In 1974 a book appeared in France which would never have been published but for the emergence of the women’s liberation movement. The book, Parole de femme, never once mentions its existence. Its problematic (i.e. its way of posing problems) is situated in the very first moments of individual revolt, in what one could call protofeminism, prior to collective action. Each sentence is a reply to the implicit question: ‘Am I inferior?’. This question is certainly the start of feminist revolt, but it is also its end if it is not transcended, or rather transformed. And this question – indeed this whole book – is addressed to men. This becomes more and more clear in the course of its pages. In the end the author, Annie Leclerc, challenges men directly: ‘You must realise that …’. She never addresses women except to rebuke them, to lecture to them, or to hold them responsible for their own oppression.
Nothing could gladden the oppressor more than such a defensive position. Leclerc is both defence and prosecutor, asking men for legitimation (‘Please recognise that my fight against you is just’). But it would be too easy to discredit the book simply because its author continues to want to separate herself from other women (i.e. to see herself in competition and not in solidarity with them) and because it has been – hardly surprisingly – applauded by men.1 What matters is why it has been applauded by them; and this is not only because it is defensive but also because it will not advance the liberation of women one jot. On the contrary, it will ease the present system.
However alone Leclerc may feel, and however isolated she may be in reality, her book is in fact a manifestation of a much wider current of ideas. This current is even established in certain groups which declare they are ‘part of the women’s movement’;2 but it is a tendency only in so far as it is a more general temptation. This is why it is established in various places, and it is also why, because this book offers the only written account of it to date,3 it must concern us.
The reasons why Leclerc’s book and the current of thought it represents pass from protofeminism into antifeminism are basically simple. Leclerc stays on men’s terrain, on the terrain of ideology, both in her ‘explanation’ of the oppression of women and in her ‘accusations’ against men. Her whole system of thought rests on idealism and its variants, naturalism and biologism. All her arguments take the basic premise of, and are tied to, the dominant ideology.
First, men and women as they are today, and their respective ‘situations in life’, are given, if not natural, entities. Hierarchy came after and independently of these divisions, and of their content.
The division between women’s tasks and men’s tasks was made according to other criteria than those of social oppression; but once the division had been established and recognised, man did everything to ensure that it be seen as a separation between a good and a bad part. [However] the division and distribution of tasks and roles (was) made originally in a judicious and rational fashion.
Second, ideas steer the world: it is values which determine social organization, and not vice versa.
(I have looked to see) in what name (men) exact, despise, and are able to … glorify themselves, (and I have found) their values inscribed on the firmament of human grandeur and dignity.
Since Leclerc takes the pretext (the thing in the name of which men oppress women, the reasons they give) for the cause of (the real reason for) the oppression of women; and since she does not question the division of labour (which is logical if it is all a question of moral values), the ground is ready for the conclusion she indeed draws:
The devaluation of woman and her inferior status (are connected in) the depreciation, the contempt and the disgust which she is accorded, whether it be traditional or natural (author’s emphasis).
One must admire how she puts natural and traditional (i.e. social) divisions of labour on a par with a simple ‘whether … or …’. The confusion she makes, or rather maintains, between two heterogeneous orders of phenomena parallels our society’s general confusion of biological males and females and the social categories of men and women. It is the stumbling block of all her reasoning, and it so happens that it is also the basis of sexist ideology. Her biologism leads inevitably to idealism.
Idealist explanations of women’s oppression: women’s devaluation and men’s need for respect
As soon as the cultural division of social activities is equated with and treated as the differentiation of biological functions of reproduction, the problematic of ‘valuation’ asserts itself. It may appear a priori that because reproductive functions are given, oppression can only occur secondarily; but if we then treat the social functions of men and women as equally given, the only question which remains is how they are subjectively evaluated. We see here a concrete instance of how biologism sustains idealism.
From the point of view of Leclerc and those who think like her, however, the conjunction of biologism and idealism is unfortunate since it leads them to a tautology. Given their premises, the sentence quoted above could be re-written as: ‘If one considers the division of social functions as given, the devaluation of women derives from the depreciation of their work’. But the second half of the sentence involves an elaboration which is really superfluous, because if social functions = natural functions, to do certain work is simply to do woman’s work. And what is the difference between being a woman and having a woman’s activity? The sentence can thus be re-phrased as ‘The devaluation of being a woman derives from the devaluation of being a woman.’
Later on Leclerc augments this equation with a new term:
The claimed inferiority of women could never give rise to solid exploitation. This inferiority could never be conceived of if the domestic tasks which accrue to it were not considered as worthless, dirty and demeaning by men (my emphasis).
Here there are three stages of causal reversal. ‘Inferiority’ (an ideological factor) causes exploitation; and this ‘inferiority’ itself is caused by another ideological factor – the ‘devaluation’ of ‘woman’s lot’. If the first equation leads to a tautology, this second one is crammed full of paradoxes. Domestic work is not thankless in itself but is decreed as such, and this is the cause of the claimed inferiority of women, itself the cause of their exploitation. But how can men be in a position to impose their negative evaluation of domestic work without first being in a position to impose full stop (i.e. to dominate)?
If domestic work is ‘natural’ for women, why be surprised if men judge it unworthy of them? Indeed how can it be judged ‘unworthy of them’ since from this perspective it is quite simply impossible for them, because it is impossible for them to be women?
Pressing on bravely up a cul-de-sac, Leclerc says:
One would not know how to set about destroying the idea of the woman’s inferiority or the fact of her exploitation if one did not also, and particularly, tackle the scorn, contempt or pity for the condition of women, whether it be biological (e.g. periods, childbirth) or traditional (e.g. domestic duties) (my emphasis).
Where we ask ourselves, does exploitation come in? If domestic duties are the ‘lot’ of (what Leclerc always calls) ‘the woman’, and if the problem is that domestic duties are supposedly unpleasant, is the problem simply that this reputation is unjust and thus false (i.e. that women’s situation is not unpleasant)? How can Leclerc rebel simultaneously against the ‘miserable lot of the woman’ and against the fact that it is unfairly considered miserable? Does our exploitation consist only of the ‘unfairness’ of the devaluation of our lot as women? Or does this devaluation itself allow the exploitation of a lot which is in itself neither thankless nor miserable? If so, what is the exploitation we suffer? Idealism has led Leclerc into an analytical blind alley: into taking the effect (the devaluation) for the cause (exploitation); and into a political blind alley: the analysis implies that we must change not the reality of women’s lives but the subjective evaluation of this reality. She neither describes nor discusses the real – material – exploitation of women. She mentions it only in order to postulate that it is
1less important than low evaluation,
2the (ultimately fortuitous) consequence of this devaluation.
