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Furthermore, to maintain that women have been successfully and totally suppressed to the point where they have been completely unable to participate is to accept the idea that women are passive; and it is to deny that women have repeatedly been able to overcome their conditioning so far as to break through to real activity.
The exceptionally elitist attitudes to their less famous contemporaries who participate in «male dominated» left organisations is not only insulting; it is inconsistent with any ideas of sisterhood to have such contempt for the sincerely held beliefs of socialist women.
The reaffirmation of the female role is taken to its logical conclusion by Jane Alpert. Her theory that women should rule and be worshipped by virtue of their potential motherhood brings us full circle, back to the gilded cage from which we have so desperately been trying to escape. But this time the purpose of the bars is not to keep women inside – instead the radical feminists waul to keep the world out.
The radical feminists have contributed important insights into what is wrong with capitalism. One of the most sophisticated radical feminist writers. Shulamith Firestone, analysed important questions, such as love, children, and the relationship between sex and racism. But Firestone, as do all the others, continued to suffer from the lack of a strategy. They had no idea of what to do. In the search for something to do, for social power, radical feminism looks towards models in past societies, where women ruled, or female groupings were powerful. Alternatively, the «key» is thought to lie in lesbianism, vegetarianism, or the occult.
In «The First Sex», by Elizabeth Gould Davis, the idea of the «noble savage» is given a new twist. This book very popular with Radical Feminists, advances the theory that the prehistoric matriarchies were ruled by physically and psychically superior, vegetarian women. Unfortunately, meat‑eating, lustful men took over, and today we see the consequences.
Medieval (and modern) witches and midwives are idealised, with their «great healing powers of skill in midwifery – (they) obtained skills through inborn psychic gifts, generations of experimentation – or perhaps being attuned to their natural instincts by living a quiet life in the woods.»
Again we find the Radical Feminists arguing that women are closer to nature!
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world!
Short cut theories, proposing a single universal key to open the door to feminist heaven, abound.
Last year the key was Lesbianism. A large number of Radical Feminists became lesbians, not out of sexual interest, but as a point of political principle. It was argued simply that «feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.» Lesbians maintained that they were the real revolutionaries, being women who had refused to submit to the female role. The realization was, however, not long in coming that relating to a woman can still be highly role-defined.
This year the key is fashion has been the question of health/nature healing/vegetarianism. Alienation, or lack of harmony between mind, emotions and body can be overcome by the amazing healing qualities of food. Furthermore, «Meat eating and male violence seemed locked together.» Institutional medicine will be superseded by astrological birth control, female nature healers and the healing crisis (or in more female terms, suffering).
The theories of matriarchy and witches, of lesbianism and nature healing lead naturally into an ideology enjoying growing popularity – female superiority. This is a very convenient solution to the search for power, since it suggests women are in fact powerful now.
More recently, female superiority is advocated quite openly. One writer has only minor reservations «about saying straight out that there are important innate differences between men and women, that biology is destiny, and that biology has made women infinitely superior to men.»
The advocates of female superiority lend to hesitate because of one consequence – if men are naturally inferior, it gives them a cop-out – they can’t help being bastards. However there are more serious political implications than this. Advocacy of female superiority is no less sexist or potentially oppressive than male chauvinism. It is authoritarian, elitist and reactionary. Furthermore, one logical conclusion is inescapable: if the female role epitomises all that is good in human nature, and females are superior to males, then women are not oppressed. How long will it be before we see an article pushing this line?
Before the industrial revolution, the family’s economic function was conspicuously productive. The family farm was the fundamental unit for production of basic necessities. But with the industrial revolution, the point of production was moved to the factory, and the family, at least in urban areas, lost any obvious productive function. The only remaining one, the production of labour power (the production and maintenance of the worker him or herself) is invisible, disguised as a personal service a wife does out of love for her husband. The function of the family, apart from the economic one of consumption, became mainly political. Training in authoritarian attitudes and sexual repression, socialization of children into the competitive, super-individualistic psychology of capitalism – that is the major task of the family.
Based on the apparent divorce of the family from economic production, the myth grew of the family as «outside» society, as a refuge, where personal life is carried on and where the man may recuperate from the pressures of the world. Despite the large numbers of women (and children who worked, this theory was developed particularly during the Victorian period. The Englishman’s home was his castle – his wife, in her peaceful sanctuary, formed the basis for capitalism’s version of a woman’s place.
Thus women’s oppression today is based on the role of woman as the centre and lynchpin of the family. The apparently personal nature of the family, separate from society, has meant that women tend to see their problems in a personal, particularist way. During its early stages, the Women’s Liberation movement concentrated on breaking down this false consciousness and through consciousness-raising groups helped women to perceive the social nature of their oppression. Thus the concept: «the personal is political».
The catchword now amounts to: «the political is personal». Everything must be looked at in a personal subjective way.
The problem here is that the Radical Feminists fail to see that the personal, subjective approach is a historically conditioned part of the female role; instead they regard it as inherently female. This a-historical approach traps them into acceptance of the essentially bourgeois ideology that the family, and consequently women, are «outside society».
No doubt such enthusiastic protagonists of women’s liberation as John Ruskin would unhesitatingly agree with a theory that women remain untarnished by not being exposed to the world!
Seeing the family as outside society leads to the frequent attempts to change family and sexual relations by sheer willpower. Thus the Radical Feminist communes such as Amazon Acres.
Twist and turn as they might, Radical Feminists like everyone else are still unable to avoid the pressing question: «What to do now?» The answer usually given is simply do what you want.
Like all change-your-head theories, Radical Feminism is voluntarist and utopian. It upholds a vision of a new society, of fundamental change, «a female world based on love trust, freedom and humanity.» But this world remains a distant dream.
Radical Feminism either declares this world will spontaneously arise, or that if we try hard enough we’ll get it. Voluntarism, the idea you can do anything you want right now, is in the long run demoralising when disillusionment sets in. In the short run, the lack of a strategy condemns a movement to activity only around short-term objectives. A strategy, an understanding of how to build the movement and to bridge the gap between immediate actions and the eventually massive social change – this is an essential concept. Radical Feminism is lacking such a concept.
The movement, under the influence of Radical Feminism, has largely reverted to those immediately actionable activities traditionally open to women – good works. The present movement around self-help is little more than charity. Setting up child-care centres, halfway houses, health centres and rape crisis groups – while these may be necessary and useful, they do not help to build a movement capable of changing the nature of society. In fact, as charity organisations usually do, they excuse the government and the whole society from taking the responsibility. And such an isolated institution can even be co-opted into the governmental structure. This is evident from the dependence of the Women’s Health Clinic in Sydney and the Women’s Centre in Berkeley, California on government grants.
This is not to say we should not act around short-term objectives. However while doing so we need to develop an understanding of how to build, a strategy that takes us towards our ultimate goals.
We need to really understand consciousness, which the Radical Feminists, for all their obsession with it, clearly do not. Consciousness is changed in the process of people struggling to change society … and themselves.
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