Much of the leftist analysis that spawned radical feminism did not take the commitments of the Marxist method seriously enough to transform it in necessary ways. It refused to continue to probe the question of power in its fullest material and ideological sense. Uniting radical feminism, class analysis, and the transformed Marxist methodology we now must focus upon the processes which define patriarchal and liberal ideology and social existence.
Developing Socialist Feminist Questions
A good starting point for a theory of woman’s oppression is with the questions why and how women are oppressed. Juliet Mitchell, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, states:
It seems to me that “why did it happen” and “historically when” are both false questions. The questions that should, I think, be asked in place of these are: how does it take place in our society? … in other words, we can start by asking how does it happen now?8
It may be true that the question, “Why did it happen?” is a false question; even if we could find out why it happened then, that might not explain why it happens now; nevertheless, it is still important to ask “Why does it happen now?” Beyond this, to fully elucidate how it happens now one must ask why sexual hierarchy and oppression are maintained. Why and how are connected questions. Either taken in isolation gives us only part of the answer. The question of how directs us to the immediate relations defining existing power arrangements, to the process of oppression. The question of why directs us to these same relations but necessitates our dealing with the existence of patriarchal history as a real force. In this sense both questions are necessary. They elucidate each other by interrelating the specific and yet universal dimensions of male supremacy.
The how and why of woman’s oppression has not been integrated in feminist theory. Radical feminism has asked why women are oppressed rather than how the process of power functions. Shulamith Firestone’s answer was that woman’s reproductive function is inherently central to her oppression. “The sexual imbalance of power is biologically based.”9 Women are defined as reproducers, as a sex class. How women are oppressed is less clearly articulated, and it was Ti Grace Atkinson who began to discuss this. In Atkinson’s concept, sex class becomes a political construct. Women are not oppressed because of the biological fact of reproduction, but are oppressed by men who define this reproductive “capacity” as a function. “The truth is that childbearing isn’t the function of women. The function of childbearing is the function of men oppressing women.”10 It is society that collapses women’s purpose with her biological capacity. Sex class is not biological oppression, it is cultural oppression. The agent of oppression is the cultural and political definition of human sexuality as “heterosexuality.” The institutions of family and marriage, and the protective legal and cultural systems which enforce heterosexuality, are the bases of the political repression of women.
Although radical feminists ask why women are oppressed and are now beginning to ask how this comes about, they most often treat history as one piece—as patriarchal history. Although this brings great richness to the radical feminist analysis, by presenting a unifying history for women, we need to understand the particular forms of patriarchy in different historical periods. Otherwise we are left with an abstract rather than concrete history. For instance, patriarchy has had different and yet similar expressions in feudalism and in capitalism. The expression of women’s oppression is distinct though related in these two time periods. As Marc Bloch has noted:
The sentimental importance with which the epic [feudal] invested the relations of the maternal uncle and his nephew is but one of the expressions of a system in which the ties of relationship through women were nearly as important as those of paternal consanguinity. One proof of this is the clear evidence from the practices of name giving.11
Children could take the name of either father or mother. There seem to have been no fixed rules about this and as a result the family seems to have been unstable as generations switched names. According to Bloch it was this very instability which feudal relations had to address. With the development of capitalism, and its necessarily new forms of economic relations, the family came to be defined more as the source of cultural and social stability. The family calmed the days of early competitive capitalism,12 whereas feudal relations themselves compensated for the unstable family order.
We must take into account two processes. One is history defined in terms of class—feudal, capitalist, socialist. The other is patriarchal history as it is structured by and structures these periods. For instance, motherhood, housewifery, and the family need to be understood as expressions of patriarchy at various historical moments because they are defined and structured differently in precapitalist and capitalist societies. These historical moments, however, are also part of an historically and culturally continuous reality, which doesn’t become concrete and real until it is understood in its particular form. Otherwise it becomes an abstraction and as such, a distorted generalized notion. This is not to disclaim the importance of understanding that patriarchy has an existence which cuts through different class history. Although patriarchy takes on specific qualities at specific moments, it cannot be understood fully, divorced from its universal existence. The universal elucidates the specifics and the specifics give reality to the universal.
If it is true that all social change begins with the leftovers of the previous society, then we must learn exactly what maintains patriarchal hierarchy. Today’s matrix of power exists through the particular constraints that capitalism can use to maintain the sexual hierarchy, but at the same time, the relations of capitalist patriarchy derive in part from precapitalist patriarchy, most specifically, feudal patriarchy. Any understanding of the relations of patriarchy has to treat them in their particular historical frame and any statement of the universal or unifying elements becomes an abstraction, albeit a necessary level of abstraction if we are to understand the unifying elements of patriarchal history. Both the specificity and universality of the relations of power must be defined to encompass the particular dynamic of male supremacy.
It is important, in a capitalist society, to understand both the enduring likenesses and differences between feudal patriarchy and capitalist patriarchy. The likenesses are important if we are to try to ensure that they do not continue in a new society. If the capitalist relations of patriarchy are connected to precapitalist forms, we need to challenge the precapitalist elements that are maintained in capitalist society. A ready example is the sexual division of labor. It has been maintained in capitalism and defined in a capitalist context while not specifically deriving from capitalist needs. The maintenance of these precapitalist forms constructs patriarchal history for us. For structuring life in the transition from capitalist patriarchy to feminist socialism, we need a theory of the revolutionary family which no longer accepts the birthmarks of the patriarchal family and sexual hierarchy.13
Beginning Notes on the Social Relations of Power
Let us begin with the question of how and why women are exploited and oppressed in capitalist patriarchy.14 We focus on these questions because understanding women’s oppression requires examining the power structures existing in our society. These are the capitalist class structure, the hierarchical order of the masculine and feminine worlds of patriarchy, and the racial division of labor which is practiced in a particular form in capitalism but with precapitalist roots in slavery. Capitalist patriarchy as an hierarchical, exploitative, oppressive system requires racial oppression alongside sexual and class oppression. Women share an oppression with each other; but what they share as sexual oppression is differentiated along class and racial lines in the same way that patriarchal history has always differentiated humanity according to class and race. Clearly, the black woman of American slave society experienced patriarchical oppression, but this experience was complicated by the other power structures to which she was subjected. As a laborer she was allowed no feminine “fragility,” as a woman she was “raped” into submission,15 and as a slave she endured a subhuman status. Instead of seeing sex or class, or race or class, or sex or race, we need to see the process and relations of power. If we direct ourselves to the process of power we can begin to learn how and why we are oppressed, which is the first step in changing our oppression.
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