This theme is taken up again in her chapter on the advantages which men derive from the oppression of women:
Woman is not first and foremost exploited … (she) is well and truly oppressed, but in quite another way …. He (the man) expects from her quite different things than those he appropriates from the slave, the negro and the wog. What he wants from her is respect.
The distinction which Leclerc draws between women’s oppression, which is primarily psychological, and the oppression of all other human beings, which is primarily material, is as arbitrary as it is radical. All oppression produces a psychological advantage – respect – among other benefits. It shows a singular lack of political sense, and quite simply a lack of knowledge of contemporary political movements, to ignore this. You do not need to look far. Militant American Blacks (what am I saying, even liberal American sociologists!) have written on this subject with regard to Black-white relations in the south. And if you hate translations, for those readers who like to have things in good French, see Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon. The self-sacrifice and admiration of slaves and servants are the themes of a whole, touching literature. Flaubert and Jack London, to name but two, have devoted immortal and universally known short stories to it.
‘Respect’ is however but one benefit among others – albeit it is also a means to get the others. It allows:
1The extortionate nature of the services rendered by the oppressed to be veiled, making them appear freely given.
2The mechanisms of the extortion also to be veiled. Thus the serf does not give (i.e. is not seen to give) his work to the lord gratuitously (i.e. because the latter has appropriated the means of production, the land). He is seen as giving it in recognition of the protection he receives from his lord (against the other lords, i.e. against the likes of himself).
3Above all it allows extortion to take diverse forms. This is not something which distinguishes the oppression of women from other oppressions. Rather it is something which distinguishes oppressions of allegiance, of personal dependence (slavery, serfdom, marriage) from oppressions of impersonal dependence (capitalist exploitation). Personal dependents (wives of husbands, serfs of lords, slaves of owners) do not owe a precise gift of a particular kind or an amount of time to their masters, but rather their entire capacity to work, which the master can use as he thinks fit.
Respect, admiration and love are, however, also satisfactions, rewards, in and of themselves.
Because ‘the man’ (to follow Leclerc’s use of essences) may sometimes dispense with a particular piece of work from his wife, Leclerc deduces that he can always do without her labour power. Because respect is one of the benefits of oppression, she concludes that it is the most important one in relations between men and women. Because she has decreed it to be the most important one, she leaps to the conclusion that it is the determining benefit: that material benefits are but by-products and, further, that they are contingent – not necessary – by-products.
Idealism and its incarnation, psychologism, are clearly at work here. Leclerc takes the manner in which oppression is justified and continued for its real cause; and she concludes from this:
That he (The man) sometimes makes her (the woman) sweat blood and kill herself with work is only a particular consequence of their type of relationship and is not at all determining.
‘A particular consequence of their type of relationship’ – how nicely put! And what a nice nothing, because what, between two people or two groups, is not a ‘particular consequence of their type of relationship’?
When we have finished admiring, we can clearly recognize a variant of the ideological account which says that women do the housework, not because this is how they earn their living, but for love and ‘freely’. An account which says that it is but a statistical accident, a fortuitous coincidence, that all women have chosen to prove their love in the same way and at the same time.
Once respect has been set up as the prime mover and the benefit men derive from the oppression of women, any material oppression is automatically excluded as a motive and benefit. Women’s being killed by work stays as a fact, and an embarrassing fact; but the theory of respect goes on to show us that it is necessary only from a psychological point of view.
It is necessary that domestic work should be seen as lowly, humble … it is even necessary for the woman to suffer so as to bear witness of her respect.
The loop is looped. What women suffer is not due to their exploitation; on the contrary, their exploitation derives from their suffering. It is but a means to make them suffer. And to make them suffer is not even the objective: suffering itself is but a means to prove devotion. It is no one’s fault (?) if devotion can only be proved by suffering, and it is pure chance if in the course of suffering women perform certain work from which men profit, again by chance. They would be equally happy if women could suffer while doing nothing.
This is an interesting theory in that it shows how, not content with learning the lessons of the ideologies of various epoques, Leclerc has sought to integrate them. We find the popular nineteenth-century doctrine according to which the wealth of the rich was but a demonstration of their moral superiority, and the poverty of the poor the result of (the punishment for?) their immorality; set alongside the more ‘scientific’ doctrine which in the same period made surplus-value the ‘recompense’ for the frugality of the capitalist. To these she has added the triumphant psychologism of the twentieth century – psychoanalysis – which (as seen in its most edifying expression in The Night Porter) explains concentration camps by the ‘masochism’ of the Jews, and the oppression of women by the ‘sadism’ of men.
Leclerc thus unites psychologism and biologism (the other incarnation of idealism) – which is not surprising since psychologism, biologism and idealism are the three udders of sexist ideology. The reversal of causality – the belief that the ideological superstructure (the devaluation of women) is the cause and not the effect of the social structure – is not one idealist interpretation among others: it is the dominant ideology itself. Naturalism – the popular version of biologism – is both the expression and the prop of idealism. Because the ‘theory’ previously mentioned stresses that the division of tasks between women and men should be seen as derived from (and of the same order as) sexual division in procreation, it is an indispensable condition of this indispensable division that the problematic of valuation be situated at the level of moral values, and only at this level – that it be abstracted from the material base of the evaluation.
Idealism needs biologism further, since it asserts that ideas – values – steer the world and, more precisely, determine social organization. The origin of these values must therefore be sought outside society. Whether this origin be in the natural order (immanent) or in the universe of ideals (transcendent) makes no difference. One can in any case pass easily from one to the other: values can be attributed to nature. In both cases the values are extra-social and extra-human. Immanence and transcendence are two interchangeable forms in which society can project its creations outside itself. It is then possible for ‘man’ (in the person of Annie Leclerc) ‘to be paid in the counterfeit of his dreams’.
Biologism is thus but one way of attempting to find extra-social explanations for facts. But it is a form of explanation one can be sure of coming across at some stage or another in most authors. What is astounding in Leclerc is that her search for the immanent production of transcendent values leads her to the aberration that the origin of the values of oppression – or as she puts it ‘masculine’ values – resides in … men’s mode of ejaculation. You read aright.
Countering sexist ideology, or revamping it?
To use men’s way of thinking (and that of other oppresssors, since I don’t think that ideology is secreted like a hormone, i.e. by a type of biological person) cannot, by definition, either explain or clarify the oppression of women: and Leclerc proves it a contrario. Ideology cannot be used against itself, and in this sense the term ‘counter-ideology’ is false, because a true counter-ideology would be an analysis which unmasked ideology for what it is: ideology. To invert the conclusion while using the same method does not destroy ideology, nor does it produce a counter-ideology. It merely produces another ideology, or rather another version of the same ideology. This is precisely what Leclerc does.
