TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE Catharine a. Mackinnon Harvard University Press Gambridge, Massachusetts London, England
I FEMINISM AND MARXISM
1 The Problem of Marxism and Feminism Marxism and feminism are one and that one is Marxism Bridges, The Unhappy Marriage exuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that U which is most one's own, yet most taken away. Marxist theory argues that society is fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make things needed to survive humanly Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value It is that activity by which people become who they are. Class is its structure, production its consequence, capital a congealed form, and control its issue Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes women and men. This division underlies the totality of social lations. Sexuality is the social pr of gender are created, organized, expressed, and directed creating the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. As work is to marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially ructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet. historically jointly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized iation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its social
4 Feminism and Marxism structure, desire its internal dynamic, gender and family its congealed extent their forms and behaviors resemble one another, could gender forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction be their c onmonaliry? Is there a relattionship between the wealth of t ronseu'ncC, andI control its issue wealthy men and the poverty of pHor women, is tiere a rlaritnis Marxism and teminism provide accounts of the way social arrange between the power of some classes over others and the power of all men ments of parterned and e disparity can be internally rational over all women? Is there a relationship between the face that the few and systematic yet unjust. Both are theories of power, its social deri ve ruled the many and the fact that those few have been met vations and its maldistribution. Both are theories of social inequality Instead of confronting these questions, marxists and feminists have In unequal societies, gender and with it sexual desire and kinship sually either dismissed or, in the more active form of the same thing property ownership, are considered presocial, part of the natural world subsumed each other. Marxists have criticized feminism as bourgeois in theory and in practice, meaning that feminism works in the interest of the ruling class. They argue that to analyze society in terms of sex creation, feminism exposes desire as socially relational, internally nec ignores the primacy of class and glosses over class divisions among essary to unequal social orders but historically contingent women,dividing the proletariat. Feminist demands, it is claimed The specificity of marxism and feminism is not incidental. To be could be fully satisfied within capitalism, so their pursuit undermines deprived of- centroL over work relations in marxism, over sexual and deflects the effort for basic change. Efforts to eliminate barriers to lations in feminism, defines each theory's conception of lack of power omens personhood-arguments for access to life chances without se. They do not mean to exist side by side, pluralistically, to er regard to sex-are seen as liberal and individualistic. Whatever women have in common is considered to be based in nature, not in terests of two discrete groups are not obscured, or the contributions of two sets of variables are not ignored. They exist to argue, respec not seem to support this analysis, womens conditions are seen as tively, that the relations in which many work and few gain, in which common or shared, and analyses that claim they are, are called some dominate and others are subordinated in which some fuck and totalizing and ahistorical. When cross-cultural analyses of womens others get fucked and everybody knows what those words mean, are ial conditions do support this analysis, women's status is seen as a e prime moment of politics universal, or analyses based on it are considered to lack cultural What if the claims of each theory are taken equally seriously, each The womens movement's focus upon attitudes, beliefs on its own terms? Can two social processes be basic at once? Can two and emotions as powerful components of social reality is criticized groups be subordinated in conflicting ways, or do they merely formally idealist; the composition of the womens movement, pur- crosscut? Can two theories, each of which purports to account for the portedly of middle-class educated women, is advanced as an explana same, thing-power as such-be reconciled? Confronted on eq terms, these theories at minimum pose fundamental questions for each Feminists charge that marxism is male defined in theory and in other. Is male dominance a creation of capitalism, or is capitalism one xpression of male dominance? What does it mean for class analysis if practice, meaning that it moves within the worldview and in the interest of men. Feminists argue that analyzing society exclusively in a social group is defined and exploited through means that seem class terms ignores the distinctive social experiences of the sexes largely independent of the organizati obscuring womens unity. Marxist demands, it is claimed, could be o it? What does it mean for a sex-based analysis if (and in part have been) satisfied without altering womens inequality capitalism might not be materially altered if it were fully sex to men. Feminists have often found that working-class movements and ntegrated or even controlled by women? Supposing that the structure d interests served by the socialist state and the capitalist state differ the left undervalue womens work and concerns, neglect the role of feelings and beliefs in a focus on institutional and material in class terms, are they equally predicated upon sex inequality? To the denigrate women in practice and in everyday life, and in general f
