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The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation:
A Class Analysis by Marlene Dixon (1977)
(Editors Note: When the University of Chicago fired feminist
sociology professor Marlene Dixon in 1969, they set off a
student sit-in that divided the campus. Although it did not
stop Dixon's firing, the sit-in helped to galvanize the women's
liberation movement in Chicago. In this 1977 article, Dixon
uses a Marxist analysis to try to explain the decline of the
women's liberation movement. The late 1970's was a difficult
time for women's liberation and many organizations ceased
to exist...including the CWLU.)
The
history of the rise and demise of Women's Liberation is a primer
for a study of the fatal weaknesses that infected all the
New Left struggles of the l960s. The collapse of Women's
Liberation shortly followed the general collapse of the New
Left in the early 1970s. Hindsight makes clear that the fatal
flaw of the New Left lay in its inability to recognize the
determinative role of class conflict. It was consequently
unable to distinguish between class antagonisms within mass
movements, a product of the failure to comprehend that revolutionary
movements arise and flourish only within revolutionary classes.
Many
of the errors of the New Left are perpetuated today, whether
it be in the so-called socialist feminist movement or in the
so-called anti-imperialist movement. Each such tendency, in
its own way, has failed to learn from the recent past. Yet,
as women, we must not fall prey to the dictum "history
repeats itself," for the massive institutionalized exploitation
and oppression of women continues, virtually untouched by all
the fulminations of the 1960s, just as American imperialism
flourishes with unhampered brutality. Nevertheless, any critique
of the New Left must recognize that it was, in itself, a powerfully
progressive force in all of its manifestations.
Consequently,
we cannot fail to recognize that the Women's Liberation movement
resurrected the "woman question" and rebuilt on a
world scale a consciousness of the exploitation and oppression
of women. For nearly forty years women had been without a voice
to articulate the injustice and brutality of women's place.
For nearly forty years women had been without an instrumentality
to fight against their exploitation and oppression. From the
mid1960s to the early 1970s, Women's Liberation became that
new instrumentality. From the United States and Canada to Europe,
to national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia, to revolutionary
China itself, the reverberations of the movement set in motion
a new awareness and new movements for the emancipation of women.
Whatever the faults and weaknesses of Women's Liberation in
the United States and Canada, it was a historical event of
worldwide importance
Nevertheless,
what happened to the Women's Liberation movement in the early
1970s is precisely what happened to each mass movement of
the last decade: internal differentiation along class and political
lines. in the case of the women's movement, the remnants
of Women's Liberation have come to be dominated by a middle
class leadership, reducing a vigorous and radical social movement
to a politically and ideologically co-opted reformist lobby
in the halls of Congress. The problem before us is to understand
the course of the class conflict that resulted in the final
co-optation and decline of the autonomous women's movement.
Consciousness
Raising: The Beginning
The
autonomous women's movement was a necessity of the time, a product
of the political realities of the l960s, a transitional movement
which was a direct product of the male supremacist structure
of the New Left and the legitimacy it permitted for the expression
of male dominance in everyday life. The New Left was an instrument
for the suppression, oppression and exploitation of women. The
formation of the autonomous movement was the only reply possible.
Women set about organizing women in order to avoid the wrecking
tactics of the men and to openly fight against the exploitation
and oppression of women. Women would never have been able to
do so within the male-dominated New Left. Women clearly recognized
that the politics and practice around the "woman question"
on the part of student and other left groupings were deformed
by their own practice of male supremacy. Women were force to
conclude, on the basis of experience, that only by building
a base among women would it be possible to put a correct priority
on the question of the emancipation of women, to confront the
entire left and force them to a recognition of the centrality
of women's emancipation in all revolutionary struggles.
