Foreword
1‘Singles Now Outnumber Married People in America – And That’s a Good Thing’, PRI, 14 September 2014.
2L. Petty, ‘Single? You’re Not Alone’, CNN, 20 August 2012.
3K. Safdar, ‘More Than Half of American Women Are Breadwinners’, Huffington Post, 12 July 2012.
4Freedom to Marry, freedomtomarry.org/landscape/entry/c/international.
5J. Cooper, ‘Globally, Men Still Aren’t Pulling Their Weight at Home’, Telegraph, 16 June 2015.
6J. E. Yavorsky, C. M. Kamp Dush, and S. J. Schoppe-Sullivan, ‘The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 77 (June 2015): 662–79; C. C. Miller, ‘Men Do More at Home, but Not as Much as They Think’, New York Times, 12 November 2015.
7‘Women in Their 20s Earn More Than Men of Same Age, Study Finds’, Guardian, 28 August 2015.
Preface
1A double issue of the journal Partisans (nos. 50 and 51) from Maspero, entitled Libération des femmes – année zero.
2Feminist Issues began in 1980 as the English-language edition of the French radical feminist journal Questions Féministes, which Christine Delphy had helped to establish in 1977. In 1981, following a split in the editorial collective in France over radical lesbianism (see Duchen 1984), Feminist Issues has in practice sided with those Delphy opposed. It has therefore not published any of her more recent work.
3Delphy’s ideas on this have been used recently by Janet Finch in a review of the extent to which wives are Married to (their husband’s) Job (1983).
4I draw here on the analysis of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes in Duchen (1983).
5For further details on Psychanalyse et Politique, see Lewis (1981), Douglas (1980), and Kandel (1980).
6cf. Molineux (1979), Barrett and Mcintosh (1979), and Eisenstein (1979).
7Here she differs from Hartmann (1974), although in many respects they agree.
3. Sharing the same table: consumption and the family
1J. K. Galbraith in a recent book shares this critique of the idea of the ‘household’:
Though a household includes several individuals – husband, wife, offspring, sometimes relatives or parents – with differing needs, tastes and preferences, all neoclassical theory holds it to be the same individual. (1973)
2The history of the creation and construction from 1895 to the present of ‘consumption scales’ recounted by Perrot in Le mode de vie des families bourgeoises (1961, pp. 21–40) is very instructive. In these studies, differential consumption is dissembled – as in the story of E. Allen Poe – by the act of bringing it to light. Three types of studies can be distinguished which, with apparently different methods, all lead to astonishingly similar scales.
In the first (Engels) ‘the increase of weight and height represents the progression of expenditure of consumption’; it suggests lower coefficients of consumption of food for women and children.
Others (‘budgetists’) cling to the actual behaviour of households and ‘discover’ that consumption is indeed differentiated according to age and sex (thus ‘confirming’ the initial assumptions of the first school).
Lastly, the nutritionists try to evaluate the calorific needs of family members, but by ‘considering that the expenditure on food of a family is proportional to the needs in calories of the people of whom it is composed’ (i.e. by taking the actual consumption as the indicator of ‘needs’).
In corroborating the coefficients of the ‘budgetists’, those of the ‘nutritionists’ carry the guarantee that the actual expenditure well covers the ‘calorific needs’, and that differential expenditures are justified by different needs. In addition they give the impression that no consideration whatsoever, other than the provision of calories, enters into the consumption of food. It is implicit that differentiation of food intake cannot relate to quality but exclusively to calorific values. Quantities being adapted to needs, distribution is hence – in the full sense of the word – just.
3This tendency to find what is morally unacceptable and also theoretically unthinkable – or at least not to think about it – overflows the restricted area of consumption. Thus Engels (followed by Simone de Beauvoir) could see nothing in the hierarchy of the proletarian family other than a dulling ‘remnant of brutality’ which did not profoundly debase the essential ‘equality in misfortune’. The latter attenuates the former and allows it alone to be conceived as empirical reality. This sentiment even overflows the limits of the family since (marxist) authors refuse to interpret hierarchies in terms of classes – i.e. in terms of exploitation – when they come across them in so-called ‘subsistence’ societies, modestly covering them over with the functionalist concept of ‘power of redistribution’. The coincidence of the existence of surplus and the existence of social inequalities is thus not an empirical discovery but an element of dogma, according to which the creation of surplus explains the appearance of inequalities. See particularly Terray (1972).
