32. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, p. 10.
33. It is important to know whether technological changes and innovations in birth control methods are tied only to concerns with population control in an era of overpopulation or if they reflect fundamental changes in the way women are viewed in this society. It matters whether women are still viewed as baby machines or not, because these views could come to define technological progress in birth control as nonprogressive.
34. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, p. 8.
35. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 414. Within the women’s movement today there is a varied dialogue in progress on the dimensions and meaning of socialist feminism, and the appropriate questions are still being formulated.
36. Sheila Rowbotham, in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), p. 17, defines patriarchal authority as “based on control over the woman’s productive capacity and over her person.” Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, pp. 407–8, sees patriarchy as defining women as exchange objects based on the exploitation of their role as propagators. Hence, she states, p. 416, that “it is not a question of changing (or ending) who has or how one has babies. It is a question of overthrowing patriarchy.”
37. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism.
38. See Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution, for the usage of this model of historical materialism in the study of history.
39. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam, 1952), p. xix.
40. Ibid., p. 33.
41. Ibid., p. 54.
42. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution (a Free Press pamphlet) and Woman’s Estate (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
43. Mitchell, Longest Revolution, p. 4. It has been pointed out that Mitchell herself did not fully understand women’s essential role in society as workers. She termed them a marginal or reserve labor force rather than viewing them as necessary to the economy, as domestic laborers as well as wage laborers.
44. Ibid., p. 6.
45. Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, p. 155.
46. Ibid., p. 156.
47. Mitchell, Longest Revolution, p. 28. It is interesting to note that Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, p. 374, focuses on the relationship between families as key to understanding women in patriarchal culture. The relationship between families distinguishes human society from other primate groups. “The legally controlled exchange of women is the primary factor that distinguishes mankind from all other primates, from a cultural standpoint,” p. 372. Hence, it is socially necessary for the kinship structure to have exogamous exchange. The psychology of patriarchy that Mitchell constructs is based on the relations of the kinship structure.
48. Newsweek, 6 December 1976, p. 69.
49. See Linda Gordon, Families (a Free Press pamphlet); A. Gordon, M. J. Buhle, N. Schram, “Women in American Society,” Radical America 5 (July-August 1971); Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975); R. Baxandall, L. Gordon, S. Reverby, America’s Working Women (New York: Vintage, 1976); Zaretsky, “Capitalism.”
50. Zaretsky, “Capitalism,” p. 114.
51. Ellen Willis, “Economic Reality and the Limits of Feminism,” Ms. 1 (June 1973): 110.
52. Nancy Hartsock, “Feminist Theory and the Development of Revolutionary Strategy” (Johns Hopkins University, unpublished paper), p. 19, and in this book. Portions of this paper appear as “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Quest 2, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 67–79.
This is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in The Insurgent Sociologist 7, no. 3 (Spring 1977). The article was first delivered as a paper in the spring of 1975 at Cornell University’s women studies weekly seminar.
SOME NOTES ON THE RELATIONS OF CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY
Zillah Eisenstein
This article attempts to clarify socialist feminism’s method of analysis. This involves a refocusing and redefinition, by feminism, of the historical Marxian approach. Radical feminist theory can be used to redirect the Marxian method toward understanding the structure of women’s oppression, particularly in terms of the sex-class structure, the family, and the hierarchical sexual division of labor and society.1 One growing school of socialist feminists has been trying to do just this.2 This integration is based upon a commitment to the transformation of the Marxist method through feminist analysis.3 The transformed Marxist method recognizes the previously unrecognized sexual spheres of power and the feminist questions require a new understanding of the specific historical processes of power. Juliet Mitchell fails to understand this systhesis when she suggests “we should ask the feminist questions but try to come up with some Marxist answers.”4 This implies a dichotomy between feminism and Marxist analysis, which stunts the analysis of socialist feminism.5
Refocusing the Marxist method (as well as its content) via feminism necessitates a reordering of priorities, particularly the question of consciousness in relation to the conditions of society. Questions of consciousness become a part of the discussion of the social reality. Reality itself comes to encompass the relations of class and sex and race. The relations between the private (personal) and public (political) become a major focus having particular consequence for the relations defining sexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. Along with this comes a focus on the importance of ideology. Thus, the dialectic will be self-consciously extended to the relations between consciousness, ideology, and social reality. This new way of viewing things—that society’s ideas and people’s consciousness are part of the objective social reality and that they operate out of the relations of sex, class, and race—is a product of the feminist assault on the inadequacies of the left, both in theory and practice.
The refocused Marxist methodology means using the theory of social relations to express the relations of capitalist patriarchy.6 Although this methodology is elucidated through the notion of class society and class conflict in Marx’s writing, it is possible to distinguish the theory of social relations from the content given it in existing Marxist analysis. It is important and possible to utilize the method while incorporating and yet moving beyond class analysis. Class analysis is necessary to our understanding but it is not sufficient for our purposes.
Marxist analysis is directed to the study of power. We can use its tools to understand any particular expression of power. That the tools have not been sufficiently used to do so is not an indictment of the analysis but of those who have used it. Marx used his theory of social relations—understanding “things” in their concrete connections—to understand the relations of power in society. Although his analysis was explicated through a discussion of class conflict, his method of analyzing social relations can be used to examine patriarchal struggle as well. This is different, however, from saying we can use the Marxist theory of social relations to answer feminist questions. This would put us back with Firestone’s analysis of a materialist history based on biology. Rather, we must use the transformed method to understand the points of contact between patriarchal and class history and to explicate the dialectic between sex and class, sex and race, race and class, and sex, race, and class.
It is impossible to develop an analysis of woman’s oppression which has a clear political purpose and strategy unless we deal with reality as it exists. The problem with radical feminism is that it has tried to do this by abstracting sex from other relations of power in society.7 It is not that radical feminists are unaware of these other relations of power, but they disconnect them. Class and race struggles are necessary for the understanding of patriarchal history; they are not separate histories in practice, although