We can further understand
such differences by looking more extensively at that political position known
as radical feminism. In part, radical feminism was created by women who had
been active in NOW and were dissatisfied with what they perceived of as NOW's
conservatism. Thus in 1967 at the annual meeting of NOW subsequent to the one
in which the above demands were formulated, a group of New York women allied
with Ti-Grace Atkinson left NOW and subsequently formed an early radical
feminist organisation, "The October 17th Movement," later called
"The Feminists.'' Radical feminism was to a large extent also constituted
by women whose previous political activity had been in the diverse
organisations of the New Left. This was the case, for example, with such women
as Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman, who founded an early radical feminist
organisation, Radical Women, in New York City in the fall of 1967. These two
women, with others, had earlier presented a series of women's demands to a New
Left conference, the National Conference for a New Politics, in the spring of
that year. None of the demands were taken seriously, causing them to begin
thinking about the necessity of separate women's organisations outside existing
groups.
The early organisers of
radical feminism shared with the rest of the New Left a belief in the systemic
nature of much of political injustice. Thus when these women began to perceive
the situation of women as representing a case of this injustice, they employed
the adjective "radical" to describe their stance. It signified a
commitment to look for root causes. Radical feminists viewed the activities of
women who had been involved in NOW or other existing business and professional
women's organisations as "reformist," helpful and necessary but
fundamentally inconsequential. This view stemmed both from a belief that the
criticisms liberal feminism made of relations between women and men in both
domestic and non-domestic life did not go far enough, and also, from a belief
that liberal feminism had no sense of the importance of gender, and the social
relations of domestic life, in structuring all social life. For radical
feminism, liberal feminism's belief in the power of the law to remedy
inequalities between women and men testified to a lack of insight into the
fundamentality of the "sex-role system," those practices and
institutions which were important in creating and maintaining sex-role differences.
Of particular importance was the family, for it was here that biological men
and women learned the cultural constituents of masculinity and femininity, and
learned about the fundamental differences of power which, according to radical
feminism, were a necessary component of both. A quotation from a manifesto of
New York Radical Feminists illustrates the political position:
Radical
feminism recognises the oppression of women as a fundamental political
oppression wherein women are categorised as an inferior class based upon their
sex. It is the aim of radical feminism to organise politically to destroy this
sex class system.
As
radical feminists we recognise that we are engaged in a power struggle with
men, and that the agent of our suppression is man insofar as he identifies with
and carries out the supremacy privileges of the male role. For while we realize
that the liberation of women will ultimately mean the liberation of men from
their destructive role as oppressor, we have no illusion that men will welcome
this liberation without a struggle....
The
oppression of women is manifested in particular institutions, constituted and
maintained to keep women in their place. Among these are the institutions of
marriage, motherhood, love and sexual intercourse (the family unit is
incorporated by the above).
In sum, for radical
feminism, women's inferior political and economic status were mere symptoms of
a more fundamental problem: an inferior status and lack of power built into the
role of femininity. Radical feminism challenged prevailing beliefs that the
constituents of this role, such as women's abilities and interests in
child-rearing or lack of assertiveness or even the content of women's sexual
interests, were "natural." Rather the argument was made that all but
certain limited biological differences between women and men were cultural. The
constituents of the sex-role system were social constructions, and more
important, such constructions were fundamentally antithetical to the interests
of women. The norms embodied in femininity discouraged women from developing
their intellectual, artistic, and physical capacities. It dissuaded women from
thinking of themselves and from being thought of by others as autonomous
agents. Whereas "masculinity" embodied certain traits associated with
adulthood, such as physical strength, rationality, and emotional control,
"femininity," in part embodied traits associated with childhood, such
as weakness and irrationality. The norms of femininity created an emphasis in women's
lives on achieving the roles of wife and mother whose outcome was a comparable
imbalance between men and women in economic and emotional autonomy. Moreover,
while the norms embodied in femininity often worked against women, the norms
embodied in masculinity served to create many unattractive beings, those who
too frequently were aggressive, selfish, instrumental in their dealings with
others, and unskilled in the arts of nurturance and caring. The source of the
problem, according to radical feminism, was to be found in the home and family,
where girls and boys received their initial and most primary lessons on the
differences between the sexes and where adult women and men played out the
lessons that they learned. The lessons of gender differences learned and practiced
in the home were in turn transferred to the outside world when women did leave
the home. Thus when women took paid employment, they replicated and were
expected to replicate the practices and inferior status of women which were a
part of the home. In sum, according to radical feminism, the inferior status of
women as political or economic beings was merely the symptom of a problem whose
roots were to be located elsewhere.