4I feel authorized by an illustrious mentor to choose ‘homely facts’ ‘drawn from everyday life’ when handling ‘phenomena whose intimate place in men’s life has sometimes shielded them from the impact of economic discussion’ (Veblen 1953, p. xx).
5The similarity between this indigenous theory and the basic postulates of consumption scales is striking. The latter ‘scientifically’ confirm the former. Thus the ‘nutritional’ scales (the most ‘scientific’) of 1918 are closer to the ‘budgetary’ scales of 1918 than to the ‘nutritional’ scales of 1970. The evaluation of the calorific needs of an individual thus vary with the allocation of food considered as ‘normal’ for that individual by the society (and the sociology) of his or her time.
6Consumption scales give many indications on this subject, but since they cannot be analysed in detail here, let us simply stress the coincidence of the relative share of adolescents in food consumption – a coefficient of 84 in the USA in 1917 and 60 in France (CREDOC) in 1965 – and the existence or absence of a theory of adolescent hunger.
4. The main enemy
1These are mechanisms of alienation and false consciousness which perpetuate oppression. The women are victims of oppression and not responsible for it.
2Féminisme, Marxisme, Action was one of the first two neo-feminist groups in France. It started in 1968 as a mixed group (men and women) but gradually became a women’s group. In 1970 it combined with another women’s group and women who had previously been isolated from any group to become the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes (MLF). (For further information on the history of the women’s liberation movement in France, see Pisan and Tristan, 1977.)
3Mouvement de Defense des Exploitations Familiales: a French Communist Party organization concerned with agriculture.
4Ernest Mandel in his Marxist Economic Theory confirms that the terms ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’ refer to neither the nature nor the intrinsic value nor the productivity of the labour involved in different types of production, but simply to the use to which the production is put – immediate consumption or consumption mediated by exchange.
5This piece by an economist is about domestic appliances and was written for a business conference on their production and sale.
6In French the word ‘femme’ means both ‘woman’ and ‘wife’. There are two words in the case of males: ‘mari’ meaning ‘husband’ and ‘homme’ meaning ‘man’. Thus even on the level of vocabulary the biological fact of being a woman and the social role of wife are synonymous.
7The point made in the previous footnote can be expanded. The term ‘slav’ has the same root as the French ‘esclave’ (slave). Here an entire ethnic group is bound to service from birth. In the same way the entire female population is bound to become women/wives.
8Such attitudes are not restricted to the Communist Party alone within the left. The Programme Commun, the platform of the recently formed coalition of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, recommends that women be allowed to leave their outside jobs five minutes early in order to do the shopping for their families before the stores close. A peculiar privilege indeed!
5. Housework or domestic work
1Among the first publications appearing in 1970 were those of Benston, Larguia, Delphy, Olah, and Mainardi. Since then many others have followed, too numerous to mention.
2For my reasons for talking of ‘women wives’, see below p. 00.
3When I originally wrote this article in 1978 I used the term domestic work, deriving from domus, to stress that the other participants in the debate in fact misused ‘domestic’ and did not distinguish it from housework. Domus has many connotations of place, and I now believe that ‘familial work’, which would connote mainly relationships, is the better term.
6. Continuities and discontinuities in marriage and divorce
1I use the expression woman-wife to stress that the one is a person and the other a role. This ontological distinction is blurred by the fact that the social role is so widely associated with a biological category that they have become equivalent.
2The thesis of Blood and Wolfe (1960), for example, is that no model exists, let alone a patriarchal one. If more married women do the housework than married men, it is because they have more time to do it and their husbands less since they work outside (!). And if married women are of less weight in making decisions, it is owing to the fact that since they do not work outside (this being compensated by the extra time they have to do the housework) so their contribution to the domestic economy is less important.
3See, for example, couples where the husbands are at business school (Marceau 1976).
4This is a legal notion which officially denotes official responsibility and, unofficially, the right to dispose of and enjoy as one may dispose of and enjoy any possession.
5In a study I was involved in, we found in one provincial court that the ex-wife was awarded a mean of £10 per month per child. In general, courts in France will never instruct the ex-husband to pay more than one-third of his income to his ex-wife and children.
6I distinguish the financial and material upkeep of a family. The first is the part of the consumption that is bought. The second consists of services, or labour applied to goods bought by the wage.
