This collection contains papers published between 1970 and 1981 by Christine Delphy, a leading activist in the French women’s liberation movement, who has been described by Simone de Beauvoir as France’s most exciting feminist theorist.
Christine Delphy’s work has only slowly become available in English. An article of hers, ‘The main enemy’, formed part of the first major publication from the women’s movement in France in 19701*, and it was translated and sold in mimeoed form at the 1974 Women’s Liberation Conference in Edinburgh. It was then reissued, together with two other articles, in a pamphlet from the Women’s Research and Resources Centre in London in 1977. A few other translations of her work have been scattered through a variety of academic collections and journals in subsequent years, including the American journal Feminist Issues.2 When the WRRC Publications group went into collaboration with Hutchinson Education, we decided, rather than reissuing The Main Enemy, to produce a new and larger collection of Delphy’s papers so as to give English and non-academic readers a better appreciation of the development and importance of her work.
‘The main enemy’ contains the core of one strand of Christine Delphy’s work: a theoretical analysis of the feminist ‘discovery’ of housework as unpaid work within the family, central to an understanding of women’s oppression today. Delphy’s conceptions of the domestic mode of production, of marriage as a labour contract, and of the economic importance of marriage to women have been developed with increasing sophistication in her work on the ways in which divorce constitutes a continuation of marriage in a different form, on the class position of women, and on the definition of housework. She was among the first in the recent wave of feminism to stress the structural importance of the family in understanding women’s situation, and she has continued to stress the significance of divisions within the family – unlike those socialist feminists who have taken up the economics of the family as a topic, but whose writings have in fact deflected attention from women’s oppression within it (for example, by continuing to focus on the functions ‘the family’ performs in relation to ‘the reproduction of capitalism’).
Delphy’s economic analysis of the family does not, of course, comprise any and everything there is to be said about women and the family. In particular, as she notes in her Introduction to this collection, it deals only tangentially with the issues of sexuality and violence. But it does explain much about the pressures towards heterosexuality and marriage which exist for all women, about women’s position within the labour market as less than freely contracting agents, about employers preference for employing married men,3 and about women and inheritance (including the low investment made in women’s education).
A second important element in Delphy’s work, which runs through all the articles included here, is a dissection of patriarchal ideologies: an untangling of the deeply entrenched ways of interpreting the world which support and continue male dominance. In a number of papers she looks at the recourse made in a variety of explanations of the divisions between men and women to ‘natural facts’, ‘universal values’, differences of ‘need’ and ‘skills’, or to women’s childbearing capacities. She also exposes the various inventions of the Origins of Humanity which have thrust back into pre-history a set of sexual divisions parallel to those of the west today, which are then used to ‘explain’ the evolution of our present system. She strongly criticizes the presumption that ‘men’ and ‘women’ exist as biologically based categories prior to and independently of the power relationship which currently exists between them. Delphy also lays bare the presumptions about women’s intrinsic worthlessness which are built into theories of the functions of the family – which assume the domestic work women do must somehow be about something else, something important, like helping to maintain class divisions, since it is clearly so trivial as not to be worth exploiting in its own right. And she also shows how the idea that the public and private spheres are eternal categories ‘givers’ of nature (and that the latter, the public sphere or the economy, is the determining influence), is built into the heart of marxist and sociological theories. Such theories therefore cannot allow for the fact that this division, and the opposition of public and private, is itself a social construct.
A final strand in many of the papers is a discussion of the politics and strategy of the women’s liberation movement. Delphy looks at the reasons why an autonomous women’s movement is needed if women’s oppression is to be not only struggled against, but recognized at all; at why excluding men does not constitute ‘inverse sexism’; at divisions within the movement and how different groups’ use of terms (for example, patriarchy/patriarchal) reflects deep differences of analysis; at the problem in demanding Wages for Housework; at the importance of remaining angry and of struggling against self-hatred; and the problems of (and for) intellectuals within political movements.
Christine Delphy’s style, the content of her arguments, and the specific targets for criticism which she selects, are, naturally enough, within a French tradition – although she is well apprised of debates and events in the English-speaking world. It is worth noting particularly in her work (as elsewhere in the French women’s movement)4 the influence of the French tradition of philosophic and logical analysis, the importance of psychoanalysis in intellectual life, her training as a sociologist and her related concern with the situation of rural women, and her sense of a need for constant vigilance against the left and the traditions of intellectual marxism.
Delphy’s work is firmly social constructionist and in line with the brand of radical feminism which has for some years dissociated itself from the biologism of Shulamith Firestone (1971). Delphy has a particularly forceful and analytic style, which she justifies by stressing the importance in the development of feminism of the freedom to criticize ideas put forward by feminists as well as by non- or antifeminists. She argues that moving forwards necessarily involves critiques of existing work, but in so doing we must be careful to attack the ideas, not the individual who advanced them (unless, of course, the writer is clearly acting in bad faith). Much of Delphy’s own work – including several articles included here – takes this form: routing out idealist (including biologistic, individualistic and psychologistic) thinking in the works of Frederick Engels, Claude Alzon, Annie Leclerc, and Michèle Barrett and Mary Mcintosh. Delphy argues that all knowledge is political and that it is not sufficient to counter one set of ideas with another view of the world: we must also show the first set of ideas to be ideological. That is to say, we must demonstrate the material relationships which exist within a society, and show how particular ideas support the continuation of the objective interests of oppressor groups.
The salience of Lacanian psychoanlysis in French academic life and for feminism can be seen from the existence of an entire group, Psychoanalysis and Politics (familiarly referred to as ‘Psych et Po’), within the French women’s movement, and from the attention given by intellectuals to the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélene Cixous, whose writings dominate a recent collection purporting to represent The New French Feminism (Marks 1982). Christine Delphy has been a vigorous opponent of the ideas of Psych et Po (and their commercial and related practices,5 for many years – as has the journal she helped to found, Questions Féministes (now Nouvelles Questions Féministes). She argues that men and women are made not born, that there are no differences of essence between the sexes, and that our bodies do not ‘speak’: do not require or restrict the possible meanings we give to anatomical features. Rather, how we understand and experience our organs and actions is socially determined and could be wholly different (and is in other cultures). She also stresses throughout her work that the relationships which exist between men and women are power relationships, and that no understanding of gender, sexuality or sexual orientation can be divorced from this for an instant. To ‘revalue’ feminity within our existing society is therefore to celebrate masochism.
In such arguments Delphy is in full accord with her sociological colleagues (or at least with those who carry the principles they hold dear in other realms into the arena of the analysis of gender). Her sociological background is also evident in her concern with the situation of the wives and daughters of small farmers in France, since, as in many European countries, France still has a substantial peasant-agriculturalist population and a flourishing school of rural sociology. The lives of country men and women have been relatively well documented, and with an attention to the economics of family life quite unlike that of sociological studies of town dwellers.
Those who argue that all aspects of society were totally transformed by the transition to industrial capitalism have criticized Delphy for too frequently using examples drawn from rural families to make points about all families. Her response would be that it is possible that many aspects of families were not changed all that much by the Industrial Revolution. At the very least we need more empirical historical investigation to show what has changed; at present much is asserted or presumed and little proved. She would also argue that contemporary farm families are sufficiently distant from many of us to enable us to see features of their families’ lives clearly, which then in return show us things we had taken for granted in our own situations. It is in any case amazingly ethnocentric for English or American urban intellectuals to suggest the wives and daughters of small farmers can be ignored because they are just a ‘backward minority’.
Difficulties in the relationship between the women’s movement and socialist groups in France have a long history. Feminists and socialists have felt ambivalent about each other for at least two hundred years, and the entryist tactics exercised by those within the ‘class struggle tendency’ within the WLM in France during the 1970s created new suspicions. Chistine Delphy has consistently argued for a completely autonomous women’s movement, but her work on the oppression of women is clearly marxist in origin. However, she uses and develops marxism, meeting marxist orthodoxy head on. She argues that while historical materialism as developed by Marx is an important tool for analysing any form of oppression, what has become ‘marxism’ holds back rather than facilitates the struggle for women’s liberation. Orthodox marxism and marxist feminist analysis seek all the time to tie the oppression of women to the oppression of the working class. They try to show what use women’s oppression has for capitalism or how women should relate to the class struggle … and thus exonerate men, and divert women’s energies from feminism. Delphy argues for a return to Marx’s own methods and practice, and against a digging around for what Marx himself (or subsequent marxists) have had to say on a topic which did not particularly concern him (or them), in analysing women’s oppression.
Those who criticize Delphy for not using ‘marxist’ concepts ‘as they should be used’ or who think that by adding ‘patriarchy’ to ‘capitalism’ they have integrated feminism with marxism, are therefore talking at cross purposes with her.6 She has said clearly that feminism cannot use concepts developed to explain capitalist class relationships because they precisely occlude the oppression which is specific to women. Nor, she argues, can we move immediately to looking at how the oppression of women relates to or ‘articulates with’ capitalist oppression7 – because we are still far from understanding women’s oppression. First, we must look much more deeply, and within an autonomous and women-only movement, at women’s oppression. We must start by taking ourselves and our oppression as seriously as we take men and men’s oppression – even if as women we find it excruciatingly difficult to devote such time and care to ourselves!
The papers included here were written over a ten year period, and while they have been edited slightly to cut out repetitions and a few specialized discussions, and in some cases retranslated, no attempt has been made to update the arguments or the examples. All the debates Christine Delphy raises here still continue: whether men can be feminists; whether individuals can make their marriages egalitarian; whether ‘bourgeois’ women and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women’s movement; how to counter naturalistic thinking in commonsense and scholarly accounts of the world. … In short, how best to understand and struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure. This collection demonstrates the sophistication of Delphy’s argument that structurally men are the agents and beneficiaries of the subordination of women. We hope it will contribute towards open discussion of the oppression of women and means to change, since her work, while intellectually radical and rigorous, gives ways of confronting and explaining men’s oppression of women without alienating any groups of women, without attaching individual responsibility to men, without closing off avenues by prescribing currently correct behaviour, and leaving open the question of the relationship between feminism and socialist, anti-racist and other movements for liberation.
Diana Leonard
November 1983
* Superior figures refer to the Notes and references at the end of each chapter.