Radical feminism also
generated new forms of political organising. Organisations such as NOW, WEAL,
BPW had engaged in traditional political means to improve women's status. Such
groups sent telegrams and lobbied in Congress. Members of NOW sometimes marched
or demonstrated. The primary intent of such actions was to bring about changes
within the law. While radical feminists also marched and demonstrated, the
intent of the action was not always the same. The point was not necessarily to
change people's thinking so that they might vote differently but sometimes to
change people's thinking so that they might live differently. This conception
of political organising was embodied in the phrase
"consciousness-raising." In the early years of radical feminism, this
was occasionally attempted through street theatre, itself a practice carried out
within the New Left. This tactic was employed in Atlantic City in the fall of
1968 at an event which first brought "Women's Lib" to national
attention. The New York Radical Women demonstrated outside the Miss America
contest, crowning a sheep "Miss America" and throwing such feminine
articles of clothing as bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, and wigs into
a "Freedom Trash Can."" It was from this event that the media's
description of "Women's Lib" as "bra-burners" was
generated. The more prevalent form that consciousness-raising took within the
early years of "Women's Lib" was small-group discussion. Women came
together to discuss the implications of gender in their own lives, which
included its personal as well as its political and economic components. What is
notable about such groups is that they expressed, and were consciously designed
to express, a political statement in their very purpose. The attention that
radical feminists gave to the dynamics of personal relations was accompanied by
a belief that attention to feelings and personal experience was a necessary
condition for eliminating the present sex-role system. Since the components of
that system were embedded in deep and complex ways in daily life experience, it
was only through careful examination of that experience that the multiple
manifestations of gender could be understood and thus changed.
This attention to
"personal experience" had immense significance for the direction
contemporary American feminism has taken. On a practical level it entailed a
rethinking of the nature of social change. On a theoretical level it entailed
anew focus on the family as a central institution in structuring social life.
To be sure, radical feminism was not the first social movement to devote
attention to the family and personal life. Psychoanalytic theory has also been
concerned with both the family and sexuality. For many radical feminists,
however, much of psychoanalytic theory appeared to reflect uncritically
prevalent assumptions concerning gender. For example, psychoanalytic theory did
not question the dominant position that men played within the family or within
society at large. It often assumed the universal existence of the family type
which prevailed in the middle classes in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Western society. In short, psychoanalytic theory did not
treat the family as a social institution whose dynamics might be susceptible to
criticism and possible change; it did not address the family and gender
relations in political terms.'
Thus the initial task which
faced early radical feminist thinkers was that of creating a theory which both
treated the family as a social institution and recognised its centrality in
structuring social life as a whole. Thus if for liberalism the state, or public
law, has been seen as possessing priority in structuring social life, and if in
certain interpretations of Marxism the economy, or sphere of production, has
been viewed as the base from which might be explained all other social
phenomena, so for radical feminism the family, sometimes described as the
sphere of "reproduction," occupies an analogous role. This point was
made explicit by Shulamith Firestone, one of the early radical feminist
theorists, in her rewriting of Engels:
Historical
materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate
course and the great moving power of all historic events in the dialectic of
sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for
procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another;
in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and childcare created by
these struggles; in the connected development of other physically
differentiated classes (castes); and in the first division of labor based on
sex which developed into the (economic-cultural) class system.'
