The Three Waves of Feminism

Martha Rampton
Thursday, October 23, 2014

It is common to speak of three phases of modern feminism; however, there is little consensus
as to how to characterize these three waves or what to do with women's movements before the late
19th century.

For instance, some thinkers have sought to locate the roots of feminism in ancient Greece with
Sappho (d. c. 570 BCE) or the medieval world with Hildegard of Bingen (d.1179) or Christine de
Pisan (d.1434). Certainly Olympes de Gouge (d.1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (d.1797), and Jane
Austen (d.1817) are foremothers of the modern women's movement. All of these people advocated
for the dignity, intelligence and basic human potential of the female sex. However, it was not until
the late 19th century that the efforts for women's equal rights coalesced into a clearly identifiable
and self-conscious movement, or rather a series of movements.

The first wave of feminism took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emerging out of an
environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. The goal of this wave was to open
up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage. The wave formally began at the Seneca Falls
Convention in 1848, when 300 men and women rallied to the cause of equality for women.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (d.1902) drafted the Seneca Falls Declaration outlining the new movement's
ideology and political strategies.

In its early stages, feminism was interrelated with the temperance and abolitionist movements and
gave voice to now-famous activists like the African-American Sojourner Truth (d.1883), who
demanded, "Ain't I a woman?" Victorian America saw women acting in very "un-ladylike" ways
(public speaking, demonstrating, stints in jail), which challenged the "cult of domesticity."
Discussions about the vote and women's participation in politics led to an examination of the
differences between men and women as they were then viewed. Some claimed that women were
morally superior to men, and so their presence in the civic sphere would improve public behavior
and the political process.

The second wave began in the 1960s and continued into the 1990s. This wave unfolded in the
context of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of
a variety of minority groups around the world. The New Left was on the rise, and the voice of the
second wave was increasingly radical. In this phase, sexuality and reproductive rights were
dominant issues, and much of the movement's energy was focused on passing the Equal Rights
Amendment to the constitution guaranteeing social equality regardless of sex.

This phase began with protests against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968 and 1969.
Feminists parodied what they held to be a degrading "cattle parade" that reduced women to objects
of beauty dominated by a patriarchy that sought to keep them in the home or in dull, low-paying
jobs. The radical New York group called the Redstockings staged a counter pageant, in which they
crowned a sheep as Miss America and threw "oppressive" feminine artifacts such as bras, girdles,
high-heels, makeup and false eyelashes into the trashcan.

Because the second wave of feminism found voice amid so many other social movements, it was
easily marginalized and viewed as less pressing than, for example, Black Power or the effort to end
the war in Vietnam. Feminists reacted by forming women-only organizations (such as NOW) and

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"consciousness raising" groups. In publications like "The BITCH Manifesto" and "Sisterhood is
Powerful," feminists advocated for their place in the sun. The second wave was increasingly
theoretical, based on a fusion of neo-Marxism and psycho-analytic theory and began to associate
the subjugation of women with broader critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, normative
heterosexuality, and the woman's role as wife and mother. Sex and gender were differentiated the
former being biological, and the later a social construct that varies culture-to-culture and over time.

Whereas the first wave of feminism was generally propelled by middle class white women, the
second phase drew in women of color and developing nations, seeking sisterhood and solidarity and
claiming, "Women's struggle is class struggle." Feminists spoke of women as a social class and
coined phrases such as "the personal is political" and "identity politics" in an effort to demonstrate
that race, class and gender oppression are all related. They initiated a concentrated effort to rid
society top-to-bottom of sexism, from children's cartoons to the highest levels of government.

One of the strains of this complex and diverse "wave" was the development of women-only spaces
and the notion that women working together create a special dynamic that is not possible in mixed-
groups and that would ultimately work for the betterment of the entire planet. Women, whether due to
their long "subjugation" or to their biology, were thought by some to be more humane, collaborative, inclusive, peaceful, nurturing,
democratic and holistic in their approach to problem-solving than men. The term eco-feminism was coined to capture the sense that,
because of their biological connection to earth and lunar cycles, women were natural advocates of environmentalism.

The third phase of feminism began in the mid-1990s and is informed by post-colonial and post-
modern thinking. In this phase many constructs have been destabilized, including the notions of
"universal womanhood," body, gender, sexuality and hetreronormativity. An aspect of third wave
feminism that mystifies the mothers of the earlier feminist movement is the readoption by young
feminists of the very lipstick, high heels and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the
first two phases of the movement identified with male oppression. Pinkfloor expressed this new
position when she said; "It's possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time."

The "grrls" of the third wave have stepped onto the stage as strong and empowered, eschewing
victimization and defining feminine beauty for themselves as subjects, not as objects of a sexist
patriarchy. They have developed a rhetoric of mimicry, which reappropriates derogatory terms like
"slut" and "bitch" in order to subvert sexist culture and deprive it of verbal weapons. The web is an
important aspect of the new "girlie feminism." E-zines have provided "cybergrrls" and "netgrrls"
another kind of women-only space. At the same time rife with the irony of third-wave feminism
because cyberspace is disembodied it permits all users the opportunity to cross gender
boundaries and so the very notion of gender has been challenged.

This is in keeping with the third wave's celebration of ambiguity and refusal to think in terms of
"us-them" or in some cases their refusal to identify themselves as "feminists" at all. Grrl-feminism
tends to be global and multi-cultural, and it shuns simple answers or artificial categories of identity,
gender and sexuality. Its transversal politics means that differences such as those of ethnicity, class,
sexual orientation, etc., are celebrated but recognized as dynamic, situational and provisional.
Reality is conceived not so much in terms of fixed structures and power relations, but in terms of
performance within contingencies. Third wave feminism breaks boundaries.

Where feminism will go from here is unclear, but the point is that feminism, by whatever name, is
alive and well both in academia and outside of it. Some older feminists feel discouraged by the younger generation's seeming
ignorance of or disregard for the struggles and achievements of the early movement. They see little progress (the pay gap has not significantly narrowed in 60 years), and are
fearful that the new high-heeled, red-lipped college grrls are letting us backslide. This, however, is not likely the case. There have always been feminisms in the movement,
not just one ideology, and there have always been tensions, points and counterpoints. The political, social and intellectual feminist movements have always been chaotic,
multivalenced, and disconcerting, and let's hope they continue to be so; it's a sign that they are thriving.

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This piece was originally published in the Fall 2008 issue of Pacific magazine. Martha Rampton is a professor of history and director of the Center for Gender Equity at
Pacific. Her specialty is the early medieval period with an emphasis on social history and the activities and roles of women. She holds an MA in medieval history from the
University of Utah and a doctorate in medieval history from the University of Virginia.

Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure
is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children,
and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and is dependent on
female subordination. Historically, the principle of patriarchy has been central to the
social, legal, political, and economic organization of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Indian, and
Chinese cultures, and has had a deep influence on modern civilization.[1]

Most forms of feminism characterize patriarchy as an unjust social system that is

oppressive to women. In feminist theory the concept of patriarchy often includes all the
social mechanisms that reproduce and exert male dominance over women.

Contents
1 Definition and usage
2 History
3 Sociobiology versus Sociology
4 Patriarchy in anthropology, archaeology and mythology
5 See also
6 Notes and references
7 Additional reading
8 External links

Definition and usage

Patriarchy is a multidimensional condition of powerand status. Whyte's 1978

comprehensive study examined 52 indicators of patriarchy, which corresponded to 10
relatively independentdimensions. The ten dimensions are:[2][3]

lack of property control by women

lack of power of women in kinship contexts
low value placed on the lives of women
low value placed on the labor of women
lack of domestic authority of women
absence of ritualized female solidarity
absence of control over women's marital andsexual lives
absence of ritualized fear of women
lack of male-female joint participation in warfare, work, and community decision
making
lack of women's indirect influence on decision making

Within feminist theory, patriarchy refers to the structure of modern cultural and political
systems, which are ruled by men. Such systems are said to be detrimental to the rights of
women. However, it has been noted that patriarchal systems of government do not benefit
all men of all classes.[4]

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 While the term patriarchy generally refers to institutions, the term is sometimes used less
effectively in describing societal attitudes. It has been argued, "institutions are very
persistent and may last, with little change, into a period in which attitudes have altered
considerably since the institutions were devised." Gordon Rattray Taylor used the words
"patrist" and "matrist" to describe attitudes (as opposed to institutions), and noted that the
outlook of the dominant social group seems to swing between the two extremes. However,
the patrist assertion that the patriarchal system of authority was the original and universal
system of social organization, invariably leads to the establishment of corresponding
institutions.[5]

Feminist Review (1979) 3, 6682. doi:10.1057/fr.1979.21

On Patriarchy
Veronica Beechey teaches sociology at Warwick University. She is writing a book onFeminism and Marxism for Virago
and doing research on part-time women's work in Coventry.

The ideas for this paper grew out of two talks I gave, the first to the Communist University of London in 1977 and the
second for Feminist Review in 1978. Bea Campbell and various members of the Feminist Review Collective persuaded
me to write them up more coherently, and I am grateful for the encouragement and support of all of them. In addition,
Sally Alexander, Colleen Chesterman, Simon Clarke, theFeminist Review Collective, Simon Frith, Stuart Hall, Richard
Hyman, Terry Lovell and Barbara Taylor gave me detailed comments on an earlier draft which have been very helpful. I
am grateful to all of them for sparing the time to do so, and to Michele Barrett and Elizabeth Wilson for their help with
the final version.

Veronica Beechey

The concept of patriarchy has been used within the women's movement to analyse the
principles underlying women's oppression. The concept itself is not new. It has a history within
feminist thought, having been used by earlier feminists like Virginia Woolf, the Fabian
Women's Group and Vera Brittain, for example 1. It has also been used by the anti-Marxist
sociologist, Max Weber (Weber, 1968). In trying to provide a critical assessment of some of
the uses of the concept of patriarchy within contemporary feminist discourse, it is important to
bear in mind the kinds of problems which it has been used to resolve. Politically, feminists of a
variety of different persuasions have seized upon the concept of patriarchy in the search for an
explanation of feelings of oppression and subordination, and in the desire to transform feelings
of rebellion into a political practice and theory. And theoretically the concept of patriarchy has
been used to address the question of the real basis of the subordination of women, and to
analyse the particular forms which it assumes. Thus the theory of patriarchy attempts to
penetrate beneath the particular experiences and manifestations of women's oppression and to
formulate some coherent theory of the basis of subordination which underlies them. The

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concept of patriarchy which has been developed within feminist writings is not a single or
simple concept but has a whole variety of different meanings. At the most general level
patriarchy has been used to refer to male domination and to the power relationships by which
men dominate women (Millett, 1969). Unlike radical feminist writers like Kate Millett, who have
focused solely upon the system of male domination and female subordination, Marxist
feminists have attempted to analyse the relationship between the subordination of women and
the organization of various modes of production. In fact the concept of patriarchy has been
adopted by Marxist feminists in an attempt to transform Marxist theory so that it can more
adequately account for the subordination of women as well as for the forms of class
exploitation. The concept of patriarchy has been used in various ways within the Marxist
feminist literature. To take several examples: Juliet Mitchell (1974) uses patriarchy to refer to
kinship systems in which men exchange women, and to the symbolic power which fathers have
within these systems, and the consequences of this power for the 'inferiorized . . . psychology
of women' (Mitchell, 1974: 402). Heidi Hartmann (1979) has retained the radical feminist
usage of patriarchy to refer to male power over women and has attempted to analyse the
inter-relationship between this and the organization of the capitalist labour process. Eisenstein
(1979) defines patriarchy as sexual hierarchy which is manifested in the woman's role as
mother, domestic labourer and consumer within the family. Finally, a number of the papers
in Women Take Issue (1978) have used the concept to refer specifically to the relations of
reproduction which exist within the family. The different conceptions of patriarchy within
contemporary feminist theory correspond to some extent to different political tendencies within
feminist politics. The concept of patriarchy in Sexual Politics and in other radical and
revolutionary feminist documents grows out of the attempt to analyse the autonomous basis of
the oppression of women in all forms of society and to provide a theoretical justification for the
autonomy of feminist politics. Marxist feminists have attempted to analyse not simply
'patriarchy' but the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production. This
is because they do not believe that the subordination of women can be absolutely separated
from the other forms of exploitation and oppression which exist in capitalist societies, for
example, class exploitation and racism; yet they reject the ways in which orthodox Marxism
and socialist organizations have marginalized women theoretically and within their practice and
have regarded the oppression of women as simply a side-effect of class exploitation. It has
become clear that socialism does not in any simple way guarantee the liberation of women, as
the experience of women in socialist societies reveals. Theoretically Marxist feminists are
committed to the attempt to unravel those complications; politically they are committed to the
development of a socialist feminist strategy which could relate women's struggles and other
political struggles. In practice this attempt to marry feminist to Marxist theory has been
difficult, but it is still important to remember that the attempt has come from a political
stance; that there are feminists who recognize that in present-day society - the world we have
to live in and struggle to change - the oppression of women is inextricably linked with the
capitalist order and that therefore to understand women's oppression necessarily means that
we must understand capitalism too, and be involved in the struggle to change it. The concern
of Marxist feminists to analyse theoretically the relationship between patriarchy and the
capitalist mode of production, and the political interest of socialist feminists in exploring the
relationship between feminism and forms of class struggle, in no way brings into question the
autonomy of the women's movement. Whether or not feminism organizes as an autonomous
movement cannot be deduced from theoretical arguments about the autonomous nature of
women's oppression. The decision to organize as an autonomous movement and in
autonomous groups is a political decision based upon a political analysis of the forms of
feminist and class struggle which exist in particular historical conditions. I wish therefore to
stress that in identifying myself with the Marxist feminist project of exploring the relationship
between the subordination of women and other aspects of the organization of the capitalist
mode of production, I do not question our right to organize politically as an autonomous
women's movement. I shall in this paper consider a variety of different approaches to the
analysis of patriarchy. None of the existing literature provides a satisfactory way of
conceptualizing patriarchy. This raises the questions of whether the quest for a theory of
patriarchy is a mistaken one, and whether the concept should be abandoned. In assessing
this,it is important to emphasize that the concept has been used by feminists in an attempt to
think through real political and theoretical problems. So,if the concept is to be abandoned, it it
essential that we find some other more satisfactory way of conceptualizing male domination

