21. See Rubin, “Traffic in Women”; Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; and Miriam Kramnick, “Ideology of Motherhood: Images and Myths,” paper delivered at Cornell Women’s Studies Program, 14 November 1975.
22. Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
FEMINIST THEORY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY
Nancy Hartsock
A number of writers have detailed problems of the left in America. They have pointed out that it has remained out of touch with large numbers of people, and that it has been unable to build a unified organization, or even to promote a climate in which to debate socialist issues. The left has been criticized for having a prefabricated theory made up of nineteenth-century leftovers, a strategy built on scorn for innovation in politics or for expanding political issues. Too often leftist groups have held that the working class was incapable of working out its own future and that those who would lead the working class to freedom would be those who had memorized the sacred texts and were equipped with an all-inclusive theory that would help them organize the world.
While such a list of criticisms presents a caricature of the left as a whole, it points to a number of real problems,1 and overcoming them will require a reorientation. Here I can only deal with one aspect of the task: the role of feminist theory and the political practice of the women’s movement as a model for the rest of the left.
I want to suggest that the women’s movement can provide the basis for building a new and authentic American socialism. It can provide a model for ways to build revolutionary strategy and ways to develop revolutionary theories which articulate with the realities of advanced capitalism. Developing such a model requires a redefinition of theory in general in the light of a specific examination of the nature of feminist theory and practice, a reanalysis of such fundamental questions as the nature of class, and a working out of the implications of feminist theory for the kinds of organizations we need to build.
Theory and Feminist Theory
Theory is fundamental to any revolutionary movement. Our theory gives us a description of the problems we face, provides an analysis of the forces which maintain social life, defines the problems we should concentrate on, and acts as a set of criteria for evaluating the strategies we develop.2 Theory has an even broader role, however. As Antonio Gramsci has pointed out, “One can construct, on a specific practice, a theory which, by coinciding and identifying itself with the decisive elements of the practice itself, can accelerate the historical process that is going on, rendering practice more homogeneous, more coherent, more efficient in all its elements, and thus, in other words, developing its potential to the maximum.”3 Thus, theory itself can be a force for change.
At the same time, however, Gramsci proposes that we expand our understanding of theory in a different direction. We must understand that theorizing is not just something done by academic intellectuals but that a theory is always implicit in our activity and goes so deep as to include our very understanding of reality. Not only is theory implicit in our conception of the world, but our conception of the world is itself a political choice.4 That is, we can either accept the categories given to us by capitalist society or we can begin to develop a critical understanding of our world. If we choose the first alternative, our theory may remain forever implicit. In contrast, to choose the second is to commit ourselves to working out a critical and explicit theory. The political action of feminists over most of the last decade provides a basis for articulating the theory implicit in our practice.5 Making the theory explicit is difficult but necessary to improve the work feminists are doing.
The Nature of Feminist Theory
Women who call themselves feminists disagree on many things. To talk in such unitary terms about a social movement so diverse in its aims and goals may seem at first to be a mistake. There is a women’s movement which appears on television, has national organizations, and is easy for the media to reach and present as representative of feminist thought. But there is a second movement, one harder to find, that is made up of small groups and local organizations whose members work on specific local projects, a movement which came together around the immediate needs of women in a variety of cities, a movement whose energies have gone directly into work for change. It is these groups that form the basis for my discussion of feminist theory. These groups were concerned with practical action—rape crisis centers, women’s centers, building women’s communities, etc. In coming together as feminists to confront the problems which dominate their lives, women have built a movement profoundly based on practice. Indeed, one of the major tasks for the women’s movement is precisely the creation of revolutionary theory out of an examination of our practice.6
All these groups share a world view that differs from that of most socialist movements in advanced capitalist countries, and that is at the same time surprisingly close to Marx’s world view. It is this mode of analysis, with its own conception of social theory as well as the concrete theories we are developing out of it, that are the sources of feminism’s power and the reason I can argue that through our practice, feminists have become the most orthodox of Marxists. As Lukacs argued, orthodoxy in Marxist theory refers exclusively to method.7
At bottom, feminism is a mode of analysis, a method of approaching life and politics, a way of asking questions and searching for answers, rather than a set of political conclusions about the oppression of women. Women are applying that method to their own experiences as women in order to transform the social relations which define their existence. Feminists deal directly with their own daily lives—something which accounts for the rapid spread of this movement. Others have argued that socialist feminism must be recognized as a definite tendency within Marxism generally; in contrast, I am suggesting that because feminists have reinvented Marx’s method, the women’s movement can provide a model for the rest of the left in developing theory and strategy.8
The practice of small-group consciousness-raising—with its stress on examining and understanding experience and on connecting personal experience to the structures which define women’s lives—is the clearest example of the method basic to feminism. Through this practice women have learned that it was important to build their analysis from the ground up, beginning with their own experiences. They examined their lives not only as thinkers but, as Marx would have suggested, with all their senses.9 Women drew connections between their personal experiences and political generalities about the oppression of women; indeed they used their personal experience to develop those generalities. We came to understand our experience, our past, in a way that transformed both our experience and ourselves.10
The power of the method feminists developed grows out of the fact that it enables women to connect their everyday lives with an analysis of the social institutions which shape them. The institutions of capitalism (including its imperialist aspect), patriarchy, and white supremacy cease to be abstractions; they become lived, real aspects of daily experience and activity. We see the concrete interrelations among them.
All this means that within the feminist movement, an important role for theory has been reemphasized—one in which theorists work out and make “coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity.”11 Feminism as a mode of analysis, especially when consciousness-raising is understood as basic to that method, requires a redefinition of the concept of intellectual or theorizer, a recasting of this social role in terms of everyday life.
Because each of us is a potential theorist, intellectual, and activist, education comes to have a very different role in the women’s movement than it does in the rest of the left today. The kind of political education feminists are doing for themselves differs fundamentally from what I would call instruction, from being taught the “correct political line.” Education—as opposed to instruction—is organically connected to everyday life.12 It both grows out of and contributes to our understanding of it.
Personal and Political Change
“If what we change does not change