Woman's Estate

Juliet Mitchell

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781804299586
• eBook ISBN: 9781781687642
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Scrutinizing the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Women's Estate describes the organization of women's liberation in Western Europe and America, locating the areas of women's oppression in four key areas: work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialization of children. Through a detailed study of the modern family and a reevaluation of Freud's work in this field, Mitchell paints a detailed picture of how patriarchy works as a social order.

Part One

THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT

Chapter One

The Background of the Sixties

Women’s Liberation and Previous Feminist Struggles

What were the origins of the Women’s Liberation Movement? Why did it arise in the second half of the sixties?

The movement is assimilated to the earlier feminist struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, not only, as I have mentioned, by external analysts, but also by itself. This obscures its novelty. Naturally the first and latest feminist protest movements bear resemblances – but it is important that these are within their characteristics rather than in their origins. Just as in the United States the nineteenth-century Abolitionist movement was different from Civil Rights and Black Power, the feminist struggles that, in part, evolved from these are different. This distinction is more than just a hotting-up of the battle: qualitively different relationships between the women and the black emancipators (or black fighters) developed. Even at a merely symptomatic level this is true: the nineteenth-century feminists discovered the prejudices (and more) of their own dominant white men and their government; with Stokeley Carmichael’s famous putting down of women to a ‘prone’ position in the revolutionary movement, women in the 1960s found the attitude of the oppressor within the minds of the oppressed. This, among many other factors, has led to the analysis offered by groups of radical feminists: the overthrow of male-dominated society (sexism) and the liberation of women is the primary revolution. Racism itself is only an off-shoot of sexism.¹

In Sweden, a different experience, the assimilation of the earlier feminist struggle to a continuous emancipatory movement, government-approved, was, I think, a brake on the growth of a militant movement. The first and most recent stages of the struggle are clearly to be very different.

In England, again, there are comparable conditions for the ‘first’ and ‘second’ feminist ‘phase’: the decline of Liberal England in the first decade of the century has its parallels in the death gasps of Labour’s swan-song in the sixties; both epochs were marked by a virulent right-wing rebellion (e.g. Enoch Powell), by violent rebellion in the nearest colony, Ireland, and by a powerful women’s movement. But the militant suffragettes and the more moderate suffragists found an issue that unified them into existence and simultaneously led them right out of any revolutionary possibilities – the vote. The slogans of feminists today may seem no more radical than those of spokeswomen in the past, but the context alters the meaning.

It is this context we have to consider: the specific political background of the 1960s.

Radicalism in the Sixties

Broadly speaking, the mid-sixties in the advanced capitalist world were characterized by the struggles of three related but distinct groups: Blacks, Students (and high-school children) and Youth (the Hippies in all their variations, American Youth International Party – the yippies – and draft resisters). Of course, not every country had all movements. These home-based, home-directed fights took over from a preoccupation with world peace and Third World struggles – Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam – yet have never lost the predilection for internationalism that their original inspiration provided. This internationalism has gone in two directions: the general and abstract quality of ban-the-bomb has nestled into the timeless void of peace-of-mind – meditation unites mankind. It is encapsulated in the simplicities of the world as a global village, it echoes from the feet of Hippies migrating to Kashmir – and back again. The Third World revolutions and guerrilla warfare provoked new analyses of oppression and new methods of struggle; Blacks are the Vietnamese within America itself. The Women’s Liberation Movement is, in a sense, a summation of so many tendencies that still mark these slightly earlier formations.

The wish to concentrate on specific oppression in one’s own country and yet link it up with a universal predicament (a reaction to the scope of imperialism?) finds perfect expression in the situation of women. The exploitation of women in the advanced societies is easy to document; its alliance with their oppression everywhere and at all times is evident. Women are the most ‘international’ of any political group, and yet their oppression is experienced in the most minute and specific area – in the home. The confluence of the personal and the political. Though some women are maintained to a high standard, the vast majority share with Blacks (and the working class) social and economic poverty; they share with students an experience of ideological manipulation and with Hippies they can protest the society’s repression or exploitation of sexuality, its denial of freedom and their search for it within the resources of the individual. But the very breadth and all-inclusiveness of women’s oppression presents complications. Like Blacks, most women are poor, yet like students and Youth revolutionaries, the women in the movement are largely middle-class. It is the implications of this combination that we have to discover in tracing back the origins of Women’s Liberation.

