Patriarchy theory
Patriarchy theory
Patriarchy Theory
The theory of patriarchy, which says that there is a fundamental
division between men and women from which men gain power, is accepted without
question today by most of the left. The theory was developed by feminists such as
Juliet Mitchell and Miriam Dixson who, in her book The Real Matilda, was
inclined to blame Irish working class men for women’s oppression, using the theory
of patriarchy as the basis for her argument. Anne Summers helped to popularise the
ideas in her book Damned Whores and God’s Police in the early seventies.
She wrote «Women are expected to be socially dependent and physically passive because
this state is claimed to be necessary for their maternal role. In fact it is because
it enhances the power of men.»
But there was some resistance to the idea that all men have power
over women, especially from women and men influenced by the Marxist idea that
class differences are fundamental in society. Heidi Hartmann, in her essay The
Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,
attempted to provide a bridge between what are fundamentally opposing views. Hartmann
purported to provide a materialist analysis of patriarchy. While capitalists exploit
the labour of workers at work, men gained control over women’s labour in the family.
This has been the theoretical starting point for much of Australian feminist
writing over the past ten to fifteen years. However, Hartmann did not challenge
the central idea of Mitchell and others, which is that there is such an identifiable
social relation as patriarchy. Patriarchy, Hartmann says, «largely organizes reproduction,
sexuality, and childrearing.»
The arguments of patriarchy theory have been adequately dealt
with by the British Socialist Workers’ Party. The purpose of this article is to
begin the much-needed task of examining the theory of patriarchy by drawing on
the Australian experience from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. I will
briefly outline the theoretical method underlying Marxism and how it differs from
the theory of patriarchy. It is necessary to do this because most feminist arguments
against «Marxism» are in fact replies to the mechanical «Marxism» either of the
Second International from the early 1890’s to 1914 or of Stalinism. Secondly I
will show that the historical arguments made by feminists do not stand up to any
objective examination. Their determination to make facts fit an untenable theory
leads them to distortions and misinterpretation. So I will look at the origins of
the family in Australia and the role of the concept of a family wage in the workplace.
Finally, but most importantly, I will show that the ideas of
male power and patriarchy have led the women’s movement into an abyss. They have
no answer to how women’s oppression can be fought. Rosemary Pringle, in her book
Secretaries Talk, expresses a sentiment common in feminist literature today:
«no one is at all clear what is involved in transforming the existing (gender
stereotyped) categories». Is it any wonder the women’s movement is plagued by pessimism
and hesitation? An analysis which says half the human race has power over the other
half must in the end question whether this situation can be changed. A theory
which says capitalism could be replaced by socialism, but women’s oppression could
continue, ends up sliding into the idea that men naturally and inevitably oppress
women.
The Marxist analysis is that the historical roots of women’s oppression
lie in class society. The specific forms this oppression takes today are the result
of the development of the capitalist family and the needs of capital. Therefore
the struggle to end the rule of capital, the struggle for socialism, is also the
struggle for women’s liberation. Because class is the fundamental division
in society, when workers, both women and men, fight back against any aspect of
capitalism they can begin to break down the sexism which divides them. Their
struggle can begin to «transform the existing categories».
In The German Ideology Marx argued that social relations
between people are determined by production. The various institutions of society
can only be understood as developing out of this core, productive interaction.
His argument applies as much to women’s oppression as to any other aspect of capitalist
society.
The history of humanity is the history of changes to the way
production is organised. The new economic relations established with each mode of
production exert pressure on other social relations, making some obsolete, remoulding
others. So any institution must be examined historically and in its relationship
to other social relations. For instance, an analysis of the family needs to be
rooted in its economic and social role and examine how it helps perpetuate the existing
relations of production.
Today it is very popular for those influenced by Louis Althusser
and others to brand this approach as «reductionist». It is useful to quote Lukács
here again, as he can hardly be accused of covering his back after this objection
was raised. «The category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an
undifferentiated uniformity, to identity». And «the interaction we have in mind
must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging objects.»
Marx’s proposition «men make their own history, but they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves», sums up the interaction we
must look for between the ideas women and men use to justify their actions and
responses to social events and the material and economic circumstances in which
they operate. This differs radically from the theoretical framework of patriarchy
theory. The most common versions take two forms. There are those like Juliet
Mitchell who see patriarchy in psychological and ideological terms: «We are dealing
with two autonomous areas, the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological
mode of patriarchy.» If you make such a distinction between the economic and ideological,
then you cannot explain anything about the development of society. Why do some ideas
dominate? And why do some dominant ideas change?
