MARXISM &

FEMINISM
Charnie Guettei

Copyright 1974 Charnie Guettei & Canadian Women's Educational Press

Typeset at Dumont Press Graphix, Kitchener, Ontario
Printed in Toronto, Canada by The Hunter Rose Company
 It is no accident that the issues of women's liberation
are urgent questions in Canada today. Women account for
over one third of the work force. The majority of these
women are working class; they make up the clerical and
service base of the Canadian economy in addition to
participating in industry. For these women the con-
tradiction of their two jobs as housewives and workers is
extremely acute. Equal pay for equal work, an end to job
discrimination, good free child care, and paid maternity
leave are the crucial demands of working women. In order
to struggle for these immediate needs most effectively, to
locate the cause of women's oppression, and then to fight
it successfully, we must develop an adequate theory
which encompasses and moves beyond these immediate
demands towards a definition of women's liberation
under socialism.
This essay speaks to both feminists and Marxists who
feel the need to develop their understanding of women's
liberation. Its author, a Marxist and an active member of
the women's movement, discusses the limitations of
feminist theory. She shows that to go beyond the present
level of theoretical analysis we must have a sound un-
derstanding of Marxism. The essay accomplishes two
things. First, it reviews past feminist writings and lays
bare their liberal assumptions. Secondly, it provides the
beginnings of a Marxist theory of women's liberation.
Currently there are a number of interpretations of
Marxist theory and strategy being discussed in the
women's movement. These debates are critical to the
further development of our theoretical analysis. With such
a theoretical analysis of women's role under capitalism we
can begin to develop political practice on women's issues
as part of the class struggle. We publish th is essay now as
a contribution to the ongoing debates, and with the hope
that it will stimulate further theoretical inquiry.

—The Women's Press

 o
MARXISM AND FEMINISM
WOMEN AS WORKERS
A remarkable number of articles and books on the
oppression of women have appeared in recent years
by authors spanning the entire political spectrum.
Women interested in taking action to end their op-
pression have developed their analysis from various
sources. Many of us are dissatisfied with a strict
bourgeois feminism which simply declares that men
oppress women, sometimes describes how, but does
not really tell us why.(l) Women in the left are looking
to Marxism to discover the basic causes of our op-
pression, and to give us the scientific understanding of
our society that will enable us to develop a strategy to
organize for liberation.
Most radical feminism, no matter how scathing its
attack on existing institutions, is very much in the
tradition of bourgeois liberalism. In his acceptance
speech Pierre Elliott Trudeau defined liberalism as a
creed that rested on the belief in that most delicate of
institutions, the individual. In capitalism's early,
relatively progressive stages, the ideology of in-
dividualism fostered by capitalism's ruling class, the
bourgeoisie, contributed to a growing respect for
individual initiative. It had a corrosive effect on the
reactionary feudal ideas which held back economic

1. The word 'feminist' is used in two ways. In its broad sense it means all
those who fight for women's rights. In the women's movement it is
sometimes used to describe those women who think the oppression of
women is primary, and even the source of all other oppressions, and as
such some liberationists will say that they will work for women's
liberation but disagree with the particular analysis of feminism.
(Knowing that 'feminist' is often used by male chauvinists to discredit
any woman's argument which threatens tradition, most liberationists
don't go out of their way to dissociate themselves from such a label,
since there is much that is useful in the feminist critique.) However, this
paper uses 'feminism' in the sense of the feminist theory of women as
opposed to the Marxist theory of women.
2

and social development. But liberalism is a con-

tradictory ideology. Its progressive side provides a
rationale for defending the rights of individuals
against the state. Its reactionary side emphasizes that
capitalism is not a system where one class exploits
another, but it is rather a collection of individuals, any
one of whom can succeed if he or she so decides.
Social science then becomes a study of the power
relations between individuals and a description of how
our ideas of ourselves and others cause our condition
and are the central force for change.
Marxism, which is the social science of the working
class, starts from the premise that we are not what we
are because of what we think, but that we think in
certain ways because of the kind of work we do, or
don't have to do, or are kept from doing.
Women are oppressed by men because of the forms
their lives have had to take in class society, in which
both men and women have been oppressed by the
ruling class. For a Marxist, the material conditions of
life—natural conditions, and the tools and social
organization by means of which we transform nature
through work—are ultimately the essential facts of
human history. Oppressions are rooted in the social
organizations through which one class (owners of
productive means) exploits the labour of others (those
who must work to live), and until the means of
production are owned in common, no oppression,
whether class, national, race, or sex, will be
eradicated from our society. History goes forward not
by the power of a few great individuals or great ideas,
but by means of masses of populations transforming
their environment through work, and their social
relations through revolution. The main contradiction is
not between men and women, but between the forces
of production, people's labour power, machines,
materials, etc., and the property relations of
production, the ownership of almost everything by a
 s

few capitalists who produce only for profit. The

struggle between the classes is an expression of this
contradiction. Capitalism tries to use reproduction,
sexuality, masculine-feminine socialization of children
in such a way as to make us more exploitable, not to
satisfy human needs. Herein lies the special op-
pression of women as women, as well as of women as
workers.

THE LIBERAL TRADITION

Historically, most arguments for the emancipation
of women have not presupposed the above. I will argue
that many of them presuppose what we have described
as a Jibero! explanation of historical change. We could
expand Trudeau's definition as follows: a
moralistically humanitarian and egalitarian
philosophy of social improvement through the re-
education of psychological attitudes. It usually regards
the freely determined individual as the moving force of
history, and politics as power relationships between
individuals, whether it is presupposed that individuals
are innately good, evil, or formed by other individuals.
Thus, its most distinguishing characteristic is that it
overlooks conflicts of class interest or includes them in
a peripheral way. It is precisely the overlooking of
class struggle which allows liberals to delude them-
selves that their own moralistic propaganda will
suffice to effect the necessary re-education; in Marxist
terminology, they possess Utopian illusions about the
path to social advance.(2)
The purpose of these definitions is not to undertake
a witch-hunt for liberalism in the theory of the
women's movement. The ideology in the fight for
freedom on most issues has been liberal, though
perhaps feminism pushes liberalism to its radical
extremes by questioning all institutions. Our purpose
2. What I mean by 'utopian' is explained in Friedrich Engels' Socialism,
Utopian and Scientific, (Moscow: Progress Publishers).
s
is rather to show that despite some valuable insights,
many of the theories are based on false views of
history and are incapable by themselves, therefore, of
yielding workable strategies. A good analogy
is the cause of civil rights. A Marxist would say that to
fight for the 'abstract rights' of individuals is in-
complete, and the notion of 'abstract rights' un-
scientific, but would not therefore oppose a movement
for democratic rights based on such a philosophy:
indeed, such a movement might be an important step in
the struggle to end oppression. The demand for
freedom takes many incomplete, even religious forms,
in the history of the fight against oppression.
It is the focusing on women's worlc, in factory, of-
fice, and the home, that has brought many activists to
seek a deeper understanding of Marxism. As a con-
tribution to developing a Marxist theory of women
under capitalism we will re-examine some of the
classics of radical liberal thought, usually referred to
as feminist, and of some students of the question who
are attempting a Marxist analysis. It is well to keep in
mind that there is almost as much disagreement among
people who declare themselves Marxists as there is
between Marxists and non-Marxists. We re-examine
feminist thought with a view to seeing where it can
provide insights that will further our Marxist un-
derstanding, to see where it falls short, and to see if
we are still falling into the same pitfalls as our liberal
predecessors.
Just as in the history of all liberal thought some of
the most profound humanitarian sentiments were
expressed one-sidedly, or in the abstract, so were they
in that part of liberal thought which addressed itself to
the woman question. Mary Wollstonecraft based her
arguments for equality on the same premise as the rest
of her fellow eighteenth-century rationalists—the
inalienable natural rights of individuals.(3) All men
and women by virtue of their common humanity and
 s

creation by God are entitled to the opportunity for full

development. From the French Revolution until about
1890 this was the dominant argument used for
women's rights. The Anti's would reply that what was
'natural' for the woman was the domestic sphere. The
answer to this varied. Many of our feminist sisters
replied that women were capable of both home and
work, many hedged, but few argued that women were
not at least responsible for the home, whatever
potential they may develop in addition to this.

JOHN STUART MILL AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS

John Stuart Mill provided the nineteenth-century
women's rights movement with the classic liberal
explanation and strategy. In his Subjection of Women
much feminist thought is prefigured.
For everyone who desires power desires it most over
those who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed,
with whom he has most concerns in common, and in whom
any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to
interfere with his individual preferences...(in the family)
the possessors of power have facilities, in this case,
greater than in any other, to prevent any uprising against
it. (4)
Women, under separate masters, are the most divided
of oppressed groups. And men prefer a willing slave to
a forced slave, hence the necessity to enslave the
mind. When one considers the natural attraction
between the sexes, the dependence of the woman on
the husband, her achievement of identity only through
him "it would be a miracle if the object of being at-
tractive to men had not become the polar star of
feminine education and formation of character."
Resignation of will and meekness become an essential
3. Mary Wolistonecraft, The Rights of Women, (New York: Everyman's
Library. 1965).
4. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, (London and New York:
Everyman's Library, 1965), p.228.
s

part of sexual attractiveness.

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently
artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some
directions, unnatural stimulation in others... no other class
of dependents have had their character so entirely
distorted from its natural proportions by their relations
with their masters.
Too true. But why are men in a position to impose
their will on women, and why are women usually
forced to accept their condition? The limitations of
Mill's proposals to change woman's condition stem
from his general view of how women got that way in
the first place, that is, from his faulty historical
analysis. For Mill, woman was in bondage from
earliest times because of her physical weakness and
sexual value to men. Force was dominant in primitive
times, and civilization has been the process of
replacing force with moral sentiments. Master and
slave relations between men and women are un-
forgivable remnants of force at a time when mankind
is capable of a higher morality. This simplified view of
history overlooks the fact that for most of human
history (before 'civilization') nothing like the ex-
ploitation of the last five thousand years existed. And
it is not innate 'weakness' that has put women at a
disadvantage, but her reproductive role in the context
of systems of exploitation. Yet this was a common
historical argument used by suffragists. It lends itself
to a kind of 'be kind to animals' approach, since it is
based on the notion that woman is a weak and
basically sexual creature who depends on the good
graces of men to improve herself. This view of history
makes possible advocating a solution which does not
necessarily rest on actual change of woman's position
in production: Mill does not mean that women should
enter into all spheres of male activity in practice.
Everyone should have the right to work so that some
exceptional women, for example, those particularly
intelligent, may become professionals. "The power of
 i

earning is essential to the dignity of woman if she has

not independent property." As long as women possess
certain legal rights commensurate with their dignity as
humans, the right to divorce, marital disobedience,
custody of children, property, etc., they will probably
not choose to work since there is one vocation for
which women have no competitors. (5) That is, Mill
regards childbearing and privatized childrearing as a
vocation, and childrearing, by implication, as
necessarily feminine. Certain 'rights' would be handed
to women: to put it bluntly, male liberalism was to be
the source of the emancipation of women. In other
words, private property is all right, as long as it is
used rationally, and as long as it is certain on paper
that women are not part of that property. Presumably
they are thus doubly insured against oppression.

