The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory

Changes in the Family

Not only has women’s role in the workforce changed dramatically at times, but the family itself is not unchanging, being continually under­mined by the kinds of social upheavals just mentioned, then having to be fought for again. Today, the family is severely undermined by the fact that almost half the workforce are women, many more women enter tertiary education than previously, and divorce rates are at an all time high. A sur­vey done by the Victorian state government estimates that only about four in every ten families is the traditional two partners with children.⁵⁶

Even bosses and parliamentarians have begun to take up the concept of affirmative action and provision of such things as childcare. Not be­cause they are for women’s liberation, but because they can see it is was­teful and uneconomic to lose women’s skills and experience if they have to leave work to raise children. In spite of their motivations, however, all these changes and more have contributed to changing attitudes in the mass of the population.

Australia Unveiled, the results of surveys conducted by The Age in Melbourne, documented some of them. Skilled tradesmen were the “most definite in their rejection of the traditional idea of the woman’s role”. Of women, 49% thought husband and children should come before a career, but only 42% of men said so. Overall, 84% said that when both partners work, they should take equal responsibility for child care and housework.⁵⁷ If men have power, why have they changed their attitudes, why do they agree they should give up some of it?

Of course, women have not been liberated. But we cannot under­stand these changes unless we see them in the context of the contradictory role of the family. Historically, the establishment of the family served the interests of the capitalist system. Once established, it played a crucial role in socialising the next generation of workers into sex roles and habits of submissiveness. But capitalism is a dynamic system, continually revolutionising production. Therefore on the one hand, developments since the war tend to undermine the family. On the other, it cannot do without at least the appearance and the idea of the family as the perfect so­cial unit for everyday living. So while the family is breaking down, we also see efforts to shore it up which fit nicely with the need of govern­ments to cut back on welfare and other social benefits such as health and education. It is the ideal cop-out for governments to be able to argue that families should take care of the aged and the sick, that students should take responsibility for their education costs. In some countries the effort to shore up the family takes the form of anti-abortion campaigns by sections of the middle classes.

This Marxist view of the family arises from an analysis which begins with production, which sees society as a whole, but which does not mechanically reduce everything directly to economics. Patriarchy theory would have to say that male workers have been in an alliance for male power in which their interests have continually been ignored, that mostly they have lost out or even been under attack from their allies.

Conclusion

Marx warned in his writings of three consequences of seeing society as an undifferentiated whole, of not putting production at the centre of our analysis. First it can lead to the view that society is unchanging, seeing society in an ahistorical way, with social relations governed by eternal laws. Second, it can lead to idealism, with the dynamic of society lying in some mystical force outside it. And third, it can lead to the view “that what exists today can only be grasped in its own terms, through its own language and ideas”.⁵⁸

It is popular today to try to graft structuralist and post-structuralist theories onto Marxism. This has been the road to accepting the theory of patriarchy for many Marxists.⁵⁹ However, all these theories display the problems Marx talked about. Foucault, who has become popular with many feminists, equates every relationship between humans with a power struggle, a completely ahistorical concept, and certainly not a new one. Thomas Hobbes, the bourgeois philosopher of the seventeenth century, was convinced that the basic drive in society was the “war of all against all”.

The epitome of the problem is the fascination with “discourse” or language. It has taken on an explicitly idealist content. Chris Weedon, an American feminist makes these typical comments: “Feminist post-struc­turalist criticism can show how power is exercised through discourse.” And “power is invested in and exercised through her who speaks.”⁶⁰ Con­sequently some feminists see literary criticism as their main area of strug­gle.

