The Liberation of Women (RLE Feminist Theory)

A Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism

Roberta Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415637053
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136194269
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Liberation of Women, Roberta Hamilton explores two of the key questions that have been systematically raised by the Women's Liberation Movement: why have women occupied a subordinate position in society and how can the variation in the forms and intensity of their exploitation and oppression be explained? Within the Women's Liberation Movement there have been seen to be two different and opposed answers to these questions: a feminist answer and a Marxist one. The feminist analysis has addressed itself to a patriarchal ideology, locating the source of male domination and female subordination in the biological differences between the sexes. Marxists, on the other hand, have seen the origins of female subordination in the growing phenomenon of private property, which, in their view, has made possible and necessary the exploitation of these biological differences in the modern world.

This new work attempts to examine this debate in specific analytical terms through a study of the changing role of women during a particular historical period – the seventeenth century. In the course of less than one hundred years the rise of capitalism and the acceptance of Protestantism had separately and together radically altered every aspect of a woman's life. Can both a feminist and a Marxist analysis account for these changes? Do such accounts conflict with each other, making a choice inevitable? Do they overlap to such an extent that retaining both would be redundant? Or, finally, are they complementary, can they usefully coexist? To answer these questions Roberta Hamilton tries to work out the changes that can be attributed to the emergence of capitalism (a Marxist explanation) and those that stemmed from the transformation in patriarchal ideology (a feminist explanation).

The Liberation of Women will be of particular interest to students of history, sociology and Women's Studies and to those who have been involved in the Women's Liberation Movement. In particular, it will prove essential basic reading for an ever-growing number of courses on sexual divisions in society and the role of women.

1

The Changing Role of Women in the Seventeenth Century

The seventeenth century has been called ‘one of the great watersheds’ in modern English history (Clark, 1947, p. ix). The transition from feudalism to capitalism interlocked with the rise of Protestantism to leave no aspect of English life untouched. Yet my decision to consider investigating seventeenth-century England was based initially on a much more limited kind of lead.

It was chosen because of scattered references in various sources to the work of Alice Clark on seventeenth-century England (1919). Her thesis seemed to be that women had played a more important role in the pre-industrial economy than they had subsequently. Any casual student of English history would also have known that it was the century which encompassed both what Hobsbawm has called ‘the first complete bourgeois revolution’ (1954, p. 63) and the ascendancy of what Weber termed the Protestant ethic (1958). And slowly, as the study proceeded, understanding the rise of capitalism on the one hand, and the development of Protestantism on the other, became central to developing an interpretation of how and why the position of women had changed during the seventeenth century. But saying this skips over an important part of the process which led to its selection.

Apparently Clark had shown that pre-industrial women played a greater part in the economy. This was not an undisputed point of view. Marx had held that, on the contrary, it was the development of technology that had made possible, and even necessary, the introduction of women into the economy (1906, p. 394). Engels went further, calling ‘the rule of the wife over her husband, a natural consequence of the factory system’ (1958, p. 164).

Why did Clark's interpretation differ from Marx's? Her conclusion had arisen from a study of the seventeenth century. But – and the importance of this was not immediately evident – this was a hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. If the important dimension in understanding the changing position of women in the economy was industrialisation, either because it further limited women, as Clark was interpreted as having said, or because, on the contrary, it made possible women's direct role in the economy, as Marx believed, why was the crucial period for Clark one hundred years prior to industrialisation?

A study of seventeenth-century economic history (Tawney, 1912; Hoskins, 1957; Everitt, 1967) along with a careful reading of Clark revealed why she had selected that century, and not the late eighteenth century, as her period. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have been interpreted by scholars as the decisive moment in the collapse of the feudal economy and the simultaneous process of capitalisation (Dobb, 1947, p. 18). It was this transitional period from feudalism to capitalism that Clark had been studying. The collapse of the feudal economy meant the decline of the domestic and family industry upon which it was based. Clark was only peripherally dealing with the effects of industrialisation on women; her main focus, and what she was explicitly considering, was the effects of the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism on the family and, therefore, on women. What then was this study to consider as being most important to understanding the changing position of women: the rise of capitalism (as had Clark) or the development of technology (as had Marx)?