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and female subordination,and, for Marxist feminism, of relating this to the organization of the
mode of production as a whole. Until we develop such an alternative analysis, the question of
the usefulness of the concept of patriarchy for feminist politics and theory remains an open
one. Since the development of an adequate Marxist feminist analysis of the relationship
between female subordination and the organization of the capitalist mode of production is so
difficult, I have decided in this paper to identify a number of problems and to raise questions
from some of the existing literature which uses the concept of patriarchy. In the concluding
section of the paper I make some tentative and exploratory suggestions about possible
alternative ways of thinking about the problem. Radical and revolutionary
feminism Radical feminism has been extremely important in developing an analysis of
women's oppression which has been influential among other currents of feminist theory (for
example, revolutionary feminism and Marxist feminism). In this section I discuss aspects of
Kate Millett's analysis of patriarchy in Sexual Politics (1969) and the more recent form of
analysis to have been developed from radical feminist theory - revolutionary feminism. Clearly
these are not the only exponents of radical and revolutionary feminist analysis. I have decided
to concentrate upon these accounts since it is possible to raise a number of crucial problems
with radical and revolutionary feminist theory by reference to these works. I also briefly
discuss the analysis of Christine Delphy in The Main Enemy (1977), which has been influential
among contemporary feminist writings. Kate Millett's Sexual Politicsrepresents one of the first
serious theoretical attempts to come to grips with the specific nature of women's oppression
within the contemporary women's movement. For Millett, patriarchy refers to a society which is
organized according to two sets of principles: (i) that male shall dominate female; and (ii) that
older male shall dominate younger male. These principles govern all patriarchal societies,
according to Kate Millett, although patriarchy can exhibit a variety of forms in different
societies. She focuses upon the first of these principles, the domination of women by men,
arguing that this relationship between the sexes exemplifies what the sociologist Max Weber
calls Herrschaft, that is, a relationship of domination and subordination. She analyses the
political aspects of the relationship between the sexes, using the notion of 'political' broadly, as
it has been used within the women's liberation movement, to refer to the power relationships
between men and women. Women are conceptualized as being a minority group within the
dominant society, and differences among women are considered to be insignificant by
comparison with the divisions between women and men; to be mere differences in 'class style'.
The most fundamental unit of patriarchy in Millett's analysis is the family, which she considers
to be a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole; it functions to socialize children into sexually
differentiated roles, temperaments and statuses, and to maintain women in a state of
subordination. Why, in Kate Millett's view, do patriarchal relations exist and persist throughout
history in all societies? What are their foundations? She rejects the view that biological
differences between the sexes can explain gender differentiated temperaments, sex roles and
social statuses. (This is the view known as biological reductionism or biological determinism 2.)
While rejecting this explanation, Kate Millett has no other theory of the foundations of
patriarchy apart from a fairly generalized conception of power relationships. She states that
there is a basic division between men and women which involves relationships of domination
and subordination without explaining what it is about the organization of all human societies
which leads to the institutionalization of such power relationships and to the different forms
which male domination and female subordination assume in different societies. We must
conclude that Sexual Politics provides primarily a description of patriarchal relationships and
some of their manifestations (for example, in literary production) and is unable to provide a
satisfactory explanation of their foundations. Radical feminism, then, introduced the concept of
patriarchy into contemporary feminist discourse, but its analysis leaves unexplained specific
forms of male domination and female subordination; nor does it explain the relationship
between patriarchal social relations and the social relations of production, that is, between sex
classes and social classes. Politically, radical feminism has been primarily concerned with
struggles against male power and the social institutions through which it is reproduced
(marriage, heterosexuality, the family). Radical feminism has also been concerned with
struggles around the woman's role in biological reproduction - a concern which has been
further developed by revolutionary feminism. Where radical feminists formulate coherent
demands, these are demands which are made of men as sexual oppressors. Yet it is never
made clear what it is about men which makes them into sexual oppressors, nor, more
importantly, what characteristics of particular forms of society place men in positions of power

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over women. This is one of the questions which an adequate theory of patriarchy should be
able to address. Revolutionary feminism has recently developed the radical feminist analysis of
female subordination, and claims that gender differences can be explained in terms of the
biological differences between men and women. Revolutionary feminism in fact develops a
theory of patriarchy and sex class which is rooted in women's reproductive capacities. It
follows the analysis of The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone, 1971) in which Shulamith Firestone tried
to resolve the dilemma posed by Sexual Politics by asserting that the basis of women's
oppression does lie in women's reproductive capacities insofar as these have been controlled
by men. I shall discuss some of the papers which have been reprinted in Scarlet
Women(Number Five) as an example of the revolutionary feminist tendency. Sheila Jeffreys
argues in 'The Need for Revolutionary Feminism' (Scarlet Women Five:10) that there exist two
systems of social classes: (i) the economic class system, which is based on the relations of
production; and (ii) the sex class system, which is based on the relations of reproduction. It is
the second system of classes, the sex class system, which, according to Sheila Jeffreys,
accounts for the subordination of women. The concept of patriarchy refers to this second
system of classes, to the rule of women by men which is based upon men's ownership and
control of women's reproductive powers. Finella McKenzie outlines in her paper 'Feminism and
Socialism' (Scarlet Women Five) the ways in which reproductive differentiation gives rise to
male power and control. She argues that the first division of labour was between men and
women and was developed on account of women's reproductive capacities and men's greater
strength. Since women have throughout history been at the mercy of their biology, she
argues, this has made them dependent upon men for physical survival, especially during
menstruation, childbearing and so on. This female dependency established an unequal system
of power relationships within the biological family - a sex class system. Finella McKenzie thus
identifies three aspects of the subordination of women: women's different reproductive
capacities; women's lack of control over them; and men who turned the dependency elicited
by women's biology into psychological dependency. Thus, as Jalna Hanmer, Kathy Lunn, Sheila
Jeffreys and Sandra MacNeill point out in 'sex Class - Why is it important to call women a
class?', it is not women's biology which is in itself oppressive, but the value men place on it
and the power they derive from their control over it. The precise forms of control change, in
Sheila Jeffreys' view, according to the cultural and historical period and according to
developments in the economic class system. However, it is the constancy of men's power and
control over women's reproductive capacities which, revolutionary feminists argue, constitutes
the unchanging basis of patriarchy. Strategically, revolutionary feminism is committed to
developing the class consciousness of women - that is, women's consciousness of the
operation of the sex class system. The papers in Scarlet Women Five emphasize the
importance of consciousness-raising activities and of exposing male power and its mode of
operation through activities around rape, sexual violence and violence within the family. The
revolutionary feminist analysis, which roots patriarchy and female subordination in the
reproductive differences between the sexes, raises many problems. First, it is biologically
reductionist and is thereby unable to explain the forms which sexual differences assume within
different forms of social organization. It takes these as given. Secondly, the concept of
reproduction is defined extremely narrowly and is limited to the physical act of reproducing
children. The reproductive differences between men and women are not located within any
system of social relationships, and no explanation is provided of the characteristics of
particular forms of society which give rise to male aggression and domination on the one hand
and to female passivity and dependency on the other. The cause of women's oppression is
represented as lying in the timeless male drive for power over women. Thirdly, revolutionary
feminism assumes the existence of two autonomous systems of social classes, economic
classes and sex classes, and says little about the relationships between these. The analysis of
production upon which economic classes are based therefore remains untouched by feminist
analysis, as by feminist struggles which are centred around reproduction. This has serious
political implications. It is unclear what the revolutionary feminist conception of a non-
patriarchal society would be and how such a society would reproduce itself. It is unclear what
strategy revolutionary feminism would adopt in order to attain such a society. Finally, since it
is assumed that men have an innate biological urge to subordinate women, how could women
possibly be freed from male power and control sufficiently to struggle for such a non-
patriarchal form of society? In her essays inThe Main Enemy Christine Delphy develops an
alternative form of analysis of patriarchy. She calls this materialist feminism. Since Christine

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Delphy's arguments have been systematically explored in Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh
(1979), I shall only discuss them in this paper insofar as they are relevant to the theoretical
problems involved in analysing the concept of patriarchy and patriarchal social relations.
Christine Delphy's major arguments run as follows. There are in capitalist society two modes of
production: (i) the industrial mode of production, which is the arena of capitalist exploitation;
and (ii) the family mode of production, in which the woman provides domestic services, in
which childrearing occurs, and in which some goods are produced for use and exchange
although this occurs to a decreasing extent as the production of more commodities takes place
within the capitalist labour process. The woman's exploitation and oppression within the family
derives, according to this account, from the man's control over both the productive and
reproductive activities which take place within the family mode of production. But in stating
that the family has primacy over all other social relationships (arguing that by virtue of
marriage women share a common class position) Christine Delphy reaches a theoretical
position in which patriarchy and capitalism become autonomous spheres, each with its own
system of exploitation and social classes. The consequence of this is that she does not
appreciate the complex and contradictory ways in which the production process and the family
are related to each other, and the ways in which in the final analysis the social relations of
production transform all social relationships, including family relationships, in the course of the
development of capitalism. This has implications for her analysis of waged work as well as for
her account of the family, since she does not discuss the conditions which prevail in large-scale
industry, the forms of labour which capital demands in particular historical conditions, and the
ways in which women have been drawn into social production outside the family in response to
certain of these demands. While she is correct to point to the double load which women have
to undertake when they enter into social production as wage labourers, she misses the
important point which Barbara Taylor has made in 'Our Labour and Our Power' (1975-6) that
women's labour takes different forms within the capitalist labour process and in the family.
Women are exploited in both conditions, but in different ways and with different advantages
both to capital and to their husbands. To assume, as Christine Delphy does, that patriarchy
resides only in the family is to provide a one-sided picture which is unable to explain why, in
the last instance, women are exploited both within the labour process and within the
family. Marxist feminism Unlike the radical and revolutionary feminist work, Marxist feminist
analyses of patriarchy are committed to the attempt to understand the relationship between
patriarchy and other aspects of the organization of modes of production. Thus the same
problem - of relating the family to production - arises within Marxist feminism as is found
within Christine Delphy's essays in The Main Enemy. Marxist feminists have defined patriarchy
in a number of ways and have explained in different ways the relationship between patriarchy
and the capitalist mode of production. There also exists within Marxist theory more broadly a
whole variety of different approaches to defining modes of production. Marxist feminists
therefore find themselves grappling with many of the debates within Marxism as well as the
feminist theoretical disputes. In this section I shall discuss two kinds of Marxist feminist
analysis of patriarchy. The first defines patriarchy in terms of ideology and grounds the
analysis of ideology within concepts which are derived from psychoanalytic theory. The second
defines patriarchy in terms of the relations of reproduction, or the sex gender system. Both
approaches attempt to spell out the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of
production. I have in this section selected a number of texts and papers which I consider to
raise central questions in the analysis of patriarchy, but my survey is by no means complete.
My intention is to try and examine several different approaches to the question and to consider
some of the problems which are raised by them, rather than to provide a comprehensive
review of the Marxist feminist literature. I hope that this does not prove to be unfair to
particular writers. (i) Patriarchy as ideology: Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalysis and
feminism One of the clearest proponents of the view that patriarchy can be defined as
ideology is Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). At one level psychoanalysis
provides a theory of the complex process whereby the child with a bisexual disposition is
initiated into human culture, thereby acquiring the specific forms of femininity and masculinity
which are appropriate to her or his place within the culture.3 One of the contributions of Juliet
Mitchell's work has been to provide a theoretical account of the development of femininity and
the constitution of womanhood which is grounded in psychoanalytic concepts and which has
been of great importance in the formation of psychoanalytic theories of femininity. There is a
second level of analysis in Psychoanalysis and Feminism which has been influential among

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feminist writings about patriarchal ideology. This is an outline account of the origins and
foundations of patriarchy within human culture. Juliet Mitchell links the two parts of her
analysis with the assertion that for Freud the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is a
concept of mankind's transmission and inheritance of cultural laws. She argues that by
understanding how the unconscious operates it is possible to gain some insight into the
functioning of patriarchal culture. The defining characteristic of a patriarchal culture for her is
that within it the father assumes, symbolically, power over the woman, and she asserts that it
is fathers and their 'representatives' and not men (as in radical and revolutionary feminist
analyses) who have the determinate power over women in patriarchal culture. Juliet Mitchell
argues against biological forms of explanation of why the father should be endowed with this
power (that is, she argues against biological reductionist forms of analysis) and asserts that
the father assumes this power symbolically at the inauguration of human culture. Why should
this be so? In answering this question she turns to Levi-Strauss' analysis of kinship systems
(1969). According to Levi-Strauss, exchange relations lie at the foundation of human societies,
and the exchange of women by men is a fundamental form of exchange which accounts for the
particular social position in which women are placed in all human societies. Underlying this
analysis of the reasons why it is women and not men who are used as exchange objects is
Freud's account of the universality of the incest taboo (Freud :1950). This negative rule gives
rise to the rule of exogamy, which dictates that people must marry outside of their own
nuclear family. It is this necessity, in Levi-Strauss' theory, which determines the use of women
as exchange objects. Using Levi-Strauss, Juliet Mitchell argues that the universality of
patriarchy is rooted in the exchange of women by men, the necessity for which is in turn
located in the universality of the incest taboo. In this way patriarchy is postulated as a
universal structure in all human societies. She does argue, however, that each specific mode of
production expresses this universal law of patriarchy in different ideological forms. It is at this
point that she attempts to tie her analysis to a Marxist analysis of modes of production. She
suggests that in capitalist society the conditions for the disappearance of the incest taboo and
kinship structures have developed, but that these structures have nevertheless remained.
Capitalism has, in her view, made the patriarchal law redundant; there exists a contradiction
between the organization of the capitalist economy and the continuing existence of patriarchy.
Women in their role as reproducers stand at the crux of this contradiction. Women remain
defined by kinship structures while men enter into the class-dominated structures of history.
Juliet Mitchell suggests that feminist struggle should be directed against the ideological mode
of patriarchy which has become increasingly redundant. Feminist struggle is thus
conceptualized as a form of cultural revolution whose object is to transform the foundations of
patriarchal culture. Juliet Mitchell's analysis of patriarchy seems problematic in a number of
ways. These can be related to her reliance upon Freud's social theory, upon LeviStrauss'
analysis, and to her use of Althusser's theory of ideology (1969, 1970, 1971) for her basic
sociological framework. Since the framework which she develops for analysing patriarchy has
been influential among some feminist writings, I wish to comment upon some of the
implications of its use. It does not provide any satisfactory theory of the foundations of
patriarchy, since it rests on the poorly formulated theory which Freud develops in Totem and
Taboo and on Levi-Strauss' account of exchange relations lying at the foundation of human
culture and the subordination of women. The problem with this is that LeviStrauss does not
provide any account of why it is men who exchange women, and hence of the foundations of
male domination over women.4 A further set of problems concerns Juliet Mitchell's conception
of ideology which is derived from an Althusserian conception of society. In his earlier
writings, For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital(1970), for example, Louis Althusser develops a
conception of society which consists of a number of analytically distinct levels or practices - the
economic, the political, the ideological. The economy is presumed to determine the other levels
'in the last instance', and the ideological level is assumed to have a 'relative autonomy' from
the economic base. In his essays in Lenin and Philosophy (1971), and especially in the paper
entitled Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser develops this notion of
ideology further in two ways. First, he analyses the functional relationships between specific
ideological institutions (which he calls ideological state apparatuses), the reproduction of
labour power, and the social relations of production in the capitalist mode of production. In this
way he links the ideological level to the economic level of the mode of production by arguing
that the ideological structures - for instance, schools - are necessary for capitalism. But this
form of theory - functionalism - does not explain why ideological institutions and practices take