Rosemary Pringle takes up the theme here in Australia, illustrating what it means to accept what exists in its own terms, through its own lan­guage and ideas. She argues that we have to find a way to “privilege” the “feminine discourse”. Women should find ways to use their femininity to “disempower” men. She doesn’t know how.⁶¹ But is it any wonder she can’t tell us how? Ideas do not come from out of the blue, they are not divorced from the material conditions which give rise to them:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material inter­course of men – the language of real life.⁶²

Femininity is part of the ideological baggage of capitalism and the family. It is part of the way women’s oppression is reinforced day in and day out. It cannot be used to undermine women’s oppression. The most apt reply to Pringle is that made by Marx to the idealist Young Hegelians in the 1840s:

This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to inter­pret the existing world in a different way, i.e., to recognise it by means of a different interpretation.⁶³

Women’s femininity means flirting, passiveness, being “sexy”, available and yet chaste. Such behaviour reinforces the idea that women are trivial, passive and purely of decorative value. For it to “disempower” men (assuming they have power, which I don’t), women would have to somehow convince men to interpret such behaviour to mean women are serious, aggressive and valuable human beings. So instead of arguing to challenge the stereotypes, of fighting for liberation as the early women’s movement did, feminism has gone full circle to espouse a profoundly con­servative outlook.

This is the dead end to which the ideas of male power and patriar­chy have led. Feminist articles in journals and papers are very good at documenting the horrific conditions most women endure. But they have precious little to say about how to begin to change the society which creates them. Take Gender at Work by Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle. It catalogues very well the problems of women at work. It is very good at searching out offensive behaviour by male workers. But nowhere, not once, is there a mention of the possibility of solidarity between men and women in struggle to change the situation. In 1981, only two years before it was published, there was a strike of 200 women textile workers in Brunswick, Melbourne. The Kortex strike was a graphic and inspiring ex­ample of how class struggle can radically alter relations in the home. Hus­bands, brothers, sons and lovers willingly did housework, cooked and minded children so the women could more effectively fight for their $25 pay rise, which they won. Because they ignore such examples, Game and Pringle can offer no way out of the entrenched discrimination and gender stereotypes women suffer from.

Most feminists have abandoned any identification with socialism.⁶⁴ This is not surprising, because if patriarchy is a power structure separate from capitalism the latter can be overthrown, leaving the former intact. This idea is given some credence by the Stalinism of most of the left, which has kept alive the ludicrous idea that the Stalinist countries arc socialist, in spite of the continuing oppression of women.

Because Marxism recognises that class divisions in society are fun­damental, that women’s oppression arises from the particular way capitalism developed, it locates the way forward in the struggle against the very society itself. Men do behave badly, do act in sexist ways, do beat and rape women in the home. Feminists interpret this as the enactment of male power. The Marxist reply is not to simply say these are the actions of men shaped by the society they grow up in. That is only one side to the ar­gument. The other is to point out, as Marx did, that “men make their own history”. While humans are the products of society they are also con­scious, thinking beings. As I showed, ideas propagated by the ruling class are not simply taken up by workers in a straightforward way. They are refracted through working class experience and interpreted in various ways. The middle class women who fought for the family did so by argu­ing that women should be “feminine” and restricted to the role of housewife and mother. Working class men saw in the family the prospect of improved living conditions, so they argued for a family wage on the grounds it would improve women’s lot.

Ruling class ideas are never completely hegemonic. In every class society, the exploited and oppressed have fought back against their rulers in one way or another. So no matter how tightly the ruling class try to or­ganise their hold on society, they cannot completely wipe out the ideas and traditions of struggle and resistance which come down to each genera­tion from the past.

Of course there is no iron rule that society will be seething with revolution at any particular point in time. In the last ten years, we have seen a massive shift to the right in the political ideas most current in society, continuing a drift which was identifiable from the mid-seventies. This change in the political climate is underpinned by the Labor government’s talk of “consensus”, and demands that workers make sacrifices “in the national interest”. As Labor has led the bosses’ attempts to cut living standards and reorganise their economy, workers have suf­fered a number of defeats and had their trade union organisation weakened. On the one hand we see affirmative action for some women, reflecting gains won during the period when the workers’ movement was on the offensive. On the other, we see no end in sight to violence in the home, as families struggle to cope with worsening living standards, the strain of unemployment, poor health care and the like.

In Britain and the United States and to a lesser extent here, we have seen attacks on abortion rights and gay and lesbian rights. The fact that they have met with a militant and vigorous response shows the situation can be reversed. All of history shows that the exploited and oppressed cannot be kept in submission indefinitely. And history also shows that it is when they begin to fight back that the horrible ideas of capitalism can begin to be broken down, precisely because the circumstances which per­petuate them are ripped asunder. Anyone who saw the women tramways workers on pickets, approaching shoppers for money and support in the lockout by the Victorian Labor government early in 1990 got a glimpse of what we mean.