Marx proposed that industrial capitalism was crucial in redefining the role of women. But this was in contrast to the focus of his total analysis, namely, the rise of capitalism. The social relations of production, he insisted, determined how the means of production would be used. Marx's definition of the Civil War and its consequences make this clear (1969, p. 139):

The Revolutions of 1648 and 1789 … were not the victory of a definite class of society over the old political order; they were the proclamation of political order for the new European society. The bourgeoisie was victorious in these revolutions; but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new order of society, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of partition over primogeniture, of the owner of the land over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over medieval privilege.

Why did Marx, who so clearly saw the rise of capitalism as the key process, focus on industrialisation when he came to study women? Why was he so impressed because industrialisation had freed them to work outside the home? After all, in feudal times men did not primarily work outside the home either. The division between ‘working’ and ‘living’ had not yet been made; the workplace and the home were coterminous.

There are two plausible and complementary explanations. First, Marx was comparing working-class women not to peasants but to the bourgeois women – leisured and at home – with whom he was more familiar. Second, his view of women led him to believe that the introduction of machinery had enabled women to participate in the economy because great physical strength was no longer required (1906, p. 431).

In fact, women had been active in all aspects of the feudal economy, including those areas requiring physical strength and endurance. That Marx had shared some of the preconceptions of his age about women, and that this had led him to abandon his overall analysis when considering them, seems reasonable. A ‘Marxist’ analysis would suggest that, since the society was so completely transformed during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the position of women would also have changed; that is to say, that capitalisation rather than industrialisation should be the key process on which to focus.

What about a feminist analysis? What would it suggest as the crucial dimension in understanding the changing role of women: the rise of capitalism or the Industrial Revolution? For the feminist, the family is the mediating institution between women and society. It is here that ‘the social function and the psychic identity of women as a group is found’ (Mitchell, 1971, p. 182). The most familiar theme in the literature has been the effects of early industrialisation on family life. Perhaps, then, this was the most important period not just for the social worker but also for the sociologist? This would be the starting point: the mother forced to neglect her children in order to work inhumanly long hours in the factory.

To the long working hours away from home were added insanitary working and living conditions and very large families. Child neglect was rife and disturbed the public conscience. So did also the fact that many working-class women, used from early childhood to work in factories, had so little experience in the most elementary household duties that they were unable, not only through sheer lack of time and physical exhaustion, but also through absence of training, to turn their living quarters into ‘homes’ – with the result that many husbands took refuge at the public house or the ‘gin-shop’. (Klein, 1963, p. 30)

But with what would this bleak picture be compared?. Who was the pre-industrial woman?

The first answer and the easy answer – that she was a peasant – was wrong. The economic historians, beginning with Marx but not ending there, as C. H. George has shown (1971), have pointed out that people did not leave their land to flock to the factories. On the contrary, they had already been evicted or ‘freed’ from the soil. By the time of the Industrial Revolution there was a virtual army of people totally dependent on wage labour employed in agriculture, manufactories, in their own hovels or in domestic work. A complex system of poor relief and Poor Laws was already in effect to deal with the vast surplus landless population which threatened the tranquillity of the English countryside as well as the burgeoning towns and cities (Hill, 1969c, p. 261). Nor, on the other hand, was the capital to build and run factories accumulated through the feudal economic arrangements; it was amassed during pre-industrial capitalism.

As a result, both the wage-earning family and the bourgeois family were well established long before the Industrial Revolution. The. economic basis of this pre-industrial, but post-feudal family was the same as that of the industrial family: it was totally dependent either on the wage labour of individual family members, or on capital. The fundamental changes in the family occur, then, not with industrialisation, but with capitalism. The peasant evicted from the land must turn to wage labour for sole support; the bourgeoisie lived not from the result of its own labour as did its predecessors, the craftsman or trader, but off capital – the surplus value realised through the surplus or unpaid labour of the newly forming wage-earning class (Marx, 1935, p. 45).