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a given specific form, nor does it take account of class struggle. The 'needs' of capital
determine everything that happens. Secondly, he develops a general account of ideology. In
this account he suggests that the 'constitution of subjectivity', that is, the way in which the
subject conceives herself or himself and her or his place in the world is a central feature of
ideology, which is a set of 'lived relations'. Juliet Mitchell bases her own argu-' ments on this
theoretical approach and on the approach of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to
whom Louis Althusser is also indebted for this way of looking at the relationship of what we
commonly think of as the individual and the world. All three assume that Freud's theory can
provide a materialist account of the constitution of subjectivity. Within the main body of her
text, Juliet Mitchell discusses patriarchy as the symbolic law of the father which, following
Freud and Levi-Strauss, she argues is a universal law which exists in all societies. But it
remains unclear what is meant by the symbolic order and what is the relationship between this
and the analysis of ideology. This problem emerges particularly poignantly in the concluding
section of Psychoanalysis and Feminism in which Mitchell shifts from analysing the symbolic
order to analysing ideology, redefining the symbolic order as ideology as she attempts to tie
her Freudian analysis into a Marxist one. Mitchell's account of patriarchy is grounded in Freud's
theory which attempts to explain how individual subjects become 'masculine' and 'feminine'.
This is essentially a universalistic theory which is assumed to apply to all forms of human
culture, and it is difficult to integrate satisfactorily this with a Marxist analysis; there exists a
tension in Mitchell's analysis between a universalistic theory of patriarchy which is grounded in
the subordination of women to the law of the father and a Marxist account which claims to
provide an historically specific theory of modes of production and of the forms of state and
ideology which emerge within specific modes of production. Mitchell claims that the origins of
patriarchy are rooted in the incest taboo and the exchange of women by men to which this
gives rise. She ignores the historical development of patriarchy and the concrete forms which
this assumes. In the course of her discussion, Mitchell's analysis of ideology shifts from being a
theory of the relative autonomy of ideology to a theory of the absolute autonomy of ideology.
Furthermore, since she represents the subordination of women within patriarchal social
relations as inescapable, the origins of the subordination of women being identified with the
origins of human culture, it remains unclear how feminist struggle could change the position of
women. Some of Althusser's and Mitchell's critics, for example Hirst (1976) and contributors to
the journal m/f nos.l and 2 (1978), have recognized that it is contradictory to adopt both a
universalistic conception of the constitution of the gendered subject which is derived from the
analyses of Freud and Levi-Strauss and an historical materialist conception of modes of
production. They have attempted to resolve the contradiction by embracing openly what Juliet
Mitchell only implies. The journal m/f has developed a form of discourse theory to explore this
problem. Their interpretation argues that the social construction of woman must be analysed in
relation to the discourses within which it is constituted, with the implication that all forms of
practice are conceptualized as discourses and that no single discourse has primacy over
others. Although this would be one mechanism of resolving a major theoretical contradiction
which besets Psychoanalysis and Feminism, its relationship to historical materialism virtually
disappears. If all forms of discourse are analysed independently from each other, the primacy
of the social relations of production, which has been one of the characteristic features of a
Marxist analysis, vanishes from the theoretical framework. Juliet Mitchell's conception of
society as consisting of a set of distinct practices has implications for her conception of the
capitalist mode of production as well as for her analysis of ideology. For, like Christine Delphy,
and like some of the other Marxist feminist writers whom I discuss in the following section, she
distinguishes between 'the economic mode of production [and] . .. the ideological mode of
reproduction' (Mitchell, 1974:412). Although she says very little about the economic mode of
production, it is clear that underlying her account is an economistic definition of the mode of
production, a definition that is in terms of a narrow conception of the labour process rather
than in terms of the social relations of production and the organization of the capitalist mode
of production in its totality. The relations of reproduction, which are defined as ideological
relations, are then analysed as independent structures which are functionally integrated within
the (economic) mode of production. It is true that she refers to a contradiction between the
ideological mode of patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production when she argues that the
conditions for the existence of patriarchy have ceased to exist, but this contradicton is
analysed in formal rather than historical terms and is by no means central to her analysis. I
shall return to some of the problems involved in analyzing reproduction in the following section

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of this paper, since some of the problems that arise in Psychoanalysis and Feminism can be
identified more sharply in some of the more recent Marxist feminist literature. (ii) Patriarchy
and the social relations of reproduction Some of the recent Marxist feminist literature on
patriarchy has focused upon the social relations of reproduction, and has discussed the relative
emphases which should be placed upon production and reproduction within Marxist feminist
theory. I think that the interest in studying women's oppression in terms of the concept of
reproduction, and in locating patriarchy within the social relations of reproduction, stems from
a number of sources: (i) Developments from the radical feminist analysis, which has produced
numerous insights into specific aspects of women's oppression which are concerned with
reproduction (childbirth, abortion, motherhood, for example). (ii) Recognition that aspects of
the oppression of women go beyond the capitalist mode of production. In some feminist
anthropological writings this takes the form of asserting the universality of the woman's
domestic, mothering and reproductive roles. (iii) The belief that patriarchal social relations
cannot be derived directly from capital, and the consequent desire to flesh out, complement
and develop the Marxist account of the production process with an account of the process of
reproduction. (iv) A return to Engels' assertions in his Preface to the First Edition of The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State that: The determining factor in history is, in the
last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life ... this itself is of a twofold
character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence . . . on the other, the
production of human beings themselves. The social institutions under which men of a definite
country live are conditioned by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of
labour on the one hand, and of the family on the other. (Engels, 1968:455) This much-quoted
section of Engels' Preface has provided a classical justification within Marxism for analysing the
sphere of repduction as one aspect of the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. (v) The
publication in France of Claude Meillassoux's bookFemmes, Greniers et Capitaux (1975) whose
central concern is with the question of why social relations based on the family (or the
domestic community) continue to have such great importance for the capitalist system. A
number of the papers that have recently elaborated upon the theory of reproduction have been
engaged in a critical debate with Meillassoux's arguments - see O'Loughlin (1977), Mackintosh
(1977), and Edholm et al. (1977). As Edholm et al. have pointed out in 'Conceptualizing
Women', reproduction has been used extremely imprecisely within the Marxist feminist
literature. But I believe that most of the writings which use the concept of reproduction share,
at a general level, a number of characteristics, and I wish to discuss these briefly. It seems to
be a shared assumption among a number of writers, for example McDonough and Harrison
(1978), several of the articles in Women Take Issue (1978), Hartmann (1979a and 1979b),
and the articles by Eisenstein inCapitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist
Feminism (1979) that the specificity of patriarchy lies in the relations of reproduction, which
are in turn located within the family. Writers differ, however, as to whether they define the
social relations of reproduction as material relations deriving, for example, from control of
women's labour, or as ideological or cultural relations. Thus, to take one example of a paper
which defines the relations of reproduction in materialist terms, McDonough and Harrison
argue that patriarchy is concerned with the control of the wife's labour in the family and the
wife's sexual fidelity and procreation. In a statement that reads very much like an assertion
from Delphy's The Main Enemy, McDonough and Harrison argue that the specific forms of
control over reproduction which characterize patriarchy arise at marriage, in which the wife
gives both her labour power and her capacity to procreate in exchange for a definite period:
life. Although the forms of patriarchy vary according to class, they argue - the control of the
wife's sexuality and fertility in the bourgeois family being concerned with the production of
heirs, while in the proletarian family it is concerned with the reproduction of labour power - the
basic form of patriarchal relations remains the same. McDonough and Harrison argue that the
further development of the concept of patriarchy must lie in the interrelationship between the
relations of production and the relations of reproduction. Their specific arguments, however,
tend to reproduce a split form of analysis which separates out the sphere of reproduction from
production, as the following passage illustrates: Although as Marxists it is essential for us to
give analytic primacy to the sphere of production, as feminists it is equally essential to hold on
to a concept such as the relations of human reproduction in order to understand the specific
nature of women's oppression. (1978:28) Some papers, for example Lucy Bland et al. 'Women
"Inside and Outside" the Social Relations of Production' (1978) do consider the relationship
between the woman's role in both spheres, but only in terms of the consequences for women's

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wage labour of their reproductive role. The family is thus considered to be the crucial site of
the subordination of women, and the mode of reproduction to be functionally necessary to
capital's desire for cheap and flexible labour power. Zillah Eisenstein states that the problem is
how to 'formulate the problem of woman as both mother and worker, reproducer and
producer' (1979:1). She argues that male supremacy and capitalism are the core relations
which determine the oppression of women: The ... dynamic of power involved... derives from
both the class relations of production and the sexual hierarchical relations of society. (1979:1)
Eisenstein depicts society as comprising on the one hand the capitalist labour process, in which
exploitation occurs, and on the other hand the patriarchal sexual hierarchy, in which the
woman is mother, domestic labourer and consumer, and in which the oppression of women
occurs. Patriarchy is not analysed as a direct outgrowth of biological differentiation, as it is in
Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1971), nor as a result of the universal existence of
the oedipus complex, as in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, but is conceptualized as resulting
from the ideological and political interpretations of biological differentiation. This is what is
meant by the social relations of reproduction, or the sex gender system5. For Zillah Eisenstein
these relations of reproduction are not specifically capitalist relations, but are cultural relations
which are carried over from one historical period to another. While the economic organization
of society may change, patriarchy, which is located in the social relations of reproduction,
provides a system of hierarchical ordering and control which has been used in various forms of
social organization, among them capitalism. In the two examples of theories of social
reproduction which I have looked at, these are defined in the first instance in terms of control
over the wife's labour, fertility and procreativity, that is, in materialist terms, and in the second
instance as ideological relations which are centrally involved in the transformation of sex into
gender. In each case priority is given to the social relations of reproduction in defining
women's oppression. These may be seen to have consequences for the organization of
production, or as functionally related to it, but the specificity of the position of women is
perceived primarily in terms of reproduction relations. I shall in the next section attempt to
point to some of the problems posed by this mode of analysis. A note on production,
reproduction and patriarchy One of the themes which I have attempted to pinpoint in
discussing a selection of the literature on patriarchy is that much of this literature develops a
form of analysis in which society is conceptualized as consisting of two separate structures.
These are variously described as: the economic class system/the sex class system
(revolutionary feminism and Firestone); the family mode of production/ the industrial mode of
production (Delphy); capitalism/patriarchy (Hartmann, 1979a); social relations of
production/social relations of reproduction (McDonough and Harrison, Women Take Issue).
These separate structures are either conceptualized as distinct determinants of historical
change which interact, accommodate or come into conflict with each other (Hartmann,
Eisenstein), or as functionally related to one another (Bland et al.). I wish by way of a
conclusion to spell out some of the problems that arise if patriarchy and capitalism, or the
social relations of reproduction and the social relations of production, are treated as
independent structures in this way. First, as Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young have
pointed out in 'Conceptualizing Women', the concept of reproduction has been used in many
different ways. They suggest that we should separate out three forms of reproduction: (i)
social reproduction, that is, reproduction of the total conditions of production; (ii) reproduction
of the labour force; and (iii) biological reproduction. Among Marxists the debates about the
first of these forms of reproduction, social reproduction, have been closely associated with
debates about the concept of mode of production, while the analysis of the reproduction of the
labour force has been of central concern to Marxist feminists engaged in the 'domestic labour
debate'. I still find it difficult to give any rigorous meaning to the various uses of the term
reproduction - to sort out, for example, whether biological reproduction should be included
within the category of the reproduction of the labour force (or reproduction of labour power),
and to understand how to make sense of the control of women's sexuality in terms of the
concept of reproduction. I think we have tended to turn to analyses of reproduction in order to
avoid a mechanistic version of Marxism which concentrates solely upon the production/ labour
process, and in order to deal specifically with women's familial activities which Marxism has
consistently ignored. However, as Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young (1977:111)
suggest, maybe we are wrong "to argue for the development of a whole set of new concepts in
order to understand human reproduction". Maybe our desire to do this merely reflects the way
in which we ourselves fetishize reproduction. The second problem is that the separation of

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reproduction or patriarchy from other aspects of the mode of production has tended to leave
the Marxist analysis of production untouched and uncriticized by feminist thinking. Yet
theoretically the Marxist analysis of the production process has been quite unsatisfactory
analyses of production are frequently economistic, the labour process has been divorced from
the social relations of production as a whole, and female wage labour has frequently been left
out of analyses of production. This is a theoretical deficiency which has serious political
implications. The working class is generally defined by male Marxists by reference to the
labour process (that is, wage labourers lacking ownership of the means of production and
subsistence) and by.some even more narrowly, by reference to productive workers who
directly produce surplus value within the capitalist labour process. This conception of class
follows from a conception of the capitalist mode of production which only concentrates upon
the production process. However, it is impossible to comprehend the complexity of the
differential relationships which men and women have to production, and the different forms
which their consciousness assumes, by reference to production alone. The analysis of
production must be located within the social relations of production as a whole, and the
position of all categories of labour cannot satisfactorily be understood without reference to the
family and the state. Recent evidence about the differential responses of male and female
workers in industrial disputes has begun to teach us a little about this process. Beatrix
Campbell and Valerie Charlton discuss in 'Work to Rule' (1978) the different demands that
male and female workers have made at Fords, the men arguing for higher wages and the
women wanting a shorter working week, abolition of contractual distinctions between part-time
and full-time workers, and sabbaticals. These different demands can only be understood if the
position of workers within the production process is conceptualized more broadly than is
usually the case within Marxist theory. It is in my view vital that Marxist feminist work does
not concentrate upon questions of ideology, reproduction and patriarchy without extending the
implications of the feminist critique to the Marxist analysis of production. The third point I wish
to make is that it is impossible to have a notion of production which does not also involve
reproduction. Any mode of production involves production and reproduction, both historically
and logically. It is important therefore that we attempt to understand the inter-relationships
between production and reproduction as part of a single process, and consider the ways in
which these have been transformed historically. I believe it is necessary to analyse the
development of the labour process, the family and the state, and the relationship between
them as capital accumulation has developed. Just as capitalism did not create the capitalist
labour process but developed it in a prolonged and uneven process on the site of historically
given forms of organization of labour power,6 so it did not create the patriarchal family but
developed on the basis of the patriarchal domestic economy which was already in existence.
We need to analyse the historical development of these institutions, the inter-relationships
between them, and the ways in which the structure of the family and our experience of family
life have been transformed as the capitalist mode of production has developed. I stated at the
beginning of this paper that the concept of patriarchy had been introduced into contemporary
feminist discourse in an attempt to answer important questions about our experience of
oppression and to provide some comprehensive analysis of this. I have discussed throughout
this paper some of the ways in which particular strands of feminist theory do not succeed in
this. It is important to emphasize, however, that Marxism itself has proved totally inadequate
to the task of analyzing the oppression of women. As Heidi Hartmann has pointed out, Marxism
has had an analysis of 'the woman question' but has been quite weak on the subject of 'the
feminist question'.7 Although I have been critical of a number of uses of the concept, I wish to
conclude by outlining some of the ways in which I think it might still be useful to develop and
utilize it. First, I think that a satisfactory theory of patriarchy should be historically specific and
should explore the forms of patriarchy which exist within particular modes of production. This
would suggest that the forms of patriarchy which exist in capitalism are different from the
forms existing in pre-capitalist or socialist societies. I do not think that the existence of a
biological differentiation of the sexes across modes of production should invalidate this
argument, since biological differentiation is less significant than the different forms of social
construction of gender and the forms of social institution in which patriarchy exists in different
societies. Secondly, the forms of patriarchy which exist in particular social institutions have to
be investigated. I think we are wrong to assume that domination assumes the same form in all
social formations and in all kinds of social institutions within a society. For example, the forms
of patriarchal domination which existed when the domestic economy was the primary

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producing unit are different from the forms which emerge as capital seizes control over the
production process. Women, having previously been subject to the control of their husbands
within the household, become subject to capitalist control if they are wage labourers. They are
thus subject both to the domination of their husbands within the family and to the domination
of capital and its agents if they also perform waged work. I think we should expect to find that
the forms of domination and women's experience of it would be different in different
institutions, depending upon the role of the particular institution within the organization of the
capitalist economy as a whole, the form of its material organization, and the form of ideology
and power relations which prevail within it. Finally, I think we are left with a difficult task. How
can we utilize a materialist method of analysis in such a way that we can satisfactorily
integrate production and reproduction as part of a single process, and which will reveal that
gender differentiations are inseparable from the form of organization of the class structure? 1 I
am grateful to Sally Alexander for pointing out to me the history of the concept within feminist
writings. 2 Biological reductionism. Political conservatives and anti-feminists have often used
this argument to suggest that because women give birth and can breastfeed they are therefore
biologically endowed with emotional and psychological characteristics associated with
motherhood, such as nurturance and self-sacrifice; and that because the male tends to be the
aggressor in sexual intercourse, women are therefore emotionally and psychologically passive.
These arguments are often supported by suggestions that hormones play a key role in causing
these psychological differences. Such explanations fail to make the important distinction
between biological sex and gender, which is socially constructed. Nor can they explain why
sex/gender differences assume different forms in different forms of social organization. 3 I do
not wish to underestimate the importance of Juliet Mitchell's writings about the development of
masculinity and femininity, and the influence these have had on subsequent feminist writings.
I am not concerned with these particular questions, however, but with Mitchell's arguments
about patriarchy and ideology which she formulates somewhat schematically in the conclusion
toPsychoanalysis and Feminism. 4 Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that in matrilineal
societies it is maternal uncles and not fathers who 'exchange' women. This casts doubt upon
Juliet Mitchell's argument that it is the power of the father to exchange women which lies at
the roots of women's subordination and of patriarchal social relations. 5 The term 'sex gender
system' was used by Rubin (1975) and is adopted as an alternative means of conceptualizing
the social relations of reproduction in some of the other essays in Eisenstein, ed. (1969). 6 See
Samuel (1977). 7 By this she means that it has been unconcerned with the forms of male
domination and female subordination.