An important problem with
Firestone's argument, which surfaces in much, and particularly early, radical
feminist writing, is a tendency to resort to biology to ground the analysis. In
Firestone's case this tendency manifests itself in her claim that the ultimate
causes of women's oppression are biological differences between women and men.
That women bear and nurse children makes necessary a basic family form in which
women are fundamentally dependent on others in a way in which men are not. This
power imbalance between women as a class and men as a class is replicated by a
similar imbalance between children and adults. From such biologically based
imbalances result the imbalances of power which have marked all human
societies. However, for Firestone, biology need not be destiny. Technological
developments in the reproduction of children conjoined with cultural changes in
child-rearing would end the so far universal "tyranny of the biological
family."
As many critics have
pointed out, Firestone's account suffers from the obvious problem of
ahistoricity. That we associate child-bearing or child-rearing with dependence
and devalue those who perform such tasks need not imply that all other societies
make or have made similar associations. Similarly, Firestone's account seems to
project onto all societies a modem Western nuclear type of family with a
certain gender division of labor. This projection seems allied with her
association of child-bearing and child-rearing with dependence. If we abstract
from our own nuclear family, where individual women are often dependent on
individual men, to different family forms with different divisions of labor,
then it is easy to see that a pregnant or lactating woman need be no more
dependent on a larger social group than any other member of that group. To
respond here that any other member possesses a greater possibility of leaving
that group because of a greater ease in existing self-sufficiently is to belie
both the social nature of human existence and the fact that women are as
capable of forsaking children as men.
These problems in
Firestone's account bear explicating only because they reflect methodological
problems prevalent in radical feminist theory. Within the larger body of that
theory there has been a tendency to create transhistorical descriptions and
explanations and at times to resort to biology. As Heidi Hartmann notes, the
radical feminist emphasis on psychology tends to blind it to history.' Also,
the inclination to articulate a transcultural perspective follows from the need
to create a theory which will explain the universal phenomenon of female
oppression. The emphasis on biology is connected with this need and also with
the radical feminist focus on the family, as the family tends to be viewed in
modern Western culture in largely biological terms. The contradiction here is
that radical feminism's attention to the family and to gender has been
motivated by the desire to denaturalise both, to enable us to see both as
constructed and changeable. It has been one of the important contributions of
radical feminist theory to make the point that women are made and not born. The
dilemma for radical feminism has been to retain this awareness of the social
construction of gender and the family while also maintaining an awareness of
the persistent and deep-seated phenomenon of female oppression and the
importance of the family both in generating that oppression and in structuring
non-domestic life.
Radical feminist practice
and theory has also changed in many ways since its genesis in the late 1960s.
One change is a growing attention to issues of race and class. Another is an
abandonment of the early reliance on the terminology of "roles" and
the "sex-role system." As Alison Jaggar has noted, role terminology
implies that women and men have a high degree of choice vis-a-vis gender; role
terminology suggests that gender is a kind of mask or script which people may
assume or relinquish at will. Also, radical feminism in more recent years
describes women's oppression less as a consequence of "the family"
and more in terms of specific practices which have been associated with that
institution, such as mothering and sexuality.
