PELICAN BOOKS

Woman's Estate

Juliet Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1940.

She came to England in 1944 and was educated at
King Alfred School, London. She read English as an
exhibitioner at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she
was a postgraduate student. From 1962. until 1970
she lectured in English literature, first at Leeds and
then at Reading University.
She is one of the editors of the New Left Review and a
member of the London Women's Liberation Workshop.
In addition to literary articles she has also written and
lectured extensively in England, Scandinavia, Canada
and the United States, on women and women's
liberation. She is at present working full-time on a
book on women and the family.
Juliet Mitchell

Woman's Estate

IJI e'er Grow to Man's Estate,

0, Give to me a Woman' sfate I
May I govern all, both great and small,
Have the last word and take the wail.
WILLIAM BLAKE

Penguin Books
 ForOtti

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Penguin Books Inc., 7II0 Ambassador Road, Baltimore,
Maryland 2.12.07, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

First published 1971

Reprinted 1973
Copyright Juliet Mitchell, 1966, 1970, 1971

Made and printed in Great Britain by

C. Nicholls & Company Ltd
The Philips Park Press, Manchester

Set in Monotype Garamond

lbis book is sold subject to the condition that

it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without
the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser
 Contents

Acknowledgements 9
Preface II

PAR 'I' ONE The Women's Liberation Movement

I. The Background of the Sixties
.a. The Women's liberation Movement
;. The Politics of Women's liberation: I
4 The Politics of Women's Liberation: .a

PAR 'I' 'I'WO The Oppression of Womm

5 The Position of Women: I
6. The Position of Women: .a
7 ThePositionofWomen:;
8. The Ideology of the Family
9 Psychoanalysis and the Family
xo. Out From Under
 :..

Preface

By 1970 there was some form of Women's Liberation Move-

ment active in all but three of the liberal democratic countries
of the advanced capitalist world.' The exceptions are Iceland-
an isolated enclave of pseudo-egalitarian capitalism - and
Austria and Switzerland, in social terms probably the most
traditional and hierarchic of European societies. Women's
Liberation is an international movement- not in organization,
but in its identification and shared goals. This distinguishes it,
in part, from its historical predecessors: the suffrage struggles
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 2 It dis-
tinguishes it also from its current media presentation as an
Anglo-Saxon, predominantly American movement. In
England, this insular presentation serves the function of
assimilating it to the popular conception of earlier feminism
and thus contributes to diffusing its impact: women went wild
before, so they are again. It's only a flash-in-the-pan!
Most of the different groups are professedly, if variously,
revolutionary. 3 Why are they rarely seen to be such?
I. There are also active groups in Japan, South Africa, Australia, Turkey
and Mghanistan; these fall outside the scope of this discussion.
z. The earlier feminists in Britain and the United States had international
contacts and did influence each other. There were also important struggles
in other countries such as Sweden and Norway. But this did not make it
international. The current coincidence of Women's Liberation groups
clearly bears analogy with the international nature of the Student Move-
ment.
3 The National Organization of Women (N 0 W) -the largest of all
American groups is reformist and is not now regarded as a partofWomen's
Liberation either by itself or by most other groups. However, see pp.
7:1:-4 for the importance of non-revolutionary and reformist groups.
 WOMAN'S ESTATE PREFACE z;
Every day in the press or on television in the United States hungry lust for sexual objects in any shape they come. As
and increasingly in England, there are comments on the move-- individuals, many men react to women's claims with fear or,
ment, or statements from its spokeswomen. As women claim alternatively, with bemused, compensatory tolerance. But
that they want to change the whole structure of society, that there is no indication that as yet, despite its enormous growth,
they see the system as oppressive and to be combatted at every the organized movement can claim more than nuisance value.
level, interviewers smile benignly (or scoffingly), clearly All previous revolutionary movements have had, at their
envisaging that a 'change in the system' might mean a bit more centre, at the crucial times, to be clandestine. It is not just that
washing-up or child-minding for the husband. It is true that the media gives Women's Liberation publicity, it is that, in
currently it is a fashionable movement, and that laughter takes concept and organization, it is the most public revolutionary
the sting out of the attack, and that if verbal aggression movement ever to have existed. Able, too, to make the most
escalates into acts of violence then, as it did with the suf- revolutionary statements in public without anyone seeming
fragettes, the state's repressive and coercive forces will come bothered. This raises many questions, not only about a society
into play. Already, it is claimed that in America militant which sees women as always unserious, but perhaps, more
women are losing or not obtaining jobs. There is no reason critically for the immediate future, about the nature of the
why violence and counter-violence should not reach the peaks movement itself.
achieved in the first decades of this century in England. Then We have to ask why it arose (the conditions that timed its
the suffragettes burnt down houses, smashed shop windows, birth in the late sixties). What it is like as a political movement,
assaulted Members of Parliament, planted bombs, destroyed What problems does it have to confront in ,analysing the
over a hundred buildings in a matter of months and disrupted position of women. And ... where do we go from here?
communications by blowing up letter-boxes and cutting In discussing the historical time at which it arose we have to
telegraph wires. They generally scarred the countryside of consider contemporary radical or revolutionary movements
England with their demand for the vote. In turn, they were with which it is in alliance or from which it broke: the student
imprisoned, forcibly fed and beaten up. A special Act of Par- movement, Black Power, draft resistance, already existent
liament - the 'Cat-and-Mouse' Act - enabled their continual sectarian groups and reformist women's groups, Third World
reimprisonment. But while this went on, the headquarters of struggles. We have to consider the specific condition of women
the most militant group- the Women's Social and Political during the decade that produced the revolt.
Union (the WSPU)- with campaign funds of 9o,ooo, one A description of the characteristics of the movement in-
hundred and ten paid staff, a subscribing membership of one volves its size, class-nature and the activity of its participants,
thousand and a newspaper circulation of 4o,ooo, remained its organization, the campaigns it wages and the concepts it is
untouched. True, conspiracy charges were brought against evolving in the process of building itself as a political move--
some of the leaders and Cbristabel Pankhurst was forced into ment: consciousness-raising, male chauvinism, sexism,
exile, but neither this nor any other organization as such was feminism, Iiberationism and its no-leadership structures. Also
ever smashed. It is sometimes necessary to shut women up, the revolutionary or radical tradition it draws on: the 'politics
but their political organizations are never to be taken too of experience', the spontarust methods of anarcha-syndicalism
seriously.
4 The 'politics of experience' is the term now loosely used to suggest an
Today, something comparable seems to be happening. The analysis of society from the perspective of one's self. The experience of
assimilation of Women's Liberation by the media into colour- personal alienation is the means of testing the total social alienation which
ful reportage may be symptomatic of something more than its is the product of ow: decaying capitalist society. R. D. Laing's The Po/ilill$
14 WOMAN'S ESTATE PREFACE