Women’s Liberation had revolutionary food from two sources: women’s economic poverty within the richest country in the world (like the Blacks) and their mental and emotional debasement in some of the richest conditions that country provides (like students and youth). A growing consciousness of the latter permitted the realization of the former.

For poverty alone cannot protest for itself. It is never extreme deprivation that produces the revolutionary. William Hinton, in Fanshen, describes the abysmal conditions of life in pre-revolutionary Shansi Province of China, an almost unbelievable account of brutality and degradation.

By the second quarter of the twentieth century these (social) relations and (natural) conditions had reduced Southern Shansi to a nadir of rapacious exploitation, structural decay, chronic violence and recurring famine which has few parallels in history …²

Yet it is not from the nadir that revolutions can come: it is from the prospect, not of a summit (Utopianism), but at least of a hill that can be ascended. American women and students were far away from the Shansi peasants at the bottom of the well (their phrase and Hinton’s); but the gap between the deprivation they suffered and glory they were supposed to enjoy was sufficiently startling for them to challenge both. It is from this position of a prospect that all the revolutionary movements of the sixties in the advanced capitalist societies emerged.

Seen from this perspective, the ‘middle-class’ composition of Women’s Liberation is not an unhappy fact, a source of anxiety and endless ‘mea culpas’ but an intrinsic part of feminist awareness. The most economically and socially underprivileged woman is bound much tighter to her condition by a consensus which passes it off as ‘natural’. An Appalachian mother of fifteen children experiences her situation as ‘natural’ and hence inescapable: a college-educated girl spending her time studying ‘home economics’ for an academic degree is at least in a position to ask ‘why?’

Oppression is about more than economic exploitation as even the most economically deprived of the early radical movements – Black Power – demonstrated.

The Black Movement

Among the earliest expressions of the Black Power struggle there were decisive cultural attacks. ‘Black is beautifull’ and the whole assertion of Black values have a political significance overlooked in the dismissive attitude that it had merely psychological importance. Perhaps we can best see this significance in the absence of anything equivalent in current working-class movements; or in the presence of it in the wars of liberation in the Third World. Despite Lenin’s strictures, working-class struggle in the West has remained too firmly within the boundaries of its own economic exploitation, tied either to trade union politics or to the gradualism of reformist communist parties. The fully-developed political consciousness of an exploited class or oppressed group cannot come from within itself, but only from a knowledge of the interrelationships (and domination structures) of all the classes in a society. Blacks do not necessarily have this ‘overview’ any more than the working-class, but because their oppression is visibly cultural as well as economic there is an impetus to see the diverse aspects of oppression within the whole system. This does not mean an immediate comprehension of the ways in which other groups and classes are exploited or oppressed, but it does mean what one could call a ‘totalist’ attack on capitalism which can come to realize the need for solidarity with all other oppressed groups.

The origins of ‘totalism’ are quite clear. As is its necessity. The inspiration is the struggle of the Third World countries against imperialist oppression; a total struggle for the survival of a nation and a culture. Blacks see their position as that of a Third World enclave within the homeland of imperialism. The first stages of struggle were, thus, the reassertion of nationhood – a Black country within America. But the truth of this is only analogous. Blacks are historically too late, geographically too dispersed, numerically too few to fight this battle. They are not the sole victims of total imperialist aggression like the Vietnamese; they are the most grossly exploited and oppressed minority within a capitalist system. The ‘totalist’ position is a precondition for this realization, but it must diversify its awareness or get stuck in the mud of Black chauvinism, which is a racial and cultural equivalent of working-class economism, seeing no further than one’s own badly out-of-joint nose. What is true of workers is no less true of Blacks:

Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.³

Imperialist-capitalism, the colossus with the feet of clay, the paper tiger, is still a tiger, still a colossus, and no oppressed group can go it alone.