6 Feminism and Marxism The Problew of Marxism and Feminism 7 to distinguish themselves from any other ideology or group dominated y male interests, where justice for women is concerned. Marxists and is both demeaning ro all women and works to the detriment feminists ti h accuse the uther nf socking wiat in cach une'sterms is of the excluded underclass. their"women inclucled rciorm-altcracions that appease and assuage and improve in accorn This kinl ol reasoning has been tonhnedl neither wn the issue of che moclation to structures of incquality--whcre, again in cach onc's vote nor to the nineteenth century, Mill's logic is embedded in the terms, a fundamental transformation is required. At irs most extreme cortical structure of liberalism that underlies much contemporary the mutual perception is not only that the other's analysis is wrong feminist theory and justifies much of the marxist critique. His view but that its success would be a defeat that women should be allowed to engage in politics was an expression Neither set of allegations is groundless. In the feminist view, sex of Mills concern that the state not restrict individuals, self- in analysis and in reality, does divide classes, a fact marxists have been government, their freedom to develop talents for their own growth, more inclined to deny or ignore than to explain or change. Marxists and their ability to contribute to society for the good of humanity. As imilarly, have seen parts of the women's movement function as a an empirical rationalist, he resisted attributing to biology what could pecial interest group to advance the class -privileged: educated and be explained as social conditioning. As a kind of utilitarian, he found professional women. At the same time, to consider this group most sex-based inequalities inaccurate or dubious, inefficient, and coextensive with"the women,'s movement"precludes questioning the therefore unjust. That women should have the liberty, as individual to achieve the limits of self-development without arbitrary interference social processes that give disproportionate visibility to the moverment's t broadly based segment. Accepting a middle-class definition of extended to women Mills meritocratic goal of the self-made man the women's movement has distorted perception of its actual compo- condemning(what has since come to be termed)sexism as an irrational sition and made invisible the diverse ways in which many women- interference with personal initiative and laissez-faire notably Black women and working-class women-have long moved The hospitality of such an analysis to marxist concerns is prob- against gendered determinants. But advocates of women's interests lematic. Mill's argument could be extended to cover class as one more have not always been class conscious; some have exploited class-based arbitrary, socially conditioned factor that produces inefficient devel arguments for advantage, even when the interests of women, working opment of talent and unjust distribution of resources among individ. class women, were thereby obscured uals. But although this extrapolation might be in a sense materiali In 1866, for example, in an act often thought to inaugurate the first it would not be a class analysis. Mill himself does not even allow for wave of feminism, John Stuart Mill petitioned the English Parliament laissez-faire and unregulated personal initiating. lth is exactly what for women,'s suffrage with the following partial justifcation: "Under whatever conditions, and within whatever limits, men are admitted to al concept of rights which this theory requires on a juridical level suffrage, there is not a shadow of justification for not admitting (especially but not only in the economic sphere), a concept that yomen under the same. The majority of women of any class are not produces the tension in liberalism between liberty for each and ikely to differ in political opinion from the majority of men in the equality among all, pervades liberal feminism, substantiating the criticism that feminism is for the privileged few same class. Perhaps Mill meant that, to the extent class determines opinion, sex is irrelevant. In this sense, the argument narrowly fits the The marxist criticism that feminism focuses upon feelings and purpose of eliminating gender as a restriction on the vote. Mill attitudes is also based on something real: the importance to feminism personally supported universal suffrage. And, as it happened, working- women s own perceptions of their situation. The practice of con class men got the vote before women of any class. But this argument lousness raising, not only or even primarily as a concrete event but can also justify limiting the extension of the franchise to women who more as a collective approach to critique and change, has been a tech- belong to"men of the same class that already exercises it-in which nique of analysis, structure of organization, method of practice,and theory of social change of the women's movement. In consciousness-
8 Feminism and MarxisN he Problem of Marxism and Feminism raising groups, which were common in the United States in the of their class. Aside from the few who have taken jobs or professions 97os, the impact of male dominance was concretely uncovered and nalyzed rhrough the collective speaking of women's experience from the bourgeoisie do not take part in social procuction. They are nothing Inets uf the surpass pmi t riir men exert fru pe ctive ot that cx Because marxists icmcI (utilIT proletariat. They are parasites tt the Ixtrisites of the su ial body of powerlessness, first and last, as concrete and externally imposed they believe that it must be concretely and externally undone co be Luxernburg's sympathies lay with " proletarian women, "who derive hanged. Through consciousness raising taken more broadly, women's their right to vote from being"productive for society like the men. G werlessness was found to be both externally imposed and deeply er blind spot to gender occupied the same place in her perspective internalized. For example, femininity is women's identity to women as hat Mill's blind spot to class did in his. Mill defended women's rell