The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory

The Family

We can agree with feminists such as Hartmann that the family is the source of women’s oppression today. But their analysis of how and why this came about is fundamentally flawed. Summers says “the institution (of the family) confers power on men”.¹⁶ The argument goes that, because men supposedly wanted to have women service them in the home, they organised to keep women out of the best jobs. A conspiracy of all men was responsible for women being driven into the role of wife and mother, working in the worst paid and least skilled jobs – if they were able to work at all.

Actually, we don’t need a conspiracy theory of any kind to explain why women are oppressed under capitalism. Women have been oppressed since the division of society into classes.¹⁷ The capitalist family was es­tablished as the result of the particular development of capitalism. The ef­fect of the industrial revolution on the working class family was devastating. Friedrich Engels painted a horrifying picture in The Condi­tions of the Working Class in England. Whole industries were built on the basis of cheap female and child labour during the industrial revolution in Britain. Engels gives figures for the 1840s: of 419,560 factory operatives in the British Empire, 242,296 were female, of whom almost half were under eighteen. Almost half the male workers were under eighteen. Women made up 56.25% of workers in the cotton factories, 69.5% in the woollen mills, 70.5% in flax-spinning mills.¹⁸ Engels pointed out:

When the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what becomes of the children? They grow up like wild weeds; they are put out to nurse for a shilling or eighteen pence a week, and how they are treated, may be imagined. Hence the accidents to which little children fall victims multiply in the factory districts to a terrible ex­tent …

This dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brines the most demoralising consequences for parents as well as children.¹⁹

Diseases such as typhus raged in industrial slums, drunkenness was widespread and there was a “general enfeeblement of the frame in the working class.” In Manchester, more than fifty-seven percent of working class children died before the age of five. These statistics disturbed the more far-sighted sections of the capitalist class.

The working class of the early industrial revolution was drawn from the peasantry, driven off the land by enclosures of the common lands and other measures. But as this source began to dry up, the bosses began to realise they needed to find a way to ensure the reproduction of a working class at least healthy and alert enough not to fall asleep at the machines. And more and more they needed an educated, skilled workforce.

The solution they came up with was the nuclear family. This is hardly surprising when we consider that the bourgeoisie themselves lived in the family. Workers fresh from the countryside were used to working and living in peasant families. It was accepted without question that women should be responsible for childcare and most domestic duties. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a massive ideological campaign by the middle and upper classes to reverse the trend away from the work­ing class family and to force women more decisively into the roles of wife and mother. This was backed up by attempts to ameliorate at least the worst aspects of working class life, especially those which endangered women and their ability to produce healthy children.

The same process was repeated here in Australia. If anything, the family was even more severely disrupted because of the transportation of convicts and the general lawlessness of the frontier society in the first years of the nineteenth century. Shortages of labour were acute in the early years of the colony, because of the distance from the home country and lack of free settlers. This pushed the colonial ruling class to try to find a solution even earlier than in Britain. Connell and Irving comment on the earliest signs of changing attitudes among the colony’s ruling class:

In the 1820s a tightening began. The movement in England by evan­gelicals against the sexual laxity of the aristocracy soon acquired colonial agents. The Protestant clergy were prominent … Particular venom was directed against the homosexual relationships formed by many convicts and pastoral workers, though unmarried women got a fair pasting as sluts and whores. The 1812 Parliamentary inquiry into transportation had hardly raised a question about sex; the 1837 inquiry and report positively smouldered with innuendo, scandal and moralis­ing.²⁰

They situate the attempts to confine women to the home, to estab­lish the “feminine” stereotype, firmly in the ruling class’s drive to stamp their authority on the new colony. They argue that women “disappeared into domesticity in the age of the bourgeois ascendancy”. From this time on we no longer see women entrepreneurs like Mary Reibey or Rosetta Terry who had run successful businesses and been prominent in other public ventures in the earlier years of the settlement.²¹

Caroline Chisholm led the way in the campaign to establish the working class family in 1847. She advised the British government that if they wanted to establish a “good and great people” they must appreciate that:

For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can ap­point, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called ‘God’s police’ – wives and little children – good and virtuous women.²²

Connell and Irving argue that “by the 1860s the lack of parental guidance and education among working-class children was recognised as a major problem of social control.”²³ After the 1870s, living standards declined as the cities grew rapidly. In the 1880s, infant mortality rates were higher in Sydney than in London. So if anything, the campaign for the family was even more strident here than in Britain. And it certainly was not a campaign by all men, but by the ruling class, male and female, and its middle class supporters both male and female.

