Close to Home

A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression

Christine Delphy, Diana Leonard

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784782504
• eBook ISBN: 9781784782528
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Social Sciences

Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women's liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether "bourgeois" and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women's movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.

Rachel Hills's foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy's analysis of marriage as the institution behind the exploitation of unpaid women's labor is as radical and relevant today as it ever was.

1.Introduction
to the collection

The analysis of patriarchy in our society which I have been developing for the last fourteen years has a history. I arrived at my conceptualization starting from two apparently unrelated theoretical concerns: one was to study the transmission of family property (patrimony), and the other was to reply to the criticisms of the women’s liberation movement which come from the left.

But these concerns were only apparently unrelated because in fact, when I started to do research, I wanted to work ‘on women’, which is to say, for me, on women’s oppression. Since my director of studies at the time told me that this was impossible, I chose to study the inheritance of property instead, hoping to get back to my initial interest eventually, by an indirect route.

In my research I discovered first what a huge quantity of goods change hands without passing through the market. These goods change hands through the family – as gifts or inheritance. I also discovered that the science of economics, which purports to concern itself with everything related to the exchange of goods in society, is in fact concerned only with one of the systems of production, circulation and consumption of goods: that of the market.

At this time (between 1968 and 1970) I was also taking part in one of the two groups which initially helped create the new feminist movement in France. I was very annoyed – and I was not alone, though like the hero of Catch 22 I thought I was being personally got at! – by one of the men in this mixed group. He claimed that the oppression of women could not be equal in importance to that of the proletariat since, he said, although women were oppressed, they were not ‘exploited’.

I was well aware that there was something wrong with this formulation. In that group at least we recognized that women earn half as much as men and work twice as hard: but apparently their oppression nevertheless had, in theory, no economic dimension!

While by the early 1970s we knew that housework existed – it was no longer invisible or non-work – we saw the problem of housework as principally a question of an unfair division of boring tasks; and since we didn’t ask the relevant questions about it, we not surprisingly didn’t get any relevant answers. My work on patrimony (i.e. on the economic aspects of the non-market sphere, or, to put it another way, on the non-market sphere of the economy) served to help me find and pose these questions.

Around this same time others were also discovering the theoretical, as well as the practical, importance of housework. But because they came at it via a different route from mine, they arrived at rather different conclusions. Analysis of gifts and the inheritance of property within the family helped me to demystify the market. This prevented my getting caught in the classic trap of opposing exchange-value and use-value: an opposition which led the pioneers (Benston and Larguia), and also others who came later, into a number of impasses – or rather, round in circles from which they could find no escape. By showing that this opposition only makes sense if one takes the viewpoint of the market, I was able to propose a theory from another viewpoint; a theory in which non-market-value, instead of being a problem in understanding housework, is one of the clues to elucidating its specific nature. By taking this non-value as a constitutive element of housework, I was able:

1to show that housework’s exclusion from the market was the cause, and not the consequence, of its not being paid for;

2that this exclusion involves not only housework, or particular types of work, but rather social actors; or, to be more precise, work done within certain social relations; and

3that in seeking to understand housework it is a mistake to see it as a particular set of tasks, whether one is seeking to describe them or to explain them in terms of their ‘intrinsic usefulness’.

I have taken up all these points again in my recent work, but they were present, at least in bud, in ‘The Main Enemy’ (1970). From this time onwards I have been able to propose a theoretical rather than an empirical analysis of housework, which I see as a particular part of the much larger category of ‘domestic work’, thanks to my initial creation of the concept of the ‘domestic mode of production’.

Patriarchy

Since 1970 I have used the term ‘patriarchy’, and in all my work I have tried to specify and delimit this word and to state precisely the relationship between patriarchy and the domestic mode of production. I am still working on this. If I have used a fairly vague term, it has been so as to show from the start that I consider the oppression of women to be a system. But the question is, what constitutes the system and how does it function? The concept has to be filled in, and this can only be done bit by bit.

I have, however, since entering the field, restricted the meaning I attach to the term patriarchy. For many it is synonymous with ‘the subordination of women’. It carries this meaning for me too, but with this qualification: I add the words ‘here and now’. This makes a big difference. When I hear it said, as I often do, that ‘patriarchy has changed since the origins of agriculture’, or ‘from the eighteenth century to the present’, I know that people are not talking about ‘my’ patriarchy. What I study is not an ahistoric entity which has wandered down through the centuries, but something peculiar to contemporary industrial societies. I do not believe in the theory of ‘survivals’ – and here I am in agreement with other sociologists and anthropologists. An institution which exists today cannot be explained by the simple fact that it existed in the past, even if this past is recent. I do not deny that certain elements of patriarchy today resemble elements of the ‘patriarchy’ of six thousand years ago or that of two hundred years ago; what I deny is that this continuation – in so far as it is a continuation (i.e. in so far as it really concerns the same thing) – does not in itself constitute an explanation.