7This is based on statistics from the Ministère de la Justice (1973) and oral communications from a lawyer.
8That this is a mere legal fiction is clear if we consider the result to which it leads, and that from the very beginning it is the judges and not the children who talk of their ‘interest’.
9When for example the woman buys off her obligation by paying for a nurse or a public nursery, etc. out of her salary.
7. Our friends and ourselves: the hidden foundations of various pseudo-feminist accounts
1Up until 1972 (when I stopped reading them) the typical theme of the strip cartoons drawn by Hari-Kiri and Charlie-Hebdo was the humiliation of a ‘bourgeois woman’ by a reputedly revolutionary male. Or rather the fact of putting down such a woman alone sufficed to designate him as a revolutionary.
2Everything I said on pages 110–17 about whites and Blacks applies mutatis mutandis to the relationship between left and proletarian groups.
A critique of the extreme left, of its avant-garde pretensions which are aggravated by – and alas caused by – its (nearly) exclusively petit bourgeois composition, is not my purpose here. It remains to be made. We can, however, mention that the women’s movement practice has added to the criticism that this ‘proletarian’ struggle is neither directed nor even followed by proletarians, another symmetrical, but not identical, criticism: that the fight of revolutionary petit bourgeois men does not stem from their own oppression. This makes clearer a note which should logically have come at the end of the first part of the paper, in response to the question which will inevitably be asked, ‘Is there then nothing men can do in the anti-patriarchal struggle?’
The reply to this question is to be found in the practice of certain men who, instead of giving women advice, work on themselves, on their sexist problems; who, instead of calling on women, interrogate themselves; who, instead of pretending to guide women, seek their own way. These men look for the ways in which the anti-patriarchal struggle directly concerns them in their everyday life. And they find such concerns without difficulty, needless to say, because it is not recognizing them which is difficult.
3For further discussion of psychoanalysis and politics see Douglas 1980 and Kandel 1980.
8. Patriarchy, feminism and their intellectuals
1Veronica Beechey (1980) has suggested that ‘first wave’ feminists in England, such as Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain and the Fabian Women’s Group, already used the term patriarchy.
2‘A god from a machine’ was a device in Greek theatre. A god was elevated above the stage and provided solutions to problems mortals could not resolve – or interesting twists to the plot.
9. A materialist feminism is possible
1I think that this will be the next great debate in the movement and that it will be found that the last ideological bulwarks which impede us, and which thus constitute the stronghold of patriarchal ideology, are also the bases of heterosexual ideology. This debate will therefore be of the very greatest importance because it will signify both the breaking of the last ideological barrier and the way out of the tunnel on the question of the relationship between lesbianism and feminism.
10. Protofeminism and antifeminism
1See the comments in the newspapers, in particular that in the Quotidien de Paris: ‘This book, while part of the women’s liberation movement, radically contests its foundations.’ I am quoting from memory so the words are approximate, but there can be no doubt that as far as the writer was concerned it was intended as a compliment.
2In the tendency called ‘Psychoanalyse et Politique’ (Psychoanalysis and Politics).
3There is also a book by Luce Irigaray (1974) which is a psychoanalytic revision and revindication of ‘woman’ as ‘the other’. This represents a different aspect of the establishment of this current of ideas and must be dealt with elsewhere (see Pedinelli-Plaza 1976).
4This is explicit in Irigaray (1974).
5Lilar’s Le malentendu de deuxieme sexe is a book attacking Simone de Beauvoir, which seeks to ‘prove’ that de Beauvoir was ‘wrong’ by using reassurances from biologists that men and women do have different sex organs!
6Gribouille is a famous French folk-character, created in the nineteenth century by the Comtesse de Ségur.
11. For a materialist feminism
1For example, are ‘body’ and ‘mind’ divisions of something concrete, or are they entries in western dictionaries? And what is the western dictionary, if not the intellectual product of, the rationalization for, an oppressive social system?
2i.e. in the subjectivity of this society, hence in its ideology.
3Which is considered a thing in and of itself (like ‘the psyche’) by both common sense and the ‘science’ which reproduces these categories; and which is linked to ‘the psyche’ by that same science which reproduces the spontaneous theory of common sense, that is, ideology.
4What have we retained of Reich’s theory? That sexual repression caused fascism.