Some of the best descriptions of class and its importance in the women’s movement were produced by the Furies, a lesbian/feminist separatist group in Washington, D.C. When the Furies began, many members of the collective knew very little about the nature of class. But the collective included a number of lower- and working-class women who were concerned about ways middle-class women oppressed them. As one middle-class woman wrote:
Our assumptions, for example, about how to run a meeting were different from theirs, but we assumed ours were correct because they were easiest for us—given our college educations, our ability to use words, our ability to abstract, our inability to make quick decisions, the difficulty we had with direct confrontations…. I learned [that] class oppression was … a part of my life which I could see and change. And, having seen the manifestations of class in myself, I better understood how class operated generally to divide people and keep them down.40
In the context of working for change, it became clear that
refusal to deal with class behavior in a lesbian/feminist movement is sheer self-indulgence and leads to the downfall of our own struggle. Middle class women should look first at that scale of worth that is the class system in America. They should examine where they fit on that scale, how it affected them, and what they thought of the people below and above them…. Start thinking politically about the class system and all the power systems in this country.41
What specifically did the Furies learn when they looked at the way class functioned in daily life? First, they learned the sense in which we have all, no matter what our class background, taken for granted that the “middle class way is the right way.” Class arrogance is expressed in looking down on the “less articulate,” or regarding with “scorn or pity … those whose emotions are not repressed or who can’t rap out abstract theories in thirty seconds flat.” Class supremacy, the Furies found, is also apparent in a kind of passivity often assumed by middle- and especially upper-middle-class women for whom things have come easily. People who are “pushy, dogmatic, hostile, or intolerant” are looked down on. Advocating downward mobility and putting down those who are not as “revolutionary” is another form of middle-class arrogance. What is critical about all of this is that “middle class women set the standards of what is good (and even the proper style of downward mobility which often takes money to achieve) and act ‘more revolutionary than thou’ towards those who are concerned about money and the future.” Middle-class women retain control over approval. The small, indirect, and dishonest ways of behaving in polite society are also ways of maintaining “the supremacy of the middle class and perpetuating the feelings of inadequacy of the working class.”42
These accounts of barriers created by class differences within the women’s movement lead us toward an understanding of several important points about the nature of class. They lead us to see first that class is a complex of relations, one in which knowledge or know-how is at a premium, and second, at a deeper level, that what is involved in the daily reality of class oppression is the concrete working out of the division between mental and manual labor. Class, especially as it affects the lives of women, is a complex of a number of factors in which political and ideological aspects as well as strictly economic factors play an important role. Theorists have focused too closely on the domination of men by production pure and simple. Looking at the role of class in women’s lives highlights the importance of other factors as well, such as the role of family and patriarchal traditions. For both women and men class defines the way we see the world and our place in it, how we were educated and where, and how we act—whether with assurance or uncertainty.43 The process of production must be seen to include the reproduction of political and ideological relations of domination and subordination. It is these factors that lead to the feelings described as “being out of control,” “feeling like you don’t know what to do,” and feeling that you are incompetent to judge your own performance.44
At bottom, people are describing the way it feels to be on the “wrong” side of the division between mental and manual labor. Indeed, the division between mental and manual labor is precisely the concentrated form of class divisions in capitalism.45 It is critical to recognize that mental labor is the exercise of “political relations legitimized by and articulated to, the monopolization and secrecy of knowledge, i.e. the reproduction of the ideological relations of domination and subordination.”46 Mental labor involves a series of rituals and symbols. And it is always the case that the dominated group either does not know or cannot know the things that are important.47
By calling attention to life rather than theory, the women’s movement has called attention to cultural domination as a whole—has begun a political analysis that does not take place in isolation from practical activity. By noticing the real differences among women in terms of class—confidence, verbal ability, ease about money, sense of group identity—we are developing new questions about class. While we have barely begun the task of reconstructing the category of class, we are learning that it is important to pay attention to the mechanisms of domination as a whole. By looking at class as a feature of life and struggle, the women’s movement has established some of the terms any revolutionary movement must use: Until we confront class as a part of everyday life, until we begin to analyze what we already know about class, we will never be able to build a united and large-scale movement for revolution. In this task, we need to recognize the decisive role of the division between mental and manual labor in all its complexity for the formation of the whole mode of life that is capitalism.
Organizations and Strategies
Feminism, while it does not prescribe an organizational form, leads to a set of questions about organizational priorities. First, a feminist mode of analysis suggests that we need organizations which include the appropriation of experience as a part of the work of the organization itself. We need to systematically analyze what we learn as we work in organizations. While the analysis of our experience in small groups was valuable, we need to develop ways to appropriate our organizational experience and to use it to transform our conception of organization itself. Some feminist organizations are beginning to do this—to raise questions about the process of meetings or about the way work is done and should be done.48
Because so many of us reacted to our experience in the organizations of the rest of the left by refusing to build any organizational structures at all, we have only begun to think about the way we should work in organizations with some structure. We need to build the possiblities for change and growth into our organizations rather than rely on small groups. This means that we need to systematically teach and respect different skills and allow our organizations to change and grow in new directions. We need to use our organizations as places where we begin to redefine social relations and to create new ways of working which do not follow the patterns of domination and hierarchy set by the mode of production as a whole.
A feminist mode of analysis has implications for strategy as well. We can begin to make coalitions with other groups who share our approach to politics. We cannot work, however, with people who refuse to face questions in terms of everyday life or with people who will not use their own experience as a fundamental basis for knowledge. We cannot work with those who treat theory as a set of conclusions to be pasted onto reality and who, out of their own moral commitment, make a revolution for the benefit of their inferiors. A feminist mode of analysis suggests that we must work on issues which have real impact on daily life. These issues are varied—housing, public transportation, food prices, etc. The only condition for coalition with other groups is that those groups share our method. So long as those we work with are working for change out of necessity, because they, like us, have no alternative, there is a real basis for common