Indeed, one of the most
important changes in radical feminism since the late 1960s has been its
increased, explicit focus on sexuality, a change associated with the extension
of radical feminism into lesbian feminism. An article which greatly contributed
to this development was "The Woman Identified Woman." This paper
claimed that women must eliminate the need for male approval and the practice
of identifying with male beliefs and values, both central components of a
misogynist culture. The authors argued that an important means for women to
accomplish such tasks and to remove the self-hate women typically have toward
themselves is to love other women, both emotionally and sexually. At the very
least, women cannot let the label "dyke" stand in the way of
developing such love and removing such self-hatred. More recently, Adrienne
Rich has also tied together female self-identification and lesbian sexuality
under the phrase, "a lesbian continuum." By using the term
"lesbian" to denote not only female homosexuality but also instances
"of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a
rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of
practical and political support," Rich argues that "We begin to grasp
breadths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a
consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of 'lesbianism,' "
However, radical feminism
has gone even further than stating that there is a connection between
lesbianism and women coming to define and love themselves. Made more explicit,
both by Rich and others, is the assertion that women's oppression is
constituted by heterosexuality. As Catherine MacKinnon puts it, "Sexuality
is the Iynch-pin of gender inequality." It is worthwhile examining the following
passage from the article in which this point was made for its illustration of
the similarities and differences between early radical feminism and more recent
forms:
Implicit
in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the moulding, direction, and
expression of sexuality organises society into two sexes-women and men-which
division underlies the totality of social relations. Sexuality is that social
process which creates, organises, expresses, and directs desire, creating the
social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. As
work is to Marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet
constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly
comprised of matter and mind. As the organised expropriation of the work of
some for the benefit of others defines a class- workers-the organised
expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex,
woman. Heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms,
sex roles its qualities generalised to social persona, reproduction a
consequence, and control its issue.
MacKinnon, like Firestone
before her, defines feminism by contrast with Marxism. As Marxism has defined
production, or human labor recreating the conditions of its existence, as
central to its analysis of oppression, so feminism, according to MacKinnon,
makes sexuality the cornerstone of its analysis of oppression. Thus MacKinnon
is continuing that path well trodden by contemporary feminists, of recognising
that Marxism, while providing a deeply insightful tool for analysing social
oppression, has no means for comprehending gender oppression. What is unique in
MacKinnon's argument is her explicit claim that the central lacuna in Marxism
and that which serves as the defining issue for feminism is sexuality.
MacKinnon's argument gives
us clues for seeing both what has been most insightful in radical feminism and
its major problems. Contemporary radical feminism has been relatively unique in
the concerted attention it has given to matters often thought of as either
natural or trivial, issues such as sexuality and the family, and in arguing for
the centrality of these phenomena in structuring relations between women and
men and social life as a whole. The insightfulness of the first point, that in
at least some cultures sex may be instrumental in structuring gender is
illustrated in the English language where the word "sex" refers both
to sexual activity and to gender. Moreover, the illuminating power of the
second point, that both sexuality and gender are concerns not only of
"private life" but of all social life, must also be recognised as a
crucial contribution of radical feminism. For one, it enables us to see the
interconnection of gender oppression in domestic and non-domestic settings.
Also, it helps us realize that the liberal feminist solution of extending the
sphere of state control is not necessarily a solution for women: that to extend
the realm of state control may entail merely a substitution in new forms of
masculine power, or gender inequality, in women's lives.
However, if the strengths of radical feminism lay in
its recognition of the interconnection of sexuality and gender and of their
importance in affecting social life, its weaknesses result from its tendency to
collapse gender into sexuality and to see all societies as fundamentally
similar. Indeed the interconnection of these two problems can be seen in
MacKinnon's analysis. MacKinnon argues that "sexuality is the Iynch-pin of
gender oppression." A question one might put regarding this assertion is:
does it hold true for all women? For example, one might say that the form of
sexism experienced by contemporary, poor, black, American women at the hands of
a white, male-dominated, state bureaucracy and corporate world seems at least
as central, if not more central, a form of sexism in the lives of these women
than the sexism experienced in the context of heterosexual relations. In other
words, MacKinnon's analysis does not appear to leave room for the possibility
that forms of gender oppression, such as those experienced in work, politics,
or religion, might express or have come to express a central form of the
oppression of some women. This is not to deny that sexuality might have played
a central role historically in generating gender oppression, but that would
constitute a historical and not an analytic truth, which would have to be
integrated with historical analysis to explicate gender oppression in other
periods. Indeed, as I will argue in later chapters, when one provides this kind
of historical analysis, the insights of radical feminism appear at their
strongest.
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