but we must be careful not to lose the connection to the pre-existing historical notion of mother and all this concept reflects about the relations of male supremacy.
These relations within the family devalue women in the marketplace when they seek employment. In 1970, only 7 percent of American women (as opposed to 40 percent of American men) earned more than $10,000 a year. Stated differently, 93 percent of the American women who worked earned less than $10,000.19 Woman’s labor in the home becomes a liability for finding jobs for pay outside the home. She is paid less in the labor force because of the relations which tie her to the family. Her labor is defined as free or cheap.
We can already see that women are ghettoized in the labor force and that their work there does not challenge the male supremacist organization of society. The influx of women into the lowest ranks of the labor force reflects the patriarchal necessity of male hierarchy for the society at large. Male supremacy is maintained through class hierarchy. This inflexibility is most clearly seen in the contradiction in women’s lives—the double day of work. Woman is both worker and mother.
What are the relations which define a woman as mother in the first place? What defines the patriarchal organization of labor? In other words, why are women oppressed as women? The answer often given is that a woman’s biology distinguishes her from a man. But even though a woman’s relation to reproduction may have initially defined her as the exchange object rather than man,20 the history of male supremacy and its particular relation to capitalism reflects a series of relations which are not now limited to this unique characteristic. There are a whole series of relations that exist as a result of this definition of woman as reproducer that cannot be “reduced” to their origin. Both cultural and political relations have been defined and redefined to maintain the hierarchy of sexual relations. The initial reason for the hierarchy—perhaps a fear of woman’s reproductive capacity, given the lack of biological knowledge of just what it entailed—no longer exists as such. But society still needs a sexual hierarchy because of the way its relations have been structured since then.
If the distinguishing biological characteristic between men and women is woman’s reproductive capacity, then we need to see why and how it is used as part of male supremacist relations, which have constructed a more troublesome system of inequality than the initial source. This is not to understate the importance of understanding woman’s biological self as a reproducer, but it is to say that this understanding must entail the political relations which define it at any moment. The relations of production and reproduction, not an abstracted notion of biology, define the relationship woman has to herself and society as a reproductive being. To focus on the fact that woman as reproducer is the universal crosscultural characteristic of male supremacy and therefore the source of the problem is to formulate the problem incorrectly. Looking at this same reality—the control of women by reproduction—does not focus sufficiently on the relations defining reproduction in the society. It is not reproduction itself that is the problem but the relations which define and reinforce it.
Patriarchy has been sustained through the sexual division of labor and society which has been based on a cultural, social, economic usage of woman’s body as a vessel of reproduction. Women were exchanged as gifts for what they could bear. Inequalities arose from the mechanism used to celebrate and/or control woman’s position as reproducer.21 Although the systems of exchange have changed, the relations which they produced became part and are still a part (although redefined) of patriarchal history. Because women were often given and were not the givers, because they had no control over the arrangements surrounding their lives, because they often found themselves in new surroundings and ignorant of the ways of the community, women came to experience the exchange system as a system of relations which excluded them from decisions, purposive activity, and control. This exists, although in somewhat different form, in capitalist patriarchal society. Women marry, lose their names, move to new communities when their husbands’ jobs necessitate it, feel lonely, and, find it difficult to meet people. And even though the majority of women in lower economic groups work in the labor force, men are treated with priority. Lesbians and other women who choose not to identify closely with a man and conform to the heterosexual norm of marriage, family, and housewife are even more isolated and ostracized. These relations express the priority given men. They define a certain control over the woman’s life.
When one looks at relations of reproduction, what one really focuses upon is a system of hierarchical control and ordering which all existing societies have needed and used. Patriarchy as male supremacy has supplied this order, even while the economic organizations of societies change. This is not to imply that patriarchal systems of control have not changed, but they have changed while maintaining their male supremacist structure and without altering the basic impact of male supremacy. During the change from feudalism to capitalism, however, the basic economic class structure and its control system does change.
Because patriarchy is a system of power, it is incomplete to say that men are the oppressors without explaining that they are oppressors because they embody the relations of patriarchy. To speak of individual men as “things,” rather than as reflecting the relations of power is to conceive of male power in abstract rather than concrete form. A man as a biological being, were he to exist outside patriarchal relations, would be a hollow shell. In patriarchal history, it is his biology that identifies him with the relations of power. Although some wish to say that men’s power is expressed on an individual level through physical strength, I think that this is a true but very limited notion of the power men have in the system of patriarchy. It is rather the relations of sexual hierarchy that allow men to express their power. They have internalized the relations and act upon them daily. A man’s sexual power is not within his individual being alone. To destroy patriarchal relations we must destroy the structures of sexual, racial, and class hierarchy partially maintained through the sexual division of labor. If we change the social relations of power, men have to change, because they will no longer have their hierarchical base.
Any of the particular oppressions experienced by women in capitalist patriarchy exhibit relations of the society. As things, they are completely neutral. Abstracted from reality there is nothing innately oppressive about contraception, pregnancy, abortion, childrearing, or affectionate familial relations. However, they all express a very particular oppression for women in this society. If contraceptive methods were devised for both men and women, with a real concern for our health rather than profits, and if abortion was not laden with patriarchal values and did not cost more money than it should, contraception and abortion would be different experiences.22 If men and women believed that childrearing was a social responsibility, rather than a woman’s responsibility, if we did not believe that childhood affection was dependent on privacy rather than intimacy, the “relations” of childrearing would be significantly different. If being pregnant did not involve a woman in patriarchal medical care, if it did not mean having to deal with the relations defining private health care, if it did not mean the loss of pay and the incurrence of financial obligations, and if it meant bringing life into a socialist feminist society, the act of childbirth would take on a wholly different meaning.
Emphasis on the patriarchal experience in capitalist patriarchy reveals, therefore, the relations of power in any particular moment in society. Since life activity in this society is always in process, in process through power relations, we must try to understand the process rather than isolated moments. To understand the process is to understand the way the process may be changed.
Notes
1. See the literature of radical feminism: Ti Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links, 1974); Ingrid Bengis, Combat in the Erogenous Zone (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam, 1970); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970); Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970) and Monster (New York: Vintage, 1972); Red Stockings, Feminist Revolution (New York: Red Stockings, Inc., 1975).
2. I am particularly interested in defining