Sociology 304

March 10, 1998

Feminist Critique of the Marxian Approach

C. Marxist Model and the Analysis of Women and the Family

The approach of Marx with respect to women and the family was little different than that
of conventional economics. In the Marxian model, women were part of the household,
responsible for bearing and raising children and for maintaining the household. While

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there may have been a recognition that this was necessary work, it was not work that was
valued through exchange and did not form part of the model of capitalist production.

Friedrich Engels did pay more attention to this issue in his writings and a year after
Marx died, in 1884, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State. Until the 1970s, when Marxist feminist approaches began to be developed, this
provided the main outlines of the Marxian approach to the oppression of women and the
inequalities within the family and household. For Engels, the patriarchal
family emerged with the development of agriculture, where males began to
develop private property in animals, tools, and land, and attempted to control more of
the surplus. In order to "ensure the legitimacy of their heirs" (p. 31) and perhaps
to control women's sexuality, men established dominance within the household and
society, and established patrilineal lines of inheritance. This resulted in the "world
historical defeat of the female sex" and women were reduced to servitude and an
instrument for the production of children. With the development of capitalism, this
system continued and became especially important for property owners - the
bourgeoisie. Since the working class has no property, such control was not necessary,
and Engels implies that male/female inequalities within the working class are minimal.

Since patriarchy began with the development of private property, when private property
is abolished the material basis for the oppression of women will be removed. While
Engels felt that it might take a generation or two for male/female equality to emerge, he
was relatively optimistic that such equality would emerge once socialism was
established.

Unlike many other approaches, the Marxian analysis did recognize the problem of
patriarchy and female oppression and did have a theoretical model which explained it.
Recent feminist analysis and the feminist movement has cast doubt on this approach.

D. Feminist Critique of Marxian Approach

1. Separation of Production and Reproduction. The division between public and

private that emerged with industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism has been
carried over into much conventional social science analysis (economics, political
science, history). In this, the Marxism of Mr. Prol is no different than conventional social
science. Marxism offers an excellent model and analysis of some forms of exploitation
within capitalism and of some of the dynamics of capitalism. But all this is based on a
strict division between public and private, with the public being worthy of extensive
analysis and the private often not considered worthy of such analysis.

In particular, the Marxian Mr. Prol model does not recognize work in the home, much
reproductive work, and much of the work females have been largely responsible for as
economic activity. Rather, Marx begins with an examination of the commodity - a good
or service produced for sale and purchase on markets - and builds his analysis of
exploitation and capitalism from the analysis of the commodity. In this sense, the
Marxian model is a model of capitalist production, with other aspects of capitalist
society not inherently part of the model. Other forms of oppression such as racism or

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patriarchy can be added to the model, but these are really not part of the Mr. Prol model,
nor do they alter the basic workings of the model of commodities and exploitation.

In the Marxian model, work may be first introduced as work in general (both in
production and reproduction), but the model of commodities and exploitation is
restricted to labour which is exchanged for a wage. Value, surplus value, and
exploitation thus occur only in the capital/labour relationship, not outside it. While
Marx may recognize that other inequities occur, these are not part of the formal model
and play little part in the description and analysis of the structures, institutions, and
dynamics of capitalism. That is, inequities within the household or discrimination that
leads to lower wages for some racial or ethnic groups do not form a central part of the
model. For example, in the Mr. Prol model the struggles of the white, male working class
may be treated as a progressive cause, likely to lead toward socialism. But improvement
in these male wages may occur at the expense of certain racial and ethnic groups, or by
excluding females from the labour force.

While all forms of work (reproductive and productive) might be added to the Mr. Prol
model, doing so might destroy the workings of the model. Take the family wage - the
male worker's subsistence wage, which must also be sufficient to support a household if
the male worker is the only one in the household that has a job. What makes this
possible? The family wage may be associated with less than subsistence wages for single
female workers and workers of a different ethnicity, and may also be associated with
inequalities within the household and family. If so, then the value of labour power, which
depends on reproductive labour, becomes problematic in the Marxian theoretical model

For Marx, the distinctive aspect of being human is human labour, the human ability to
be creative in work, and have that work produce a social surplus. The Neo-prol
approach notes that many types of resources have an ability to produce a surplus and the
uniqueness of labour (p. 33) may not be in its ability to produce a surplus but in its
ability to contest terms of exchange. If so, this is presumably true of all forms of work,
both paid labour in commodity production and unpaid labour in reproductive work, so
that both should be included in the model.

2. Analysis of Reproduction. This is nonexistent or inadequate in the Marxian Mr. Prol

model. The lack of such an analysis creates problems for developing a model of
population, family, household in this model, and for creating a model of the supply of
labour. The Neo-prol model recognizes this problem and contemporary Marxists
introduce an analysis of household, family, and female labour. Folbre deals with this
later, on pages 104 - 111 and in the historical sections.

Marx noted that each mode of production has its own law of population and implicitly
assumed that there would be no shortage of population growth to supply labour. The
main Marxian population model is that of the industrial reserve army. This is useful in
showing how surplus labour is created in capitalism and how unemployment expands
and contracts over the business cycle. But as an explanation for population size and
changes in demographic variables, such as fertility decline and changes in the value of
labour power, the Marxian model is limited.
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In terms of analyzing the decline in fertility, Folbre notes that improvements in
the status of women are an important feature (p. 108). Women traditionally were
responsible for the bulk of work associated with bearing and raising children, but once
women were able to exercise greater control over this work, the fertility rate declined. A
conventional economic analysis of the costs and benefits of children is a large part of
the explanation for fertility decline. Children were once aneconomic benefit (as
labourers in agriculture and family businesses, as support in old age, and as heirs to pass
land on to - p. 109) but these benefits have mostly disappeared and with urbanization
and industrialization, the cost of children has increased dramatically. Folbre notes that
"fertility decline ... is not simply the result of changing relative prices. It is also the
product of a complex cultural and political renegotiation of the meaning of family life"
(p. 107).

3. Patriarchy. According to Engels, and much subsequent Marxian writing, patriarchy

as a system of "rule of the fathers" or "rule of the men" (p. 59) emerged with the
development of private property. But is this the real source of patriarchy? There are a
number of problems here, and pages 74-78 of Who Pays for the Kids? contain a
discussion of the origins of patriarchy. Folbre's use of patriarchy differs somewhat from
the traditional Marxian concept. She notes the following.

a. First, the meaning of patriarchy is not clear and covers many different possible forms
of social organization. What may be meant by patriarchy is "combinations of structures
of constraint based on gender, age, and sexual preference" (p. 59).

b. Second, the summary on p. 78 is more specific and indicates that patriarchy may be
three things:

subordination of women,
control over the younger generation, and
repression of some sexual preferences.

These emerge from interplay of biology, group competition, and collective struggles.

Further, the political message of Engels's argument is sometimes taken to mean that the
elimination of patriarchy requires a political program of elimination of private property.
In this approach, private property created patriarchy, so patriarchy will not end without
the abolition of private property. In contrast, feminists generally argue that male
privilege and female subordination must be fought at all levels. For feminists, this
struggle is on a par, or perhaps more important than class struggle. Folbre outlines one of
these approaches, the Neo-Prol, or socialist feminist, dual systems view (pp. 37-38)
where "patriarchy and capitalism are ... 'dual systems' of production" (p. 38). Folbre
notes though that while this would seem to be an improvement over Engels, this
relegates other inequities and difference to "a lower level of theoretical importance" (p.
38). Folbre argues for an even broader interpretation of the bases of collective action in
the forms of cooperation and conflict.

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4. Economic Factors and Class Structure. The Marxian model is materialist, with a
strong emphasis on production within the economic sphere. The commodity forms the
basis for Marx's analysis, exploitation occurs in the productive process, and class
structures emerge from the workings of the productive process. These class structures are
the primary social structure within capitalism, and capitalism can be replaced by
socialism only through the development of the working class. Economic factors and
social class are primary in the Mr. Prol and Neo-prol Marxian models.

a. Dominance of the economic. The whole structure of exploitation and class comes
from an analysis of commodity exchange in capitalism. Other forms of inequity and
oppression may be recognized, but the truly important feature of the Mr. Prol model is
that of exploitation of workers within the production process organized and controlled by
capitalists. Folbre notes (p. 36) how the basic vocabulary of Marxian theory
(commodities, mode of production, capitalism, commodity, exploitation) emphasises
economic factors. The Mr. Prol model tends to ignore factors such as race, gender,
sexual preference, age, or nation as sources of inequality, so that these latter factors have
no systematic status within the Marxian model. Where there are wage differences
between the sexes or among workers of different ethnicity or race, the Mr. Prol model
may recognize these but there is no systematic explanation of these differences (p. 36).

The Neo-prol model does emphasize a range of possible assets and positions that
workers may have. For example, the Marxian model can incorporate differences in skills
as a results of education or on-the-job training. Further, the preferential position of
professional and highly skilled workers, and those who work in large, successful firms
can be accommodated in these models. However, while the Neo-prol model tends to
widen the scope of the economic, by recognizing a wide range of possible assets that
workers may have, it does not move much beyond the economic arena. Folbre asks us to
consider factors such as gender, race, or nationality as being of similar importance to the
economic, with different factors being dominant in different situations.

b. Class structures (pp. 31-2). In Marxian models, class structures and class struggles
are the primary social structures in capitalism. The structure that is most constraining on
individuals is that of social class and these classes become the main form of collective
agency. The neo-prol model may alter this somewhat, in that the classes may be more
numerous and a little different. For example, Erik Olin Wright discusses class locations
such as expert managers, semi credentialled supervisors, and small employers, in
addition to bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and proletariat (Wright, p. 88). But even in the
Neo-prol models, these are generally rooted in production and the economy, so that class
and class consciousness are most important in terms of defining the constraints and
opportunities faced by people.

Within Marxian models, people have little choice in determining their social class so that
the structural constraints on people are severe. While other structures, such as race,
ethnicity, age, sex may be considered important, in that they allow capitalist employers
"to divide and conquer, to pit each group against each other, to segment the working
class" (p. 31) they are definitely secondary forms of constraint at the level of the society
as a whole and even for the individual. The solution to the problems created by
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capitalism is to replace capitalism with socialism; this is expected to deal not only with
problems related to inequitable class structures but also with other forms of inequality.

The Mr. Prol model gives little attention to non-class forms of exploitation and
inequality - sex, race, ethnicity, or nation (p. 31). The establishment of socialism is
viewed as solution to these forms of inequality, and without socialism these latter
inequities cannot be solved. The Neo-prol model modifies this somewhat by defining
other groups based on assets. Folbre notes that these are "class-like groups" - e.g.
professionals with assets of human capital, athletes with special abilities, or the
underclass with negative assets in most everything - in that the possession of assets
creates a market advantage (or disadvantage where the asset is lacking) for the group.
But even the neo-prol model does not explain divisions based on sex, race, nation very
well (pp. 35-36).

c. Interests or identities. The Marxian model is very good in explaining the origin and
nature of groups based on common economic interests, but is much weaker in
explaining how groups form on the based of common identity occur (p. 36), especially
where that identity may initially be non-economic in nature. In recent years, identity
politics has become an important basis for social and political action. Groups based on
culture, nationality, region, religion, sexual preference, environment - single issue social
movements that are not directly based on class (although they may have a class
component to them) - have become common, if not the dominant form of social
movements. Marxism has little to say about the origin or power of these groups. Some of
these are single issue movements but Folbre notes that the individual may identify with
and act on the basis of more than one group (p. 38). In fact, it is probably most common
to have multiple identities, and the single identity may be an aberration. Folbre notes
the need for social scientists to examine a wide variety of interest groups and non-class
categories. In the first part of this course we have seen how some of the cultural factors
associated with ethnicity, race, history, and religion lead to strong group identity.

d. Class consciousness and false consciousness do not provide an adequate basis for
analyzing issues related to collective identity and action.

Note: See the notes from March 3 for a discussion of these issues.

5. Work and Labour.

a. Value of labour power and exploitation. The rate of exploitation depends on the
value of labour power, along with the division of the working day into necessary and
surplus labour. The value of labour power equals the value of the commodities
necessary for its production - the costs of social reproduction on a daily and
generational basis. But these are not clearly spelled out in the Marxian model, and they
are not subject to exchange and the market. Much reproductive labour is carried out by
unpaid labour in the household, where it is not subject to exchange, and hence does not
have a value.

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Included in the determination of the value of labour power by Marx is a moral and
historical element. This is presumably subject to bargaining between employers and
employees (through trade unions) and also bargaining within households and families.
Long run developments such as changes in fertility rates and female labour force
participation will also have an effect on this moral and historical element in the value of
labour power.

Folbre asks why wages for females and minority groups are less than that for males if
the value of labour power depends on the value of commodities necessary for its
production. The bundle of goods and services necessary for the reproduction of female
or minority group labour is presumably little different that that for white males (top of p.
31). While the claim that employers attempt to divide and conquer is undoubtedly
correct, this does not become part of the model dealing with the value of labour power.
Bargaining, coercion, discrimination, and economic power all play a role here, and in the
model there are no clear guidelines concerning what the outcome of these will be.

b. Value of non-market labour. Labour which is not sold to an employer is not

exchanged for a wage and has no value in the Marxian sense. But clearly this labour is
necessary for and assists in creating value. Also, the labour of workers who work at non-
market work potentially has a value if these workers do enter the market.

Who Pays for the Kids? contains an interesting discussion of how the housewife came to
be considered unproductive; this was not something which was natural or has always
existed (p. 95). This development began with the political division into public and
private, and the accompanying economic division of work and occupations into
productive and unproductive. In the nineteenth century, this development began to be
reflected in the censuses in Western Europe and North America. By the early part of this
century, household work was omitted from measurement in the census, and this was later
replicated in statistics of economic production such as gross national product (GNP).
Why? Folbre speculates that two groups pushed in this direction.