ENGELS
Until fairly recently there has not been much in-
terplay between Marxist and liberal thought. Con-
temporaneous with John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels
was developing a scientific socialist analysis based on
the most current anthropology, with a view to
developing a working class strategy for women.
Engels' famous Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State is not primarily about women.
That it is sometimes thought to be the last word on the
question results in many misunderstandings. It simply
explains how the condition of women is a result of
5. Mill overlooked in his arguments the large number of women who
already had to work. In other works Mill espouses Utopian socialism, but
this does not disallow a casualness about the existence of private
property itself in much of his social critique. On the woman question, at
least, he keeps the two issues separate, Harriet Taylor Mill, who ap-
parently collaborated on his Political Economy as well as his thinking on
the woman question, went further on the question of public childcare, at
any rate. See Alice Rossi's introductory essay to Essays on Sex Equality
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
8

certain developments in private property, the state,

and the family.
This provides a basis for explaining the origins of
women's subjection and by extension, for discovering
the conditions for their emancipation. Writing in a
nascent period of the social sciences there is some
misinformation in Engels as there is in his principal
source, Morgan's Ancient Society, e.g. the belief that
the brain size can be correlated with intelligence. The
periodizationNMTERMS-SAVAGERY,BBARBARIS
civilization, etc. have been replaced by most Marxists
and non-Marxists with a different sequence of stages,
which nonetheless roughly correspond to different
types of subsistence: root and fruit, fishing and bow
and arrow for hunting, horticulture, domestication of
animals, agriculture.
Interesting is Engels' misconception of the nature of
female sexuality— not surprising considering the
period in which he lived. In his defense it can be said
that scientific approaches to the study of sexuality are
fairly recent, Masters and Johnson making the
significant inroads only in the 196O's.(6) What we are
more concerned with is how Engels correlated sex
oppression with private property, or more explicitly,
the oppression of women with class exploitation.
The first class antagonism which appears in history
coincides with the development of the antagonism bet-
ween man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the
first class oppression with that of the female sex by the
male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the
same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private
wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every

6. Engels shares with other Victorians, at least by implication, the belief

that males by virtue of their male sexuality are more opposed to
monogamy than are women. Any such mystifications of sexuality can be
laid to rest by the findings of William H. Masters and Virginia E. John-
son's Human Sexual Response (New York: Little, Brown and Company,
1966). (There are many different attacks on and defenses of monogamy
amongst women's liberationists, both Marxist and non-Marxist, none of
them including the argument that woman is innately monogamous.)
 S
ADVANCEISIKEWISEARELATIVEREGRESSIONHICHTHE
weli-being and development of the one group are attained
by the misery and oppression of the other. It is the cellular
form of civilized society, in which we can already study the
nature of the antagonisms and contradictions which
develop fully in the latter.{7)

By monogamy Engels means here the paired

marriage based on the supremacy of the male. It was
an historical advance in the way that private property
was, a contradictory way: that is, it accelerated
development but brought misery, the man developed
(in part) at the expense of the woman; the ruling class
developed at the expense of the ruled. "The role of the
man in the family, the procreation of children who
could only be his, destined to be the heirs of his
wealth—these alone were frankly avowed by the
Greeks to be the exclusive aims of monogamy." It is the
notion of a contradiction that liberalism cannot deal
with. Engels differs from liberals not only in taking
account of the actual concrete history of human
production, but also in his use of dialectics. Marxists
see all history as processes of development, the motive
forces of which are contradictions. Every historical
stage contains within it the seeds of its own change,
7 Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
(Moscow: Progress Publishers) p. 66. Branka Magas' excellent article
emphasizes that misrepresentation of this section in Engels is key to
Kate Millett's misunderstanding of Engels' theory. The first class an-
tagonism was not between man and woman in monogamy, but man's
oppression over woman in monogamy coincided with the first class
antagonism, slavery."Whereas Engels really argued that the
development of productive forces gave rise to private property,
resulting in the subjugation of women as well asthesubiugation of most
men, Millett's Engels argues that it is the subjugation of women that
gave rise to private property (ownership of women being its first form)
and thereafter to 'the total structure of human injustice'. According to
her, both Mill and Engels saw the subjugation of women as the cause of
other forms of oppression, and therefore she can argue that once this
oppression disappears all other forms will do so as well. The class
history of mankind is thereby turned into a sex theory of
history."(Branka Magas, "Sex Politics: Class Politics,"New Left Review,
No. 66, March-April 1971, p.83).
10

and the task of the dialectical historian is to discover

and map out the very complex elements of social
contradictions as they are to be found in particular
societies. As society develops some things get better,
but in the propertied stages at the expense of more and
more of society's members. Eventually, material
conditions resulting from production developments
make it possible for the exploited to overthrow the
exploiters (the contradiction matures). Social forms
contain certain contradictions which force them to
change as society changes: for example the family both
protects and oppresses women. When women no
longer need its protections they will be in a better
position to resist its oppressions. It is enough in
studying the history of women to grasp that class
struggle is in the long run the underlying social factor
in propertied society and, in the short as well as the
long run, history does not move in a straight line. In
some stages and in different cultures women are
better off in some respects, worse off in other
respects. For example, women in primitive society
possessed a certain amount of respect and dignity, but
pain and early death were also conditions of that level
of development. A division of labour and the in-
tensified exploitation of nature was a condition for the
advance of mankind, but the ability of humans to
create a surplus, that is, something over and above
what was necessary to keep one alive (subsistence),
also made it worth man's while to exploit human
labour, male and female.
Division of labour originally was 'natural'
between the two sexes. For Engels, the man's going to
war and hunting, and the woman's staying at home
and gathering and preparing the food was 'natural'.
A better way of describing this might be that one of
society's first important cultural adaptions was
assigning to the woman tasks compatible with
childbearing and childrearing, and to the man (for the
 11

most part) all others, encouraging a higher

development of both kinds of tasks. What was
produced had to be used in common if anyone was to
survive. In the nineteenth century, ethnologists were
just beginning to examine matrilineai societies, those
in which kinship is traced through the mother. In these
societies women often enjoyed considerable authority
and dignity which was a challenge to the widespread
belief that the 'patriarchal' family was a God-given
universal. Some feminists have interpreted Engels to
mean that once women ruled and were defeated by the
male sex. They were defeated all right, but before that
no one ruled in the way they do in class societies with
states. As long as the division of labour was reciprocal
there was no exploitation and hence no domination in
the sense of propertied advantage.
At a certain point in development, let us say with
the accumulation of tools, domesticated animals, and
other property, the tasks in the male sphere came to
give him considerable advantage over the female.
With the rise of the state and professional armies the
polarization of tasks became extreme. The basis of
male supremacy was the development of property in
herds and later in land, property which made
necessary a state for its protection. The kind of
property varies in different societies, but he who
owned, say, the cattle, could exchange them for
commodities and slaves.
All the surplus now resulting from production fell to
the man; the woman shared in consuming it, but she had
no share in owning it. The 'savage' warrior and hunter had
been content to occupy second place in the house and
give preference to the woman. The 'gentler' shepherd,
presuming upon his wealth, pushed forward to first place
and forced the woman into second place. And she could
not complain. Division of labour in the family remained
unchanged, and yet it now put the former domestic
relationship topsy-turvy simply because the division of
labour outside the family had changed. The very cause
12

that had formerly made the woman supreme in the house,

namely, her being confined to domestic work, now assured
supremacy in the house for the man; the woman's
housework lost its significance compared with the man's
work in obtaining a livelihood; the latter was everything,
the former an insignificant contribution. Here we see
already that the emancipation of women becomes
possible only when women are enabled to take part in
production on a large, social scale, and when domestic
duties require their attention only to a minor degree. And
this has become possible only as a result of modern large-
scale industry which not only permits of the participation
of women in production in large numbers, but actually
calls for it and, moreover, strives, to convert private
domestic work also into a public industry.

Thus Engels starts from production relations. It is

not just a matter of the kind of work but who owns the
means of the kind of work which yields the productive
surplus. It is access to this surplus that gives the
property owner his advantage over others, class
dominance in society, male dominance in the home.
Engels goes so far as to describe the male as the
bourgeois and the female as the 'proletariat'. Instead
of a community of people raising children more or less
collectively in the clan, the rise of the private
ownership of herds and land creates a situation in
which individual families become the economic unit of
society. Engels quotes Marx:
The modern family contains in embryo not only
slavery (servitus) but serfdom also, since from the very
beginning it is connected with agricultural services. It
contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms
which later develop on a wide scale within society and its
state.

This is the economic base of the 'patriarchal' family.

But development at a further stage begins to create the
conditions for the emancipation of woman. In
capitalist modern industry, workers—male and female
—labour collectively, even while the industry is still
privately owned. The economic base of society is more
 13

and more outside the family: it is not the father's

property that provides a living, but the selling of
labour power to the capitalist. And this tends in some
respects to weaken familial authority. Of course, the
matter is considerably more complicated. The woman
is thrust onto a separate labour market for low paying
'female' jobs, with the double burden of home
responsibilities and work. Other conditions must exist
as well. It is just that labour force participation and
collectivization of domestic labour is prerequisite to
these changes on a general scale.
Engels predicts that those features of monogamy
which arise from property relations, dominance of the
man and the indissolvability of marriage, will
disappear when capitalism disappears. What forms of
sex relationships develop in the future will be decided
by a generation for whom sex is entirely disassociated
from money or social power.
Engels concentrated on the transition from society
before private property to society based on private
property and exploitation, and tried to show in general
how family forms and the position of women depended
upon what people owned and how they made a living.
He does not develop an analysis of women's oppression
under capitalism and does not even mention unequal
pay and the responsibilities of maternity which are
central to the oppression of the double burden. Fur-
thermore, his analysis of the family is limited to the
propertied family.
Engels focuses on the emergence of the upper class
family as an
instrument for the concentration of individual wealth. He
does not clearly define the lower-class family as affording
an important buttress for class society by making the
individual acutely vulnerable to exploitation and control.
The separation of the ordinary labourer from the com-
munal security of the gens meant the worker was
responsible as an individual not only for his own main-
tenance but also that of his wife and children. This to a
14

large measure insured not only his labour, but also his
docility; it rendered him—as he is to this day—fearful of
fighting against the extremities of exploitation as en-
dangering not only himself but also his wife and his
dependent children. With wonderful wit and satire, and
warm sympathy, Engels deals with the conjugal relations
produced by monogamy, but largely in relation to the
bourgeois family. He writes of the proletarian wife who
moves into public industry under conditions of great
difficulty for herself and her children, but does not
elaborate on the enormous ambivalence the individual
family creates in the working-class man and his wife as a
result of their isolation.(8)

Also in romanticizing the working class family Engels

is unable to show how economic insecurity is at the
heart of male chauvinism. A Marxist psychology of
male chauvinism would have to start from an analysis
of male fears that stem from responsibilities as a
breadwinner in a class society.
Chauvinism is difficult to analyse historically
because it strikes at the most intimate of human
relations. We tend to be more subjective about it,
ignoring it out of fear (particularly if we are male), or
reading it in even when it does not exist because it is so
prevalent and objectionable now. The oppression of
women varies in different historical periods. In pre-
historical society before exploitation there was a
sexual division of labour, but also a kind of reciprocal
equality between the sexes in the clan. In feudal and
slave societies and in early small capitalist production,
ruling class women were not the equals of ruling class
men, but the majority of women were partners in
oppression with their men. Moreover they were in-
cluded in some social production, insofar as the home
was still the scene of production, though they were
chained to a cyclical round of drudgery with their men

8. Eleanor Burke Leacock, Introduction to Engels' Origin of the Family,

Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers,
1972), p. 42. Leacock's introduction is the most valuable current study
of Engels available and mandatory reading for any serious Marxist.
 15

which was not to be changed until advanced in-

dustrialization. With capitalism, the possibilities for
women's emancipation created by industrial wealth
are in sharp contrast to the reinforced sex roles
capitalism maintains to exploit working people. Now
the ideology of sexism as we know it becomes more
explicit, more unjust, more bizarre. The sexism we are
analyzing is that specific to capitalism. At a moment
when the forces of production are highly developed
and the working class partly organized, capitalism has
to maintain a primitive form of work, petty housework,
side by side with the advanced social production of the
exchange economy. It must also maintain unequal
wages to preserve a cheap supply of labour. Where it
can, capitalism seeks to distinguish groups it specially
exploits and oppresses by some physical charac-
teristics, and raises its children with the blinding
prejudices necessary to sustain this. Racism depends
on the distinction of skin colour, sexism on the gender
of a person's reproductive organs. Just as Marx and
Engels had no theoretical work on racism, a
phenomenon that has become a central brake on
progress in the working class movement in t
imperialism, so did they lack a developed critique of
sexism under capitalism. Their class analysis of
society still provides us with the best tools for
analyzing both forms of oppression, although con-
cerning women it is very underdeveloped.