Many people think that when they have found the birth of an institution in the past, they hold the key to its present existence. But they have in fact explained neither its present existence, nor even its birth (its past appearance), for they must explain its existence at each and every moment in the context prevailing at that time; and its persistence today (if it really is persistence) must be explained by the present context. Some so-called ‘historical’ explanations are in fact ahistorical, precisely because they do not take account of the given conditions of each period. This is not history, but mere dating. History is precious if it is well conducted: if each period is examined in the same way as the present period. A science of the past, worthy of the name, cannot be anything other than a series of synchronic analyses.

The search for ‘origins’ is a caricature of even this falsely historical procedure, and this is one of the reasons I have denounced it, and why I shall continue to denounce it each and every time it surfaces – which is, alas, all too frequently. (The other reason I denounce the search for origins is because of its hidden naturalistic presuppositions.) But from the scientific point of view, it is as illegitimate to seek keys to the present situation in the nineteenth century as in primitive societies.

Since 1970, then, I have been saying that patriarchy is the system of subordination of women to men in contemporary industrial societies, that this system has an economic base, and that this base is the domestic mode of production. Needless to say, these three ideas have been, and remain, highly controversial.

The domestic mode of production

Like all modes of production, the domestic mode of production is also a mode of consumption and circulation of goods.

While it is difficult in the capitalist mode of production to identify the form of consumption which distinguishes individuals of the dominant class from those of the dominated, at least at first sight, since consumption is mediated by the wage, things are very different in the domestic mode. Here consumption is of primary importance and has the power to discriminate, for one of the essential differences between the two modes of production lies in the fact that those exploited by the domestic mode of production are not paid but rather maintained. In this mode, therefore, consumption is not separate from production, and the unequal sharing of goods is not mediated by money.

Consumption in the family has to be studied if we want not only to be able to evaluate the quantitative exploitation of various members, but also to understand what maintenance consists of and how it differs from a wage. Too many people today still ‘translate’ maintenance into its monetary equivalent, as if a woman who receives a coat receives the value of the coat. In so doing they abolish the crucial distinction between a wage and retribution in kind, produced by the presence or absence of a monetary transaction. This distinction creates the difference between self-selected and non-free consumption, and is independent of the ‘value’ of the goods consumed.

Every mode of production is also a mode of circulation. The mode of circulation peculiar to the domestic mode of production is the transmission of patrimony, which is regulated in part by the rules of inheritance. But it is not limited to these. It is an area which has been fairly well studied in some sectors of our society (e.g. farming), but completely ignored in others. With the transmission of family property we can see, on the one hand, the difference between the abstract model and the concrete society, and on the other the consequences of the fact that our social system (or more precisely the representation which has been made of it, i.e. our model of our social system) is composed of several sub-systems, several modes of production.

Studying how possessions are passed from one generation to the next in the family is interesting because it shows the mechanisms which produce complementary and antagonistic classes at work. It shows how owners are divided from non-owners of the means of production.

The effect of the dispossession of one group is clear in the agricultural world for instance. Those who do not inherit – women and younger siblings – work unpaid for their husbands and inheriting brothers. Domestic circulation (the rules of inheritance and succession) here flows directly into patriarchal relations of production.

Patrimonial transmission is equally interesting and important at another level, in reconstituting the capitalist mode of production generation after generation. It not only creates possessors and non-possessors inside each family, it also creates this division between families.

The latter is the only aspect of patrimonial transmission which has really been studied to date. The former system, the division into classes within a kin group, is passed over in silence by sociologists and anthropologists alike. Indeed they pretend – against all the evidence, and in particular against all the evidence on the division of society into genders – that all the children in a family in our society inherit the goods and status of the head of the family equally. But of course, the fact that the reconstitution of capitalist classes is the only effect of patrimonial transmission recognized by (traditional) sociology makes this effect no less real. This is indeed one of the times when the domestic mode of production meets the capitalist mode and where they interpenetrate each other.

Depriving women of the means of production by patrimonial transmission is not, however, the only way in which they are dispossessed of direct access to their means of subsistence, if only because many families simply do not have any family property to transmit or not to transmit to them. The same effect is produced by the systematic discrimination which women face in the wage-labour market. (Let us for the moment call it the dual labour market.) This also pushes women to enter domestic relations of production, mainly by getting married, though some may act as housekeepers for kin.

The situation of women in the labour market has been relatively well studied. The only originality in my approach in this field has been to invert the direction of links usually established. While ordinarily it is seen as ‘the family situation’ which influences the capacity of women to work ‘outside’, I have tried to show that the situation created for women in the labour market itself constitutes an objective incentive to marry, and hence that the labour market plays a role in the exploitation of their domestic work.