Politicians, business people, and others who promoted expansion of markets and
economic development may have played a role. By excluding this type of work
from measurement, growth rates appeared more rapid than was really the case.
That is, economic activity formerly carried on in the household (unmeasured)
began to move into the market (where it was measured).
Male trade unionists used the argument to promote the "family wage," arguing
that the working men needed a higher wage to support their families. This became
part of organized trade union demands, and some unions may still use this
argument. While this had many positive effects in creating higher wages for males
and improved living conditions for families, it did have some negative features.
The family wage for men was generally associated with a lower or nonexistent
wage for women, creating below subsistence wages and great difficulty for single
women and other women who had to work at jobs.

Folbre notes how some women writers and womens' organizations fought the view that
housewives were unproductive. There have been recent developments in this area, with
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some attempt by the census and surveys to provide a measure of women's unpaid labour.
Some women have also argued for wages for housework and for other economic benefits
for women in the home.

c. Exploitation. The models of exploitation originally developed by Marx have been

modified somewhat by recent developments in Marxian theory. Two examples follow.

i. In production. The surplus labour provided by workers and taken by capitalists in the
process of production is the source of exploitation. This model is well developed by
Marx. In Neo-prol models, other forms of exploitation may be based on differences in
assets (p. 32 and 33-34). For example, some groups of workers with special skills or
forms of human capital may be able to gain some part of the surplus (e.g. athletes). Other
workers may be able to use their special technical knowledge (computer programmers)
or special place within the productive process (top managers) to gain economic
advantages which could be considered to be part of exploitation. This can considerably
confuse the class structure, because these individuals may be considered workers at one
level, but are so highly paid, that they appear to be part of the exploiting class.

ii. In the household (p. 37). Folbre notes that production for use can be as exploitative
as production for exchange. Exploitation of this form can occur as an unequal
distribution of human labour or inequities in the redistribution of market income among
household members. For example, the family wage provides the possibility that the male
worker will share his income with all family members in an equitable manner. But there
is nothing that obliges him to do so, and a male with considerable income may deprive
his wife and family of an adequate or reasonable level of living. Note that there is
redistribution but no explicit exchange within the household, so that the models of
exploitation and extraction of surplus value really do not apply here. That is, within the
household the mechanisms of exploitation are not systematic, but depend on coercion,
bargaining, norms concerning proper and acceptable male/female interaction and
behaviour, etc.

d. Redefine work. In the Neo-prol models, there is sometimes a redefinition

of work and output to include emotional and caring work (p. 37). Who Pays for the
Kids? also contains a discussion of the importance of family labour (pp. 96-98). The
Marxian model often begins by analyzing the nature of work in general, but then
immediately jumps to the analysis of labour exchanged for a wage. The latter tends to be
treated as the dominant form of work within capitalism, and labour that is not exchanged
for a wage is forgotten in further analysis. Folbre urges us to consider all human labour,
examine how it is exercised, how much is carried out, who does it, who benefits from it,
and what are the social interactions and social relationships surrounding this.

6. Individual Choice. In the Marxian analysis, agents are always collective, and these
are often groups such as working class or petty bourgeoisie that are imposed on the
individual. This has two aspects to it - social interaction and types of collective agency
and behaviour.

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 Social interaction. The Marxian model says little about aspects of daily life
outside the job, and perhaps not all that much about interaction with workers on
the job. Some of the Neo-prol models attempt to include this in their analysis (p.
33).
Collective agency and behaviour. Neo-prol models examine the existence of class-
like groups (e.g. the semi-autonomous employees of Wright, or the women whose
labour is exploited by males p. 34). Folbre's stylized feminist model widens this
approach to include groups which might be "chosen groups" that are not
necessarily based on positions within the economy and the process of production.

F. Toward a Feminist Synthesis

Folbre notes that there are a number of problems created by the conventional
neoclassical and Marxist views.

1. Models of the economy and society are incomplete and inadequate. The
conventional economic approach examines only production in the economy, devaluing
the contribution of any necessary labour in the household. Measures of production such
as gross national product (GNP) are misleading measures of economic activity because
only certain forms of economic activity are valued.

2. Models of economic development are inadequate, because they consider only

production, not reproduction and the social arrangements surrounding these. These
issues are especially important for the poorer countries today. The manner in which
women, family and households are affected by economic changes, and the constraints
and opportunities faced by them will have a lot to do with whether and how economic
development occurs in these countries.

3. Analysis of political debates and conflicts over social welfare programs may be
misleading. Among the questions that need to be asked are how were these programs
initially achieved, and in whose interests were they implemented? For example,
excluding women from factory work during the nineteenth century is often treated as a
great gain for the working class and for society. But this may have had serious long run
negative effects for women. Today, when social welfare programs are under attack, who
will be hurt by the decline of these? How can coalitions be developed to maintain and
restore these programs?

4. In the Marxian approach, the lack of attention to unpaid household labour has led to
an inadequate theory of population and labour force. There is little in the Marxist
model that deals with the reasons for fertility decline, and neoclassical explanations
(costs and benefits) are probably superior in that regard. As well, why women have
entered the labour force in such large numbers, and why the feminist movement emerged
are not adequately explained in the Marxian model.

References.

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Wright, Erik Olin, Classes, London, Verso, 1985.

Notes for March 10, 1998 class. Last edited on March 10, 1998.

Theories of Patriarchy
Issue:
Posted: 8 October 06

by Lindsey German
This article first appeared in International socialism (second series) 12 in 1981
Perhaps the most persistent and widespread theory around the Womens Movement today is that of
patriarchy. It takes many different forms but the ideas behind it that male domination or sexism is
something which exists not just as a product of capitalism but as something quite separate from the capitalist
mode of production and which will endure beyond capitalism are accepted so widely that a wholesale
rejection of the theory is greeted with complete and genuine amazement.

Such theories contain little understanding of how womens oppression and the nature of the family have
changed historically. Nor is there much notion of how widely differing that oppression is from class to class.
Instead we are presented with the eternal truth that patriarchy in one form or another is the cause of
womens oppression.

This is justified by pointing to the existence of womens oppression in societies other than those of western
capitalism in the class societies that predated capitalism and in the so-called socialist societies of Russia,
China, Cuba, Eastern Europe and so on.

The patriarchy theory backs up the notion widely accepted within the womens movement that there has to
be a separation of struggles, socialism and the workers movement fight capitalism, the womens movement
fights a separate struggle against patriarchy. The logic of the separation of the struggles now is the separate
social development of each sex in the future. This is a logic which many people who espouse the patriarchy
theory would not accept. But if patriarchy is indeed something by which all men oppress all women, how can
it ever be overcome by women and men acting together?

I want to argue something completely different. I want to reject the concept of patriarchy as at best a
muddled term simply mean womens oppression (in which case it cannot explain this oppression), and at
worst a completely idealist notion which has no basis in material reality. I want to show that it is not men
who benefit from the oppression of women but capital. I want to look at the way in which the family has
changed, and how as it has changed womens conception of themselves has also changed. Hopefully that will
demonstrate that womens continued oppression is not the result of male conspiracy (or an alliance between
male workers and the capitalist class), but of the continuation of class society in every part of the world. It
follows that I shall argue the socialist countries have no more in common with socialism than they have
with womens liberation.

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Finally I want to consider the question which is always thrown at socialists. Engels and the early Marxists
considered that the proletarian family (unlike the bourgeois family) would disappear since it was not based
on property. It clearly has not. Since I do not believe that this is because of patriarchy, I want to look at
precisely what does keep the family going.

Various forms of the theory

The joy of the patriarchy theory is that it can be all things to all people. It thrives on the vague feelings so
beloved by sections of the womens movement, rather than on a materialist analysis. Consequently, even
searching for a definition of the term can be difficult, since there are so many to choose from.

Patriarchy can for instance refer to a specific society where the father (the patriarch) ruled not only the
women in the family but also the younger men. Such a society depended on peasant or artisan production
based at least partly in the home. The patriarchs power derived from his possession of the wealth produced
and his ownership of land. But in most cases such an historically specific society is not what is meant by the
term. Even the vaguest of patriarchy theorists can see that we do not live in such a peasant society today, and
their concern is to deal with present day womens oppression.

The prevalent versions of the theory take two forms.

First there are those who see patriarchy purely in ideological terms. Juliet Mitchell for instance, sees a strict
demarcation: We are dealing with two autonomous areas, the economic mode of capitalism and the
ideological mode of patriarchy.1 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor put similar arguments in In Defence of
Patriarchy.2

Such a separation of the economic and ideological has to be queried. There is always a connection between
the economic basis of a society and the ideas which arise within that society. The two cannot be seen as
autonomous spheres. As Marx long ago pointed out, if you see history as just the result of the dominance of
ideas or of a succession of ideas, then you cannot explain anything about the development of society. For why
do some ideas dominate? And why do dominating ideas change?

If we reject the religious notion of womens position as being ordained by a (male chauvinist) god, then we
have to look for the material conditions that have led human beings to act in certain ways in relationship to
the world and therefore to each other. The origins of womens oppression have to be sought in these, just as
the origins of any other social phenomenon. Then we can understand the way in which the ideas that justify
that oppression have arisen and engage in a meaningful fightback.

What Marx wrote in 1845 applies as much to womens oppression as to anything else in our society: We do
not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined,
conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their
real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus
no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development: but men, developing
their material production and their material intercourse alter, along with their real existence, their thinking
and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.3

By contrast, to see patriarchy as an ideological mode is to see ideas as sustaining themselves. The struggle
for the liberation of women then ceases to be linked to the struggle against material exploitation which can
tie in with the mundane concerns of millions of working women and men. Instead it becomes what Alexander
and Taylor call for a cultural struggle to change peoples ideas in isolation from changing society. It is easy
to see from this how ideas about the autonomy of the womens movement develop. If ideas are autonomous
from economic exploitation, why not fight against womens oppression autonomously too?

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Some women have recognised a contradiction here, and so have tried to develop, more recently, materialist
theories of patriarchy. They argue that men (all men) benefit from womens oppression, and that they are
able to do so because of the fundamental biological differences between the sexes. Here lies the basis for
patriarchy. As Roberta Hamilton puts it: The feminist analysis has addressed itself to patriarchal ideology,
that patriarchal mode which defines the system of male domination and female subjugation in any society.
But [the ideology]... is predicated on biological differences between the sexes, giving it a historical basis of its
own.4

Christine Delphy puts forward such a materialist argument from the point of view of radical feminism in The
Main Enemy.5 A similar attempt, but using Marxist categories has been made by Heidi Hartmann6. It is this
I want to look at at some length. If these sorts of arguments can be shown to be faulty, then the whole
attempt to combine patriarchy theory and Marxism falls to pieces.

Are men the exploiters of women?

Hartmann defines patriarchy as a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and
which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence or solidarity among men that enable them to
dominate women. She further argues that the material base upon which patriarchy rests lies most
fundamentally in mens control over womens labour power [it] does not rest solely on childbearing in the
family, but on all the social structures which enable men to control womens labour. Control is maintained
by denying women access to necessary economically productive resources and by restricting womens
sexuality.7

In denying women access to these economically productive resources, men form an alliance with capital.
Evidence for this is cited in the development of capitalism, and the working class response to its problems in
the form of demands for protective legislation and the family wage. The argument goes that both were fought
for by male workers in order to benefit them by putting women into the home where they could both service
men and be controlled sexually by them. But is this view of events true?

The development of capitalism in Britain had the effect of destroying domestic production and of forcing
women and children, as well as men, into the factory system. This had a devastating effect on the
reproduction of the working class. Infant mortality reached horrific levels, due (as Marx showed in Capital)
to mothers working long hours away from home. Children were left with slightly older children, or minders
who often neglected them or kept them quiet with gin or laudanum. When they grew old enough to work
machinery they too were pulled into factory production. As Marx put it: the mighty substitute for labour and
for workers, the machine, was immediately transformed into a means for increasing the number of wage-
labourers by enrolling under the direct sway of capital every member of the workers family, without
distinction of age or sex.

The conditions described here by Marx, and by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England8,
show how horrific the early factory system was. The impact of the new system pulled the old pre-capitalist
family apart, as each member of the family became wage labourers. Capitalist exploitation did, however,
despite its brutality lay the basis for the men and women of the propertyless class, the proletariat, to be equal.
Both had to rely on wage labour, and men had lost their property. That was why Engels made such a
distinction between the bourgeois and the proletarian families. The tendency seemed to be for the working
class family to cease to exist. In that, Engels was right.

But what he didnt appreciate was the impact that the factory system had on the very process of reproduction.
In Manchester, probably the most advanced centre of factory production, there were 26,125 deaths per
100,000 infants under one year of age9; treble the mortality rate in some non-industrial areas. The most far-

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sighted members of the ruling class could see that the systems future supply of labour power was being
destroyed.

It was out of these conditions that the demand for protective legislation and the family wage came. They
fitted in with the changing needs of capitalism but were also in part due to the real concerns of working class
men and women for better standards of living, safer pregnancies, healthier children and cleaner homes.

Theorists of patriarchy like Hartmann argued that men allied with capital to exclude women from certain
jobs. There were it is true attempts at this. Skilled craft workers used their unions to exclude women from
some trades. But it was not only women they excluded. The children of unskilled workers and of immigrant
workers could stand as little chance as women of getting apprenticeships in such trades and the exclusion
then was of anyone who had not served their time. It is stretching the notion of patriarchy to absurd
limits to make it mean as Hartmann does, white male supremacism and it would be beyond absurdity to
make it fit the historical facts by being white skilled male supremacism which discriminates not only
against all women and all immigrants, but against most native workers as well.

What is more, some of the most important areas from which women were excluded were ones where the
unions were weak or non-existent and in no position to exclude anyone. The legislative exclusion of women
from certain industries was carried on by bourgeois parliaments But was that really the alternative posed?
Firstly the working class (male) was hardly the brilliantly organised monolithic class that Hartmann
pretends. The.majority of workers were not even members of unions. For a long period after the decline of
Chartism they hardly fought at all for demands of a generalised nature. They accepted the ideas and
framework of capitalism including the dominant ideology about women. One can hardly expect them to have
fought for greater socialisation of childcare when they were fighting for little else.

Secondly, there was the problem for working class women of the danger and frequency of childbirth. Today
in virtually every advanced capitalist country women are refusing to have many (if any) children. Our access
to contraception, however inadequate, is something completely undreamed of until our generation. To those
women there was no alternative to a lifetime of frequent and often unwanted pregnancies other than
abstention. To working class people of both sexes childbirth was a fact of life, and in such circumstances they
usually both wanted the woman to be protected. This explains in a much more satisfactory way than any
theory of male conspiracies why it was women who left the factory at marriage and why the family wage was
a wage for men.

It is still a fact that these moves dealt a blow to womens chances of overcoming their subordinate social
position. Capitalism had presented the potential for equality, but that equality could not come to fruition
within the system. In the interests of the reproduction of labour power, women were isolated and atomised in
the home. Their work was seen as serving their husbands and their families. They were denied financial
independence. This ideal was never the reality for all working class women; many always engaged in wage
labour. But the ruling ideas propagated the notion of the family as sacred, projecting the stereotype of the
bourgeois family on to the working class as a means of ensuring reproduction. And the stereotype was what
working class women and men accepted as the norm even if it did not match their own personal reality.

Even today, as the development of capitalism has drawn the majority of women into the labour market, this
view of women has not disappeared although it has been severely eroded. Attitudes to women, and of women
to themselves, have advanced enormously under the combined impact of control over contraception and
entry into the workforce. The way changed material conditions have changed attitudes is itself an argument
against seeing oppression as the result of some mystical male ideological hold that never changes.