However I do not intend answering these ideas more fully because
the arguments which seem to offer a more serious challenge to Marxism are not
these but the other version of patriarchy theory argued by writers like Heidi Hartmann.
She criticised Juliet Mitchell: «Patriarchy operates, Mitchell seems to be saying,
(in Psyche/analysis and Feminism) primarily in the psychological realm …
She clearly presents patriarchy as the fundamental ideological structure, just as
capital is the fundamental economic structure.» Hartmann concludes «although
Mitchell discusses their interpenetration, her failure to give patriarchy a material
base in the relation between women’s and men’s labour power, and her similar failure
to note the material aspects of the process of personality formation and gender
creation, limits the usefulness of her analysis.»
However, Hartmann’s own attempt at a materialist analysis is
not grounded in the concept of society as a totality in which production forms
the basis for all social relations.
This is a decidedly un-Marxist formulation, for all Hartmann’s
pretension to Marxist categories. It has much more in common with structuralist
and post-structuralist theories which take a mechanical view of society as a series
of social structures which can exist side by side. They do not attempt to unite
the social structures into a coherent whole. In fact, they are often hostile to
the very concept of society as a totality, preferring a view of society as fragmented
and chaotic. «All attempts to establish a working framework of ideas are regarded
with the deepest suspicion.»
Hartmann, while at pains to distinguish herself from the feminists
who tended towards a psychoanalytical explanation of women’s oppression, uses fundamentally
the same approach.
This framework fits neatly with Hartmann’s view of society as
both capitalism and patriarchy. And along with all those who have taken on board
elements of this method, Hartmann downgrades class as the fundamental determinant
– because in the end you can’t have two structures. One has to be primary, so her
analysis does not treat patriarchy and capitalism as two systems in partnership.
She argues that it was a conspiracy between male workers and capitalists which established
women’s oppression under capitalism. In other words, patriarchy is more fundamental
than capitalism. This is an inbuilt confusion in theories which claim to «marry»
Marxism and patriarchy theory. Again and again, they have to read their own prejudice
into historical facts to fit the abstract and mechanical notion of patriarchy.
We can agree with feminists such as Hartmann that the family
is the source of women’s oppression today. But their analysis of how and why
this came about is fundamentally flawed. Summers says «the institution (of the
family) confers power on men». The argument goes that, because men supposedly wanted
to have women service them in the home, they organised to keep women out of the
best jobs. A conspiracy of all men was responsible for women being driven into the
role of wife and mother, working in the worst paid and least skilled jobs – if
they were able to work at all.
Actually, we don’t need a conspiracy theory of any kind to explain
why women are oppressed under capitalism. Women have been oppressed since the division
of society into classes. The capitalist family was established as the result of
the particular development of capitalism. The effect of the industrial revolution
on the working class family was devastating. Friedrich Engels painted a horrifying
picture in The Conditions of the Working Class in England. Whole industries
were built on the basis of cheap female and child labour during the industrial
revolution in Britain. Engels gives figures for the 1840s: of 419,560 factory operatives
in the British Empire, 242,296 were female, of whom almost half were under eighteen.
Almost half the male workers were under eighteen. Women made up 56.25% of workers
in the cotton factories, 69.5% in the woollen mills, 70.5% in flax-spinning
mills.
Diseases such as typhus raged in industrial slums, drunkenness
was widespread and there was a «general enfeeblement of the frame in the working
class.» In Manchester, more than fifty-seven percent of working class children
died before the age of five. These statistics disturbed the more far-sighted sections
of the capitalist class.
The working class of the early industrial revolution was drawn
from the peasantry, driven off the land by enclosures of the common lands and other
measures. But as this source began to dry up, the bosses began to realise they
needed to find a way to ensure the reproduction of a working class at least healthy
and alert enough not to fall asleep at the machines. And more and more they needed
an educated, skilled workforce.
The solution they came up with was the nuclear family. This
is hardly surprising when we consider that the bourgeoisie themselves lived in
the family. Workers fresh from the countryside were used to working and living
in peasant families. It was accepted without question that women should be responsible
for childcare and most domestic duties. The second half of the nineteenth century
saw a massive ideological campaign by the middle and upper classes to reverse the
trend away from the working class family and to force women more decisively into
the roles of wife and mother. This was backed up by attempts to ameliorate at least
the worst aspects of working class life, especially those which endangered women
and their ability to produce healthy children.
