Marxist theories disagree with the implication that women are a class and argue that such views divide the proletariat. Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English state: “Women are not a ‘class’; they are not uniformly oppressed; they do not all experience sexism in the same way.”[1] Do proletarians, including women all experience class oppression in the same way? On the level of the work women do, women’s lives are strikingly similar across class. Kate Millett has argued that “ economic dependency renders women’s affiliations with any class a tangential vicarious and temporary matter.” [2] Evelyn Reed has responded: “To oppose women as a class against men as a class can only result in a diversion of the real class struggle.”[3]
Marxists seem worried that to posit women and men as classes suggests that women must fight for their freedom. “ What is logical and inescapable extension of the basic feminist position that the fundamental social division is one of sex, that the oppression of women stems from male supremacy, that all women are ‘sisters’ if not that women should place themselves on the opposite side of the barricades from their oppressors- from men?”[4] Apparently it is a matter of judgement – perhaps an assessment of importance as much as a deduction from theoretical postulates or empirical evidence- which struggle is the “real class struggle.” If women were considered oppressed as a class, Marxists should be among the last to protest recourse to the barricades.
Beyond the disagreement over categorical primacy, if one accepts sex as a material social category at all and uses Marx’s analysis of class to scrutinize feminist analyses of sex, a substantial body of feminist work can be criticized for the very tendencies Marx criticized in burgeois theory. Marxists have charged feminism with liberalism of two kinds: idealism or belief in the power of ideas alone to cause social change; and individualism, or reliance on the individual to effect social change.[5] The first criticism is often presented as addressing attitudes rather than the material base of those attitudes[6] or as relying on moral persuasion.[7] The theory and practice of consciousness raising can lapse into treating social reality as if it were constructed solely by one’s idea of it, so that all that is required for social change is to persuade people of the morality and utility of equality for women to achieve equality by force of reason and exemplary practice.[8] This approach attributes the movement of history to the movement of ideas and changes in these ideas to abstract human reason or to eternal ever unfolding verities of ever progressing justice. Marx criticized Hegel and Proudhon for idealism in attributing movements in the material world to movements in reason rather than to alterations in material relations. Marx ridiculed Proudhon’s notion that ‘ it was the principle that made the history and not the history that made the principle.” [9]
As an example of the feminism to which such a criticism of idealism would apply, Mary Daly in Gyn/ Ecology speaks less of the creation of the women’s consciousness by the realities of male power, therefore of the depth of women’s damage, and more of its lies and distortions, positing mind change as social change. For instance, in the investigation of Sati, [10] Daly focuses upon demystifying its allegedly voluntary aspects. Women are revealed as drugged, pushed, browbeaten or otherwise coerced.[11] Comparatively neglected- both as to the women involved and as to the implications for the diagnosis of sexism as illusion – are perhaps sati’s deepest victims: women who want to die when their husband dies, who volunteer for self immolation because they believe their life is over when his is, women whose consciousness conforms to the materially dismal and frightening prospect of widowhood in Indian society. To the extent this analysis turns on whether the women jump or are pushed, it gives ideas both too much and too little power. In the case of male power, too much, in suggesting that the subordination of women is an idea such that to think it differently is to change it. In the case of female powerlessness, too little, in neglecting the consciousness of the most totally victimized in favour of a critique of the victimization of those whose consciousness at least has escaped. Similarly, Susan Griffith, in Pornography and Silence, reduces the problem of pornography to the problem of the ‘pornographic mind’[12] Pornography is opposed to eros in a distinction that I fundamentally psychological rather than interested something to be unthought and therefore changed, rather than a form of exploitation rooted in social life which both constitutes and expresses its material realities.
A similar failure to situate thought in social reality is central to Carol Gilligan’s work on gender differences in moral reasoning[13] By establishing that women reason differently from men on moral questions, she revalues that which has accurately distinguished women from men by making it seem as though women’s moral reasoning is somehow women’s, rather than what male supremacy has attributed to women for its own use. When difference means dominance as it does with gender, for women to affirm differences is to affirm the qualities and characteristics of powerlessness. Women may have an approach to moral reasoning, but it is an approach made both of what is and what is not allowed to be. To the extent materialism means anything at all, it means that what women have been and thought is what they have been permitted to be and think. Whatever this is, it is not women’s possessive. To treat it as if it were to leap over the social world to analyse women’s situation as if equality, in spite of everything, already ineluctably existed.
The women’s morality Gilligan discovers cannot be morality “in a different voice”. It can only be morality in the feminine voice, in a higher register. [14] Women are said to value care. Perhaps women value care because men have valued women according to the care they give. Women are said to think in relational terms. Perhaps women think in relational terms because women’s social existence is defined in relation to men. The liberal idealism of these works is revealed in the ways they do not take social determination and the realities of power seriously enough. As a matter of sociology of knowledge, it is enlightening, though, that affirming the perspective that has been forced on women is rather widely taken as real progress toward taking women seriously.