The
origin and importance of the small consciousness-raising group
is to be found in the basic organizing tool of the autonomous
movement: organize around your own oppression. There were
many foundations for such a position. First, the major task
faced by early organizers was to get women to admit that they
in fact were oppressed. The socialization of women includes
a vast superstructure of rationalizations for women's secondary
status; the superstructure of belief is reinforced through
inducing guilt and fear (of not being a "true" woman,
etc.) as a response to rebellion against women's traditional
role; consequently, women are raised to be very conservative,
to cling to the verities of the hearth, to a limited and unquestioning
acceptance of things as they are. However, organizers very
quickly learned that under the crust of surface submission
there had built up in countless women an enormous frustration,
anger, bitterness - what Betty Friedan called "an illness
without a name." Women's
Liberation gave the illness a name, an explanation and a cure
The cure was the small group and the method was what the Chinese
Communists call "speaking bitterness." The bitterness,
once spoken, was almost overwhelming in its sheer emotional
impact.
For
many new recruits, consciousness raising was the end-all and
be-all of the early movement, a mystical method to self-realization
and personal liberation. But for others, especially for left-wing
radical women, the original aim of the small group was supposed
to have been the path to sisterhood - that unity expressed
in empathic identification with the suffering of all women
- which would lead from the recognition of one's own oppression
to identification with the sisterhood of all women, from
sisterhood to radical politics, from radical politics to
revolution. Early organizers had correctly understood that
women could be organized on a mass scale in terms of their
own subjective oppression and by appealing to the common
oppression of all women (irrespective of class). Aiming at
radicalizing the constituency of Women's Liberation, early
radical organizers talked a great deal about the common source
of oppression (hoping to foster the empathic identification
that would provide the bridge to cross-class unity). They
talked much less about the fact that the common oppression
of women has different results in different social
classes. The result of the class position, or class identification,
of almost all recruits to Women's Liberation was to retranslate "organize around your own oppression" to "organize
around your own interests.” The step from self understanding
to altruistic Identification and cross-class unity never occurred
because the real basis for radicalization, common economic exploitation,
was absent.
"Organize
around your own Oppression" was indeed a Pandora's Box
of troubles. Middle class women used this maxim to justify the
pursuit of their own class interests: "We are oppressed
too," "We must take care of our own problems first."
Middle class women also justified ignoring the mass of working
class women by asserting that "ending our oppression will
end theirs," i.e., the fight against discrimination would
equalize the status of all women.
The
transformation of the small group from its original political
consciousness raising function into a mechanism for social
control and group therapy was a result of the predominantly
middle class character of Women's Liberation. The fact that
there were so few women in Women's Liberation who were directly
experiencing material deprivation, threats of genocide or
enforced pauperization - that is, so few who were driven
by conditions of objective exploitation and deep social oppression
- made it almost inevitable that the search for cultural
and life-style changes were substituted for revolutionary
politics.
What
radicals had not taken into account was the fact that middle
class and wealthy women do not want to identify with their
class inferiors; do not care, by and large, what happens
to women who have problems different from their own; greatly
dislike being reminded that they are richer, better educated,
healthier and have more life chances than most people.
Therefore,
behind the outward unity of the Women’s Liberation movement
of the 1960s, centered as it was around a public ideology based
upon feminism, sisterhood and the demand for equal rights, there
raged an internal fight between the so-called feminists and
politicos. This fight was disguised in many ways, most effectively
by personalizing it or by casting it as a battle against "male-identified"
or "elitist" women, in which the pejorative "politico"
implied both sins summed up by the phrase "anti-woman."
All of these pseudo-psychological arguments were manipulative
verbiage which mystified the fact that class politics vs. reform
politics, and therefore class conflict for hegemony over the
leadership of the movement, were the real stakes of the combat.
Certainly, participants at the time often were not consciously
aware of the true nature of their struggle, but from the vantage
point of hindsight, the true meaning of these struggles is manifestly
clear. While in the beginning, roughly from 1967 to 1969, the
left was in a relatively powerful position, by 1973 a coalition
of the center and right had gained control of the women's movement.
The
Rise of Class Conflict
The
early and primitive ideology of Women's Liberation stressed
psychological oppression and social and occupational discrimination.
The politics of psychological oppression swiftly transmuted
into the bourgeois feminist ideology of "men as the enemy,"
for psychological world-views pit individual against individual
and mystify the social basis of exploitation. Nevertheless,
the politics of psychological oppression and of invoking the
injustice of discrimination were aimed at altering the consciousness
of women newly recruited to the movement in order to transform
personal discontent into political militancy. Women, being in
most cases without a political vocabulary, could most easily
respond to the articulation of emotion. (This, of course, explains
the impassioned, personal nature of the early polemical literature.
