Patriarchy And Class

African Women In The Home And The Workforce

Sharon B Stichter, Jane Parpart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367282400
• eBook ISBN: 9781000313154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política africana

This book argues for the applicability of a materialist mode of production analysis to the situation of women in Africa. It briefly reviews some of the intellectual background and current theoretical dilemmas of marxism-feminism.

1
Introduction: Towards a Materialist Perspective on African Women

Sharon B. Stichter and Jane L. Parpart

The great debate between feminism and marxism, so central to the development of contemporary feminist theory, seems in many ways to have passed African studies by. Marxist analyses focusing on modes of production, capital accumulation and class formation in Africa have abounded, yet most of these have paid scant attention to feminist concerns. On the other hand, empirical studies of the position of African women have flourished, yet the implications of these for a marxist-feminist approach¹ have not been drawn out.

The present volume argues for the applicability of a materialist mode of production analysis to the situation of women in Africa. Although the contributors by no means agree on precise theoretical formulations, nor even on the use of the term "mode of production," they are united in addressing themselves in one way or another to fundamental problems of conceptualization relevant to marxism-feminism. Some of the chapters are couched in a specifically theoretical vein, while others have as their primary aim the interpreting of particular experiences of women in concrete African social formations. This introduction will briefly review some of the intellectual background and current theoretical dilemmas of marxism-feminism, setting the context for the main themes and contributions of the various chapters.

A.

The feminist challenge to marxism arose from complex roots. Analytically, it seized on the glaring fact that the subordination of women did not seem to be in any sense coterminous with capitalism. Not only had especially oppressive forms of patriarchy flourished in precapitalist societies; the situation in many contemporary socialist societies indicated that the abolition of capitalism would not necessarily lead to patriarchy's demise.

Conventional Marxists had always approached the "Woman Question" as a function of women's position in the system of production. Early marxist analyses of women in capitalist society focussed on women's exclusion from wage work and their confinement to the "non-productive" sphere of housework as the key explanatory factors. The capitalist system, with its emphasis on private property and the commoditization of waged labor, was seen as the cause of this sexual division of labor. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argues that women's subordination is a form of oppression resulting from the institution of class society and maintained because it serves the interests of capital. Male dominance, according to Engels, was inextricably bound up with capitalism and the ruling class, and would disappear with the advent of a socialist revolution and the wholesale entry of women into the waged labor market (Engels 1972).

In contrast, radical feminism, initially expressed by writers such as Shulamith Firestone (1971) and Kate Millett (1971), sought to understand women's oppression by focussing directly on sex: on male/female inequality in biological reproduction, conceived as a trans-historical fact, independent of and more important than class inequities. In Maureen Mackintosh's oftquoted words, "the characteristic relation of human reproduction is patriarchy, that is, the control of women, especially of their sexuality and fertility, by men" (1977). But the danger in this approach was biological determinism, or the reduction of sex inequality to biology (Barrett 1980, p. 13). One answer seemed to be to distinguish sex as a biological category from gender as a social one. This insight can be traced to Gayle Rubin (1975), who proposed the term "sex/gender system" to denote the "set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention." Rubin interpreted the sex/gender system quite non-materially; it seemed, in her account, to be almost synonymous with the kinship system.

Two main issue areas were raised by feminists: patriarchy and reproduction. According to many, the former had its roots in the latter, rather than in production. A third feminist concern, one that did have to do with production and thus was of immediate interest to marxism, was unpaid "domestic labor" in the home, done largely by women. Christine Delphy, for example, located the origin of patriarchy in men's control over women's labor in the domestic arena: housework and childcare. Expanding Millett's argument that women's relation to the means of production differed from men's, since it is contingent upon marriage, Delphy gave the example of the divorced wife, the "displaced homemaker." Though such a woman may have been married to a man of the capitalist class, she did not usually own the means of production and was not therefore a full member of that class. Women's class position must be understood in terms of the institution of marriage, which is in fact a labor contract constituting a domestic mode of production and a patriarchal mode of exploitation (Delphy 1977; for critiques see Barrett and McIntosh 1979 and Molyneaux 1979).

Many feminist writers were strongly influenced by marxism; some considered themselves to be working within it. Yet feminism as a whole posed a profound challenge to marxism. In her influential essay, Heidi Hartmann (1981) argued against the subsumption of the feminist struggle into the supposedly "larger" struggle against capital. The "marriage" of marxism and feminism, if it were to continue, had to become an egalitarian one. The near-universal male dominance over women demanded explanation, and it was not sufficient to argue simply that it was functional for capital. Further, the relationship of women to men could not be adequately explained simply by reference to the relationship of women to the economic system. Categories of analysis were needed that were not "sex-blind."

Marxism struggled to respond to the feminist onslaught. The limitations of the concept of "patriarchy" were quickly noted: its universalistic character, its purported autonomy, its lack of division into types, variations or degrees, made it impossible to link to any changes in the organization of production or to any historical trends (Beechey 1979; Barrett 1980, pp. 10-19). Efforts were undertaken to attach this cultural and relational notion to a material base (Kuhn and Wolpe 1978). Roisin McDonough and Rachel Harrison, for example, agreed that patriarchy was "the form of control of the wife's labor and of her sexual fidelity," but they reasserted the subordination of this control system to economic class relations. At least under capitalism, the social relations of human reproduction were class-specific. True, the wife only "inhabited" her husband's class position, but "different contradictions inevitably arise for women inhabiting different class positions" (1978, pp. 34-37). This proposition seemed persuasive empirically, but it did not explore or resolve the fundamental question of the relation of reproductive to productive labor.

A still more traditional marxist view was reasserted in the work of Karen Sacks (1979), who quite explicitly saw reproductive relations as secondary. She argued that historical changes in the mode of production in Africa, and specifically in women's relations to the means of production as either "sisters" (equal members of a community of owners) or "wives," determined their wider political, personal and social status. Kin and marriage relations were seen as allocating material means, rather than children. Contrasting communal, kin corporate, and class or state societies, Sacks argued a well-constructed case against the notion of the universal subordination of women.

Most writers, however, saw a need to conceptualize women's status in reproduction as well as production. With reference to the contemporary Third World this view was underlined in the writings of Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen (1981; 1982). They called for a double focus on class and gender in studying the impact of development on Third World women, posing this approach in opposition to both neo-classical economic'theory and cultural explanations of women's subordination such as those inherent in modernization theory. Beneria and Sen were less concerned to specify the exact interrelations between reproduction and capital accumulation than they were to point to aspects of women's position in the Third World, such as seclusion, bridewealth, dowry, and the "double day" of home and production work, which were unconvincingly explained in conventional marxist analysis.

Many of those committed to a merging of marxism and feminism found that the term "socialist feminism" best expressed their theoretical and political goals (e.g. Jagger 1983). Following Rubin and Hartmann, initial efforts at fusion were encapsulated in the notion of "dual systems," a patriarchal one, based in the household or family, in which women are controlled by men, and an economic one, in which workers are controlled by capitalists. Zillah Eisenstein and others attempted to specify the relation of the two spheres by arguing that patriarchy was functional for all modes of production: "Male supremacy, as a system of sexual hierarchy, supplies capitalism (and systems previous to it) with the necessary order and control" (Eisenstein, ed., 1979, pp. 27-28). Despite its insights, the dual systems approach underestimates the difficulty of achieving a synthesis of marxism and feminism. In some formulations the major analytic task is taken to be the relation between the "sex division of labor" and patriarchy in a cultural and social sense. In this version, the confusion remained over whether it was the sex division in production or in human reproduction which was most important. If it was the latter, then women's oppression was clearly quite separate from the sphere of production and as Iris Young objected, this dual system approach allowed traditional Marxism "to maintain its theory of production relations ... in a basically unchanged form" (Young 1981, p. 49). In other formulations women's subordination was seen as related in some way to the mode of production and class structure, but little headway was made in the analysis of this question. Lise Vogel argued that "socialist feminists have worked with a conception of Marxism that is itself inadequate and largely economistic. At the same time, they have remained relatively unaware of recent developments in Marxist theory" (Vogel 1981, p. 197). As the alternative, Vogel offered the more traditional marxist view that human reproduction should be seen as one part of the reproduction of labor power, as part of the larger process of social reproduction (Vogel 1983).

Clearly, the theoretical status of biological reproduction had become central to the debate. Many feminists had turned to Engels in support of their contention that human reproduction was as important as production. Time and again this famous passage was quoted:

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a two fold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, ... on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch live is determined by both kinds of production . . . (1972, pp. 71-72)

Unlike much of Marx's writing, these lines seemed to give major recognition to human reproduction, anchoring it firmly as a material and social process; they avoided Marx and Engels' more usual characterization of the sex division of labor in childbearing and rearing as "natural." But they still did not solve the "dual systems" dilemma: what was the relationship between production and reproduction? What independent status, if any, did the system of human reproduction have?

