Womeu HevolutiolJ A discussion of the unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism Edited by Lydia Sargent Women and Revolution deals with contemporary feminist political theory and practice. It is a debate concerning the importance of patriarchy and sexism in industrialized societies - are sexual differences and kin relations as critical to social outcome as economic relations? What is the dynamic between class and sex? Is one or the other dominant? How do they interact? What are the implications for social change? The principle essay to which the others respond - either criticizing it, extending, or attempting to improve it - is The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism by Heidi Hartmann. Hartmann argues that class and patriarchy are equally important and that neither a narrow feminism nor an economistic Marxism will suffice to help us understand or change modern society - instead we need a theory that can integrate the two analyses. The twelve contributors to this discussion are: Iris Young, Christine Riddiough, Gloria Joseph, Sandra Harding, Azizah ai-Hibri, Carol Ehrlich, Lise Vogel, Emily Hicks, Carol Brown, K.aties Stewart, Ann Ferguson & Nancy Folbre, Zillah Eisenstein. Paperback· ISBN: 0-919619-20-7 BLACK ROSE BOOKS Hardcover ISBN : 0-919619-19-3 Montreal WOMEN AND REVOLUTION W~ENAND Rf.WOLUTION A DISCUSSION OF THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM edited by Lydia Sargent BLACK ROSE BOOKS Montreal Copyright © 1981 by Lydia Sargent BLACK ROSE BOOKS LTD. 39 81 Boul. St. Laurent Montreal, H2W 1Y5, Quebec No pan of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any infor­ mation storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author or publisher, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or maga­ zine. BLACK ROSE BOOKS No. K. 66 Paperback ISBN: 0-919619- 19-8 Hardcover ISBN: 0-919619-20-1 Cover Design: Bob Mercer Front cover illustration: Joyce Woods THE INCOMPATIBLE MENAGE A TROIS: MARXISM, FEMINISM, AND RACISM copyright © 1981 by Gloria Joseph. WHAT IS THE REAL MATERIAL BASE OF PATRIARCHY AND CAPITAL? copyright© 1981 by Sandra Harding. CAPITAUSM IS AN ADVANCED STAGE OF PATRIARCHY BUT MARX­ ISM IS NOT FEMINISM copyright© 1981 by Azizah Al-Hibri. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Women and revolution Includes index. ISBN 0-919619-20-1 (bound).- ISBN 0-919619-19-8 (pbk.) 1. Women and socialism. 2. Feminism. I. Sargent, Lydia. KX546.W65 305.4 '2 C81-090024-6 Printed and bound in Quebec, Canada. CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION NEW LEFT WOMEN AND MEN: THE HONEYMOON IS OVER 1x Lydia Sargent THE LEAD ESSAY THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM: 1 TOWARDS A MORE PROGRESSIVE UNION Heidi Hartmann DISAGREEMENTS BEYOND THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE: 43 A CRITIQUE OF THE DUAL SYSTEMS THEORY Iris Young SOCIAUSM, FEMINISM, AND GAY/LESBIAN LIBERATION 71 Christine Riddiough THE INCOMPATIBLE MENAGE ATROIS: 91 MARXISM, FEMINISM, AND RACISM Gloria Joseph THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM: 109 CAN IT BE SAVED? Carol Ehrlich WHAT IS THE REAL MATERIAL BASE 135 OF PATRIARCHY AND CAPITAL? Sandra Harding CAPITAUSM IS AN ADVANCED STAGE OF PATRIARCHY: 165 BUT MARXISM IS NOT FEMINISM Azizah Al-Hibri vu MARXISM AND FEMINISM: UNHAPPY MARRIAGE, 195 TRIAL SEPARATION OR SOMETHING ELSE? Lise Vogel CULT1JRAL MARXISM: NONSYNCHRONY 219 AND FEMINIST PRACTICE Emily Hicks EXTENSIONS OF PATRIARCHY MOTHERS, FA1HERS, AND CHILDREN: 239 FROM PRIVATE TO PUBLIC PATRIARCHY Carol Brown 1HE MARRIAGE OF CAPITALIST AND PATRIARCHAL 269 IDEOLOGIES: MEANINGS OF MALE BONDING AND MALE RANKING IN U.S. CUL 11JRE Katie Stewart 1HE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF PATRIARCHY 313 AND CAPITALISM Ann Ferguson and Nancy Folbre REFOCUSING THE DISCUSSION REFORM ANDjOR REVOLUTION: 339 TOWARDS A UNIFIED WOMEN'S MOVEMENT Zillah Eisenstein REJOINDER SUMMARY AND RESPONSE: 363 CONTINUING THE DISCUSSION Heidi Hartmann Vlll NEW LEFT WOMEN AND MEN: THE HONEYMOON IS OVER by Lydia Sargent Lydia Sargent has been a member of South End Press since it began in 1976. She is also playwright, director, and actor with The Newbury Street Theater and a mem­ ber of The Living News­ paper, a radical newstheater collective. She has adapted women's fiction and oral histories into a show called FOOTHOLDS, has scripted a full length play based on Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley, and written an original feminist mystery comedy, The Long Sigh. IX THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE In the opening paragraph