M.A.(Political Science) Part-II Paper-VIII (Option XI) Semester-IV Women and Political Theory

M.A.(Political Science) Part-II Paper-VIII (Option XI) Semester-IV Women and Political Theory LESSON NO. 1.7 AUTHOR : SAMARDEEP KAUR Socialist feminism Introduction Socialist feminists arose in the late 1960’s. It is a branch of feminism that focuses upon both the public and private spheres of a woman's life and argues that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression. It is a two-pronged theory that broadens Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Although, it grew out of the same social ferment and the same consciousness raising groups that produced radical feminism yet it reject radical feminism’s main claim that patriarchy is the only or primary source of oppression of women. Rather, socialist feminists assert that women are unable to be free due to their financial dependence on males in society. Women are subjects to the male rulers in capitalism due to an uneven balance in wealth. They see economic dependence as the driving force of women’s subjugation to men. Further, socialist feminists see women’s liberation as a necessary part of larger quest for social, economic and political justice. They draws upon many concepts found in Marxism; such as a historical materialist point of view, which means that they relate their ideas to the material and historical conditions of people’s lives. Socialist feminists thus consider how the sexism and gendered division of labor of each historical era is determined by the economic system of the time. Those conditions are largely expressed through capitalist and patriarchal relations. Socialist feminists, thus reject the Marxist notion that class and class struggle are the only defining aspects of history and economic development. Marx asserted that when class oppression was overcome, gender oppression would vanish as well. According to socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression as a sub-class of class oppression is immature and much of the work of socialist feminists has gone towards specifying how gender and class work together to create distinct forms of oppression and privilege for women and men of each class. For example, they observe that women’s class status is generally derivative of her husband’s class or occupational status, e.g., a secretary that marries her boss assumes his class status. Thus, they attempted to produce a creative synthesis of radical feminism and Marxist feminism. No doubt, there way of make this synthesis is different. The problem of the subordination of women and the need for their liberation was recognized by all the great socialist thinkers in the nineteenth century. It is part of the classical heritage of the revolutionary movement. Yet, for M.A. (Political Science) PART II 91 PAPER VIII (Option XI) most of the mid-twentieth century, the problem became a subsidiary, if not an invisible element in the preoccupations of socialists. Perhaps no other major issue was so forgotten. Throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s a resurgent women’s movement emerged across many parts of the world. This time women were fighting to go beyond the right to vote and for formal equality in law. Despite the gains their mothers and grandmothers had made, women in the West still suffered clear discrimination in employment and education, as well as continued oppressive attitudes from the men in their lives. The right to vote had not changed this, and the lack of female representation or male politicians campaigning on women’s issues in most parliaments created a sense of anger and frustration. This became known as the second wave of feminism, after the first wave of struggles for the right to vote in the first half of the 20th century. Juliet Mitchell is one of modern socialists of United Kingdom. In her important book, Women’s Estate, Mitchell offered a rigorous criticism of classical socialist theory, criticizing it for locating woman’s oppression too narrowly in the family and in an undifferentiated manner. She rejects the reduction of woman’s problem to her incapacity to work, which stresses her simple subordination to the institutions of private property. According to her, “we are dealing with two autonomous areas: the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy.” She defines four basic structures in which woman’s powerlessness is rooted. These “structures” of (a) production, (b) reproduction, (c) sexuality, and (d) socialization of children define the four-dimensional existence of women in capitalist society. To be able to cope with the series of oppressions women experience, Mitchell thinks it first necessary to differentiate among them. Reproduction is the “natural” role in producing children. The biological function of maternity is a universal, a temporal fact which has come to define woman’s existence. Woman is socializer in that “woman’s biological destiny as mother becomes a cultural job in her role as a socializer of children.” The causal flow which Mitchell constructs of woman’s oppressive existence derives from woman’s capacity as reproducer and of its connected consequences for her social and economic activity. Woman’s biological capacity defines her social and economic purpose. Maternity has set up the family as an historical necessity, and the family has become woman’s world. Hence woman is excluded from production and public life, which results in sexual inequality and in woman’s resulting powerlessness. The four structures are meant to be inclusive of women’s activity. Production or work is activity which exists both within and outside the family. Reproduction most often takes place within the family structure, whereas the structure of sexuality affects women in all areas of life. The socialization of children which is done by mothers is located within the family, although socialization takes place at all times. Mitchell locates woman’s oppression through structures which, though M.A. (Political Science) PART II 92 PAPER VIII (Option XI) not limited to the family, do not exclude it. Both the family and society in general are implicated in woman’s oppression. Thus Mitchell is led to conclude that, by focusing on the destruction of the family, one does not necessarily substantially alter woman’s situation. For Mitchell, “socialism would properly mean not the abolition of the family but the diversification of the socially acknowledged relationships which are forcibly and rigidly compressed into it.” Mitchell analyzes the family in capitalism as a supportive pillar to woman’s oppressive condition, in terms of its support both of capitalism and of the sexual division of labor and society. According to her, capitalism sees conflict and disruption as very much a part of people’s lives. The family provides the affection bonds and a medium of calm for life to be maintained amidst the disruption. The family supports capitalism economically in that it provides a productive labor force at the same time that it supplies the market with an arena for massive consumption. The family also performs an ideological role in that it cultivates the notions of individualism, freedom, and equality basic to the belief structure of society, even if they are at odds with social and economic reality. The importance of Mitchell’s analysis consists in her picturing of the different dimensions of woman’s activity without denying her sexuality or her class oppression. She focuses on the very powerlessness that women experience because they are reproductive beings, sexual beings, working individuals, and socializers of children. She makes it clear that woman’s oppression is based in part on the support the family gives the capitalist system in trapping woman in sexual and class oppression via these different structures. In this analysis, power is seen in its more complex reality. We are still left, however, with the basic problem of clarifying the relationship of the family and the political economy in capitalist patriarchal society. In spite of its title, which may put many sociologists off, her work Psychoanalysis and Feminism should be of interest to those who are concerned with the relationship of family structure to personality. Mitchell interprets Freud as saying that women's secondary status is not a result of their biology (in spite of his "anatomy is destiny" statement) but rather of structural features of human kinship systems. Even though she is not a biological determinist, and argues convincingly that Freud was not one either, the implications of her analysis of sexism are pessimistic. She only hints at a positive solution while dwelling at length on Freud's concept of the unconscious, which she sees as embodying universal features of social structure. Although a Marxist, she explicitly states that women's oppression is based not on capitalism nor on private property but on the very features which distinguish human society from animal society. Basing her analysis on the work of Claude Levi Strauss, Mitchell argues that women's secondary status is rooted in kinship systems with their prohibitions on incest and related rules of M.A. (Political Science) PART II 93 PAPER VIII (Option XI) exogamy. It is not the nuclear family but the rules of exchange between kin groups that are the foundation of human society and women's oppression. Kin groups relate to other groups through marriage. Marriage laws and the incest taboo are set up not because incest is biologically bad, but because the establishment of society depends on solidify relationships being established between biological kin groups. Thus the point of the incest taboo is that it necessitates exchange with outsiders and the act of exchange and the reciprocity involved becomes the skeins which hold a society together.

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