use of Marx.
As used by Engels, "gens" refers to a circle of blood relations in the female line.
This is merely one concrete instance of the larger difficulty of assuming the existence of a matriarchal society and the primacy of changes in property relations. Engels needs a matriarchy so it can be overthrown by men—not as men but rather as owners of private property, or the instruments of labor^ That is, the course of history depends on changes in the mode of production and the consequent property relations, not on (or as well on) sexual-power relations or the mode of reproduction. For Engels, the family becomes part of the superstructure rather than a part of the base. He recognizes the centrality of the "mode of reproduction," but fails to carry out the exploration of sexual politics required to understand it.
Third, also along these lines, if cattle and slaves were such clear signs of wealth, how did the presumably male heads of households claim them? Why did they not belong to women? "Custom"* cannot explain why these sources of power could so easily be appropriated by men.
I am led to two possible conclusions: either there never was a matriarchy (in which case one cannot explain the oppression of women solely on the basis of changes in production-property relations), or the overthrow of matriarchy was a political as well as economic revolution in which men as men subdued or destroyed the privileged (or perhaps equal) position of women for a number of historically possible reasons (such as men discovering their role in reproduction and/ or asserting control over reproduction).
Fourth, why should inheritance be such a crucial issue. Engels is reading the present into the past. In gens society, is there any danger to children themselves (would they be outcast, or not be taken care of), or is illegitimacy and/or individual inheritance even a meaningful concept in a matriarchal society? Men must already have been feeling excluded from the gens and/or from reproduction, since, as Engels states, in pre-monogamous marriage systems, only the mother of the child could be known with certainty.1°
Thus, men might attempt to use children as a means of claiming power and overcoming exclusion, promising protection in return. (As feminists have pointed out, this is one of the oldest protection rackets around— women and children are guaranteed protection by the aggressors- men.) Furthermore, in most cultures, only sons can inherit property, not daughters; thus inheritance can be seen as another way of keeping power and property within male control." Alternatively, inheritance could point to the possibility that women and their products (children) were already regarded as property. Indeed, Levi Strauss suggests that women were the first form of property and were traded out of their clan to cement relationships between men in differing clans. At least initially, such a system must have been instituted and maintained by force.
Fifth, Engels suggests that men wanted their own children to inherit and that this was a reason for overthrowing the then traditional matrilineal order of inheritance. But what is wrong with a sister's children (or anyone else) as inheritors? There must already have been a property/ patriarchal system in which children and women were seen as a special sort of property.
This is where the concept and reality of patriarchal privilege become important. Men, according to Engels, would want to retain the power and privilege they held as a result of the original division of labor. Women's natural interest in a restricted birthrate (because childbearing is dangerous and tiring) would oppose men's interest in increasing their power by increasing the amount of property for trade or labor available to them. Restricting births would also reduce men's control over women since women would have more energy for activities other than child-birth and child rearing. In addition, as long as women have children at home, service to children spills over into service to the man (why cook, sew, clean, for example, only for children). Why would anyone want to give up these personal services? So men have an interest in controlling reproduction. At this point, the sexual division of labor becomes an instrument of oppression.
Sixth, Engels argues that the overthrow of mother right could take place through a simple decree. Wouldn't women be disturbed by being transferred out of their gens upon marriage, thus losing a crucial source of their power? How and by whom could a "simple decree" be issued that descent would in the future be patrilineal? Why would women obey it? Certainly legal doctrines had little meaning in this era and would have had to be backed by other forms of power. Again, the very structure of early social systems seems to point to force being used by men against women, originally for control over scarce resources (children) and later to maintain the privileges the initial system created.