as women's desirability to men-indeed, it becomes identity to uffrage on gender grounds with a logic that excluded working-class omen because it is imposed through men's standards for desirability women:Luxemburg defended wome women s suffrage on class grounds women.From this practical analytic, a distinctly feminist conce although the vote would have benefited women without regard to of consciousness and its place in social order and change has emerged It does not substitute one set of professed ideas for another and declare Women as women, women unmodified by class distinctions and hange, in the mode of liberal idealism. Nevertheless, what marxism part from nature, were simply unthinkable to Mill, as to mos conceives as change in consciousness is not, within marxism, a form of beals, and to Luxemburg, as to most marxists. Feminist theory asks social change in itself. For feminism, it can be, but this is because marxism: what is class for women? Luxemburg, again like Mill with womens oppression is not just in the head, so feminist consciousness in her own frame of reference, subliminally recognized that wo is not just in the head either. But to the materially deprived, the pain men derive their class position from their personal alliances with men isolation, and thingification of women who have been pampered and This may help explain why women do not unite against male domin- pacified into nonpersonhood is difficult to swallow as a form of ance, but it does not explain that dominance which cuts across class oppression. As a result, changing it is difficult to see as a form of lines even as it takes some forms peculiar to classes. What distinguis aberation in any but the most reduced sense. This model is particularly es the bourgeois woman from her domestic servant is that the latter difficult to swallow for women who will never carry a briefcase and is paid (if barely), while the former is kept (if contingently).Is whom no man has ever put on a pedestal this a difference in social productivity or only in its measures,mea- Marxism, similarly, has not been just misunderstood. Marxist sures that themselves may be products of womens undervalued statu theory has traditionally attempted to comprehend all meaningful The tasks the women perform and their availability for sexual social variance in class terms. In this respect, sex parallels race and access and reproductive use are strikingly similar. Luxemburg saw the nation as an undigested but persistently salient challenge to the bourgeois woman of her time as a"parasite of a parasite"but faile exclusivity or even the primacy of class as social explanation. Marxists to consider her possible commonality with the proletarian woman who typically extend class to cover women, a division and submersion that inadequate to womens d common experience. For example, in 1912 Rosa Luxemburg addressee is the slave of a slave. In the case of bourgeois women, to lim a limit this analysis to their relations to capitalism through men is to a group of women on the issue of suffrage see only its vicarious aspect. To fail to do this in the case of proletarian en is to miss its vicarious aspect. In both cases, to define wo- Most of these omen who act like lionesses in the str men's status solely in class terms is entirely to miss their status as wo- against"male would trot like docile lambs in the men defined through relations with men, which is a defining relational action if they had the suffrage. Indeed status they share even though the men through whom they acquire hey would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part differ
The Problen of Marxisn and Feminism (r ro feminism and Marxism Feminist observations of women's situation in socialist countries, state and productive power overturn work relations, they do not though not conclusive on the contribution of marxist theory to overturn sex relations at the same time or in the same way, as a class uNderstanding womENS Have supported the feminist th alvis of icI. and in sme tasts di. predict and promise retical critique. In the feminist view, socialist countries have solved Sexual visions e. lo exampie. is un I guti. Nt inet (es hiology 1) many social pproblems-women's subordination not included. The ocialism, both of which purport to alter woimen's ruic at the point of criticism is not that socialism has not automatically liberated women production, has ever yet equalized womnen's status relative to meEt in the process of transforming production(assuming that this trans- even in the workforce. Nothing has. Sex equality appears to require formation is occurring). Nor is it to diminish the significance of such separate effort-an effort with necessary economic dimensions, poten- changes for women: There is a difference between a society in which d by a revolutionary regime and shaped by transformed ism is expressed in the form of female infanticide and a society in relations to production-but a separate effort nonetheless. In light of which sexism takes the form of unequal representation on the Central these experiences, women's struggles, whether under capitalist or ommittee. And the difference is worth dying for. Some feminists, socialist regimes, appear to feminists to have more in common with however, have more difficulty separating the two: "It seems to me that each other than with marxist a country that wiped out the tsetse fly can by fiat put an equal number Attempts to create a synthesis between marxism and feminism of women on the Central Committee. "9 The basic feminist criticism is termed socialist-feminism, have recognized neither the separate integ hat these countries do not make a priority of working to change rity of each theory nor the depth of the antagonism between them womens status relative to men that distinguishes them from nonso- Many attempts at a unified theory began as an effort to justify women's cialist societies in the hat their pursuit of other goals distin- struggles in marxist terms, as if only that could make them legitimate. uishes them. Capitalist countries value women in terms of their Although feminism has largely