Second, I argued that a feminist mode of analysis leads to an integration of theory and practice. For feminists, theory is the articulation of what our practical activity has already appropriated in reality. As Marx argued, as struggle develops, theorists “no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.”30 If we look more closely at the subject about which Marx was writing on this occasion—the British working class—we find that by the time Marx wrote these words that group had already developed theory out of its practice to a considerable degree. A variety of trends had emerged, and ideas about organization and politics had been diffused over a wide area. Isolation from experienced national leadership, and the overimportance of personalities created problems, but the facility with which English working-class people formed associations is impressive. They used a variety of forms taken over from Methodism, friendly societies, trade unions, etc. By the time Marx wrote, it was clear that most people understood that power came from organization.31
In looking at history, one is especially struck with the number of false starts, the hesitancy, the backtracking that went into making what we would today recognize as class consciousness. Forming theory out of practice does not come quickly or easily, and it is rarely clear what direction the theory will finally take.
Feminists, in making theory, take up and examine what we find within ourselves; we attempt to clarify for ourselves and others what we already, at some level, know. Theory itself, then, can be seen as a way of taking up and building on our experience. This is not to say that feminists reject all knowledge that is not firsthand, that we can learn nothing from books or from history. But rather than read a number of sacred texts we make the practical questions posed for us in everyday life the basis of our study. Feminism recognizes that political philosophy and political action do not take place in separate realms. On the contrary, the concepts with which we understand the social world emerge from and are defined by human activity.
For feminists, the unity of theory and practice refers to the use of theory to make coherent the problems and principles expressed in our practical activity. Feminists argue that the role of theory is to take seriously the idea that all of us are theorists. The role of theory, then, is to articulate for us what we know from our practical activity, to bring out and make conscious the philosophy embedded in our lives. Feminists are in fact creating social theory through political action. We need to conceptualize, to take up and specify what we have already done, in order to make the next steps clear. We can start from common sense, but we need to move on to the philosophy systematically elaborated by traditional intellectuals.32
A third factor in making feminism a force for revolution is that the mode of analysis I have described leads to a transformation of social relations. This is true first in a logical sense. That is, once social relations are situated within the context of the social formation as a whole, the individual phenomena change their meanings and forms. They become something other than they were. For example, what liberal theory understands as social stratification becomes clearer when understood as class. But this is not simply a logical point. As Lukacs has pointed out, the transformation of each phenomenon through relating it to the social totality ends by conferring “reality on the day to day struggle by manifesting its relation to the whole. Thus it elevates mere existence to reality.”33 This development in mass political consciousness, the transformation of the phenomena of life, is on the one hand a profoundly political act and on the other, a “point of transition.”34 Consciousness must become deed, but the act of becoming conscious is itself a kind of deed.
If we grant that the women’s movement has reinvented Marx’s method and for that reason can be a force for revolution, we need to ask in what specific sense the women’s movement can be a model for the rest of the left. At the beginning I outlined a number of criticisms of the left, all rooted in the fact that it has lost touch with everyday life. The contrast I want to draw is one between what Gramsci recognized as “real action,” action “which modifies in an essential way both man and external reality,” and “gladiatorial futility, which is self-declared action but modifies only the word, not things, the external gesture and not the [person] inside.”35
At the beginning of this paper I suggested that education took on a new significance for the women’s movement because of the role of personal, everyday experience in constructing theory and transforming reality. Feminists are aware that we face the task of building a collective will, a new common sense, and this requires that we must participate in a process of education in two senses. We must, first, never tire of repeating our own arguments and, second, work to raise the general intellectual level, the consciousness of larger numbers of people in order to produce a new and different understanding of everyday life.36 The women’s movement is working at both these tasks—the first by insisting that every woman can reconstruct the more general feminist arguments on her own, the second by turning to the writings of more traditional intellectuals for whatever guidance we may find there.
Marx applied his method systematically to the study of capital. Feminists have not yet really begun systematic study based on the mode of analysis we have developed. Here I can only mention some of the questions which are currently being debated in the women’s movement—issues on which there is not yet a consensus but whose theoretical resolution is inseparable from practical, daily, work for change.
Issues for Feminist Theory
The Nature of Class
Marxists have devoted a great deal of attention to the nature of class.37 Most Marxist theorists agree that there are problems with traditional definitions of class. If to be working class means to have nothing to sell but labor power, then the vast majority of the American population falls within this definition. If to be working class means to contribute directly to the production of surplus value, then far fewer of us fall into that category. A number of modifications of these traditional ideas have been presented. Some writers have argued that there is a “new” working class, that what is important now is the possibility for alliances with sectors of the “new petty bourgeoisie,” that knowledge and its possession (science) have become productive forces, or that the working out of the division of mental from manual labor with its attendant ritualization of knowledge is critical to the working out of class boundaries.38 In this maze of theories about the nature of class under advanced capitalism, a feminist mode of analysis can provide important insights into the nature of class as it structures the concrete existence of groups and individuals.
Because feminists begin from our own experience in a specific advanced capitalist society, we recognize that the lived realities of different segments of society are varied. While it is true that most people have only their labor power to sell (for wages or not), there are real differences in power, privilege, ability to control our lives, and even chances for survival. By focusing on people’s daily lives we are learning that our class is not defined by our relationship to the mode of production in the simple sense that if we sell our labor power (for a day or a lifetime) or are part of the family of someone (presumably male) who does, we are working class. Being working class is a way of living life, a mode of life not exclusively defined by the simple fact that we have only our labor power to sell.
Class distinctions in capitalist society are part of a totality, a mode of life which is structured as well by the traditions of patriarchy and white supremacy. Class distinctions in the United States affect the everyday lives of women and men, white and black and Third World people in different ways. A feminist mode of analysis leads us to ask questions which recognize that we already know a great deal about class (in fact, in our daily activity we act on what