Claude Meillassoux is perhaps the first modern marxist to give autonomous importance to human reproduction. The conditions under which capitalism arose, he wrote, did not point to the reproduction of human labor power as an urgent matter, either practically or theoretically. "Through the process of primitive accumulation it was solved straight off and the peasants migrant from European hinterlands contributed to rid the theoreticians of this extra worry" (1981, p. xii). But in precapitalist "domestic society," the somewhat vaguely defined "domestic community" in which reproduction takes place is not subordinate but is the very unit of production. The reproduction of labor is central. This is particularly so because the level of development of productive forces provides tools which are extensions of the human body rather than ones which subordinate it to non-human means of production. In domestic societies, and to a certain extent in all subsequent modes of production since they continue to depend on the domestic community for human reproduction, the social position of women derives from male control of their special reproductive powers. In the course of human evolution, the advanced domestic community succeeds in governing reproduction through the orderly circulation of women among men, that is, through patrilineality and patrilocality. Women are the actual means of reproduction. Rights to the progeny are granted to the husband's community; women cannot create descent relations or reproduce social ties: filiation only operates through men. Women are dispossessed of their children to the benefit of men; this exploitation of their reproductive capacities sets the stage for their second exploitation, their inability to acquire a status based on rights in the means of production.

One weakness of this account noted by marxist-feminists was that women seemed to be completely passive, apparently acquiescing in their own oppression (Mackintosh 1977). Another weakness, pointed out by Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young (1977), was the failure to distinguish between the reproduction of human beings and the reproduction of the labor force, or those available to work. A common problem in all early marxist-feminist writings was the tendency to lump together three separate concepts: biological reproduction, reproduction of the labor force, and the larger process of reproduction of the social relations of production in the mode as a whole. Hindess and Hirst decried what they termed this "astonishing play on the word reproduction" (1976, p. 54). In rescuing discussion from this conceptual morass, Edholm, Harris and Young made a simple but critical point: in any mode of production the labor force, i.e. those available to perform socially productive labor, is socially constituted. Under capitalism, for example, it consists only of those who are forced to sell their labor power on the market. Human reproduction cannot be seen as directly equivalent to the constitution of the labor force. There are a set of intervening processes which categorize individuals as to their position in the labor process. Thus a central issue is the analysis over time of the relation between population levels (the outcome of society's, or men's, control over reproduction) and the organization of production (which determines the demand for labor).

Meillassoux seemed to be arguing that in all human societies subsequent to hunting bands and gynolocalities (excepting, in the future, advanced communism), men had of necessity controlled reproduction, and hence controlled women. Edholm, Harris and Young responded that even if some kind of social control over reproduction were a necessary feature of all societies, such control need not necessarily be by men, nor need it be inimical to the interests of women. Furthermore, control over reproduction was only part of the problem of controlling allocation to the labor force. Finally, the question of who controlled women's important work as material producers had been neglected. Reproduction had become an overloaded concept; to make it the all-inclusive explanation for men's control over women was unconvincing.

In addition to "patriarchy" and "reproduction," the marxist-feminists took up the question of "domestic labor" raised by radical feminists and this issue soon became a major preoccupation. Against early feminist efforts to depict housework under capitalism as a definite mode of production (Harrison 1973; Delphy 1977) producing only use values (Benston 1961), marxists were concerned to specify housework's contribution to capital, to demonstrate that it was functional to it. Wally Seccombe's major statement (1974) argued that the wage, which appeared to pay for the worker's labor only, was actually paying for all the labor that reproduced his labor power and that of his family. The wage has two parts, that which sustains the laborer, and that which sustains the housewife. Domestic labor is commodity production, in that it produces labor power, yet it is not subject to the law of value, it does not produce "surplus value," and therefore is not technically "productive." In reply, Jean Gardiner (1975) raised the question: if domestic labor did not contribute to surplus value, then how did capital stand either to gain or to lose by domestic labor? Further, she could see no intimation of exploitation in Seccombe's implied equal exchange between husband and wife. She asserted instead that the wife's labor time in effect adds to the wage time of the husband to yield the total subsistence or necessary level of labor time, and that domestic labor reduces the necessary part of the worker's labor time, or the value of labor power, to a level that is lower than the actual subsistence level of the working class. The difference is made up by the housewife's unpaid labor. Domestic labor thus cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Towards a Materialist Perspective on African Women
• 2 The Material Basis of Sexism: A Mode of Production Analysis
• 3 Patriarchal Social Formations in Zimbabwe
• 4 Demographic Theories and Women's Reproductive Labor
• 5 Rural Women's Access to Labor in West Africa
• 6 Sexuality and Power on the Zambian Copperbelt: 1926-1964
• 7 Domestic Labor in a Colonial City: Prostitution in Nairobi, 1900-1952
• 8 Evading Male Control: Women in the Second Economy in Zaire
• 9 The Middle-Class Family in Kenya: Changes in Gender Relations
• 10 Trapped Workers: The Case of Domestic Servants in South Africa
• Notes on Contributors
• Index