The family ceased to be the economic unit of production. It was this process – the decline of family and domestic industry – which shattered the interdependent relationship between husband and wife, which led to the identification of family life with privacy, home, consumption, domesticity – and with women.

Both a feminist and a Marxist analysis would indicate, then, for different though related reasons, that the transition period from feudalism to capitalism rather than the process of industrialisation was the most crucial. This was so because for the Marxists it had been the most important transformation in the society in a thousand years, for the feminists because the family, that institution which mediates between women and society, had been fundamentally altered as a result of the transition.

The decision to interpret the changing position of women in terms of the transition from feudalism to capitalism was made with Marxist and feminist considerations in mind. Essentially, however, it resulted in a Marxist explanation; that is, it assumed that the mode of production determined the role played by women in society. This proved useful in accounting for the productive role played by women of all feudal estates. It further explained the development in capitalist society of ‘two nations’ of women, to use Viola Klein's descriptive phrase (1963, p. 28). Women of the labouring class were burdened with toil at home and work; women of the bourgeoisie found themselves atop a pedestal. From this pedestal – bored with their life of idleness and powerlessness – they would eventually press their ‘feminist’ demands.

This account – the analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism – did not lend itself, however, to an interpretation of the changing ideas about women which developed in the same period. Historians agree that feudal women of all classes had been economically productive. The reason seemed clear: the family was a unit of production. Women were partners with their husbands in the economic functions of the family, a situation which gave rise to what Power called a ‘rough-and-ready equality’ (1965, p. 410).

But this was in conflict with most of the literature written about women in feudal times, the literature of the Catholic Church. Its ideas about women, far from mirroring ideas of equality, concern rather their evilness, their potential threat to men, their general uselessness to men except in procreation. It viewed the family as a third-rate choice for the weak; men and women were urged to enter monasteries and nunneries to avoid cohabiting with each other. To put it another way: at a time when the family was the economic unit of the society, the best the Catholic Church could find to say about that institution was still Paul's admonition that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’ (1 Corinthians 7 : 9).

On the other hand, by the end of the seventeenth century women of the rising bourgeoisie were increasingly idle, their leisure first becoming an occasion for ridicule, then a status symbol. Their image at this time, however, had become one of helpfulness, loyalty, domesticity and purity. The Protestant preachers had turned Catholic ideology on its head: women were now the custodians of morality and spirituality; men were tarnished by the dirt and corruption of the world. As the inquiry into religion proceeded, a means of studying changes in patriarchal ideology became clear. For during this period it was the church, more than any other institution, which carried and dispersed the ideas about the nature of men and women, and the appropriate relationship between them. Studying the teachings of the church about women, men and the family gave rise to some interesting questions.

Why did the Protestants harshly attack the Catholic ideas on the evilness, the carnality, the seductive powers of women? Why did they adamantly insist instead upon the image of ‘good wife’, as helpmate and companion to man in the travails of his life? The answer was first sought by looking at the changing economic system. Were the Protestants’ ideas about women reflecting in some way the transition from feudalism to capitalism? It seemed not. For the redefinition of patriarchal ideology by the Protestant preachers was proceeding in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At that time they were still decrying the greed and corruption of the emerging capitalist system which, they felt, endangered the existence of religion itself (George, 1971, p. 405). More important, the Protestants, in their redefinition of the relationship between men and women, were referring not to the bourgeois family but to the working partnerships prevalent in the household of the yeomen and craftsmen, that is, to the feudal family.

