Any of the particular oppressions experienced by women in capitalist patriarchy exhibit relations of the society. As things, they are completely neutral. Abstracted from reality there is nothing innately oppressive about contraception, pregnancy, abortion, childrearing, or affectionate familial relations. However, they all express a very particular oppression for women in this society. If contraceptive methods were devised for both men and women, with a real concern for our health rather than profits, and if abortion was not laden with patriarchal values and did not cost more money than it should, contraception and abortion would be different experiences.22 If men and women believed that childrearing was a social responsibility, rather than a woman’s responsibility, if we did not believe that childhood affection was dependent on privacy rather than intimacy, the “relations” of childrearing would be significantly different. If being pregnant did not involve a woman in patriarchal medical care, if it did not mean having to deal with the relations defining private health care, if it did not mean the loss of pay and the incurrence of financial obligations, and if it meant bringing life into a socialist feminist society, the act of childbirth would take on a wholly different meaning.
Emphasis on the patriarchal experience in capitalist patriarchy reveals, therefore, the relations of power in any particular moment in society. Since life activity in this society is always in process, in process through power relations, we must try to understand the process rather than isolated moments. To understand the process is to understand the way the process may be changed.
Notes
1. See the literature of radical feminism: Ti Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links, 1974); Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1970); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970); Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970) and Monster (New York: Vintage, 1972); Red Stockings, Feminist Revolution (New York: Red Stockings, Inc., 1975).
2. I am particularly interested in defining the newer and politically more complex portion of socialist feminism rather than any particular sectarian line. This is the position least well articulated at the Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, summer, 1975: that woman’s oppression reflects the problem of capitalism and patriarchy. Radical feminism and Marxist analysis are both viewed as necessary elements in the theory.
3. I am indebted to correspondence with Marla Erlien for clarification of this point.
4. Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 99.
5. Firestone’s analysis is limited by this structural dichotomy. She says she will develop a “materialist history” (Marxist method) based on sex itself (feminist question). In the end she is unable to construct this history because of this dichotomy. Her substitution of sexual oppression for class oppression distorts reality. It limits the possibilities of developing a “real materialism” based on sex and class. See Firestone, Dialectic of Sex. Also see Mitchell’s discussion of Firestone in Woman’s Estate.
6. See Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973) and Capital, vols. 1 and 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
7. At the same moment that radical feminism suffers from abstraction by dealing insufficiently with economic class reality it is responsible for explicating the “personal” sexual experience, and in this way remedies the earlier abstraction of the Marxist method. For a discussion of this see Nancy Hartsock, “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Quest 2, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 67–80, and this volume.
8. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 364–65.
9. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 9.
10. Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, p. 5.
11. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 137. See also Oliver Cox, Caste, Class and Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959) and Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (New York: Harvest Books, 1933).
12. See Linda Gordon, Families (a New England Free Press pamphlet); A. Gordon, M. J. Buhle, N. Schrom, “Women in American Society,” Radical America 5 (July-August 1971); Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (Clifton, N. J.: Augustus Kelly, 1969); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (a Socialist Revolution pamphlet).
13. See literature on how socialist countries treat the particularly patriarchal elements of their society: “Women in Transition, Cuba Review 4, no. 2 (September 1974); Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1974); Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1972); “Women in Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Dhofar, China and Japan,” Red Rag, no. 9 (June 1975); Judith Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows: The Significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 2, no. 43 (1975) and in this volume; Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); Linda Gordon, The Fourth Mountain: Women in China (a New England Free Press pamphlet).
14. See Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973); Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
15. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1 and 2 (reprinted from Black Scholar, December 1971).
16. See the varied discussions of women’s domestic labor: Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation (a New England Free Press pamphlet); Peggy Morton, “Women’s Work Is Never Done,” in Women Unite (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1972); Mariarosa dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” and Selma James, “A Woman’s Place” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (a Falling Wall Press, Ltd. pamphlet, 1972); Ira Gerstein, “Domestic Work and Capitalism” and Lise Vogel, “The Earthly Family,” Radical America 7 (July-October 1973); Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism,” New Left Review 83 (January-February 1973), with postscript in Red Pamphlet, no. 8 (Britain: IMG pub.); B. Magas, H. Wainwright, Maragaret Coulson, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism—A Critique” and Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labor,” New Left Review 89 (January-February 1975), and, for the latter, this volume.
17. See “Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970) for a discussion of the relationship between production and consumption. See also Amy Bridges and Batya Weinbaum, “The Other Side of the Paycheck,” in this volume.
18. See Ann Oakley, Woman’s Work (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
19. Karen Lindsey, “Do Women Have Class?” Liberation 20, no. 2 (January-February 1977): 18.
20.