The same process was repeated here in Australia. If anything,
the family was even more severely disrupted because of the transportation of convicts
and the general lawlessness of the frontier society in the first years of the nineteenth
century. Shortages of labour were acute in the early years of the colony, because
of the distance from the home country and lack of free settlers. This pushed the
colonial ruling class to try to find a solution even earlier than in Britain.
They situate the attempts to confine women to the home, to establish
the «feminine» stereotype, firmly in the ruling class’s drive to stamp their authority
on the new colony. They argue that women «disappeared into domesticity in the age
of the bourgeois ascendancy». From this time on we no longer see women entrepreneurs
like Mary Reibey or Rosetta Terry who had run successful businesses and been prominent
in other public ventures in the earlier years of the settlement.
Connell and Irving argue that «by the 1860s the lack of parental
guidance and education among working-class children was recognised as a major
problem of social control.» After the 1870s, living standards declined as the
cities grew rapidly. In the 1880s, infant mortality rates were higher in Sydney
than in London. So if anything, the campaign for the family was even more strident
here than in Britain. And it certainly was not a campaign by all men, but by the
ruling class, male and female, and its middle class supporters both male and female.
The idea that male workers joined in an alliance with their male
bosses to carry out this scheme so they could get power over women is simply not
borne out by the facts. Men did not rush into the family, chaining women to the
kitchen sink and smothering them with babies’ nappies. As late as 1919, it was
reported in the NSW Legislative Assembly that there was a high proportion of bachelors
in Australia.
Anne Summers herself admits that «many women resisted being forced
into full-time domesticity, just as men resented being forced to support a number
of dependent and unproductive family members.» This goes some way to explaining
why «the taming and domestication of the self-professed independent man became a
standard theme in late nineteenth century fiction, especially that written by women».
So men had to be cajoled and ideologically convinced of the benefits of home life
– they did not go out to enforce it. Family desertions were very common. But
just everyday, ordinary life meant for many workers – working on ships, moving around
the country looking for work, doing itinerant and seasonal jobs such as cane cutting,
droving, shearing, whaling and sealing – that they were not serviced by their
wives’ labour in the home much at all.
In any case, when a man took on the responsibility of feeding
a wife and children from the low and unreliable wage he earned, he actually faced
a worsening of conditions. Stuart McIntyre has shown that working class families
living at the turn of the century were most likely to suffer poverty during the
years when they had small children.
Summers makes this point herself: «indeed they (men) will generally
be better off if they remain single.» She dismisses it by assuming that a wife’s
services, the emotional security of a relationship «as well as the feelings of
pride and even aggrandizement associated with fathering and supporting children»
outweigh the minor inconvenience of not having enough money to live on. This is
a typically middle class attitude; that the ability to survive could be less
important than «emotional security», or that it could reliably exist in a life of
poverty and degradation. In any case, on both these criteria – emotional security
and the pride of parenthood – it would have to be said women have a stake in the
family. It is precisely the yearning to realise these often unattainable goals
which does partly underpin the acceptance of the family as the ideal. They tell
us nothing about whether the family bestows power on men or not.
This argument is not meant to idealise workers. Sexist ideas about
women are as old as class society. So it is not surprising that male workers were
sexist and accepted the standard stereotyped view of women. But that is not the
same as being in an alliance with male bosses. And it did not mean they strove to
establish the stifling, restrictive existence of the nuclear family. It simply
means they were the product of given social relations not of their own making. «The
sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal
conditions.»
The fact is that it was the ruling class, via magazines produced
for workers, who actually argued for women to become homemakers, wives and mothers
above all else. That is why every mass circulation magazine, every middle class
voice shouted the virtues of womanhood – a certain kind of womanhood that is (as
they still do today). And it is clear that the overwhelming arguments for women
to be primarily housewives came from women.
Connell and Irving rightly drew the connection between the establishment
of bourgeois society in Australia and the fight to establish the «feminine» stereotype
for women: «The women (in the social elite) … played an active role in maintaining
class consciousness through their policing of gentility.»
Of course, these women were not feminists. But some of the most
advanced women of the middle classes of the time, the suffragists as they were called,
mouthed the honeyed phrases promising women the approval of respectable society
if only they would devote themselves to the care of their husbands and children.
