The term ‘patriarchy’ was little used until the early 1970s, i.e. until the renaissance of feminism in western societies. The term was, however, part of everyday language, but it was used principally in the form of the adjective ‘patriarchal’. It was above all literature, and particularly the literature of the nineteenth century, which made it familiar. The human sciences, in contrast, ignored it, and still ignore it for the most part.
Curiously, authors such as Bachofen, Morgan and Engels, whose evolutionist vision of the history of human societies rests on the very dubious presumption of an original matriarchy which was later ‘overturned’, did not consider it useful to call the stages which followed this overthrow ‘patriarchal’. And when Marx uses the word it has the same atemporal, in a word poetic, connotations as are found when it is used by Victor Hugo. This adjective for them, as for almost all authors who use it, has an eminently positive connotation. It is generally followed by the word ‘virtues’, and the greatest patriarchal virtue is ‘moral simplicity’. In what do these ‘simple’ morals consist?
On examination, we find the poets who speak of patriarchal ‘virtues’ evoking the same sort of society as those sociologists who, like Tönnies and Durkheim at the beginning of the century, got excited about Gemeinschaft (olden communal society) and ‘organic solidarity’, in contrast to Gesellschaft (modern, atomized society) and ‘mechanical solidarity’. In the same way contemporary anthropologists, generally marxists, are inclined to oppose primitive societies (which are supposedly classless and with no exploitation) to modern stratified and exploitative societies. These oppositions, more or less clearly mythical, nevertheless all say the same thing. They show a nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of humanity, based on consensus and not conflict. This utopia is directly associated for them with an image of a human group where family organization is simultaneously the principal concrete base and the model for all social relations.
These myths – whether they are recognized as such or credited with an appearance of science – all reveal the same belief: that peace, social cohesion and the absence of hierarchies between ‘classes’ – meaning between men – require that familial hierarchy, which is good and natural (good because natural, in fact called natural because judged good) be established and accepted.
The introduction of the noun ‘patriarchy’ and its widespread use, however, are due to the feminist movement of the 1970s. And the feminist movement introduced this term not on the literary or the university scene, but in the place where such movements must situate themselves: on the political scene. Before the new feminism,1 the term ‘patriarchy’ had no explicit meaning, and above all no explicitly political meaning. This is not surprising. It is of the nature of patriarchy – as of all systems of oppression – to deny that they are such. Thus feminists in some ways invented the term, in the frequent and favoured use they give it, and above all in the role they had it play. And, obviously, for feminists its connotations are no longer positive, but, rather, negative. It is no accident, however, that they (that we) have chosen this word to designate what is responsible for our oppression. A systematic content analysis would doubtless reveal that all the explicit meanings which feminists give to the term ‘patriarchy’ were present in embryo in literary and commonsense (i.e. in patriarchal) usage of the adjective ‘patriarchal’, as I have tried briefly to show.
The renaissance of feminism in the late 1960s can be characterized in many ways. The new feminism sought a marked break with what remained – in worn-out, degenerate and reformist form – of earlier feminist movements, and with other contemporary political movements. It introduced simultaneously a new way of understanding women’s situation, and hence the situation of all social groups, and a new way of doing politics. As a corollary, it introduced a number of new concepts necessary to express its different visions. For both these aspects, i.e. its conception of the ‘feminine condition’ and society on the one side, and its conception of politics and revolution on the other, ‘patriarchy’ is without doubt one of the most, if not the most important concept.
However, the usefulness of patriarchy as a concept is not unanimously accepted among feminists. The role which has devolved on to it in different analyses reveals the deep splits which exist within the movement. In France the division is clear. The use of the term ‘patriarchy’ neatly divides the radical feminists from the socialist feminists (called ‘Tendance lutte des classes’). While the opposition between these two currents has been present since the start of the WLM in all countries, various changes have taken place over the last ten years. The women’s movement has changed. And in France, as elsewhere, it has, as a whole, become radicalized. This radicalization is attested to by the more and more frequent usage of the term ‘patriarchy’ by socialist feminists. It has not, however, reached the point where the term has ceased to be problematic, nor has patriarchy ceased to be the rallying cry of the radical tendency. In Paris on 8 March 1980, the radical feminists marched behind the banner saying ‘We struggle here against patriarchy’, which clearly showed that they were not sure that this held true for all the demonstrators.
I shall presume sufficient familiarity among readers with the situation of the women’s movement, and with the disagreements between the two main groupings, for it to be unnecessary to elaborate at length here on the reasons why patriarchy is a controversial notion. For socialist feminists, the oppression of women is due, in the last analysis, to capitalism, and the main beneficiaries are capitalists. For radical feminists, on the other hand, women’s oppression is mainly due to a different, earlier, system, which although it is tightly intermixed with capitalism in the concrete society, is nonetheless not to be confused or identified with it. It is men who benefit from this system, and the system is patriarchy.
The basic reason why patriarchy was transformed from a description of society into a major concept in a theory of women’s position was because feminists perceived women’s oppression as a system. This perception itself flows from the first and common postulate underlying the whole of the new feminism: that women’s oppression is not an individual phenomenon and not a natural phenomenon. It is political. This perception has different implications however in different analyses. Socialist feminists do not deny that the oppression of women is part of a system, but they think the determinants of this system are to be found in capitalism. They think that the system which oppresses women is at base the same as the one which oppresses male workers.
This position has a number of shortcomings which are revealed by the fact that socialist feminists have never been able to produce an analysis of a single aspect of women’s oppression which relates exclusively, in the final analysis, to capitalism. It is doubtless because of this, as much as because of an authentic radicalization (which elsewhere cannot be denied) that they are obliged more and more to resort to the term ‘patriarchy’, or to the qualifying adjective ‘patriarchal’ (as in patriarchal capitalism). If this recourse is evidence of the weakness of the position which says there is but one system of oppression, it shows even more clearly that the term patriarchy is not synonymous with the concept of ‘patriarchy’. Indeed, the way in which some socialist feminists use the term shows clearly that they still refuse to consider patriarchy as a system. Using the term is thus not a theoretical panacea. It does not guarantee a radical feminist analysis.
On some occasions when socialist feminists use the term ‘patriarchy’ it appears simply to be a way of reintroducing distinctions which radical feminism has thoroughly questioned, e.g. between the public and the private spheres, or between the natural and the social. For instance, in one of the first writings by socialist feminists in which the term appeared (e.g. Bland et al. 1978), it was used as a coverall. It certainly had no theoretical status. There was no knowing if patriarchy described a global system of social relations (as in radical feminist analysis), or if it was part of a system, or it could possibly have been an ideology, or even a psychological trait. It was a deus ex machina,2 which came from who knows where to account for whatever orthodox marxist concepts had failed to explain. A deus ex machina, but also a dustbin, wherein were consigned all the anomalous bits and pieces which wouldn’t fit orthodox marxist theory.
In socialist feminist usage, patriarchy has been thrown back above all on to the side of ‘ways of thinking’; but not on to the side of ‘ideas attached to a particular social system’, but rather to the side of fundamental and ahistorical ‘mental patterns’, in a word, to the side of ‘human nature’. In the article by Bland, Brunsdon, Hobson and Winship mentioned above, there are in fact just such connotations of the classic (i.e. pre-feminist, i.e. biologistic and psychologistic) use of ‘patriarchal’. In such usage, patriarchy is some kind of simultaneously inexplicable and irreducible core of ‘human nature’.
It was Juliet Mitchell, however, who gave the most explicit formulation of such a recuperation of the term ‘patriarchy’ in her Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975). She, like others, uses the term while denying the feminist definition, and hence the theoretical utility, of the term; i.e. while denying its nature as a social system. Her definition of patriarchy has been criticized in detail elsewhere (McDonough and Harrison 1978, and Beechey 1979) so it need not be repeated here. I want merely to underline the fact that her work caricatures all the theoretical and analytical inconsistencies, and all the reactionary implications, of the use of the term.
Mitchell sets patriarchy (explicitly) within the superstructure, where she calls it not an ideology but The Ideology. According to her, not only is a material oppression (that of women) caused purely by an ideology, but this ideology is, curiously, that of capitalism. But not only of capitalism, however, since she says patriarchy is also the ideology of pre-capitalist societies as far back as pre-history, or even as the (unknown and unknowable) ‘origins’ of humanity. Thus while on the one hand she suggests patriarchy might arise from history, since it is called an ‘ideology’ (which presumes a precise social system), on the other she equally and at the same stroke de-historicizes it because she sees it as an ahistorical mental structure, produced not by one or by some concrete societies, but by Society. She in fact presents patriarchy as being the very base of the constitution of society as such.
