39. Poulantzas, Classes, p. 14.
40. Ginny Berson, “Only By Association,” The Furies 1, no. 5 (June-July 1972): 5–7.
41. Nancy Myron, “Class Beginnings,” The Furies 1, no. 3 (March-April 1972): 3.
42. Charlotte Bunch and Coletta Reid, “Revolution Begins at Home,” The Furies 1, no. 4 (May 1972): 2–3. See also Dolores Bargowski and Coletta Reid, “Garbage Among the Trash,” The Furies 1, no. 6 (August 1972): 8–9. Some of the essays from the Furies are collected in Class and Feminism, ed. Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (Baltimore: Diana Press, 1974).
43. Clearly I disagree with Poulantzas who locates women on the mental side of the mental/manual division of labor. He admits that women tend to occupy the more manual jobs within the hierarchy of jobs on the mental labor side, but as he defines the working class (focusing almost exclusively on employment) the majority of the working class is male. To argue that women are part of the “penumbra around the working class” (p. 319) is to make the mistake Poulantzas himself argued against; it is to refuse to pay attention to political and ideological factors and even to refuse to pay attention to economic factors in any but the narrowest sense. When a woman from a working-class family takes a secretarial job this is hardly enough to make her a part of the petty bourgeoisie.
44. These statements come from Sennett and Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class, pp. 97, 115, and 157. One of the most important effects of class is to make working-class people doubt they have a legitimate right to fight back.
45. Poulantzas, Classes, p. 233.
46. Ibid., p. 240.
47. Ibid., p. 257. Poulantzas correctly calls attention to the fact that there is no technical reason why science should assume the form of a division between mental and manual labor (p. 236). See also Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, who documents the history of the increasing separation of the two forms of labor. The separation of mental from manual labor has particularly interesting ramifications where women are concerned, since they have been increasingly excluded from the exercise of technical functions in capitalism. An interesting example is provided by the increasing exclusion of women from the practice of medicine as medicine became a technical skill. (See Hilda Smith, “Ideology and Gynecology in Seventeenth Century England,” 1973).
48. Lukacs, History, p. 333.
49. More extensive criteria for choosing strategies are presented in Charlotte Bunch, “The Reform Tool Kit,” Quest 1, no. 1 (Summer 1974).
50. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 289.
51. Ibid., p. 293.
My thanks to C. Ellison, S. Rose, and M. Schoolman for their suggestions and encouragement, and to the Quest staff who helped me formulate these ideas. Parts of this article appeared in Quest: a feminist quarterly 2, no. 2 (1975), as a critique of the first national socialist feminist conference. In addition, parts were presented in a lecture series in socialist feminism at Ithaca College in the spring of 1977.
MOTHERHOOD, REPRODUCTION, AND MALE SUPREMACY
As we have mentioned, when Engels noted the dual importance for society of production and reproduction he uncovered a key political reality which neither he nor most political analysts since have understood. Most existing discussions of reproduction do not recognize it as a politically necessary aspect of any society that must be organized and ordered along with the other relations of survival. As a result there is no recognition of the political base intrinsic to the biological capacity for reproduction and the societal necessity for it. It has been the particular concern of socialist feminists, including Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Gayle Rubin, Nancy Chodorow, and Linda Gordon, to remedy this situation.
Nancy Chodorow focuses on mothering as part of the operation of male dominance. Given that both the idea and the reality of motherhood define the activities of most women, Chodorow seeks to explain how motherhood as an institution is reproduced through mothering. Motherhood focuses not only upon the reproduction of children, but also on the reproduction of society: mothering reproduces not only new children but new mothers. This society reproduces the relations of male supremacy and the hierarchical relations necessary to the capitalist marketplace.
In Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, Linda Gordon showed that a woman’s lack of control of reproduction is part of the social relations that define her oppression, and that the struggle for such control has been part of the varied struggle for women’s rights and liberation. These relations and struggles must be understood as part of the history of patriarchal, male-supremacist, and/or sex-gender systems. Here Gordon shows that the struggle for control over reproductive capacities is central though not sufficient for the struggle for liberation. She describes the struggle in three stages: (1) nineteenth-century feminism; (2) early twentieth-century feminist socialism; and (3) 1970s feminism. At each stage women have moved toward a fuller understanding of how men control them through control of reproduction. Gordon’s basic thesis is that “birth control does not mean population control or birthrate reduction or planned families but reproductive freedom.” Reproductive freedom is defined as the control over one’s reproductive capacities, not the elimination of biological reproduction. Reproductive self-determination becomes a basic condition for sexual equality and political revolution.
Socialist theory has dealt insufficiently with the reality of women as mothers and radical feminism only begins to probe the question in its full political, economic, and psychoanalytic sense. It has been socialist feminist women who have begun to push the analysis of psychoanalysis to better understand the dynamic involved in the social relations of mothering as it is practiced. Juliet Mitchell was important in opening up this area for analysis, although I think she reinvents the problem of woman’s oppression as belonging to the unconscious realm disconnected from real conditions. Nancy Chodorow begins to tackle the question of how the unconscious operates out of a series of conscious realities. If the unconscious were not reinforced daily by the conscious political organization of the society, the unconscious would lose its capacity for reproduction. An analysis of the dynamics of the mind must be integrated with the society which produces, defines, redefines, and reproduces the mind. Socialist feminists have only begun this difficult task; the beginnings are presented in this section.
Related Reading
Bachofen, J. J., Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
Bamburger, Joan, “The Myth of Matriarchy,” and Chodorow, Nancy, “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” in Woman, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
Briffault, Robert, The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1931).
Chodorow, Nancy, “Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots,” Social Problems (April 1976).
Dinnerstein, Dorothy, The Mermaid and The Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
Engels, Friedrich, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972).
Erikson, Erik H., “Womanhood and the Inner Space,” Identity, Youth, and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968).
Freud, Sigmund, “The Passing of the Oedipus Complex. Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes (1925),” “Female Sexuality (1931),” Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963).
Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: