which maintain social life, defines the problems we should concentrate on, and acts as a set of criteria for evaluating the strategies we develop.2 Theory has an even broader role, however. As Antonio Gramsci has pointed out, “One can construct, on a specific practice, a theory which, by coinciding and identifying itself with the decisive elements of the practice itself, can accelerate the historical process that is going on, rendering practice more homogeneous, more coherent, more efficient in all its elements, and thus, in other words, developing its potential to the maximum.”3 Thus, theory itself can be a force for change.
At the same time, however, Gramsci proposes that we expand our understanding of theory in a different direction. We must understand that theorizing is not just something done by academic intellectuals but that a theory is always implicit in our activity and goes so deep as to include our very understanding of reality. Not only is theory implicit in our conception of the world, but our conception of the world is itself a political choice.4 That is, we can either accept the categories given to us by capitalist society or we can begin to develop a critical understanding of our world. If we choose the first alternative, our theory may remain forever implicit. In contrast, to choose the second is to commit ourselves to working out a critical and explicit theory. The political action of feminists over most of the last decade provides a basis for articulating the theory implicit in our practice.5 Making the theory explicit is difficult but necessary to improve the work feminists are doing.
The Nature of Feminist Theory
Women who call themselves feminists disagree on many things. To talk in such unitary terms about a social movement so diverse in its aims and goals may seem at first to be a mistake. There is a women’s movement which appears on television, has national organizations, and is easy for the media to reach and present as representative of feminist thought. But there is a second movement, one harder to find, that is made up of small groups and local organizations whose members work on specific local projects, a movement which came together around the immediate needs of women in a variety of cities, a movement whose energies have gone directly into work for change. It is these groups that form the basis for my discussion of feminist theory. These groups were concerned with practical action—rape crisis centers, women’s centers, building women’s communities, etc. In coming together as feminists to confront the problems which dominate their lives, women have built a movement profoundly based on practice. Indeed, one of the major tasks for the women’s movement is precisely the creation of revolutionary theory out of an examination of our practice.6
All these groups share a world view that differs from that of most socialist movements in advanced capitalist countries, and that is at the same time surprisingly close to Marx’s world view. It is this mode of analysis, with its own conception of social theory as well as the concrete theories we are developing out of it, that are the sources of feminism’s power and the reason I can argue that through our practice, feminists have become the most orthodox of Marxists. As Lukacs argued, orthodoxy in Marxist theory refers exclusively to method.7
At bottom, feminism is a mode of analysis, a method of approaching life and politics, a way of asking questions and searching for answers, rather than a set of political conclusions about the oppression of women. Women are applying that method to their own experiences as women in order to transform the social relations which define their existence. Feminists deal directly with their own daily lives—something which accounts for the rapid spread of this movement. Others have argued that socialist feminism must be recognized as a definite tendency within Marxism generally; in contrast, I am suggesting that because feminists have reinvented Marx’s method, the women’s movement can provide a model for the rest of the left in developing theory and strategy.8
The practice of small-group consciousness-raising—with its stress on examining and understanding experience and on connecting personal experience to the structures which define women’s lives—is the clearest example of the method basic to feminism. Through this practice women have learned that it was important to build their analysis from the ground up, beginning with their own experiences. They examined their lives not only as thinkers but, as Marx would have suggested, with all their senses.9 Women drew connections between their personal experiences and political generalities about the oppression of women; indeed they used their personal experience to develop those generalities. We came to understand our experience, our past, in a way that transformed both our experience and ourselves.10
The power of the method feminists developed grows out of the fact that it enables women to connect their everyday lives with an analysis of the social institutions which shape them. The institutions of capitalism (including its imperialist aspect), patriarchy, and white supremacy cease to be abstractions; they become lived, real aspects of daily experience and activity. We see the concrete interrelations among them.
All this means that within the feminist movement, an important role for theory has been reemphasized—one in which theorists work out and make “coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity.”11 Feminism as a mode of analysis, especially when consciousness-raising is understood as basic to that method, requires a redefinition of the concept of intellectual or theorizer, a recasting of this social role in terms of everyday life.
Because each of us is a potential theorist, intellectual, and activist, education comes to have a very different role in the women’s movement than it does in the rest of the left today. The kind of political education feminists are doing for themselves differs fundamentally from what I would call instruction, from being taught the “correct political line.” Education—as opposed to instruction—is organically connected to everyday life.12 It both grows out of and contributes to our understanding of it.
Personal and Political Change
“If what we change does not change us/we are playing with blocks.”13
Feminist emphasis on everyday life leads to a second area of focus: the integration of personal and political change. Since we come to know the world (to change it and be changed by it) through our everyday activity, everyday life must be the basis for our political work. Even the deepest philosophical questions grow out of our need to understand our own lives.14 Such a focus means that reality for us consists of “sensuous human activity, practice.”15 We recognize that we produce our existence in response to specific problems posed for us by reality. By working out the links between the personal and the political, and by working out the links between daily life and social institutions, we have begun to understand existence as a social process, the product of human activity. Moreover, the realization that we not only create our social world but can change it leads to a sense of our own power and provides energy for action.
Feminism as a method makes us recognize that human activity also changes us. A fundamental redefinition of the self is an integral part of action for political change.16
If our selves are social phenomena and take their meaning from the society of which we are a part, developing an independent sense of self necessarily calls other areas of our lives into question. We must ask how our relationships with other people can foster self-definition rather than dependence and can accommodate our new strengths. That is, if our individuality is the ensemble of our social relations, “to create one’s personality means to acquire consciousness of them and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations.”17 Clearly, since we do not act to produce and reproduce our lives in a vacuum, changed consciousness and changed definitions of the self can only occur in conjunction with a restructuring of the social (both societal and personal) relations in which each of us is involved.
Thus, feminism leads us to oppose the institutions of capitalism and white supremacy as well as patriarchy. By calling attention to the specific experiences of individuals, feminism calls attention to the totality of social relations,