To struggle over ideology is, of course, useful in at least two ways (i.e. it has two meanings or two principal functions).
1It is useful in analysing the dominant ideology as ideology, i.e. in showing that it is a rationalization for the actual oppression of women. To prove it is a rationalization we must prove it is, first, false, and second, useful to the system. This implies, or rather requires, that we produce a non-ideological – non-idealist – explanation of the oppression of women.
2It is useful in helping us to acquire another image of ourselves. This requires the destruction of the negative image of women given by the ideology. To do this it is not enough to show that the content of the ideology – the negative image – is false. Once again it must be shown to be ideological. That is to say, the false content must be related to what produces it and what it justifies: the social, and more precisely the oppressive, structures of society.
Leclerc’s book however fails to reach the first objective (to explain the oppression of women) for the same reasons as it fails to reach the second (to give women a new understanding of themselves).
If we look closely we can see that Leclerc’s reasoning is the exact mirror image of sexist ideology. It is inverted but identical. Like sexist ideology, she bases the antagonism of the sexes on an antagonism of values. Just as men ‘prove’ women’s ‘inferiority’, so she ‘proves’ our ‘superiority’. In order to do this she resorts to using a natural order of values – as does sexist ideology.
Leclerc concludes, not that ‘the natural order of values’ is an ideological construct, but that we have read it wrongly – or perhaps even that it has been wrongly constructed. We have replaced the true order – which exists – with a forgery. Her whole account is aimed at showing this. But first – like all ideologies – she has to assert a supreme value, a value unto itself, a value which can be evaluated only in terms of itself and which is thus the source and the measure of all other values. The value is Life. Just as other standard measures in France are deposited at the Pavilion de Sèvres, so Leclerc deposits the life-measure in the firmament of Platonic ideals, which she calls ‘the Universe of Values’. Life is to replace the (false) ‘masculine’ values which have usurped it.
Having done this, it only remains for her to ‘show’ that ‘masculine’ values are stripped of value when measured against this Value. They cannot fail so to be, since she calls them ‘death values’. To show this she either cleverly (i.e. arbitrarily) chooses a few texts by phallocrats or notorious sots, like Malraux – which is foul play; or she cleverly (i.e. arbitrarily) interprets garbled quotations from less notorious phallocrats, like Sartre. Finally, equally cleverly (i.e. by an abusive generalization) she implies that her findings apply to the generality of men, i.e. to a biological category.
I would not deny that this affords great satisfaction to certain women and certain satisfaction to a great many women. It is always amusing to show an enemy that you can turn his way of seeing things back on him. But there is a big difference between amusing yourself and thinking you have got hold of the ultimate weapon; and it is dangerous to confuse the two. For just as you turn the weapon on him, so the enemy can turn it back again, etc.
What is surprising is not that Leclerc has played this little game, but that she really believes in it. The inversion of the masculine account which she produces should have demystified not only the conclusions but the very procedure for her. If a supreme value, a standard value, really existed it would be external to all authors, and thus the same for everyone. But whereas Leclerc sees the supreme values as Life, and the capacity to give life, St Augustine saw things differently. (I’ll spare you the details …). Both of them, and I am sure fifteen or sixteen thousand others, chose their measure according to the conclusion they want to reach, and they establish it in advance.
Against her own advice, Leclerc uses throughout what she calls ‘man’s speech’, i.e. the system of thought and the methods of oppression. Her whole book is an exercise in ‘masculine’ rhetoric: in ideology. We find in it all the procedures of this rhetoric: simplification, reduction, confusion of the part and the whole, and substitution of analogy for analysis. These procedures are particularly flagrant in a bravura section on the ‘mode of ejaculation’. To be able to deduce the existential manner of functioning of a whole category of individuals from the functioning (or rather the interpretation of the functioning) of one of their physical organs, involves an unscrupulous indulgence in a few sophisms which derive directly from magical thinking. It is:
1to move directly from the fact of physical sexual differentiation to the hypothesis (treated as a given, even though to this day it has not a trace of a foundation even as a hypothesis) that psychological differences exist between the sexes;
2to assume also something which is not only difficult to imagine, but which is quite impossible: the replication of physiological mechanisms at the psychological level;
3to assume that the functioning of the whole person is a aptly b sufficiently i described ii explained by the functioning of certain of his or her cells;
4completely to discredit the intervention of consciousness, which is not only what distinguishes the psychological level from other levels, but also what establishes it as a distinct level;
5in return (as one might say) for this removal of consciousness from the psyche, to describe physiological processes by terms which apply only to the phenomena of consciousness (activity, passivity, etc.) – in short, to inject into physiology the very consciousness refused to the psyche.
We can recognize here the same reasoning as enabled St Paul, Freud, Suzanne Lilar, St Augustine, Menie Gregoire, and others we’ll let pass, to create their various theories of ‘femininity’. We can further recognize the reasoning which allows the ‘scientific’ inference of the ‘passivity’ of women (creatures fully endowed with consciousness) from the passivity imputed to … the ovum, and the ‘activity’ of men (creatures fully endowed etc.) from the activity attributed to a spermatozoid. Leclerc purely and simply inverts the conclusions while starting with the same premises. To attribute as she does a ‘death value’ to ejaculation is to return the ideology of ‘A woman is determined by her uterus’ to its sender: ‘A man is determined by his ejaculation’.
This inversion is again demonstrated in her conclusion to the fable of origins, which she no more spares us than have Freud, Engels, etc. She does not even have the merit of originality in making such an inversion, since Mead, Bettleheim and Hayes, among others, long ago found parallels for ‘penis envy’. Fear of castration (according to Hayes) or jealousy of the ability to bear children (according to Mead and Bettleheim) become (according to Leclerc) ‘[the man’s] resentment of his mother’. It is not a new temptation to want to explain the social by the psychological. On the contrary it is as old as the hills.
Nothing in Parole de femme gives even the beginnings of the shadow of a key with which to approach the problem of the oppression of women, let alone an explanation of it. Whether discussing the present situation, or its origins, Leclerc, like others, always ends in the same impasse because the same approach is to be found everywhere: because idealism rages everywhere. Leclerc has made a catalogue of motives for men’s oppression of women; but just as a mass of bad reasons do not make one good reason, so a pile of motives does not give an analysis. The initial question remains. Why and how do men do it? It may be that men want and need respect. (And are they alone in this?) But what is it that gives them the means to obtain it? To suggest that their biology condemns them to disparage life-values does not explain what enables them to impose their ‘counter-values’. They (and indeed she) are free to experience ‘resentment’ of their mother, and indeed even worse things. But between even the most intense hatred and vengeance, between the thought and the act, is a big step: that of instrumental possibility. And this is the thing which interests us, and it is this which, by chance, everyone passes over. We are given instead ‘reasons’ for men’s domination which presuppose it: the existing ‘predominance of their values’ and their need for respect.