Finally, why did shifts in inheritance of property bring total supremacy to the male? Doesn't this view transfer the present centrality of private property back to "primitive" times? Moreover, there is no reason to think that property owned by families would necessitate or lead to male dominated families. The existence of male domination and private property cannot be explained unless we postulate a whole structure of society in which power derives from and is exercised by males as well as by a property-based ruling class. All men are kings in their castles, no matter what or who they are in the King's castle. In short, the dynamic which Engels sees centered in property and inheritance must also be grounded in a struggle for power, in the dialectic of sex. Changes in the mode of production are not a sufficient explanation for the overthrow of mother-right. On another level, even though it is doubtful that a matriarchy ever existed, Engels nonetheless needed to postulate one so that he could paradoxically avoid following out the implications of his statement about the modes of production and reproduction. Women (communal property) are overthrown by men (private property): Engels only examines property relations, not relations between men and women, and hence does not carry out a thorough analysis of the mode of reproduction. In fact, the mode of production and the mode of reproduction are not necessarily in harmony, and contradictions can be overcome by force, by the maintenance of patriarchy, and by realignments of the family, and realignments within the family.
Marx acknowledges this when he discusses "the natural division of labor in the family. Marx means "natural" in a very specific sense, i.e., "uncivilized." "Natural" is the opposite of "social." So the "natural" division of labor in the family must be based on the capacity of women to bear children, and since they bear them, it is "convenient" (Engels) for them to also raise children. Marx explicitly acknowledges that the distribution of labor and its products is unequal within the family and that it is unequal because the man has control over the woman and children and can do with their labor and reproductive power what he wills. Property is the power of controlling others' labor.Marx does not explain how/why men got this power. Furthermore, he says that the slavery latent in the family is the "nucleus" of later forms of property, which are just higher forms of essentially the same relation. Although the question of how men got this initial power is still unresolved, its existence permits men to gain other, more extensive and elaborate forms of property and power. Thus we can argue that "patriarchal privilege" is both a foundation for ("primitive accumulation"?) and basis of men's economic power. Once the initial act of expropriation (women and children as property) is carried out, men can use their differential power bases to subordinate other men through gift-giving, wife-trading, etc. To destroy men's privileged position in the family means to take control over our own labor power and thus it is analogous to removing the privilege of appropriation of surplus value from the capitalist.
In fact, Marx himself seems to be making a similar analogy in his next paragraph when he says: the division of labor offers us the first example for the fact that man's [woman's] own act [childbearing, labor for the man] becomes an alien power opposed to him [her]- as long as man [woman] remains in natural society, that is, as long as a split exists between the particular and the common interest, and as long as the activity is not voluntarily, but naturally divided. For as soon as labor is distributed, each person has a particular, exclusive area of activity which is imposed on him [her] and from which he [she] cannot escaped
Translated into feminist terms, Marx's argument means that patriarchy is a form of individual expropriation which constricts the possibility of developing a communal form of society. The man's private possession of women and children leads to the antisocial form of private and privatistic families. Nonetheless, the man has an interest in maintaining this form of property; he benefits directly from this inequality. Furthermore, women will remain enslaved as long as they are subject to a "natural" as opposed to "social" division of labor.
Marx does not point out, however. that the division of labor has different consequences for men and women.
Men go outside the home; the family is the base from which they can move out. Women remain embedded in the family, and the split which results from the sexual division of labor (particular/common, private/public), reinforces the powerlessness and exploitation of the woman.'* While historically neither men nor women can escape their exclusive areas of activity, men's sphere has expanded and increased in importance while women's area of activity (the family) has decreased in importance. Men, having committed the first act of expropriation and having accumulated their first property, are free to expand their holdings and power. Women remain slaves.
In addition, Marx has an ambiguous view of the family. He states that "the third circumstance entering into historical development from the very beginning is the fact that men who daily remake their own lives begin to make other men, begin to propagate: [they create] the relation between husband and wife, parents and children, the family. Since the two forms of activity to which Marx refers—the, production of material lite (food, clothing, shelter), and the creation of new needs which arise once the old ones are satisfied- are constitutive of human history, we might assume that the mode of reproduction is just as important as the mode of production itself. Indeed, in the paragraph following, Marx calls the production of persons and the mode of cooperation which accompanies it a "productive force.Marx implies that the family could be treated as the "mode of cooperation" with which the production of persons is allied. At the same time, however, Marx says that the family becomes a "subordinate" relationship as society becomes more complex. This would imply that although historically the family was one of three aspects of historical development, it no longer retains any independence and can only be understood as a subset of some more central, autonomous aspect. However, Marx does not tell us here what the family becomes subordinate to or how this occurs—a typical failing of Marxist discussions of the family.
Finally, any mention of women as women, or of how their historical development might have proceeded differently from men's is glaringly absent from Marx's discussion. Indeed, this absence points to the dangers inherent in any analysis of women's oppression which relies solely on a history of the changes in the mode of production. Without an analysis of patriarchy, women as historically specific beings disappear.
This is where socialist feminist theory must begin. We must trace the history of the mode of reproduction and its changing forms of social cooperation. We must work out the relation between the mode of reproduction and the mode of production, with special attention to the different experiences of women and men within this history (the dialectics of sex as well as the dialectics of class).
In order to carry out such an analysis, we must overcome the simplistic determinism we have inherited. (Marxists have their equivalent of the Holy Grail—the search for f/ic contradiction from which everything else follows.) An analysis of the mode of reproduction requires considering psychological and sexual-political dimensions which remain almost untouched in Marxist literature.
Patriarchal Ideology and Feminist Theory
Georg Lukacs shows us the interaction between self-interest and theoretical unclarity: The hegemony of the bourgeoisie really does embrace the whole of society in its own interests {and in this it has had some success). To achieve this it was forced both to develop a coherent theory of economics, politics, and society (which in itself presupposes and amounts to a 'Weltanschauung') and also to make conscious and sustain its faith in its own mission to control and organize society.
His words apply to men's protection of their interests as well as to the bourgeoisie. Any ruling group protects its hegemony by making universally valid rules out of currently existing relationships. In addition, however, the ruling group must develop a clear enough grasp of reality to be able to control and manipulate it. A ruling group thus claims objectivity, but only elucidates those aspects of relations which are in its interest to know. For example, bourgeois economists could develop laws of the market but could not develop the Marxist labor theory of value or the concept of surplus value. The self-interest of any ruling group must necessarily lead it to ignore the deeper contradictory aspects of reality which underlie the immediately given, and which provide possibilities for revolt and liberation.
Lukacs contrasts the bourgeoisie's need for mystification to the proletariat's need for an analysis of the real social relations underlying the production and exchange of things.» He adds a warning that is as relevant to feminists as it is to socialists:
When the vulgar Marxists detach themselves from this central point of view, i.e., from the point where a proletarian class consciousness arises, they thereby place themselves on the level of consciousness of the bourgeoisie. And that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will prove superior to the proletariat both economically and ideologically can come as a surprise only to a vulgar Marxist."
Feminists must understand that in order to maintain their hegemony, men will attempt to deny or obscure the experiences and insights of women who challenge their privilege and power. Men will deny that they have any special self-interest because in order to maintain hegemony, they must insist that they are speaking for and acting in the interest of society as a whole. If we deny the lessons of our own experience and/or try to fit that experience into categories established by men, we will lose both the meaning of that experience and our struggle for liberation (men cannot be beaten on their own ground).
This means we have to stop "acting like women," by justifying our theory and practice to men. We must stop seeking their approval of what we do. In particular, we must stop proving we are more socialist than they.
Men do not have a monopoly on truth. Indeed, their self-interest keeps them from seeing the totality. The "personal is political" because our experience drives us both to understand and to transform the present (indeed the two activities must be aspects of each other, integrally connected). If we deny our own experience, if we decide a priori to fit those experiences into categories which others have decided are politically correct, we lose the very possibility for comprehending and overcoming our oppression.