and the Situationists, the separatism of Black Power, socialist of the working class as the revolutionary class under capitalism?
theories of the unity in struggle of oppressed peoples, the If so, with what consequences? What is the relationship be-
concept of its~lf as a grass-roots, potentially mass movement. tween class-struggle and the struggles of the oppressed? What
Also, of the analysis so far tentatively developed, which in its are the politics of oppression?
broadest outlines runs something like - women are an op-
pressed people, we can learn about this oppression by using
the 'politics of experience', we can combat oppression by
attacking the agents and institutions of power (men and/or
male-dominated society) to produce either 'equality' or the
'liberated self': 'whole people'. s
We have also to discuss the specific features of woman's
situation that most clearly locate her oppression. Quite simply,
how do we analyse the position of women? What is the
woman's concrete situation in contemporary capitalist society?
What is the universal or general area which defines her oppres-
sion? The family and the psychology of femininity are clearly
crucial here. However inegalitarian her situation at work (and
it is invariably so) it is within the development of her feminine
psyche and her ideological and socio-economic role as mother
and housekeeper that woman finds the oppression that is hers
alone. As this defines her, so any movement for her liberation
must analyse and change this position.
Where are we going? Quite simply, is the movement which
claims to be revolutionary in intention moving towards the
formation of itself as a revolutionary organization? What
would this mean in terms of its internal structure and external
alliances? Is the feminist concept of women as the most
fundamentally oppressed people and hence potentially the
most revolutionary to be counterposed to the Marxist position
of Experience and The Bird ofParadise1 is perhaps a focal point for this notion:
'No one can begin to think, feel or act now except from the starting point
of his or her own alienation Humanity is estranged from its authentic
possibilities We are born into a world where alienation awaits us
AHenation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence
perpetrated by human beings on human beings' (pp. u-u). The 'politics
of experience' fuses the personal and the politicai.
5 For a discussion of the notion of 'whole people' see Sheila Row-
botham: Women's Liberation and the New PoliticS', published by the Bertrand
Russe,ll Foundation and The May Day Manifesto, 1970.
Part One

