Women Take Issue

Aspects of Women's Subordination

CCCS, CCCS

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2006. Women Take Issue draws on collective and individual research by members of the Women's Studies Group at the Centre. It concentrates on the problems of analysing women's subordination in Britain.The book opens with a retrospective article which comes to grips with the problem of doing feminist intellectual work through the experience of the Women's Studies Group. This is followed by an analysis of some aspects of the early women's movement. In the third section economic approaches to the basis of women's oppression are examined for their usefulness and limitations.

The second half of the book includes articles on:

• The culture of teenage girls

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• Young working class women at home

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• Woman - the problem of femininity as constructed in this magazine

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• Women's reproductive role through class and history

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• Anthropology

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• Women, kinship structures and family.

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This combination of theoretical work and contemporary case studies engages constructively with the traditions of cultural analysis from a feminist perspective, and contributes to the study of women's situation in Britain.

1

Women’s Studies Group: trying to do feminist intellectual work

Editorial Group

This book has been produced by a group of nine women and two men, some of whom have previously worked together in the Women’s Studies Group (WSG) at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). This is a postgraduate research centre where students and teachers, as well as conducting individual research, work collectively in groups organized around areas of shared interest -for example, education, media, women’s studies. This form of work allows groups to define their own area of study without the formal division teacher/taught or the constraint of examinations. There is also usually some continuity in group membership which makes it possible to attempt extended and continuing collective work. This work is annually presented to the whole of the department in the summer term and has formed the basis for issues of the journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies.

When we decided to do this book we thought we were deciding to produce the eleventh issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies (1). Ten issues, with only four articles concerning women – it seemed about time. Women’s continuing ‘invisibility’ in the journal, and in much of the intellectual work done within CCCS (although things are changing), is the result of a complex of factors, which although in their particular combination are specific to our own relatively privileged situation, are not unique to it. We want here to outline some of the problems the Women’s Studies Group has faced, in a way which gives this book some sort of history, but also attempts to deal with the more general problems of women’s studies and trying to do feminist intellectual work.

Our situation, as a group of research students, may seem very removed from that of women trying to introduce non-sexist teaching materials in schools, running women’s studies (WS) courses on a shoe-string or trying to do feminist research alone in an unsympathetic department or at home with kids. We think, however, that the very different problems of each specific academic environment in which we try to work as feminists are informed by broadly the same basic issues and needs. We are all involved in some way in challenging both the existing understanding of society, and the role and construction of sex/gender within this, and the ways in which this understanding is achieved and transmitted. It is through the questions that feminism poses, and the absences it locates, that feminist research and women’s studies are constituted as one aspect of the struggle for the transformation of society which would make ‘women’s studies’ unnecessary.

Working as a group in an academic context raises in a particular way the problems of the relationship between intellectual and political practice. Our relationship to the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) as a group has been ambiguous. For some of us the WSG is our closest contact with the WLM. Others are more active in relation to women’s liberation outside an academic context. This topic, and our disagreements over what our practice should be, dominated our early discussions about taking the journal on. The questions this raised became the problem of whom to address in our writings: how far could we assume our readers to be Marxists, or feminists, or both, or neither? We also had to try to be self-conscious about the use we made of theoretical concepts to help us to understand women’s subordination more precisely; to avoid a general tendency in CCCS towards an unself-conscious use of theoretical language which is one element in perpetuating knowledge as the property of a few. We do not think that we were, by any means, always successful in distinguishing these uses.

Women’s studies in academic institutions

The difficulty with writing this type of account is partly that our own rather limited experience is only one example of the way feminists have worked together since the beginnings of the WLM in the late 1960s. One thing to arise from the diverse practices and perspectives of the WLM was women organizing together both to share experiences, and work collectively towards a knowledge of them, and to interrogate and appropriate ‘knowledge’ and skills which exclude or ignore women. This both preceded and continues to accompany the establishment of WS courses in academic institutions.

We concentrate on our own experiences as a group in an academic institution not because we consider it the more important but because it is in this way that we have experienced problems concretely. We would argue that these problems are partly constituted through the contradictions of women’s studies as an academic field.

The Manchester Conference on Women’s Studies in December 1976 identified two major problems confronting women’s studies in Great Britain. One was the division between academic and non-academic women’s studies, the other the ‘amorphous nature of women’s studies’. The organizing collective understood the problem of the ‘amorphous nature of WS’ as largely determined by

an underlying academic versus non-academic conflict concerning both the structure and content of the conference and the participants to whom it was directed.