SUFFRAGE AND THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

While the liberal and Marxist views co-existed, it
was the former which predominated in universities
and in the press, and it is in this tradition that
bourgeois women's rights activists sought to find
explanations for their oppressions and strategies for
change. There was, of course, a spectrum within
liberal thought, ranging from those who limited the
16
struggle to the vote, to the free love anarchism of
Victoria Woodhall and Tennessee Claffin. I will try to
show, however, that the various strands have more in
common with each other than any of them have with
Marxism.
Aileen Kraditor, in an analysis of the ideology of
suffragism, distinguishes the justice arguments (or
what I have called the arguments based on the notion
of abstract equality) from the expedience arguments
used in the later period of suffragism, when many
upper class women jumped on the bandwagon of the
struggle for the vote and the whole character of the
earlier movement changed.
The claim of women to the vote as a natural right never
disappeared from the suffragist rationale but the meaning
of natural right changed in response to new
realities...(that is, natural right did not always extend to
workers and immigrants)....Some suffragists used the
expediency argument because social reform was their
principal goal and suffrage the means. Other suffragists
used the same expediency argument because the link of
women suffrage to reform seemed the best way to secure
support for their principal goal: the vote.(9)

Just what was the essence of the expediency

argument? The basic assertion was that women are
indeed very different, if not superior, and as mothers
of the species they are the guardians of its domestic
and peaceful virtues. Since so much that was formerly
done in the home is extended to the marketplace and
government, women must have some hand in these
spheres, if only to be better wives and mothers, and
extend that motherhood where it is needed. Thus
motherhood, an institution which some earlier
women's rights advocates had found difficulty in
providing for under conditions of projected equality,
became the cornerstone of arguments to include
9. Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-
1920 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp.
44-45.
 17

women in government. Government needed women

because they enjoyed a natural monopoly
(motherhood). They understood 'natural' to mean
caring for as well as conceiving the entire human
species. Feminism in its good sense, as a protest
against reducing women to the reproductive role, was
for the most part sold down the river. But that wasn't
the only taint on the movement: all too often the
predominance of this argument was an indication that
for white, middle class, native born, protestant suf-
fragists, sex role antagonism with their men was
overridden by class and race similarities. For many,
the vote was the crowning glory in solidifying the
middle class fortress of men and women against the
potential onrush of the 'unqualified' voter. How far
from that first generation of suffragists such as
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, for
whom the vote was a means for further reforms for
women, and such socialists as Charlotte Perkins
Gillman for whom all women's rights struggles were
steps in the transformation of propertied society into
socialism.
William O'Neill attributes the collapse of the
woman movement to the pragmatism of using
motherhood arguments, and distinguishes between
social feminists who were interested in the woman
question only secondarily, and the feminists, who not
only regarded the woman issue as primary but some of
whom went so far as to criticize marriage and the
family.(10)
These categories are not very helpful in politically
analyzing the movement, however, since one could be
very extreme on the question of women's rights and yet
be estranged from the working class movement and
socialism. To be 'radical' did not necessarily mean to
10. William O'Neill, "Feminism as a Radical Ideology," Alfred Young, ed,,
Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1968).
18

be left. For example, the issue of 'free love' was

scarcely an issue for working class women at the
margin of survival, except probably negatively, since
loyalty to the family was so important economically.
However, it was usually interpreted as daring and
'left' within bourgeois circles, and a threat to all
manner of conventions. (Unfortunately, some socialists
classified the birth control movement in a very
mechanical way, as middle class, accusing its
proponents of seeing overpopulation as the main
enemy, rather than capitalism. Of course, for many
middle class women, birth control was seen in this
way, but this does not mean that access to birth
control is not a working class issue.)
In any event, O'Neill overlooks the significance of
the beginnings of a socialist analysis of women's
oppression. The great historical materialists Friedrich
Engels and August Bebel were using the first
ethnological discoveries to establish a scientific basis
for believing that the full development of men and
women is equally possible in practice. But the women's
movement was for the most part neither socialist nor
working class, and it is beginning to be both these
things only now when there is a basis for these
developments in society, a material basis predicted in
part by the early historical materialists.

INTERIM PERIOD
But then followed the great ideological void on the
woman question. The bourgeois women's movement,
with few exceptions, began its period of disassociating
itself from feminism, and all too often the left in
capitalist countries, in part disillusioned with the
limited middle class demands of much of the women's
rights movement, but also for reasons of internal
chauvinism, took a similar position. Although in many
real ways women in socialist countries were to become
 19

the world's most liberated, merely pointing to some

gains under socialism was an inadequate substitute
for a theory of women under capitalism, or indeed a
a theory of women in the pre-communist period of
socialism where scarcity still puts limitations on
liberation. I am speaking here specifically of progress
in the theory of women's liberation. Why should
August Bebel's Women and Socialism, which went
through about forty editions in less than a generation,
have been the last serious study by a Marxist of this
question, or at least the last extensive one published
in many languages? (11)
An obvious reason is that the next major strategy
works would have to come from a women's movement,
since practice is necessary to push theory forward.
Not only was the movement limited, but women were
disadvantageously represented in producing extensive
theoretical works of any kind because few received
higher education, and most of those who did were
burdened with family responsibilities. Only recently is
this being overcome to some extent. There is also such
a thing as backlash, both capitalist and male, and to
even raise any question in their own interests women
have been forced to fall all over themselves protesting
that this does not in any way threaten the sanctity of
the home, etc., etc. Probably most important, not only
the women's movement but all social movements of the
left in capitalist countries were set back by the relative
material success of imperialism. Part of this was what
O'Neill refers to as the "conservative backlash of the
Gilded Age." The tendency to dilute the cause for
small gains was also a trend in what Lenin called the
labour aristocracy', which all too often divided itself
from the rest of the working class by tying its interests
with imperialism. The super-exploited unorganized
11. A number of shorter works were widely circulated, such as the
recently reprinted Communism and the Family by the Bolshevik
Alexandra Kollantai (London: Pluto Press, 1971).
20

were so divided by employer counter-attack, race,

nationality, sex, etc., that they haddddifficulty
organizing over wages, let alone women's issues.
Womankind, like mankind, does not set itself problems
it cannot solve, and until women were securely and
irrevocably in social production there was no base for
their movement. The woman movement as such in
capitalist countries never had a working class base
until this time around; it is historically false to
characterize the turn of the century movement as
working class, regardless of militancy. Socialist
thought tends to approximate, in the long run, the
possibilities of the working classes it deals with.
Another reason is related to this, and still applies. A
feminism which necessarily focuses its criticism on the
family cannot get very far so long as the working class
needs families for survival. And this is a factor af-
fecting the influence of feminism on the current
working class movement.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND MODERN RADICAL

FEMINISM
The next major inquiry into the position of women
wasn't to come until after World War II and it was not
Marxist. Rather I think it can be considered a
development within radical liberal thought. This is of
course Simone de Beauvoir's great existential work,
The Second Sex, which is easy to criticize now, but for
which de Beauvoir was considered a great social
threat in the fifties. (12)
To benefit from a reading of de Beauvoir one must
distinguish between her existentialist theory, which is
inadequate, and the valid sociological insights which
do not necessarily depend on her theory.
For de Beauvoir, woman is always the 'other', the
12. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex(New York: Bantam Books,
1968).
 21

immanent (passive) who is dependent on man and

therefore can live only through him: it is the man who
transcends, or plays the creative role in society. The
woman is socialized to be satisfied by passivity, or to
make her mark on the world in only feminine ways. In
the best tradition of classical liberalism, the positive
side, de Beauvoir argues that "woman is not a com-
pleted reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her
becoming that she should be compared with man, that
is to say, her possibilities should be defined." A
common form of the nineteenth century equal rights
argument was that women are not now 'equal'
because of their history of subjection, but they must
have every opportunity for becoming equal. But while
de Beauvoir's descriptions of the formation of feminine
character are illuminating and force us to recognize so
much of what being a woman means, her analysis of
women in history and therefore her theory of women
falls short of providing a women's movement with any
kind of collective strategy. I think this follows from the
moralistic terms in which she places the question.
DeBeauvoir describes existentialist ethics thus:
every individual transcends through his projects (a
technical term meaning constantly forging a future);
liberty is the continual reaching out for more liberty in
an indefinite future. Anything else is stagnation,
immanence, subjection. "This downfall represents a
moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted
upon him it spells frustration and oppression. In both
cases it is an absolute evil." Transcendence is the only
justification for existence, and to the argument that
housewives are happy being 'immanent' de Beauvoir
would respond".. .1 am interested in the fortunes of the
individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in
terms of liberty." This might make some sense in
describing an upper middle class woman who chooses
to be a wife rather than to create her own 'project',
but even here the element of choice is dubious. Cer-
22

tainly for most working class women, that is for most

women, the alternative to housewifery is not a
"continual reaching out towards other liberties" but a
drudge job which is added on to domestic labour. It is
true that in our society man is considered the essential
and woman the inessential who depends on the for-
tunes of males, but whether the solution lies in enticing
women to risk resistence as individuals is another
matter.
To make her position clearer we must understand de
Beauvoir's reasons for dismissing historical
materialism. Her understanding of how Marxists
regard technology's influence is revealing. The change
from communal ownership to private ownership could
not, according to de Beauvoir, have been decisive in
the subjection of women if man did not himself relate to
property in a certain way, if he did not regard it (and
women as part of his property) as his 'project'. And
why wasn't the association of male and female
friendly? Enslavement was "a result of the imperialism
of the human consciousness seeking always to exercise
its sovereignty in objective fashion. If the human
consciousness had not included the original category
of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the
Other, the invention of the bronze tool could not have
caused the oppression of women." (This is how de
Beauvoir interprets Engels' connection between the
bronze age and the transformation of social relations
that enslaved women.) However, 'imperialism of the
human consciousness' sounds like a concept of innate
aggression, and this is the kind of explanation to which
Marxists have tried to develop an alternative.
It is interesting that T. Grace Atkinson, a con-
temporary radical feminist, takes a view similar to de
Beauvoir's in that it presupposes innate aggression.
Atkinson goes a bit further and describes the process
of the enslavement of women as 'metaphysical can-
nibalism'.
 23

It is to eat one's own kind, especially that aspect

considered most potent to the victim while alive, and to
destroy the evidence that the aggressor and the victim
are the same. The principle of metaphysical cannibalism
seemed to meet both needs of Man: to give potency
(power) and to vent frustration (hostility)...Some psychic
relief was achieved by one half of the human race at the
expense of the other half. (13)

Most feminists would not acknowledge Atkinson as a

spokeswoman for the movement. I use her as an
example because she states the presuppositions of her
theory of society. Of course most feminists would not
agree with her view of human nature. But as I intend
to show, much feminism is based on some kind of
concept of power relations between individuals on the
basis of strength, to be overcome only when humanity
prevails not by a show of strength but through higher
forms of action. Presumably, we would learn this
through education, hence eliminating male-female
division of labour. In this respect such feminism can be
regarded as a development within radical liberal
thought; a Marxist theory emphasizes that to make
those kinds of changes in education, production
relations would have to change first, or at some point,
in order to make educational changes sufficiently far-
reaching, and to create new social institutions to
provide the conditions for equality.

