The family has become a microcosm of the political economy for Engels: “It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.”21 The man is the bourgeoisie, the woman, the proletariat. What is most interesting is that Engels does not use the categories of male as bourgeoisie and female as proletariat outside of the family. There people are assigned class positions according to their relations to the means of production, not their sex. He uses different criteria inside and outside the family to define membership within a class. If these categories were built on like bases of power, the same units of analysis would be applicable both in and out of the family. And if one wants to say that ultimately the usage of proletariat/bourgeoisie by Engels within the family is economic, there are evidently still other considerations involved. If this were not so, then he would not have (1) class divisions in the family as bourgeoisie-male/proletariat-female, and (2) class divisions in society in terms of ownership-nonownership of the means of production. Even though, for him, these ultimately mean the same thing, what do they reflect initially about the relations of the family and capitalism? It would seem that these considerations have to do with power emanating from the sexual differences between men and women in their relations to reproduction. This, however, was not grasped by Engels.
Most of the time Engels works from the simple equation that oppression equals exploitation. Even though Engels recognized that the family conceals domestic slavery, he believed at the same time that there were no differences (in kind) between domestic slavery and the wage-slavery of the husband. They both were derived from capitalism: “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large social scale and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.”22 The real equality of women would come with the end of exploitation by capital and the transference of private housework to public industry. But given his lack of understanding of the sexual division of labor, even public domestic work would, for Engels, most probably remain woman’s work.
In conclusion, the analysis sketched by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, and then further developed by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, reveals their belief that the family, at least historically, structured the division of labor in society, and that this division of labor reflects the division of labor in the sex act. Initially, the family structure defined the structure of society.
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a two-fold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.23
This perception is lost, however, in the discussion of the family in capitalist society, for here the family comes to be viewed as just another part of the superstructure, totally reflective of class society, and relations of reproduction become subsumed under the relations of production. The point is not that the family doesn’t reflect society, but that through both its patriarchal structure and patriarchal ideology the family and the need for reproduction also structure society. This reciprocal relationship, between family and society, production and reproduction, defines the life of women. The study of women’s oppression, then, must deal with both sexual and economic material conditions if we are to understand oppression, rather than merely understand economic exploitation. The historical materialist method must be extended to incorporate women’s relations to the sexual division of labor and society as producer and reproducer as well as to incorporate the ideological24 formulation of this relationship. Only then will her existence be understood in its true complexity and will species life be available to her too.
Antithesis: Woman as Sex
1. Patriarchy and the Radical Feminists
Although the beginnings of radical feminism are usually considered to coincide with the beginnings of the recent women’s liberation movement—around 1969–1970—radical feminism in fact has important historical ties to the liberal feminism25 of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Taylor Mill, women who spoke of sexual politics long before Kate Millett. These women understood in their own fragmented way that men have power as men in a society organized into “sexual spheres.” But while they spoke of power in caste terms, they were only beginning to understand the structure of power enforced upon them through the sexual division of labor and society. The claims of these feminists remained reformist because they did not make the necessary connections between sexual oppression, the sexual division of labor, and the economic class structure.
Radical feminism today has a much more sophisticated understanding of sexual power than did these feminist forebears and has thus been able to replace the struggle for the vote and for legal reform with the revolutionary demand for the destruction of patriarchy. It is the biological family, the hierarchical sexual division of society, and sex roles themselves which must be fundamentally reorganized. The sexual division of labor and society expresses the most basic hierarchical division in our society between masculine and feminine roles. It is the basic mechanism of control for patriarchal culture. It designates the fact that roles, purposes, activity, one’s labor, are determined sexually. It expresses the very notion that the biological distinction, male/female, is used to distinguish social functions and individual power.26
Radical feminists have not only found the analysis of Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Taylor incomplete, but they have, in much the same way, found the politics and theories of today’s left insufficient: existing radical analyses of society also fail to relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system. Sexual, not economic, power seemed to be central to any larger and meaningful revolutionary analysis. These women were not satisfied with the Marxist definition of power, or with the equation between women’s oppression and exploitation. Economic class did not seem to be at the center of their lives.27 History was perceived as patriarchal, and its struggles have been struggles between the sexes. The battle lines are drawn between men and women, rather than between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the determining relations are of reproduction, not production.
For radical feminists patriarchy is defined as a sexual system of power in which the male possesses superior power and economic privilege. Patriarchy is the male hierarchical ordering of society. Although the legal-institutional base of patriarchy was more explicit in the past, the basic relations of power remain intact today. The patriarchal system is preserved, via marriage and the family, through the sexual division of labor and society. Patriarchy is rooted in biology rather than in economics or history. Manifested through male force and control, the roots of patriarchy are located in women’s reproductive selves. Woman’s position in this power hierarchy is defined not in terms of the economic class structure but in terms of the patriarchal organization of society.
Through this analysis, radical feminists bridge the dichotomy between the personal and the public. Sex as the personal becomes political as well, and women share their position of oppression because of the very sexual politics of the society. The structuring of society through the sexual division limits the activities, work, desires, and aspirations of women. “Sex is a status category with political implications.”28
2. Shulamith Firestone: Sexual Dialectics
In her book Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, Shulamith Firestone offered a paradigmatic expression of radical