It seemed reasonable, then, to consider that it developed out of the early Protestant world-view itself: from their doctrines advocating a life in the world, rather than an escape from it, a married rather than a chaste life, a life with woman rather than without her. The Catholic ideas on the evilness of women were not suitable to the gentle life of conjugal bliss that the Protestants envisioned for themselves. They wanted a life with women. But they were no more prepared to grant women a life of equality with them than were the Fathers of the Church of Rome. With great ingenuity and countless contradictions they proceeded, not to undermine, but to change the nature of patriarchal ideology to conform with their developing view of the world.

Addressing themselves to the institution of the family, they invested it with an ideological significance which owed more to the Jews of the Old Testament than the Christians of the New. Within the family they set guidelines for the relationship between husband and wife, and developed appropriate attitudes about sexuality, love, marriage and divorce.

The church was the primary institution for education and propaganda in the feudal and early capitalist world. Its teachings indicate that the ideas that men and women held about themselves, each other and the relationship between them, were not simply reflections of the economic system. Rather these ideas appear, as it were, to have had a life of their own. The churchmen themselves would agree. For on a manifest level they attributed the inferiority of the female sex, at least in part, to her biology. Like the Catholic Church, the Protestants believed that Eve's transgression had only made the yoke of women painful. The woman in innocency was to be subject to the man’ (George, 1961, p. 277). Her nature suited her for a life of obedience, his for a life of domination.

That there was a relationship between the emergence of capitalism and Protestantism, if not the nature of that relationship, has been taken as axiomatic by all scholars since Marx and Weber. At the end of his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber wrote these words (1958, p. 183):

It is … not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth.

With those words in mind, it was tempting to continue this study a little further in history by looking at the interconnections between the changes in the position of women attributable to capitalism and those resulting from Protestantism.

Protestant teachings on women and the family had been patterned on the household of the yeoman or craftsman. Their ideas shifted slowly but steadily in tone and meaning as they were picked up and taken over by succeeding generations whose experience in family life was bourgeois. The home as ‘a tent pitch'd in a world not right’ (Zaretsky, 1973, p. 102) posed a false dichotomy for Protestants who saw ‘little churches’ as the foundation of, not a retreat from, the Commonwealth. But the idealisation of the home was one of their more remarkable bequests to posterity. It was an inheritance given substance by the capitalistic division of the world into work and home, public and private. The pale Victorian lady, the ultimate bourgeois woman, was scarcely the Protestants’ idea of a worthy helpmate, yet her genesis owed much to their redefinition of womanhood.

The lives of women changed profoundly during the seventeenth century. Their activities, attitudes, behaviour, their place in the order of things, the ideal towards which they were to strive: nothing remained the same. A Marxist and a feminist interpretation each reveal different aspects of those changes. In the next chapter a Marxist interpretation will be used to account for the changes in the role of women during this century. Marx analysed the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He at once railed against, and saw as a necessary historical development, the reducing of ‘the family relation to a mere money relation’ (1948, p. 123). The effect of this process upon the role of women will comprise the substance of the next chapter.

Following this, in Chapter 3, a feminist interpretation will be used to account for how the ideas about women changed during this period. These ideas, comprising what feminists have described as patriarchal ideology, were undergoing great changes in response to the gradual replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism. How and why Protestants undertook this transformation in patriarchal ideology, and the effects of that on the position of women, will be explored in this chapter.

In the concluding chapter some of the major contemporary literature will be discussed in order to draw out the implications of this historical study for the debate about whether the Marxist and feminist analyses should be seen as rival perspectives or as complementary answers to such questions as: why are men and women treated differently? why do they behave differently? and why have women had to mount a Liberation movement to alter their subordinate place in the scheme of things?

2

The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Marxist Perspective on the Changing Role of Women

THE FEUDAL FAMILY

In this chapter ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Changing Role of Women in the Seventeenth Century
• 2 The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Marxist Perspective on the Changing Role of Women
• 3 The Transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, a Transformation in Patriarchal Ideology: A Feminist Perspective on the Changing Role of Women
• 4 An Examination of the Marxist and Feminist Theories
• Bibliography
• Index