Firestone’s presentation of the idea of a sex class obviously departs from the classical Marxist meaning of class as an economic category denoting a relationship to the means of production. Woman, as a sex, is a class; man is the other and opposing class. This novel idea began the long and important process of trying to articulate the dynamic of sexual power. However, in trying to answer and reject the economic theory of power, as presented by Marxists, she artificially separates the sexual and economic spheres, replacing capitalism with patriarchy as the oppressive system. She fails to move further through an additive or synthesizing perspective because she chooses to deal with sexuality as the key oppression of modern times rather than to view oppression as a more complex reality. It is not that Firestone does not see economic oppression as problematic for women but that she does not view it as the key source of oppression. The either/or formulations about woman’s situation stunt the analysis, so that she cannot deal with the complex mix of woman’s existence. Dichotomy wins out over woman’s complexity. Thus, much as Marxist analysis is not extended to the specificity of women’s oppression, Firestone’s version of radical feminism cannot understand the full reality or historical specificity of our economic existence. Patriarchy remains a generalized ahistorical power structure.
In this framework the feminist revolution involves the elimination of male privilege through the elimination of sexual distinction itself and the destruction of the biological family as the basic form of social organization. Woman will then be freed from her oppressive biology, the economic independence of women and children will be created, and sexual freedoms not yet realized will develop.
The problem, however, is that woman’s body becomes the defining criteria of her existence. It also becomes the central focus in terms of freedom from her reproductive biology. This is a negative definition of freedom—freedom from—where what we need is a positive model of human development—freedom to develop the integration of mind and body. While clearly sexuality is the unique oppression of woman, this does not mean that it encompasses the totality of her situation or that it can express the full dimensions of human potentiality. It says what is different about women, but it doesn’t connect woman to the general structure of power. It cannot explain the complexity of power relationships in our society.
There are further problems. Firestone intends to present a synthesis of Marx and Freud. She attempts to do so, however, by negating the social and historical framework of Marx, by treating woman’s biology as an atemporal static condition. But inequality is inequality only in a social context, while Firestone thinks of it in terms of nature. Women’s and men’s bodies differ biologically, but to call this an inequality is to impose a social assessment on a biological difference.31 She acknowledges that one cannot justify a discriminatory sex class system in terms of its origin in nature, but one cannot explain it in such terms either.32 Firestone thus in effect accepts the patriarchal ideology of our own culture, when what is needed is an analysis of how woman’s sexuality has been interpreted differently throughout history.
For example, although sex roles existed in feudal society they were experienced differently than in advanced capitalist society because economic and sexual material life were different. Although the nuclear family is precapitalist as well as capitalist, it is actualized in different forms in different societies. To know there are universal elements to women’s oppression is important, but it has limited meaning when the specificity of our existence is relegated to the universal. All history may be patriarchal, but this does not mean that the differences between historical periods is not important. It is the specifics which elucidate the general meaning of patriarchal existence. Patriarchy, in this sense, should be understood not merely as a biological system but a political one with a specific history.
Firestone’s asocial, ahistorical framework becomes particularly limiting when she discusses technology. It is her view that technology will free woman from her body, through contraception and extrauterine reproduction. Technology is therefore the key to woman’s liberation. But although contraception has freed women in important ways, the question remains whether birth control, abortion rights, and so on, will ever be allowed to develop to the degree that would allow woman’s role as reproducer to become irrelevant to her social position. Firestone’s analysis loses its plausibility when we understand that technology is an intrinsic dimension of a society’s power structure. Male ruling-class needs define technological developments; without a change of those in power (and hence of those who define the purposes of technology), technology is an unlikely liberator.33
The thrust of Firestone’s analysis is to isolate sex oppression from the economic class organization of society although she realizes herself that economic suffering contributes to woman’s oppression at least as much as any female ills.34 She does note that a woman, even when well educated, will not earn as much money as a man. A woman also suffers from this lack of money when she decides to care for children. This in itself should invalidate a totally biological argument for the basis of a revolution needed in the family. Firestone speaks of wanting to relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, but she fails to do this. Even if we accept the idea that economic oppression was a basic defense of sexual oppression historically, today the two systems support each other. They are mutually dependent. This relationship only gets distorted when one tries to define it in causal and dichotomized terms. The effect of this dichotomization is the theoretical assertion that sexual oppression is the primary oppression. I do not know what you do with this position politically in a society which superexploits its women within the general context of unemployment and inflation. To say that sexual oppression is primary is to sever the real connections of everyday life. Is this not what Marx did himself by focusing on class exploitation as the primary contradiction? Social reality complicates these theoretical abstractions. It was a consciousness of the incompleteness of the “primary contradiction” syndrome that spawned radical feminism in the first place. Is it not ironic to be plagued by this very same inadequacy once again? Both Shulamith Firestone and, most recently, Robin Morgan have asserted their rejection of Marxist oversimplication of political reality. We need not replace it with radical feminist one-dimensionality. If a commitment to restructuring sexual and class existence is needed then we also need a theory that integrates both.
The connections and relationships between the sexual class system and the economic class system remain undefined in the writings of radical feminism. Power is dealt with in terms of half the dichotomy. It is sexually based; capitalism does not appear within the theoretical analysis to define a woman’s access to power. Similarly, interactions between patriarchy as a system of power and woman’s biology are also kept separate. Instead of seeing a historical formulation of woman’s oppression, we are presented with biological determinism. The final outcome of this dichotomization is to sever the relationship between these conditions and their supporting ideologies. As a result, neither Marxists nor radical feminists deal with the interrelationships between ideas and real conditions sufficiently. If reality becomes segmented, it is not surprising that ideological representations of that reality become severed from the reality as well.
Synthesis: Social Feminism
1. Exploitation and Oppression
Marxist analysis seeks a historical explanation of existing power relationships in terms of economic class relations, and radical feminism deals with the biological reality of power. Socialist feminism, on the other hand, analyzes power in terms of its class origins and its patriarchal roots. In such an analysis, capitalism and patriarchy are neither autonomous systems nor identical: they are, in their present form, mutually dependent. The focus upon the autonomous racial dimensions of power and oppression, although integral to