Tony Cliff has shown the relationship of the high points in epic class struggles and the position of women and the struggle for liberation.⁶⁵ A couple of examples will sketch the point here. In the revolution in China, 1925-27, led by the working class in the cities and supported with gusto by the peasantry in the countryside, there were moves to stop the barbarous practices such as foot binding which oppressed women so harshly. In revolutionary Spain, in 1936, a country dominated by the sexism of Catholicism, women could go about among male workers without fear of rape, and participate in the most untypical activities without derision. The very rise of the women’s liberation movement was related to the high level of struggle by the working class in the late sixties, as well as the entry into the workforce and out of the isolation of the home by greater numbers of women. And one of the first demands of the revolu­tion in Romania in 1990 was abortion on demand for women.

Every time there has been a lull in the struggle, ideas of pessimism, ideas which say the working class cannot offer a way forward, are sung from the roof tops. But these kinds of struggles will break out again. The events in Eastern Europe are shaking the world system not just in the East. In every strike, every demonstration of protest, no matter how small, there lies the seed of struggles which could rip capitalism apart. It is not simply a matter of ideas, of education which convinces workers of different ideas. The struggle creates a material reason to change – the need for solidarity in opposition to their rulers can, in certain circumstances, quite rapidly break down the divisions which in other times hold workers back.

The fight for women’s liberation begins there. The idea that men have power over women can do nothing but get in the way. It reinforces the division of sexism. Men are sexist today. But women’s oppression does not equal male power. If we see the fight against sexism as separate from the class struggle, we can easily fall into seeing working class men as an enemy. In reality, they are potential allies. In the seventies when building workers were confident of their union strength the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) supported women’s right to work on build­ing sites. Every defence of abortion rights against the Right to Life has received support from large numbers of men. In the mass abortion cam­paign against Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government in 1979-80, men were able to be won to support the struggle, including transport workers at Email, who stopped work to join a picket. In 1986, BLF support for the nurses’ strike in Victoria challenged their sexist ideas about the role of women.

Once we understand that working class men have nothing to gain from women’s oppression, we can see the possibility of breaking them from sexist ideas. Then we can be confident that workers, women and men fighting side by side in solidarity, can begin to change the “existing categories”. There is nothing automatic about changes in consciousness in struggle. But with an understanding of the roots of women’s oppression, socialists can intervene around these issues and relate them to the ex­perience of workers’ struggles.

Women are better placed today to fight for liberation than in any time in history. They are no longer simply housewives. They are half the working class and able to exercise the power of that class alongside male workers. Ultimately, it is the struggle of the working class which can destroy the very social structures which gave rise to women’s oppression in the first place.

Notes

1 At the International Socialists’ Conference at the beginning of 1990 we scheduled a talk called “Male Power - Does it Exist?” The theory of patriarchy is so widely accepted that the title was mostly received by non-members with astonishment.

2 Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda, Penguin, Ringwood 1976

3 Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, Penguin, 1977

4 Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union” in Women and Revolution, Ed. by Lydia Sargent, Montreal 1981

5 ibid, p. 11

6 Lindsey German, “Theories of Patriarchy” in International Socialism second series no 12; Chris Harman “Women’s Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism” in ISJ 2nd series no. 23; Tony Cliff, Class Struggle & Women’s Liberation, Bookmarks, London 1987; Lindsey German Sex, Class and Socialism, Bookmarks, London 1989.