Vida Goldstein was a famous feminist. In 1903 her paper, Australian Woman’s
Sphere recommended that women’s education should include instruction on baby
care. Goldstein defended the women’s movement from attacks that said emancipation
meant women were refusing to have children by insisting that on the contrary, women
were awakening to a truer sense of their maternal responsibility, and that most
wanted a career in motherhood – hardly a departure from the sexist ideas of bourgeois
society. Maybanke Anderson espoused women’s suffrage and higher education for women
but also compulsory domestic science for schoolgirls, and sexual repression.
The bosses wanted the family and they had to fight for it. Workers,
both men and women, had to be goaded, pushed and coaxed into accepting ruling
class ideas of a «decent» life. The argument that women’s role in the family was
somehow established by an alliance of all men simply ignores the influence of not
only middle class and bourgeois respectable women, but also the feminists
of the time who were vastly more influential – because of material wealth and organisation
and ideological influence through newspapers and the like – than working class
men.
Hartmann argues: «the development of family wages secured the
material base for male domination in two ways. First, men have the better jobs
in the labour market and earn higher wages than women.» This «encourages women
to choose wifery as a career. Second, then, women do housework, childcare, and
perform other services at home which benefit men directly. Women’s home responsibilities
in turn reinforce their inferior labour market position.» The argument that the
establishment of a family wage institutionalised women as housewives and mothers
earning low wages if they went to work is widely accepted. Lindsey German and Tony
Cliff accept that the working class supported the idea of a family wage in Britain.
In August 1989, I wrote: «the family wage helped establish the connection between
sex stereotypes and the workplace.» And the «gender divisions … in the Australian
workforce … were codified and legitimised by the Harvester Judgement of 1907.»
I am now much more sceptical about this argument.
Most feminist historians hold up the Harvester Judgement of 1907
as decisive in institutionalising the family wage and low wages for women in Australia.
They argue it was a turning point in establishing the gender division in the work
force and the idea that women don’t need to work, because they should have a breadwinner.
Justice H.B. Higgins, as President of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court,
heard a test case involving H.V. McKay, proprietor of the Sunshine Harvester works
in Victoria. Higgins awarded what he called a «living wage» based on what a male
worker with a wife and «about three children» needed to live on. He awarded 7s a
day plus 3s for skill. Women’s wages were set at 54% of the male rate.
It may have been used as the rationale for lower wages for women,
but it certainly did not instigate the concept. Nor did it initiate the gender
divisions in the workplace. To prove that this judgement was decisive in establishing
women’s position in the home and at work, it would have to be shown that it established
lower pay for women than before and drove women out of the workforce. Neither
is the case.
It is well known that convict women in the early years of settlement
were always regarded as cheap labour. And as Connell and Irving point out, «a sex-segregated
labour market was established» by 1810. In that year, of about 190 jobs advertised in the Sydney Gazette, only seven were for women. Of those, six were
for positions as household servants. Most of the women immigrants brought to Australia
by the efforts of Caroline Chisholm in the 1840s were employed as housekeepers and
maids. By and large, women’s wages were lower than men’s from the earliest development
of industry. In the 1860s, in the Victorian Woollen Mills, men earned 35s a week
while women received 10s and girls 4s. In 1896, the Clothing Trades Wages Board
in Melbourne fixed women’s wages at 44% of men’s – 3s 4d against 7s 6d for men.
New South Wales didn’t even introduce a minimum wage until 1907. Its aim was «to
prevent employment of young girls in millinery and dressmaking for nothing for
periods of six months to two years»!
Any agitation for a family wage has to be seen in the context
of the ruling class’s push to establish the family. Again and again, the ruling
class has had to campaign around these ideas, partly because workers have not taken
them up with the enthusiasm they wanted, but also because capitalism itself continually
undermines the family. The slump of the 1890s disrupted family life, with men
travelling around the country looking for work, or simply deserting their families
in despair. By the early 1900s, birth rates had fallen to the lowest in the world.
So it is not accidental that the ruling class looked for ways to strengthen the
family and the ideas associated with it. It is in this light that we have to view
the Harvester judgement and the general climate at the time which has led many
feminists to identify this as the turning point for the position of women in Australia.