Leclerc’s account is invalid, however, not because she has chosen to situate her account at the level of values. By itself this would at most have meant risking reducing the interest of her book because it has already (indeed often) been done before. More than one author (female or male) has shown, convincingly, that the devaluation of women is not only unjust but also in contradiction with the avowed values of our culture. The contrast between the shabby pursuits of men and their pretensions has rarely escaped women’s attention, and when they bring it to light they are always sure to score a bull’s-eye. This can provide emotional outlets, and we should never spurn the opportunity for a good laugh, but Leclerc knows (for she says it) that if ridicule could kill, the male of the species would be on the verge of extinction. What then can she hope to gain from the ‘cut of ridicule’?
Her approach is also not invalid because she tries to attack the myths which make the biology of women itself into a handicap. Quite the opposite. This ideological struggle is welcome, good, useful and necessary; and this is doubtless why the book, while on the whole reactionary, has been of interest even to radical feminists.
Her fault, indeed her sin – what makes her work invalid – is that she never relates these values to the material and social structure. This would be a simple omission if she had chosen to talk of values at a purely descriptive level, as many others have done. But she does not limit herself to this. She attributes them a causal role in oppression on the one hand, and, what is more, she explains these values by other values. It is thus no longer a question of the choice of a level of description, but the choice of an explanatory theory. This stance voids the two objectives of her book: namely, the recovery by women of a positive image of their biological selves; and the production of a theory of oppression.
Leclerc’s treatment of the devaluation of the biological ‘condition’ of women is distorted and felled by her idealism, mainly because we cannot recover a positive image of ourselves solely or principally by recovering a positive image of our ‘procreative’ functions. We must also and above all develop a capacity to define ourselves other than by these functions. We must recover as specifically part of women (i.e. as an equally integral and defining part of ourselves) our non-procreative organs and functions. It is a real indictment of the present view of women that this should be necessary.
While Leclerc’s book strives to revalue women’s procreative functions, it also strives to imprison us in them: to reduce our being, our pleasures, our value (and even our whole value, ‘The undeniable, original value of woman’, the quality of life-possessing, etc.) to them. In short, she continues to define women in the same way as men (and the general ideology) do: by their relationship to men, and more particularly by their usefulness to men. Our use lies in our ability to bring into the world the only thing men cannot make.
Revaluing women’s bodies
We do nevertheless certainly need to revalue our bodies, our physical way of being in the world, even though this will only make sense as part of a broader attack. Leclerc however both dissociates this objective from a collective political struggle (which she does not envisage) and, even at the level of women’s physicality where she places herself, she allows a major ambiguity to reign: just how in fact the revaluation is to occur. This is because she totally isolates the ideological level. She considers it the most important level; she considers it independent of other levels; and she considers it the only field of battle.
When trying to ‘revalue’ our bodies she uses only words which denote very physical things and acts: vagina, childbirth, menstruation etc. However, while there is certainly a physical, non-social element in our bodies and actions, there is also a social component. It is essential to recognize that the meaning of periods for instance, is not given with and by the flow of blood, but, like all meaning, by consciousness, and thus by society.
A particular culture not only imposes a meaning on an event which, being physical, is in and of itself bereft of meanings. Society (culture) also imposes a material form through which the event is lived, or rather is moulded in a constraining way. A ‘pure’ childbirth does not exist, but rather childbirth in Europe, Africa, Polynesia, etc. You do not have ‘a’ period, the same in all situations and all countries. You have your period, different in each culture and subculture. In the west we have unpleasant periods because the culture devalues the flow of blood. It is an objectively disagreeable material event, made so by the society. It is not just a question of my attitude to my periods. The attitudes of others, their requests, their expectations, their demands are for me as concrete, as tangible, as a chair. The social period is a material framework of conduct for the individual.
In France, we have to hide our periods. This is not my idea, not my own invention; it is a constraint imposed on me which is quite outside (and material for) me. As Leclerc herself says, people compel me to behave ‘as on other days’. But this is materially difficult, whatever my ‘values’ may be. Whatever my interpretation of the flow of blood may be, I cannot experience this obligation to pretend as other than something disagreeable. Not only am I not able to talk about it, it is also not an acceptable excuse for absence. (When I was young, whenever I had a pain during my period I used to talk of attacks of appendicitis.)
I do not have the right to have my periods. This is shown very simply and effectively by the fact that, in addition to the taboo on my talking about them, I also do not have the means to have them. The society is materially understood and made for a population without periods. To have a period away from home is always to be in a situation which is, if not dramatic, at least extremely embarrassing. There are neither sanitary towels nor tampons in French public toilets (nor in many in England); there is nowhere to change and nowhere to throw tampons or towels – in doing so one risks blocking the WC. Leclerc is clear about this constraining character. Why, she asks, should I have to be as on other days? I am not as on other days. But she seems to ignore the essential question: how can women change their attitude while having a period remains the same concrete experience?
Society does much to make us think that the material conditions of periods or motherhood derive from the physical event: that their socially constructed conditions are natural conditions. And we have believed it for a long time. Many see no possibility of getting rid of the disagreeableness of a period or of being a mother, except by getting rid of the physical event itself. Leclerc follows the same reasoning, even though she inverts the conclusion: for her, too, periods or motherhood are entirely natural – but naturally ‘good’. She ignores with good intent what the society ignores with ill intent: that culture has transformed these events, in themselves neutral, into actual handicaps.
There are thus not one but two cultural interventions:
1the devaluation of women’s bodies and physiology;
2the material handicap created by the social conditions.
The two are obviously linked. It is even easier for society to devalue the flow of blood – the fact of being female – if all women can verify that it really is a handicap to have a period. Conversely, it is even easier for society to impose these conditions as inevitable once women are convinced that periods – the fact of being female – is a natural misfortune. It is in the interests of society to hide the fact that periods are not a natural phenomenon but a constructed phenomenon. In this situation, ideology – the interpretation of the phenomenon – plays an important part. It is internalized and reappears among those involved under the guise of strongly felt shame. But this ideological aspect is absolutely inseparable from the material part. The two are continually and necessarily part of one another. To hide one’s sanitary towels is at first an external constraint; it gives rise to subjective shame; and finally, in a third phase, the hiding appears to be the expression of the shame which in fact caused it.
Women in devaluing their periods are not only obeying their brainwashing; not only ‘adopting masculine values’. We are also reacting, and in a healthy (non-masochistic) way, to a real handicap. However, when we devalue our periods as such – as a physical phenomenon – in addition to depreciating ourselves, we accept the ideological version: that the handicap is natural and not social. The struggle thus consists in separating and distinguishing elements which are distinct but which the society confounds.
