epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.51
As the communist/Marxist ideology envisages ‘a classless society’, it aims to regulate both modes of production in a way that would eradicate any class stratification in society. Among its proposed stages of economic development, communism will be the last stage where the whole society will be transformed into one family rather than being divided into different classes of family (that is, working, middle, and upper). Instead of analysing the family with regards to individuals (either women, men, or children), communism focuses on the ←39 | 40→relation between reproduction and capitalism, which transforms family into an economic unit together with ‘sex role differentiation’. As Irene Bruegel argues:
Capitalism exploits the differentiation of the sexes. It does this by differentiating between ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’, using women both as a cheap labour for employment in the more marginal and insecure jobs, and as a reserve army of labour. […] Thus it is in the interests of capitalism as a system to sustain sex role differentiation and the family as a reservoir of potential (latent) labour power.52
Through this role differentiation, capitalism creates a ready human labour force, and women’s participation in the market offers an opportunity for cheaper labour due to their socially specified inferior role at home. Therefore, as Heather A. Brown highlights in Marx on Gender and the Family (2012), Marx and Engels indirectly argue that ‘since the origins of class-society exists in the family, a classless society cannot be created and maintained so long as familial and gender oppression exits’.53 Lindsey German, a Marxist feminist, explains the relation between reproduction and capitalism: ‘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 the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact’.54 The Marxist/communist ideology envisages the transformation of the family via the economic transformations in historical development, say, from capitalism to socialism. In this sense, it critiques the family with regards to the material conditions such as private property that cause the inequalities between the sexes in society.
In Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (1976), Eli Zaretsky argues that the family is ‘already an integral part of the economy under capitalism’, and the bourgeois view that presents the family as ‘the basic unit of the society’ regardless of the individuals or classes ‘reinforce[s]; the deeply rooted traditions of male supremacy’.55 In Marxist and functionalist views of the family alike, men have been the reference and norm against which everything else is measured and discussed. From a functionalist perspective, women’s roles as mothers and wives contributed greatly to the sustenance of a stable society. Marxist/communist ←40 | 41→views critiqued this society for creating an unequal distribution of power and labour between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, while ignoring a greater unequal distribution of labour and power relations existent between men and women in the family. Women have been at the very centre of these theories, but their labour in the family has been excluded or made invisible. Feminist movements, contrary to Marxist and fundamentalist views, have prioritised womanly concerns and their problems in the family. The invisibility of women’s labour and their exclusion from wider society and from Marxist theory and politics have been what energised diverse feminist movements—liberal, radical, and Marxist—as part of their critique of the family.
Feminism and the Patriarchal Family
There have been diverse feminist views of familial arrangements, but feminists agree that families are ideological and political structures where humans become gendered. The central focus in feminist criticism is on the effect the family has on women. Feminist theory critiques the traditional family as a patriarchal unit. The patriarchy thrives through unequal treatment of men and women in family and society. For example, men benefit from women’s service in the family, and they are also privileged by a lack of competition in the relative absence of women in wider society. Women’s oppression under their assumed natural roles as wives, mothers, and daughters creates ways in which they are disadvantaged in public spheres through being given work akin to their familial obligations. Feminists claim these roles are ‘not natural but grow out of and are the expressions of a complex series of social relations: patriarchy, economic systems, legal and ideological structures, and early childhood experiences and their unconscious residues’.56 In other words, gender roles are learned and therefore can be changed in favour of an egalitarian family and society.
By focusing on women’s conditions in the family, feminists challenge patriarchal ideology, operating as a means of ‘holding together and legitimising the existing social, economic, political and gender systems’.57 The feminist critique of the family therefore puts extant social, political, economic, and patriarchal systems into question. In their critique, feminists analyse sub-systems of family such as marriage, pregnancy, childrearing, and domesticity as key to the construction and eradication of gender inequalities. Each feminist movement has critiqued ←41 | 42→the family as a site of female oppression and gender inequalities. Although feminist critiques of the family vary in their orientations and emphasis, they all, with their distinctive and specific concerns, look at the ways in which family and its obligations are central to women’s oppression and so, the creation of an unjust society. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the feminist perspectives called for equality in all spheres of life. These calls ‘contributed greatly to the changes in family law’ such as The Abortion Act 1967 and The Divorce Reform Act 1969 in the UK, which successively enabled women to have control—though limited—over their sexuality and made divorce relatively easier.58
All feminist movements agree that gender roles have shaped human behaviours in a way that disadvantages half of society (women). On the other hand, behaviours that are not generated by gendered extremes, such as strong men and weak women, would relieve the pressures on men, women, and children, and enable them to focus more on their individual capacities rather than gendered ones. For example, a family where parenthood and domesticity are shared equally would not only lessen the burden on women, but it would also contribute to men’s capacities as nurturers. This would in return mean equal participation in wider society, enabling women to fully enter the public sphere and develop their human potentials. Variations in feminist movements are not due to ambivalence, but rather suggest that what is a problem for women is a problem for the entire society, requiring multiple solutions from distinctive perspectives.
The recognition of the family as a subject of feminism dates back to the early years of liberal feminism in the late eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft advocated an egalitarian transformation of family and society where women could have the same rights as men. She critiqued patriarchal relations and inequalities in the family. With the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft called for equality in marriage, access to paid work, and women’s education. She argued that men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and therefore men need to follow the same moral and virtuous values expected of women.59 In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, in his ←42 | 43→The Subjection of Women (1869), highlighted family ‘as a school of despotism, in which virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished’.60 These virtues can be transformed into freedom with a just family: ‘The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom’.61 Mill sees the family as a sphere where women need to spend their energies to gain equalities in wider society. This is because a virtuous family, for Mill, is a prerequisite for justice in other social and political spheres. Both Wollstonecraft and Mill acknowledged family as central to women’s development as much as it is to do with their oppression.
The eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal
