Limits of Feminism,” Ms. 1 (June 1973): 110.
52. Nancy Hartsock, “Feminist Theory and the Development of Revolutionary Strategy” (Johns Hopkins University, unpublished paper), p. 19, and in this book. Portions of this paper appear as “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Quest 2, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 67–79.
This is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in The Insurgent Sociologist 7, no. 3 (Spring 1977). The article was first delivered as a paper in the spring of 1975 at Cornell University’s women studies weekly seminar.
SOME NOTES ON THE RELATIONS OF CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY
Zillah Eisenstein
This article attempts to clarify socialist feminism’s method of analysis. This involves a refocusing and redefinition, by feminism, of the historical Marxian approach. Radical feminist theory can be used to redirect the Marxian method toward understanding the structure of women’s oppression, particularly in terms of the sex-class structure, the family, and the hierarchical sexual division of labor and society.1 One growing school of socialist feminists has been trying to do just this.2 This integration is based upon a commitment to the transformation of the Marxist method through feminist analysis.3 The transformed Marxist method recognizes the previously unrecognized sexual spheres of power and the feminist questions require a new understanding of the specific historical processes of power. Juliet Mitchell fails to understand this systhesis when she suggests “we should ask the feminist questions but try to come up with some Marxist answers.”4 This implies a dichotomy between feminism and Marxist analysis, which stunts the analysis of socialist feminism.5
Refocusing the Marxist method (as well as its content) via feminism necessitates a reordering of priorities, particularly the question of consciousness in relation to the conditions of society. Questions of consciousness become a part of the discussion of the social reality. Reality itself comes to encompass the relations of class and sex and race. The relations between the private (personal) and public (political) become a major focus having particular consequence for the relations defining sexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. Along with this comes a focus on the importance of ideology. Thus, the dialectic will be self-consciously extended to the relations between consciousness, ideology, and social reality. This new way of viewing things—that society’s ideas and people’s consciousness are part of the objective social reality and that they operate out of the relations of sex, class, and race—is a product of the feminist assault on the inadequacies of the left, both in theory and practice.
The refocused Marxist methodology means using the theory of social relations to express the relations of capitalist patriarchy.6 Although this methodology is elucidated through the notion of class society and class conflict in Marx’s writing, it is possible to distinguish the theory of social relations from the content given it in existing Marxist analysis. It is important and possible to utilize the method while incorporating and yet moving beyond class analysis. Class analysis is necessary to our understanding but it is not sufficient for our purposes.
Marxist analysis is directed to the study of power. We can use its tools to understand any particular expression of power. That the tools have not been sufficiently used to do so is not an indictment of the analysis but of those who have used it. Marx used his theory of social relations—understanding “things” in their concrete connections—to understand the relations of power in society. Although his analysis was explicated through a discussion of class conflict, his method of analyzing social relations can be used to examine patriarchal struggle as well. This is different, however, from saying we can use the Marxist theory of social relations to answer feminist questions. This would put us back with Firestone’s analysis of a materialist history based on biology. Rather, we must use the transformed method to understand the points of contact between patriarchal and class history and to explicate the dialectic between sex and class, sex and race, race and class, and sex, race, and class.
It is impossible to develop an analysis of woman’s oppression which has a clear political purpose and strategy unless we deal with reality as it exists. The problem with radical feminism is that it has tried to do this by abstracting sex from other relations of power in society.7 It is not that radical feminists are unaware of these other relations of power, but they disconnect them. Class and race struggles are necessary for the understanding of patriarchal history; they are not separate histories in practice, although history is often written as if they were. Unless these relations are taken into account, male supremacy is viewed as a disconnected thing, not a process or power relation.
Much of the leftist analysis that spawned radical feminism did not take the commitments of the Marxist method seriously enough to transform it in necessary ways. It refused to continue to probe the question of power in its fullest material and ideological sense. Uniting radical feminism, class analysis, and the transformed Marxist methodology we now must focus upon the processes which define patriarchal and liberal ideology and social existence.
Developing Socialist Feminist Questions
A good starting point for a theory of woman’s oppression is with the questions why and how women are oppressed. Juliet Mitchell, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, states:
It seems to me that “why did it happen” and “historically when” are both false questions. The questions that should, I think, be asked in place of these are: how does it take place in our society? … in other words, we can start by asking how does it happen now?8
It may be true that the question, “Why did it happen?” is a false question; even if we could find out why it happened then, that might not explain why it happens now; nevertheless, it is still important to ask “Why does it happen now?” Beyond this, to fully elucidate how it happens now one must ask why sexual hierarchy and oppression are maintained. Why and how are connected questions. Either taken in isolation gives us only part of the answer. The question of how directs us to the immediate relations defining existing power arrangements, to the process of oppression. The question of why directs us to these same relations but necessitates our dealing with the existence of patriarchal history as a real force. In this sense both questions are necessary. They elucidate each other by interrelating the specific and yet universal dimensions of male supremacy.
The how and why of woman’s oppression has not been integrated in feminist theory. Radical feminism has asked why women are oppressed rather than how the process of power functions. Shulamith Firestone’s answer was that woman’s reproductive function is inherently central to her oppression. “The sexual imbalance of power is biologically based.”9 Women are defined as reproducers, as a sex class. How women are oppressed is less clearly articulated, and it was Ti Grace Atkinson who began to discuss this. In Atkinson’s concept, sex class becomes a political construct. Women are not oppressed because of the biological fact of reproduction, but are oppressed by men who define this reproductive “capacity” as a function. “The truth is that childbearing isn’t the function of women. The function of childbearing is the function of men oppressing women.”10 It is society that collapses women’s purpose with her biological capacity. Sex class is not biological oppression, it is cultural oppression. The agent of oppression is the cultural and political definition of human sexuality as “heterosexuality.” The institutions of family and marriage, and the protective legal and cultural systems which enforce heterosexuality, are the bases of the political repression of women.
Although radical feminists ask why women are oppressed and are now beginning to ask how this comes about, they most often treat history as one piece—as patriarchal history. Although this brings great richness to the radical feminist analysis, by presenting a unifying history for women, we need to understand the particular forms of patriarchy in different historical periods. Otherwise we are left with an abstract rather than concrete history.