The political implications of Mitchell’s analysis are clear. If patriarchy is the corollary, or better the condition, of the passage from nature to culture, it is not only inevitable, but also desirable. Patriarchy is dictated by the nature of the social, which is itself dictated by physical nature. The passage from nature to culture in this vision necessarily implies the oppression of women, because of the respective anatomies of men and women, or rather of males and females. Thus the advent of patriarchy and its subsequent maintenance appears doubly mexorable and justified. It is inevitable and just, on the one hand, because of biology, because of the animal nature of the human species; and on the other, because of the social, because of what is strictly human in our nature.
The concept of patriarchy can be co-opted, it can be emptied of the meaning of ‘social system’, in other ways too. For instance, the concept can have reinjected into it elements of patriarchal ideology itself. In particular it can contain the nebulous and typically ideological distinction between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’.
The feminist debate in Anglo-Saxon countries is more and more orientated in this direction, as also is some of the research on domestic work in France (Bourgeois et al. 1978). Those of us who are materialist radical feminists find this dangerous. However, it has to be admitted, and it is not the least of the paradoxes of the history of radical feminist ideas (and of the history of ideas, full stop), that among those who claim to have re-invented as a marvellous discovery what they have in fact inherited from patriarchal ideology, there are some radical feminists. Indeed, the theoretician who is considered by many in the USA and in England to have founded radical feminism, Shulamith Firestone, is outrageously biologistic, since she sees the oppression of women as deriving from the ‘natural handicap’ of pregnancy (Firestone 1971). Socialist feminists have long opposed her theory, with good arguments though for bad reasons. In denouncing Firestone’s biologism, they used to reject the primacy which she gave to the struggle between the sexes, so they could reaffirm the equally doubtful principle of the primacy of the class struggles. Not being able to explain totally the oppression of women in terms of capitalism, they nowadays, as I said, deny the latter arguments. Instead they now talk of ‘patriarchy’, but they identify this with a new concept, that of a ‘system of reproduction’. It is not at all clear what this term covers, except that it is linked to the physical role of the sexes in procreation, on the one hand, and explicitly opposed to the concept of a ‘system of production’ on the other. In using this concept they make clear the underlying biologism with which their analyses have always been tainted. If until recently they were pre-occupied with only the ‘capitalist’ oppression of women, this was precisely because this is the only thing they see as social, all the rest being, by implication, natural. In addition, by identifying a ‘system of reproduction’ when, to their way of thinking, the system of production remains the motor of history, they are only leading back, in different words, to the doctrine according to which the women’s struggle is secondary in relation to the anti-capitalist struggle.
Stranger still, what they now support is obviously the same analysis as is proposed by some radical feminists, such as the English revolutionary feminists, but which leads the latter to absolutely opposite political conclusions. The revolutionary feminists in fact retain from the division between production and reproduction only the irreducibility of the one system to the other, and they therefore argue the priority for women of the anti-patriarchal fight. While it must be admitted that there is no perfect equation between analyses and the political strategies which are held to ‘derive’ from them, this disparity is bizarre. It does make clear, however, that the biologism which those of us who are materialist feminists see as an essential dividing line between analyses, is not an essential divide from the point of strategies. It is not the perspective on biology which divides radical feminists (for whom patriarchy is the enemy) from socialist feminists (for whom capital is the enemy).
Feminists must accommodate to the paradox that the road to exactly the same political conclusions, far from being the same for all, can in fact take divergent and even opposite paths. This requires us to look more closely at the relationship between theoretical analyses and political strategies; and it suggests also that it might be advisable to look at the biologism of radical feminists and of socialist feminists to see if they have exactly the same content – though I cannot undertake this here.
Those of us who are radical feminists and also claim a materialist approach, have, after years of thought, arrived at the provisional conclusion that to understand patriarchy it is necessary radically to question the whole of patriarchal ideology. We must reject all its presuppositions, up to and including those which appear not to be such, but rather to be categories furnished by reality itself, e.g. the categories ‘women’ and ‘men’. Sketching in our current work very briefly, we think that gender, the respective social positions of women and men, is not constructed on the (apparently) natural category of sex (male and female), but rather that sex has become a pertinent fact, hence a perceived category, because of the existence of gender.
For most people, including many feminists, anatomical sex (and its physical implications) creates, or at least permits, gender – the technical division of labour. This in turn creates, or at least permits, the domination of one group by another. We believe, however, that it is oppression which creates gender; that logically the hierarchy of the division of labour is prior to the technical division of labour and created the latter: i.e. created the sexual roles, which we call gender. Gender in its turn created anatomical sex, in the sense that the hierachical division of humanity into two transforms an anatomical difference (which is in itself devoid of social implications) into a relevant distinction for social practice. Social practice, and social practice alone, transforms a physical fact (which is in itself devoid of meaning, like all physical facts) into a category of thought.
This is obviously a hypothesis, and it will be some years before it is proved (or disproved) since it runs directly counter to what now appears as incontrovertible evidence – namely, that the different roles played by males and females in procreation could not but possess an intrinsic importance for society as a whole, whatever form is subsequently constructed on this difference. To show that the process is in fact the opposite of this, and that this difference (i.e. the meaning given to it) is the end result of social practice and not the basis of social practice, is a gamble, but it is nevertheless the bet we wish to place.
This approach is for us the logical follow-up to the initial common vision of the women’s movement, i.e. seeing men’s domination as a political phenomenon. This starting point has lead us to put the accent on the relationship which establishes women and men in two groups which are not only different, but above all, and from the first, hierarchized. That is, it has led us to adopt a class problematic. In such a problematic it is not the content of each role which is essential, but the relationship between the roles, between the two groups. This relationship is characterized by hierarchy and it is the latter which explains the content of each role, and not the reverse. In this problematic, therefore, as we see it, the key concept is that of oppression, which is, or ought to be, the key concept of all class problematics.
This has consequences not only for what is contained in the analysis of the situation of the oppressed and for the strategies aimed at ending this situation; it also has implications for ways of thinking about oppression: for the role of theory itself, and of theoreticians, in the struggle.
The role of theory and intellectuals in class struggles
This paper was first given at a conference held to discuss patriarchy, and held within a university. Yet up to this point there has been no mention of either particular disciplines or of academia as a whole in relation to the concept of patriarchy, and this is not by chance. It is because universities have played no role whatever in the creation of this concept, nor indeed in the creation of any other political concept, just as they played no role in the emergence of the social movement, feminism, which developed the analyses and concepts. However, academia has obviously played a role in promoting debates around the various theories and concepts. The question is, what role precisely?
One of the things which distinguished the WLM from the ultra-left from the start – the left which remains its opponent and its privileged interlocutor – is the relationship between the subject and the object of their discussions and ‘revolutionary’ practice. For left groups fight for liberation and for the coming to power of a proletariat of which they are not part, for people other than themselves. The contradictions which result from this situation are foreign to feminism. We are not fighting for others, but for ourselves. We and no other people are the victims of the oppression which we denounce and fight against. And when we speak, it is not in the name or in the place of others, but in our own name and in our own place.
This identity of victim and champion, of subject and object of struggle, gives us a revolutionary legitimacy which the petits bourgeois who make up the ultra-left cruelly lack. That women, because they are fighting for themselves, should have this direct legitimacy seems plain. But is it a plainnness or a semblance; or rather, is it directly a reality, or is it simply a potentiality?
Women, like all oppressed people, hate feeling they are women, because we, like all human beings, hate feeling oppressed. This is a major obstacle to women getting involved in the women’s movement, because to join in the fight is to recognize that one is oppressed, and recognizing one is oppressed is painful. For many women, the only possible mitigation of the oppression they endure consists in fantasy, in a denial of this oppression, since they cannot escape it in reality. This denial leads to a refusal to accept the relevance for them of the feminist struggle.
But there is also another form of denial. This consists in saying, or implying, in words or in actions, that, sure women are oppressed, but only other women, or principally other women. I think here of the practice which has been maintained for a long time by a whole section of French socialist feminists. For them the women’s struggle consists in fighting precisely and exclusively against the exploitation of workingclass women, which they are not. This obviously corresponds, to the ultimate degree, to the remit of their mixed organization, and reflects the ‘workerism’ ranging in this sort of extreme left group. But I think this remit also meets needs in the women; and the need is not to be confronted with the fact that they are also women. Paradoxically, the fact of pursuing what they call a ‘women’s cause’ (boulot-femmes) distances them radically from a consciousness of being women – or at any rate it has held back their feminist consciousness rather than raised it. Either way, the practice of consciousness raising, a fundamental element in the new feminism, was condemned as ‘petit bourgeois’ in such groups and explicitly forbidden. I think also of the Yugoslavian university women who, in 1978, organized a seminar on the situation of women and talked all the time about ‘them’. To say ‘them’ when it is no longer possible to keep quiet altogether, is the last defence of those faced with the fearsome perspectives opened up by the word ‘us’.