We agree that this can contribute to a problem of definition for WS in general but think that it also relates to the considerable diversity, in aims, methods and contents, between WS courses within various academic institutions. What the organizing collective define as WS’s ‘amorphous nature’ has also to do with WS in itself being a potentially subversive non-academic set of practices. The established structures of learning are continually challenged in the attempt to construct objects of knowledge and to devise ways of learning that are radical alternatives to the institutions within which they exist. Women’s studies, like black studies, as a subject or discipline, has political not academic roots (2), and is constituted through the recognition of economic, ideological, sexual and political subordination and exploitation of a social group. Its political origins mean that it necessarily exists in many different forms, and that its very appearance within an academic context is both the result and the occasion of struggles inside and outside that context (3).

We have to learn as women together, in many different ways and on many different fronts, often drawing on the collective knowledge of the WLM in areas ranging from self-help health care, aspects of legal and financial (in)dependence and so on, right through to various ‘academic’ courses (4). WS courses have to fight for recognition and at the same time guard against the inroads of academic respectability, viability and fashionability which incorporate and politically neuter them. We would argue that there are inherent contradictions between the political origins and objectives of WS in the WLM and the academic space that these WS courses occupy. As Hartnett and Rendel (1975) put it:

In essence the dilemma for WS is one of maintaining its own integrity within an educational system having (certain) characteristics while trying to infiltrate and leaven all knowledge.

Moreover the divisions do not work only at the level of ‘content’, as the Women’s Report Collective (1975) point out:

We should be asking what we want from WS. Is it to raise consciousness – to provide ammunition – to change the education system – to produce feminists – or all of these? or none of these?

We deal with this point partly in relation to our own work but first we make four necessarily interrelated points about WS within academic institutions. Firstly, taking a WS option or course can act as a form of consciousness-raising particularly as it is mainly women who take these courses. The content of WS courses consists of material with a personal relevance for the women involved. The course can therefore provide a forum in which to explore issues about, for example, sexuality, as they relate to individuals, and enables the participants both to dispel the neurosis-producing ‘it-only-happens-to-me’ complex, and to situate personal experience and their subjectively registered responses to them in a sociological and historical context. Secondly, WS courses take a different starting point in specific disciplines – that of women. This takes the form either of the discovery of new empirical material or the privileging of already existing material. It takes women’s sphere of activity, previously marginalized, and places it centrally. Thirdly, WS provides a critique of sexism and chauvinism in existing theories, texts and courses. This often arises as part of, and along with, the previous two aspects. This is because working from the point of view of women reveals that there is a systematic absence of this viewpoint, and the presence of whole sets of assumptions about women (and, usually, their place in the family). It is thus necessary to begin to formulate an explanatory theory which rests on some notion of women’s structural subordination.

This in turn leads to the need to develop conceptual tools for feminist analysis. This may mean using already existing, but neglected or taken-for-granted concepts like the ‘sexual division of labour’. It may also mean the separation of concepts like ‘sex’ from ‘gender’ as Oakley (1972) does, and the development of new concepts with specific meanings – for example the usage of relations of reproduction in Article 8 in this book. These concepts are developed and explored in the attempt to understand the material processes which constitute a social formation structured into division and conflict on the grounds of gender as well as class. The struggle for new ways of understanding the social formation (5) means that a ‘feminist perspective’ in existing disciplines cannot consist of just a token acknowledgement, somewhere, of women. We would argue that society has to be understood as constituted through the articulation of both sex/gender and class antagonisms, although some feminists would accord primacy to sexual division in their analyses.

In relation to our own work, one of our main intellectual and political difficulties has been making effective interventions in work that was going on in CCCS. How does WS or feminist research transform existing research and knowledge? Where should we start in the attempt to analyse a social formation as structured through both class antagonisms and sex/gender? How do we carry out our work without being sucked into the intellectual field as already constituted, i.e. gaining legitimation at the expense of our feminism, losing sight of the informing politics of our work?

To intervene effectively as feminists in other group areas of interest it seems we would have to conquer the whole of cultural studies, in itself multi-disciplinary, and then make a feminist critique of it. Or, the alternative we tended to adopt, we could concentrate on what we saw as the central areas of research within the WSG, and thus risk our concerns remaining gender-specific – our own concerns: the ‘woman question’ claimed by, and relegated to, the women. Sporadic attempts to argue against the ‘hiving off of the woman question from this seemingly snug corner were viewed as double-binding other CCCS members – either we had something to say and we should say it, or else we didn’t, and so we should stop making everyone feel guilty.

The problems will be familiar to feminists. It is only if the problem of women’s subordination is recognized, politically, that questions about, for example, sex-differentiation, the invisibility of women, the consideration of gender at a structural level, the sexual division of labour, the role of the family arise at a theoretical and intellectual level. However, these questions do not follow automatically from this political recognition, particularly when the focus of study is the general area of, say, ‘Education’ and not ‘Women and …’ or ‘Women in …’. The political/theoretical recognition that women have always already been ‘left out’ (that the field of study will have been constituted through the taken-for-grantedness, and hence, invisibility, of women’s subordination) is only the pre-condition for a feminist critique, and subsequently for feminist research. Thus even if a group consciously make a decision, as the media group did, to move into an area of study more obviously related to feminist concerns – in this case from the study of ‘hard’ current affairs television to a family programme within the same spectrum, BBC’s Nationwide – there is no guarantee that the resulting work will be ‘feminist’. In this case, the research material reproduced traditional biases, with some updating. Thus, for example, the gender of interviewers in relation to the type of interview had not been routinely recorded, except in the case of obviously sexist items. Our work always confronts the disparity between the sophistication of analyses of the social formation in terms of class, and the relative under-development of work on the structures of sex/gender. We have tended as a group to address ourselves to the problem of the articulation of these two areas at a theoretical level, and are thus constantly undermined by the lack of specificity in our work. It is this necessity – to do concrete, historically specific research from a feminist perspective – which could be described as the most important thing that we have learnt from our last few years.

Establishing the group

The group started in October 1974. Until that time we had been just two or three individual women amongst about twenty men at CCCS. We had worked in various sub-groups, none of which had a serious concern for women as a focus of study, and found ourselves in isolation interrogating text after text for this major absence. The structured absence of women from most theoretical and academic texts poses acute problems when trying to work with this material through insights from the WLM, and alongside material from the WLM, some of which is in many ways antagonistic to theoretical/academic work per se. We were constantly trying to understand the experience of the absence of women, at a theoretical level (there must be more to this than meets the eye …) – to see how gender structures and is itself structured. Although in some areas, at one level, it is a question of the absence of empirical material – for example, there is more data available about boys at school than about girls – this absence is always already structured. We can’t just say ‘what about women?’ when the answer to this question involves thinking differently about the whole field or object of study. Because women’s lives are structured through their subordination, absent data about women cannot simply be filled in – you cannot just add girls’ experience of school to boys’ experience of school, because the determinants of this experience are different, and have to be understood as such before even the question about girls’ experience at school can be asked (see Article 5). However, at this stage, we didn’t even raise the question of ‘what about women?’. We found it extremely difficult to participate in CCCS groups and felt, without being able to articulate it, that it was a case of the masculine domination of both intellectual work and the environment in which it was being carried out. Intellectually, our questions were still about ‘absences’. Socially, but inseparable from our intellectual presence, as one woman put it at the time, we could either strive for a sort of ‘de-sexualized’ intellectual role, or retain ‘femininity’ either through keeping quiet, or in an uneasy combination with being ‘one of the lads’. These problems could only be seriously discussed in a small women’s group, a solution which came directly from the WLM. In part, however, it was the influx in 1974 of several more women intending to work on women that finally precipitated the move to set up a WSG – originally only two of us had a thesis topic on women. When it was set up, the WSG was open to both women and men. This is necessarily the case with most WS courses inside academic institutions. However, it was not until the second term of 1975 that one man joined us. The group was, until then, as self-selective in terms of sex-origin as most WS courses.

Unlike other CCCS groups, the WSG had a supportive function for us as women, analogous to consciousness-raising groups in the WLM, and this to some extent gave it an ambiguous function and status in the CCCS. Again in common with many WS courses we were both a woman’s group and a women’s studies group. But this political aspect can create problems (which are perhaps more apparent in a research group with a fairly constant membership than, for example, one-year courses) both in terms of our work, i.e. a support group carrying on academic work and, related to this, in the way we carried it on. As women, we are inevitably the subject and object of our study. This creates a tension which at one level delivers the political power of our own work, and at another delivers a particular kind of humour, mode of working and an understanding of the uncertainties we all encounter in our work as women. It is based on the recognition of our common experiences of femininity. These considerations and their implications resulted in us being split over the question of whether the group should be explicitly closed (to men) in the same way that WLM small groups are. We consequently gave out rather contradictory messages to the rest of the CCCS.

It was in an attempt to deal directly with some of these problems that we proposed, in June 1976, to set up a women’s forum (WF), a closed women’s group, open to all women at CCCS. We hoped in this way to allow the WSG to continue its intellectual project, while discussion of more general feminist issues at CCCS would take place in the larger group. We also saw the WF as fulfilling wider supportive functions for women at and around CCCS. This group was to be the one through which we could organize as women in a more direct relation to the WLM. The proposal provoked lengthy discussion in a meeting at which it originally seemed that no one opposed it. We would now see this in many ways as the beginnings of a more open discussion of the implications of feminism for the CCCS as a whole.

Work in the Women’s Studies Group

In the first term the WSG undertook the task of examining ‘Images of Women in the Media’...