Since the birth of the women’s liberation movement in France, the United States and elsewhere, the marxist point of view has been represented by a line formulated outside the movement. This has been put forward by both traditional communist parties and more recently developed left groups, and it has been brought into the movement by militant women from these groups.
Most women in the movement consider this line unsatisfactory, in both theory and strategy, for two basic reasons:
1it doesn’t account for the oppression common to all women, and
2it concentrates, not on the oppression of women, but on the consequences this oppression has for the proletariat (cf. the analysis in McAffee and Wood, 1969).
This is only possible because there is a flagrant contradiction between the principles which adherents of marxism claim to uphold and the way in which they have applied these principles to the situation of women. Historical materialism is based on the analysis of social antagonisms in terms of classes; classes being themselves defined by their place in the system of production. While these principles have supposedly been used to analyse the situation of women as women, the specific relations of women to production have in fact simply been ignored. That is to say there has been no class analysis of women. This theoretical failure has had immediate consequences.
1The oppression of women is held to be a secondary consequence of (and derived from) the class struggle, which is currently defined exclusively as the oppression of the proletariat by Capital.
2The continuing oppression of women in countries where capitalism as such has been destroyed is attributed to purely ideological factors. This implies an idealist and non-marxist definition of ideology. It treats it as a factor which can survive in the absence of any material oppression that it serves to rationalize.
These assumptions go against the dynamic of the women’s movement, and hold back the development of women’s awareness of a twofold need. First, a theoretical need: to find the structural reasons why the abolition of capitalist relations of production as such is not sufficient to free women; and second, a political need: to establish the women’s movement as an autonomous force.
Hardly born, the movement has had to confront the following contradiction. At the very moment when it is becoming a revolutionary force, the only analysis which places the struggle of women in a global revolutionary perspective denies the first of these necessities (the need to seek the causes of the specific oppression of women), and offers no theoretical basis for the second (it allows, but does not establish the necessity, for an autonomous movement). The results of this contradiction are directly manifested within the movement in a general uneasiness, the appearance of opposing factions, and a difficulty in functioning. These are all due to the impossibility of defining a coherent practice so long as a gap exists between the theory to which we refer and the actual oppression of women against which we fight. This will continue so long as the very reason for the existence of the movement lacks a solid theoretical foundation.
The existence of this marxist line in practice holds back the movement – an effect which is obviously not accidental. My aim here is not to analyse the mechanisms by which this line came to be adopted by women themselves,1 nor to show how this constitutes further proof of the existence of objective interests in the oppression of women – interests not confined to the capitalist class. Suffice to say that, because of this objective role in retarding the liberation of women, the existing marxist line must be regarded as the creation of groups interested in the subjection of women; and because of its non-scientific nature it can only be a marxist camouflage for theories which justify this subjection: that is, it is itself an ideology. But to repeat, my aim is not to question this line point by point (which I do elsewhere in other chapters in this book, cf. pp. 106 and 154), but to try to provide what the movement crucially needs at this moment: the basis for a materialist analysis of the oppression of women.
My concern certainly reflects an objective need in the movement, as is clear from the fact that in 1969–70, various attempts to provide such an account were made by a number of different women, separated by thousands of miles and having no contact one with another. In the United States, Margaret Benston wrote ‘The political economy of women’s liberation’ (1969) and Suzie Olah ‘The economic function of the oppression of women’ (n.d.), in Cuba there was an article ‘Against invisible work’ (Larguia 1970) and in France the group FMA (Féminisme, Marxisme, Action)2 produced an unpublished manifesto.
The relations of production entered into by women
In order to survive, each society must create material goods (production) and human beings (reproduction). The attempts at analysis just referred to all concentrate on the oppression of women in terms of their participation in family production (and not on those commonly stressed – i.e. reproduction). That is to say, they analyse domestic work and child-rearing as productive activities. They thus constitute the embryo of a radical feminist analysis based on marxist principles, and they reject the ‘marxist’ pseudo-theories of the family which ignore its economic function and see it as above all the site for the ideological indoctrination of ‘future workers’ (i.e. which see the family as existing in order to sustain indirectly the only form of exploitation recognized under capitalism: that of the workers). The new analyses show the family as itself the site of economic exploitation: that of women. Having shown that domestic work and child-rearing are, first, exclusively the responsibility of women, and, second, unpaid, these essays conclude that women have a specific relationship to production which is comparable to serfdom. But they do not go far enough. We need also:
1to analyse the relationship between the nature of domestic goods and services and their mode of production;
2to proceed to develop a class analysis of women; and
3on the basis of this analysis, to trace the broad outlines of the women’s movement’s political perspective in terms of our goals, constituency and political alliances.
All contemporary ‘developed’ societies, including ‘socialist’ ones, depend on the unpaid labour of women for domestic services and child-rearing. These services are furnished within the framework of a particular relationship to an individual (the husband). They are excluded from the realm of exchange and consequently have no value. They are unpaid. Whatever women receive in return is independent of the work which they perform because it is not handed out in exchange for that work (i.e. as a wage to which their work entitles them), but rather as a gift. The husband’s only obligation, which is obviously in his own interest, is to provide for his wife’s basic needs, in other words he maintains her labour power.
In the American and Cuban texts mentioned above there is an ambiguity, or rather a remnant of the dominant ideology. Although they recognize that domestic work is productive, they suggest – or say explicitly – that its non-value, its non-remuneration, and its exclusion from the domain of economic exchange, are due to the very nature of domestic services themselves. This idea is based on and expressed in two assumptions:
1that women ‘have no structural responsibility for the production of commodities’ and are ‘excluded from the realm of surplus value’ (Benston 1969);
2that women are restricted to activities which produce goods and services that have only ‘use-value’ and no ‘exchange-value’, and which do not create any ‘surplus value’ (Larguia 1970).
I contend, on the contrary, that far from it being the nature of the work performed by women which explains their relationship to production, it is their relations of production which explain why their work is excluded from the realm of value. It is women as economic agents who are excluded from the (exchange) market, not what they produce.
1The relations of production of domestic work described above, i.e. the non-remuneration of the wife’s work by the household head, are not limited to products consumed within the family (child-rearing, domestic services) but apply also to products destined for the market when they are produced within the family, and to work done by other family members
Women’s participation in the creation of commodities and vital necessities is attested by the whole anthropological literature, and this constitutes an obstacle in the path of those ideologists who claim that they can explain the inferior status of women by our secondary role in the survival of the species – if not now, at least ‘in the beginning’. In a later chapter (p. 182) I shall look further at the phenomenon of ‘naturalist’ ideologies which explain the present system by a myth of its origins. It is enough to say here that anthropological evidence as a whole shows that the economic importance of the work performed by women or by men is unrelated to the social pre-eminence of one sex or the other. On the contrary, all the anthropological and sociological evidence reveals an inverse relationship: it reveals that the dominant classes make the classes in their power do the productive work – that the pre-eminent sex does less work.
In France today women’s labour may be unpaid not only when it is applied to products for use in the home, but also when it is applied to goods and services for the market. This occurs in all those sectors where the unit of production is the family (rather than the workshop or the factory); i.e. on most farms, in small retail businesses, and in small craft workshops. Thus work by women in family production is by no means marginal.
In 1968, wives of small farmers, for example, devoted an average of four hours a day to agricultural work (Bastide 1969). The ‘rural crisis’ which France is experiencing is largely due to the fact that girls no longer want to marry farmers, and by general consensus ‘a farm can’t be run without a woman’. Michelet said that when a farmer couldn’t afford to hire a domestic worker he took a wife. This is still true. As the mother of an unmarried farmer said to me: ‘Michel needs someone to help him and he can’t find a servant. If only he could get married…. ‘In France the tasks assigned to farmers’ wives vary from region to region, but they always raise young animals, and keep poultry and pigs. Otherwise they are good for anything. They are the assistants, the subordinates, to whom all the dirty, unpleasant, non-mechanized tasks are assigned. (In particular they are given the milking if this is done by hand. This work is so arduous and demands such a tiring schedule that some women now demand exemption from it in their marriage contracts. Men take over the work when it is mechanized.) Often the only source of cash which enables the household to buy things which are not produced on the farm is the sale of goods which are exclusively produced by the wife: i.e. milk, eggs and poultry. But whatever her tasks on the farm may be, a wife’s work is absolutely indispensable. A man alone cannot keep a farm without doubling his workload, and in the last resort he cannot manage it at all – and I speak here only of the actual farm work, since a man on his own with no children does not need a great many domestic services.
