Women, Class and Family

Abstract

This paper explores the relations between patriarchy and class in the context of the capitalist mode of production. The relations between these terms, patriarchy and class or patriarchy and capitalism have been, in the women's movement, embedded in an often rancorous debate. For Marxistfeminists in particular, the dilemmas of how to locate ourselves in what were often represented by both sides as contradictory and opposing struggles, were serious and painful. On the one side, radical feminists posed men as the 'main enemy'.' For them, therefore, any struggle must oppose patriarchy directly as a form of domination imposed by men on women. For them, Marxist-feminists, who link the struggle against patriarchy with a struggle with men against the ruling class, work with the oppressor and are thereby complicit in the reproduction of patriarchal relations. They have gone over to the other side. On the other side, Marxist feminists, viewed as traitors by radical feminists, encountered a parallel accusation from the Left. Basing arguments on the theoretical work of Engels, women's oppression was identified with the historical emergence of private property and hence of class relations. The struggle for a classless society subsumed the struggle for women's emancipation. To struggle separately for immediate gains for women, or worse, to struggle within Marxist organisations against male chauvinism, served only to divide and weaken organisations committed to class struggle. The problems for Marxist-feminists have been how to represent feminism within class struggle, how to understand the relations between patriarchy and capitalism, how to confront and oppose male chauvinism in the working class and in the often petty bourgeois character of Left organisations, how to relate revolutionary organisation and struggle to the autonomous women's movement and how to bring understandings learned there into the struggle for socialism.