at the Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, summer, 1975: that woman’s oppression reflects the problem of capitalism and patriarchy. Radical feminism and Marxist analysis are both viewed as necessary elements in the theory.
3. I am indebted to correspondence with Marla Erlien for clarification of this point.
4. Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 99.
5. Firestone’s analysis is limited by this structural dichotomy. She says she will develop a “materialist history” (Marxist method) based on sex itself (feminist question). In the end she is unable to construct this history because of this dichotomy. Her substitution of sexual oppression for class oppression distorts reality. It limits the possibilities of developing a “real materialism” based on sex and class. See Firestone, Dialectic of Sex. Also see Mitchell’s discussion of Firestone in Woman’s Estate.
6. See Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973) and Capital, vols. 1 and 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
7. At the same moment that radical feminism suffers from abstraction by dealing insufficiently with economic class reality it is responsible for explicating the “personal” sexual experience, and in this way remedies the earlier abstraction of the Marxist method. For a discussion of this see Nancy Hartsock, “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Quest 2, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 67–80, and this volume.
8. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 364–65.
9. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 9.
10. Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, p. 5.
11. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 137. See also Oliver Cox, Caste, Class and Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959) and Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (New York: Harvest Books, 1933).
12. See Linda Gordon, Families (a New England Free Press pamphlet); A. Gordon, M. J. Buhle, N. Schrom, “Women in American Society,” Radical America 5 (July-August 1971); Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (Clifton, N. J.: Augustus Kelly, 1969); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (a Socialist Revolution pamphlet).
13. See literature on how socialist countries treat the particularly patriarchal elements of their society: “Women in Transition, Cuba Review 4, no. 2 (September 1974); Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1974); Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1972); “Women in Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Dhofar, China and Japan,” Red Rag, no. 9 (June 1975); Judith Stacey, “When Patriarchy Kowtows: The Significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 2, no. 43 (1975) and in this volume; Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); Linda Gordon, The Fourth Mountain: Women in China (a New England Free Press pamphlet).
14. See Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973); Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
15. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1 and 2 (reprinted from Black Scholar, December 1971).
16. See the varied discussions of women’s domestic labor: Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation (a New England Free Press pamphlet); Peggy Morton, “Women’s Work Is Never Done,” in Women Unite (Toronto: Canadian Women’s Educational Press, 1972); Mariarosa dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” and Selma James, “A Woman’s Place” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (a Falling Wall Press, Ltd. pamphlet, 1972); Ira Gerstein, “Domestic Work and Capitalism” and Lise Vogel, “The Earthly Family,” Radical America 7 (July-October 1973); Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism,” New Left Review 83 (January-February 1973), with postscript in Red Pamphlet, no. 8 (Britain: IMG pub.); B. Magas, H. Wainwright, Maragaret Coulson, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism—A Critique” and Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labor,” New Left Review 89 (January-February 1975), and, for the latter, this volume.
17. See “Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970) for a discussion of the relationship between production and consumption. See also Amy Bridges and Batya Weinbaum, “The Other Side of the Paycheck,” in this volume.
18. See Ann Oakley, Woman’s Work (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
19. Karen Lindsey, “Do Women Have Class?” Liberation 20, no. 2 (January-February 1977): 18.
20. I am very much indebted here to the discussion of Rubin, “Traffic in Women.”
21. See Rubin, “Traffic in Women”; Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; and Miriam Kramnick, “Ideology of Motherhood: Images and Myths,” paper delivered at Cornell Women’s Studies Program, 14 November 1975.
22. Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
FEMINIST THEORY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY
Nancy Hartsock
A number of writers have detailed problems of the left in America. They have pointed out that it has remained out of touch with large numbers of people, and that it has been unable to build a unified organization, or even to promote a climate in which to debate socialist issues. The left has been criticized for having a prefabricated theory made up of nineteenth-century leftovers, a strategy built on scorn for innovation in politics or for expanding political issues. Too often leftist groups have held that the working class was incapable of working out its own future and that those who would lead the working class to freedom would be those who had memorized the sacred texts and were equipped with an all-inclusive theory that would help them organize the world.
While such a list of criticisms presents a caricature of the left as a whole, it points to a number of real problems,1 and overcoming them will require a reorientation. Here I can only deal with one aspect of the task: the role of feminist theory and the political practice of the women’s movement as a model for the rest of the left.
I want to suggest that the women’s movement can provide the basis for building a new and authentic American socialism. It can provide a model for ways to build revolutionary strategy and ways to develop revolutionary theories which articulate with the realities of advanced capitalism. Developing such a model requires a redefinition of theory in general in the light of a specific examination of the nature of feminist theory and practice, a reanalysis of such fundamental questions as the nature of class, and a working out of the implications of feminist theory for the kinds of organizations we need to build.
Theory and Feminist Theory
Theory is fundamental to any revolutionary movement. Our theory gives us a description