But if we do not analyse what is social, what is constraining, in the phenomenon currently experienced by all women under the name of ‘periods’, we are playing society’s game. Because (if one does not make allowance for the social) it is impossible to feel proud of something which is actually unpleasant; to value periods. In addition, if it were possible, it would lead, in so far as conditions were unchanged, to our ‘accepting’ the handicap – as society asks us to; and all arguments which lead us better to accept social constraints are dangerous, and can never ever be styled ‘liberating’.
This is why the ‘revaluation of women’s bodies’, without further specification, is an extremely ambiguous project. On the one hand it can mean a struggle against the actual handicap – which is the necessary condition for the revaluation of the natural function. It is only once it is materially revalued that it can become subjectively experienced as positive. And the fight to change attitudes is itself only positive on the condition that it changes something concrete in women’s lives: that it leads into a struggle against the constraints imposed on our bodies.
On the other hand, ‘revaluation’ can mean the abandonment of this struggle. It can go in the same direction as the ideology. The latter says that all the dissatisfactions women experience are due to a refusal of themselves, of their bodies. The ‘revaluation’ undertaken by psychoanalysis, by the feminine press in France, and by Margaret Mead (among others) is destined to make us swallow the social handicap in the same mouthful as the physical phenomenon. That mouthful verges on masochism. It leads to women being made to accept that to love themselves is to love suffering.
‘Self-acceptance’ as a value is not neutral. It addresses itself only to female individuals, and it is of recent origin. It appeared at precisely the time when feminism was born, as a new ideological weapon to make women accept their submission. Thus ‘valuation’ or ‘revaluation’ of womanhood should be very closely examined. It can go in two directly opposite directions. A new version of the dominant ideology can be camouflaged under the guise of ‘liberation’. The term ‘self-acceptance’ is also suspect because of the problem of what it is ‘to accept oneself’. What is the ‘self’ one accepts? In so far as the ‘self’ is taken without question, is equated with the historical person (albeit the historical aspect is not mentioned and is thus implicitly denied – the historical individual being considered as a natural person), this is an ahistoric and reactionary notion. It seems that Leclerc’s procedure (whatever its intentions), by its omissions and its implications, objectively goes in the same direction as the dominant ideology, and thus furthers the repression of women.
Domestic work or women’s material oppression
Leclerc notes that everything women do is lowly valued – and that this includes women’s work and housework. She none the less comes back time and again to the question of the intrinsic nature, the intrinsic interest, the intrinsic value of housework. Clearly, however, it is not what is intrinsic to housework that is in question, because everything which women do has little value. So, how does she deal with this?
She replies that men ‘are mistaken’. That women’s work, including housework, is valuable. She argues on the same grounds as those which allow men to assert, equally peremptorily, that it is not. She ought rather to have replied to her own question: ‘What does “the interest” or “the value” of a task mean?’ She would then have realized that the interest and the value of a task is unrelated to its nature and is determined by other criteria. It is the relations of production within which a task is done which explain, simultaneously, its subjective interest and its objective (i.e. its social) value.
So what does ‘the interest of a task’ mean? And, more precisely, what does ‘task’ mean in this phrase?
The word task is mystifying as used here in that it is employed as equivalent to, as synonymous with a trade or a job. To reduce a trade or a job to a technical task allows a false question to be put: namely, what is more interesting about the tasks of a company director than the tasks of a schoolteacher; the tasks of schoolteacher than the tasks of a road sweeper? The sophism of the question lies in the fact that in this problematic the definition of a road sweeper is: ‘a man who pushes a broom’. Nothing could be further from the truth. A road sweeper is a man who pushes a broom on the instructions of someone else and in exchange for a derisory wage.
We can thus see that the very fact of posing the question of ‘the intrinsic interest of household tasks’ rests on confusion between the technical task and the job. The latter comprises not only the technical task but also its conditions of performance and remuneration (in money and prestige), the social status of those who do it, etc. The question as put totally obscures all these factors and is thus ideological. It must be renounced. We shall see later how not giving it up leads Leclerc into other blind alleys.
Leclerc questions the reasons which have been put forward for deeming domestic work uninteresting. She is right. As a task, housework is neither more nor less interesting or stupefying than other tasks. This is proven by the fact that one can maintain (equally convincingly each time) that domestic work is particularly expressive or creative, or on the contrary that it is particularly repetitive and alienating. To doubt the validity of the judgement should logically have led Leclerc to glimpse, fleetingly at least, that the reason for the low value set on domestic work cannot reside in its ‘interest’: that the criteria employed are not good ones.
But no, she sticks to them. She does not question the criteria themselves, but simply the way they have been used. She takes sides in the sterile argument about housework being ‘creative/repetitive’. She does not challenge the question but the answer, without seeing that the question is badly posed – and not by chance. If she could see that it is not women’s tasks which are devalued, since we do all sorts of tasks, but our jobs, she would be all set to pose the right question: namely, for whom do women do this work; in what relations of production is it done? But she persists in thinking that domestic work has been devalued because it is ‘judged uninteresting’ (note that she totally identifies social utility and subjective interest). She persists in her search for the criteria of interest (or usefulness) which are supposedly extra-social and based on an experience both subjective (the subject’s) and independent of social relations.
In this she follows de Beauvoir who sees (saw?) the oppression of women as due to the ‘immanence’ (!) of their tasks. The ‘immanence’ and the ‘subjective interest’ of a task are of the same order: they are mystifying concepts in that they suppose and suggest that social relations are based, in the final analysis, on relationships with things, with the natural world. But not only do relationships with the natural world not exist, but to disguise relationships between people as relations between or to things, is (or should be) a well-known characteristic of bourgeois ideology. (I refuse to give page references to the great ancestor who first taught us this.)
The tale of Leclerc is a good example of that standing of history on its head which is typical of ideological thought. She describes a hypothetical society where women would be the superiors because they ‘give life’. She thus postulates a ‘natural value’. But this phrase is quite simply a contradiction in terms. Nature does not know and cannot produce values. Values are produced by societies, human societies, as are all phenomena which imply consciousness. The idea that a society’s values could originate outside it is simply a return to Platonic universals.
Throughout her account it is clear that for Leclerc the social hierarchy is a hierarchy of values, and that these values not only pre-exist the social order, but come from Nature. It is a reversal, a negation of materialist, or quite simply political thought, according to which if values have a function in the hierarchy, it is in so far as they reflect and justify it, as means created by and for it, and not as causes.
The source of the present hierarchy of the sexes
Leclerc follows all too many authors into the trap of seeking the explanation for the present hierarchy in the ‘original conditions of humanity’. Since the conditions within which humanity evolved, and the form of the earliest social structures, have been (and will remain) unknown, it means that she can obviously only be using a pretext for projecting (or perhaps it would be fairer to say injecting) present conditions into pre-pre-history. At the end of this projection she (like others) makes the present situation re-emerge, with a history. Of course, it is not history proper which is being set up (historians can at least defend what did and did not happen in historical times, albeit feebly). She is setting up an ‘origin’ which can only be ‘reconstructed’: in truth, invented. This mythical reconstruction is a negation of the spirit if not the letter of historicism.
Leclerc thus goes ahead with her projection of what poor old ‘primitive humanity’ must have been like; and although she does not cite her sources here, they are recognizable. She uses Engels’ theory, which is decidedly well worn. According to him (1884), the first division of labour was ‘the natural division of labour between men and women’. This was the first – meaning the greatest – of Engels’ mistakes. Having shown that all divisions of labour are the consequence and the means of hierarchy and oppression, Engels none the less found the division of labour between the sexes to be ‘natural’; and he said that in this case, and in this case only, hierarchy followed and did not precede the division. He thereby disavowed his own method and so threw a cloud not only on this analysis, but on all his others. For if one can turn the marxist causal order upside down for women, why not in other cases? The worm was in the bud of marxist method. However, a hundred years have elapsed since Engels wrote and many studies have shown that the content of the division between men and women is variable, and hence not natural.
But let us leave Engels and follow Leclerc, who, again following many others, looks for the cause of hierarchy and differential evaluation of jobs not only in their origins, but also in the different utility of the jobs themselves. It is interesting here to compare her account with that of Elizabeth Gould Davis (1973). Davis holds that the ‘original’ women did not do ‘what is commonly believed’, but rather ‘useful’ things – agriculture, etc. – and that consequently (it is the ‘consequently’ which is interesting) they must have been at the top of the hierarchy. Leclerc however maintains that the ‘original’ women did indeed do ‘what is commonly believed’, but she then argues that these things were (are) as ‘useful’ as other things which men did/do). She and Davis thus disagree on whether the issue is to show that women did things which were judged useful by our culture (i.e. that we have been mistaken about the nature of their past tasks); or to show that women did things which were judged useless, but which are ‘in reality’ useful (i.e. that we have been mistaken as to what is useful). Both rely on the naive idea that the social value of jobs is determined by their social utility. Someone a hundred years ago showed that if any group was ‘useful’ it was the workers. So is it just a question of the ruling class having been ‘mistaken’ – of their obviously not having noticed the usefulness of the proletariat?
Leclerc thus makes the same mistake historically as she makes in analysing contemporary society. We know that the sexual division of labour varies, but that in cultures where men do what women do in our culture, their work is not lowly, but on the contrary highly valued. We would have to be blind not to see that it is not the intrinsic utility of a task which determines the authority which is commanded (and the prestige which is received) by its performer. On the contrary, it is the authority which the performer commands which determines the society’s appreciation of the ‘utility’ of the task.
One thing is common to all the jobs done by women, and this is not their contents. It is their relations of production. This answers Leclerc’s questions: ‘Why has woman’s lot always been judged inferior, lowly, etc.?’ There is, therefore, no longer any need to resort to looking at the content of our lot. Indeed it is impossible to resort to this, since the details of women’s situation vary.
What is the difference between planting millet and planting sweet potatoes? In one African society, however, one is ‘glorious’ – high status, the other ‘humiliating’ – low status. Women plant millet which is appropriated by the men; and the men plant sweet potatoes which they appropriate for themselves. High and low status thus express in the realm of moral values the reality of the relations of distribution of material values between men and women. But they do more: they justify these positions. In a reversal typical of idealist thought processes (which are here clearly demonstrated to be coterminous with the ideology) the inferior value of women’s work (which is the expression and therefore the consequence of women’s inferior status) is advanced as its cause. Women’s dispossession of their produce is ‘explained’ (justified) by the ‘inferiority’ of their work, by their doing less important things. In the same way women and reproduction are devalued in our own culture not because men happen to be dominant and because they ‘happen’ not to value life, but because women have children for men.
We can now pose another question which Leclerc does not ask (and with reason). If all work done in certain conditions is devalued – those conditions being that the product of the work is appropriated by someone other than the producer – what then is the purpose of a division of labour?
If one looks closely at the sexual division of labour, and if this is defined as a differential and rigid attribution of tasks according to sex (i.e. as a technical division of labour by sex), we see that it does not really exist. For instance, women keep accounts for their husbands, i.e. they do the same work as highly paid (and respected, i.e. valued) accountants. They act diplomatically for their husbands, i.e. they do the same operations as highly paid (and respected, etc.) diplomats. … When we stop confusing the task – the technical operation – with the whole job – we see that the technical division of labour tends to vanish, to disappear as an empirical fact, under the observer’s very eyes. The differential valuation of jobs does not spring from the technical aspect of the division of labour. We then see that the question put by Leclerc is remarkably circular. She asks why a given job (e.g. a wife doing the accounts for her husband) is not prestigious; but the non-prestige is already an integral part of this job: doing a task unpaid for someone else.
In so far as a certain division of labour by sex does exist, it is not a question of tasks done, but of the status of the work as a whole. The task is only part of this. Thus it is said that domestic work is women’s work; but this is only true if what is meant is the status, the conditions of doing it, the relations of production of this work. It is not true of the technical operations which comprise domestic work at the instrumental level: washing, ironing, cooking, etc. Launderers, washers-up and chefs do the same technical operations. What makes housework housework is not each particular operation, nor even their sum total; it is their particular organization, which is itself due to the relations of production in which the person doing them finds herself. The place where they are performed, for example, appears as a ‘technical’ feature, but it is directly derived from the relations of production. The fact that housework is done ‘at home’ flows from its being done ‘for the husband without payment’.
Like everybody else, Leclerc thinks she can justify her faulty analysis of the present by finding it a base in the past. She thus projects what she thinks is the reason (in the sense of ‘good reason’ – i.e. good grounds) for the division of labour by sex back to an origin – and she gives us a well-known reconstruction. She treats us to the hackneyed (but always sickening) scene of a pseudo ‘primitive horde’, where all the women are pregnant and breastfeeding (all at once, and constantly) and where all the men are hunting (all at the same time, etc.) – even though she earlier denounced as a myth the idea that motherhood engenders incapacity.
Why did it have to be a man – Theodore Sturgeon (1960) – who first ridiculed these ‘historical reconstructions’ and their authors? Who asked why the strongest women were not hunting with the strongest men, while the weakest women stayed in the camp with the weakest men? It is an indication of the prevailing level of idiocy that we have to admit that, in the present state of things, his piece of science fiction is a daring effort of the imagination. Not that it goes far enough, for we must question not only the assumptions: 1 that strength was more important then than it is nowadays; and 2 that individuals were classified according to their strength; we must also question 3 why they were classified into only two classes. As soon as the ‘primordial encampment’ is evoked, any and every fantasy becomes permissible.
But in fact the fantasies of primitive societies are strangely well ordered. They are collective fantasies. They all follow the same lines.
1All the women are pregnant or nursing at the same time, and, furthermore, all the women are always pregnant or nursing.
2Pregnancy or breastfeeding makes women totally incapable of meeting their own needs.
3To imagine women would be perpetually pregnant if this made them incapable implies that they had no control of their fecundity. (If they had had control they would certainly not have allowed themselves to be so disabled.)
4This implies (and the more one sees pregnant women in the primordial camp the more necessary is the implication) that women must have already been dominated.
There is thus, again, a circular argument. Domination is again supposedly being explained by a situation which already presupposes it.
(For actual facts about the existing economies which most nearly approach what could have been the first economies, i.e. those of hunters and gatherers, see Sahlins (1974), especially his chapter on ‘The original affluent society’. Briefly, such economies are exactly the opposite of western myths. Gathering provides ample food, and is neither arduous nor time-consuming. In a few hours women, including pregnant women, can collect an abundant supply to feed themselves. They do it every day and still find time (as moreover do the men) to take plenty of little naps, thank you very much.)
These collective myths of origin are, furthermore, self-contradictory. Even if we accept, for the purposes of argument, that pregnancy and breastfeeding occasion, not total incapacity (that goes beyond the limits of good sense), but at least reduced mobility, how can we explain the move from the partial and temporary incapacity of a few women to the permanent exclusion of all women from entire categories of activity or, more accurately, social positions? The latter (a rigid sexual division of activities and status) is however presented as a natural consequence of the former. It is very clear that it is not a question of a natural consequence, nor a concern with the ‘rationalization’ of work. It is rather a case of shutting one’s eyes to the fact that, in this move, ‘nature’ not only does not play, but cannot play, any role whatsoever, and that the social must necessarily intervene.
An attempt is made to veil this intervention by presenting the passage from situation A to situation B as being a very ‘gradual’, ‘unconscious’, etc. evolution. But whatever the time over which this transition may have been spread, it is not a question of a gradation, but of an abrupt change. It is a question of a passage from the natural to the social. The date or the duration is irrelevant. The inventors of this ‘transition’ cannot avoid the fact that the assumed slowness of the process cannot warrant a non-existent continuity between the natural and the social. Since this is in fact what they are claiming, they are making a horrendous epistemological (or simply logical) leap.
It is not a question of our needing another, different, reconstruction; of adding another stone to the edifice when it is its very foundations which are tottering. It is rather a matter of not going back into an unacceptable problematic. For in fact, under cover of putting an historical question, an ahistorical one has actually been posed: ‘What are the natural reasons for male supremacy?’ It is being suggested that the ‘original society’ was, must have been, less ‘social’ than the societies which succeeded it.
It is also a question of it being thought, without it being said, that if it could be ‘proved’ that the oppression of women is due in the final instance to our ‘weakness’, this would equally establish that this oppression is legitimate. In this case, and only in this case, it is held that the fact that domination is materially possible makes it morally just. There is thus an implicit interpretation of the facts that are held to be established; and this interpretation (once again intended only for the case of women) ties together inevitability and legitimacy. This is moreover the only reason why an attempt to prove that the oppression of women was ‘inevitable’ is made. The premises of this ‘question’ thus already include a moral assumption, a political judgement, and an unacceptable ‘scientific’ assumption. Present social structures and rationalizations – in particular the transformation of women’s biology into a handicap by oppression – are injected into the ‘nature’ (deemed more ‘constraining’) of this mythical and barely social society. In other words, the culture of our own society is attributed to the ‘nature’ of a hypothetical society.
It is thus, to repeat, not the answers to the question of origins which are in question. It is the question itself. We must quite simply abandon the problematics with which it is in practice associated and from which it is logically inseparable – namely, the psychologistic and idealist problematic of domination as a consequence of ‘intolerance of difference’;4 and its premises: the ‘natural’ division of lots, the ‘natural’ opposition of social categories (identification of males with men, females with women), etc. So too must the other false questions we have encountered (the discussion of the ‘intrinsic’ interest or usefulness of tasks). The political problematics which flow from all of these, or are at least associated with them – ‘revaluation’ of the ‘situations’ of men and women; the revindication of ‘difference’ between the sexes, etc. – must consequently also go. They are invalid because they come from idealist problematics and because they themselves, inevitably, are idealist and hence reactionary. They transform the concrete struggle of concrete individuals against a concrete oppression into a quarrel over ‘values’ or a conflict of ‘essences’ (when it is not one of ‘principles’).
We have thus arrived at the following conclusion: if a rigid division of technical work between the sexes were to be established anywhere, it would be a fact of culture not of nature. In our own society, however, it is not a case of certain tasks being forbidden to women, but of our being allowed to do them only in certain conditions. It is not that women may not act diplomatically, but that we may not be diplomats; it is not that women may not drive a tractor, but that we may not get on to one as the boss, nor even as a paid worker, etc.
A technical division of labour is thus not necessary to the sexual hierarchy. Does one therefore exist? And if it does, where and why? This would be a valuable topic for research. The only hypothesis we can make (in our present state of non-information) is that where it does exist – where tasks and not jobs are forbidden to women – it is because for some reason these tasks have but one mode of performance. In other words, in cases where the task is indissociable from its mode of performance, tasks which cannot be done in a subordinate mode must be forbidden to women.
It appears in sum, that:
1The sexual division of labour is not a division of tasks but a division of jobs.
2Jobs comprise as an integral part of their definition relations of production: the relationship of producer to product.
3The division of specific tasks by sex, where it exists, is a by-product of the hierarchy of statuses (whose basis is obviously the relations of production). For example, in Africa the different relations of production also, and rigidly, correspond to different material products. This animal or vegetable product is always produced in a given mode of production, that other product in another mode.
Protofeminism or antifeminism?
When Annie Leclerc says, ‘I don’t ask why this lot has been given to women, but why this lot has been judged inferior’, she is way off course. She cannot reply to the second question without asking the first; and if she doesn’t ask the first question it is because, like many others, she wonders why the job is devalued, but considers only the task. She evades the crucial intermediary variable: the fact that the job is defined not only by the task, but also and above all by the relations of production. It is work done in a subordinate relationship, and not the task, which is devalued, and for one very simple reason – namely, that it is relations of production which devalue (or give value): it is the relationship of the producer to the value produced.