In summary, it is the orthodox Marxists who have been insufficiently dialectical, and who have never adopted the standpoint of women. They did not adequately deal with the "woman question," in part because they never really explored reproduction as a crucial moment of history- both in its internal relations and in its relation to the other moments of history. An overly deterministic methodology which focuses exclusively on production in the narrowest sense, will, of necessity, ignore women and the dialectic of sex because women's labor often takes place "outside" the market. Moreover, determinism leads one to focus on things rather than on relations, and patriarchy is above all a social relation.
One cannot ignore the fact that most socialist theorists are men. It is not in their interest to acknowledge the existence of patriarchy. Engels' work is a clear example of the distortions and omissions typical of orthodox Marxists. After the opening chapter of the Origins, the book becomes an analysis of the changing nature of production. Reproduction and the family disappear, "hidden from history" indeed.
Historically, socialists have put off women's demands until "after the revolution," or have defined women's demands as particularistic, divisive of the working class, not central to socialist revolution or society. Again, we must ask: who defines what is central and what is not? On what grounds? Working class demands are defined by Marx as both particular and universal: this is precisely what defines it as the revolutionary class. Working class demands as traditionally defined by Marxists speak to transforming the social relations of production. We women must speak to the question of reproduction, because in that realm, as well as in production, our labor is being expropriated.
Marxism can only help us understand women's oppression if it is radically reconceptualized. Specifically, we must develop a theory of social relations, and analyze history as the development of social relations.
Marxism can help us understand one aspect of social relations: that between the exploiters and the exploited in the realm of production. (It was to understand these relations that Marx developed categories such as surplus value, commodity fetishism, and class.) Furthermore, Marx (and Hegel) developed a method—dialectics —one of the most flexible and richest modes of social analysis. But there are other, equally important aspects of social relations, among them, relations centering around reproduction. Despite his insistence that all history is rooted in concrete human beings, Marx had little to say about these other relations. The categories adequate for comprehending the realm of reproduction have yet to be developed; though reproduction and production are separate but inter-related spheres, it is a mistake to impose categories developed for the comprehension of one directly onto the other. In developing these new categories, we need to look beyond Marxist theory. Psychoanalysis, structuralism, and phenomenology have provided many valuable possibilities for comprehending the reproduction of social persons, but they often lack a historical dimension. Freud enables us to begin to understand how sex/gender comes to constitute a central element of our very being as persons. Under patriarchy we do not become a person but a male or female person. In many ways our gender is who we are and this identification goes far deeper than sex roles understood in the sense of socialization or intentional (and easily changed) choices of roles and behavior. The theory of the unconscious, the role of sexuality, and the Oedipus complex which traces out on an unconscious level the consequences of the domination of the father—all provide a starting point for the analysis of the social relations of reproduction. Structuralism and phenomenology are excellent tools for examining ongoing social relations without falling into the simple determinism characteristic of orthodox Marxism.
We can conceptualize production and reproduction as two spheres of human life and history, constituted by the social relations within them and by the relations of persons to their own biology and to the natural world. These two spheres have historically been related to each other through the family. For this reason, the organization of the family reveals information about both spheres, and shows us the attempts people are making to bring these spheres into some sort of harmony. The study of the family can also reveal the contradictions between the demands of production and reproduction. The more disjunctive the nature of production and reproduction become (conceptualized by Marx as the difference between use and exchange value, and by Freud as the conflict between the pleasure and reality principles), the more possible it is for the family to retain an aspect of autonomy and uniqueness. The categories we employ must do justice to these disjunctions, not submerge them.
Conclusion
As feminists, we must not assume that there are Marxist answers to feminist questions. Our history is not the same as men's—neither on an individual nor on a collective level. Until we understand the mode of reproduction more thoroughly, we cannot begin to bridge the often discussed gap between Marx and Freud. To comprehend reproduction, we must continue to explicate our experience with the help of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and phenomenology. This is not to deny the interrelation of the world of production and reproduction, or to ignore the fact that we are shaped by both—indeed we need to retain consciousness of this inter-relatedness while carrying on our explorations. We must come to understand how and why men obtained and kept power over women and how this power relation varied historically. We must explore the consequences this relation has for the ways we are constituted as persons. We must learn how power relations interact with and affect relations of production. Finally, we must discover the most effective sources for change.