KATE MILLETT
Kate Millett's SexuaJ Politics is one of the most
popular statements of the feminist position. In
describing certain psychological realities it is razor
sharp, but her analysis of the way society works has

13. Grace Atkinson. "Radical Feminism,"Notes from the Second Year,

Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds. (New York, 1970), p. 36.
Atkinson is also explicit that by class she means women as a class.
24

some of the limitations of the radical feminism already

considered. (14)
Politics for Millett is not the state or political parties
but "power structured relationships, arrangements
whereby one group of persons is controlled by
another." In what she calls "notes toward a theory of
patriarchy" she attempts to "prove that sex is a status
category with political implications." Economic power
for Millett is a consequence of psychological
domination. She defines our society as a patriarchy
with the power to 'condition the consent' necessary to
legitimize its authority. Distinctly human activity is
reserved for the male; the female is conditioned to the
biological, cyclical sphere. Status is for Millett one's
political position, role the sociological, and tem-
perament the psychological. Very little is innate, but
most that is learned is conditioned by the patriarchal
family.
Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a cir-
cumscribed but complementary personality and range of
activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each
represents a status or power division. In matter
of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without
peer; it is probable that no other system has ever exer-
cised such complete control over its subjects.
The family mediates between the individual and
society and therefore crucially affects the total per-
sonality. Millett regards the female as having "fewer
permanent class associations than does the male.
Economic dependency renders her affiliations with
any class a tangential, vicarious, and temporary
matter." As for patriarchy
a referent scarcely exists with which it might be con-
trasted or by which it might be confuted. While the same
might be said of class, patriarchy has a still more
tenacious and powerful hold through its successful habit
of passing itself off as nature.

14. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City; Doubleday and Co. .Inc.,
1970).
 25

One can see then why Millett regards the sexual

revolution which contested the universal patriarchy as
the historical development central to the liberation of
women. The struggle for the vote, divorce, etc. which
accompanied the beginnings of the sexual revolution
made inroads on the patriarchy but was immediately
met by a period of reaction, described by Millett as the
counter-revolution. It was not just that sexual
revolution was crushed in a counter-attack, the
revolution itself extended only to some formal and
flagrant injustices, "leaving the socializing processes
of temperament and role differentiation intact," a
"psychic structure, deeply imbedded in our past,
capable of intensification or attenuation, but one
which, as yet, no people have succeeded in
eliminating."
Millett's preoccupation with 'psychic structures' is
an indication of her view of social change. She em-
phasizes changing attitudes, rather than necessarily
transforming the production relations which in the
long run cause these attitudes. This is why it is fair to
classify her variety of feminism as a form of liberalism,
and her theory of history as idealist, as opposed to
materialist.
It must be clearly understood that the arena of sexual
revolution is within the human consciousness even more
pre-eminently than it is within human institutions. So
deeply embedded is patriarchy that the character
structure it creates in both sexes is perhaps even more a
habit of mind and a way of life than a political system.

But where does character structure come from within

each generation? For a Marxist, consciousness is not
transmitted autonomously from the minds of one
generation to those of the next. Psychic realities are
always bound to the social and production relations of
a society, through social institutions—including the
family—that are created out of very real material
needs. Habits of mind cannot simply be enforced
26

through psychological pressures. They are products,

in our case, of a propertied social order which is
preserved by a class-based state. Indeed family forms
are backed by law (courts, prisons, police). Laws are
made by a class that controls the surplus, and hence
the state. True, masculine-feminine character pat-
terns are far-reaching and will take generations to
eliminate, but that is because they are based on a
male-female division of labour, the elimination of
which requires the transformation of not only the
forces and relations of production but also the vast
superstructure of social institutions. (And it does not
happen automatically and instantly even when the
workers take power, particularly when besieged by
imperialism.)
It is her view of history that allows Millett to be so
casual about class relations (how 'temporary' a matter
is class position to a working class woman?) and about
the very real emancipation of women developing in
socialist countries. This stands out in Millett's
treatment of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as
comparable examples of the sexual counter-
revolution, a misrepresentation of even a surface view
of history.
A defining characteristic of radical liberalism since
1917 is a naive view of the transition to socialism and
consequently a disenchantment with existing
socialism. This stems from two of our tenets of
liberalism: 1) belief in the power of ideas alone to cause
social change, and 2) reliance on individuals to
transform their own personal lives—in this case into
socialist lives. Sometimes it seems that their very
position as radicals drives certain leftists to dissociate
themselves from existing socialism, as well as from
groups such as the Communist Party which
acknowledges existing socialism to be progressive.
Similarly, many radical feminists remain oblivious to
the actual gains made by women under socialism,
 27

sometimes as an over-reaction to the early ex-

pectations of Utopians who expected immediate
liberation. Simone de Beauvoir did not call herself a
feminist until she became thoroughly disillusioned with
existing socialism, which contributes to the use of the
term feminism to describe an alternative to socialism
rather than seeing women's liberation developing from
existing socialism.(15)
As a consequence of this attitude the history of
women in the Soviet Union is popularly related in the
manner of Kate Millett. According to the story, initially
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held to the
Engelsian promises of abolition of the family, abortion
on demand, universal daycare, equality etc. But
Stalinism reversed these developments and left women
much as they had been under capitalism.
What actually happened was far more complicated.
The Soviet Union had the economic base in 1917 to lift
women from feudalism, and yet they managed in
addition to grant equality before the law, equality in
training and access to male professions, daycare (at
least in the cities), and very importantly, universal
literacy. Revoking the right to abortion, which has long
since been corrected, was Stalinist, and a distortion of
socialism, but must be seen against a network of other
positive developments, as well as itself being a
response to the severe population problems inflicted
by imperialist war.
Millett accurately points out the relevance of Engels'
assertion that patriarchal authority rests on the
economic dependence of members of the family. But
Engels goes further in stating that 'patriarchy' itself as
a form of authority is a result of the mode of
production. Patriarchy is considered an imprecise
term by anthropologists, though it has been used to
describe certain forms of class society (for example,

15. Interview with Simone de Beauvoir, 7 Days (March 1972).

28

those consisting of households of slaves.) If it simply

means male-dominated then we must establish terms
to distinguish between various stages, since there are
different kinds of societies that are male-dominated.
For example, a crucial difference between a
'patriarchal' nomadic society and bourgeois industrial
society is the gradual entrance of women into the
industrial labour force. Describing all societies as
simply patriarchal masks this historical progression.
Victorian families can be characterized as patriarchal
in the sense that they are male-dominated, but as
production increasingly takes place outside the family,
the society is more accurately characterized by
features behind the family—in the case of capitalism,
industrial property relations and the state. That is,
there are other causal factors than the lineage system
and parental control that become increasingly im-
portant as society develops.
Millett interprets Engels to mean that "due to the
nature of its origins, the family is committed to the idea
of private property in persons and goods." But it is not
just an idea of property, but actual property relations
which leave women under the control of men and in
the capitalist stage the labour power of both men and
women becomes a commodity to be purchased by the
capitalist. In other words, Millett has done what
feminists all too often have done with Engels; that is,
she gleaned some of his historical information, some of
his comments about women in production and the
public rearing of children, without integrating that
into the basis of his theory, which is really a theory
about family, private property, and the state. Male-
female relations do not necessarily define a stage of
society, they themselves are products of a given class
system.
While Millett recognizes the shortcomings of John
Stuart Mill's faith in the legal solution, and differs in
her conclusions, she argues most of her case in the
 29
spirit of Mill, and shares the psychological—i.e. non-
socio-economic approach to the woman question
associated most famously with his work. Many
contemporary socialist liberationists feel, however,
that traditionally, Marxists have underestimated the
significance of reproduction and socialization of
children in the total condition of women. As long as
childcare is 'female' no matter how public, certain
inequalities will persist. Juliet Mitchell rightly points
out that while Bebel in focusing on women added "the
biological element—her maternal function" as "one of
the fundamental conditions that made (the woman)
economically dependent on the man," still he "was
unable to do more than state that sexual equality was
impossible without socialism." (16) Now that socialist
countries exist, and there is the prospect of other even
more industrialized countries becoming socialist, the
question of changing the totality of women's condition
is no longer academic for socialists. The editors of
Women: A Journal of Liberation suggest that a Marxist
history of women requires consideration of hitherto
unemphasized factors:
Marx and Engels made enormous contributions to an
understanding of the process of history, but we think this
process can be understood in a slightly different way to
provide a more complete understanding of how strongly
human reproduction and socialization have affected
history. This vital aspect of history has been ignored, not
only by Marxists, but by all theorists of history. We con-
tend that this approach may span the gap between the
study of large groups of people offered by Marx and the
more specific understandings which are needed when we
deal with individual consciousness and behaviour.
Through an understanding of the role of reproduction-
socialization we can understand the operation of the
superstructure with more accuracy. (17)

16. Juliet Mitchell, "Women: the Longest Revolution," New Left

Review, No. 40 (November-December, 1966), p. 15.
17. Editorial, Women: Journal of Liberation, Vol. 1 No. 3 (Spring 1970),
p.35.
30

JULIET MITCHELL
Juliet Mitchell attempts to provide a Marxist
model for studying women in the family by in-
corporating concepts from structuralism. Mitchell
follows French Marxists like Louis Althusser in em-
ploying some of the work of French structuralists, like
Claude Levi-Strauss and others. This approach divides
society into several "structures". Although the
structures may inter-relate originally, still each has
laws peculiar to it. By adopting this perspective,
Mitchell and other Marxists hope to focus attention on
the family, socialization of children, etc., in order to
bring out what is peculiar to them and to see the ways
in which their histories have a relative autonomy.
According to Mitchell, for Marxists traditionally
women's condition has been "deduced derivatively
from the economy" or "equated symbolically with
society." But it should rather be considered a specific
structure, which is a unity of different elements.
Historically, the elements have been variously com-
bined. "Because the unity of women's condition at any
one time is the product of several structures, it is
always 'overdetermined'." Overdetermination is a
technical structuralist term. By this term struc-
turalists mean that no social change is brought about
by any one sort of force (e.g. economic ones), but
requires that different sorts of 'structures' (scientific
ideas, religion, political conditions, modes of work,
etc.) all have some influence. Mitchell lists the key
structures of women's condition: Production,
Reproduction, Sex, and Socialization of Children.
Altogether they comprise woman's condition, but each
"may have reached a different 'moment' at any given
historical time." Structural interpretations of Marxism
vary, but Mitchell's understanding of Louis
Althusser's approach is important in clarifying her
theory of the separate structures of women's con-
dition. She summarized a point in Althusser's Con-
 31

tradiction and Overdetermination thus:

Althusser advances the notion of a complex totality in
which each independent sector has its own autonomous
reality but each of which is ultimately but only ultimately,
determined by the economic. This complex totality means
that no contradiction in society is ever simple. As each
sector can move at a different pace, the synthesis of
different time-scales in the total social structure means
that sometimes contradictions cancel each other out and
sometimes they reinforce one another. To describe this
complexity Althusser uses the^Freudian term 'over-
determination.' The phrase 'unite de rupture'...refers to
the moment when the contradictions so reinforce one
another as to coalesce into the conditions for a
revolutionary change.
Perhaps in discussing Mitchell it becomes a
question of how 'ultimate' is the effect of the
'economic' factor, meaning this in the broad sense of
mode of production, which includes the propertied
relations of classes.
Mitchell describes the internal contradictions of
the separate structures. Woman's role in production
has not been due to her physical 'weakness'; the cause
is not 'biological' in this sense but social. If it were a
case of weakness alone, machine technology and
automation of itself could be expected to liberate
women, but this has not happened. Of course equality
in production is prerequisite to woman's liberation,
but creating the conditions for equality in production
requires an understanding of the part reproduction
plays in a woman's life. It is woman's role in
reproduction that has made her socially inferior,
including not just the bearing and rearing of children
but managing the family. The causal chain is as
follows: "Maternity, Family, Absence from Production
and Public Life, Sexual Inequality." What society
assumes is the idea of the family. Mitchell breaks
down women's role in the family into three structures
which now compose it "but which tomorrow may be
decomposed into a new pattern": reproduction,
32

sexuality, and the socialization of children. The 'mode

of reproduction' has not varied with the 'mode of
production'.
As long as reproduction remained a natural phenomenon,
of course women were effectively doomed to social ex-
ploitation. In any sense they were not masters of a large
part of their lives. They had no choice as to whether or
how often they gave birth to children (apart from
repeated abortion); their existence was essentially
subject to biological processes outside their control.
Contraception provides the "technical possibilities for
the humanization of the most natural part of human
culture." Easily available contraception threatens to
divorce sex from reproduction, apparently a threat to
the bourgeois family.
Because women are still defined by their
biological function, maternity, children remain
'products', the objects of women's 'creativity'. The
objectification of children is a consequence of the
mother's misconstruing her reproductive role as a
productive role. Control over the children is a com-
pensation for maintaining the home as a retreat for the
man.
So long as (maternity) is allowed to remain a substitute
for action and creativity, and the home an area of
relaxation for men, woman will remain confined to the
species, to her universal and neutral condition.

Sexuality, the third structure, "can be assimilated

to the statute of possession much more easily and
completely than the productive or reproductive
relationship." Mitchell discusses some of the con-
tradictions in the history of sexuality. Polygamy in-
volved an extreme form of degradation for women,
although monogamy in its present form is not an ab-
solute improvement. In the West, Christian monogamy
was accompanied by a great wave of sexual
repression. Mitchell suggests that equality under
monogamy may be a precondition for sexual liberation.
Sexual freedom is two-sided, however—it can be
 33

exploited by the "totally co-ordinated and drugged

social machine," as well as containing possibly "the
greatest potential for liberation."
Socialization of children,the last structure,is part of
the 'expressive' role of women. This term is taken from
Talcott Parsons, who goes so far as to divide human
organisms into "lactating and non-lactating classes."
While the father may be instrumental, both towards
the outside world and in relation to the wife-mother
(instrumental meaning something like being able to
take effective action toward), the mother is in-
strumental only during a certain period of a child's
development, and only towards that child. As the
economic function of the family has declined and the
frequency of reproduction has been reduced, the
socialization of children in families has come to be
regarded as full-time work in itself.
Mitchell's conclusion is that "the liberation of
women can only be achieved if a]] four structures in
which they are integrated are transformed. A
modification of any one of them can be offset by a
reinforcement of another, so that more permutation of
the form of exploitation is achieved."
Mitchell has attempted to provide a framework
for analyzing women, and has raised the kinds of
questions a Marxist theory of women must meet. But
whether or not abstracting these four structures is
adequate to the task is another matter. For nowhere is
social class as a 'structure' considered, and the in-
tegration of this would change the emphasis, par-
ticularly in production, but in all the other structures
as well. The family itself varies by class. And by class I
mean class as it affects the total condition of woman,
including class war within a society, class war bet-
ween nations, that is, imperialism in an era of
proletarian states as well as capitalist states.
According to Mitchell, even though militant suf-
fragism "surpassed the labour movement in the
34

violence of its assault on bourgeois society," the

situation of women remained almost the same. To
conclude that the radical critique of the family and the
feminist demonstrations were more militant than the
struggles which labour (including female labour)
underwent for generations in combatting their em-
ployers is, to say the least, inaccurate.The suffrage
movement went no further because it was based
primarily on middle and upper middle class women,
most of whom did not carry their demands further than
certain legal equalities because that was as far as
their class was willing to go.
Mitchell paints a picture of defeat for women's
liberation in socialist countries as well. Not only is this
a short view, but it is a false view of how social
transformation takes place in history. Property
relations are transformed by a maturation of con-
tradictions, and acquiring state power can result in a
total reversal of those relations. But the consequences
of state power transference to the proletariat unfold
over generations during the development of the forces
of production, particularly in an underdeveloped
country. And regardless of existing contradictions and
underdevelopment, certain real advances in socialist
countries have occurred, however incomplete; people
fight and die for them and are right to do so. Not
everything in society is transformed all of a piece or
with a total 'unite de rupture'. There is a more or less
long historical process leading up to the qualitative
moment of change of direction, including popular
struggles on many levels. Whatever Mitchell gained in
the way of (much needed) focus on the complexity of
women's roles, her de-emphasis of class obscured the
perspective on long range developments, and
especially the potentialities of progress for women
under existing socialism. Concluding that it "is only in
the highly developed societies of the West that an
authentic liberation of women can be envisaged
 35
today" reveals a certain casualness not so much about
the prerequisite of socialism, with which Mitchell
would agree, but about the fact that in certain im-
portant respects socialism has already overtaken the
'West' in the liberation of women.
But this might stem from an idealistic concept of
what the 'moment' of revolution is. The appeal of the
structuralist interpretation of Marxism is that it
potentially gives more weight to the superstructure in
causative analysis than is usually the case with
Marxists. When factors in the base (forces and
relations of production), and factors in the super-
structure reach different moments, or may be pulling
in different directions, which I do not deny happens, it
is features of the superstructure—idea of the family,
idea of woman, that seem to be sufficient in Mitchell's
scheme for a significant 'unite de rupture'.The three of
Mitchell's structures which constitute the lynch pin of
women's conditions are ideological. No historical
materialist would dispute the effect of ideology in the
short run, particularly in a revolution, which is, if
anything is, such a moment. The question might be put:
how long is the short run? And what are the conditions
that allow the ideological factor to be effective in the
first place?
Mitchell's application of structuralist Marxism
seems to ignore the dialectical relation between the
mode of production (base) and superstructure, at least
as regards the transformation of state power. Indeed,
state power is a factor which is absent from her
analysis entirely, more specifically class acquisition of
state power. Class is not just another complex con-
tradiction; it is central to the Marxist theory of history.
Ideologically, it is one's stand on the class-based state,
whether or not one supports the dictatorship of the
proletariat, that defines one in the Marxist spectrum,
not one's position on the family issue. So much
the worse for Marxism,, might be the feminist reply.
36

But since it is a question of class control of the state,

and it is the state which enforces whatever forms of
family suit the mode of production in the interests of
the class or classes in power, women's position within
the contending classes determines her role in the
struggle. Women must be workers before they can
significantly affect worker power; that is part of the
significance of Engels' emphasis on production.
I suggest that disregarding the importance of the
revolutionary transformation from bourgeois to
proletarian state power allows the problem to be
formulated in such a way that one's only choices are
reformism or Utopian socialism. Mitchell rejects
reformism, that is making changes in the family
without raising the question of socialism, though most
of the discussion of 'structures' is without reference to
property relations, the crucial factor in the scientific
socialist analysis of capitalism. We might define
Utopian socialism as understanding a socialist
revolution to be a moment when all structures have
been revolutionized, presumably the critical ones all at
once, and this appears to be the kind of revolution
implied in Mitchell's article and also her recent
publication Woman's Estate.(18)The importance of the
article in the developing ideology of the movement lies
not, however, in its recommendations for action. It
does not pretend to include a program, although one
could argue that its theory does not provide for a link
between immediate demands, such as daycare and
equal pay, and the general transformation of women's
condition. But its whole purpose was to call for such a
theory. Mitchell was ahead of most theorists of women
in raising a critique of traditional Marxism that
Marxists would have to meet ifo
women was to develop any further. And from this point
18, The New Left Review article criticized here was subsequently
incorporated into Juliet Mitchell's book Woman's Estate (Great
Britain: Penguin Books, 1971).
 37

(1968) women went in both Marxist and feminist

directions, often starting from a critique similar to
Juliet Mitchell's:
The error of the old socialists was to see the other
elements as reducible to the economic; hence the call for
the entry of women into production was accompanied by
the purely abstract slogan of the abolition of the family.
Economic demands are still primary, but must be ac-
companied by coherent policies for the other three
elements(reproduction, socialization, and sexuality),
policies which at particular junctures may take over the
primary role in immediate action.
Before we attempt to meet this criticism, it is well to
note that many of the 'old socialists' Mitchell probably
includes in her charge at least saw the relation
between immediate demands against the capitalist
state, (and they were not all directly economic), and
the struggle for socialism which they felt to be
prerequisite for the liberation of women. With this in
mind they neither overestimated, as did many of
their contemporary bourgeois suffragists, nor un-
derestimated, as do many women's liberationists
today, the contradictory role of even such a reform as
suffrage. Even legal reform is a gain, however limited,
for women, insofar as it pushes the movement forward
and heightens contradictions which press to be
resolved. Universal suffrage and formal legal equality
lay bare the real causes of workers' oppression when
the workers see that formal equality before the law
and a vote still do not end exploitation. In Origin of the
Family Engels describes this as a step toward creating
the conditions for making more far-reaching demands.

The peculiar character of man's domination over woman

in the modern family, and the necessity, as well as the
manner, of establishing real social equality between the
two, will be brought out into full relief only when both are
completely equal before the law. It will then become
evident that the first premise for the emancipation of
women is the re-introduction of the entire female sex into
public industry; and that this again demands that the
38

quality possessed by the individual family of being the

economic unity of society be abolished.
Complete equality before the law was a goal of the
bourgeois women's movement, and advances towards
this, its limited contribution. Formal equality before
the law is possible under capitalism, although the first
example of complete equality took place only with the
first socialist revolution. And it did become apparent,
as was anticipated, that many economic and social
developments, including new generations of children
educated equally, with equal access to productive
roles, were prerequisite to revolutionizing the family in
practice, developments hindered in large measure by
imperialist intervention and fascist war within the
space of just one of these generations. It is from such
an historical perspective that one must approach the
uneven course of the liberation of women under
socialism. Understanding this will have not a little
effect on the ideology of socialist women fighting
capitalism. (19)

FIRESTONE
Shulamith Firestone's feminism is not unusual in
purporting to develop from and beyond Marxism. To
formally disavow Marxism is not in vogue, but I think
this is misleading. The Dialectic of Sex is actually a
radical feminist alternative to the explanation begun
by Engels.
Firestone describes her theory as historical
materialist: Marxism is to her what Newtonian physics

19. Included in the growing literature on women in socialist countries is

Chris Camerano's "On Cuban Women," Science and Society. Vol. 35
(Spring 1970), and William Mandel's "Soviet Women and Their Self-
image," Science and Society. Vol. 35 (Fall 1971), and "Soviet Women in
the Workforce and Professions," American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 15
(November-December 1971).
 39

is to the theory of relativity.

For an economic diagnosis traced to ownership of the
means of production, even of the means of reproduction,
does not explain everything. There is a level of reality that
does not stem directly from economics.

