Feminism is above all a social movement. Like all revolutionary movements, its very existence implies two fundamental presumptions. First, that the situation of women is cause for revolt. This is a platitude, but this platitude entails a corollary, a second presumption, which is much less frequently admitted. People do not revolt against what is natural, therefore inevitable; or inevitable, therefore natural. Since what is resistible is not inevitable; what is not inevitable could be otherwise – it is arbitrary, therefore social. The logical and necessary implication of women’s revolt, like all revolts, is that the situation can be changed. If not, why revolt? Belief in the possibility of change implies belief in the social origins of the situation.
The renewal of feminism coincided with the use of the term ‘oppression’. Ideology (that is, common-sense, conventional wisdom) does not speak of ‘women’s oppression’ but of ‘the feminine condition’. The latter relates to a naturalistic explanation, to a belief in the existence of a physical constraint. This puts exterior reality out of reach and beyond modification by human action. The term oppression, on the other hand, refers to something arbitrary, to a political explanation and a political situation. Oppression and social oppression are therefore synonyms; or, rather, social oppression is a pleonasm. The notion of a political (that is a social) cause is integral to the concept of oppression.
The term oppression is therefore the base, the point of departure, of any feminist research, as of any feminist approach. Its use radically modifies the basic principles, not only of sociology, but of all the social sciences. It nullifies any ‘scientific’ approach which speaks of women in one way or another, at one level or another, but which does not include the concept of oppression. A feminist study is a study whose objective is to explain the situation of women. When this situation is defined as a situation of oppression, theoretical premises which do not include this concept, i.e. which exclude it, can be used only at the risk of incoherence. Having a feminist approach is thus not just a matter of applying the unchanged premises of the established sciences to the study of women, with good political intent. It is useless for feminists to try to develop such studies when their premises are nullified in each particular discipline.
The premises of sociology, for example, deny the oppression of women, and in consequence the discipline 1 cannot account for it – cannot find at the end what it denied at the beginning; and 2 can only mask the oppression, and to that extent contribute to its perpetuation. There are, of course, certain approaches within sociology which are compatible with feminism, with revolt; the notion of the social origin of social phenomena for instance. But this compatibility has remained virtual, because:
1a theory can be called sociological without so being. Most sociological theories deny not only the oppression of women, but also the social itself. Functionalism, for example, is, in the last analysis, a typical case of psychological reductionism. Structuralism is equally psychologically reductionist, although differently from functionalism. Functionalism rests on Freudianism (on the universality of the emotional structures) while structuralism rests on the universality of cognitive structures. They both explain different social formations, and the phenomenon of the social itself, by human nature.
2All these theories are expressions of idealism and thus totally incompatible with the revolt of oppressed groups. They affirm a that history is the product of an individual – universal – biological functioning; and b areas exist which are indifferent to, and independent of, relationships of power between groups.
A feminist – or a proletarian – science aims at explaining oppression. In order to do this, it has to start with oppression. If it is coherent, it inevitably comes up with a theory of history in which history is seen in terms of the domination of some social groups by others. Likewise it cannot at the start consider any area of reality or of knowledge, as outside this fundamental dynamic. A feminist interpretation of history is therefore ‘materialist’ in the broad sense; that is, its premises lead it to consider intellectual production as the result of social relationships, and the latter as relationships of domination.
The implications of this concern not only precise theories or areas – i.e. their content; they also directly concern the intrinsic character of these areas – the principles which constitute them (i.e. the principles according to which the real is divided into areas of knowledge). All categorization, all separation into areas, actually presupposes an implicit theory of human nature, of the nature of the social, and of history.1
The division of knowledge into tight areas is an effect and a tool of ideology, as is also the content of these areas or disciplines. The idea that there are separate areas of experience which are the concern of the different disciplines, each with its own methods, and that these can afterwards be joined so as to juxtapose their findings, is typically anti-materialist. For what is this confrontation, this highly vaunted ‘interdisciplinarity’? It is in fact nothing but the result of the disciplinarity that it presupposes. The latter is founded on the postulate that subjectively distinct levels of experience – distinct in the subjectivity of our society – all obey their own ‘laws’: the psychological obeys the laws of the instincts, the social obeys the laws of interaction, etc.
The reactionary character of this approach can be seen very concretely for example in studies of the family. Here the sexual relationships of husband and wife, their economic relationships, and their social relationships, etc., are studied separately, as if they each obey a distinct and heterogeneous logic. These heterogeneous ‘results’ are then put together and we end up with an uninteresting mosaic. It is devoid of meaning; but this is precisely in the interest of ‘science’. It thereby negates the profound unity of these ‘levels’, and the way in which they are all locations and means of oppression.