Some feminists early in the second wave advanced “ feelings” as pure reflection of the external world and therefore unmediated access to truth. The San Fransisco Redstockings for example asserted; “Our politics begin with our feelings: feelings are a direct response to the events and relationships that we experience; that’s how we know whats really going on….. Information derived from our feelings is our only reliable and our political analysis can be trusted only so long as it does not contradict our feelings.” [15] This intuitionist approach posits feelings, as Proudhon and others posited reason, as outside society an internalized reference system for measuring social reality that derives its claim to validity from its place beyond social reach. Surely one is more likely to feel bad than justified when confronting difficulties in a situation that social learning supports, such as motherhood. This response may produce the sense that feelings are n independent basis for understanding reality, that thoughts are able to grasp it only derivatively, and that thinking is socially constructed while feelings are not. Yet feminism has uncovered women’s social roles in women’s actual feelings and society’s standards in women’s feelings, both in embracing and in rejecting their roles. If a woman feels anger at not being treated as a full person, this surely refers to social definitions of personhood, possibly even liberal ones, to which men routinely experience entitlement without being subjected to class- based critique. Similarly feelings of loss of control over one’s life may reflect a social standard of self-actualization that requires control as a means to it.
Some feminist practice – such as therapy, crisis intervention, and service work- tends to focus on the individual as if social life were constructed of an amalgam of independent and solitary individuals, so that social change is a matter of moving their lives one by one. Opposing the suggestion that there is a matter of moving their lives one by one. Opposing the suggestion that there is a sphere of human social activity which belongs to each individual as a unit, Marx states: “ The individual is the social being. The manifestation of his life- even when it does not appear directly in the form of a communal manifestation, accomplished in association with other men is …. A manifestation and affirmation of social life.”[16]
Marxist epistemology makes the isolated individual a person without consciousness, unthinkable to self as well as for theory, social order and social change.
The Marxist criticism of feminist individualism often turns into a criticism of its focus on private life, on the supposition that private life is intrinsically the realm of the individual. Thus, Engels said women’s emancipation and equality were impossible so long as women were restricted to housework, which is private.”[17] Updated, “ the sex occurs on privatized, intimate terrain within the family unit.” [18] The husband’s authority, the children’s demands, and the wife’s conditioned conception of a good housekeeper may be seen as ‘ simply the personal means through which economic necessity is expressed inside the family,” yet addressing housework is called individualistic and characterized as adopting “ primarily interpersonal forms of struggle.” [19] The woman “ rebels as an isolated individual to the immediate detriment of her husband and children and her actions do not contest the relations of capital directly….. Her rebellion is objectively untenable because she is not part of an union.” [20] Presumably, a union of organized labour.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that such charges of individualism are disagreements with the analysis that the division between women and men is a basic social division of power, including labour. Similarly, the charge of idealism often turns into the view that the social division between women and men can be attacked only as unreasonable or immoral- which is another way of saying that it is not a matter of exploitation and has no material base. Yet social theory via individual biography surely has its limitations. Consider the following quotation, which exemplifies virtually all the strains in feminist thought singled out for Marxist criticism- the focus on the individual, the reflective theory of perception, and the asocial “ ideas move life” logic:
We know that true revolution is a glacial process of unknown cell structures that will evolve out of shared bits of profoundly internalized consciousness. This consciousness, which is at first realised through the painful acknowledgement of hierarchical oppression, is transformed by degrees into the birth of the self and the celebration of spontaneous behaviour appropriate to the individual and her perception to the constantly changing environment and social conditions.”[21]
[1] Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, Glass Mountain Pamphlet No. 2 Feminist Press, 1973, p. 11
[2] Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970) p. 38
[3] Evelyn Reed, Problems of Women’s Liberation, Pathfinder Press, New York 1972, p. 74
[4] Sparticist League, Women and Revolution: Journal of the Women’s Commission of the Sparticist League7 (Autumn 1974): 1, See also Reed, Problems, p. 72, for a view by the Socialist Worker’s Party which co-incides with this approach.
[5] Charnie Guettel, Marxism and Feminism, Toronto, Hunter Rose Company, 1974, p. 26
[6] wally Seccombe, The Housewife and her Labour under capitalism, New Left Review 83 (Jan- Feb 1974)
[7] Branka Magas, ‘Sex Politics: Class Politics,’ New Left Review 80 ( March – April 1971): 69
[8] Bebel, Women under Socialism, p. 210 exemplifies this position
[9] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, New York, International Publishers, 1963, p. 115
[10] A practice in which Indian widows are supposed to throw themselves upon their dead husband’s funeral pyres in grief
[11] Mary daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of radical Feminism, Boston: Beacon Press, 1978, pp. 113-133.
[12] Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature New York, Harper and Row, 1981, pp. 2-4, 251-265
[13] Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982
[14] For a subtle empirical
[15] San Fransisco Redstockings, “ Our Politics Begin with our feelings”, in Masculine/ Feminine: Readings in sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, ed. Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak ( New York: Harper &Row, 1969) pp.285-290
[16] Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. and trans. T.B. Bottomore, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), pp. 121
[17] Origins, p. 221
[18] Seccombe, The Housewife and her Labour, p. 22
[19] Ibid. ,pp. 27
[20] Ibid. p. 22
[21] Jill Johnston, “ The Myth of Bonnies without Clydes: Lesbian Feminism and the Male Left, “ Village Voice, April 28, 1975, p. 14 as cited in CATHERINE A MACKINNON, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachussets, London England 1989
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