Not that there is a psychosexual reality behind

economics, for this would contradict historical
materialism. Firestone attempts "to develop a
materialist view of history based on sex itself." In her
view de Beauvoir came closest to this,but Firestone
asks:
Why postulate a fundamental Hegelian concept of
Otherness as the final explanation—and then carefully
document the biological and historical circumstances that
have pushed the class 'women' into such a category—
when one has never seriously considered the much
simpler and more likely possibility that the fundamental
dualism sprang from sex itself.(2O)
Procreation , a biological process, is at the basis of
the sexual dualism. Woman's nurture of infants
creates a biological imbalance within the family itself.
Just as socialism requires a seizure of the means of
production by the proletariat, so
the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the
underclass (women) and the seizure of the control of
reproduction: the restoration to women of ownership of
their own bodies, as well as feminine control of human
fertility, including both the new technology and all the
social institutions of childbearing and childrearmg. And
lust as the end goal of a socialist revolution was not only
the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the
economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of
feminist revolution must be, unlike the first feminist
movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of
the sex distinction itself: genital differences between
human beings would no longer matter culturally...The
reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of
both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial
reproduction: children would be born to both sexes

20. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist
Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1971).
40

equally, or independently of either, however one chooses

to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother
(and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened
dependence on a small group of others in general, and any
remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would
be compensated for culturally. The division of labour
would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether
(cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would
be broken.
For Firestone, all other oppressions stem from the
original oppression in the patriarchal family. For
example, racism is a justification for the whites
treating the blacks like children in a 'family of
man.'(21)
Radical feminism is the key, then, to ac-
tually reorganizing society; as such it is a 'solder' of
the radical movement as a whole and is
developing a new way of relating, a new political style, one
that will eventually reconcile the personal—always the
fernine prerogative—with the public, with the "world
outside", to restore that world to its emotions, and
literally to its senses.

In Firestone's scheme the male and female prin-

ciples which arise from the biological family are the
determinants of all culture. While repudiating the
chauvinist clinical applications of Freudian insights,
Firestone credits Freud with grasping the "crucial
21. One of the gravest errors committed by narrow feminism divorced
from class analysis is the non-existent or cursory attention paid to
racism, such as the above. The consequence is ignoring the very special
position of, for example, black women, triply jeopardized in a racist,
sexist, class society. The black slave woman was a partner in forced
labour with her man, denied the luxury of any kind of passivity. The
story of the heroic contributions of the black woman has scarcely been
told although a beginning is made in the very important article by
Angela Davis, "On Black Women" in Ms( August 1972), a good antidote
to Firestone's casual treatment. Male chauvinism in the context of
racism has a special character, and cannot be simply equated with the
chauvinism experienced by women protected from the worst ravages of
racism by their skin colour.
 41

problem of modern life:Sexuality."It is well to note that

despite Firestone's insistence that the proletarian
revolution is a stage towards liberation, the actual
proletariat in her own country is dismissed. The
"problem is much deeper than merely the struggle of
the proletariat, which in any case is hardly the
American vanguard." Firestone's analysis seems to be
out of touch with the working class."In the sixties the
boys split. They went to college and down South. They
travelled to Europe in droves. Some joined the Peace
Corps; others went underground."
But most boys went to work or the army. I think this
is an indication of the many ways Firestone has got
around Marxism rather than beyond it. Focusing on
sexuality allows her to remain in the realm of the
private, the psychology of the individual. It is no ac-
cident that her analysis is consistent with Freudian
categories, since for her the repression of sexuality is
the key to all socialization. Exploitation is in no way a
central concept. Her category of oppression is very
much like Freud's concept of civilization; the moving
historical forces are comparable. While it is not
possible here to respond to all Firestone's points,
particularly concerning the oppression of children, we
can list two ways in which the sexual dualist theory of
history is not consistent with Marxism.
In the first place, theoretically in Firestone's scheme
we must believe that the way of having and raising
babies is more important than the mode of work, the
social complexity of which for Marxists is what
distinguishes humans from other species. We are also
asked to believe that the male-female principles ex-
tending to more than just reproductive roles are
biologically based, which means we are postulating
extensive innate differences between the sexes.
In the second place, we are left with no way to get
from here to liberation, since the sisterhood alliance
Firestone advocates would only be effective after we
 42

get control of the means of production (and how this

without the male working class?) Getting from here to
there means relying on our femaleness, which includes
character traits that have either been imposed on us
by a male-dominated culture (Millett's emphasis) or
pervade our culture because of the enormity of the
effect of reproduction on our character formation
(Firestone).
The tactic of "consciousness-raising" is certainly a
valid component of the women's movement, and
Firestone's insights into the nature of romantic love,
like de Beauvoir's descriptions of female socialization
and Millett's analysis of male sexuality, are at least
suggestive in themselves. But the difficult task of a
political ideology is to provide a way for the private
change of consciousness to develop into a public
transformation of concrete reality and vice versa. All
four spheres, the private, the conscious, the public,
and the active are all inter-related. But an ideology
which limits resolution of conflict to the cultural
sphere (and sexual roles are cultural) tends to remove
the struggle from the concrete, class issues of the day,
including those which especially effect women. In-
terpreted one way, Firestone's scheme is similar to a
mechanical Marxism which says: "wait till after the
revolution, wait till we have socialism and are building
communism, then we'll discuss sex roles." We cannot
just transcend exploitation, we have to fight. And
Firestone's theory still does not provide us with a way
of combining women's struggle with the present class
struggle.

SISTERHOOD AND SELF-HELP

The middle and upper-class bourgeois feminist
idealistically believed in a unity on the basis of gender
alone; she overlooked the very real difference between
her oppression and the oppression of the working-
class woman. The bourgeois woman was excluded
 43

from production and relegated to domestic duties and,

depending on wealth, an excess of leisure. The op-
pression of the majority of women consisted in either
domestic drudgery under conditions of poverty, which
was a full-time job, or a combination of paid work and
housework. The more difficult it was for reasons of
national chauvinism and racism for members of the
family to get jobs, the more the distance from the
WASP sister was compounded. But as the population
becomes proletarianized there develops a more
concrete basis for sisterhood. Increasingly, women
experience the actual contradictions of the double
burden, rather than the powerless ennui of the bird in
the gilded cage. The radical critiques which arose
from the latter tradition, for example, in Kate
Chopin's unusually advanced novel, The
Awakening,(22) are given more substance by the
possibilities for the present unity of the exploited. Now
the stage is set for materially transforming society to
meet our needs. As part of this, a Marxist critique of
male chauvinism under capitalism inherits the best
insights of radical feminism and is able to test them in
the cauldron of a more advanced struggle.
The interplay between liberal feminism and
Marxism continues. Feminist analysis forces socialist
liberationists to deal, for example, with sexuality as a
social issue. Indeed, making sexuality a public issue, a
poJitical issue, a subject 'fit for Marxists' and other
revolutionaries, is one of the historical tasks of
feminism. But because of their bourgeois view of
sexuality, feminists have been unable to advance it as
a human health right and to push for the social in-
stitutions that would make healthy sex a reality, such
as sex education in the schools and sex therapy clinics.
Usually the demand has been framed only negatively,
that is, to release individuals from the oppression of

22. The Awakening (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964).

44

the family. It is interesting that one of the popular free-

love advocates who frames the question in this limited
way, Germaine Greer, expects to employ an extended
Italian family to care for her children in a warmer
clime. But then most feminists who see the struggle
against the family form as central have resorted to
some form of extended family to take its place,
whether it be a commune or an arrangement of
convenience—necessary developments but not politic-
al solutions. Indeed sometimes communal family life
becomes politics for reasons of time. This also happens
in the movement for parent-controlled daycare when
it is pursued separately from an effort to tax the
corporations to pay daycare workers so that parents
can be freed of daycare. This lack of vision persists
insofar as the woman's movement does not address
itself to the immediate needs of working people. As
part of this they do not see work relations, of ourselves
and the men in our lives, as the basis of our ex-
ploitation and the key to our liberation.
Radical feminism sees the negative but not the
positive side of the proletarianization of women. In this
lies its central shortcoming. It focuses its analysis on a
position of weakness, our isolation as housekeepers,
wives, and mothers, rather than as workers or
potential workers in social production. From this
follows the self-help, individualist solutions which
define its liberalism politically.
Common to much bourgeois radical feminism is an
adulation of characteristics ascribed to woman that
are part of her confinement to the domestic sphere:
peacefulness, spontaneity, sensitivity to interpersonal
tensions, emotional responsiveness, and so on, as
opposed to the acquisitive, calculating, distant,
aggressive work characteristic of the male. While it is
true that motherhood training leaves women with a
variety of humanism not usually permitted those
socialized as masculine, seeing our emancipation as
 45

dependent on those very traits ascribed as womanly is

self-defeating. This leads to such conclusions as Kate
Millett's eschewing violence out of hand as a political
tactic. Women in Vietnam would have little use for
such dogmatic pacifism. But the general orientation
has other far-reaching implications for strategy. It is a
feminist version of the back-to-the-earth movement of
the disenchanted middle-class, an individualist op-
position to civilization, well in the tradition of
bourgeois anarchism. In its feminist version it can be a
kind of back-to-the-earth-mother.{23)
Just as in the rural communal solution freedom is
conceived of as freedom from industrial society, so in
this kind of feminism freedom is seen as freedom from
male chauvinist industrial society. Independence from
man is seen as self-realization of the woman. Instead
of upgrading women by facilitating their entry into the
professions, particularly the scientific professions,
and positions of power, back-to-earth-mother
feminism seeks to reduce all tasks to something like the
petty level of skill required for housekeeping. This
effort is a reaction to our exclusion, but its result is
only to compound our misery. For example, do-it-
yourself gynaecology falls into the apolitical, indeed
harmful self-help category. The alternate strategy
would be attacking the chauvinism of current
gynaecology, encouraging women to become
gynaecologists, working politically for improvement of
hospital facilities etc.
Do-it-yourself psychiatry is another strategy of the
women's movement and has led to the popularity of
such writers as Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing. In the
absence of a good Marxist psychology, many leftists
have gone the way of the bourgeois Freudian tradition
which substitutes literary metaphor for a real study of

23. Branka Magas develops this point (in "Sex Politics: Class Politics")
in her critique of Greer. Miilett and Figges,
46

the mind and social relations.(24)

Freud's view was that sexual repression was the key
to civilization.(25) The neo-Freudian Wilhelm Reich
argued that extreme sexual repression leads to ex-
treme social oppression, in particular fascism. While
it is true that sexual misery can be correlated with
social oppression in general, to say it is the cause of
other oppressions turns the matter on its head. An
exploitative society can reduce individuals to a state of
abject fear and mutilate many aspects of our
humanity, including our sexuality. But to say that
sexual repression causes fascism is as erroneous as
believing sexual liberation is the cure, the obvious
conclusion of such a theory.
Rebels have often been regarded as neurotic, and
this has led women to question whether or not there is
any such thing as madness. Laing and his followers,
who regard madness as a form of social protest, and
schizophrenia as a kind of purification, are popular
with some feminists. While it is true that rebellion
against confining sex-typed roles has often been
wrongly diagnosed as madness, and the label
"neurosis' used as a weapon, there is such a thing as
real mental illness. To deny these painful conditions
and to negate the value of medical research leads to a
mystification of psychosis. Laing reinforces a cavalier
attitude toward physiological psychology and the
nascent attempts of modern medicine to go beyond
palliatives into actual cures for such diseases as
schizophrenia.(26) When some feminists read Reich
24. Juliet Mitchell makes a fatal concession to Freudianism by agreeing
that psychoanalysis is a science which does not have to be tested like
the natural sciences because its subject matter is the unconscious.
Woman's Estate, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1971), pp.166-167.
25. Mary James Sherfy accepts this formulation in The Nature and
Evolution of Female Sexuality (New York; Random House, 1972).
26. Bruce Burns gives us some indication of the complexity of psychosis
as a medical question, and in passing places Laing in perspective, in
"Trends in British Psychiatry," Marxism Today (January 1971).
 47

or Laing, just as liberals have always read Freud, they

are not bothering to question the scientific validity as
much as they are seeking an individual or small group
solution to a malaise.Acquiring sexuality with an
orgone blanket or talking someone out of a nervous
breakdown apparently offers one an immediate course
of action, unlike mass political organizing or years of
progressive scientific work.
Granted, radicals resort to unscientific solutions out
of frustration. Neither the political system nor in this
case the medical facilities allow for much beyond that.
But there is a connection between anti-science and
opposition to mass organizing. Science is extremely
social. Its method is premised on the historical ac-
cumulation of discoveries of millions of individuals. It
develops over a long period of time, unevenly, but
logically and as a consequence of various social needs.
In the face of its complex and apparently over-
whelming division of labour, any woman who seeks a
self-help solution can isolate herself from the ongoing
process of science just as she can from mass political
action. After all, her education was less oriented to
the sciences than that of her male counterparts, just
as her appointed sphere of work, the home, was
isolated from most social interaction. It is a wonder
that women, nurtured for housekeeping, have not
gravitated even more toward individual or small
group solutions, perceiving their most radical
moments to be a return to nature. But it is through
creative work relations and through science that we
master nature and develop our humanity. Nature is
not a better master than a male.
Another strategy which starts from women's role
as housekeepers is the movement for state pay for
wives and mothers which sometimes justifies itself in
the name of Marxist economics. Its most recent
proponents are Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma
48