The objective (and the result) of official science and its division into disciplines is thus the rendering unintelligible of human experience. This is true not only of sociology but of all the disciplines which with it comprise the social sciences. Psychoanalysis, for example, claims and asserts sexuality as its domain. Yet neither psychoanalysis nor sociology takes account of the oppression of women. Not taking it into account, they necessarily interpret it in their own terms – they integrate it as a given. They thus study the domains of social life and of subjective experience where and by which women are oppressed, without this oppression appearing as such. They thus have a precise ideological function: to make the oppression of women disappear from the results of their studies. Since everything is circular, this is accomplished only by having denied it at the beginning.
Can we, then, utilize the existing disciplines and their concepts at all to study the oppression of women, given that the body of knowledge they comprise presupposes it? Can we even utilize ‘elements’ from them? The positive response to this question prevalent today suggests we can dissociate the social philosophy of certain theories from their concepts. However, even these elements are obtained from epistemological premises. Each science constructs its own object. This means that not only its theoretical content, but also its limits, and the definition of its field of application, its very domain, far from pre-existing the discipline, are its creation; and the premises of all the social sciences, to the extent that they do not posit men/women relationships as relationships of oppression, posit them, by commission or omission, as something else.
These premises are thus in radical opposition to those of women’s liberation and women’s studies. A field of knowledge which starts from the oppression of women cannot be content with questioning this or that result of this or that discipline. We must challenge the premises themselves, we must start with how the results were obtained; the point of view from which the ‘facts’ were regarded; the point of view which concerns us, but also the outlook which perceived the object, and the object that it constituted – right down to the most apparently ‘technical’ and ‘neutral’ concepts.
It is illusory to pretend to arrive at different interpretations with the same conceptual instruments. These are no more neutral, no less constructed, than the areas they delimit, nor than the theories – the content of the disciplines – they generate.
Rejecting interdisciplinarity does not, however, mean refusing to recognize that subjective experience2 is aware of different levels. What it does mean is rejecting the current cutting-up of reality into disciplinary domains – into fiefdoms; a cutting up born of, and accrediting, the idea that entire areas of experience are outside of oppression, i.e. of the political.
To the patchwork of interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity a materialist feminist approach opposes a unique dynamic which expresses itself differently at different levels. This approach has yet to be fully defined. It will challenge structuralism, for example, not because structuralism suggests that a subjectively distinct cognitive level exists, but because it imputes to this level a content independent of social relationships. This approach will challenge psychoanalysis not because psychoanalysis suggests the existence of a purely subjective level, but because it imputes to this level a content independent of social relationships.
Obviously the social which is at issue here is not ‘the social’ of journalists. It is not the exterior as opposed to ‘the interior’, the superficial, surface events as opposed to the inner depths. It is the political as opposed to ‘the private’. Nor does the pre-eminence we accord this concept of the social have anything to do with the chauvinism of a specialist. It is, on the contrary, a theoretical position that is opposed to the prevalent concept of ‘specialism’. It is a global view of history, hence of the social sciences; it prohibits all recourse to extra-social and extra-historical factors. Such recourse, however limited it may be, is incompatible with the concept of oppression.
It is a commonplace that there is no neutral knowledge, but from our point of view this has a particular meaning. All knowledge is the product of a historical situation, whether it is acknowledged or not. But whether it is acknowledged or not makes a big difference. If it is not acknowledged, if knowledge pretends to be neutral, it denies the history that it pretends to explain. It is ideology and not knowledge. Thus all knowledge which does not recognize social oppression, which does not take it as its premise, denies it, and as a consequence objectively serves it.
Knowledge that seeks to take the oppression of women as its point of departure constitutes an epistemological revolution, not just a new discipline with woman as its object, and/or an ad hoc explanation of a particular oppression. Such knowledge is an expression of materialism, but also a renewal of it. It applies a materialist point of view to something materialism has ignored, i.e. the oppression of women. It is a new perspective and not a new object. This perspective necessarily applies to the whole of human experience, individual and collective.
How then can materialism be ‘extended’? Up to now materialism has implied, denoted, a theory of history as the history of the class struggle. But women as a group were excluded from the classes involved. Their oppression was not thought of as a class exploitation. I maintain that it is the absence of women from history, from the representation of history, which has left the field open to the establishment and/or upholding of private ‘areas’ and to the monopoly of the ‘disciplines’, i.e. which has led to the dominance of idealist views of entire sectors of experience.
In so far as materialism has been applied to understanding the process of the production of ideas in relation to the exploitation of the proletariat and the class struggle (as traditionally defined), so the areas of life designated as subjective – affective and sexual3 – have escaped it. This was an obvious but inevitable contradiction. But equally it could not fail to appear insoluble. The whole intellectual history of the first, and perhaps also of the second, half of the twentieth century is marked by attempts – constantly renewed – to unify certain principles of explanation. These attempts have predominantly taken the form of attempts at conciliation and reconciliation between Freudianism and marxism. Needless to say the fact that there have been so many is both because the contradiction is distressing, and because each attempt to resolve it has ended in failure. This failure was inscribed in the very premises of the proceedings, because people have tried to reconcile the results, the findings, of the two approaches, forgetting that their epistemological premises were irreconcilable. The failure of all the attempts is due to their acceptance of the extravagent claims of psychoanalysis to be, not a system of interpretation of subjectivity, but subjectivity itself.