It was indeed "speaking bitterness.") Furthermore,
women of almost any political persuasion or lack of one can
easily accept the straightforward demand for social equality.
Explaining the necessity for the abolition of social classes,
the complexities of capitalism and its necessary evolution
into imperialism, etc., a much more formidable task, often
elicited more hostility than sympathy. On the other hand, the
stress on discrimination and psychological theorizing aimed
directly at the liberal core of North American politics. In
turn, sex discrimination affects all women, irrespective of
race, language or class (but the fact that it does not affect
all women in the same way or to the same degree was often absent
from discussion).
The
primacy of ideologies of oppression and discrimination (and
the absence of class analysis exposing exploitation) and the
ethic of sisterhood, facilitated the recruitment of large numbers
of women from certain strata of the middle class, especially
students, professionals, upper-middle class housewives and
women from all sections of the academic world.
Given
the predominantly apolitical disposition of women in general
coupled with their initial fearfulness and lack of political
experience, the task of revolutionary political education was
an uphill battle from the beginning. The articulation of a
class analysis in both Canada and the U.S., too often in a
style inherited from the competitive and intellectually arrogant
student left, frightened women away or left them totally confused
and unable to understand what the fuss was all about. In a
purely agitational sense, the feminists' anti-male line had
the beauty of simplicity and matched the everyday experience
of women; the left-wing radicals had the disadvantage of a
complex argument that required hard work and study, an "elitist" sin.
However, the anti-male line had its difficulties too, rooted
in a fundamental contradiction which faces all women. It was
impossible to tell women not to resent men, when it was plain
in everyday life that the agents of a woman's oppression at
home and on the job were men. On the other hand, women were
unwilling and unable to actualize anger against sexism into
a hatred of men.
Because
of this contradiction there existed a predisposition to take
a rhetorical anti-male stand (throwing men out of meetings
to keep them from being obstructionist, expressing anger and
contempt towards men to display defiance and thus give moral
support and courage to new women, etc.), overlaying a profound
ambiguity regarding what was, or ought to be, the relationship
between men and women.
The
result was a situation which might be termed dual leadership,
made up of the early left activist organizers, the politicos,
and the newer level of middle class women, the feminists, the
latter seeking, by virtue of their class position, wealth and
education, to bring the goals, ideology and style of the movement
into line with their politics and class interests. The ethic
of sisterhood publicly smoothed over these two opposing conceptions
of the enemy, i.e., who and what is going to be abolished To
accomplish the liberation of women. Thus, the public ideology
of Women’s Liberation built unity around certain basic
feminist tenets acceptable to the mixed class composition of
the mass movement: I) first priority must be placed on the
organization and liberation of women (glossing over differing
and contradictory positions on the definition and means to
attain liberation); 2) action programs ought to put first priority
upon woman-centered issues; 3) socialist revolution would not
in itself guarantee the liberation of women.
The
class conflict seething under the nominal agreement on the
basic tenets of feminism was ideologically expressed in two
contradictory lines of analysis corresponding to the dual leadership
situation. The feminist line stemmed from the assertion that "men
are the principal enemy” and that the primary contradiction
is between men and women. The politico line stemmed from the
assertion that the male supremacist ruling class is the principal
enemy and that the primary contradiction exists between the
exploited and exploiting classes, in which women bear the double
burden of economic exploitation and social oppression. The
leftist line stressed that the object of combat against male-supremacist
practices was the unification of the men and women of the exploited
classes against a common class enemy in order to transcend
the division and conflict sexism created between them. Women's
Liberation was called upon to combat sexism by combating the
dependency and subjugation of women that created and perpetuated
the exploitation and oppression of women. The position on men
was explicit: men in the exploited classes, bribed through
their privileged position over women, acted so as to divide
the class struggle. The source of divisiveness was not men
per se but the practice of male supremacy.
One
can immediately see that the leftist analysis, pointing to
class and property relations as the source of the oppression
of women, was much more difficult to propagandize than the
feminist anti-male line. In everyday life what all women
confront is the bullying exploitation of men. From the job
to the bedroom, men are the enemy, but men are not the same kind of
enemy to all women.
