Thus the social relations of society define the particular activity a woman engages in at a given moment. Outside these relations “woman” becomes an abstraction. A moment cannot be understood outside the relations of power which shape it and the ideology which defines, protects, and maintains it. In describing these moments, understanding the ideology of a society becomes crucial because the social relations of capitalist patriarchy are maintained through the ideologies of liberalism, male supremacy, and racism. Here one finds the interpretation of any particular moment that is necessary to the maintenance of capitalist patriarchy.
The Relations of the Family
The family is a series of relations which define women’s activities both internal and external to it. Because the family is a structure of relationships which connect individuals to the economy, the family is a social, economic, political, and cultural unit of a society. It is historical in its formation, not a simple biological unit. Like women’s roles, the family is not “natural”; it reflects particular relations of the society, particular needs to be filled.
What are some of the relations that define the family? First, woman is a reproducer of children who become workers for the economy and members of the society. She also socializes these children for their roles in the work world and the society as a whole. She labors to feed, clothe, and care for these children, and for her husband. In these capacities, the mother is a domestic laborer within the economy and a nurturer of the social world as well.16
Second, within her role in the family woman is a consumer. Consumption is the other side of production.17 She buys the things the family needs and the economy has to sell. She cares for these goods—by laundering a new dress or preparing a meal. As a consumer, woman is working to select, prepare, and maintain the goods. A woman is importantly intertwined with the economy and society. She is doing what is absolutely necessary for the economy—consuming.
Although motherhood includes the activities we have called domestic labor, it should not be reduced to them. Motherhood should be understood as a more complex reality than domestic labor within the relations of capital—rather, as a patriarchal institution not reducible to any class reality. Domestic labor and housewifery may be the specific capitalist patriarchal statement of motherhood,18 but we must be careful not to lose the connection to the pre-existing historical notion of mother and all this concept reflects about the relations of male supremacy.
These relations within the family devalue women in the marketplace when they seek employment. In 1970, only 7 percent of American women (as opposed to 40 percent of American men) earned more than $10,000 a year. Stated differently, 93 percent of the American women who worked earned less than $10,000.19 Woman’s labor in the home becomes a liability for finding jobs for pay outside the home. She is paid less in the labor force because of the relations which tie her to the family. Her labor is defined as free or cheap.
We can already see that women are ghettoized in the labor force and that their work there does not challenge the male supremacist organization of society. The influx of women into the lowest ranks of the labor force reflects the patriarchal necessity of male hierarchy for the society at large. Male supremacy is maintained through class hierarchy. This inflexibility is most clearly seen in the contradiction in women’s lives—the double day of work. Woman is both worker and mother.
What are the relations which define a woman as mother in the first place? What defines the patriarchal organization of labor? In other words, why are women oppressed as women? The answer often given is that a woman’s biology distinguishes her from a man. But even though a woman’s relation to reproduction may have initially defined her as the exchange object rather than man,20 the history of male supremacy and its particular relation to capitalism reflects a series of relations which are not now limited to this unique characteristic. There are a whole series of relations that exist as a result of this definition of woman as reproducer that cannot be “reduced” to their origin. Both cultural and political relations have been defined and redefined to maintain the hierarchy of sexual relations. The initial reason for the hierarchy—perhaps a fear of woman’s reproductive capacity, given the lack of biological knowledge of just what it entailed—no longer exists as such. But society still needs a sexual hierarchy because of the way its relations have been structured since then.
If the distinguishing biological characteristic between men and women is woman’s reproductive capacity, then we need to see why and how it is used as part of male supremacist relations, which have constructed a more troublesome system of inequality than the initial source. This is not to understate the importance of understanding woman’s biological self as a reproducer, but it is to say that this understanding must entail the political relations which define it at any moment. The relations of production and reproduction, not an abstracted notion of biology, define the relationship woman has to herself and society as a reproductive being. To focus on the fact that woman as reproducer is the universal crosscultural characteristic of male supremacy and therefore the source of the problem is to formulate the problem incorrectly. Looking at this same reality—the control of women by reproduction—does not focus sufficiently on the relations defining reproduction in the society. It is not reproduction itself that is the problem but the relations which define and reinforce it.
Patriarchy has been sustained through the sexual division of labor and society which has been based on a cultural, social, economic usage of woman’s body as a vessel of reproduction. Women were exchanged as gifts for what they could bear. Inequalities arose from the mechanism used to celebrate and/or control woman’s position as reproducer.21 Although the systems of exchange have changed, the relations which they produced became part and are still a part (although redefined) of patriarchal history. Because women were often given and were not the givers, because they had no control over the arrangements surrounding their lives, because they often found themselves in new surroundings and ignorant of the ways of the community, women came to experience the exchange system as a system of relations which excluded them from decisions, purposive activity, and control. This exists, although in somewhat different form, in capitalist patriarchal society. Women marry, lose their names, move to new communities when their husbands’ jobs necessitate it, feel lonely, and, find it difficult to meet people. And even though the majority of women in lower economic groups work in the labor force, men are treated with priority. Lesbians and other women who choose not to identify closely with a man and conform to the heterosexual norm of marriage, family, and housewife are even more isolated and ostracized. These relations express the priority given men. They define a certain control over the woman’s life.
When one looks at relations of reproduction, what one really focuses upon is a system of hierarchical control and ordering which all existing societies have needed and used. Patriarchy as male supremacy has supplied this order, even while the economic organizations of societies change. This is not to imply that patriarchal systems of control have not changed, but they have changed while maintaining their male supremacist structure and without altering the basic impact of male supremacy. During the change from feudalism to capitalism, however, the basic economic class structure and its control system does change.
Because patriarchy is a system of power, it is incomplete to say that men are the oppressors without explaining that they are oppressors because they embody the relations of patriarchy. To speak of individual men as “things,” rather than as reflecting the relations of power is to conceive of