These two examples recall moments in feminism’s evolution, whether they have been or remain to be overcome. But is there no possibility of going backwards, especially if we think this time of the collective level? Does a movement always go forward?
Feminism had entered the university, in the US more than in Europe, in England more than in southern Europe, in Spain more than in France. No one denies that ‘women’s studies’ are a good thing. But again it depends on how they develop and, even more to the point, what relationship they maintain with the political movement which instigated them and which feeds them. The development of women’s studies in the United States is such a vast topic that it is neither my purpose nor within my competence to deal with it here, except to say that certain aspects of its development disquiet, reasonably it seems, more than one American feminist.
The problem which we have to face is what role in the struggle can, and should be played by feminists who are also intellectuals, or intellectuals who are also feminists? Academia is not a neutral location and the revolution is not, to my knowledge, over. This is a question which concerns not only universities and feminists, but the intelligentsia in general and political struggles in general.
There are in fact several orders of problem. I will start with the most obvious, the one which faces all revolutionaries and the whole intellectual class. (To forestall any criticism let it be clear that I am using class here in a very loose sense.) Some think that being women we are only women, and hence absolved by our quality of victims in this regard from our privileges in any other. But we materialist feminists, who affirm the existence of several – at least two – class systems, and hence the possibility of an individual having several class memberships (which can in addition be contradictory); we who think that male workers are not, as victims of capitalism, thereby absolved of the sin of being the beneficiaries of patriarchy, must refuse this way out. It is too easy to be honest. How can those of us who have an institutional bond to the intellectual class make sure that academia serves feminism and not feminism academia? The latter seems totally improbable at first sight, but it isn’t.
Take for example the role played by marxists in French academic life and in French intellectual life in general. If in the US marxists intellectuals can be counted on the fingers of one hand and take risks in declaring their politics within their work situation, this is not the case in France. Marxism is largely accepted in French university life. I do not doubt for a moment the good faith and the goodwill of our marxist thinkers. They are sincere in calling for the revolution they desire and they work hard for it in their disciplines. But what is the end result of all their efforts and all their labours? Is the revolution further ahead in France than in the US, or than in Spain, where marxism had until recently a smell of sulphur and was certainly not compatible with a university career? The analyses of our marxist intelligentsia are astonishingly revolutionary. The only problem is that they are written in language which can only be understood by a ridiculously small proportion of the population. They certainly denounce the reactionary presuppositions and ideology of capitalism wherever they see them. But above all they like to unmask them in other scientific work, rather than in ideological production aimed directly at the general public. It follows that their denunciations are very convincing … when you can understand them. And in general only their colleagues can understand them. From this comes the paradox that they are understood and appreciated by those they consider their political opponents, i.e. their reactionary colleagues, while those they claim to defend at best ignore them, and at worst see them as mystifiers, hence as enemies. Whatever their intentions, what is the objective outcome of their work? In so far as they address right-wing intellectuals and exclude the non-intellectuals of the left, their work objectively helps the cohesion of the intellectual class as a whole, all political positions taken together, over and against the non-intellectual ranks of the population.
This is not due solely to the contradiction from which women escape: the fact that they do not in reality belong to the class they support. If as feminists we do not have this initial handicap, if we are both subjects and objects of our analyses, we are none the less as members of universities, members of the intellectual class, even if low-ranking members. The oppression of women could become one object of study among others, without questioning either the methods of the disciplines or the role of academia and science as privileged locations for ideological production, and hence for the maintenance of oppression – of all oppressions. This is what has happened to orthodox marxism, perhaps because of the petit bourgeois origin of marxist theorists. But then again we could ask why it has been precisely the petit bourgeois who have monopolized marxist theoretical accounts.