The
Material Basis of Bourgeois Feminism
For the middle class woman, particularly if she has a career
or is planning to have a career, the primary problem is to get
men out of the way (i.e. to free women from male dominance maintained
by institutionalized discrimination), in order to enjoy, along
with the men, the full privileges of middle class status. The
system of sexual inequality and institutionalized discrimination,
not class exploitation, is the primary source of middle class
female protest. Given this fact, it is men, and not the very
organization of the social system itself, who stand in the way.
Consequently, it is reform of the existing system which is required,
and not the abolition of existing property relations, not proletarian
revolution - which would sweep away the privileges of the middle
class woman.
The
fact that the fight against discrimination is essentially a
liberal reform program was further mystified by the assertion
that the equalization of the status of women would bring about
a '”revolution” because it would alter the structure
of the family and transform human relationships (which were
held to be perverted through the existence of male authoritarianism).
The left line held that equalization of the status of women
is not, nor could it be, the cause of the decomposition of the
nuclear family. The organization of the family is a result of
the existing economic structure; just as the origin of the contemporary
nuclear family is to be found in the rise of capitalism, so
it is perpetuated in the interests of monopoly capitalism. Furthermore,
equalization of the status of women would be no more likely
to introduce an era of beautiful human relationships than did
the introduction of Christianity bring obedience to the Golden
Rule or the Ten Commandments. The claim that status equalization
would bring about a "”revolution” is of the same
order as the claim made by the Suffragists that giving women
the vote would usher in an era of world peace. Abolishing discrimination
would not lead to a "revolution" in the status of
women because it would leave the class structure absolutely
untouched. Gloria Steinem might build a corporation, a woman
might become a general or a corporation vice-president, but
the factory girl would remain the factory girl.
The
tactical and ideological error of the left in this
struggle was to try to win the entire mass movement
to their position. The failure to recognize class struggles
led to the defeat of the leftist position not only because
of the predominant middle class background of the movement,
but also because the left had not only to fight the petty
bourgeois reformers, but also the anticommunist, cold war
ideologies with which almost all North Americans have been
so thoroughly infected. Without disciplined organization
and a working class base, a left position will always lose
in a mass movement, or be reduced to self-defeating opportunism.
Sisterhood:
Root of Bourgeois Feminism
The politics of oppression and the politics of discrimination
were amalgamated and popularized in the ethic of sisterhood.
Sisterhood invoked the common oppression of all women, the common
discrimination suffered by all. Sisterhood was the bond, the
strength of the women's movement. It was the call to unity and
the basis of solidarity against all attacks from the male-dominated
left and right, based on the idea that common oppression creates
common understanding and common interests upon which all women
can unite (transcending class, language and race lines) to bring
about a vast movement for social justice - after first abolishing
the special privileges enjoyed by all men, naturally.
The
ideology of sisterhood came to emphatically deny the
importance, even the existence, of class conflict in the women's
movement. To raise class issues, to suggest. the existence
of class conflict, to engage in any form of class struggle
was defined as divisive of women, as a plot. by men to destroy
women (after all, were not Marx and Lenin men?) as weakening
the women's struggle, and the perpetrator was proven beyond
the shadow of a doubt, to be a traitor to women, male-identified,
an agent of the enemy in the sisterhood. Sisterhood was a moral
imperative: disagreements were to be minimized, no woman was
to be excluded from the movement, all sisters were to love
all other sisters, all sisters were to support. all other sisters,
no sister was to publicly criticize other sisters.
Sisterhood,
and the outward unity it provided, also disguised and mystified
the internal class contradictions of the women's movement.
Specifically, sisterhood temporarily disguised the fact that
all women do not have the same interests, needs, desires:
working class women and middle class women, student women and
professional women, minority women and white women have more conflicting interests than could ever be overcome by their common experience based
on sex discrimination. The illusions of sisterhood were possible
because Women's Liberation had become in its ideology and politics
predominantly a middle class movement. The voices of poor and
working class women, of racial and national minority women
or even of housewives with children were only infrequently
heard. Even when these women were recognized, they were dismissed
with a token gesture or an empty promise. When the isolation
of the left was complete, almost all internal opposition to
bourgeois feminism disappeared.