James.(27) By Dalla Costa's logic women should be

remunerated for producing the commodity labour
power, that is for performing maintenance chores for
children and husbands. But in Marxist economics we
do not call reproduction of the family 'production/
precisely because it cannot happen unless the family is
supported by someone engaged in production, whether
it be the man, the woman, or both. Housework, no
matter how much work is involved, is still un-
productive consumption, economically speaking.
Insofar as woman is relegated to the sphere of con-
sumption her power is reduced. Measures must be
taken that decrease woman's role as reproducer
rather than solidify her in that place. Dalla Costa and
James get themselves into the singularly un-Marxist
position of encouraging women not to work (which they
argue benefits only capitalism), of opposing the trade
unions, of advocating withholding household labour
from the family as a central tactic — all this and mor
as a consequence of basing their strategy on women as
housekeepers.
In the last five years, parts of the women's
movement have gone in a radical feminist direction,
sometimes in the name of Marxism. The critique of the
family and male chauvinism has been carried on in
many journals and books and is still developing. Much
of it is anti-capitalist, but since male chauvinism and
the patriarchal family is often seen as the cause of
capitalist oppression, the critique of the family usually
takes precedence over the critique of capitalism.

27. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Women and the Sub-
version of the Community and A Woman's Place (Bristol, Eng.: Falling
Wall Press, 1972). Similar arguments have been advanced by Mary
Inman in Woman Power (Los Angeles, 1942),and answered by A. Landy
in Marxism and the Woman Question (Toronto: Progress Books, 1943),
and by Isabel Larguia and John Dumoulin in "Toward a Science of
Women's Liberation," Political Affairs (June and August 1972), and
answered by Margaret Cowl in "Economic Role of the Housewife,"
Political Affairs (August 1972).
 49

It is not possible at this point to respond to all

feminist criticisms with a fully developed Marxist
critique. What I will attempt is to show where we can
begin, and touch upon some of the questions with
which we must deal.

A MARXIST ALTERNATIVE TO FEMINIST THEORY

Is sex or class the primary contradiction? If one
accepts the fundamentals of historical materialism,
then conditions of labour determine, in the long run,
human life. Conditions of labour include the
technological base and who appropriates the product
of your work. Sex would be the primary contradiction
if all males owned the means of production and all
females worked for them, But almost all males and
females, under capitalism, work for some males, not
by virtue of the latter's maleness, but because they
own property. And this is the essence of the Marxist
critique of bourgeois feminism.
Feminists charge that defining a woman by virtue
of the class position of her father or husband obscures
the oppressive relation between male provider and
woman. But this overlooks the fact that the oppression
of man over woman would not exist for long if the man
were not in the first place a provider in a class society.
It is precisely because a woman usually needs the
remuneration of a male breadwinner, since she lacks
access to subsistence jobs for herself and her children,
that she must defer to her mate and males in general.
Subsistence in our society is something between $6,000
and $10,000 per year; women's average salary in
Canada is far below $4,000. This is the meaning of
economic base: much that occurs between men and
women is of a non-economic nature, but where they
must live, with whom, and by means of what, these are
determined by economic factors, and they in turn
50

determine the parameters of male-female relation-

ships.
This is best explained by the concept of primary
and secondary contradiction. Historical materialism
holds that in a society founded on private property the
class struggle is primary: racial, national, and sex
contradictions are secondary. What this means in
short is that sexism cannot be explained without
reference to the dynamics of class, while an ex-
planation of the broadest outlines of class dynamics
does not require a theory of sex. The resolution of
sexist contradictions requires the resolution of class
contradictions. Of course the relation between the
resolutions of the two contradictions is dialectical, and
this is a second key concept, without which the con-
cept of primary and secondary is useless. The struggle
against chauvinism is political, and like other
democratic struggles for self-determination, such as
the franchise and national autonomy, its secondary
nature in no way detracts from its importance, since
political struggles against the bourgeoisie in these
many forms is an important part of the class struggle.
Part of the meaning of 'primary' is that in acting
politically, one keeps the overall development 0/ the
class struggle in mind in deciding which one 0/ the
secondary contradictions is the order of the day. An
example of a current form of the class struggle is the
alliance of a national bourgeoisie, peasants, and
workers, in an anti-imperialist war such as Vietnam.
In any event, formulating the problem simply as a
question of what is more 'important', sex or class, is
mechanical (in the technical Marxist sense). To say
that a social process develops dialectically is to
recognize that struggle to overcome secondary con-
tradictions in the process sometimes takes precedence
over struggle to overcome primary ones. For example,
the general strike and other direct manifestations of
the primary contradiction, the class struggle, are not
 51

even usually, let alone always, the order of the day.

They are inter-related with other struggles, which
though strictly involving secondary contradictions,
may be nonetheless parts of the political struggle
against the bourgeoisie.
Dorothy Ballan criticizes interpreting the primacy of
class struggle to mean subordination of the women's
struggle. Her essay is a defense of Engels' position on
women, but this is consistent with her formulation of
the implications of Engels' theory.
The women's struggle is not subordinate to the class
struggle. It is itself a form of class struggle, especially if
consciously conducted against the bourgeoisie. The
struggle against male supremacy and women's op-
pression is a crucially important political struggle and all
manifestations of chauvinism in an organization, and most
importantly in a revolutionary organization, are a
reflection of the ideology of the bourgeoisie and must be
fought as part of the revolutionary struggle.
What's involved here is the confusion of the primacy
of the overall historical character of the class struggle
with the supremacy of any particular political struggle
against the bourgeoisie....Marx said that every political
struggle is a class struggle.
A great deal of harm is done in the radical movement
in the name of Marxism by those who in reality do
subordinate the struggle for women's liberation and do
practice male supremacy.
But this should no more disqualify the Marxist,
materialist interpretation of historical phenomena than
the presence of a multitude of fraudulent medical quacks
should disqualify the theory and practice of medicine.(28)

The terms primary and secondary were developed as

part of a Leninist application of historical materialism
necessary for action against the bourgeoisie. But they
are also necessary concepts for historical explanation
in general, explanation for the purpose of action
against the bourgeoisie being a specific application of
historical materialism.
28. Dorothy Ballan, Feminism and Marxism (New York: World View
Publishers, 1971), pp. 47-48.
52

I think it is possible to criticize both some feminists

and some traditional Marxists for holding simplistic
and mechanical views of the woman question. Liberal
feminists regard the male-female division as the
primary contradiction; the mechanical Marxists are
unable to integrate the secondary contradictions of
women's oppression into either a theory of historical
explanation or a theory of political action, the latter
presupposing the former.
The term 'secondary' is not merely a catch-all: the
onus is still on Marxism to fit the family, reproduction,
etc., into the Marxist theory of history. In this theory
'family' is a dependent variable. Breadwinners are the
units in the family which tie the family to the exchange
economy under capitalism. That is why woman's
position in production is crucial to her position in the
family as well. And that is why marriage is a property
relation even if the family owns nothing: the family
members under capitalism (and the state enforces
this) have a right to part of the product of the
breadwinner's labour. Services from the mother and
submission to parental authority are part of this
arrangement. Capitalism must reproduce and
maintain labour power; therefore, maintenance of the
worker's family is included in the wages bill. (Sub-
sistence includes the cost of reproduction, and wages
tend toward subsistence.) The woman's domestic work
is itself without value. Her double oppression exists in
the fact that she is sustained by either her own or her
husband's wages from outside the family to perform
unpaid labour in the home. The family changes as the
labour force changes, from rural to urban, small
property to wage labour, different kinds of wage
labour, (for example, highly skilled, unskilled,
migratory). Whether households contain extended kin,
double breadwinners, or are women-headed, etc.,
depends in large part on how the labour force is
recruited. The way in which a family serves as an
 53

emotional refuge, socializer of children, and welfare

sanctuary varies according to many cultural and
economic, factors, but its existence is premised on
source of income.
The editors of Women: A Journal of Liberation show
unintentionally in their criticism of Marxist history of
women that Marxists are quite correct in relegating
'family' to the superstructure, while the long run
moving force of development remains in the forces and
relations of production, both of which are in the base.
"It is our hypothesis that reproduction and
socialization have influenced production, not by the
power to transform it, but by the power to stabilize it."
By its very nature women's work is usually limited to
maintenance. The ultimately decisive factors
historically are changes in labour productivity and,
after the advent of private property, changes in labour
productivity have taken place largely in the most
socialized sections of production, spheres in which
women have been subordinated drastically, or ex-
cluded entirely, until fairly recently.
But this is still not a complete answer to liberal
feminism. Most important is that to ignore the primacy
of class struggle is to assume either that capitalism
can liberate women (reformism) or that the defeat of
the family and chauvinism can of itself destroy
capitalism, or at least precede its downfall (two
versions of radical feminism). If any of these positions
is right, the question of socialism is superfluous, from
the point of view of liberating women.
I think that an extension of the defense of socialist
liberation must include a theory of the fate of women
after socialism. Since the place of women involves
secondary contradictions, why will women necessarily
be liberated with the resolution of the primary con-
tradiction of the class struggle? I wish to argue that
the oppression of women, while not primary, is
nonetheless crucial to capitalism, and the liberation of
54

women, while not primary, is nonetheless crucial for

the development of socialism.
To a certain extent capitalism liberated women
from feudalism, 'freed' them to sell their labour power,
which brought them into social production. But it also
alienated them, along with men, from the product of
their labour to an extent unprecedented in history.
The endeavour of women to secure economic self-
support and personal independence has, to a certain
degree, been recognized as legitimate by bourgeois
society, the same as the endeavour of the workingman
after greater freedom of motion. The principal reason for
such acquiescence lies in the class interests of the
bourgeoisie itself. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class,
requires the free and unrestricted purveyance of male
and female labour-power for the fullest development of
production. (29)

It is also necessary but not profitable for capitalism

to reproduce the workers. The burden is placed on the
worker's private family, usually most of the unpaid
labour falls to the woman. The family burden puts the
woman at a bargaining disadvantage in her work force
participation: unprepared, untrained, limited by
children's schedules, etc., the woman tends to have to
settle for what job she can get, and capitalists have
always taken advantage of this. Women's partial
integration into the work force is in some ways more
complicated and oppressive than preserving and
increasingly remunerating the housewife role. This is
the nature of contradictory development. It is the
contradiction between home and work roles, but the
necessity of the latter, that drives women to resist
their oppression.
Why do women work? Valerie Kincade Op-
penheimer concludes that the American economic
system, in any case, needs their labour power; it is a