The Women's Liberation Movement

Chapter One

The Background of the Sixties

Women's Liberation and Previous Feminist Struggles

What were the origins of the Women's Liberation Movement?
Why did it arise in the second half of the sixties?
The movement is assimilated to the earlier feminist struggles
of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, not only, as I
have mentioned, by external analysts, but also by itself. This
obscures its novelty. Naturally the first and latest feminist pro-
test movements bear resemblances but it is important that
these are within their characteristics rather than in their origins.
Just as in the United States the nineteenth-century Abolitionist
movement was different from Civil Rights and Black Power,
the feminist struggles that, in part, evolved from these are
different. This distinction is more than just a hatting-up of the
battle: qualitively different relationships between the women
and the black emancipators (or black fighters) developed. Even
at a merely symptomatic level this is true: the nineteenth-
century feminists discovered the prejudices (and more) of
their own dominant white men and their government; with
Stokeley Carmichael's famous putting down of women to a
'prone' position in the revolutionary movement, women in
the 196os found the attitude of the oppressor within the minds
of the oppressed. This, among many other factors, has led to
the analysis offered by groups of radical feminists: the over-
throw of male-dominated society (sexism) and the liberation
of women is the primary revolution. Racism itself is only an
off-shoot of sexism.'
I. See Shulamith Firestone's analysis of racism in The Dialectic of Sex,
Jonathan Cape, 1971. I discuss some of the implications of her argument
onpp. 87-96.
2.2 WOMAN'S ESTATE 'I'HE BACKGROUND OF THE SIXTIES .z;
pre-revolutionary Shansi Province of China, an almost un- overlooked in the dismissive attitude that it had merely psy-
believable account of brutality and degradation. chological importance. Perhaps we can best see this sig-
nificance in the absence of anything equivalent in current
By the second quarter of the twentieth century these (social) rela-
tions and (natural) conditions had reduced Southern Shansi to a
working-class movements; or in the presence of it in the wars
nadir of rapacious exploitation, structural decay, chronic violence of liberation in the Third World. Despite Lenin's strictures,
and recurring famine which has few parallels in history ... working-class struggle in the West has remained too firmly
within the boundaries of its own economic exploitation, tied
Yet it is not from the nadir that revolutions can come: it is either to trade union politics or to the gradualism of reformist
from the prospect, not of a summit (Utopianism), but at least communist parties. The fully-developed political conscious-
of a hill that can be ascended. American women and students ness of an exploited class or oppressed group cannot come
were far away from the Shansi peasants at the bottom of the from within itself, but only from a knowledge of the inter-
well (their phrase and Hinton's); but the gap between the relationships (and domination structures) of all the classes
deprivation they suffered and glory they were supposed to in a society. Blacks do not necessarily have this 'over-
enjoy was sufficiently startling for them to challenge both. It view' any more than the working-class, but because their
is from this position of a prospect that all the revolutionary oppression is visibly cultural as well as economic there is an
movements of the sixties in the advanced capitalist soci.,ties impetus to see the diverse aspects of oppression within the
emerged. whole system. This does not mean an immediate comprehen-
Seen from this perspective, the 'middle-class' composition sion of the ways in which other groups and classes are exploit-
of Women's Liberation is not an unhappy fact, a source of ed or oppressed, but it does mean what one could call a
anxiety and endless 'mea culpas' but an intrinsic part of 'totalist' attack on capitalism which can come to realize the
feminist awareness. The most economically and socially under- need for solidarity with all other oppressed groups.
privileged woman is bound much tighter to her condition by The origins of 'totalism' are quite clear. As is its necessity.
a consensus which passes it off as 'natural'. An Appalachian The inspiration is the struggle of the Third World countries
mother of fifteen children experiences her situation as 'natural against imperialist oppression; a total struggle for the survival
and hence inescapable: a college-educated girl spending her of a nation and a culture. Blacks see their position as that of a
time studying 'home economics' for an academic degree is at Third World enclave within the homeland of imperialism.
least in a position to ask 'why?' The first stages of struggle were, thus, the reassertion of
Oppression is about more than economic exploitation as nationhood- a Black country within America. But the truth of
even the most economically deprived of the early radical this is only analogous. Blacks are historically too late, geo-
movements - Black Power demonstrated. graphically too dispersed, numerically too few to fight this
battle. They are not the sole victims of total imperialist ag-
gression like the Vietnamese; they are the most grossly exploit-
The Black Movement ed and oppressed minority within a capitalist system. The
'totalist' position is a precondition for this realization, but it
Among the earliest expressions of the Black Power struggle must diversify its awareness or get stuck in the mud of Black
there were decisive cultural attacks. 'Black is beautiful!' and chauvinism, which is a racial and cultural equivalent of work-
the whole assertion of Black values have a political significance ing-class economism, seeing no further than one's own badly
2. William Honton: Fanshen, Vintage Books, 1966, pp. 67-8. out-of-joint nose. What is true of workers is no less true of
Blacks:
2.6 WOMAN'S ESTATE THE BACKGROUND OF THE SIXTIES