redirected its efforts from justifying merit"by male standards; in socialist countries women seem invisible itself within any other perspective to developing a perspective of its xcept in their capacity as"workers. "This term seldom includes the own, this anxiety lurks under many synthetic attempts. The juxtapo- work that remains women's distinctive service to men, regardless of sitions that result emerge as unconfronted as they started feminist or the politics of those men: housework, prostitution and other sexual exist, usually the latter. Socialist-feminist practice often divides typically tional cross- barely mentioned. The concern of socialist and socialist revolutionary memberships and mutual support on specific issues, with more leadership for ending women's confinement to traditional roles too support by women of issues of the left than by the left of womens often seems limited to making their labor available to the regime, issues. Women with feminist sympathies urge attention to womens leading feminists to wonder whose interests are served by this version sues by left or labor groups; marxist women pursue issues of class of liberation. Women become as free as men to work outside the hom within feminist groups; explicitly socialist-feminist groups come while men remain free from work within it. The same pattern occurs ogether and divide, often at the hyphen nder capitalism. When woman's labor or militancy suits the needs of Most attempts at synthesis try to integrate or explain the mergency, she is suddenly man's equal, only to regress when the feminism by incorporating issues feminism identifies as central--the urgency recedes. Feminists do not argue that it means the same to family, housework, sexuality, reproduction, socialization, personal women to be on the bottom in a feudal regime, a capitalist regime life--within an essentially unchanged marxian analysis. According d a socialist regime. The commonality is that, despite real changes, to what type of marxist the theorist is, women become a caste,a stratum, a cultural group, a division in civil society, a secondary bottom is bottom Where such attitudes and practices come to be criticized, as in Cuba contradiction, or a nonantagonistic contradiction. Women's liberation becomes a precondition, a measure of societys general emancipation ina, changes appea hey do in capitalist countries, even where the effort looks major. If seizures of part of the superstructure, or an important aspect of the class struggle
of feminism or how women are reduced to some other category, such as"wonen workers A Feminist Critique of ith all women become near reflex, women become"the family, as if this single form of women's definition ment, which is then div Marx and engels lines, can be presumed to be the crucible of womens determination, 1> A common approach to eating women s situation as coterminous with the family is to make women's circumstances the occasion for We often romanticize what we have first despis reconciling Marx with Freud. Such work is typically more Freudian Wendell Berry, The Gift of' than marxist, leaving feminism as the jumping-off Or, the marxist meaning of reproduction, the iteration of productive Marx, women were defined by nature, not by society To him. sex was within that"material substratum nation to men; and as if this social analogue to biological make that was not subject to social analysis, making his explicit references to women's definition material, therefore based on a division of"labor women or to sex largely peripheral or parenthetical. With issues of sex after all, therefore real, therefore potentially unequal. Sometimes unlike with class, Marx did not see that the line between the social and- eproduction refers to biological reproduction, sometimes to the the pre-social is a line society draws. Marx ridiculed treating value and reproduction of daily life, as in housework, sometimes to both.19 lass as if they were natural givens. He bitingly criticized theories that Family-based theories of womens status analyze biological reproduc operated mechanistically-yet tion as part of the family, while work-based theories see it as work armoniously in accord with natural laws. He identified such theories Sexuality, if noticed at all, is, like"everyday life, "4 analyzed in as justifications for an unjust status quo. Yet this is exactly the way he render-neutral terms, as if its social mea can be presumed to be treated gender. Even when women produced commodities as waged the same, or coequal, or complementary, for women and men. 2I labor, Marx wrote about them primarily as mothers, housekeepers, and Although a unified theory of social inequality is prefigured in these members of the weaker sex. His work shares with liberal theory the view trategies of subordination, staged progression, and assimilation of that women naturally belong where they are socially placed women's concerns to left concerns most an uneven combination is Engels, by contrast, considered women s status a social phenomenon accomplished. Some works push these limits. But socialist-feminism that needed explanation. He just failed to explain it. Expanding upon basically stands before the task of synthesis as if nothing essential to arx's few suggestive comments, Engels tried to explain womens ither theory fundamentally opposes their wedding-often as if the subordination within a theory of the historical development of the union had already occurred and need only be celebrated. However family in the context of class relations. Beneath Engels' veneer of sympathetically, the woman question"is always reduced to some dialectical dynamism lies a static, positivistic materialism that reifies other question, instead of being seen as tbe question, calling for woman socially to such an extent that her status might as well have nalysis on its own terms. a been considered naturally determined. Marx and Engels each take for granted crucial features of relations between the sexes: Marx because woman is nature and nature is given, and Engels because woman is the family and he is largely uncritical of woman's work and sexual role