A wife’s unpaid labour is therefore taken for granted in the economy of a farm, as is also the unpaid labour of younger brothers and sisters of the owner (who are literally disinherited), and that of children in some cases. Even though today in most cases younger siblings and children may threaten to leave a family enterprise unless they are paid (and some actually do leave), it is important to remember that their exploitation was the rule in every sector of the economy until industrialization (the end of the eighteenth century) and in agriculture until the Second World War.
Historically and etymologically the family is a unit of production. Familia in Latin means all the land, the slaves, the women and the children who were under the control of (the synonym for the property of) the father of the family. The father of the family dominated this unit as he still does today. The labour of the people who are under his authority belongs to him. In other words, a family is a group of individuals who owe their labour to a particular ‘boss’.
Since the family is based on one individual’s exploitation of those who are related to him by blood or by marriage, wherever the unit of production is still the family, this exploitation still exists. In Morocco for example:
In rural communities the women gather fruit and take care of the animals. These women receive no payment for their work; they are entitled to receive upkeep from the head of the family
(Nouase 1969).
It also continues in the West. In France today 7 million women are actually designated as ‘working’, i.e. as participating in production. Out of these 7 million, 1 million, are ‘family helps’, which is an official category meaning they work unpaid within a family business. Of those women who are working but not paid, almost eight out of ten are employed in agriculture.
The status of ‘family help’ is the consecration of family exploitation in official statistics, because it institutionalizes the fact that some producers are not paid, i.e. that the profits acquired from their production belong to their brother, husband or father. This status was invented after the war in order to allow these particular workers to receive social welfare benefits. (Most wives of small farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen, however, continue to declare themselves to be ‘unemployed’.) But even so, the number of women other than wives who participate in the production of commodities within the framework of family businesses is far larger than the number of women who are counted in the census as ‘family helps’. Assuming that the number is underestimated by 40 per cent, there are 1,400,000 women out of 14 million adult women (between 17 and 64 years old) who are subject to this relationship of production, i.e. one woman in ten.
Thus the unpaid nature of married and unmarried women’s labour in the family is still taken for granted. The unpaid labour of male children is however being called into question. More and more frequently, when a farming household is made up of different generations, the son demands that he be paid for his work and no longer ‘recompensed’ by the mere maintenance of his labour power. The suggestion that his wife might demand the same thing, however, that the young couple should receive two wages for two jobs, is greeted with total incomprehension. Thus, while the unpaid labour of men is strongly under attack (currently only one in forty-three ‘working’ men is a family help, as opposed to one in seven ‘working’ women), the unpaid labour of women is still institutionalized. It is institutionalized in practice in the bookkeeping of the state (through the status of family help), and also in the demands of opposition political parties. The MODEF,3 for example, is demanding that each family farm be assured of an income equivalent to one wage, the implication being that the wife’s labour, which is incorporated into household production, does not merit a wage – or perhaps rather, since the production of the wife is exchanged by the husband as his own, that her work belongs to him.
2The domestic services supplied by wives are no different from other so-called productive goods and services produced and consumed by the family
In the traditional peasant farm economy, the family produces a large part of the goods which it consumes; it directly absorbs much of what it produces. But what it produces is at the same time saleable. There is no distinction here between use-value and exchange-value. The product which is consumed by the family, and thereby has a use-value, also has an exchange-value, since it could have been sold on the market. Conversely, if it had not been self-produced, it would have had to be replaced by its equivalent bought on the market.
Because of this, produce from the farm which is self-consumed is considered income by those concerned, and as part of production in the national economy (i.e. it is included in estimates of the gross national product). The only question raised is whether a pig eaten by the family should be valued at its selling price, i.e. the price for which it could have been sold (the profit missed by the enterprise), or at its purchase price, i.e. the price which would have had to have been paid had it not been produced (the cost avoided by the unit of consumption) (see p. 82).
When the producer and the consumer are one, as in the farming family, it is obvious that there is a continuum between production and consumption: you sow wheat in order to consume it, you mill it because you cannot consume it in the form of grains, you bake it because you cannot consume it in the form of flour. None of these operations is useful without the others because the goal is the final consumption. It is therefore absurd to introduce a break into the process. This, however, is what happens when only a part of the process is considered productive – up to and including the production of flour – and when the rest of the process, the baking of the bread for example, is considered nonproductive. Either all of the labour involved in making a product which is self-consumed is productive, or none of it is. The latter hypothesis is absurd because wheat which is eaten could have been sold on the market, in which case it would have had to have been replaced by its equivalent in food purchased on the market. When farmers produce only one crop or animal, and especially when they produce goods which they cannot consume, they must exchange products twice before they can consume something. (They sell the goods they produce, and purchase the goods they consume.) This masks the fact that the ultimate goal of all production is consumption. What breaks the continuum between production and consumption, however, is not the fact that some activities necessary for the final goal, consumption, are not productive, but that when production is specialized, consumption (the final object of all production) is mediated by exchange.
The example of self-consumption on small farms shows clearly that there is no essential difference between activities which are said to be ‘productive’ (like growing wheat and milling it) and domestic activities which are called ‘non-productive’ (like cooking the selfsame flour).
To sum up, on small farms men and women together create use-values which are:
apotentially exchange-values. Women and men produce milk, eggs and agricultural produce for their own consumption and for exchange. The desired level of consumption and the desired quantity of cash determine what they put on the market and what they consume themselves;
bsome of the use-values are officially included in the calculation of production (the gross national product);
c‘productive’ use-values are no different from ‘non-productive’ use-values created by the purely domestic labour of the housewife. They are both part of the same process of creation and transformation of raw materials (they are carried out on the same raw materials for the production of food) and have the same goal: self-consumption.4
3Just as there is a continuity and not a division between activities for self-consumption which are called productive and activities for self-consumption which are called non-productive (household activities), so there is continuity between the services furnished without pay by wives and commercialized services
Many of the operations necessary to turn raw materials into consumable goods are now industrialized. Operations such as the manufacture of bread, clothes and preserved foods, which were once part of household activities, are now performed outside the home. Bakeries, clothing manufacturers and canning and freezing companies today sell goods incorporating paid labour which were, in the past, produced with unpaid labour by women. This manufacturing is considered production and is officially included in the national product. The labour involved in it is considered productive labour and the individuals who perform the work are producers. This was not the case when these goods were created with the unpaid labour of women.
When women in families cannot provide certain goods and services, these are bought. And in fact all the usual domestic services exist on the market. Delicatessens and restaurants offer prepared dishes, nurseries and babysitters offer child care, cleaning agencies and domestic servants offer housework, etc. Food, for example, which is the major item on household budgets in France (50 to 80 per cent of weekly outgoings) can either be bought ready to eat, thus paying for the value which has been added to the raw materials by the paid labour of the caterer, the restaurateur, etc., or it can be bought in raw form and labour applied to make it edible. Most households spend the bulk of their food budget on raw materials.
One might say that the household itself manufactures final products for consumption, just as a business firm manufactures final products. To do this the household uses labour (domestic), durable goods (domestic appliances) and raw materials (the intermediary products bought from the manufacturers), which are transformed by the household itself with the aid of a certain quantity of labour and capital. Looked at in this way, the only distinction between the household and the firm is that the household adds to production (which is the sole function of the firm) the activity of consumption (which is the goal of the production performed by the household itself with the aid of goods produced by a firm)
(Wolfelsperger 1970, p. 20).5
The final goal of production for the producer is consumption, either of his own products in a subsistence economy, or of the products of others in a specialized economy. The money he obtains from the exchange of specialized products, or the sale of his labour power on the market, is not sufficient to accomplish this goal. It has to be reached in two stages: first, by the purchase of raw materials for consumption using money earned by the sale of products or by paid labour; and second, the transformation of these primary materials by domestic labour into products which can be directly consumed.
We have then, on the one hand work inside the house which supplies a certain quantity of directly consumable goods, and on the other hand work outside the home which brings in a certain monetary income. But how is this income used? We can readily see that it is not used to purchase goods which can be directly consumed, as the traditional theory asserts, but, according to our hypotheses, it is used to contribute to the production of consumable final products; that is to say, the capital goods purchased with this income (raw materials and machines) contribute to this production
(Wolfelsperger 1970, p. 22).
What this bourgeois economist does not mention is that if most ‘households’ prefer to buy food in a raw form, it is because domestic labour is unpaid and because this labour is provided almost entirely by women. These facts give the lie to the ideology which says that the husband’s wage buys everything the entire household consumes, while the housewife does not ‘earn her own living’, despite the hours of work she does each week (see Girard 1958 for figures on hours of housework).
The fact that women’s labour is excluded from the zone of exchange therefore results not from the nature of what they produce, since their unpaid labour goes towards producing goods and services which:
areach and are exchanged on the market (in agriculture, crafts and small retail businesses); and
bare paid for when done outside the family.
Their work is only not paid when it is done within the family; and all the work they do within the family is not paid, whatever its nature.
4The appropriation of women’s labour power is nowadays largely limited to their unpaid provision (the exploitation) of domestic work and child-rearing
With industrialization, the family was stripped of much of its function as a unit of production, except in certain sectors, because one of the main effects of industrialization was to make production for the market impracticable within the family. As a result, market production less and less incorporated the unpaid labour of wives and children. Or, to put it another way, wives’ work could no longer be used for family production intended for exchange, since production for exchange was performed outside the family. As the industrial capitalist mode of production spread, the number of independent workers who could use the labour of their wives for exchange diminished, while the number of wage-earners who could not exchange this labour increased, and is still increasing.
In sectors where all production intended for exchange is performed by paid labour, the unpaid labour of a wife can now only be applied to production which is not intended for exchange. Or, to be more precise, the family mode of production – the exploitation of wives’ (and other family members’) unpaid labour – can no longer be applied to production intended for exchange. It must be pointed out, however, that this concerns exchange by the husband. A woman’s agricultural labour, for instance, is only not paid for if it is performed within the family. She cannot exchange her family production on the market. In family production, she does not make use of her labour power; her husband makes use of it. He alone exchanges his wife’s production on the market. In the same way, a woman does not make use of her housework as long as it is performed within the family; she can only exchange it outside the family. Thus women’s production always has an exchange-value – i.e. it can always be exchanged by them – except when they work within the framework of the family. With industrialization, family production became limited to housework; or, more precisely, we call housework that to which the unpaid labour of the housewife has been limited.
Women’s entry into industry as paid workers was the direct consequence of it becoming impossible to exploit their labour power completely within the family. However, the appropriation of their labour power by their husbands has been so absolute that even when women work outside the family, their wage still belongs to their husbands. A wife has legally had the use of her own wage in France since 1907, but in fact the custom in most marriages has been such as to annul this concession. All her earnings go into a common budget which the husband alone controls. Similarly a wife’s entire labour power has been appropriated. Until 1965 a husband could prevent his wife working outside the home, and though since then women have legally had control of part of their own labour power (i.e. they have been legally free to work outside the home), they are in fact not free. Part of a woman’s labour power is still appropriated since ‘she must fulfil her family responsibilities’ – that is, she must do the housework and raise children without pay. Not only has going out to work not freed women from domestic work, it has not been allowed to interfere with it either. Thus what women have been free to do has been to have a double workload in return for a certain amount of economic independence.
The situation of the married woman who has a job clearly reveals the legal appropriation of her labour power. Her provision of domestic work can in fact no longer be justified by the economic exchange to which the servitude of the housewife is often attributed, i.e. it can no longer be claimed that she performs domestic labour in return for her keep, that this upkeep is the equivalent of a wage, and that therefore her work is paid, since women who go out to work keep themselves. It is therefore clear that they perform domestic work for nothing.
Moreover, when a woman works ‘outside’, the cost of childcare and any extra taxes, etc., are paid for from her income. They are not taken from the couple’s income as a whole. This shows that:
ait is believed that these services should be provided free, unlike other items such as housing and transport, which are considered as normal expenses; and
bthe wife alone is exclusively responsible for providing these services, since it is deemed that the part of her wage which goes towards paying for them when she works outside the home is cancelled out, as though she had never earned the money in the first place. In terms of these calculations it is generally discovered that the wife earns ‘almost nothing’.