women's liberationists were and are, students in Arts Facul- -to past and future 'golden ages' - for the apotheosis of their
ties. Of more elusive and interesting importance is the shifting values, these values are, in fact, inevitably a distorted mirror-
socio-economic background which produced the conditions reflection of advanced capitalist ideologies. The Hippy com-
just described. This background made possible the change in munity can now often reintegrate into society as a religious
the student consciousness and so also affected the position and enclave - because it has never got outside its own, and the
awareness of middle-class women, enabling them, as it did society's, religiosity. Primitive reflective politics of this kind
the students, at least partially to transform their class origins. that try to extend the dimensions of the offered values are
Precisely from their affluence, both groups were able to move easily incorporated. Even the apparently 'delinquent' drug-
to demand its overthrow. Students claiming to be 'workers' culture used a radical language that was a sad mockery of the
should not be taken to refer simply to their poverty, but rather available culture- drugs 'expand one's consciousness'; in a
to the poverty of their affluence, to the compulsion of their slightly different sense, what else does a consumer society
much-vaunted 'choice'. And middle-class women are in a want to achieve but to expand the consciousness of needs for
similar position: told they are equal, that emancipation has the vastly increased sale of a vastly increased number of pro-
given them everything, that working as housewives 'your ducts? The danger of such vague ideological radicalism is that
time is your own'-lucky to be women, not having the work, it remains ideological. Most Hippy groups transcend the
the worry and the responsibility ... but.... The position of capitalist socio-economic order only by inhabiting its more
students and housewives in the eyes of those who are neither is ethereal and timeless realms, ultimately by exploring its most
really very analogous: idle and free from responsibility. pervasive sell - religion. Opium is the religion of these....
It is not, then, that these movements are simply the product Admittedly, carrying anything to its logical conclusion has
of disillusionment: you offered us culture, you offered us radical effects. Few bourgeois ideologues initially owned up to
leisure, and look what it means. Rather, there is a profound their Hippy progeny. And, in their turn, in the process of ex-
contradiction between the actual work endured and an ploring the freed zone of consciousness, many groups came up
ideology that denies it. with insights and possibilities with revolutionary dimensions.
Students are protesting against their mental and intellectual The counter-cultural parody of the Yippies has yet more
manipulation within a context - the university - that is sup- radical possibilities. By turning to expose and exploit the
posed to guarantee their freedom. media (particularly television), the Yippies at least focus on
one manifestation of the ideological terrain on which this
battle has to be fought. But it is as yet an uncharted one, and
Hippies and the Politics of Youth the protest can effervesce into random exuberance. The line
between parodying the T.V. show and providing it with a
Hippies protest against the social manipulation and repression necessary shot-in-the-arm of youthful fun and games is a hard
of emotion. In a world of automation and alienation, they one to draw.
assert that what anyone feels is valid. Mter all, having been In the unorganized politics that such movements propagate,
told that all along- why not put such pieties to the test? The in their essential absence of leaders and structures, their ul-
Hippy underground initially appropriated the values of free- timate effectiveness depends on the political commitment of
dom, emotionality and the rights of the individual and, by individuals. . . . Yet at their worst, they are the more-or-less
taking them seriously, validated them for the first time. Yet, joyful symptoms of a decaying order; at their best, they are the
despite the fact that the Hippies look backwards and forwards agents or instigators of a new one.
 THE BACKGROUNJ? OF THE SIXTIES
.?.8 WOMAN'S ESTATE
brought a demand for literacy in its wake and, tardily, a com-
The Shared Background. pulsory education system. However, what we are witnessing
in the expansion of higher education from the early sixties
Education onwards is not just a straight continuation of this earlier
An essential and dominant aspect of the common context of development. It is something qualitatively as well as quan-
t~ese movements seems to me to be the vast expansion in titatively different. People are being educated not simply (as is
higher education in the first half of the sixties. This was par- often made out) for the skills required in the increasing com-
tially a response to demographic pressures - the babies of the plexities of technical production, but also for the expansion of
post-war birth-boom came of college age in 1964 and also a the mental universe itself, a universe that has to be enormously
result of changing economic demands. In America, Black much wider in a society geared to consumption than in one
colleges, city and state schools expanded. In England, many oriented around primary production. 4
technical, educational and art colleges had the greatness of Consumer capitalism depends on the ability to sell and the
university status thrust upon them in an open arm policy of massive multiplication of the means of selling. For each new
providing a respectable home for the nation's teeming youth. product a new advertisement, new copy-writer, new lay-out
The population of all the political movements of the sixties is girl, new transmission operator, a new need in the buyer
young and likely to be 'educated' - even if, as with Blacks, created by.... The material 'thing' is still paramount, but
they are grotesquely under-privileged. It is education and its clearly the whole is 'bottom-heavy'. This in itself is an index of
implications that can explain the problem of the class-nature affluence. The greater the development of capital, the higher
of the new revolutionaries. For now it seems that there is the the rate of reproduction that is necessary to maintain it.
potentiality within a greatly increased intellectual sector of People from the colleges and universities are increasingly