29.August Bebel, Women Under Socialism, (New York: Labour News

Company, 1904), p.167.
 55

matter of supply and demand.(30) But why does

capitalism need them while some men are still
unemployed? In the first place, working women
outnumber many times the number of men unem-
ployed. Secondly, there must be a male labour reserve
army, to some extent, for the male labour market; the
constant retraining necessary for switching workers
into separate labour markets reaches a point of
diminishing returns. Thirdly, and very importantly,
increasing the labour power necessary for the sub-
sistence of a family—and this is the main purpose in
doubling the number of necessary breadwinners per
family—is a way of increasing the rate of exploitation.
Fourthly, there is no doubt that increasing the number
of woman-typed low wage jobs in the labour force is a
way of keeping the cost of labour power down and, as
part of this, presenting barriers to trade unionism. A
job classification in which many participants consider
their work 'extra* income is qualitatively harder to
organize than if they were all sole or principal
breadwinners. Sexism, like racism, divides the ex-
ploited so they are less able to fight the oppressor.
Sexism, like racism, creates separate labour markets
and labour reserve armies. The cheap labour, like the
unpaid domestic labour, is fundamental to the
maintenance of our profit-making economy.
To the extent that women figure in the productive
and reproductive process under capitalism, the
history of the struggle for women's liberation can be
understood against the background of the central
contradiction of capitalism. Capitalism does two things
simultaneously. It tends to socialize the forces of
production while at the same time concentrating
ownership of the means of production, thereby in-
creasing the disparities between exploiter and ex-

30. Valerie Kincade Oppenheimer, The Female Labour Force in the

United States, (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies 1970)
p.49.
56
ploited. Socialization of the productive forces means
that the factories and offices become increasingly
collective and rationalized, the division of labour
becomes more complex, more workers co-operate in
the same production process, the discipline needed for
successful production becomes more far-reaching.
Profit becomes less and less an economic criterion for
investment. And an increasingly disciplined working
class is on hand to recognize this fact, a working class
which creates the surplus value the capitalists rake
off in the first place.
Some of the reproduction and maintenance of labour
power is becoming socialized as well, and is both
privately and publicly subsidized. Universal education
is an example: capitalism needs a more or less literate
work force, although only in the advanced countries.
Parallel with the rationalization of the productive
forces, reproduction begins to be rationalized. For
example, voluntary childbirth or birth control, is part
of the rationalization of reproduction, commensurate
with the needs of women who increasingly work.
Abortion on demand becomes a 'right' that the
economy can both demographically and
technologically afford, and that women can win.
Daycare is part of the socialization of functions which
originally, under capitalism, were totally privatized in
families.
Some of this begins to happen under capitalism:
economic and social development of itself tends to
demand it. But it is not usually profitable. And not only
is instruction in birth control not particularly
profitable, reactionary views on this issue are part of
an absolutist defense of certain family forms and a
conservative concept of women as baby machines and
sex objects. This is all part of a chauvinist culture
which is both an extension and reinforcer of a
profitable division of labour. {It is no accident that, in
addition to its racism and national chauvinism, the
 57

right wing launches an attack on sex education in the

schools.) Usually for the system as a whole childcare is
socially necessary but not profitable, so it is put on the
backs of women and is regarded as peripheral to the
exchange economy.
The 'intensity' (Marx's term) of labour power, its
degree of skill or ability to produce, is tied in with the
education of the possessor of the labour power, and
that education varies by sex. Part of the socialization
of the forces of production includes the breakdown of
the sexual division of labour, replacing it with a more
rational labour division which does not waste so many
human resources. But girl children are still streamed
into educational programmes commensurate with their
family roles being primary, so as wives and mothers
they can cheaply reproduce the next generation of
workers. This is a clear example of the contradiction
between rationalization of the forces of production
(including equal education) and the persistence of
general profit considerations which demand captive
and doubly exploitable women.
It is enough to say that the contradictions between
home responsibilities and work demands are in-
tensified under capitalism where the latter is in-
creasingly social (more education required, more
rational methods and organization) and yet still
privately owned and operated for profit. It is because
the central human need of reproduction and
socialization of children is subject to all the anarchy of
capitalism that women can less and less bear the
contradictions. For the home burden under these
conditions makes women less and less able to compete
in a labour force where higher education and more
advanced skills are increasingly required. Their
motivations to resist capitalism are intensified by
capitalism's very development. Women are learning
that capitalism can well afford to socialize the burdens
of the home. They are also realizing that capitalism
58

can well afford to prepare them for work roles equal to

men. The dual role of wife-mother and worker in-
creases women's dissatisfactions in both spheres. In
many ways the woman feels the contradiction between
privatization and socialization more keenly than
anyone under capitalism: this is part of the basis of her
revolutionary potential.
One sometimes gets the impression that some
early socialists envisaged the emancipation of women
as automatically arising from her participation in
production. But it is full integration in production that
is necessary, and a condition for equality in
production is the socialization of many of the child-
care and domestic functions which are the material
basis for women's inequality with men in the labour
force. Even where schools of higher education do not
discriminate against women, a woman with children is
far more handicapped in struggling through training
than a child-free man, particularly for specialist roles
and positions of political administration. For this
reason I think Mitchell's attempt to integrate the other
'structures' of women's condition into production is
crucial.
A mechanical socialist formulation of the problem
might be the following: Women are exploited by
capitalism as are men. They are also oppressed as
women. Males within the working class do not usually
fight for equality because 1} they consider women
competition for their jobs and 2) the idea of male
chauvinism pervades their consciousness because of
this fear. But this leaves out a step. Chauvinistic at-
titudes and chauvinist sexuality are not merely ex-
pressions of the fear of female competition, they are
reflections of the existence and fetishization of the
motherhood role itself. Fetishization of female
childrearing creates a sexual division of labour in
almost every sphere of life, a material difference of
experience that cannot be reduced to a simple
 59

rationalization of alleged mental inferiority.

Chauvinism is constantly reaffirmed by the per-
petuation of the feminine childrearing 'monopoly'
itself. This elementary division of childrearing labour
by sex is at the root of the inequalities in the work
force where 1) women are driven to the more
alienating jobs at less pay in part because of the
motherhood demands made on them by their husbands
and children (who are, of course, forced to make the
demands because of the system), and 2) women are
assigned motherhood-type roles (service, education) in
the work force. Women cannot compete because of the
added material burdens of wifery and motherhood:
motherhood is part of the material base of sexual
inequality. Capitalism did not just pick chauvinism out
of the air and virtually force it on the working class in
order to divide and rule and super-exploit (which is
just about a description of the inculcation of racism
since the advent of black slavery in the 1600's).
Rather, patriarchal attitudes are in large part the
result of experiencing woman first as mother and then
as wife, in fetishized roles so close to immediate ex-
perience that they affect just about every aspect of the
personality. Often, while the two tactics of equal pay
and daycare are advocated in the concrete, over-
coming male chauvinism is formulated in the abstract.
This overlooks the fact that women will not actually
achieve equal work in practice short of the
socialization of maternity, which means that paren-
thood must be shared, in the sense that males and
females participate equally in childrearing.
And for this socialism is necessary. The kinds of
changes necessary to liberate women from the female
'monopoly' of childrearing would necessarily be so far-
reaching and unprofitable for capitalism, that the
workers would need the ownership of the means of
production simply to make them possible. Capitalism
cannot support both multi-billion dollar war and multi-
 60

billion dollar daycare, equal education, in-

dustrialization of domestic labour, socialized
recreation, and all those institutions that would make
the mother- and wife- centred family a relic.(I think we
often underestimate the enormity of the expense and
labour power of a universal creche system. Shortage
of labour power in developing socialist countries is still
a major block to completing the socialization of infant
care.) At the point when the fetishization of female
childrearing, or motherhood, becomes a fetter on the
development of the forces of production, instead of a
probably necessary catch-all for all manner of bur-
dens in an unevenly developed society, people will
decide for themselves how they want motherhood
tasks socially differentiated. The contention here is
simply that in the absence of private property con-
siderations, the rationalization of the forces of
production will create the technological and social
conditions for male-female equality. Although many of
the fruits of unalienated social production affect men
and women in similar ways, the way in which society
adapts its reproductive tasks to the mode of production
is of particular importance to women. Perhaps
struggle on this will constitute the primary con-
tradiction at some point in the transition from
socialism to communism, a primary contradiction
hopefully of the non-antagonistic variety.

STRATEGY
The most serious shortcoming of much radical
feminism is that it fails to develop a strategy around
the real needs of working class women, whether they
are housewives or paid workers or both. A working
class strategy would put at the centre the following
issues: 1) struggle at the workplace and in the trade
unions for equal pay for work of equal value; 2)
organizing the unorganized; 3) a mass movement to
 61

tax the corporations for universal state daycare,

democratically controlled. Daycare would be an
extension of the public school system and as much our
right as public education. Abortion, birth control,
combatting sexism in the media, and so on, are all
related to these movements, but direct confrontation
on work and childcare is still the key to women's
emancipation.
To achieve these gains women will have to work in
a variety of organizations, sometimes with men and
sometimes not. Avoiding these organizations or failing
to set them up has been one of the reasons women's
liberationists have been unable to mobilize large
masses of people for daycare and equal pay. The
success of abortion campaigns has been due partly to
the fact that the illegality of abortion is the kind of
clear-cut injustice which lends itself to a single issue
campaign, that of getting a law off the books. It im-
mediately becomes a nation-wide issue.
Work issues are plant, office, or industry-
oriented, and day care is a very local, long-term
struggle. It involves legislation at various levels, as
provisions for subsidy are at present provincial and
municipal, though they should be federal, for that is
the only level where we have access to corporation
taxes.(31) To develop equal pay and daycare as
national issues will require much groundwork and
many coalitions.
It is true that women in the movement have been
unfairly criticized for 'consciousness-raising.' This
tactic certainly has its place: due to family respon-
sibilities women are isolated. Furthermore, women are
not respected intellectually. This makes necessary a
period of building up confidence in order to speak out
politically, to discover that problems hitherto believed
31. See Barb Cameron and Lesley Towers. "The Case for Universal
Daycare," in The Daycare Book (Toronto: Canadian Women's
Educational Press, 1972).
62

to be personal are in fact social, and that to fight

against them is political. But consciousness-raising
without mass political work is a cul-de-sac. In in-
dividual psychiatry in the best Freudian tradition, the
patient talks until she reveals what is in her un-
conscious, and either makes an adjustment or chooses
to change the course of her life. Sometimes
autonomous women's politics proceeds as a kind of
collective psychiatry. It is presumed that your chains
consist simply of false notions of the family and
woman's place. Once these are revealed and ad-
mitted, it is assumed, personal liberation follows.
Politics could be limited to propagandizing this
revelation.

CONCLUSION
The efforts to find a 'new Marxism,' purified in
the cauldron of woman's consciousness, is as natural
to the women's movement as other 'separate at-
tempts'—separate women's political parties, separate
women's trade unions, and some kind of never-quite-
becoming autonomous women's movement. It could
well be that these represent stages in injecting
women's issues into the left generally, but stages
constantly re-emerging far into the struggle for
socialism. In part, the theory we demand for such
struggle is and will be a product of science which can
only be developed fully in a socialist society. But even
in its present undeveloped stage, this science is one of
our most important weapons. There can be no isolated
super-theory of women's liberation. The next thing on
the agenda is a more developed Marxist psychology to
analyze sexuality, socialization, and the myriad of
aspects of development involved in our liberation. And
since this requires scientific and medical advances of
a kind not yet available to us, the questions have
scarcely surfaced, let alone the answers.