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Hartmann argues that men benefit from womens labour in the home. She asks: Who benefits from womens
labour? Surely because the conditions in those industries was seen as harmful to the creation of the next
generation of workers (either directly, where pregnant women were working with processes that could harm
foetuses or indirectly, where they were working hours that prevented them playing their part in the
socialisation of their children). The motive force for exclusion did not lie with patriarchal men, but with
capitals view of its own long term needs.

The theory that the family wage a wage paid to the man sufficient to keep not just himself but his family as
well was acapitalists, but also surely men, who as husbands and fathers receive personalised services at
home. The content and extent of these services may vary by class or ethnic or racial group, but the fact of
their receipt does not. Men have a higher standard of living than women in terms of luxury consumption,
leisure time and personalised services.11

Now of course it is true that women bear the brunt of childcare and housework in the home. But does it
follow from that that men benefit from womens labour? The division of labour is after all a division of
labour where men do different work, both in the factory and in the home. But to say that welding is better or
worse than housework is to look at both in completely subjective and unmeasurable terms. The same is true
of leisure. Men have more rigidly defined leisure which tends to be social (the pub, football) just as they tend
to have more rigidly defined working hours. But it cannot be simply said to be more it is different.

Housework, by definition, is work that is not subject to the tempo imposed by capitalist exploitation in the
factory or the office. It does not involve intensive effort for a certain number of hours, followed by a period of
recuperation in order to allow application of another fixed spell of intensive effort. Therefore there is no way
the amount of labour that goes into it can be measured against the amount of labour that goes into factory
work. All that can be said with certainty is that both factory work and housework are debilitating -one leading
to occupational diseases (which is why symptoms such as chronic bronchitis are much higher among male
workers than among housewives), horrific accidents, acute fatigue and often, an early death; the other to
demoralisation, atomisation, insecurity, and a variety of ailments that are normally ignored by doctors. The
great disadvantage that housewives suffer is not that they are somehow exploited by men, but that they are
atomised and cut off from participation in the collective action that can give the confidence to fight back
against the system.

In fact, the problem of benefits only really arises where there is a departure from the old stereotype division
of labour between the male worker and the female housewife. As married women are increasingly drawn
into the employed labour force, many women find themselves doing fulltime paid labour yet still expected to
run the home. They are left with much less time to recoup their labour power than their husbands as they
have to combine work and house work. Yet even in these instances it is doubtful if the husbands benefit in
more than a marginal way. The most tiring and debilitating aspects of housework are those connected with
child care. The great parasite on womens domestic labour is the child. Yet it is not the husband who
benefits from the childs existence, but capital which thereby is guaranteed a future source of surplus value
Just because the woman suffers a double burden of both directly producing surplus value in the factory or
office and of reproducing future sources of surplus value in the home, it does not follow that the male
workers single burden is less.

I would argue therefore that not only do men not benefit from womens work in the family (rather the
capitalist system as a whole benefits), but also that it is not true that men and capital are conspiring to stop
women having access to economic production.

We live in a period where more women work in most advanced countries than in any other period in history.
The jobs they do differ from men, in that sense the sexual division of labour is as alive as ever. And their pay

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is far from equal. This is because women still (usually) have their working lives interrupted by childbirth
(although much less so than a couple of generations ago) and are still expected to play the major part in
caring for the children as well as work.

But the structure of womens jobs has more to do with the period of capitalist development in which they
entered the labour force (the expansion of the service sector in particular) than with any male conspiracy.
This is particularly clearly shown if you compare the jobs women have with those of immigrants of both
sexes. Both are concentrated (with a few exceptions such as foundry workers) in cleaning, transport, catering,
light manufacture, food processing, because both entered the workforce at similar times. The job segregation
of women has nothing to do with their role in the home. It is sometimes argued that womens jobs reflect
motherhood and housework. But canning peas can in no way be seen as an extension of the sort of things
women do in the home. Nor can the jobs of bank tellers, typists, filing clerks, telephonists, cashiers. (In
offices, only the privileged elite secretaries play the role of surrogate wife to the (male) managers the mass
of clerical workers certainly do not.)

Neither has the present recession had the effect of driving women wholesale out of the workforce. Hartmann
claims that It is symptomatic of male dominance that our unemployment was never considered a crisis. In
the 1930s, the vast unemployment was partially dealt with by excluding women from all kinds of jobs one
wage job per family, and that job was the mans.12

This is simply wrong. A study of US labour in the period 1930-40 shows that more women entered wage
labour in that decade than in any other in American history.13 This was despite the rhetoric of some men
including trade union bureaucrats like Samuel Gompers, and was a reflection of the impact of the crisis.
Similarly in Germany in the great slump, although all the parties (except the Communists) were for married
women giving up their jobs, the female proportion of the total workforce rose between 1928 and 1932 from
35.3% to 37.3% and this was due to increased working by marriedwomen.14 As men were thrown out of the
traditional industries, women were forced onto the labour market at whatever price.

A similar tendency can be seen today. Of course this doesnt mean that capital has become pro-women and
anti-men. But what it does mean is that capital will use the ideology of womens place being in the home to
enforce low wages, poor union organisation and inferior conditions. The question the theorists of patriarchy
have to answer is this if capital and men are indeed in alliance why are women not being thrown out of
work and replaced by unemployed miners, steelworkers and dockers?

Is the family unchanging?

The common contention to all theories of patriarchy is that male domination has remained the same,
regardless of other changes in society. Thus patriarchy endures and the struggle against it is something apart
from the struggle against capitalism. In the biological theories, the problem is reduced to that of the
differences of men from women. Logically the solution is the eradication or removal of these creatures. These
arguments are fairly easy to dismiss and have little influence in Britain at any rate.

More influential are the sorts of arguments put across by people like Hartmann, who see capitalism and
patriarchy as two different forces that ally against women. She tells us that Marxists underestimated the
strength of pre-existing patriarchal social forces with which fledgling capital had to contend and the need for
capital to adjust to these forces.15 But this assumes that the old precapitalist family passed intact into
capitalism, without changing. And as such it is part of her more general argument that within class society
there are two forms of production labour and the family. One involves a mode of production, the other a
mode of reproduction. She justifies this claim with a quote from Engels first preface to The Origins of the
Family, Private Property and the State16: The determining factor in history is the production and
reproduction of immediate life on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food clothing

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and shelter and the tools necessary for that production on the other side the production of human beings
themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisation under which people of a particular
historical epoch live is determined by both kinds of production.

She sees the two modes as equally important (criticising Marxists for referring to economic production as
the mode) and she argues that there appears to be no necessary connection between changes in the one
aspect of production and changes in the other.17 In other words each mode of production can change
independently of the other. Capitalism can be abolished while patriarchy remains intact.

Marxists have always argued something quite different from this. Engels, in his preface to Origins of the
Family, goes on to say that as class society develops it is less and less the case that the two modes co-exist and
that what arises is a society in which family relations are entirely subordinated to property relations.18 As
capitalism develops as a world system, a totality, it envelops and changes all pre-capitalist structures,
including the family.

The nature of the family is transformed. It could hardly be otherwise. It could not have survived the
transition from feudalism to capitalism without changing fundamentally. For this transition was not
something peaceful but a revolutionary upheaval in peoples lives. It meant the destruction of the old ways of
life, of the old forms of domestic production, of the situation where women were dependent on the man in
the family for their livelihood, and its replacement by generalised wage labour. Of course the family endures
through history in the sense that the reproduction of life continues. The biological process remains the same.
But the social relations of production change completely. Each new form of family is recreated by the ruling
class to serve its own needs. And the new family created by capitalism cannot exist independently of the
capitalist mode of production.

To suggest otherwise is to deny that material conditions can change ideas or structures of society. Sheila
Rowbotham makes the same mistake when she argues that the capitalist family contains elements of feudal
forms of production and so is a mode within a mode.19 Yet vestiges of pre-capitalist society that endure
within capitalism do not remain at all the same as previously. The monarchy is a remnant of feudal society
but has been so totally transformed by capitalism that it bears really little relation to its previous role. So with
the family. It may look the same (although even that is dubious) but its role and functions, its foundations
have been transformed by capital. Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the
superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system a revolutionary overthrow of society
means that the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact.

Hartmann claims that a society could undergo transition from capitalism to socialism for example, and
remain patriarchal20. But it couldnt. For with the abolition of class society, the socialisation of childcare
and housework would mean that the material base of the capitalist family would be destroyed. That isnt to
say that there will be no problems the day after the revolution. The problems facing the Russian working
class when they did try to do these things were immense. Revolution and civil war had a massive impact on
the lives of men and women. Ultimately therevolution was lost through the failure of the working class in the
advanced capitalist countries to follow the Russian lead. That in its turn led to severe setbacks to the position
of women. But in the early years they saw the glimmers of opportunity of equal work, socialised housework
and a much freer sexuality which was made possible by the revolutionary overthrow of the old society.

The fact that womens oppression manifestly exists in the so-called socialist countries is not evidence of
patriarchy. On the contrary it is evidence of the non-existence of socialism. No wonder that a society based
on accumulation is not willing to allow any spending on the socialisation of childcare. Instead the burden on
women is as great as in the West. True, nurseries are often said to be widely available, but the most
widespread form of childcare in Russia is the grandmother, or child-minder, which of course requires no

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capital investment on the part of the capitalist class a familiar story? It is theoretical acceptance of these
countries being somehow better than Western capitalism that leads to acceptance of theories of patriarchy: if
women are manifestly unequal there, this must be the fault of men, rather than of the economic system.

The family, the system of reproduction, is not a historical given but changes with the development of the
forces of production. Not only that. Within capitalism the family has not remained constant either.21

The pre-capitalist family was destroyed by the rise of capitalist relations of production which created a class
of propertyless free wage labourers. This in turn created at least the potential of the equalisation of relations
between men and women. This is what Engels pointed to in his controversial writings on the subject. In early
capitalism, before the predominance of the factory system, the outworking system meant that both sexes
could act as joint producers. It would be wrong to idealise this period as it clearly wasnt a golden age in any
sense but it did give women a relative freedom from the previous degrees of sexual and economic control by
men. But the rise of the factory system meant not just that the individual wage labourer no longer controlled
his or her work, but that the whole system of reproduction of the working class was put into jeopardy, as was
so clearly demonstrated by Marx and Engels.22

Hence the improvement in living standards, protective legislation and the family wage. These were in the
interests of capital, but it is also true that the working class of both sexes welcomed the move away from the
factories by women.

Since the second world war the family has changed drastically yet again. Womens increased role in the
workforce, coupled with greater ability to control our bodies (contraception, legal abortion), has developed a
whole new number of attitudes. Marriage is not onthe decline, but the number of divorces is increasing
dramatically. Women and men are not rejecting the institution of marriage, but no longer feel it has to be for
life. Control over reproduction and a degree of economic independence for women means more than one
partner (or none at all-witness the growth of single parent families) becomes an option.23

Childbirth rates in virtually every advanced capitalist country (including Eastern Europe) have dropped
dramatically, an indication that where women have a choice, it is not to spend their lives in childbirth.
Migration is also a feature of late capitalism. As old industries decline, workers within the advanced
capitalisms are forced to leave their families to seek work. As certain industries expand, workers from
Southern Europe and Asia are brought to the industrial heartlands to fill the demand for cheap, pliable
labour. Such movement has huge effects on traditional ideas, including ideas of the family. Yet the family
remains a stifling, stultifying place where attitudes and roles are taught and learned, where prejudices and
values are transmitted through the generations. It changes to fit the needs of capitalism but doesnt
disappear. It will take an upheaval outside the family to begin to achieve that.

What keeps the family going?

So what keeps the family going today? If we dont accept that it is the material interest of men, then what is
it? Its existence depends upon two fundamental factors, although there are many subsidiary things involved
as well.

First we have to look at the economic interests of capital in maintaining the family. The role the family plays
in reproducing the existing workforce and the next generation of workers has been amply documented.24
The existence of the family wage (even if today it barely covers the reproduction of the family and needs to be
supplemented by state benefits and by womens mainly part time work) and unpaid labour in the home allow
the costs of reproduction to be borne very cheaply.

If the system were capable of sustained economic expansion over many decades, then, hypothetically, the
economic functions of the family could be replaced by other mechanisms. As Irene Bruegel has demonstrated

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conclusively, it would be possible for the system to increase total surplus value if most (if not all) housework
and child care were carried out by capitalistically organised paid labour, freeing all women to produce value
and surplus value for capital.25 But to reorganise reproduction in this way would involve massive
expenditure on investment in new childcare facilities and probably a complete restructuring of the housing
stock. This is not something which is going to be undertaken in the present crisis ridden phase of the system
especially since the reserve army of the unemployed is amply large enough for the systems likely labour
needs.

And so women are left with the responsibility for childbirth and childcare. This above explains why the family
and womens oppression continue. Womens roles as mothers and childrearers structure their whole lives.
Part-time working is a product of their role as mothers. Unequal and generally low pay is a product of them
not being considered as breadwinners. From the beginning of their lives in capitalist society, the assumption
is that they are going to be something different from men. Their pinnacle of achievement is presented as
motherhood and marriage.

Theoretically there is no reason why women should care for children and perform the bulk of the housework,
just because they give birth to children. But in a world of privatised reproduction, of a rigid sexual division of
labour, where jobs are not paid at the same rate as mens, for most families there is really no alternative. It
makes sense for the woman to be the one to stay at home, and so the circle continues.

Talk of sharing housework, of men taking on the role of housewife in such a world are only possible for a
tiny minority of people where the woman has a profession or skill which enables her to earn as much or more
than the man. Even then the ideas of a society which is based on womens inequality are difficult to combat.
For the mass of workers such role sharing is pure utopianism.

The material significance of the family for capitalism is reinforced by ideological considerations. I dont mean
by this that capitalists are male chauvinists who want to keep women inferior to men (although they usually
are). Rather, the family provides some of the ideological cement that holds the system together.

At every stage in its development the system has had to establish structures that bind those that it exploits to
it. These continue to exist at later stages in its development when its own economic dynamic demands new
structures. The family is integrated into a complex network of such structures. These take advantage of the
way housewives, isolated in the home and cut off from the wider collectivities that form around industrial
production, are more susceptible to unchanging ideas about ones place in society; dependent upon their
husbands for a livelihood they can be persuaded that any sort of social change is a threat to their family and
their security. Or, again, these structures rely on the way the male worker, having to worry about the security
of his wife and children as well as himself personally, is likely to think twice before getting involved in a
strike, occupation or insurrection. The slogan of defence of the family becomes a slogan for mobilising
working people in defence of the status quo. So even when capitalism no longer directly needs some element
in the structures associated with the family in the past (for instance, it no longer needs anti-abortion
legislation now that it does not look to an army many millions strong to defend itself against its rivals) it only
abandons that element under enormous pressure. For it cannot afford to damage structures, that however
marginal to its central economic interests, help bind workers to present day society.

Again, hypothetically, given unlimited economic expansion for a long period of time, the system could
develop new ideological structures to replace those identified with preservation of the present family. But
that is not the condition in which the system finds itself. Today it clings to any means of support it can find
-which is why in Southern Italy or Northern Ireland it has not been able to dispense with archaic structures
like the Mafia or the Orange Order. It is even less likely to contemplate abandoning a structure, like the
family, which continues to provide it with certain economic services.

