Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf’s position on the family significantly differed from those of Wollstonecraft and Mill. She viewed the patriarchal family to be a prototype of fascism for creating a male-dominated sex-gender system, and hence producing unequal distribution of power between the sexes. Woolf explores the ideological connection between private (family) and public (society) spaces: ‘the tyrannies of and servilities of the one are the tyrannies of and servilities of the other’.62 Therefore, the eradication of tyranny in the private sphere is key to ending it in public. Woolf illustrates that the exclusion of women from public affairs, denying them representation in public positions of prestige and power, renders society far from democratic. She goes on to contend that the continual relegation of women to the family and domestic sphere is the reason for their absence from public affairs as well as their lack of power within their families.
In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) challenged the ways in which femininity is constructed. Her argument that ‘[o];ne is not born, but rather, becomes, a woman’ explains that femininity and the traits attributed to women (for example passive, nonessential, and secondary) are not the result of biological, psychological, and intellectual differences between men and women, but rather are the products of differences in their situations.63 Questioning the validity of women’s ‘biological role’ as carers and nurturers would mean putting the biological family under scrutiny. The call to overthrow the myth of the ‘happy ←43 | 44→housewife’ and involve women in ‘meaningful works’ for self-fulfilment came in the early years of second-wave feminism. With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan challenged hegemonic sexism in the United States by exposing the myth that the roles ascribed to women were natural. For Friedan, the marketing industry and companies that sold household products benefited from the myth of the ‘happy housewife’, creating the ways in which familial problems are ignored. The ‘feminine mystique’, which resulted from women’s confinement to unending domestic responsibilities, was the reason for the ‘problem that has no name’, a term Friedan employed to explain women’s ongoing dissatisfaction in the family during the 1950s and 1960s. She encouraged middle-class educated women to minimise their familial obligations and involve themselves in ‘meaningful works’ such as careers, with the aim to develop their talents and potential. The argument was that the inclusion of women in public affairs and the workplace would solve their unhappiness and create a more egalitarian society.64 Since the 1960s, liberal feminism has been key to women’s demand for equal rights in wider society.
Marxist feminism critiques the family as a site of women’s exploitation under the economic system of capitalism and gender oppression under patriarchy. The writings of first-generation Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx determined that women’s liberation was dependent upon the economic transformation from capitalism to socialism. However, Marxist feminists such as Heidi Hartmann consider this to be unrealistic and suggests that ‘women should not trust men to liberate them after the revolution’.65 This is because it would mean the acceptance of women’s ongoing oppression until a particular yet undefined stage, one determined by men. Therefore, Hartmann calls for a synthesis of Marxism and feminism, abstaining from a relationship in which the latter is subordinate to the former.66 In this regard, Marxist feminism expands the Marxist theory of class by looking at gender and hence at the ideological connectedness between ←44 | 45→capitalism and patriarchy. Hartmann argues that while capitalism creates a hierarchal labour structure, patriarchy based on male hegemony determines the ordering of this structure, resulting in women being connected with the private and men with the public.67
It is in the family that women carry out their assigned tasks under the name of supporting men and children, including by cooking, doing laundry, cleaning, and childrearing. However, in socialist and communist movements, women at home were not recognised as a social class and hence their labour in the family was excluded from a discussion in relation to capitalist modes of production. Yet the tasks women carry out are key to sustaining capitalism, as they reserve a free and ready labour force required for production. Marxist feminism enabled the recognition of women as a social class and their labour in the family as part of the economy under capitalism. Eli Zaretsky critiques Juliet Mitchell and Shulamith Firestone’s conceptions of the economy, which he argues signifies ‘the production of goods and services to be sold’.68 For Zaretsky, this conception recognises that a woman hired to cook in a restaurant performs an economic activity, but it does not extend the same recognition to a housewife who cooks for her family. Such an understanding therefore excluded housewives and families from revolutionary politics and the struggle between ‘economic classes’.69 Marxist feminism challenges capitalism’s control of the family and men’s control of women, hence women’s double oppression under the workforce both at home and in public.
The main feminist objection towards the family has been a ‘[c];ritical analysis of the family, and efforts to change traditional family arrangements’, which inflicted upon women oppressions including domesticity, marriage, reproduction, and childrearing.70 Family has long been associated with the biological, natural and universal, as it is considered the domain of birth, nurturing, and other such events. This understanding was promoted by the nineteenth-century evolutionists who associated women with ‘an unchanging biological role’ while viewing men as ‘the ←45 | 46→agents of all social processes’.71 The term biological family, which was built upon the biological distinction between men and women, underwent a vigorous challenge and critique from radical feminism.
The start of the second-wave feminist movement in the early 1960s radically questioned the main reasons behind women’s oppression in the family and larger society. During this time, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Germaine Greer introduced a wide range of theoretical perspectives that called for a radical approach to feminism, one that considered biological differences between men and women as the main reason for the oppression and exploitation of the latter. The family is where women’s sexuality and reproduction are controlled by biology. In the patriarchal systems of family and society, men benefit from the daily support of women directly, and so create and contribute to situations in which women are oppressed. Therefore, radical feminists also hold men responsible for female subordination. In the late 1960s, radical feminists in the United States argued that patriarchy was evident in all societies as the root of gender oppression. For them, patriarchy was perpetuated by the family, which they argued needed to be abolished in order to remove the conditions that oppressed women.72 In the early 1970s, Firestone proposed pregnancy and motherhood as the conditions that create women’s exploitation and oppression. As a solution, she envisioned a post-patriarchal society in which ‘tyranny of the biological family would be broken’ and where ‘[t];he reproduction of the species by one sex […] would be replaced by […] artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either’.73 Although Firestone’s solution of alternative reproduction methods was found to be utopian in the following decades, her discussion was essential in demystifying the relation between reproduction, motherhood, and patriarchy, and in enabling other critics to explore these concepts. Radical feminists offered ‘new reproductive technologies’, advocated ‘opting out of family’, and proposed ‘separatism from men’ as solutions to end women’s oppression.74 These suggestions, though radical in mood, opened the path for ←46 | 47→exploration of alternative kinship and human relations that can be considered within the context of non-normative families.
During the 1970s, feminist criticism took a new direction, one that expanded existing criticism into a psychoanalytical approach.75 This led feminists to analyse the family in relation to early childhood experiences, motherhood, childrearing, and reproduction. The