The feminist argument that decisions such as the Harvester
judgement are the decisions of patriarchy, an alliance between male workers and
male bosses, does not stand up any better. Leave aside that it made no appreciable
difference to the material conditions of women, it certainly cannot be shown to
have brought any great boon to male workers. The amount of 7s a week was not a living
wage for a family of five. Higgins said he wanted to award «merely enough to keep
body and soul together.» In fact, he left out any consideration of lighting, clothing,
boots, furniture, utensils, rates, life insurance, unemployment, union dues, books
and newspapers, tram and train fares, school requisites, leisure of any kind,
intoxicating liquors, tobacco, sickness, religion or expenditure for contingencies.
A confusion in the hearing resulted in the allowance for skill of 3s, one shilling
less than members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers got for the same work.
In the end, the decision was overturned a year later. But
Higgins was still awarding 7s many years later, in spite of 27% inflation. No wonder
Buckley and Wheelwright point out dryly that «trade unionists at the time
(unlike historians later) showed little interest in the Harvester judgement.»
If male workers were involved in some alliance with capital, they certainly got
very little monetary reward for their part in it.
The idea that the capitalists were in some kind of alliance with
working class men to get women into the home is ludicrous when we look at the conditions
men worked under. In the depression of the 1890s, thousands were sacked, wages
plummeted and most trade unions were either completely destroyed or reduced to a
miserable rump. In 1905 there were 2500 to 3000 wharf labourers and coal lumpers
in Sydney. At least 1500 of them could not earn enough to live on. And at this
time male shop assistants, some of the few workers who consistently worked a full
week, could not afford to marry unless their wife worked. Such «rewards» were hardly
calculated to keep men on side for the dubious (and mostly unrealised) benefit of
having a wife to wait on them. Furthermore, given that the bosses were in such a
strong position, there is no reason why they needed an alliance with male workers.
They got what they wanted anyway. A more reasonable explanation is that these conditions
convinced men that the family wage would raise their living standards.
The concept of a family wage was then of some ideological importance.
It strengthened the already prevalent conception about women’s role in the home,
and how «decent» people should live. But a true family wage was never a reality
for more than a small minority of workers. An important fact which shows that workers’
families couldn’t live on one wage was the huge number of married women who continued
to work. In the half century from 1841 to 1891, the number of women in Britain’s
textile mills grew by 221%. In Australia, the picture was much the same. Working
class women have always worked in large numbers. In 1891, 40% of women aged 18–25
worked. And they continued to work in sizable numbers in the twentieth century,
even before the massive growth in their numbers following the Second World War.
Men did take up sexist ideas about women’s role – this is hardly
surprising given the ruling class campaign was backed up even by the feminists of
the time. But it is not the case that men argued for the family wage or protective
legislation and the like on the basis that they wanted women to be their unpaid
chattels in the home. The situation is more complex than that.
We might not agree that the solution was for women to be confined
to the home. But the man quoted does not talk of women making life easier for men.
He says quite clearly that the family wage is seen as a way of alleviating the
horrible conditions endured by women in the workplace.
This is an outrageous assertion with no facts to back it up.
The only basis can be her own prejudice. She does not document any examples of
male workers opposing pay rises for women, or arguing that they should service them
in the home. The feminist interpretation misses the complexity of the relationship
of ideas and material circumstances. Workers are products of this society, and
the ideas of the ruling class dominate their thinking. But they are not empty vessels
which simply take up every phrase and idea of the ruling class just as it is
intended. Workers found their material circumstances unbearable. One response when
trying to find a way out was to take up ideas propagated by the bosses and use them
in their own way and to their own advantage. So the demand for women to be able
to live in the family is at the same time repeating bourgeois ideas and an attempt
to raise living standards.
Male workers, whether for exclusion of women, for a family wage,
or for unionisation of women, were mostly worried about the use of women as cheap
labour to undercut conditions and pay generally. Ray Markey, who has done a detailed
study of the Australian working class in the latter half of last century, notes
that «broadly, the labour movement’s response to female entry into the workforce
was twofold: one of humanitarian concern and workers’ solidarity, and one of fear.»
1891–2, the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council maintained a strong campaign
against sweating, particularly of women, and assisted in the formation of unions
of unskilled workers, of which a sizable minority were women. In this case, male
trade unionists were involved in organising women as workers – not driving them
out of the workplace.
Hartmann implies that male workers supported protective factory
legislation because this restricted the work women could do. This was the result
of much protective legislation. But at least here in Australia, it does not seem
to have been the motivating force behind union support for it. And once again,
middle class reformers saw protective legislation as one way of improving the conditions
of working women.
Carol Bacchi argues that «most suffragists favoured special factory
legislation for factory women». She comments that few realised that this placed
them under a competitive handicap. That is why I say the facts have to be distorted
and misinterpreted to draw the conclusion that protective legislation was a deliberate
ploy by males to limit women’s employment opportunities.
Markey says of the attitudes of workers: «Hopefully, it was
the thin edge of the wedge: once protection for some workers was accepted on the
statute books, it might be easier to extend it later.» Overall, protective legislation
did improve working conditions. Children especially gained from restrictions on
the hours they could be made to work.
Anne Summers criticises male trade unionists for only supporting
unionisation of women for fear of their own conditions being undercut, not for
the conditions of the women. Markey replies to this criticism; he says the maritime
strike of 1890 taught many workers of the danger of having a mass of unorganised
workers.
Similar fears had probably motivated the male tailors in encouraging
the organisation of the tailoresses. However, far from denigrating the ‘class solidarity’
of the union movement, this merely emphasises the material basis of class organisation.
Markey makes an important point. Summers expresses a fundamental
misunderstanding common not just among feminists: that is, a confusion between
the material circumstances people react to and the ideas they use to justify their
actions. Mostly people act because of their material situation, not simply because
of ideas. Whatever the reasons given for trade union organisation, it is a progressive
step. So while it is true that unions such as the Printers and the Engineering
Union prior to World War II tried to exclude women, other Australian unions had
quite a good record of defending women workers. In the early 1890s, a strike by
women laundry workers over one worker being victimised at Pyrmont in Sydney got
wide support, as did the Tailoresses’ Union in 1882 in Victoria. Neither the actions, nor even the arguments made for the worst positions, paint a picture
of some united campaign by male workers in connivance with male capitalists to force
women to be simply their domestic servants.
While the facts suggest that by and large workers did not show
overwhelming enthusiasm for the family, it does seem that this campaign did not
fall on completely barren soil. Workers gradually came to see the family as a haven
in a cruel world. It offered the prospect of a home where children could have some
care, where women could have their children away from the debilitating conditions
of the factory. And gradually, the family took root, becoming one of the most
important institutions for the maintenance of capitalism. In this way women’s oppression
became structured into capitalism.
The family became absolutely central for the reproduction of
the labour force – not a minor consideration for the system. It provided a cheap
means of reproduction and socialisation of the next generation. Individual working
class families were forced to take responsibility for child care, the health of
their children, teaching them habits of conformity and respect for authority at
minimal expense to the state or individual bosses. The existence of the family
helps reinforce the relations of production; capitalists buy the labour power of
workers like any other commodity, and its price is kept as low as possible by
the role of the family. So labour performed in the home does not benefit other
members of the family – it benefits the capitalist class who buy the labour
power of workers.
Apart from this economic role, the family plays an ideological
role of central importance for the maintenance and stability of the society. The
consolidation of the family entrenched the sexual stereotypes of man and woman,
living in married bliss and raising happy, healthy children. This in turn provided
an excuse for low wages for women. The assumption was more and more that they would
have a male breadwinner. Each generation is socialised to expect marriage and family
responsibilities, so getting a job and accepting the drudgery of work seems normal
and unquestionable behaviour. At times it forces workers to accept poor conditions
for fear of losing their job and not being able to provide for their family.
As the sex stereotypes became established, anyone who stepped
outside this narrow view of life was seen as strange, as challenging the very fabric
of society. This was no accident. It was part of the overall campaign to curtail
the sexual relations of the «lower orders» and establish a unified, orderly capitalist
society in Australia. As the cycle developed, it was increasingly perceived as «natural»
for women to stay at home with the children. This was reinforced by the fact that
their wages were inevitably lower than what men could earn. So women with small
children were often forced out of the workforce and into the home.
Once we look at the development of the family as satisfying a
very real need of capitalism itself, and the massive ideological offensive by
the ruling class and their supporters, the picture is very different from that
painted by the feminists. There was no conspiracy between male workers and capitalists.
In as far as workers accepted the family, it was because they expected it to bring
an improvement in their living standard. There is no separate power structure of
patriarchy. The capitalists and their allies in the middle classes fought for and
won very important changes in order to take the system forward. To workers at
the time, it seemed like a gain for them too. And in some ways it was. Given the
low level of production at the time, the poor methods of contraception and the absence
of state welfare, it is ahistorical and utopian to expect that workers could have
had expectations very different from those of the right to a family wage, and
the supposed shelter of the family home.