7 Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries Talk, Sydney 1988

8 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Moscow 1976, p. 41

9 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, London 1983, p. 28

10 ibid, pp. l2-13

11 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London 1975

12 Hartmann op. cit., p. 12

13 ibid, p. 3

14 Richard Bradbury, “What is Post-Structuralism?” in International Socialism, Second series, No. 41, p. 153

15 Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate, Penguin, 1974, p. 101

16 Summers op. cit., p. 259

17 This is a controversial point. The Marxist position was first articulated in Friedrich Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. For a more contemporary defence of the position against feminist attacks, see Eleanor Burke Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance, New York & London 1981, and Harman op. cit., p. 37, Note 1

18 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Moscow 1977, p. 160

19 ibid, pp. 160-161

20 R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Melbourne 1982, p. 65

21 ibid, p. 65

22 Summers op. cit., p. 291

23 Connell op. cit., p. 126

24 Summers op. cit., p. 291

25 Edna Ryan & Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders, Nelson, 1975, p. 108

26 Summers op. cit., p. 170

27 ibid, p. 170. Summers does not draw any conclusions about women in pushing these ideas.

28 Stuart Macintyre, The Labour Experiment, Melbourne 1989, p. 18. McIntyre comments that his figures actually underestimate the level of poverty, because they do not take account of any interruptions in earning capacity. During this period, most workers would have been unlikely to have avoided such interruptions.

29 Summers op. cit., p. 147

30 ibid, p. 148

31 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Pan Book, 1988. For his account of the treatment of convict women by the soldiers, coupled with his indictment of the “pompous moral phraseology of the Enlightenment, the good flogging Christians”, see pp. 258-261

32 Quoted in Summers op. cit.

33 Connell op. cit., p. 53

34 Penny Russell, “For Better and for Worse: Love, Power and Sexuality in Upper-class Marriages in Melbourne, 1860-1880”, in Australian Feminist Studies, No. 7 & 8, p. 12

35 Connell op. cit., p. 204

36 Hartmann op. cit., p. 22

37 Cliff op. cit., “Rebuilding the Workers’ Family”, pp. 200-204; German op. cit., pp. 31-36

38 Sandra Bloodworth, “Gender at Work” in The Socialist, August 1989

39 Ryan op. cit., p. 91

40 Connell op. cit., p. 41

41 Ryan op. cit., p. 32

42 ibid, p. 39

43 Report of the Royal Commission into the alleged shortage of labour in New South Wales, with minutes of evidence, Sydney 1911-12, p. xviii – Quoted in Ryan and Conlon, p. 45

44 Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 4, 1911, p. 558 in Ryan and Conlon, p. 78

45 ibid, p. 79

46 ibid, p. 91

47 Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers, Melbourne 1988, p. 234

48 Edna Ryan, “Women in Production in Australia” in Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, Ed. Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 266

49 From the Ten Hours Advocate in 1846, Quoted in Hartmann op. cit., p. 21

50 Summers op. cit., Her book is generally very well documented. But she gives no evidence to back up this assertion about equal pay claims of unions in the 1920s.

51 Ray Markey, “Women and Labour 1880-1900” in Women, Class and History, Ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle, Fontana/Collins, 1980, p. 84

52 Carol Bacchi, “Evolution, Eugenics and Women: the impact of scientific theories on attitudes towards women 1870 1920” in Windschuttle, p. 140

53 Markey op. cit., p. 95

54 ibid, p. 94. Markey correctly comments in a note on p. 109 that Summers “presents a false idealist-materialist dichotomy in the nature of class relations.”

55 Ryan op. cit., pp. 33-34

56 “Shaping Melbourne’s Future”, published by the Victorian Government 1987

57 Australia Unveiled – The Changing Face of a Nation, published by The Age, Melbourne 1989

58 Chris Harman, “Base and Superstructure” in International Socialism, Second series, No. 32, p. 16

59 Ann Curthoys, in her book For and Against Feminism, Allen & Unwin, 1988, says that just as she was being attracted to Marxism, many women she knew were abandoning it under the influence of the ideas of Louis Althusser. Today the “Marxist” journal Arena makes serious concessions to post-structuralism.

60 Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice & Poststructuralist Theory, Basil Blackwell, 1988

61 Pringle op. cit., p. 42

62 Marx op. cit., p. 42

63 ibid, p. 36

64 See the debate in issues 6, 7 & 8 of Australian Feminist Studies

65 Cliff op. cit., Cliff shows that even bourgeois revolutions – which could not open the way to a classless society – brought the woman question to the fore because they challenged the social relations of feudal society. And women have always played an important role in social upheavals.

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