How should we conceptualize this fact? How should we interpret it with regard to the relations between capitalism, patriarchy and the domestic mode of production? Should we talk of capitalist mechanisms in the service of the domestic mode of production? Or should we speak of domestic mechanisms at work in the labour market? Whatever the reply – and the question will stay open for a long time – one thing is clear: whether it is a matter of patrimonial transmission (which assists if it does not create relations of production other than those which are strictly domestic), or the capitalist labour market (which assists if it does not create relations of production other than capitalist ones), the two systems are tightly linked and have a relationship of mutual aid and assistance.

What is more, the relations between patriarchy and the domestic mode of production are themselves not ones of simple superimposition. The domestic mode of production is in places more extensive than patriarchy, and in places less. The same is true also of the capitalist mode of production: one of its institutions, the labour market, is in part ruled, or used, by patriarchy.

The domestic mode of production, therefore, does not give a total account of even the economic dimensions of women’s subordination. It certainly does not account for other dimensions of this subordination, in particular those oppressions which are just as material as economic exploitation, such as the general violence from men to women and the violence associated with sexual relations between them. Some of these forms of violence can be shown to be related to the appropriation of women’s labour power – as C. Hennequin, E. de Lesseps and I demonstrated in the case of the prohibition on abortion and conception (1970). Since raising children requires work, and since this work is extorted from women, it can be argued that men are afraid women will try to escape motherhood, or excessive motherhood, by limiting the number of children they bear. Men therefore ensure they always have the means to withdraw control of childbearing from women. Making abortion illegal is one such means. Putting pressure on women to be heterosexual and, within this sexuality, to ‘choose’ practices which result in impregnation, is another. The same sort of reasoning has been applied to marital violence (Hanmer 1978) and rape (Féministes Revolutionnaires 1976).

However, to be fair, the links established so far between such oppressions and the domestic mode of production are too tenuous to be called full explanations. There remain therefore whole sections of women’s oppression which are only very partially, if at all, explained by my theory. This may be a shortcoming; but it is certainly not an involuntary shortcoming. It is rather a consequence of certain refusals, and of methodological choices on my part.

On methodology

I distrust theories which seek from the outset to explain every aspect of the oppression of women. I distrust them for two reasons.

The first, general, reason is that theories which seek to explain everything about a particular situation, themselves remain particular. In being too glued to their object, to what is specific to it, they themselves become specific and are therefore unable to locate their object among other similar things (e.g. among other oppressions) because they do not possess the tools to make it comparable.

The explanatory power of a theory (or concept or hypothesis) is tied to its capacity to find what is common to several phenomena of the same order, and hence to its capacity to go beyond the phenomenal reality of (i.e. what is immediately present in) each case. The belief that the reason for the existence of things is to be found beyond their appearance, that it is ‘hidden’, is integral to scientific procedure (though it can, of course, be contested). This is why I do not accept the objection which has been made to my use of the concepts of ‘mode of production’ and ‘class’. It has been suggested that these concepts were created to describe other situations, and that in using them I deny the specificity of women’s oppression. This overlooks the fact that all analysis proceeds by ‘butchery’. To understand a phenomenon, we begin by breaking it down into bits, which are later reassembled. Why? So that the bits shall be the same for all instances of the phenomenon being studied. (The phenomenon I study is the subordination of one group by another; the oppression of women being one instance of it.) The recompositions we later obtain are then comparable. To understand is first to compare. This is how all sciences proceed, and it is how we proceed in everyday life: how you and I describe a person, a place, a situation, to people who are not able to have direct experience of them. With a few concepts a geographer can describe any landscape.

Non-specific concepts are used in theories, however, not so much to describe things as to explain them (although all description requires a classification, hence at the start an explanation; and conversely all explanation is also a description in so far as it can itself be further explained). The aim of analysis is explanation.

The bits into which a phenomenon is broken down are not those of immediate perception. (The economic dimension, for instance, is not an ‘obvious’ category for thinking about the family today, but then it was also not an obvious one for thinking about any phenomenon whatsoever a few centuries ago, even those which our current language now calls ‘the economy’.) It follows, therefore, that when the bits are reassembled, the results are in no way restitutions of the objects initially treated, but rather models: images of the realities underlying and causing the objects.

The initial ‘objects’ are in any case not ‘pure’ facts, but rather the immediate perception of things, informed in a non-explicit fashion by a certain view of the world (what Feyerabend referred to as ‘natural evidences’).

Thus, on the one hand, the more a theory pretends to be ‘general’ (in regard to its object), the more it has descriptive power and the less it has explanatory power; a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction to the collection
• 2. Women in stratification studies
• 3. Sharing the same table: consumption and the family
• 4. The main enemy
• 5. Housework or domestic work
• 6. Continuities and discontinuities in marriage and divorce
• 7. Our friends and ourselves: the hidden foundations of various pseudo-feminist accounts
• 8. Patriarchy, feminism and their intellectuals
• 9. A materialist feminism is possible
• 10. Protofeminism and antifeminism
• 11. For a materialist feminism
• Bibliography
• Notes and Reference
• Index