For socialist feminists, oppression and exploitation are not equivalent concepts, for women or for members of minority races, as they were for Marx and Engels. Exploitation speaks to the economic reality of capitalist class relations for men and women, whereas oppression refers to women and minorities defined within patriarchal, racist, and capitalist relations. Exploitation is what happens to men and women workers in the labor force; woman’s oppression occurs from her exploitation as a wage-laborer but also occurs from the relations that define her existence in the patriarchal sexual hierarchy—as mother, domestic laborer, and consumer. Racial oppression locates her within the racist division of society alongside her exploitation and sexual oppression. Oppression is inclusive of exploitation but reflects a more complex reality. Power—or the converse, oppression—derives from sex, race, and class, and this is manifested through both the material and ideological dimensions of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. Oppression reflects the hierarchical relations of the sexual and racial division of labor and society.
My discussion will be limited to understanding the mutual dependence of capitalism and patriarchy as they are presently practiced in what I have chosen to call capitalist patriarchy. The historical development of capitalist patriarchy can be dated from the mid-eighteenth century in England and the mid-nineteenth century in America. Both of these periods reflect the developing relationship between patriarchy and the new industrial capitalism. Capitalist patriarchy, by definition, breaks through the dichotomies of class and sex, private and public spheres, domestic and wage labor, family and economy, personal and political, and ideology and material conditions.
As we have seen, Marx and Engels saw man’s oppression as a result of his exploited position as worker in capitalist society. They assumed that woman’s oppression paralleled this. They equated the two when they suggested that domestic slavery was the same, in nature and essence, as wage-slavery. Marx and Engels acknowledged that woman was exploited as a member of the proletariat if she worked in the labor force; if she was relegated to domestic slavery she was seen as a nonwage slave. Capitalism was seen to exploit women, but there was no conception of how patriarchy and capitalism together defined women’s oppression. Today, especially with the insights of radical feminism, we see that not only is the equation of exploitation and oppression problematic, but that if we use Marx’s own categorization of productive labor as wage labor, domestic slaves are not exploited in the same way as wage slaves. They would have to be paid a wage for this to be true.
The reduction of oppression to exploitation, within Marxist analysis, rests upon equating the economic class structure with the structure of power in society. To the socialist feminist, woman’s oppression is rooted in more than her class position (her exploitation); one must address her position within patriarchy—both structurally and ideologically—as well. It is the particular relation and operation of the hierarchical sexual ordering of society within the class structure or the understanding of the class structure within the sexual ordering of society which focuses upon human activity in capitalist patriarchy. They exist together and cannot be understood when falsely isolated. In dealing with these questions, one must break down the division between material existence (economic or sexual) and ideology, because the sexual division of labor and society, which lays the basis for patriarchy as we know it, has both material form (sex roles themselves) and ideological reality (the stereotypes, myths, and ideas which define these roles). They exist in an internal web.
If women’s existence is defined by capitalism and patriarchy through their ruling ideologies and institutions, then an understanding of capitalism alone (or patriarchy in isolation) will not deal with the problem of women’s oppression. As Juliet Mitchell has written, “the overthrow of the capitalist economy and the political challenge that effects this do not in themselves mean a transformation of patriarchal ideology.”35 The overthrow does not necessitate the destruction of patriarchal institutions either. Although practiced differently in each place, the sexual division of labor exists in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in China. The histories of these societies have been different, and limitations in the struggle against patriarchy have been defined in terms of the particularities of their cultures. There has been real progress in women’s lives, particularly in China and Cuba. But it would be inaccurate to say that a sexual division of labor and society does not exist in these countries. Only recently in Cuba has the sexual division of labor been tackled as a particular problem for the revolution. Patriarchy is crosscultural, then, by definition, though it is actualized differently in different societies via the institutionalizing of sexual hierarchy. The contours of sex roles may differ societally but power has and does reside with the male.
Both radical feminists and socialist feminists agree that patriarchy precedes capitalism, whereas Marxists believe that patriarchy arose with capitalism. Patriarchy today, the power of the male through sexual roles in capitalism, is institutionalized in the nuclear family.36 Mitchell ties this to the “law of the prehistoric murdered father.”37 In finding the certain root of patriarchy in this mythic crime among men at the dawn of our life as a social group, Mitchell risks discussing patriarchy more in terms of the ideology patriarchy produces, rather than in connecting it to its material formulation in the confrontation between man and woman. She roots the Oedipus complex in the universal patriarchal culture. However, culture is defined for her in terms of an exchange system which primarily exists in ideological form today. For Mitchell, patriarchy precedes capitalism through the universal existence of the Oedipus complex. I contend, however, that patriarchy precedes capitalism through the existence of the sexual ordering of society which derives from ideological and political interpretations of biological difference. In other words, men have chosen to interpret and politically use the fact that women are the reproducers of humanity. From this fact of reproduction and men’s political control of it, the relations of reproduction have arisen in a particular formulation of woman’s oppression. A patriarchal culture is carried over from one historical period to another to protect the sexual hierarchy of society; today the sexual division of society is based on real differences that have accrued from years of ideological pressure. Material conditions define necessary ideologies, and ideologies in their turn have impact on reality and alter reality. There is a two-way flow: women are products of their social history, and yet women can shape their own lives as well.
For socialist feminists, historical materialism is not defined in terms of the relations of production without understanding its connection to the relations that arise from woman’s sexuality—relations of reproduction.38 And the ideological formulations of these relations are key. An understanding of feminist materialism must direct us to understanding the particular existence of women in capitalist patriarchal society. The general approaches of both Marxists in terms of class and radical feminists in terms of sex obfuscate the reality of power relations in women’s lives.
2. Pioneers in Feminist Materialism: de Beauvoir and Mitchell
Simone de Beauvoir confronts the interrelationship between sexuality and history in The Second Sex. While for her “the division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history,”39 nevertheless she says “we must view the facts of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social, and psychological context.”40 She understood that women were defined by men and as such cast in the role of the “other,” but she also realizes that the sexual monism of Freud and the economic monism of Engels are inappropriate for the full analysis of woman’s oppression.41 De Beauvoir’s initial insights were further developed by Juliet Mitchell, who offered in Woman’s Estate a rigorous criticism of classical socialist theory, criticizing it for locating woman’s oppression too narrowly in the family.42 She rejected the reduction of woman’s problem to her inability to work,43 which stresses her simple subordination to the institutions of private property44 and class exploitation.
Instead, woman’s powerlessness in capitalist society is rooted in four basic structures, those of production, reproduction, sexuality, and socialization of children. Woman’s biological capacity defines her social and economic purpose. Motherhood has set up the family as a historical