5On this basis we can now outline the main elements of an analysis of the class position of women
There are two modes of production in our society. Most goods are produced in the industrial mode. Domestic services, child-rearing and certain other goods are produced in the family mode. The first mode of production gives rise to capitalist exploitation. The second gives rise to familial, or more precisely, patriarchal exploitation.
307,000 men (who are family helps) out of about 15 million adult men are subject to patriarchal exploitation. They are mainly in agriculture and provide skilled services unpaid within the family. All married women (i.e. 80 per cent of adult women at any given moment) are subject to patriarchal exploitation. They provide minimally or unpaid domestic services and child-rearing within the family. The status of son or younger brother, on which the familial exploitation of men is based, is temporary, whereas the status of women is lifelong. Moreover, male family helps are not exploited because they are men, whereas women are exploited because they are women (wives).6 While unpaid work in the farm, workshop or shop can be performed just as easily by men as by women members of the family, unpaid housework is performed exclusively by women, generally as wives of the heads of households.
The labour of women is appropriated for family production when the family is the unit producing for the market (wives of farmers, independent craftsmen and shopkeepers – approximately one million out of 14 million adult women in France) and is used exclusively for household production when the family no longer produces directly for the market (e.g. wives of wage-earners). In the first case the labour power of the woman is entirely appropriated; in the second her labour power is totally appropriated if she doesn’t work outside the home, or partially appropriated if she does. (37.8 per cent of married women in France are economically ‘active’, but we must subtract from this figure the number of family helps – approximately 8,000,000 wives of farmers, independent craftsmen and shopkeepers.) The majority of married women thus had no independent income and work for their keep.
The difference between the family mode of production and the wage mode of capitalist production lies neither in the quantity of benefits given for work nor in the difference between the value of a wage and upkeep, but in the relations of production themselves. The wage-labourer sells his labour power for a fixed wage which depends on the service he provides. These services are also fixed: defined in quantity (hours of work) and kind (qualifications). The equivalents are determined according to a fixed scale (that is, by a price determined by the overall supply and demand on the labour market in the capitalist system) – a scale which is not subject to the will of either party. The employer and the employee have no personal influence on the terms of their contract and the individuals are interchangeable. The labour which is performed has a universal value and it is this value which the employer buys and over which the worker can bargain because it is possible for him to take his labour power elsewhere. The fact that it is precise services which are bought may enable the worker to increase his earnings by improving his performance, either in quantity or in kind.
The services which a married woman provides, on the contrary, are not fixed. They depend on the will of the employer, her husband. And these services are not paid according to a fixed scale. Her keep does not depend on her work, but on the wealth and goodwill of her husband. For the same work (for example, the rearing of three children) the wife of a business executive receives as much as ten times the benefits received by the wife of a manual worker. On the other hand, for the same benefits, a wife may furnish very different quantities and kinds of services, depending on the needs of her husband. For example, the housework of the wife of one bourgeois man may consist of running single-handedly a large house, while another may be given several servants to free her for the work of social display.
Since the benefits which wives receive have no relationship to the services which they provide, it is impossible for married women to improve their own standard of living by improving their services. The only solution for them is to provide the same services for a richer man. Thus the logical consequence of the non-value of women’s family labour is the hunt for a good marriage. But even though a marriage with a man from the capitalist class can raise a woman’s standard of living, it does not make her a member of that class. She herself does not own the means of production. Therefore her standard of living does not depend on her class relationship to the proletariat; but on her serf relations of production with her husband. In the vast majority of cases, wives of bourgeois men whose marriage ends must earn their own living as wage-workers. They therefore become in practice (with the additional handicaps of age and/or lack of professional training) the proletarians that they essentially were.
The non-value of a woman’s work is shown by the independence of the services she renders from the upkeep she receives. This stems from the impossibility of exchanging her labour, which stems in turn from the impossibility of changing employers. (We need only compare the number of divorced women who remarry with the number of workers who change jobs within a given year.) In addition, the contract can be broken unilaterally by the husband even when a woman continues to provide adequate services. (Women are given care of the children on separation and only their upkeep is covered by alimony – when the payments are actually made. See Chapter 6, p. 93.)
In sum, while the wage-labourer depends on the market (on a theoretically unlimited number of employers), the married woman depends on one individual. While the wage-labourer sells his labour power, the married woman gives hers away. Exclusivity and nonpayment are intimately connected.
6Providing unpaid labour within the framework of a universal and personal relationship (marriage) constitutes a relationship of slavery
Since less than 10 per cent of all women over 25 have never been married in developed societies, chances are high that women will be married at some point in their lives. Thus effectively all women are destined to participate in these relations of production. As a group which is subjected to this relation of production, they constitute a class; as a category of human beings who are destined by birth to become members of this class, they constitute a caste.7 The appropriation of their labour within marriage constitutes the oppression common to all women. Destined as women to become ‘the wife of someone, and thus destined for the same relations of production, women constitute but one class.
When they participate in capitalist production, women enter additionally into a second relation of production. Nearly 6 million women in France are integrated into capitalist production: 5,160,000 wage-workers and 675,000 self-employed. In the whole of France only 11,000 women are ‘industrialists’. This small minority of women belongs to the capitalist class, while the majority of women who work belong to the proletariat. Within the latter class, they constitute a super-exploited caste, as is well known. This super-exploitation is clearly connected to their specific, familial exploitation as women.
In view of what has been said, we can see that it is about as accurate to say that the wife of a bourgeois man is herself bourgeois as it is to say that the slave of a plantation owner is himself a plantation owner. However, this is very commonly asserted. There is, equally, currently a confusion between women workers and the wives of workers. That is to say, women’s class membership is sometimes based on a marxist definition of class – on their relationship to production – and sometimes on a conception of women as the property and extension of their husbands.
Society is divided into classes and women are not outside these classes; consequently the lot of every woman is linked to that of other women and men who belong to the same class and social category
(PCF 1970, p. 129).
But if only the capitalist mode of production is considered – as is usually the case – and if the same criteria are applied to women as men, then it can be seen that all women who do not work outside the home are outside the (proletariat/capitalist) class system. What is more, such women can only be reintegrated into the class system by determining their class membership according to non-marxist criteria (that is, by attributing them the class of their husbands). By pretending that women belong to their husband’s class, the fact that wives belong, by definition, to a class other than that of their husbands is hidden. By pretending that marriage can take the place of relations of production in the capitalist system as the criterion for class membership in this system, the existence of another system of production is masked, and the fact that the relations of production within that system place husbands and wives into two antagonistic classes (the former benefiting materially from the exploitation of the latter) is hidden. The ‘reintegration’ of women into classes by defining them as the property of their husbands has as its objective precisely hiding the fact that they really are the property of their husbands.
If one merely wanted to rally women to the anti-capitalist struggle, it would be enough to show that, in so far as they are integrated into this mode of production (as wage-workers), the vast majority of women (nine out of ten women who work) have an objective interest in this struggle. But because women are assigned their husbands’ class, the wives of the bourgeoisie (who are not integrated into capitalist production) are considered as enemies of the anti-capitalist struggle. It is thus clear that what is at issue is not so much a question of rallying all women to the anti-capitalist struggle, as of denying the existence of a non-capitalist system of production. In denying the existence of this system of production, the existence of relations of production specific to this system are also denied, and those who participate in this system are prevented from having the possibility of rebelling against it. The priority of the left, therefore, appears to be to preserve the patriarchal mode of production of domestic services (i.e. the unpaid performance of these services by women). In this regard it is revealing to compare the current ideas of the French Communist Party with Lenin’s recommendations.8 Lenin said:
The true liberation of women and true communism will only begin when the struggle of the masses against this petty domestic economy begins (led by the proletariat in power), or to be more precise, when this economy is totally transformed into large scale socialist economy
(Lenin, p. 462).
The Communist Party solution however is to: ‘make domestic appliances available for all households which can lead to the mechanisation of domestic labour’ (PCF 1970). According to the Communist Party, employers and the public administration should ‘enable the working woman to fulfil her role as mother of a family’ (PCF 1970). Lenin himself commented:
Among our comrades, there are many of whom one can unfortunately say, ‘scratch the communist and you will find a Philistine’. There is no more convincing proof of this than the fact that men calmly watch their wives exhaust themselves at the petty monotonous work which absorbs their time and energy: housework. … There are few husbands, even within the proletariat, who would think of substantially lightening the labour and cares of their wives, or even of doing away with these altogether by helping them with ‘women’s work’
(quoted by Zetkin).
