and society expresses the most basic hierarchical division in our society between masculine and feminine roles. It is the basic mechanism of control for patriarchal culture. It designates the fact that roles, purposes, activity, one’s labor, are determined sexually. It expresses the very notion that the biological distinction, male/female, is used to distinguish social functions and individual power.26
Radical feminists have not only found the analysis of Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Taylor incomplete, but they have, in much the same way, found the politics and theories of today’s left insufficient: existing radical analyses of society also fail to relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system. Sexual, not economic, power seemed to be central to any larger and meaningful revolutionary analysis. These women were not satisfied with the Marxist definition of power, or with the equation between women’s oppression and exploitation. Economic class did not seem to be at the center of their lives.27 History was perceived as patriarchal, and its struggles have been struggles between the sexes. The battle lines are drawn between men and women, rather than between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the determining relations are of reproduction, not production.
For radical feminists patriarchy is defined as a sexual system of power in which the male possesses superior power and economic privilege. Patriarchy is the male hierarchical ordering of society. Although the legal-institutional base of patriarchy was more explicit in the past, the basic relations of power remain intact today. The patriarchal system is preserved, via marriage and the family, through the sexual division of labor and society. Patriarchy is rooted in biology rather than in economics or history. Manifested through male force and control, the roots of patriarchy are located in women’s reproductive selves. Woman’s position in this power hierarchy is defined not in terms of the economic class structure but in terms of the patriarchal organization of society.
Through this analysis, radical feminists bridge the dichotomy between the personal and the public. Sex as the personal becomes political as well, and women share their position of oppression because of the very sexual politics of the society. The structuring of society through the sexual division limits the activities, work, desires, and aspirations of women. “Sex is a status category with political implications.”28
2. Shulamith Firestone: Sexual Dialectics
In her book Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, Shulamith Firestone offered a paradigmatic expression of radical feminism. The specific oppression that women experience, she argued, is directly related to their unique biology. Woman’s reproductive function is inherently central to her oppression; thus, too, is the biological family. According to Firestone, “the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based.”29 Men and women are anatomically different and hence not equally privileged. The domination of one group by another is then derived from this biological male/female distinction.30 (Although there has been change and development since 1970 among radical feminists, as can be seen in Robin Morgan’s new book Going Too Far, the unifying thread among them is the concept of sex class as primary to understanding the relation of power.)
Firestone’s presentation of the idea of a sex class obviously departs from the classical Marxist meaning of class as an economic category denoting a relationship to the means of production. Woman, as a sex, is a class; man is the other and opposing class. This novel idea began the long and important process of trying to articulate the dynamic of sexual power. However, in trying to answer and reject the economic theory of power, as presented by Marxists, she artificially separates the sexual and economic spheres, replacing capitalism with patriarchy as the oppressive system. She fails to move further through an additive or synthesizing perspective because she chooses to deal with sexuality as the key oppression of modern times rather than to view oppression as a more complex reality. It is not that Firestone does not see economic oppression as problematic for women but that she does not view it as the key source of oppression. The either/or formulations about woman’s situation stunt the analysis, so that she cannot deal with the complex mix of woman’s existence. Dichotomy wins out over woman’s complexity. Thus, much as Marxist analysis is not extended to the specificity of women’s oppression, Firestone’s version of radical feminism cannot understand the full reality or historical specificity of our economic existence. Patriarchy remains a generalized ahistorical power structure.
In this framework the feminist revolution involves the elimination of male privilege through the elimination of sexual distinction itself and the destruction of the biological family as the basic form of social organization. Woman will then be freed from her oppressive biology, the economic independence of women and children will be created, and sexual freedoms not yet realized will develop.
The problem, however, is that woman’s body becomes the defining criteria of her existence. It also becomes the central focus in terms of freedom from her reproductive biology. This is a negative definition of freedom—freedom from—where what we need is a positive model of human development—freedom to develop the integration of mind and body. While clearly sexuality is the unique oppression of woman, this does not mean that it encompasses the totality of her situation or that it can express the full dimensions of human potentiality. It says what is different about women, but it doesn’t connect woman to the general structure of power. It cannot explain the complexity of power relationships in our society.
There are further problems. Firestone intends to present a synthesis of Marx and Freud. She attempts to do so, however, by negating the social and historical framework of Marx, by treating woman’s biology as an atemporal static condition. But inequality is inequality only in a social context, while Firestone thinks of it in terms of nature. Women’s and men’s bodies differ biologically, but to call this an inequality is to impose a social assessment on a biological difference.31 She acknowledges that one cannot justify a discriminatory sex class system in terms of its origin in nature, but one cannot explain it in such terms either.32 Firestone thus in effect accepts the patriarchal ideology of our own culture, when what is needed is an analysis of how woman’s sexuality has been interpreted differently throughout history.
For example, although sex roles existed in feudal society they were experienced differently than in advanced capitalist society because economic and sexual material life were different. Although the nuclear family is precapitalist as well as capitalist, it is actualized in different forms in different societies. To know there are universal elements to women’s oppression is important, but it has limited meaning when the specificity of our existence is relegated to the universal. All history may be patriarchal, but this does not mean that the differences between historical periods is not important. It is the specifics which elucidate the general meaning of patriarchal existence. Patriarchy, in this sense, should be understood not merely as a biological system but a political one with a specific history.
Firestone’s asocial, ahistorical framework becomes particularly limiting when she discusses technology. It is her view that technology will free woman from her body, through contraception and extrauterine reproduction. Technology is therefore the key to woman’s liberation. But although contraception has freed women in important ways, the question remains whether birth control, abortion rights, and so on, will ever be allowed to develop to the degree that would allow woman’s role as reproducer to become irrelevant to her social position. Firestone’s analysis loses its plausibility when we understand that technology is an intrinsic dimension of a society’s power structure. Male ruling-class needs define technological developments; without a change of those in power (and hence of those who define the purposes of technology), technology is an unlikely liberator.33
The thrust of Firestone’s analysis is to isolate sex oppression from the economic class organization of society although she realizes herself that economic suffering contributes to woman’s oppression at least as much as any female ills.34 She does note that a woman, even when well educated, will not earn as much money as a man. A woman also suffers from this lack of money when she decides to care for children. This in