middle class for revolutionary impetus on its own behalf. In called in to perform this work - and no longer to undertake
othe~ wo7ds, not acting as an enclave and as leverage within
traditional intellectual work in 'the professions'. They are the
the working-class struggle (i.e. the revolutionary 'role of the agents of consumer capitalism, themselves the symptom of
intellectual'), but themselves participating as an organic part the development away from the primary production to in-
of that struggle. This is the opposite position from that cessant reproduction and, a part of the same process, to
ideological s~atement ~f tpe embou~geoisement of the working consumption.
class. What 1s happerung, rather, 1s that some groups within To the extent that large-scale industry is developed, the creation
the traditional working class, the skilled technicians, for in- of real wealth comes to depend less and less on the labour time and
~tance, and some within the traditional middle class are grow- the quantum of labour employed compared with the power of the
mg closer together in their class position. This is far from a agents set in motion during that labour time, which in its turn in
personal shift up or down the social ladder, it is a symptom of its powei:ful effectiveness- is not minimally related to the immediate
labour time that their production costs, but depends rather on the
the progress of capitalism itself.
general state of science and of the progress of technology, or of the
The sheer number of students, in a country like America, in application of this science to production. Work no longer seems
colleges and universities, is an important aspect of an advanced to be included in the production process as man rather stands apart
capitalist situation. This is a somewhat different phenomenon
f~om that found in early capitalist societies. During the 4 See Tom Nairn: The Beginning of the End, Panther Books, 1968, for a
full development of this thesis. I have found Nairn's analysis most helpful.
runeteenth century the increasing complexity of machinery_
 WOMAN'S ESTATE THE BACKGROUND OF THE SIXTIES 33
institutions themselves. The growth of ideology depends to train personnel for the maintenance of the ideological
upon the institutions which produce it: the educational and structure itself; an ideological structure that radical students
socializing institutiops. The schools, the colleges, the family: reject.
in the home and at school, children are brought up to believe
in the world. This belief is not a faith: it is all the ideas and
expectations (or lack of both) that we have about the world, Class and Culture
themselves included. Since the end of the Second World War,
but yet more emphatically since the decline of the cold war, The counter-cultural protests of the sixties, their most explicit
there has been an ever-increasing stress on the role of the exponents with the youth movement - Hippies, Yippies,
family and of the school as centres for the production of students and school children - occupy different places in the
ideology. During a war, or even a 'cold war', coercion and spectrum of ideological revolutionaries. At their lowest, most
repression can be much more overt: the development of' con- unpolitical point, this revolt merely elevates the ideological
sensus ' means the expansion of training, the 'internalizing' qualities that current capitalist regimes claim to espouse but
of obedience; the encouragement of tolerance necessitates our really abuse: selfhood and the free individual. This assertion of
'instinctive' conformity. On the whole, schools and families the possibility of realizing the temptations offered as sops by a
make quite a good job of it. capitalist society is a backward-looking Utopianism only too
Yet as soon as this conformity recoils on itself, then the prone to reaction. At the other, and most political point, the
institutions that have engendered it must be called into ques- onslaught on ideology attacks the institutions of its incarna-
tion. Women, Hippies, youth groups, students and school tion: the family, education and the media. It is inevitable that
children all question the institutions that have formed them, in almost all its manifestations this ideological or 'super-
and try to erect their obverse: a collective commune to replace structural' revolution should be initiated by people of middle-
the bourgeois family; 'free communications' and counter- class origin. By and large, only middle-class children go on to
media; anti-universities - all attack major ideological in- higher education (or stay at school beyond fifteen), or those
stitutions of this society. The assaults are specified, localized that do continue their education, in this way become middle-
and relevant. They bring the contradictions out into the open. class; working in the media is largely a middle-class job
This gives the movements staying power beyond the current (conditions, salaries, expectations, etc.); it is middle-class
set-backs. For example, in challenging - often violently- the children who can afford to 'drop out' and experiment with
institutions for the propagation of consensus, the students living styles; middle-class mothers who can contemplate the
have unleashed the powers of coercive state violence that are implications of the small nuclear family. But this is only the
always there as a background support. It is this inevitable phenomenal form: more important than this is the fact that the
relationship between the quietude of consensus and the dominant ideology of a capitalist society is the bourgeois one.
brutality of coercion (the killings, beatings-up, imprison- The class divisions that operate within the economic base
ments) that has shocked the intelligentsia and brought liberals apply within the superstructure, but not simply in a reflective
rallying round to preserve the university as an ivory-tower manner. Each class has aspects of its own culture, which are
enclave, isolated and immune from its own social function. relatively autonomous. This fact is illustrated by such phrases
The conflict in the university is between its ideology of its own as 'working-class culture', 'ghetto-culture', 'immigrant-
privacy and 'free-speech' and its increasingly obvious public culture', etc. and by the absent phrase- 'middle-class culture'.
functions, not just to provide the right economic workers but We talk of middle-class mores: manners and habits U and
 WOMAN'S ESTATE THE BACKGROUND OF THE SIXTIES