None the less, the Communist Party asserts that, ‘an equal distribution of difficulties and fatigue in a household is a limited concept of equality’ (PCF 1970).
The consequences of this analysis for the WLM
Patriarchal exploitation is the common, specific and main oppression of women.
1Common: because it affects all married women (80 per cent of women at any given moment);
2Specific: because only women are under an obligation to perform free domestic services;
3Main: because even when women go out to work, the class membership they derive from that work is conditioned by their exploitation as women in the following ways. First, because access to the ownership of the means of production was forbidden them by marriage laws (until 1968 in France) and by the practice of inheritance (the majority of women who own property and employ other people are only children or widows). Second, because their earnings are cancelled out by the deduction of the value of the services which they are obliged to buy to replace their own unpaid services. And third, because the material conditions for the exercise of their outside occupation are dictated by their patriarchal oppression. On the one hand, the very possibility of women being employed is conditional on their fulfilling their primary ‘family duties’, which results in the work they do outside the home being either impossible or else added to their domestic work; while on the other, family duties are erected as a handicap by capitalism and used as a pretext to exploit women in their outside work.
It has not been possible in this chapter to study the relationship between the exploitation of women’s productive capacity and the exploitation of their reproductive capacity. The control of reproduction is both the cause and the means for the second great material oppression of women – sexual exploitation. Control of reproduction is the second facet of the oppression of women. Establishing why and how these two forms of exploitation are affected and reinforced by each other, and why and how both have the same framework and institution, the family, should be one of the primary theoretical goals of the movement.
Such an analysis is basic to a study of the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. It means that we must know what patriarchy is in order to understand to what extent it is theoretically independent of capitalism. Only such an understanding can enable us to account for the historical independence of these two systems. Only then will it be possible to establish the material basis for the connection between the struggle against patriarchy and the struggle against capitalism. So long as this connection remains based on unproven assumptions about the relative priority of the two struggles, which derive not from analysis but from a fear of upsetting the political practice and priorities established before the women’s movement, we are condemned to theoretical confusion and to political ineffectiveness in the short term, and to historical failure in the long term.
This analysis should be followed by a class analysis which integrates individuals into both systems of exploitation (patriarchal and capitalist) according to their objective interests. This is necessary in the short term to enable us to mobilize for the immediate struggle, and in the long term to enable us to see how the dynamic of the struggle against patriarchy and the struggle against capitalism can be oriented to combine them in revolutionary struggle. (Needless to say, this must be the object of a continuing study whose bases will constantly be modified as the struggle evolves.)
For now, we can say that women will not be liberated unless the patriarchal system of production and reproduction is totally destroyed. Since this system is central to all known societies (however it originated), this liberation necessitates the total overthrow of the bases for all known societies. This overthrow cannot take place without a revolution, that is, the seizure of political power over ourselves presently held by others. This seizure of power should constitute the ultimate objective of the women’s liberation movement, and the movement should prepare for a revolutionary struggle.
Our strategy should be centred on patriarchal oppression and should therefore include all individuals who are oppressed by patriarchy and who are hence interested in its destruction, that is all women. The work of mobilization must emphasize the solidarity of all people oppressed by the same system. To do this we must:
1attack the problems of false consciousness, that is class consciousness determined according to membership in capitalist classes rather than in patriarchal classes, and the identification of women under this pretext with enemy patriarchal classes;
2show how this false consciousness serves the interests of patriarchy and detracts from our struggle.
Finally, in the immediate future, the political alliances and strategy of the movement in relation to other groups, movements or revolutionary parties should be based only on an unambiguous dedication on the part of the latter to the goals of the women’s movement. That is, on the basis of their clearly and officially expressed desire to destroy patriarchy and their actual participation in the revolutionary struggle for its destruction.
* First published in Partisans, no. 54–5 (July-October 1970). An English translation by Lucy ap Roberts was sold in mimeoed form at the 1974 National Women’s Liberation Conference in Edinburgh, and later included in a Women’s Research and Resources Centre pamphlet with the same title in 1977.