Marx warned in his writings of three consequences of seeing society
as an undifferentiated whole, of not putting production at the centre of our analysis.
First it can lead to the view that society is unchanging, seeing society in an ahistorical
way, with social relations governed by eternal laws. Second, it can lead to idealism,
with the dynamic of society lying in some mystical force outside it. And third,
it can lead to the view «that what exists today can only be grasped in its own terms,
through its own language and ideas».
It is popular today to try to graft structuralist and post-structuralist
theories onto Marxism. This has been the road to accepting the theory of patriarchy
for many Marxists. However, all these theories display the problems Marx talked
about. Foucault, who has become popular with many feminists, equates every relationship
between humans with a power struggle, a completely ahistorical concept, and certainly
not a new one. Thomas Hobbes, the bourgeois philosopher of the seventeenth century,
was convinced that the basic drive in society was the «war of all against all».
The epitome of the problem is the fascination with «discourse»
or language. It has taken on an explicitly idealist content. Chris Weedon, an American
feminist makes these typical comments: «Feminist post-structuralist criticism can
show how power is exercised through discourse.» And «power is invested in and exercised
through her who speaks.» Consequently some feminists see literary criticism as
their main area of struggle.
Rosemary Pringle takes up the theme here in Australia, illustrating
what it means to accept what exists in its own terms, through its own language and
ideas. She argues that we have to find a way to «privilege» the «feminine discourse».
Women should find ways to use their femininity to «disempower» men. She doesn’t
know how. But is it any wonder she can’t tell us how? Ideas do not come from out
of the blue, they are not divorced from the material conditions which give rise
to them:
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is
at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse
of men – the language of real life.
Femininity is part of the ideological baggage of capitalism and
the family. It is part of the way women’s oppression is reinforced day in and day
out. It cannot be used to undermine women’s oppression. The most apt reply to Pringle
is that made by Marx to the idealist Young Hegelians in the 1840s:
This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret
the existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognise it by means of a different
interpretation.
Women’s femininity means flirting, passiveness, being «sexy»,
available and yet chaste. Such behaviour reinforces the idea that women are trivial,
passive and purely of decorative value. For it to «disempower» men (assuming they
have power, which I don’t), women would have to somehow convince men to interpret
such behaviour to mean women are serious, aggressive and valuable human beings.
So instead of arguing to challenge the stereotypes, of fighting for liberation
as the early women’s movement did, feminism has gone full circle to espouse a profoundly
conservative outlook.
This is the dead end to which the ideas of male power and patriarchy
have led. Feminist articles in journals and papers are very good at documenting
the horrific conditions most women endure. But they have precious little to say
about how to begin to change the society which creates them. Take Gender at
Work by Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle. It catalogues very well the problems
of women at work. It is very good at searching out offensive behaviour by male workers.
But nowhere, not once, is there a mention of the possibility of solidarity between
men and women in struggle to change the situation. In 1981, only two years before
it was published, there was a strike of 200 women textile workers in Brunswick,
Melbourne. The Kortex strike was a graphic and inspiring example of how class
struggle can radically alter relations in the home. Husbands, brothers, sons and
lovers willingly did housework, cooked and minded children so the women could more
effectively fight for their $25 pay rise, which they won. Because they ignore such
examples, Game and Pringle can offer no way out of the entrenched discrimination
and gender stereotypes women suffer from.
Most feminists have abandoned any identification with socialism.
This is not surprising, because if patriarchy is a power structure separate from
capitalism the latter can be overthrown, leaving the former intact. This idea is
given some credence by the Stalinism of most of the left, which has kept alive the
ludicrous idea that the Stalinist countries arc socialist, in spite of the continuing
oppression of women.
Because Marxism recognises that class divisions in society are
fundamental, that women’s oppression arises from the particular way capitalism
developed, it locates the way forward in the struggle against the very society
itself. Men do behave badly, do act in sexist ways, do beat and rape women in
the home. Feminists interpret this as the enactment of male power. The Marxist
reply is not to simply say these are the actions of men shaped by the society
they grow up in. That is only one side to the argument. The other is to point out,
as Marx did, that «men make their own history». While humans are the products of
society they are also conscious, thinking beings. As I showed, ideas propagated
by the ruling class are not simply taken up by workers in a straightforward way.
They are refracted through working class experience and interpreted in various
ways. The middle class women who fought for the family did so by arguing that women
should be «feminine» and restricted to the role of housewife and mother. Working
class men saw in the family the prospect of improved living conditions, so they
argued for a family wage on the grounds it would improve women’s lot.