Consequently, as soon as a ‘lot’ is attributed to women, Blacks or proletarians (the ‘lot’ consisting not of tasks but of jobs and thus relations of production) the hierarchy (the ‘valuation’ in Leclerc’s terms) is set up. It is not established after, nor independently, but in and by the very process of attributing ‘lots’: by the social, not technical division of labour.
The question of subjective interest and moral evaluation of a task is resolved: these reflect a particular reality. The objective valuelessness (its unpaidness and the obligation to do it – the two are bound together) of domestic work is reflected in its lack of interest and low evaluation. Leclerc’s claim that this work should be ‘revalued’ (i.e. given a higher place in the disincarnate universe of values) is therefore absurd, and also criminal. For once we know the origin of the objective value of housework, which has nothing to do with its social utility, to try to enrich its subjective value is purely and simply to reinforce the brainwashing which helps prevent women from rebelling against their enslavement. This attempt is not new: a whole generation of American ideologues, including Margaret Mead (1958) and Ashley Montague (1952), not to bother to name the psychoanalysts, have been employed on it. They have done nothing more than improve the every day glorification of the role of wife and mother by presenting it under a pseudo-scientific – and worse, pseudo-feminist – disguise. Leclerc’s conclusion is completely in line with this school, which Caroline Bird (1968) calls ‘neo-masculinist’: an antifeminism disguised as pseudo-feminism.
The ideas of this school are simple. The domination of women by men is bad and should cease. But there is no question of trivial things like women’s economic dependence or their material oppression ceasing. No. It is all a question of Values. What is deplored is the lack of respect which women suffer. Similarly, women don’t do a job, they carry values – moral values of course, the values of the ‘female principle’: gentleness, respect for life, etc. Women’s ‘secondary status’ (oppression is a dirty word, or should be kept for those who really deserve it) comes from these values not being given their rightful status.
These values – not the women – have, however, a contribution to make to a world which, as everybody can see, is going awry. Fortunately – what luck! – feminine values, the above-mentioned gentleness, understanding, concern for others, innate aptitude for washing nappies, and other Platonic ideals, will counterbalance, if they are needed, the violence (dynamic) and closeness to death (promethean nature) of masculine values. Masculine values are good in themselves – indeed they are the fountainhead of the culture – but they should not be carried to extremes. And they have been, witness all the wars – and now pollution – caused by values (!) Could we but recognize and use the antidote which grows just beside the poison – how well-made the world is! – we could kill two birds with one stone. We could use feminine values to balance the world (to restore it to its natural equilibrium) and also keep women happy. Such an ideology is not only based on the idea of a total and equal partitioning of the world, it extends and perfects the idea: it even divides out universal values.
This school also, especially when applied to women, stresses the notion of participation so beloved of de Gaulle. Just as capital and labour must recognize that they are mutually necessary and must value each other to this extent, so must men and women. Now, mutually necessary men and women may be, but in what way? The proposition that ‘without game there is no hunter’ does not have the same meaning for the hunter as the proposition that ‘without the hunter, there would be no game’ has for the game. The ‘complementarity’ so vaunted by Leclerc, whether it be between capitalists and proletarians or between (social) men and (social) women, has no other meaning.
Postscript
Let me repeat, I have analysed Parole de femme not because it is unique but, on the contrary, because it speaks for a much wider current of thought. This current is important not because of the ideas it defends – which far from being original are on all points those of the dominant ideology – but because of its political position.
The women’s movement has in fact released a general counter-offensive and backlash (as one could have expected). This is coming from all sides – from the university and the government, the right and the left – and is taking all sorts of forms – from obscene attacks (the most frank) to skilful recuperation of losses (the most dishonest and thus the most effective). Undoubtedly the extreme, and thus the most dangerous, form of this recovery is the one which is most ‘internal’ to the movement on both the institutional and the political planes. The two characteristics of the trend which Leclerc’s book demonstrates are 1 that it is expressed through a woman’s voice, and 2 that it presents itself as aimed at the liberation of women.
Three months after this article was submitted for publication, an article appeared in the Nouvel Observateur (Righini 1974) which confirms that we are right not to treat Leclerc’s book as an isolated case but as an example of a trend. The author follows Leclerc’s procedure and cites her frequently, along with other neo-masculinists of previous generations, such as Lilar5 and Breton. The English writer Penelope Gillott took exactly the same line in an article in Cosmopolitan (1974), as did the collective article on motherhood which appeared in a special issue of Les Temps Modernes (Les chimères 1974). Finally, it is said that Parole de femme bears an astonishing resemblance to a transcript of talks held in the group Psychoanalyse et Politique, and some women from this group have squarely accused Righini of stealing their ideas on ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’.
The degrees of involvement of these women in groups within the women’s movement are very different: Leclerc has never heard of the movement, Righini has crossed and then overtaken it, Gillott has ‘taken part’ and left, the motherhood collective and Psycho et Po claim to take part in and to be integral to it. The motives of the individuals and groups also doubtless differ; and there seems no evidence of these being concerted efforts. But they do show a trend in that, despite their lack of consultation, they all display major traits in common:
1They start with an avowed concern for women’s liberation – sincere or insincere (the question of actual individual motivation is irrelevant).
2They use the ideology’s problematics both in their analysis of oppression and in order to work out ‘remedies’ for it.
3This leads on logically to a ‘revamping’ of the dominant ideology, only this time (and this is most important) it is presented as a demand for liberation.
It is as if the best way of escaping from the disturbing implications of the struggle were to pretend to lead them. This allows the same things to be done as before, but this time with a ‘good revolutionary conscience’, while pretending that ‘from now on it’s for other reasons’. It is as if the resistance to the challenge of feminism came mostly from the interior of its movement – just as for Gribouille the river was the only place where one could be protected from the rain….6
The positions of this trend are presented as the results of using, and at the same time of getting beyond, feminist questioning. Here, it might be said, the ambiguity is clear. It is easier to think oneself further along a road if one has never used it, than if one has traversed it; to think oneself further on when one is not only elsewhere but staying elsewhere: when one has not even set off. In this way ante-feminist positions can be presented as positions which are not only feminist but even post-feminist (which in itself is suspect; and which, in the way it is always put forward, implies a gross deformation of feminism). A great danger lying in wait for the women’s struggle today is that the ‘before’ of the feminist question can be presented as its ‘after’ – thus sparing us the trouble of fighting. An ideology which oppresses women – or rather the entire system of which ideology is but a part – may be presented as new invention and as a means to women’s liberation. Protofeminism promoted as post-feminism and becoming militant is antifeminism.
* First published in Les Temps Modernes, no. 346 (May 1976), pp. 1469–1500. An English translation was included in the WRRC pamphlet, The Main Enemy, 1977.