Femininity and Domination

Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

Sandra Lee Bartky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136785337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

1

Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness

I

Contemporary feminism has many faces. The best attempts so far to deal with the scope and complexity of the movement have divided feminists along ideological lines. Thus, liberal, Marxist, neo-Marxist, and what are called “radical” feminists differ from one another in that they have differing sets of beliefs about the origin and nature of sexism and thus quite different prescriptions for the proper way of eliminating it. But this way of understanding the nature of the women’s movement, however, indispensable, is not the only way. While I would not hesitate to call someone a feminist who supported a program for the liberation of women and who held beliefs about the nature of contemporary society appropriate to such a political program, something crucial to an understanding of feminism is overlooked if its definition is so restricted.

To be a feminist, one has first to become one. For many feminists, this involves the experience of a profound personal transformation, an experience which goes far beyond that sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as “political.” This transforming experience, which cuts across the ideological divisions within the women’s movement, is complex and multifaceted. In the course of undergoing the transformation to which I refer, the feminist changes her behavior: She makes new friends; she responds differently to people and events; her habits of consumption change; sometimes she alters her living arrangements or, more dramatically, her whole style of life. She may decide to pursue a career, to develop potentialities within herself which had long lain dormant or she may commit herself to political struggle. In a biting and deliberately flat tone, one feminist enumerates some of the changes in her own life:

During the past year I … was arrested on a militant women’s liberation action, spent some time in jail, stopped wearing makeup and shaving my legs, started learning Karate and changed my politics completely.¹

These changes in behavior go hand in hand with changes in consciousness: to become a feminist is to develop a radically altered consciousness of oneself, of others, and of what, for lack of a better term, I shall call “social reality.”² Feminists themselves have a name for the struggle to clarify and to hold fast to this way of apprehending things: They call it “consciousness-raising.” A “raised” consciousness on the part of women is not only a causal factor in the emergence of the feminist movement itself but also an important part of its political program. Many small discussion groups exist solely for the purpose of consciousness-raising. But what happens when one’s consciousness is raised? What is a fully developed feminist consciousness like? In this paper, I would like to examine not the full global experience of liberation, involving as it does new ways of being as well as new ways of perceiving, but, more narrowly, those distinctive ways of perceiving which characterize feminist consciousness. What follows will be a highly tentative attempt at a morphology of feminist consciousness. Without claiming to have discovered them all, I shall try to identify some structural features of that altered way of apprehending oneself and the world which is both product and content of a raised consciousness. But before I begin, I would like to make some very general remarks about the nature of this consciousness and about the conditions under which it emerges.

Although the oppression of women is universal, feminist consciousness is not. While I am not sure that I could demonstrate the necessity of its appearance in this time and place and not in another, I believe it is possible to identify two features of current social reality which, if not sufficient, are at least necessary conditions for the emergence of feminist consciousness. These features constitute, in addition, much of the content of this consciousness. I refer, first, to the existence of what Marxists call “contradictions” in our society and, second, to the presence, due to these same contradictions, of concrete circumstances which would permit a significant alteration in the status of women.

In Marxist theory, the stage is set for social change when existing forms of social interaction—property relations as well as values, attitudes, and beliefs—come into conflict with new social relations which are generated by changes in the mode of production:

At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.³

Social conflict regularly takes an ideological form, so much so that conflicts which are fundamentally economic in origin may appear to be struggles between ideas, as, for instance, between competing conceptions of the nature of legitimate political authority or of woman’s proper sphere. To date, no one has offered a comprehensive analysis of those changes in the socioeconomic structure of contemporary American society which have made possible the emergence of feminist consciousness.⁴ This task is made doubly difficult by the fact that these changes constitute no completed process, no convenient object for dispassionate historical investigation, but are part of the fluid set of circumstances in which each of us must find our way from one day to another and whose ultimate direction is as yet unclear. In spite of this, several features of current social reality cannot escape notice.

First, if we add to the Marxist notion of “modes of production” the idea of “modes of (biological) reproduction,” then it is evident that the development of cheap and efficient types of contraception has been instrumental in changing both the concrete choices women are able to make and the prevailing conceptions about woman’s function and destiny. Second, the rapid growth of service industries has had much to do with the steady rise in the percentage of women in the work force, since the post–World War II low in the early fifties. While poor women and women of color have often had to work for wages, middleclass women were largely restricted to the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker; this restriction, together with the rationales that justify it, is clearly out of phase with the entry of millions of such women into the market economy. The growth and spread of a technology to ease the burden of housekeeping, a technology which is itself the result of a need on the part of late capitalism for “innovations” in production, serves further to undermine traditional conceptions about woman’s place. During part of the period of the most rapid rise in the percentage of women in the work force, to cite still another “contradiction,” there appeared an anomalous and particularly virulent form of the “feminine mystique,” which, together with its companion, the ideal of “togetherness,” had the effect, among other things, of insuring that the family would remain an efficient vehicle of consumption.⁵ What triggered feminist consciousness most immediately, no doubt, were the civil rights movement and the peace and student movements of the sixties; while they had other aims as well, the latter movements may also be read as expressions of protest against the growing bureaucratization, depersonalization, and inhumanity of late capitalist society. Women often found themselves forced to take subordinate positions within these movements; it did not take long for them to see the contradiction between the oppression these movements were fighting in the larger society and their own continuing oppression in the life of these movements themselves.⁶

Clearly, any adequate account of the “contradictions” of late capitalism, that is, of the conflicts, the instabilities, the ways in which some parts of the social whole are out of phase with others, would be a complex and elaborate task. But whatever a complete account of these contradictions would look like, it is essential to understand as concretely as possible how the contradictory factors we are able to identify are lived and suffered by particular people. The facts of economic development are crucial to an understanding of any phenomenon of social change, but they are not the phenomenon in its entirety. Dogmatic Marxists have regarded consciousness as a mere reflection of material conditions and therefore uninteresting as an object for study in and of itself. Even Marxist scholars of a more humane cast of mind have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which the social and economic tensions they study are played out in the lives of concrete individuals. There is an anguished consciousness, an inner uncertainty and confusion which characterizes human subjectivity in periods of social change—and I shall contend that feminist consciousness, in large measure, is an anguished consciousness—of whose existence Marxist scholars seem largely unaware. Indeed, the only sort of consciousness which is discussed with any frequency in the literature is “class consciousness,” a somewhat unclear idea whose meaning Marxists themselves dispute. In sum, then, the incorporation of phenomenological methods into Marxist analysis is necessary, if the proper dialectical relations between human consciousness and the material modes of production are ever to be grasped in their full concreteness.

Women have long lamented their condition, but a lament, pure and simple, need not be an expression of feminist consciousness. As long as their situation is apprehended as natural, inevitable, and inescapable, women’s consciousness of themselves, no matter how alive to insult and inferiority, is not yet feminist consciousness. This consciousness, as I contended earlier, emerges only when there exists a genuine possibility for the partial or total liberation of women. This possibility is more than a mere accidental accompaniment of feminist consciousness; rather, feminist consciousness is the apprehension of that possibility. The very meaning of what the feminist apprehends is illuminated by the light of what ought to be. The given situation is first understood in terms of a state of affairs in which what is given would be negated and radically transformed. To say that feminist consciousness is the experience in a certain way of certain specific contradictions in the social order is to say that the feminist apprehends certain features of social reality as intolerable, as to be rejected in behalf of a transforming project for the future. “It is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and we decide that these are unbearable.”⁷ What Sartre would call her “transcendence,” her project of negation and transformation, makes possible what are specifically feminist ways of apprehending contradictions in the social order. Women workers who are not feminists know that they receive unequal pay for equal work, but they may think that the arrangement is just; the feminist sees this situation as an instance of exploitation and an occasion for struggle. Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a “fact” into a “contradiction”; often, features of social reality are first apprehended as contradictory, as in conflict with one another, or as disturbingly out of phase with one another, from the vantage point of a radical project of transformation.

Thus, we understand what we are and where we are in the light of what we are not yet. But the perspective from which I understand the world must be rooted in the world too. My comprehension of what I and my world can become must take account of what we are. The possibility of a transformed society which allows the feminist to grasp the significance of her current situation must somehow be contained in the apprehension of her current situation: the contradictory situation in which she finds herself she perceives as unstable, as carrying within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. There is no way of telling, by a mere examination of some form of consciousness, whether the possibilities it incorporates are realizable or not; this depends on whether the situation is such as to contain within itself the sorts of material conditions which will bring to fruition a human expectation. If no such circumstances are present, then the consciousness in question is not the kind of consciousness which accompanies a genuine political project at all, but merely fantasy. I think that an examination of the circumstances of our lives will show that feminist consciousness and the radical project of transformation which animates it is, if less than an absolutely certain anticipation of what must be, more than mere fantasy.

The relationship between consciousness and concrete circumstances can best be described as “dialectical”. Feminist consciousness is more than a mere reflection of external material conditions, for the transforming and negating perspective which it incorporates first allows these conditions to be revealed as the conditions they are. But on the other hand, the apprehension of some state of affairs as intolerable, as to-be-transformed, does not, in and of itself, transform it.

II

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization. To apprehend one-self as victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation. For some feminists, this hostile power is “society” or “the system”; for others, it is simply men. Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many. In the realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims. To come to see oneself as victim, to have such an altered perception of oneself and of one’s society is not to see things in the same old way while merely judging them differently or to superimpose new attitudes on things like frosting a cake. The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality is really like.

The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness. To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time, feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed. Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength. But this division in the way we apprehend ourselves has a positive effect, for it leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself.

The consciousness of victimization may be a consciousness divided in a second way. The awareness I have of myself as victim may rest uneasily alongside the awareness that I am also and at the same time enormously privileged, more privileged than the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. I myself enjoy both white-skin privilege and the privileges of comparative affluence. In our society, of course, women of color are not so fortunate; white women, as a group and on average, are substantially more economically advantaged than many persons of color, especially women of color; white women have better housing and education, enjoy lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and, unlike many poor persons of color, both men and women, are rarely forced to live in the climate of street violence that has become a standard feature of urban poverty. But even women of color in our society are relatively advantaged in comparison to the appalling poverty of women in, e.g., Africa and Latin America.

Many women do not develop a consciousness divided in this way at all: they see themselves, to be sure, as victims of an unjust system of social power, but they remain blind to the extent to which they themselves are implicated in the victimization of others. What this means is that the “raising” of a woman’s consciousness is, unfortunately, no safeguard against her continued acquiescence in racism, imperialism, or class oppression. Sometimes, however, the entry into feminist consciousness, for white women especially, may bring in its wake a growth in political awareness generally: The disclosure of one’s own oppression may lead to an understanding of a range of misery to which one was heretofore blind.

But consciousness divided in this way may tend, just as easily, to produce confusion, guilt, and paralysis in the political sphere. To know oneself as a “guilty victim” is to know oneself as guilty; this guilt is sometimes so profound that it sets a woman up for political manipulation. When this happens, she may find herself caught up in political agendas or even in political organizations that speak only to her guilt and not, at the same time, to her need; indeed, she may have been recruited on the basis of her guilt alone. The awakening comes at last: The recognition that she has been manipulated—“guilt-tripped”—brings in its wake resentment, anger, and very often a headlong and permanent refusal to engage ever again in any political activity. A consciousness so divided, again, so guilt-ridden, may experience paralysis in still another way: Trained anyhow to subordinate her needs to the needs of others, a woman may be so overwhelmed by the discovery of her own complicity in such evils as racism or imperialism that she denies herself permission fully to confront the real discomforts of her own situation. Her anger is mobilized on behalf of everyone else, but never on her own behalf. We all know women like this, admirable women who toil ceaselessly in the vineyards of social justice, alive to the insults borne by others, but seemingly oblivious to the ones meant for them.

To apprehend myself as victim in a sexist society is to know that there are few places where I can hide, that I can be attacked almost anywhere, at any time, by virtually anyone. Innocent chatter, the currency of ordinary social life, or a compliment (“You don’t think like a woman”), the well-intentioned advice of psychologists, the news item, the joke, the cosmetics advertisement—none of these is what it is or what it was. Each reveals itself, depending on the circumstances in which it appears, as a threat, an insult, an affront, as a reminder, however, subtle, that I belong to an inferior caste. In short, these are revealed as instruments of oppression or as articulations of a sexist institution. Since many things are not what they seem to be and since many apparently harmless sorts of things can suddenly exhibit a sinister dimension, social reality is revealed as deceptive.

Contemporary thinkers as diverse as Heidegger and Marcuse have written about the ambiguity and mystification which are so prominent a feature of contemporary social life. Feminists are alive to one certain dimension of a society which seems to specialize in duplicity—the sexist dimension. But the deceptive nature of this aspect of social reality itself makes the feminist’s experience of life, her anger and sense of outrage difficult to communicate to the insensitive or uninitiated; it increases her frustration and reinforces her isolation. There is nothing ambiguous about racial segregation or economic discrimination. It is far less difficult to point to such abuses than it is to show how, for example, the “tone” of a news story can transform a piece of reportage into a refusal to take women’s political struggles seriously. The male reporter for a large local daily paper who described the encounter of Betty Friedan and the Republican Women’s Caucus at Miami never actually used the word “fishwife,” nor did he say outright that the political struggles of women are worthy of ridicule; he merely chose to describe the actions of the individuals involved in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous. (Nor, it should be added, did he fail to describe Ms. Friedan as “petite.”) It is difficult to characterize the tone of an article, the patronizing implications of a remark, the ramifications of some accepted practice, and i...