Henry Parkes drew the connection between the push to establish the family and ruling class designs in the NSW Legislative Assembly in August 1866:

Our business being to colonize the country, there was only one way to do it – by spreading over it all the associations and connections of family life.²⁴

The idea that male workers joined in an alliance with their male bosses to carry out this scheme so they could get power over women is simply not borne out by the facts. Men did not rush into the family, chain­ing women to the kitchen sink and smothering them with babies’ nappies. As late as 1919, it was reported in the NSW Legislative Assembly that there was a high proportion of bachelors in Australia.²⁵

Anne Summers herself admits that “many women resisted being forced into full-time domesticity, just as men resented being forced to sup­port a number of dependent and unproductive family members.”²⁶ This goes some way to explaining why “the taming and domestication of the self-professed independent man became a standard theme in late nineteenth century fiction, especially that written by women”.²⁷ So men had to be cajoled and ideologically convinced of the benefits of home life – they did not go out to enforce it. Family desertions were very com­mon. But just everyday, ordinary life meant for many workers – working on ships, moving around the country looking for work, doing itinerant and seasonal jobs such as cane cutting, droving, shearing, whaling and seal­ing – that they were not serviced by their wives’ labour in the home much at all.

In any case, when a man took on the responsibility of feeding a wife and children from the low and unreliable wage he earned, he actually faced a worsening of conditions. Stuart McIntyre has shown that working class families living at the turn of the century were most likely to suffer poverty during the years when they had small children. Hardly a gain worth siding with their exploiters for. He says of his statistics:

They … serve to illustrate the life-cycle aspects of vulnerability to poverty. As such they suggest an explanation of the strength of the working class desire to assist the family breadwinner.²⁸

Summers makes this point herself: “indeed they (men) will general­ly be better off if they remain single.”²⁹ She dismisses it by assuming that a wife’s services, the emotional security of a relationship “as well as the feelings of pride and even aggrandizement associated with fathering and supporting children” outweigh the minor inconvenience of not having enough money to live on.³⁰ This is a typically middle class attitude; that the ability to survive could be less important than “emotional security”, or that it could reliably exist in a life of poverty and degradation. In any case, on both these criteria – emotional security and the pride of parenthood – it would have to be said women have a stake in the family. It is precisely the yearning to realise these often unattainable goals which does partly under­pin the acceptance of the family as the ideal. They tell us nothing about whether the family bestows power on men or not.

This argument is not meant to idealise workers. Sexist ideas about women are as old as class society. So it is not surprising that male workers were sexist and accepted the standard stereotyped view of women. But that is not the same as being in an alliance with male bosses. And it did not mean they strove to establish the stifling, restrictive existence of the nuclear family. It simply means they were the product of given social rela­tions not of their own making. “The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions.”³¹

The fact is that it was the ruling class, via magazines produced for workers, who actually argued for women to become homemakers, wives and mothers above all else. That is why every mass circulation magazine, every middle class voice shouted the virtues of womanhood – a certain kind of womanhood that is (as they still do today). And it is clear that the overwhelming arguments for women to be primarily housewives came from women. Caroline Chisholm was in the forefront of the efforts to return women to the home:

the rate payable for female labour should be proportional on a lower scale than that paid to the men … high wages tempt many girls to keep single while it encourages indolent and lazy men to depend more and more upon their wives’ industry than upon their own exertions thus partly reversing the design of nature.³²

Connell and Irving rightly drew the connection between the estab­lishment of bourgeois society in Australia and the fight to establish the “feminine” stereotype for women: “The women (in the social elite) … played an active role in maintaining class consciousness through their policing of gentility.”³³ This point is also made in a study of ruling class women in the colony between 1860 and 1880:

Ladies tended to put the demands of their class above their personal claims to individual expression. The very existence of the upper class in Melbourne depended largely on its continued visibility and the per­ceived superiority of its values over those of the rest of Melbourne’s social world. Any failing, especially in the area of morality, threatened its survival, and the efforts of women were directed at maintaining a visible moral and spiritual superiority.³⁴

Of course, these women were not feminists. But some of the most advanced women of the middle classes of the time, the suffragists as they were called, mouthed the honeyed phrases promising women the approval of respectable society if only they would devote themselves to the care of their husbands and children. Vida Goldstein was a famous feminist. In 1903 her paper, Australian Woman’s Sphere recommended that women’s education should include instruction on baby care. Goldstein defended the women’s movement from attacks that said emancipation meant women were refusing to have children by insisting that on the contrary, women were awakening to a truer sense of their maternal responsibility, and that most wanted a career in motherhood – hardly a departure from the sexist ideas of bourgeois society. Maybanke Anderson espoused women’s suffrage and higher education for women but also compulsory domestic science for schoolgirls, and sexual repression.³⁵

The bosses wanted the family and they had to fight for it. Workers, both men and women, had to be goaded, pushed and coaxed into accept­ing ruling class ideas of a “decent” life. The argument that women’s role in the family was somehow established by an alliance of all men simply ignores the influence of not only middle class and bourgeois respectable women, but also the feminists of the time who were vastly more influen­tial – because of material wealth and organisation and ideological in­fluence through newspapers and the like – than working class men.