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
Lukбcs 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.
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