Ruling class ideas are never completely hegemonic. In every
class society, the exploited and oppressed have fought back against their rulers
in one way or another. So no matter how tightly the ruling class try to organise
their hold on society, they cannot completely wipe out the ideas and traditions
of struggle and resistance which come down to each generation from the past.
Of course there is no iron rule that society will be seething
with revolution at any particular point in time. In the last ten years, we have
seen a massive shift to the right in the political ideas most current in society,
continuing a drift which was identifiable from the mid-seventies. This change
in the political climate is underpinned by the Labor government’s talk of «consensus»,
and demands that workers make sacrifices «in the national interest». As Labor has
led the bosses’ attempts to cut living standards and reorganise their economy,
workers have suffered a number of defeats and had their trade union organisation
weakened. On the one hand we see affirmative action for some women, reflecting
gains won during the period when the workers’ movement was on the offensive. On
the other, we see no end in sight to violence in the home, as families struggle
to cope with worsening living standards, the strain of unemployment, poor health
care and the like.
In Britain and the United States and to a lesser extent here,
we have seen attacks on abortion rights and gay and lesbian rights. The fact that
they have met with a militant and vigorous response shows the situation can be reversed.
All of history shows that the exploited and oppressed cannot be kept in
submission indefinitely. And history also shows that it is when they begin to fight
back that the horrible ideas of capitalism can begin to be broken down, precisely
because the circumstances which perpetuate them are ripped asunder. Anyone who saw
the women tramways workers on pickets, approaching shoppers for money and support
in the lockout by the Victorian Labor government early in 1990 got a glimpse of
what we mean.
Tony Cliff has shown the relationship of the high points in epic
class struggles and the position of women and the struggle for liberation. A couple
of examples will sketch the point here. In the revolution in China, 1925–27, led
by the working class in the cities and supported with gusto by the peasantry in
the countryside, there were moves to stop the barbarous practices such as foot binding
which oppressed women so harshly. In revolutionary Spain, in 1936, a country dominated
by the sexism of Catholicism, women could go about among male workers without fear
of rape, and participate in the most untypical activities without derision. The
very rise of the women’s liberation movement was related to the high level of
struggle by the working class in the late sixties, as well as the entry into the
workforce and out of the isolation of the home by greater numbers of women. And
one of the first demands of the revolution in Romania in 1990 was abortion on demand
for women.
Every time there has been a lull in the struggle, ideas of pessimism,
ideas which say the working class cannot offer a way forward, are sung from the
roof tops. But these kinds of struggles will break out again. The events in Eastern
Europe are shaking the world system not just in the East. In every strike, every
demonstration of protest, no matter how small, there lies the seed of struggles
which could rip capitalism apart. It is not simply a matter of ideas, of education
which convinces workers of different ideas. The struggle creates a material reason to change
– the need for solidarity in opposition to
their rulers can, in certain circumstances, quite rapidly break
down the divisions which in other times hold workers back.
The fight for women’s liberation begins there. The idea that men have power over women can do nothing but get in the way.
It reinforces the division of sexism. Men are sexist
today. But women’s oppression does not equal male power. If we see the fight against
sexism as separate from the class struggle, we can easily fall into seeing
working class men
as an enemy. In reality, they are potential allies. In the seventies when building workers were confident of their union strength the Builders’
Labourers’ Federation (BLF) supported women’s right to work on building sites. Every defence
of abortion rights against the Right
to Life has
received support from large numbers of men. In the mass abortion campaign against Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government in 1979–80, men
were able to be won to support the struggle,
including transport workers at Email, who stopped work to join a picket. In 1986, BLF support for the nurses’ strike in Victoria challenged their sexist
ideas about the role of women.
Once we understand that working class men have nothing to gain from women’s oppression, we can see the possibility of breaking them from sexist ideas. Then we can
be confident that workers, women and men fighting side
by side in solidarity, can
begin to change the «existing
categories». There is
nothing automatic about changes in consciousness in struggle. But
with an understanding of the roots of women’s oppression, socialists can intervene around these issues and relate them to the experience
of workers’ struggles.
Women are better placed today to fight for liberation than in any time in
history. They are no longer simply housewives. They are half
the working class and
able to exercise
the power of that class alongside male workers. Ultimately, it is
the struggle of the working class which can destroy the very social structures which gave
rise to women’s oppression in the first place.