In the hands of intellectuals, marxism has undergone an enormous perversion. Marxist analysis of society is presented, in the orthodoxy, as being the source of class consciousness and of perceptions of oppression. Indeed, in this orthodoxy it is marxist analysis and it alone which can disclose oppression and, in the last inversion, it is marxist analysis which confirms oppression, which gives a ‘certificate of oppression’ to a group to enable it to rebel in a legitimate fashion, i.e. with the approval of the marxist establishment. At any rate this was the sort of argument that leftists used when trying to invalidate feminism at the start of the WLM. But such treatment isn’t reserved for women alone. Many intellectuals believe that it is marxist analysis which establishes the reality of proletarian oppression, a belief which is both historically and logically absurd.
I cannot expand at length here on how Marx himself in fact started from already authenticated reports of the oppression of workers; how he could not have done otherwise; how, far from trying to prove its existence, the certainty of its existence was for him a basic given; how, without this a priori he would have had no reason, either subjective or objective, to try to demonstrate the mechanisms by which the oppression was obtained; and in short, how you cannot study something which does not exist.
This perversion of revolutionary theory, of the conception of the origins of revolt and class consciousness, effected by orthodox marxism, also lies in wait for feminism. This perversion can take other forms, but don’t imagine that we shall be preserved from danger either by magic or by our ovaries. In any case we shall certainly not be saved by the fact that we are intellectuals, because it is part of the objective interests of the intellectual class, of which we are also members, part of the logic of its maintenance as a class, to claim to hold all the lines of social movements, up to and including their origins. This is why this class gathers everything, including revolution, together into its private domain: analysis and theory.
Let us make no mistake. Analysis and theory have their limits. They can tell us how, and in a strict sense why, oppression exists; but they cannot pretend to authorize revolution, which comes from a consciousness of oppression. And they cannot establish the reality of oppression since they themselves only begin from the moment when this reality is established. Otherwise the theory would have no object. Oppression is a reality and at the same time an interpretation of reality: a perception of reality as intolerable – as precisely oppressive. This perception of reality as oppressive cannot be founded ‘in reason’, based on a theory which at the start ignores it and then ‘discovers’ it. On the contrary, different theories of society, of reality, start from pre-existing perceptions of what is tolerable and what is not; of what is just and what unjust. There is no Science which can tell us that we are oppressed. Oppression is the experience of being unjustly treated, which becomes objective because it is shared. It has no more scientific base than ideas of justice or equality. We must always be aware of this. We must always remember that theories cannot substitute for revolt, and that, on the contrary, theories themselves derive from revolt and can originate only from it.
If we accept that all intellectual practices are rooted in a class position, whether consciously or not, it follows that no analysis has any strictly scientific value. There is no Science with a capital S. This is for me the inevitable corollary of a materialist position of any consequence. An analysis has value only from a class position, in so far as it serves this position. (This means of course that reactionary analyses are not ‘wrong’ in the absolute. They are correct from the point of view of the dominants.) If there is no Science, there is also therefore no neutrality. This means that once an analysis no longer serves a particular class position, it does not therefore become neutral, still less ‘objective’. It deserts the first position, but, being unable to be outside class, it then serves another class position.
This has a whole series of implications for our work, which I have far from fully explored and concerning some of which I have at the moment no more than a few intuitions.
One of these intuitions is the primordial role which must be played in our work by anger, our anger, in the way we approach the problem of the relationship between our membership of the intellectual class and our revolutionary usefulness. This is not an exclusively feminist problem: it has been broached by others. It has been an extremely painful contradiction for all those who have realized really sharply both their objective function in serving the power of the intellectual class and the need for revolution. It has led those such as Sartre to wish ‘to destroy myself as an intellectual’. This position shows great moral and political integrity; but it does not resolve the problem of the existence of the intellectual class and its role. We live this role every day. Academia produces knowledge which is both necessary for the revolution and withheld from its protagonists. It can produce knowledge only in a form which makes it incomprehensible to the masses and which at the same stroke alienates them from it. Production of knowledge (which is frequently useful) is, under present conditions, inseparable from the production of a learned discourse which is defined in opposition to ‘popular’ language – i.e. that of the group which is dominated. The progress of knowledge thus itself reinforces, in a seemingly inexorable way, the exclusion of the masses, and their increasingly radical separation from intellectual tools: from ways of thinking about their oppression.