I refuse to accept that objecting to the theory of psychoanalysis is synonymous with a lack of interest in its object. Rejecting Freud’s ideas does not mean one is indifferent to – or that one negates – the existence of subjectivity, though not only the adherents of psychoanalysis but also the vast majority of people claim it does. Once psychoanalysis’s claim is accepted, however, attempts to resolve the contradiction of materialism’s failure to come to grips with subjectivity are doomed, because to come to grips with subjectivity, it is held, one must accept the premises of psychoanalysis. And to accept them means to reintroduce idealism on to the scene. Under the cover of introducing materialism into subjectivity, one in fact introduces the enemy in its place: one introduces idealism into history.
But why must attempts to reconcile marxism and Freudianism accept the premises of psychoanalysis, when the latter is only one form of ‘psychologism’, itself a form of idealism? Especially when the areas monopolized by psychologism were not places of confrontation between the only groups materialist theory recognized as classes: proletarians and capitalists? For, so long as only these groups were recognized as classes, and so long as the materialist theory of history was reduced to the history of their confrontation, the domains where this confrontation did not exist were necessarily left outside of the problematic of the class struggle, and therefore of materialism. (Wilhelm Reich’s attempt at reconciliation is exemplary in this respect. He believed he could reintroduce sexuality under the wing of materialism, while in reality he did nothing but betray materialism by psychologizing the class struggle.)4
Sexuality is, however, very much a place of class struggle. It is one of the fields of confrontation of two groups; but the groups are not the proletarians and the capitalists, but social men and social women. Only the women’s struggle, and the simultaneous conceptualization of women’s condition as oppression, has brought sexuality into the political arena. Feminism, by imprinting the word oppression on the domain of sexuality, has annexed it to materialism. It was the necessary condition for this annexation.
Calls for a materialist psychology are not new. How then do we explain why, despite the recognized necessity of considering ‘subjectivity’ as one of the expressions, if not one of the mechanisms, of social organization, the reverse process has made ceaseless progress throughout the time during which these calls have been made? Why have biologism and instinctualism continued to reign over, better to constitute, the study of ‘the psyche’? Why has psychologism not even limited itself to the study of subjectivity, but has grabbed the study of interaction, of groups, and even of institutions? How do we explain this except by admitting that the political base for such knowledge is missing?
If the women’s struggle is the necessary condition for the inclusion of new areas of experience in materialist analysis, equally materialist analysis of all the instances of women’s oppression is one of the processes of this struggle – and an indispensable process.
So long as an area of experience stays outside the class struggle, it remains out of the reach of materialism. To change this it was not sufficient for it to be a site of real antagonisms. It was necessary for these antagonisms to take the form of a consciously political confrontation. This was why the emergence of the WLM was significant. Conceptualization followed, because it could not but follow a real social movement. The condition of women did not give rise to a struggle because it was ‘political’. ‘Political’ is a concept, not an element of concrete reality. The condition of women became ‘political’ once it gave rise to a struggle, and when at the same time this condition was thought of as oppression.
Today the conditions are present for the advent of a new stage of knowledge. Women were oppressed before, and oppressed also in and by ‘sexuality’, but that was not sufficient for sexuality to be envisaged from a materialist point of view.
In the same way, proletarian class consciousness is not the result of Marx’s theory of capital. On the contrary, Marx’s theory of capital was founded on the necessary premise of the oppression of proletarians. Oppression is one possible way of conceptualizing a given situation; and this particular conceptualization can originate only from one standpoint (that is, from one precise position in this situation): that of the oppressed. It is only from the point of view and life experience of women that their condition can be seen as oppression. This coming consciousness takes place neither before nor after the struggle. In other words, it is a question of two aspects of the same phenomenon, not of two different penomena.
The women’s movement is a concrete political fact, which cannot but add a new element to the political domain, and which may overturn it from top to bottom. The same thing could be expressed by saying that women’s consciousness of being oppressed changes the definition of oppression itself.
Materialist feminism is therefore an intellectual approach whose coming is crucial both for a social movement, the feminist movement, and for knowledge. This approach will not – cannot – be limited to a single population, to the oppression of women alone. It will not leave any aspect of reality, any domain of knowledge, any aspect of the world untouched. As the feminist movement aims at revolution in social reality, the feminist theoretical point of view must also aim at a revolution in knowledge. Each is indispensable to the other.
* First published in L’Arc, 61 (1975). An English translation by Mary Jo Lakeland and Susan Ellis Wolf was published in Feminist Issues, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1981).