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The Marxist theory of the family tries to explain womens continued oppression in the context of womens
role as childbearer and rearer. Hartmann claims that Marxism is sex-blind; in other words can explain why
people are in certain places but cannot explain why these people are women. Yet the theory does precisely
that. It locates womens oppression historically, or locates its continued existence in the individual
responsibility for reproduction, which in turn structures the whole of womens lives. It also puts a solution to
that problem in terms of a socialism which would begin to break down both the material conditions which
create womens oppression, and the ideas which have arisen from them ideas with which we are so familiar,
about the family and childcare being natural, women in the home being natural. It can do so by switching
responsibility for childcare from the individual to society as a whole. That on its own would open up a new
world for millions of women and allow us to behave as equals in a new society.

Conclusion
Theories of patriarchy are not in fact theories of womens liberation. Instead of starting with an assessment
of the material position of women in capitalist society, they start with crude biological assessments of the
positions of men and women. They point no way forward for womens liberation. Why then have they become
so popular? Here we have to look very briefly at how the womens movement has developed since the late
sixties.

The womens movement started in the late sixties as the result of womens changing role in society. Womens
entry into the

workforce, and increased control over contraception, meant that women had new ideas about their role, their
careers, their aspirations. Such ideas were fed upon and developed by a massive expansion of higher
education, which, although it discriminated against women in many areas, meant that for the first time
women were able to enter relatively well paid, professional jobs with at least nominally equal pay. For most
women this was a huge advance on the lives of their mothers and grandmothers.

But old ideas about women lagged behind reality. True, ideas about sex and sexuality changed, but the old
view of woman as wife and mother still persisted. All sorts of legal anomalies meant that women were often
treated as little better than children when it came to buying goods on hire purchase or obtaining mortgages.
Advertising still portrayed an idealised view of women in the home which bore little contact with reality.

It was out of the conflict between this economic and social reality and the old ideals that ideas of womens
liberation sprang. Women somehow felt that they were as good as any man and the reality of their lives was
that they were indeed usually doing more than most men, being burdened in the home as well.

In the early years of the womens movement, the feeling was that everything not only could change but was
changing. The aftermath of 1968 left a large radicalised layer open to the ideas of the womens movement.
Many of the ideas put forward by women inside the womens movement (overwhelmingly the educated
professionals) struck a chord with working class women. Changes in consciousness are difficult to measure,
but a quick glance at the mass circulation womens magazines Woman and Womans Own over the last
fifteen years will show the extent to which sex, unemployment, tampons and many other social issues are
dealt with alongside the usual features on film stars and the royal family. There was always a huge gap
between the womens movement and working class women, and little contact between the two but at least the
womens movement talked about organising in the working class.

Today things are rather different. The lack of general economic struggles of the last five years and the lack of
political confidence within the working class has resulted in widespread demoralisation among sections of
those radicalised in the 60s and early 70s. The womens movement appears to have suffered this particularly
acutely. Now the pages of Spare Rib are not where you will find out about the latest strikes involving women,

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but rather where you can reflect on whether celibacy is your personal answer to the problem of sleeping with
men. The latest abortion campaign against Corrie would never have sustained itself had it not been for
socialist organisations and the (often male) trade union movement. An occupation by 200 women at Lee
Jeans has been largely ignored by the womens movement.

The feeling is that nothing can be done, so all we can do is sort out our own ideas. Consequently, arguments
about changing the whole of society are replaced by exhortations to change our own lifestyles. Instead of
activity we are confronted with an abstract moralism which demands that the small number of men (and
women) who accept the ideas of womens liberation purge themselves of deviations as a substitute for
changing society. The logic is that if we change the attitudes of men we can change the world as though it
were men, not capitalism, which is the problem. It is from these ideas that the theory of patriarchy has
developed and which now in turn reinforces these ideas.

As I have said it in no way points us forward to how we liberate ourselves. Instead it demands theoretical
correctness from the few while accepting inaction by the many. Some women today are taking the theory to
its conclusion and arguing for separate lifestyles within capitalism separate homes, single sex schools,
separate social lives. Not only do these solutions fail to see the connection between material being and
consciousness, and how that consciousness changes, but they are also profoundly elitist. They assume a
certain level of income, which means a certain level of housing and a certain choice about where one lives,
sends ones children to school and so on. For most women the choice simply isnt there. When Hartmann
talks about the divorce rate evening up between the classes, she doesnt consider how miserable life was for
women and men of the working classes who for generations couldnt divorce. Even today where divorce is
relatively simple to obtain, there must be hundreds of thousands of couples who stay together out of material
constraint (they cant afford two mortgages, the council will not rehouse if one leaves the marital home, there
is virtually no cheap private accommodation). For the mass of the working class, such solutions are simply
Utopian and we should treat them as such.

We should not just reject the theory of patriarchy and all the idealist talk which accompanies it, we have to
assert that as Marxists we have a theory of womens liberation which can be achieved and which can lead to
the liberation of the whole of humanity from capitalist exploitation and alienation. To do so we have to reject
the notion underlying the theories of patriarchy, of the little woman analysis, which as Joan Smith describes,
pictures women at the hearth, men on the battlefield.26 This is a picture which was never really true of
whole sections of the working class, and in fact was based much more on the family of The banker, the
middle manager, the industrialist and their clerks and skilled workers than it was on the family of the casual
labourer, the handyman and the immigrant worker.27

If it wasnt true then, today it is a manifestly absurd view of women. The typical woman today works in waged
labour for the majority of her adult life. Typically she leaves work for the period until her children attend
school and then goes back to fulltime work. Even 20% of women with children under 5 work usually part
time. The full time housewife is a myth when 40% of the workforce are women and where women are
entering work at a faster rate than men. Women are also joining trade unions at a much faster rate than men.

The myth has a number of advantages for capital. It enables them to foist poor wages, conditions and hours
on women. It makes women feel that their job is not their real work which makes them less likely to
organise at work, and more likely to acquiesce to unemployment. It promotes the double burden of waged
and housework for women. But it is nonetheless, a myth.

When we look at women as workers and not as isolated housewives, our response becomes different. We see
that women as part of the class organised in workplaces can build the cohesion and confidence to challenge
and eventually overthrow capitalism. That has to be our aim, and in the process of building a revolutionary

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party which can lead the class to overthrow capitalism we have to have a picture of the class which contains
women as an integral part of the workforce. But, it is usually argued, this doesnt solve the problem that men
are sexist even in the party and even after the revolution. No one could deny this was true. But our solution to
it depends on whether we see fighting sexism as something separate from class struggle, or as an integral part
of it. If it is the latter than our strategy cannot be for an autonomous movement separate from the party. We
have to make the party and the socialist revolution reflect womens aspirations and demands as part of the
demands of the class. That means recognising the reality of womens oppression, which often makes it harder
for women to get involved at all levels of political life, and which puts on them the double burden of childcare
and housework, as well as waged work.

To try to overcome this disadvantage which all women suffer, we need special mechanisms, a womens paper,
meetings, attempts to get women party members to take an active and leading part in all aspects of our work.
All these recognise the real problems that women have, and also attempt to overcome them in a material way,
not by exhortation. What is clear is that concessions to any theory of patriarchy, or to the idea that men are
the enemy, are not only inoperable but point to the wrong problem, to the manifestations of society rather
than to its root. Socialist revolution, the abolition of class society, alone provides an answer to how we win
our liberation.

NOTES
1.Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London 1975.

2 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, In Defence of Patriarchy, New Statesman January 1980.

3 German Ideology, Moscow 1964, p35.

4 Roberta Hamilton, The Liberation of Women, London 1978, pi 1.

5 Christine Delphy, The Main Enemy, WRRC, 1977.

6 Heidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, Capital

and Class, no 8, Summer 1979.

7 Ibid

8 Marx Capital, vol 1, London 1976, p 517.

9 Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Moscow 1973; Marx,
Capital, vol 1, London 1976, p 521.

10 Hartmann, op. cit.

!! Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ruth Milkman, Womens work and economic crisis: some lessons of the Great

Depression, Review of Radical Political Economy, 1976.

14 Helen Brak in Bessel and Feuchtwanger Social Change and Political

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Development in Weimar Germany, London 1981, ppl62-3.

!5 Hartmann, op. cit.

!6 Engels, The Origins of the Family, Moscow nd.

17 Hartmann, op. cit.

18 Engels, op. cit. This is a point ignored by Hartmann. It was also ignored by Joan

Smith when she tried to develop an analysis based upon the two modes (IS [old series] 100).

19 Sheila Rowbotham, Womans Consciousness, Mans World, London 1973.

20 Hartmann, op. cit.

21 The arguments I have presented owe a great deal to the excellent article by Johanna Brenner Womens
Self-Organisation, A Marxist Justification, Against the Current, New York, Fall 1980.
22 Marx, Capital, vol 1, London 1976. Engels, Conditions of the Working Class, op. cit.

23 Hartmann dismisses the increased divorce rate as simply an evening up between classes. Even if that were
true why should it happen now? Because for the first time working class women have more chance of doing
what upper class women have always been able to do: they have some degree of economic independence
however miserable and are not tied to an exhausting life of childbirth and fear of pregnancy. (It is
interesting to remember that in all the recent abortion campaigns one of our major and most successful
arguments has been that working class women are only getting because of the 1967 Act what rich women
always hadsafe legal abortions.)

24 In particular the discussion in IS (old series) 100,104 and IS (new series) 1 and 3 between Joan Smith and
Irene Bruegel.

25 Irene Bruegel, What Keeps the Family Going?, IS (new series) 1.

26 Joan Smith, Womens oppression and Male Alienation IS (new series) 3.

27 Ibid

The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory

By Sandra Bloodworth

Originally published in Socialist Review (Australian), Issue 2, Winter 1990, pp. 5-33

Online edition prepared by marcn@comcen.com.au in June 2003

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.1 The theory was

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developed by feminists such as Juliet Mitchell and Miriam Dixson who, in her book The Real
Matilda,2 was inclined to blame Irish working class men for womens 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 Gods 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.3
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.4
Hartmann purported to provide a materialist analysis of patriarchy. While capitalists exploit the
labour of workers at work, men gained control over womens 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. 5
The arguments of patriarchy theory have been adequately dealt with by the British Socialist
Workers Party.6 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 1890s 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
womens movement into an abyss. They have no answer to how womens 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.7 Is it any wonder the womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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.

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The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory Sandra Bloodworth

Theory
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 womens oppression as to any other
aspect of capitalist society.
The fact is that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite
social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and
without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production.
The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however,
of these individuals, not as they appear in their own or other peoples imagination, but as they actually are, i.e.,
as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and
conditions independent of their will.8

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 historical-
ly 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. Marx argued that the relations of production of every society form a whole, a concept
Lukcs took up in his philosophical writings. He wrote:
(it) is not to deny that the process of abstraction and hence the isolation of the elements and concepts in the
special disciplines and whole areas of study is of the very essence of science. But what is decisive is whether this
process of isolation is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it
presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated fragment retains its autonomy and
becomes an end in itself. In the last analysis Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent
sciences of law, economics or history, etc.: there is nothing but a single, unified dialectical and historical
science of evolution of society as a totality. 9

Today it is very popular for those influenced by Louis Althusser and others to brand this approach
as reductionist. It is useful to quote Lukcs 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.10
Marxs 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.11 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 womens and
mens 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.12
However, Hartmanns 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. And so she writes:
We suggest that our society can best be understood once it is recognized that it is organized both in capitalistic
and in patriarchal waysa partnership of patriarchy and capitalism has evolved. 13

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This is a decidedly un-Marxist formulation, for all Hartmanns 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.14
Hartmann, while at pains to distinguish herself from the feminists who tended towards a
psychoanalytical explanation of womens oppression, uses fundamentally the same approach. The
similarity is clear when we look at what Juliet Mitchell, influenced by Althussers attempt to graft a
structuralist theory onto Marxism, wrote:
In a complex totality each independent sector has its own autonomous reality though each is ultimately, but only
ultimately, determined by the economic factor the unity of womans condition at any time is in this way the
product of several structures [and] each separate structure may have reached a different moment at any given
historical time.15

This framework fits neatly with Hartmanns 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 cant 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 womens
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.

The Family
We can agree with feminists such as Hartmann that the family is the source of womens 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.16 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 dont 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.17 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.18 Engels pointed out:
When the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of
time there or elsewhere, what becomes of the children? They grow up like wild weeds; they are put out to nurse
for a shilling or eighteen pence a week, and how they are treated, may be imagined. Hence the accidents to
which little children fall victims multiply in the factory districts to a terrible extent
This dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brines the most demoralising
consequences for parents as well as children.19

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

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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. Connell and Irving
comment on the earliest signs of changing attitudes among the colonys ruling class:
In the 1820s a tightening began. The movement in England by evangelicals against the sexual laxity of the
aristocracy soon acquired colonial agents. The Protestant clergy were prominent Particular venom was
directed against the homosexual relationships formed by many convicts and pastoral workers, though unmarried
women got a fair pasting as sluts and whores. The 1812 Parliamentary inquiry into transportation had hardly
raised a question about sex; the 1837 inquiry and report positively smouldered with innuendo, scandal and
moralising.20

They situate the attempts to confine women to the home, to establish the feminine stereotype,
firmly in the ruling classs 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.21
Caroline Chisholm led the way in the campaign to establish the working class family in 1847. She
advised the British government that if they wanted to establish a good and great people they must
appreciate that:
For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can ap point, all the churches you can build, and
all the books you can export, will never do much good without what a gentleman in that Colony very
appropriately called Gods police wives and little children good and virtuous women. 22

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.23 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.
Henry Parkes drew the connection between the push to establish the family and ruling class designs
in the NSW Legislative Assembly in August 1866:
Our business being to colonize the country, there was only one way to do it by spreading over it all the
associations and connections of family life.24

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.25
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.26 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

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that written by women.27 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. Hardly a gain worth siding with their exploiters for. He says
of his statistics:
They serve to illustrate the life-cycle aspects of vulnerability to poverty. As such they suggest an explanation
of the strength of the working class desire to assist the family breadwinner. 28

Summers makes this point herself: indeed they (men) will generally be better off if they remain
single.29 She dismisses it by assuming that a wifes 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.30
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.31
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. Caroline Chisholm was in the forefront of
the efforts to return women to the home:
the rate payable for female labour should be proportional on a lower scale than that paid to the men high
wages tempt many girls to keep single while it encourages indolent and lazy men to depend more and more upon
their wives industry than upon their own exertions thus partly reversing the design of nature. 32

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.33 This point is also made in a study of ruling class women in the colony between 1860
and 1880:
Ladies tended to put the demands of their class above their personal claims to individual expression. The very
existence of the upper class in Melbourne depended largely on its continued visibility and the per ceived
superiority of its values over those of the rest of Melbournes social world. Any failing, especially in the area of
morality, threatened its survival, and the efforts of women were directed at maintaining a visible moral and
spiritual superiority.34

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
Womans Sphere recommended that womens education should include instruction on baby care.
Goldstein defended the womens movement from attacks that said emancipation meant women were

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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 womens suffrage and
higher education for women but also compulsory domestic science for schoolgirls, and sexual
repression.35
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
womens 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.