Feminists also face this problem. Concretely, what use should we make of the instruments of knowledge given us by academia. How far will our feminism undermine academia? How far, on the other hand, will it be recuperated by the latter, for its own ends? For example, when we criticize the sexism of the work of our male colleagues, it is obvious that we do it with the intention of forwarding the feminist struggle. But how will we, how can we, do it in such a way that the critiques can be used by feminists as a whole, since this presupposes first and foremost that the critiques should be understandable. But, depending on the language we use, our critiques may be understood by feminists – and disdained by our learned colleagues; or else they may be understood by these selfsame colleagues, who we thus convict of sexism in the eyes of the scientific community, but with whom we thereby establish a much more fundamental complicity – a complicity based on the exclusion of all non-intellectuals, in which group are also to be found the majority of feminists.
I have no ready answer to this question, no miraculous remedy to a problem which no one has managed to resolve up to now. I have only an awareness of certain definite dangers. If the critique of sexism in scientific disciplines is important, it is important only in so far as the accounts of these disciplines are the learned version of popular patriarchal ideology. That is what matters to us, that is what our critiques must reach. What must interest us is not the arguments of our masculine colleagues in and of themselves, but the fact that they give a guarantee of ‘science’ to the dominant ideology; it is because the mystification of Science redoubles the mystification of popular ideology that we must analyse these learned accounts. But we tread a fine line. If other women do not understand our critiques, if they cannot use them, if they mean nothing to them, then we will in fact be addressing ourselves to our male colleagues; we will have confirmed our solidarity with the mystifying institution over and above having been useless to the feminist battle. We will thus be doubly traitors to the class of women.
To use academia in the feminist battle necessarily leads to a denunciation of the academy, to a denunciation of the double mystification of learned discourse: the first mystification being that it does nothing other than paraphrase and reiterate the dominant ideology; the second that it gives legitimacy to the myth of Science: Pure, Neutral, Universal. The sole fact of individual feminists, or feminists’ concerns, entering academic life does not guarantee that the resources of academia will be recuperated by us, i.e. used against the role of the intellectual class and for the revolution. When a feminist question, for example that of housework, becomes an academic subject, when it is treated as such, i.e. as under the jurisdiction of Pure Knowledge (a patriarchal and bourgeois myth), then feminism is, wittingly or not, betrayed. The only valid reason for studying housework, since we are in the privileged position of being able to study it, is that thousands of women, every day and every second, suffer in the flesh from being ‘only housewives’. To make this into a mere academic problem is to deny, worse to insult, this suffering. It is to take the part of the intellectual class against the oppressed, against housewives, and to reify the latter a second time.
The only way to avoid this involuntary reversal of alliances is to always keep this suffering in one’s mind and to know that it is the only valid reason for studying housework. Likewise to remember that the only value of theory lies in the contribution it may make to ending this situation. The only way not to forget the suffering of others is to start by recognizing your own. That this isn’t easy goes without saying.
The admittance of feminist questions to the rank of academic questions often appears as progress for the feminist struggle itself, not only because academia thus gives us a warrant of ‘seriousness’, but also because university circles assure, indeed require, a non-emotive approach to problems. This passionless approach seems to guarantee a more rigorous, calm analysis. This is a devil’s trap. That is to say, it is part of the dominant ideology which has created a myth of Science. If we succumb to this all too easily, it is because this dispassionate approach also attracts us more directly, i.e. affectively. Without even looking at the interests of Science, it is clear it gives us protection against our own anger. Contrary to what is commonly thought, it is not easy to be, and above all to remain, angry. It is painful, because to remain angry is to keep permanently in mind the cause of this anger; it is constantly to remember what we want to forget, at least from time to time, to be able to survive – i.e. that we too are humiliated and offended against.
But for us as intellectuals to forget this, even for an instant, is to loose the thread which connects us to our class as women. It is the railing which prevents us tipping over on to the side of the institution, to the side of our oppressors. We tend to see anger as something we can get beyond, and also as a disagreeable feeling; as something temporary, which ceases at some time to be useful; and even as something of an encumbrance, which we should leave at the university door so as to be able to work in peace.
But our only weapon against the potential treason written into our status as intellectuals is precisely our anger. The only guarantee that we will not, as intellectuals, be traitors to our class, is our awareness of being, ourselves, women, of being among those whose oppression we analyse. The only basis for this consciousness is our revolt; and the only foundation for this revolt is our anger.
* First published in Nouvelles Questions Féministes 2 (October 1981). An earlier version was presented to the ‘Jornadas de estudio sobre el Patriarcado’ held at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in April 1980.