of "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism" Heidi Hartmann states: The marriage of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capital. To continue the simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce. (Hartmann, p. 2.) That unhappy marriage of marxism and feminism is what this book is about. Can we as radical, socialist, marxist, lesbian, anarchist, and black feminists achieve equality in a left/ progressive movement whose dominant ideology is marxism and can we achieve equality in a future society which is organized around marxist theory and practice? In this book, thirteen women from different politics, theoretical perspectives, and experiences discuss Hartmann's un­ happy marriage of marxism and feminism in an attempt to clarify and expand on current feminist theory and practice. REASONS WHY The immediate impetus for this discussion of the "failed" marriage of marxism and feminism came out of the experiences of women in the civil rights, new left, and women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As the new left debated, marched, organized, and eventually developed an analysis of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, new left activists, more often than not, identified themselves within a marxist leninist tradition of thought and revolutionary practice. While rejecting the "old left" and the tradition of communist and socialist parties with their attachment to the politics of the soviet union, the new left, nonetheless, identified itself with one or another of the socialist countries in the world and with all countries struggling for national liberation from neo-colonial powers: Cuba, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Chile .. .lt was a new kind of marxism, to be sure, a marxism that attempted to integrate the student and youth culture concept that capitalist/ imperialist ideology permeated every aspect of daily life: schools, work, music, television, film, commu- X nity, environment, and expecially sexualjsocial relations. But within this "expanded" new left politics the bottom line for women in the U.S movement was always limited to: "men will make the revolution and make their chicks." 1 Women working in new left and civil rights organizations were faced more and more with two main problems: (1) the problem of day-to-day work (who cleans the officejwho messes it up, who writes the leaflets/who types them, who talks in meetings/who takes notes, who gains status through sexual relations/who gives status through sexual rela­ tions) and; (2) the problem of theory (who leads the revolution, who makes it, who is liberated by it, and who keeps the home fires burning during it). It didn't take long for new left women to discover the answers to the problems of theory and day-to-day work. Marxism defined the answer to the first question; sexist males the answer to the second. That is, workers at the point of production (read white working class males) will make the revolution led by revolutionary cadre of politicos (read middle class white males steeped in marxist economic theory). Women (mostly white) would keep the home fires burning during it, functioning as revolutionary nurturersj secretaries: typing, filing, phoning, feeding, healing, supporting, loving, and occasionally even participating on the front lines as quasi-revolutionary cheerleaders. It became crucial, given this vision (nightmare), for women to define the nature and extent of their oppression if they were to become more than sex-objects for their revolutionary "brothers." THE PROBLEM OF WHO CLEANS THE OFFICE: DEFINING OUR OPPRESSION Betty Friedan writes about the "problem with no name" in her book The Feminine Mystique: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of disatis­ faction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even the silent question-"'Is this all?"Z At the same time that suburban women read and identified with Friedan's "problem with no name," women in the new left Xl were busy cleaning and decorating movement offices, cooking movement dinners, handling daycare, chauffering activists to demonstrations, typing letters and leaflets, answering phones, and lying beside their movement lovers and husbands at night also afraid to ask the silent question-"ls this all?" Although Simone de Beauvoir didn't give this "problem" of women's alienation and sense of valuelessness a name, she did attempt to define it as early as 1949 in her book The Second Sex: Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being... And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex-absolute sex, no less.