non- U) but not of a whole 'culture'. We don't think of' middle- ant that it is within the sphere of ideology that the oppressions
class culture' as something separate - it simply is the overall of the whole system sometimes manifest themselves most
culture, within which are inserted these isolable other cul- apparently. It is here that middle-class radicalism has its place.
tures. However, this cultural hegemony by bourgeois thought This should not mislead us into thinking that attacking the
is not on an absolute par with the domination within the institutions and agents of the superstructure is a middle-class
economy by the capitalist class. There is no sense in which one occupation and that, say, students must just ally with workers
'culture' can rise up and overthrow the one that dominates it. who will bring in the economic struggle. That would be a
The mode of ideological domination is such as to make its parody of the division of labour that capitalism offers us. The
domination invisible (its role, of course, is also to obscure the structure of advanced capitalism both at home and in its
economic domination by its own class). Its aim- and achieve- imperialist actions in pre-capitalist countries - suggests that
ment- is precisely to unify the otherwise opposing groups; to the role of oppressed groups, that is those groups which ex-
bury class antagonism beneath a welter of divergent, totally perience their oppression as much culturally as economically,
irrelevant alternatives (if it is a liberal democracy, tolerating is increasingly important. Women are an oppressed half of the
'free thought', a thousand sects - religious or political population.
obliterate one class), or beneath an homogenizing unity of
purpose (e.g. the nationalism and racism of fascism, etc.).
There is no cultural conflict because social groups remain Background to the Women's Liberation Movement
fairly isolated from each other in fact all the sub-cultures
manage to establish are a series of communication barriers. It The contemporary Women's Liberation Movement has been
is not a case of one class operating the machinery of another formed by a series of reactions - isolated within the Civil
class, but of one class being given breathing space for its own Rights Movement in the U.S.A., whites withdrew to student
cultural habits within the total aerial environment of another power and draft-resistance, isolated once more within these
class. groups, women withdrew into Women's Liberation. Each
For this .reason, among others, there is no chance of the withdrawal has strengthened that segment and as none of the
working class rising up and simply asserting their cultural movements from which each emerged has disintegrated with
values over and against those of the middle class. The ideo- success (as in the nineteenth century, Abolition was won, or,
logical dimensions of the revolution are likely to come initiai!J in the early twentieth, the vote granted) so alliances with, or
from within the ideologicai!J dominant class. Oearly nothing will be influence within, these other radical movements has become
achieved within this sphere alone: nothing- even ideological- possible. Consequently, the revolutionary implications are
can be changed without a transformation of the economic greater. A complex attack on a system is likely to be stronger
base. So far all revolutions have occurred, and all classical (politically rather than in actional terms) than a situation in
Marxist analyses developed, in countries with early capitalist which one political movement evolves from the ashes of
or feudal-capitalist systems. Although ideology is a permanent another.
feature of all societies, the balance between it and the economy Although the recent chronological development ran from
.varies. In conditions of coercion and grotesque economic Blacks, students and Hippies to women, I think that the com-
scarcity, it is not that the ideological weapons of oppression mon context just described produced them all, enabling one
are diminished, but that the exploitation of the base is more movement to exist in a country in which another does not.
visible. In a consumer society the role of ideology is so import- This common context has been crucial in. the formation of
 THE BACKGROUND OF THE SIXTIES
;6 WOMAN'S ESTATE

Women's Liberation. It is this context which establishes a educational system and the new jobs to which it is geared have
break with earlier feminism, and which establishes the struggle crucially affected women. Other than as teachers, women have
against oppression as a revolutionary one a struggle in never been the traditional intellectuals administrators,
which all oppressed groups can ultimately be allied. Members of Parliament, lawyers, clergy, etc. And now,
If the suffragettes as a whole in England had seen their battle educated, sans large families, apparently technocratized out
(as a few did) as distinct from but comparable to that of the of the home, these women move straight into new indust-
oppressed Irish (rebelling at the same time against colonialism), rial jobs in a consumer society. Indeed it is the growth of
they could never have landed up handing out the white feather these industries that may well, by a turn of the screw, have
or calling their paper the Britannia. The most prominent of made possible the expansion in ~merica of university places
them never submerged their class interest in their own ,for women: women are particularly suitable for the glamorous
feminist struggle. Today, the conditions for doing precisely lower reaches of the media industry as, apparently, they are
this are present. suited for computer-programmers and jobs in comparable,
The predominantly middle-class membership of the earlier less 'pure' reaches of science. 6
feminist struggles did limit them: among other things, it The ideological manipulations and alienations of higher
directed them (despite the acute awareness by some members education affect women, as they affect all the other groups we
of working-class and/or Black problems) towards focussing on have discussed. This is equally true of the industries respon-
largely bourgeois issues. So Christabel Pankhurst could con- sible for the expansion of consumer-consciousness ad-
tend that even if the vote were given to red-haired women of a vertising and the media. Though here women are presented
certain stature, their aims would have been achieved. And with a further contradiction that male students as a whole
indeed, when in 1918 in England it was given to women over escape. The jobs they are going into- which in any case are so
thirty who owned property, the most powerful wing of the far removed from their own production tend, by a further
movement was satisfied and the force of the struggle evapora- twist, to use women as their means of reproduction. The woman
ted. Today, the issue cannot be so dear cut, nor the various working for the media, supervises the activities of the media,
issues subordinated to one legal, symbolic gesture. This is at which themselves re-produce the product by means which, as
least, in part, because of the changing nature of this type of often as not, are herself. It is hard to explain this Frankenstein
middle-class movement. nightmare. The machine has taken over production from
man, and also ensures its own reproduction: its means of
doing this is - among other things to produce a constant
market (a consumer market), the means of creating this is to
Women and Education sell a product - the means to sell a product is a sexy woman.
It is far too crude to claim in an unqualified way that the The contortions of this process of alienation truly make an
Women's Liberation Movement is middle-class, but this is 'object' of the' guardian' involved. It was inevitable that one
always done. Its largest membership comes from the 'edu- of the first protests of the Women's Liberation Movement was
cated' middle class and it arose in a country (the U.S.A.) against the use of women as 'sexual objects' in the whole com-
where education is the ultimate aspiration, and where its municatioty.s industry.
availability is enormous and far more inclusive than in any 6. As if to confirm this point, it is here, in the media, computer-
previous epoch, and where women uniquely form forty-two programming, advertising, that, at least in intention, there is equal oppor-
per cent of college students. The changing implications of the tunity- it is in the older professions that overt discrimination prevails.
 WOMAN'S ESTATE THE BACKGROUND OF THE SIXTIES 39
that women's oppression manifests itself in economic and
cultural deprivation, that oppressed women are found in all
Women's Liberation and the Politics of Experience exploited minorities, in all social classes, in all radical move-
The aspect of the ideological revolution that has enabled the ments. That on the issue of the position of women, friends are
promotion of 'feelings' to the ranks of political action (the foes. It is with these realizations that the theory and practice
'politics of experience', propagated above all by Hippies) has of the movement has to contend,
certainly had important liberating effects: it has also opened up
political possibilities to completely new groups of people.
However, while being a crucial initiator of Women's Libera-
tion itself, sometimes it has also boomeranged back in a way
that has been highly detrimental. In the ideology of capitalist
society women have always been the chief repository of feelings.
They are thus among the first to gain from the radical 'cap-
ture' of emotionality from capitalist ideology for political
protest movements. But the elevation of this quality ignores
its really oppressive side within our society. Emotions cannot
be 'free' or 'true' in isolation: they are 4ependent today on a
social base that imprisons and determines them. The liberation
of emotionality, as a transformation that apparently takes
place on its own (within the superstructure alone) is im-
possible. Indeed, the belief in its possibility is an ironic self-
parody. Late capitalist ideology precisely urges one to be free
in faith, personal and individual in emotions, and to think that
one can be this without a socio-economic transformation;
much Hippy ideology has merely explored this possibility.
Here, as with all the other .radical movements in which they
initially participated, women haveJound their inspiration and
their desolation. The fight for Black rights, at fust, seemed to
transcend sexual discrimination; the students were men and
women; the Hippy communes accorded women the newly
glorious role of emotionality and creativity. . . . But dis-
crimination runs deep, oppression is larger than the sum total
of all these radical offerings. The economic changes that
thrust into revolutionary prominence the new 'educated',
youthful middle class, that provoked radical attacks on the
ideological institutions, caused the rise of the Women's
Liberation Movement. Once it had arisen, like its predecessor
Black Power, it saw that its tasks were greater than its origins:
 -QQ._.11

THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT 41

Chapter Two Yet offered a mystifying emancipation and participating in an

ideology of equality, the sense of something wrong is more
acute than where women share in the openly dominative
The Women's Liberation Movement structures of feudal, semi-feudal or early capitalist societies.
All the countries characterized by Women's Liberation
groups can point to the same areas and usually something like
the same degrees of discrimination. Women in all the countries
Discrimination Against Womm: Preconditions of the constitute a little more than one third of the labour force (the
Movement American figure of forty-two per cent is the highest). Their
wages range from around half to nearly three quarters of the
Comparable conditions for women and compar~ble dis- equivalent male wages. The largest percentages of women
criminations against them operate in all the ~o~nt~1es _where workers are, in all cases, in unskilled jobs. All countries in
Liberation Movements have arisen. The s1m1lanty m the signing the Treaty of Rome, ratifying the International Labour
position of women in these countries may _have re~evance for Office agreement, or instigating their own Equal Pay Acts are
the development of the movements there;_mdeed.' 1t may ~e a committed (in slightly varying ways) to authorizing equal pay
precondition of their existence. These a~e mdustnal countr:es. to all workers for equal work. In England it has been on the
Women's Liberation has not developed 1n rural areas, farmmg Trade Union Agenda since r888.
or peasant. In Italy, for example, it is mainly to be found in the Girls compose from less than one quarter to over one third
cities of the North. of the university student body. The American figure is ex-
Outside the socialist countries these are the main nations in ceptional. In no other country are th.ey more than twenty-six
the world with egalitarian programmes: they are li~~ral per cent. In nearly all cases, though they can leave school as
democracies ostensibly organized through consensus pollucs. well qualified, their opportunities for higher education and
Within the 'ideology of equality, the overt discriminatory further training (apprenticeships) or part-time study (day-
practices come as a shock.' The egalitarian ideology does not release) are less than half as good as the boys'. In the majority
mask a gap between the 'reality' and the 'illusio~' ~ff~red of these countries there has been an acclaimed policy of equal
but, on the contrary, is the way in which both_th~ discnn:ma- educational facilities for all for the best part of a hundred
tion and the opposition to it is lived. The bellef m the nght- years.
ness and possibility of equality that women share has enabled Legal discrimination disguises itself as 'protective' legisla-
them to feel 'cheated' and hence has acted as a precondition of tion. All countries operate some legal prohibitions on the
their initial protest. In fact, what we are witnessing in this type, hours and place of work of women and minors. The
general denigration of women is a_n i~evi~able ~ons_equence of interests of the married woman are ostensibly safeguarded by
the socio-economic system of cap1tallsm m which lt operates. the necessity of her maintenance during and after marriage.
The inferiorization of women is essential to its functioning. Usually her earnings are classified as part of her husband's
. Or do they? Maybe the struggles of oppress~d peoples in the ad- income and the man, as assumed provider, is also legal cus-
1
vanced capitalist world with their co~s~ant expre~~IO~ of outrage at the todian of the child. All these laws are the consequence of the
abuses they suffer contribute to maintammg an eqUJhbnum. ~~e structural woman's assumed dependence on the man- in fact, of course,
inequities and inegalities of capitalist society are made less VISible by _each
they create and ensure it. This in countries which utilize
assumption that they should not be there. Could these ?e as effectively
concealed by revolutionary demands as they are by refornusm? women in what are recognized as the most exhausting jobs;
 WOMAN'S ESTATE THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT 43
countries which do not simply extol motherhood, but mere
invidiously stress the profound implications of mother-love The Organization of the Movement
and nurturance: giving her the tasks and him the, rights.
Degrees of availability of contraception and abortion differ Women in the different countries experience a comparable
in the various countries. In all of them its distribution and oppression and the Women's Liberation Movements have
safety is random and haphazard. In none of them is it con- comparable aims, but organizationally, and hence to some
sidered the automatic right of every woman. In all of them it is extent theoretically, they can be quite dissimilar. This diversity
the privilege of the rich (white middle class) or the abuse of is largely due to their different origins. In England the length
the poor (e.g. the use of Puerto Ricans as guinea pigs in testing and strength of unionized working-class struggle is crucial, in
birth control devices). Even the most liberal laws on abortion, Italy it is the Marxist students and in America the Black Power
as in Scandinavia, England and New York, force the woman to struggle. I have selected five countries, each with somewhat
provide 'reasons' which are equivalent to self-denigration different problems and different methods of organizing. I hope
(physical or financial difficulties are rarely as acceptable as thereby, to illustrate the diversity possible within a united aim:
confession of psychological ineptitude). All this in industrial the Liberation of Women.
countries urging (for the rest of the world?) population con-
trol: countries extolling individualism and its correlate - a England
high degree of personal attention for the young child.
All these countries exhibit an essential imbalance of The first whisperings of the Women's Liberation Movement in
production and consumption. Women as housewives are seen England were late in 1967; by 1968 it was a named and or-
as the main agents of consumption. The ethic of consumption ganized movement. Its earliest manifestations were from three
(spending money) is counterposed divisively to that of pro- distinct sources: American radical politics, psycho-cultural-
duction (creating wealth) - the province of the husband. political groups and, in r 96 8, the labour movement. Specifically
Appealed to as consumers, women are also the chief agents of these were the American women in London working against
that appeal: used aesthetically and sexually they sell themselves the Vietnam war and for U.S. deserters (e.g. The Stoppit
to themselves. Used in these advertisements they also lure Committee), the grass-roots politics of Agitprop and the
men into the temptation of 'luxury' spending. Woman's psycho-politics of the Dialectics of Liberation Congress and
fundamental job as provider of food, health and welfare comes the Anti-University, and then the strike of Ford women
to seem an extravagance and so does she along with it. Her workers for equal pay. Later these seminal groups were joined
responsibility for the most basic needs of people is convj::rted by women discontented with their role in the Revolutionary
into a leisure-time activity and she a play-thing (if she is young Socialist Students Federation, and rst caucuses and then
enough) that accompanies such work. Both she and the job separate groups were formed within the traditional left sects.
are evllluated accordingly. Despite her work, she represents Many already existent equal-rights organizations quickly
leisure and sexuality. And this in industrial societies which identified or provided an overlapping membership - for in-
have, at least in the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon and Scandanavian stance, the Open Door International and Mothers in Action.
oountries, an ethic of puritanism and hard work. By late 1969 many of the major towns had Women's Libera-
tion groups and a number of the larger cities, particularly
London, had several different organizations in operation. The