The
collapse of sisterhood was principally a result of the disguised
class and political conflict which became acute throughout
1970-71. Under the guise of rejecting "elitism" left-wing women
were attacked mercilessly for being "domineering," "oppressive," "elitist," "male-identified,"
etc. In fact, the early radical leadership was in this way either
discredited or driven out of the movement, to be replaced by
"non-oppressive," "apolitical," manipulative
feminist or "radical feminist" leadership. This was
the period of the "trashing." At this time a clearly
defined right-wing also emerged, the reactionary "radical
feminists" who were, by and large, virulently anti-leftist
and anticommunist.
In
the end, political debate became almost completely nonexistent
in the small group, which was essentially reduced to being
a source of social and psychological support. Rivalries, disputes
and feuds often grew up between small groups in the same city
(each doubtless accusing the other of being "elitist"),
frequently having the effect (along with the major programmatic
and ideological divisions between feminists and politicos) of
making even the minimal workings of a women's center impossible.
Reactionary
Feminism
The bourgeois feminist line, "men are the enemy,"
branches into two ideologies, liberal feminism and reactionary
(or "radical") feminism. The first, liberal feminism,
does not openly admit that its ideology is a variant on "men
are the enemy" but disguises that assumption behind a liberal
facade that men are "misguided" and through education
and persuasion (legal if need be) can be brought around to accepting
the equalization of the status of women. Since the questions
of the origins of injustice and the roots of social power are
never very strong in any liberal ideology, there is little besides
legislative reforms and education to fall back on.
Reactionary
feminism, on the other hand, openly asserted as its fundamental
tenet that all men are the enemies of all women and,
in its most extreme forms, called for the subjugation of all
men to some form of matriarchy (and sometimes for the extermination
of all men). It offered a utopia composed of police states
and extermination camps, even though reactionary feminists
very rarely followed through to the logical outcome of their
position.
Reactionary
feminism was not an ideology of revolution (the likelihood
of victory seeming remote even to its advocates) but an ideology
of vengeance. It was also a profound statement of despair that
saw the cruelty and ugliness of present relationships between
men and women as immutable, inescapable. Reactionary feminism
may have been politically confused, and it was certainly politically
destructive, but it powerfully expressed the experience and
feeling of a whole segment of the female population.
The
root of reactionary feminism was in the sexual exploitation
of women. Its strength lay in the fact that it did express
and appeal to psychological oppression, for this oppression
is far worse than the conditions of economic exploitation experienced
by petty bourgeois women. In the last analysis reactionary
feminism was a product of male supremacy, and its corollary,
sexual exploitation. Male supremacy, itself reactionary, breeds
reaction.
With
the virtual expulsion of the left leadership the "radical
feminists" assumed leadership over the portion of the movement
not yet co-opted into the reformist wing. The excesses of the
right: man-hating, reactionary separatism, lesbian vanguardism,
virulent anti-communist, opposition to all peoples' revolutionary
struggles (including Vietnam), served to discredit Women's Liberation
and to make public the split in the movement between the reformists
and the radical feminists. Of the expulsion of the left, no
mention was made, keeping up the masquerade as an "anti-elitist
campaign." The triumph of the right resulted in the disintegration
of the Women's Liberation movement. In the shambles to which
the movement had reduced itself, left and right opportunists
were swift to seize the opportunity to take control. The leftists
watched the predictable occur with despair while the reactionary,
so-called "radical" feminists, with their shriek of
"elitism" still issuing from their mouths, found the
movement they had sought to control snatched out of their hands.
The
Failure of Program
Women's
Liberation never produced a coherent program. Programmatic
development requires theoretical development, and Women's Liberation
was incapable, on the basis of its class contradictions alone,
of generating a coherent political analysis. What program and
agitation existed clearly reflected the class nature of the
movement. The wide variety of national and local single-issue
programs undertaken by isolated women's groups reflected the
overriding problems of younger, middle class women: the need
for legal abortion (rather than a demand for universal health
and nutritional care, including abortion and birth control
services, which working class and poor women desperately need);
demands for cooperative, "parent controlled" day-care centers (rather than
universal day-care with compensatory educational programs which
the majority of working class parents and children need); the
creation of women's centers to provide young women with a "place
of their own" in which to socialize, to work for abortion
on demand or to secure illegal abortions (rather than creating
organizational" centers capable of organizing with working
class women for struggles on the job or in the community).
The
cold truth of the matter is that the women's centers often
differed very little from the standby of the suburban housewife
community work, complete with good deeds, exciting activities,
lively gossip and truly thrilling exercises in intrigue and
character assassination. Within these centers working class
women often wandered about in a state of frustration and
confusion. They knew something was very wrong, but they did
not know what.
Given the almost exclusive attention to sexual exploitation
and the consequent psychological oppression, the focus was
not upon male supremacy as part of class exploitation, but
upon its result, the practice of male chauvinism; not upon
the need for revolutionary social and economic changes, but
upon individualized struggles between men and women around
the oppressive attitudes and objective sexual and social
privileges of men. Furthermore, emphasis upon male chauvinism
had the effect of privatizing the contradiction between men
and women, transmuting the conflict into problems of personal
relationships, rather than politicizing the conflict as part
of the overall capitalist system of economic and class exploitation.
The
internal failures of the movement may be summed up in a brief
series of criticisms. Mass movements contain within them class
contradictions; women were far too slow to recognize class struggle
for what it was within the movement. Furthermore, lack of a
correct theoretical analysis led to the left's inability to
generate correct programs to guide internal class struggle.
The movement was thus reduced to single-issue mass campaigns
which had to coalesce around the lowest common denominator,
reform. Leadership thus passed to liberal reformers or left
opportunists who opposed straightforward class conflict or open
recognition of the inevitability of such conflict. The movement
isolated itself, for these and other reasons, from the concrete
struggles of working class women, in the home and in the factory,
who make up the majority of oppressed and exploited women. The
final and perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is
that a movement without coherent politics, organization and
discipline cannot be a fighting organization.
In
short, Women’s Liberation, for all its rhetoric and all
its pretensions, for all its brave start, has outwardly become
what it really was (indeed, what it had to be): an anti-working
class, anticommunist, petty bourgeois reform movement.
Socialist
Feminism
The
last gasp of Women's Liberation continues today as a loose collection
of small local organizations committed in varying degrees to
autonomous socialist feminist organizing. The constituency is
almost exclusively from the white petty bourgeoisie as indicated
by attendance at the National Conference on Socialist Feminism
(held in 1975). Reports of the 1975 conference suggest that
the socialist feminist constituency is very mixed in political
orientation.
There
is without doubt a significant proportion of women who are
biding their time with socialist feminism in reaction to the
regressive positions of most new Marxist-Leninist formations
(whose morality is Victorian and whose understanding of the
so-called "woman
question" is hardly equal to Bebel's statement written
in 1879). There is reason to believe, however, that its stable
constituency is made up of white radical feminists who are conscious
social democrats and who represent one continuation of the radical
petty bourgeois politics of the early days of Women's Liberation.
Whatever the precise class composition of socialist feminism
might be, its leading tendency is clearly a cross between radical
feminism and social democracy. This peculiar amalgamation underlies
the first three "principles of unity" drawn up by
the conference organizers:
1. We recognize the need for and support the existence of
the autonomous women's movement throughout the revolutionary
process.
2.
We agree that all oppression, whether based on race, class,
sex, or lesbianism, is interrelated and the fights for liberation
from oppression must be simultaneous and cooperative.
3. We agree that Socialist Feminism is a strategy for revolution.
(1)
It is not surprising that these "principles of unity"
produced very little unity and a great deal of confusion and
contention, also very reminiscent of the confused and contradictory
organizing conferences of Women's Liberation. Nevertheless,
the "principles of unity" exhibit very clearly the
petty bourgeois class character of Women's Liberation perpetuated
under the guise of socialist feminism. For example, in principle
no.
2 we note that "all oppression, whether based on race,
class, sex or lesbianism, is interrelated" without any
indication of how they are interrelated. Throughout, oppression is
used, but not exploitation. Oppression
is a psychological term, while exploitation is an economic
term that refers to class relations. Class is used as
a category in itself, as are race, sex and lesbianism. There
is no recognition that race and sex discrimination are products
of class exploitation. We must assume that tacking on "lesbianism" is a result
of an opportunist attempt to appeal to radical lesbians, for
surely homosexuality is subsumed under sexual discrimination.
Hostility
toward recognizing the determinative role of class, also inherited
from Women’s Liberation, is demonstrated in a report of
the conference written by a member of the Berkeley-Oakland Women's
Union:
There
was much said in panels and in workshops on the question
of race, class, lesbianism, etc., but there was no agreed-upon
framework in which to place these discussions. Nor was there
any apparent reason to attempt to resolve differences, as
we were making no commitment to work or struggle together
beyond the conference... .Members of the Marxist-Leninist
caucus often stated that class was the primary contradiction.
They also often remarked that the women's movement was a "middle
class" movement.
Many of the working women at the conference expressed a personal
disgust at this sloppiness of terminology, as well as the
way it discounted their own position in the work force...
(2)
The "disgust" was
displayed by those women who were sympathetic to the position
put forward by Barbara Ehrenreich:
Let's start by being very honest about class. About ninety
per cent of the American people are "working class":
in the sense that they sell their labor for wages, or are
dependent on others who do... Now' what does that tell us?.
. It tells us, for political purposes, a class is not defined
strictly by gross economic relationships. For political purposes,
a class is defined by its consciousness of itself as a class
that exists in opposition to another class or classes. (3)
The Ehrenreich position resolves the problem of "sloppy
terminology" by liquidating the middle class (or new petty
bourgeoisie) into a vast, undifferentiated mass (90% of the
population) defined by class consciousness-for-itself. Since
no such class or class consciousness presently exists in the
United States, class is effectively made non-existent. It therefore
follows that women can be united around their common "oppression"
and become a “class defined by its consciousness of itself
as a class that exists in opposition to another class or classes,"
and we are right back to the unity of sisterhood propounded
by Women's Liberation. Is it any wonder that 'the conference
was also plagued with the homogeneity contradiction (sic), most
of the women there being white and under thirty-five years old..."?
(4') Dismissing the determinative role of social class as a
"gross economic relationship" and substituting a psychological
definition without a material basis perpetuates the Women's
Liberation tactic of "organizing around your own oppression,"
exemplified by the retention of the slogan, "the personal
is political." The rejection of Marxism as' an "agreed-upon
framework" thereby continues to justify the hegemony of
white middle class (petty bourgeois) women in Women's Liberation-by-another-name:
socialist feminism.
The real unity of the socialist feminist tendency is stated
in the first principle asserting the necessity of an autonomous
women's movement. In clinging to this belief, socialist feminism
would condemn women to continued isolation and segregation.
The formation of the autonomous movement in the mid-1960s
reflected the constraints that pervasive and entrenched left-wing
male sexism put upon any attempt to organize women as a significant
part of the New Left. In organizing the autonomous movement,
women had demonstrated their ability to organize a vigorous
mass movement. Yet, the male-dominated left's actual response
was to isolate and ghettoize the women's movement even within
the petty bourgeois left. Women's Liberation fell into the
trap by characterizing political struggles as "male-dominated,"
or Marxism as "penis politics," reducing Women's
Liberation to dead-end reformist programs around "women's
issues":
abortion, day-care, women's studies programs, women's health
clinics and so forth. The reduction of the autonomous movement
to a trivialized, isolated and limited series of local reformist
struggles was the legacy of retaining a separate women's movement.
Once
the "woman question" had been put on the New Left
agenda, conditions were created that potentially could have
enabled women to carry the fight against sexism directly into
the left. By and large, this did not happen. The autonomous
movement, by isolating women, did not allow a serious political
campaign against sexism to be carried out between men and women
as an organizational struggle. The continued political segregation
of women limited opposing sexism to opposing sexism in one's
lover or husband; Consequently, the autonomous movement failed
in its mission of defeating left-wing sexism, as the regressive
lines of much of the new communist movement make quite clear.
The prolonged existence of the autonomous movement, with its
penchant for psychological theorizing, made it difficult to
see that the defeat of sexism and racism in the left was
an organizational, not attitudinal, problem. The
solution to the prevalence of both sexism and racism must
be found in the process of party formation itself. The very
structure of a revolutionary party must provide an organizational
basis upon which equality between comrades can be developed
and enforced,
The rejection of Marxism, the rejection of the determinative
role of the relations of production, also serves to mystify
precisely what sexism is - a class relationship between the
sexes, just as racism is a class relation between races.
This was the insight provided by Engels so long ago, when
he wrote that the relationship between man and wife was as
the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. It is not that men and
women, black people and white people, each make up a class
(although at one time that was asserted in Women's Liberation)
but rather that the social relations existing between them
irrespective of actual class membership have the character
of class relations, being, as they are, the product of class
relations. Thus, sexism and racism have a class identity:
each demands relations of inequality, subordination, and
the assumed inferiority of one group of humanity to another.
The
refusal to recognize the determinative role of class relations
in Women's Liberation and in its offspring, socialist feminism,
must result in reducing talk of "revolutionary process"
and "socialist feminism is a strategy for revolution" to
radical cant. These phrases can have no content, no real
referent, without a unified theoretical understanding of the
origins of exploitation and the material roots of psychological
oppression. Socialist feminism is, in the final analysis, nothing
more than a continuation of Women's Liberation past its time. New
Directions
The
entire period of the 1960s in North America was crippled by
the cold war repression of the 196Os and l950s which had left
two generations almost completely bereft of any knowledge,
theoretical or historical, of North American class struggle
and North American socialism. Over twenty years of anti-Marxist,
anti-Soviet propaganda (which began in the elementary school
and continued through graduate education) guaranteed that
the majority of North American youth was anticommunist, anti-socialist,
anti-Marxist. U.S. imperialism and its Canadian branch plant
protected the masses of the people from severe material deprivation
and served to validate the ideologies of "America, the
apex of democratic, free enterprise" on both sides of
the border. Indeed, it was one of the contradictions of imperialism,
the brutal exploitation of black and native people throughout
the continent and of Quebecois in Canada, which began the
revival of a moribund left and signaled the sharpening of
the contradictions and class struggle which marks the 1970s.
Isolation
from revolutionary theory and practice left the movement,
specifically the New Left, the peace movement and Women's Liberation,
without the theoretical tools (and most particularly without
any understanding of dialectical analysis) so necessary to
guide practice in the long run. As a result, practice was typically
pragmatic and sporadic, marked by few victories and many defeats,
exhausting and disillusioning people. Isolation from revolutionary
classes, combined with theoretical and historical ignorance,
meant that people often did not have any adequate analysis.
As a result, people were tactically, not strategically oriented.
Furthermore, they were populist and reformist by default, through
ignorance and programmed anti-communist. Great numbers of militants
responded with confusion and despair as effort after effort
collapsed or was defeated outright or, even more frustrating,
was co-opted into irrelevant reform. Without any knowledge
or sense of the dialectics of history, without a correct understanding
of capitalism and imperialism, with no way to evaluate or understand
the course of class struggle, the radicalism of the 1960s found
itself bankrupted in a few short years. Thus, we can clearly
see that Women's Liberation was not unique, but that the fate
of the Women's Liberation movement followed the general pattern
for the New Left of the 1960s.
Many
of us, after more than ten long years of experience in a
series of movements, and especially the Women's Liberation
movement, have become Marxist-Leninists - not because we
read books, but because we fought and lost too many battles, then read
the books. In short, we must begin again. This time, however,
we are far better armed, in terms of ideology and practice,
not to repeat the mistakes of the past, not to compromise
with counterrevolutionary racism and sexism, not to be
sucked into petty bourgeois class collaborationism, not to
fail in our struggle to build an organization, a fighting
organization for the liberation of our sisters, our brothers,
ourselves. NOTES
I. Barbara Dudley, "Report on the Conference," Socialist
Revolution (October-December 1975), pp. 109, 111,
l14.
2. Ibid., pp.111, 114.
3. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Speech by Barbara Ehrenreich,"
Socialist Revolution (October-December 1975), p.89.
4. Dudley, p.107
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