‘Totalism’, then, is the expression of the protest against all oppressed conditions in the form of an assertion of complete liberation involving the overthrow at one blow of the whole of capitalist society. In ‘totalism’ the oppression of one group stands for the oppression of all. Within its undifferentiated inclusiveness there is only place for tactics, not overall strategy. However, it is an important early stage in the organization against an oppression which is as much manifest in social and cultural repression as in exploitation. ‘Totalism’ applies to the feminist struggle as it does to the Black.

The Black struggle, then, made the first stand for the inclusiveness of oppression. But few Black militants were initially middle-class. In protesting the experience of middle-class deprivation, women found themselves closer to the student movement in which many of them had participated.

Students

For Lenin, the poor students of autocratic Russia were one of a number of oppressed groups. The present-day Student Movement, at least its Marxist components, tried urgently to recapture this self-definition. Students, they claimed, were not the privileged enclave that a complacent society saw itself as generously providing, they were the new poor, a new part of the working-class. I am not concerned for the moment with the viability of this argument, rather with how it came to be made possible, and with its implications. Lenin’s students were poor and hence radical: the students of the 1960s were radicals and hence saw clearly their own poverty. Yet, whether living on state stipends, loans, their own part-time work or on their parents, it still remained true that students came, in the overwhelming majority, from (white) middle-class homes, and these were, largely, where they were returning. Any actual poverty they suffered was temporary. Their protest, then, did not come out of economic exploitation or oppression. It came out of a new definition of the latter. What is interesting is that both the students and the middle-class women of Women’s Liberation have open to them many possibilities of all the available education and wealth. It is these they have rejected as ‘poor’. Obviously this is a complex assertion.

Really until the Second World War, students in the Arts subjects were an intellectual élite, studying for its own sake, with future work connected to the status of being a graduate, rather than to the content of the University Degree pursued. The future work of science and technical students was always more related to their university course. Other professional jobs had their own training – separate from universities – lawyers, doctors, accountants, journalists, and so on. Gradually, since the war, but far more acutely during the sixties, the position of students in the Arts subjects has been shifting out of its ivory tower possibilities into a situation much more analogous to that previously applicable only to scientists and technicians. Arts students have had to professionalize themselves into media-men or advertising copy-writers in a booming media industry. The university has become the training ground for agents of the consumer society. Students are no longer students in the classical sense of the term. University courses cling vainly to an inappropriate tradition against whose conservative content students protest, while courses introduced to fit organically into their future jobs reveal a banality that condemns both themselves and those jobs. It is the Arts students who are the vanguard and mainstay of the Student Movement. If not the new workers, they are certainly the new apprentices to a new type of job.

This position of students has bearings on Women’s Liberation in two ways. Most simply, a large number of early women’s liberationists were and are, students in Arts Faculties. Of more elusive and interesting importance is the shifting socio-economic background which produced the conditions just described. This background made possible the change in the student consciousness and so also affected the position and awareness of middle-class women, enabling them, as it did the students, at least partially to transform their class origins. Precisely from their affluence, both groups were able to move to demand its overthrow. Students claiming to be ‘workers’ should not be taken to refer simply to their poverty, but rather to the poverty of their affluence, to the compulsion of their much-vaunted ‘choice’. And middle-class women are in a similar position: told they are equal, that emancipation has given them everything, that working as housewives ‘your time is your own’ – lucky to be women, not having the work, the worry and the responsibility … but.… The position of students and housewives in the eyes of those who are neither is really very analogous: idle and free from responsibility.

It is not, then, that these movements are simply the product of disillusionment: you offered us culture, you offered us leisure, and look what it means. Rather, there is a profound contradiction between the actual work endured and an ideology that denies it.

Students are protesting against their mental and intellectual manipulation within a context – the university – that is supposed to guarantee their freedom.

Hippies and the Politics of Youth

Hippies protest against the social manipulation and repression of emotion. In a world of automation and alienation, they assert that what anyone feels is valid. After all, having been told that all along – why not put such pieties to the test? The Hippy underground initially appropriated the values of freedom, emotionality and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The Women’s Liberation Movement
• Part Two: The Oppression of Women
• About the Author