The Family Wage

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. Womens
home responsibilities in turn reinforce their inferior labour market position.36 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.37 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 1907.38 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 dont 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.
Womens wages were set at 54% of the male rate.
Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon argue that:
the Harvester judgement was to have extraordinary impact on working women. When in later hearings the court
further defined the average employee living in a civilised community, the definition included those responsible
for keeping families but women were not presumed to be amongst them. The imposing edifice of a family wage
was to bar the progress of womens pay rates for over half a century. 39

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 womens 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.40 By and large, womens wages were lower than mens 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.41 In 1896, the Clothing Trades Wages Board in Melbourne fixed womens
wages at 44% of mens 3s 4d against 7s 6d for men.42 New South Wales didnt 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!43
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The facts do not indicate that Higgins judgement was decisive in relation to the numbers of women
working, or in establishing a gender division in the workforce. Table 144 shows that the ratio of
women to men employed in factories in NSW and Victoria continued to rise, illustrating the fact
that more women were able to find work other than as domestic servants. And Table 245 shows that
the percentage increases of women in the workforce rose at a faster rate than men from 1907-8 to
1909-10.
Table 1:
Ratio of females to males employed in factories, NSW & Vic, 1886-1916
NSW Vic
1886 1:7 1:5
1891 1:6 1:5
1903 1:4 1:3
1916 1:3 1:2

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 Table 2:

Percentage increases in the Work Force, Commonwealth, 1905-10

Females Males
1905-6 7.82 6.08
1906-7 11.05 8.15
1907-8 4.66 3.06
1908-9 4.84 2.98
1909-10 8.67 7.24

Any agitation for a family wage has to be seen in the context of the ruling classs 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.46 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.47 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.48 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 womens 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 couldnt 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
Britains 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 womens 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. The arguments from
trade unionists in favour of a family wage are overwhelmingly dominated by reference to the needs
of women, like this one quoted by Hartmann:
It is needless for us to say, that all attempts to improve the morals and physical conditions of female factory
workers will be abortive, unless their hours are materially reduced. Indeed we may go so far as to say, that
married females would be much better occupied in performing the domestic duties of the household, than
following the never-tiring motion of machinery. We therefore hope the day is not too distant, when the husband
will be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending the former to endure the drudgery of a cotton
mill.49

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.
Anne Summers also distorts the truth about male workers attitudes to women workers.
Where equal pay was sought or opposed in the Arbitration Court most unions supported the principle
because they saw it as protecting mens jobs. It is less certain however whether most unionists saw it this way.
For the male worker on low wages any decision for equal pay would be likely to have direct consequences in his
own home; his wife and daughters might find jobs they would otherwise have rejected attractive for economic
reasons, his own status as bread-winner would be eroded and the one area of his life where he had any power
would be cut from under him.50

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 movements response to female entry into the
workforce was twofold: one of humanitarian concern and workers solidarity, and one of fear.51
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.

Protective Legislation
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.52 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 womens 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.53 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.54
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 womens 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 ex-
pectations very different from those of the right to a family wage, and the supposed shelter of the
family home.

Ideas
Women were relegated to the lowest paid and least skilled jobs as a consequence of their position in
the family. Male workers often tried to exclude women from particular trades, ignored the needs of
women workers even excluding them from their unions and expressed sexist ideas, as they do
today. But society cannot be explained if we begin with the ideas in peoples heads. We have to be
able to explain where those ideas came from, otherwise we have to revert to saying men are
naturally and inevitably sexist.
Or logically, we would have to say women are responsible for their own and other womens
oppression. Because women themselves are one of the most important agents for the socialisation of
children into male and female stereotypes. Women are not free of the prejudices and prevailing
ideas about the appropriate role for women. It is more fruitful to see it as Marx did: The ruling
ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
The argument that men benefit from womens oppression is a powerful one, because it describes
what seems to be the reality in everyday life. Men can often lounge around drinking with their
mates
while their wives are housebound with irritable and demanding children. But again, as
Marx said, if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided, we wouldnt
need theory. And Lukcs describes this kind of theory, which simply describes the
appearance of things under capitalism as reflex consciousness.
The point is to locate where real power lies, how the institutionalisation of the sex
stereotype which is fundamental to womens oppression took root in this society, and who
benefited from it. Once we recognise the familys importance in reproducing labour
power for the capitalist class, it is easier to see that it is not individual men who benefit
from womens role as housewives and mothers. When women labour at home, they are
performing a most important economic function for capitalism. Because it is separated
from work into the private sphere of life, this role has been marginalised and
trivialised.
Society says work in the home is not important, has no status, so those who do it are of
less use to society than those who work for a wage. The theory which says this work is
simply for the gratification of mens individual needs is (in spite of the intentions of its
proponents) a reflection of this prevailing view, because it too denies the extremely
important economic role of the family in the reproduction of the labour force.
Rather than concentrating solely on the times when male workers had a wrong response
to their fear that women would be used as cheap labour, it is worth pointing out that in
light of the vociferous campaigns for the family by respectable society, it is surprising
that workers ever took a decent stand at all. The fact is, ideas which really only serve the
interests of the employing class usually penetrate the working class ideas such as
sexism and racism along with homophobia, nationalism and religious sectarianism. This
is not surprising when we think of the capitalists control over all means of propagating
ideas on a mass scale, and their control over the material wealth of society. The
acceptance or otherwise of capitalist ideas by workers depends on many factors such as
the level of class struggle, the intervention by workers who hold opposing ideas, to name
just two very important ones. We do not need a theory of patriarchy to explain why
working men took up ideas opposed to the overall interests of their class.
Racism has plagued the Australian working class. This was another wrong response by
workers to the supposed threat of cheap labour, this time by immigrant (especially Asian)
workers. To be logical, feminists would have to explain this by another power structure
that of Australian born workers over immigrants. Such a position leads into a morass of
power structures which followers of Foucault accept that do not clarify, but confuse
the issues.
A glaring weakness in the theory of patriarchy is the absence of organisational
expressions of patriarchal power. Where are the informal and formal means for co-
ordinating and harnessing this power? It is true there are all-male clubs. But the famous
ones are inevitably restricted to members of the ruling class. There are no workers other
than waiters, cooks and so on frequenting the Melbourne Club. Even informal gathering
places such as pubs are divided by class. Robert Holmes aCourt does not hang around
with wharf labourers in the early openers. This is highlighted by the fuss that
accompanies a visit by dignitaries to workers pubs and the portrayal of the event as a
media stunt.
Even the organisations which male workers did have were not sufficiently strong to
influence the outcome of historic events in the period when the family was being
established. Only 20% of workers ever belonged to unions before 1890. In the depression
of the nineties, the unions were smashed and most hardly continued to exist. The best or-
ganised were the skilled workers who were notorious for trying to keep women out of
their trades. But they did not just try to keep women out. They tried to keep out the sons
of other workers as well with their restrictive entrance to apprenticeships.
However, even these relatively well-organised workers could not determine the nature of
the workforce in the long run. It was always the employers who determined any
fundamental shift in employment patterns. For instance, the boot trade was originally a
skilled area of work, mostly done by men. Over the years, the bosses deskilled the work
by the introduction of new technology. This led to the industry becoming an area of
female employment.
Ryan and Conlon give an interesting account of how employers began to break up the
work of tailoring, employing women on very low wages and getting around the rules
regarding apprenticeships during the depression of the 1890s.55 Eventually, by the
introduction of machines and continuing this process, the clothing trades came to be
dominated by low-paid female labour.
We can see in other ways that it has always been the needs of capital which have
determined the nature of work. During the depression of the 1890s, the position of
women workers appears to have worsened compared with men. But during the 1930s in a
similar crisis, often it was women who could continue to work while men spent long
periods unemployed. Most accounts of the Great Depression talk of the anguish this role
reversal caused for many families. And during the last slump of the early eighties in
Australia, it was the traditionally male industries which suffered mass sackings.
During World War II, women were drawn into the workforce in huge numbers, doing
work usually restricted to men. After the war, the media launched a huge campaign to re-
establish womens role in the home and to emphasise mens place in the old, stereotyped
jobs again. In the post-World War II boom, women were drawn into the workforce in
unprecedented numbers. Because of the nature of some of the fastest expanding
industries, women were concentrated in clerical jobs which had previously been mainly a
male preserve.
It is impossible to interpret these facts from the point of view of patriarchy theory. Why
would men decide as a whole to allow women into the workforce sometimes, drive them
out at others, concentrate them in certain jobs which men had previously done? Why did
male workers agree to let women into some industries? Why did they agree to allow their
jobs to be deskilled and working conditions undermined? Why havent they demanded
that they be given womens jobs by their male allies in the employing class? It does not
make sense to even pose the questions this way.
Whether men or women were thrown out of work at any time depended on which
industries were hardest hit by a slump. When the ruling class wanted to defend its
interests from other national ruling classes in wars, it needed women to replace the male
workers they sent off to die for them. Where it was possible to deskill work and lower
wages, it was often a useful strategy for bosses to use women. At every point, it was not
male interests being furthered, but those of capital with its continual drive for profits.
Changes in the Family
Not only has womens role in the workforce changed dramatically at times, but the family
itself is not unchanging, being continually undermined by the kinds of social upheavals
just mentioned, then having to be fought for again. Today, the family is severely
undermined by the fact that almost half the workforce are women, many more women
enter tertiary education than previously, and divorce rates are at an all time high. A survey
done by the Victorian state government estimates that only about four in every ten
families is the traditional two partners with children.56
Even bosses and parliamentarians have begun to take up the concept of affirmative action
and provision of such things as childcare. Not because they are for womens liberation,
but because they can see it is wasteful and uneconomic to lose womens skills and
experience if they have to leave work to raise children. In spite of their motivations,
however, all these changes and more have contributed to changing attitudes in the mass
of the population.
Australia Unveiled, the results of surveys conducted by The Age in Melbourne,
documented some of them. Skilled tradesmen were the most definite in their rejection of
the traditional idea of the womans role. Of women, 49% thought husband and children
should come before a career, but only 42% of men said so. Overall, 84% said that when
both partners work, they should take equal responsibility for child care and housework.57
If men have power, why have they changed their attitudes, why do they agree they should
give up some of it?
Of course, women have not been liberated. But we cannot understand these changes
unless we see them in the context of the contradictory role of the family. Historically, the
establishment of the family served the interests of the capitalist system. Once established,
it played a crucial role in socialising the next generation of workers into sex roles and
habits of submissiveness. But capitalism is a dynamic system, continually revolutionising
production. Therefore on the one hand, developments since the war tend to undermine the
family. On the other, it cannot do without at least the appearance and the idea of the
family as the perfect social unit for everyday living. So while the family is breaking
down, we also see efforts to shore it up which fit nicely with the need of governments to
cut back on welfare and other social benefits such as health and education. It is the ideal
cop-out for governments to be able to argue that families should take care of the aged and
the sick, that students should take responsibility for their education costs. In some
countries the effort to shore up the family takes the form of anti-abortion campaigns by
sections of the middle classes.
This Marxist view of the family arises from an analysis which begins with production,
which sees society as a whole, but which does not mechanically reduce everything
directly to economics. Patriarchy theory would have to say that male workers have been
in an alliance for male power in which their interests have continually been ignored, that
mostly they have lost out or even been under attack from their allies.

Conclusion
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.58
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.59 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.60
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 doesnt know how.61 But is it any
wonder she cant 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.62
Femininity is part of the ideological baggage of capitalism and the family. It is part of the
way womens oppression is reinforced day in and day out. It cannot be used to undermine
womens 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.63
Womens 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 dont),
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 womens 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 ex-
ample 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.64 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
womens 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 womens 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
governments 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.65 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Queenslands 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 womens
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 womens 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 womens oppression
in the first place.
1

8
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Moscow 1976, p. 41
9
Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, London 1983, p. 28
10
ibid, pp. l2-13
11
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London 1975
12
Hartmann op. cit., p. 12
13
ibid, p. 3
14
Richard Bradbury, What is Post-Structuralism? in International Socialism, Second series, No. 41, p. 153
15
Juliet Mitchell, Womans Estate, Penguin, 1974, p. 101
16
Summers op. cit., p. 259
17
This is a controversial point. The Marxist position was first articulated in Friedrich Engels The Origins of the Family, Private
Property and the State. For a more contemporary defence of the position against feminist attacks, see Eleanor Burke Leacock,
Myths of Male Dominance, New York & London 1981, and Harman op. cit., p. 37, Note 1
18
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Moscow 1977, p. 160
19
ibid, pp. 160-161
20
R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Melbourne 1982, p. 65
21
ibid, p. 65
22
Summers op. cit., p. 291
23
Connell op. cit., p. 126
24
Summers op. cit., p. 291
25
Edna Ryan & Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders, Nelson, 1975, p. 108
26
Summers op. cit., p. 170
27
ibid, p. 170. Summers does not draw any conclusions about women in pushing these ideas.
28
Stuart Macintyre, The Labour Experiment, Melbourne 1989, p. 18. McIntyre comments that his figures actually underestimate
the level of poverty, because they do not take account of any interruptions in earning capacity. During this period, most workers
would have been unlikely to have avoided such interruptions.
29
Summers op. cit., p. 147
30
ibid, p. 148
31
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Pan Book, 1988. For his account of the treatment of convict women by the soldiers, coupled
with his indictment of the pompous moral phraseology of the Enlightenment, the good flogging Christians, see pp. 258-261
32
Quoted in Summers op. cit.
33
Connell op. cit., p. 53
34
Penny Russell, For Better and for Worse: Love, Power and Sexuality in Upper-class Marriages in Melbourne, 1860-1880, in
Australian Feminist Studies, No. 7 & 8, p. 12
35
Connell op. cit., p. 204
36
Hartmann op. cit., p. 22
37
Cliff op. cit., Rebuilding the Workers Family, pp. 200-204; German op. cit., pp. 31-36
38
Sandra Bloodworth, Gender at Work in The Socialist, August 1989
39
Ryan op. cit., p. 91
40
Connell op. cit., p. 41
41
Ryan op. cit., p. 32
42
ibid, p. 39
43
Report of the Royal Commission into the alleged shortage of labour in New South Wales, with minutes of evidence, Sydney
1911-12, p. xviii Quoted in Ryan and Conlon, p. 45
44
Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 4, 1911, p. 558 in
Ryan and Conlon, p. 78
45
ibid, p. 79
46
ibid, p. 91
47
Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers, Melbourne 1988, p. 234
48
Edna Ryan, Women in Production in Australia in Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, Ed. Norma Grieve and Ailsa
Burns, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 266
49
From the Ten Hours Advocate in 1846, Quoted in Hartmann op. cit., p. 21
50
Summers op. cit., Her book is generally very well documented. But she gives no evidence to back up this assertion about equal
pay claims of unions in the 1920s.
51
Ray Markey, Women and Labour 1880-1900 in Women, Class and History, Ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle, Fontana/Collins,
1980, p. 84
52
Carol Bacchi, Evolution, Eugenics and Women: the impact of scientific theories on attitudes towards women 1870 1920 in
Windschuttle, p. 140
53
Markey op. cit., p. 95
54
ibid, p. 94. Markey correctly comments in a note on p. 109 that Summers presents a false idealist-materialist dichotomy in the
nature of class relations.
55
Ryan op. cit., pp. 33-34
56
Shaping Melbournes Future, published by the Victorian Government 1987
57
Australia Unveiled The Changing Face of a Nation, published by The Age, Melbourne 1989
58
Chris Harman, Base and Superstructure in International Socialism, Second series, No. 32, p. 16
59
Ann Curthoys, in her book For and Against Feminism, Allen & Unwin, 1988, says that just as she was being attracted to
Marxism, many women she knew were abandoning it under the influence of the ideas of Louis Althusser. Today the Marxist
journal Arena makes serious concessions to post-structuralism.
60
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice & Poststructuralist Theory, Basil Blackwell, 1988
61
Pringle op. cit., p. 42
62
Marx op. cit., p. 42
63
ibid, p. 36
64
See the debate in issues 6, 7 & 8 of Australian Feminist Studies
65