Marxism alone cannot answer our questions. But if we retain and expand our original insights into our experience as women, we will be operating within the spirit which originally motivated Marx—that history is rooted in human needs and social relations. By confronting Marxism with feminism we require an overcoming, a retaining of the old within the new. What we will create will be neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis, but a much more adequate form of social theory. The concepts used by Marx, Freud, and others are only guidelines along the way, to be retained in a new form within a more integrated and inclusive theory. For now, we have only glimpses of the necessity and possibility of such a theory, through the frustration we encounter in trying to answer feminist questions.
Footnotes
This paper could not have been written without the ideas and discussion provided by Jessica Benjamin, Jean Elshtain, Anne Ferguson, and Heidi Hartmann. However, they are not responsible for the final result.
1 Juliet Mitchell, Woman's Estate (New York: Random House, 1971), Maragaret Benston, 'The Political Economy of Women's Uberation,"Monthly Review, XXI: 4(1969), Hizaretsky, "Capitalism, the Family and Personal Uie."Socialist Revolution, III: 1-3 (1973), and the articles on women's labor in Radical America, VII: 4-5 (1973) all insist that m the last instance contradictions wif^in the sphere of production are the crucial determinant of women's status. The radical feminists emphasize patriarchy as either equal to class or as the first form of class oppression wfiich still underlies all forms of oppression. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1971), and Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), as well as Barbara Burns, The Fourth World Manifesto," Notes From the Third Year.
2 Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed, Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York International Publishers, 1972). All citations from Engels refer to this edition. Ibid.. p. 119
4See, for example, Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Family," Man, Culture, and Society, ed. Harry Shapiro (London: Oxford Uruversity Press, nd) for the varieties of work done by women in primitive cultures.
5 See Sherry B. Ortner, 'Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" Women, Culture, and Society, eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 67-73.
6 Karen Sachs, Women, Culture, and Societ eds. Rosaldo and Lamphere, pp. 211-212.
7'Engels, op. cit.. pp. 119-120.
8Ibid., p. 119. pp.
9Ibid 119-120. 10
10Ibid., p. 106.
11Suzie Olah, "Impolite Questions about Frederick Engels," A Feminist Journal 1:1 (March, 1970), p. 4.
12 Engels, op. cit., p. 120.
13 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology," in Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (eds.) Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), p. 424.
14/bid.
15Ibid., (My comments in brackets.)
16 For an elaboration of this point see Rosaldo, Theoretical Overview," IVomen, Culture, and Society, eds. Rosaldo and Lamphere, pp. 23-42.
17Marx and Engels, op. rif., p. 424.
18Ibid.. p. 421.
19 Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Boston: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 65-66.
20Ibid., p. 68.
21 Ibid.
Jane Flax teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and works in an experimental living/learning community there. She has been an active feminist for many years.
Reprinted from Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, Vol. Ill, No. 1, Summer, 1976. Quest is available from P.O.Box 8843, Washington D.C. 20003, USA at $ 14.50 a year overseas airmail; S 11.00 overseas surface; $ 10 for Canada and Mexico and $ 9 a year USA.
The Socialist and the Suffragist
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
"My cause is greater than yours!
You only work for a Special Class,
We for the gain of the General Mass,
Which Every good insures!"
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
"You underrate my Cause!
While women remain a Subject Class,
You never can move the General Mass,
With your Economic Laws!"
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
"You misinterpret facts!
There is no room for doubt or schism
In Economic Determinism
It governs all our acts!"
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
"You men will always find
That this old world will never move More
swiftly in its ancient groove
While women stay behind!"
"A lifted world lifts women up,"
The Socialist explained.
"You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,"
The Suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
"Your work is all the same:
Work together or work apart.
Work, each of you, with all your heart
Just get into the game!"
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman