The divisions between men and women in capitalist society grow more and more acute as the crisis deepens. Policies like positive action and equal opportunities are seen as divisive and against men's interests. And some feminists argue that men's oppression of women, while having something to do with the structure of class society nonetheless requires a separate struggle by women against men and male attitudes. Judith Arkwright disputes such accepted wisdom within the women's movement. She argues that it is dangerous to argue that men in some way benefit from women's oppression, and certainly incompatible with Marxist analysis.
There may be many differing theories of patriarchy but they all share one basic assumption: that the oppression of women is a system of domination which is independent of any given social structure. It exists as a set of ideas and practices such as sexism and male violence which reproduce themselves. Patriarchy theories see the oppression of women as preceding capitalism and, without a separate revolution to get rid of male domination, succeeding capitalism. In my view none of these theories can be integrated into a Marxist framework.
It is one of Engels' enduring achievements that he recognised that the monogamous family was the first to be based on economic relations rather than stemming from natural conditions. Morgan (the anthropologist) had argued that in pre-commodity societies, social organisation was dominated by blood ties rather than the mode of production itself: 'At this stage the type of production is less decisive than the degree in which the old blood ties and the old mutual community of the sexes within the tribe has been dissolved.' In other words the social relations of these societies were determined by natural conditions and therefore tended to vary according to the circumstances of different tribes and peoples.
It is true that Engels tended to idealise these pre-class societies. It is obvious that in subsistence societies, life was extremely hard and also possible and probable that certain inequalities existed between men and women because of the exigencies of child-care, and the low level of technology. The situation was however uneven according to prevailing natural conditions, and in societies of more abundance there is evidence that such inequalities did not exist. But Engels' proposition is not refuted by this, for he argued that before class society social relations were not determined in the same way by a mode of production and certainly not by a 'system of male domination'. It was only with the emergence of class society that the monogamous family emerged and was reproduced from generation to generation. It was only then that the 'historic defeat of the female sex' was finalised in a certain direction. For the first time the oppression of women was systematised and organised by class society and through the state. For Engels the appearance of the monogamous family marked not reconciliation between the sexes but the lifelong subjugation of one sex by the other, parallel to class society. Engels also established that the root of woman's oppression was her 'exclusion from social production'. He pointed out something which has been proved correct subsequently — that capitalism is the only form of class society to produce internal contradictions acute enough to destroy class society as a whole.
By analogy, the capitalist form of family also contains within it a massive contradiction. It offers the opportunity for women to become involved in social production and yet also needs women's domestic service in the home. As a system it produces abundance and a level of technology sufficient to overcome all kinds of inequality in society. Yet because it is based on profit it cannot fulfill this role as a system. It is this kind of contradiction which itself gave birth to the modern women's liberation movement. In putting forward this thesis Engels' whole purpose was to challenge women's isolated role in the home and to demand the socialisation of domestic work, and the abolition of the family.
Contrary to what many feminists assume, Engels' method was the opposite of economist. Engels said that the form of the family was determined by a mode of production which gave rise to class society. This does not mean that he argued that the family is merely the sum of its economic functions. It is a system of relationships. According to Engels the family gives rise to a series of juridical relations which safeguard paternity, monogamy for the woman and more than this — social/sexual mores. Before Freud, Marxists were the first to understand the possibility that sexual behaviour itself was determined by social conditions. Thus while Engels may have theories about sexual relations under socialism which we would not agree with now — the method he adopted is hardly invalidated by this.
One revolution or two?
These are the main theoretical gains of Engels which we should uphold and which are totally contradictory to any theories of patriarchy or a system of male domination. The debate on the origins of women's oppression is so crucial because the theories of patriarchy conclude that as patriarchy existed and exists before and separate from class society, two revolutions and political struggles are necessary. It is, indeed, a challenge to the whole basis of Marxism to argue that a system of ideas and ideology (patriarchy), can in and of itself be the determining force in social relations. The mode of production and reproduction are related and the latter is determined by the former. In Origins of the Family, Engels' whole argument is based on the thesis that the two modes tend to exist less and less separately and towards 'a society in which family relations are entirely subordinated to property relations'.
However, this does not tell us everything about the nature of the relationship between the two which, of course, has changed under different class societies. In capitalist societies women's role within the family, which is important for capitalism, is further used to keep women as a reserve force to be pulled in and out of work according to the needs of capital. This is made possible by her role in the home. Through this and other mechanisms the family under capitalism takes on a specific form even though it may have borrowed characteristics from previous societies. Under each form of class society the relation of the mode of production to the family and to ideology has been different.
Do men have an interest in oppressing women?
Thus Engels asserts that the family was an instrument of class rule. The historic mission of the working class is to abolish the family and class rule. The working class does not consciously understand this task and is not united behind it — it is divided by sexism, racism, economic differences and so on. Working class men in many instances actively oppose women's liberation. This does not prove they have interests or benefits to defend (this is indeed an economic determinist argument). Insofar as working class men oppose women's liberation, this is an expression of false consciousness.
Many working class women in the first instance are often moved into struggle to defend their families: women struggling against deportation, women struggling for the right to work because they are the only breadwinner, and so on. Do we deduce from this that women have an interest in maintaining the family? No, this would be absurd. Do we even deduce that in these cases women's immediate needs clash with their long-term needs as members of the working class. No, of course we don't. Why, then, apply this method of approach to working class men?
When we look closely at these supposed benefits or material gains which men have in oppressing women, several flaws in the argument arise. Hartmann and others have used the example of the debate around protective legislation in the 19th century as proof that men have an interest in maintaining women's oppression. She says that men wanted to exclude women from the labour force for two reasons. First, that they wanted to preserve their own jobs and felt that women would take them away, and secondly, they wanted women to be in the family to look after them.
But there were many and complex reasons why working class organisations at the time might have supported protective legislation. Clara Zetkin, a leader of the German social democracy, changed her opinion during the debate. At first she was opposed to protective legislation because it excluded women from certain jobs. Then she was in favour of it because of the appalling conditions in which women and children had to work and because it could lead to a fight for better conditions for men as well. So the reasons being put forward for protective legislation were by no means all based on an anti-women perspective.
But it is evident from the debates in the 1st and 2nd Internationals that many sections of the workers' movement at the time were simply opposed to women going out to work for the two reasons outlined above. This does not prove they had a material interest in so doing. In fact we can see clearly that this was against the interests of the working class as a whole. Sending women back into the home and out of the workforce did nothing to alleviate unemployment. Women's role in bolstering the family actually helped to increase the rate of exploitation of male workers because there was more chance of imposing the strict regimentation of capitalist life on the workers; there was also less money coming into the home, two people were now being fed for the price of one. It was sections of capital who were the motor force behind the move to exclude women from certain areas of production and who benefited from it.
Today many trade unionists argue that the family wage is an important bargaining counter in negotiations even if it does deny women's rights to work. Does this mean there is a conflict of interests here between working class men and women? No, the family wage is a con by the capitalist class. It means they can shove onto the individual worker the costs of the welfare state. The costs of maintaining the welfare state come out of the surplus value of the capitalists. The concept of the family wage means that this can instead be deduced from the individual wage packet. Thus it is against the interests of male and female workers to defend such a concept in bargaining. Insofar as male workers do defend this then they are displaying false consciousness.
Because the family does not oppress men in the same way it does women and children, it does not mean to say that men benefit from or have an interest in maintaining it. If this was the case then surely men's and women's interests would be irreconcilable in the way the radical feminists suggest. Even if they did have some common causes in other spheres — if men have an interest in maintaining the family and women don't — then they are irreconcilable. Of course men get their washing and ironing done in the family. Of course women act as emotional props to men in the family. And of course many men would rather live in a family than fend for themselves. But this doesn't tell you anything about whose interests are at stake in all this. You could even argue that children have an interest in the family if you use this method. Nor should we exaggerate the idea of the family as a haven from capitalism. Under a decaying capitalism the family is an institution which means violence, repression and sexual misery. Why then does the family continue to exist? Why would most men, women and children in this country fight to defend it? Is it because men have an interest in it? No, it's because there is no alternative to the family under capitalism.
Insofar as working class men oppress women they are acting against their own interests and in the interests of the capitalist class. Alternatively a step forward for women is a step forward for the class as a whole. Men are the agents of women's oppression, acting on behalf of the ruling class to keep the family going, but they have no interest whatsoever in maintaining this system.
The need for unity
The demands of the women's movement should not and indeed do not centre on the ideological aspects of women's oppression — trying to pinpoint the way men oppress women. Our demands should be directed against the state to expose the class nature of women's oppression. The ideological battle whilst being a part of this does not have the same weight or importance as campaigns at a national level like women's rights at work or a woman's right to choose. The demand for a woman's right to choose is primarily a legal demand for democratic rights and it is this concept which has determined the direction of the campaign and the basis of the united front around abortion. The ideological aspects are drawn out in relation to this, not to challenge male attitudes as the prime focus. It is only when these ideological issues find some reflection at the level of the state that this becomes possible anyway. For example in the William Patten case a challenge was mounted by an individual man against his wife's right to an abortion. It was only because of the possibility of the courts making a ruling on this case that it became a focus for activity.
Of course it is true that the practice of women's oppression operates across classes — that is all women are oppressed in some way as a sex and all men act as agents of women's oppression. But as socialists and revolutionaries we are talking about how to change this situation and how to mount the counter-attack at the crucial points for the ruling class. Take the issue of violence and sexual harassment of women. The main focus of the campaign has been to place demands on local councils, on the government and so on, not on individual men. In fact to focus on individual men, on punishment, on general propaganda about women's sexuality is to approach the whole issue from a thoroughly reformist perspective.
There is furthermore an assumption here that men constitute an identifiable social group without any differentiation between them. This encompasses men in the union bureaucracy, male employers and working class men. We put demands on the bureaucracy of the labour movement which is male-dominated and we fight to commit them to action, recognising that they have no interest in fighting consistently for women's liberation. This is not to deny that they don't reflect the backward attitudes within the working class as a whole, but we should concentrate our fire on the bureaucracy because they help to crystallise and reproduce these attitudes by failing to lead the class. While it is true that male workers do harass women workers on the job, the implications of harassment by the foreman or the boss are far more serious, for they have the real material power over a woman and her job.
Any credence given to theories of patriarchy is therefore misleading for practical orientation. To argue that all men have an interest in women's oppression is to pit men's interests against women's and to ignore the crucial role of the family. It questions the idea that a women's movement in alliance with the labour movement is the way forward. The position of socialists should be that working class men and women should fight together to smash capitalism and to develop alternatives to the family. We realise that women are doubly oppressed and will be the most consistent fighters against their own oppression whereas working class men will not; but this is the reason why we fight for a mass independent, proletarian women's movement. We must pose the issue of an independent women's movement not by emphasising the divisions within the working class, but positively, by stressing the need and potential for unity within the working class to fight for women's liberation.
1. Heidi Hartmann and others, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, Pluto Press, 1981.
Yvonne Taylor and Judy Watson challenge the view that there is no contradiction between the immediate and class interests of working class men. They argue that an analysis of patriarchy can be situated within a class framework.
The potential for the women's movement to gain mass support is greater today than ever before. We have seen the trade union leadership forced to make a public stand on abortion and more recently on rape. Positive action for women at work, in the unions and the Labour Party is a major issue, and women are forcing the unions to take seriously the problem of sexual harassment from bosses and fellow workers. The Labour Party, with the support of the unions, is organising a national event on a woman's right to work in June.
But along with these new opportunities have come new problems which socialist feminists have found are inadequately explained by existing Marxist theory. For instance, the increased interest and action on women's oppression in the labour movement, while valued by socialist feminists, has brought them into conflict with the patronising, overbearing attitudes of many male (including rank and file) trade unionists and their inability to understand the need for an autonomous women's movement. And the fact that rape is now an issue of public debate has exposed the narrowness of interpretation to which Marxists are prone on the question of women's oppression. While it is seen as important to make political demands on the state round this issue, the role of men in sexual violence against women is inadequately explained. Many Marxists argue that it is impossible to challenge male domination in a systematic way, except in personal relationships, until socialism is achieved.
Socialist feminists have rejected revolutionary or radical feminist theories which see the oppression of women by men — what they define as patriarchy — as the fundamental social antagonism. However most would argue that men have played, and do play, an important role in helping to maintain women's subordination. A different definition of the term patriarchy has been adopted by some socialist feminists to describe the ideology and practice of male domination that has been a feature of all class and transitional societies. Such a definition of patriarchy can be a useful analytical development in a thoroughly Marxist approach to the issue of women's oppression. We would argue that patriarchy as we would define it — the ideology and practice of male domination — is materially based in capitalist society. The capitalist mode of production today rests as much on the super-exploitation of women at work and the free services they perform for capital in the home as it does on the exploitation of male labourers. Capitalism's interest in a patriarchal capitalist society has been relatively easy to establish. More contentious is the view that men themselves derive material privileges or benefits from the oppression of women which means they have some interest in the continued existence of patriarchy.
Back to the beginning
There is a broad school of thought in the women's movement which believes that male domination preceded class society and that sexual divisions were always oppressive to women. Many would share the view that women's oppression is not simply reducible to the mode of production in any given society. But we would argue that male domination can be understood within a materialist perspective. Engels' work was a revelation in its assertion that women's oppression is a problem of history rather than biology. In the Origins of the Family he claims that matrilineal societies predominated and their overthrow by patrilineal society coincided with the subordination of the female sex to the male. Women's oppression arose alongside and not from class society. He presents no evidence that class society caused women's oppression but shows very clearly that the sexual division of labour in pre-class society played an important role in the development of class society. It is an expansion of this point that has arisen in recent literature.
The question Engels fails to answer is why it is women who became subordinate to men and not the other way around. He puts forward the theory that patrilineal society overthrew the traditional matrilineal order as men's position in the sexual division of labour allowed them to accumulate wealth, and this acted as a stimulus for them to ensure their own children inherited their wealth. 'As to how and when this revolution was affected,' says Engels '...we know nothing.' It must be assumed that women 'allowed' men to keep and control their wealth due to their lack of physical strength, the primitive division of labour and the demands of childcare. Whatever social processes allowed men to obtain their powerful position, they need to be investigated.
Whatever the outcome of such a study, Engels' most important contribution to the development of a class analysis of women's oppression will not become redundant. His method which sought to demonstrate that the unequal position of women was socially determined and was coincidental with the rise of private property, the monogamous family and the state, was and is a major theoretical gain for women. It remains the only approach which points to the real possibility of women's liberation with the abolition of private property.
A dialectical history of women's oppression
Whatever social processes created women's oppression, the patriarchal ideology of class society has played an active role in maintaining that oppression and is not solely a product of class society. In order to avoid the economism of some Marxist explanations of women's oppression, some socialist feminists have attempted to explain it as a result of the existence of two sets of social relations in society: the class relations of the mode of production and patriarchal relations which are based on the sexual division of labour. We would argue that patriarchy and class are interrelated and to separate them out in such a framework can be misleading. A class analysis of women's oppression must look at the dialectical history of that oppression and therefore the dynamic interrelationship of the sexual division of labour and the mode of production which determines class divisions in society. Gramsci argued for a similar approach against those who used Marxist theory as a mechanical formula for understanding social processes. He drew attention, in particular, to the way ideology has become increasingly important to the capitalist state in the development of social control by 'consent' as well as by 'coercion'. Such an approach would lead us to explain the persistence of patriarchy in the transition to capitalism for example in the following way.
The development of capitalist industrialisation which, during its first phases, transferred women from the home to the factory, together with the absence of private property in the proletarian home, appeared to Engels to contain the basis for the emergence of a new family form in which male domination would disappear. It has been well documented elsewhere how the indiscriminate and reckless use of labour power in the early days of industrial production soon became impractical. Among other measures that were taken to safeguard the long term health of the workforce was the state restriction that was imposed on the use of women's labour. Women were moved out of production and into the home. A new sexual division of labour came into being in which women contributed to the most effective method of exploiting wage workers by reproducing, nurturing and servicing them at home at no extra charge. The large scale re-introduction of women into the workforce came with the post war boom. But woman's role at work did not supplant her role in the home. Waged work became rather an additional job, giving rise to an unequal sexual division of labour at work.
The role women play in the bourgeois family is so entrenched that it is seen as natural and timeless. In reality, it locks both men and women very firmly into capitalist social relations as many have analysed. Nonetheless, the relationship between women and men in the family and the oppression which they suffer is not equal. The specific way in which women's large scale entry into production has been structured so as to maintain the sexual division of labour in the family has meant that Engels' prediction that this would play a huge part in ending male domination over women in the working class has been superceded. In fact, women seem to have traded male domination at home for male domination at work and at home.
Do men benefit?
Women's experience of the sexual division of labour in capitalist society has been a narrowing of job opportunities outside the home combined with continuing domestic responsibilities. In law and in reality, she is financially dependent on her husband. These same disadvantages have been experienced as positive benefits by working class men in the form of better pay, conditions and opportunities at work and the provision of personal services and comforts in the home. It is arguable to what extent they have colluded, through the organised labour movement, in bringing about this situation.
For example, women were moved out of early capitalist production under pressure not only from the state, but also from the male trade unions. The concern of male trade unionists for the indiscriminate exploitation of women and children also provided them with an argument for getting rid of a cheap labour source which threatened permanently to undercut their wages. Moreover, the concern expressed by the state over the disintegration of family life due to working mothers was to provide men with the basis for a new argument in wage negotiation — the notion of the family wage. Of course, by choosing to uphold the sexual division of labour in this way, it is clear that the male dominated labour movement was helping to forge the very divisions in the working class which allow workers to be played off against each other.
How are such actions to be explained? Are men simply working against their own self-interest? To maintain and uphold the oppression of women is in no way in men's long term material — that is, their class — interest. In the workplace, sexual divisions do divide and weaken the workforce. To maintain these divisions means, in the long run, condemning working class men, as well as women, to exploitation and oppression. But some Marxists seem to see only men's class interest as crucial in understanding their relationship to women. They refuse to accept that equally important in determining this relationship are those immediate benefits which men themselves may gain from women's subjugation. They change the question from 'Do men benefit?' to 'Who really benefits?' and, of course, come out with the answer, 'the ruling class'! This may provide neat pigeon holes into which social groups can be slotted by virtue of 'class interest' but it simply ignores the historical processes by which the ruling class and the working class have been shaped. The differing histories and experiences of these two classes have not produced two homogeneous blocs. Both the ruling class and the working class have a stratified composition. This is one important reason for the uneven development of class consciousness as Lenin recognised. He argued, for example, that the privileges which the working class in Britain derived from imperialism would have to be challenged in the fight against imperialism.
In a similar way, one can point to sectors of the working class, such as white workers in South Africa, or Protestants in Northern Ireland, who are prepared to act as agents of oppression on behalf of the ruling class and the state to protect their material privileges.
The answer to the question of whether men have any material interest in patriarchy is of course that there is a contradiction between men's immediate and long term interests, just as there is a contradiction between the immediate and long term interests of other privileged groups of workers. This analysis leads to a rather more precise and scientific use of the term 'false consciousness' which some Marxists are rather too fond of dragging in as a substitute for real analysis.
However patriarchal relations differ significantly from other relations of oppression in three major ways. First, women's oppression co-exists with other forms of oppression — racial, imperialist and so on — and affects that group of people who make up one half of the world's population. Furthermore, it has been a feature of all class societies and transitional societies. And finally, the relationship between women and men in the family, which structures the sexual division of labour in capitalism, involves women in personally servicing men by providing for their material, emotional and sexual needs.
Two important things flow from our analysis: first, the need for an autonomous women's movement and second, the need to incorporate in our fight for political consciousness in the working class a challenge to patriarchal ideology. The real importance of the self-organisation of women arises not from women's 'backwardness' or lack of self-confidence but out of the backward consciousness of men based on the benefits they receive from patriarchy. The role of the autonomous women's movement cannot be taken over by the organisations of the labour movement, political movements, revolutionary organisations or even the construction of a mass revolutionary party. These will always be dominated by patriarchal ideology.
This does not mean that the labour movement, or the revolutionary organisations that exist today, have no role to play in the fight for women's liberation. On the contrary, the political and ideological battle against patriarchy has to be allied to the general struggle of the working class against oppression and ultimately for political power. But if that possibility is to be turned into a reality then it is important to begin now to tackle the role that is also played by men in maintaining patriarchy. This means men's backward consciousness will have to be challenged directly. For instance, male violence, pornography, sexual harassment, rape, male domination in the labour movement and the revolutionary party, male chauvinism and so on, are all problems that women have to confront each day from working class men. But they are not problems that can be resolved solely at the level of the state.
We are not arguing that demands should be placed on individual men around these issues. But we can begin to challenge male domination by taking up specific demands to which we could win men. For example, the demand for positive action for women in the trade unions and the Labour Party, campaigns against pornography at work, the provision of procedures for dealing with sexual harassment, for a woman's right to choose, and for the provision of creches and the planning of meetings at times when women can attend. The political campaigns that women organise around winning women's rights from the state inevitably cut across the benefits that men derive from women's oppression. It can be dangerous to ignore this when arguing the above demands. Instead of denying that any of these measures would challenge men's privileges, we would argue that socialists have to explain how their privileges are obstacles to the construction of a better society for both men and women.