Heidi Hartmann - "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism"

Hartmann compares marxism and feminism to English common law marriage. The two people are joined to become one - the husband, or in this case marxism. She argues that recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism tend to absorb the feminist struggle in the marxist struggle against capital. It is an unequal marriage. Hartmann's view is that marxism provides valuable insight and is a good analytical tool, but it is sex blind. A specifically feminist analysis is necessary to describe the systematic relations between men and women. But, feminism by itself is not satisfactory either because it is insufficiently materialist and blind to history. We must use both, and not by subsuming one into the other, to analyze the development of western society and the experience of women within it. She argues that patriarchy is a social and economic structure, not just a psychic one. We must understand that society is organized in a capitalistic and patriarchal manner.

1. Marxism and the Woman Question

Marxist analysis examines the relationship between women and the economic system, not the relationship between women and men. It is therefore not a feminist question, but a woman question. There have been three forms: All see women's oppression has a result of our connection, or lack of connection, to production. They define women as part of the working class and subsume women's relationship to men within the relationship between workers and capital.

1) Early Marxists (Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin): capitalism will draw all women into the wage workforce and this will destroy the sexual division of labor. Engels attributed the inferior position of women to the institution of private property. He argued that proletarian women were not oppressed like bourgeois women because there was no private property in those families. Women's participation in the labor force was the key to their freedom. Capitalism would get rid of sex differences and treat all equally as workers. Work would allow women to be economically independent. Capitalism would destroy patriarchal relations. Political implications: women must become wage earners before women's liberation can occur and they must join with men in the revolution against capitalism. Capital and property are the reasons women are oppressed just as they are the cause of workers' exploitation in general.

These early marxists did not see the differences in the experiences of men and women under capitalism. They did not address the feminist question. They did not see the vested interest men had in women's subordination. Patriarchy is not simply a leftover from pre-capitalist times, it has survived and thrived as a part of capitalism. Therefore, the end of capital and private property will not ensure women's liberation because they do not cause the oppression of women as women.

2) Contemporary Marxists/Everyday Life School (Zaretsky): Women are incorporated into an analysis of everyday life under capitalism. All aspects of life reproduce capitalism and we are all workers. The everyday life school is best exemplified by Eli Zaretsky's Socialist Revolution. He focuses on the different experiences of men and women under capitalism and argues that capitalism shapes the particular form of capitalism that exists now. Capitalism created the separation of family and work life and has not included women in the workforce to the extent of men as Engels predicted. Sexism has worsened under capitalism because of this separation of life and women's increased oppression is a result of their exclusion from wage work. Men are oppressed under capitalism by having to work for wages and women are oppressed by not being allowed to work for wages. In fact, capitalism created this exclusion of women because it created wage work outside of the home and requires women to work in the home to reproduce the work force, etc. Z. sees women as working for capital, not for men. The separation of home and work only makes it appear as though women are working for men. This appearance has led the women's movement down the wrong path. Women should recognize that are part of the working class even when they work at home. The housewife is a product of capitalist society. Men and women should work together to reunite the divided spheres and recognize that capitalism is the root of the problem and not fight one another. The end of capitalism, therefore, will mean the end of oppression for both men and women.

Zaretsky takes the feminist movement into consideration, but argues it needs redirection. He does not acknowledge the existence and importance of the inequality between men and women. He, like earlier marxists, focuses on the relationship between women and capitalism rather than between women and men. He cannot provide an answer for why, when capitalism separated life into two spheres, men went into the labor force and women stayed in the private sphere. Hartmann argues that this question cannot be answered without acknowledging patriarchy (the systematic dominance of men over women). Hartmann argues that women's work really is for men, it just also reproduces capitalism too. She agrees that socialism is in the interests of both sexes, but question whether the vision of that socialism is the same for men and women or that the struggle to get there is perceived the same by men and women.

3) Marxist Feminists (Dalla Costa): Marxist feminists focus on housework and how it relates to capital. They argue that houseworkers work for capitalists by creating surplus value. They also have absorbed the feminist struggle into the struggle against capital. Mariarosa Dalla Costa's analysis of housework, for example, is not about the relations between men and women as shown by housework. It is about the relationship between housework and capitalism. However, her work has been useful to the women's movement because she argues that women should demand wages for housework, increasing the recognition of the importance of housework. She argues that houseworkers provide important services for capital (reproducing the workforce) and create surplus value by doing so. Therefore, it should be wage work. She uses feminist views on housework (as real work) to claim its legitimacy under capitalism. She says that women can lead the struggle against capital by demanding pay for housework and refusing to participate in the paid labor force. She legitimates women's political activity by making them part of the working class.

Again, her approach focuses on capital, not on the relations between men and women. She uses the rhetoric of feminism, but does not have a feminist focus. She does not address the reason women perform housework, Hartmann argues that the continued participation of women in housework is crucial to the maintenance of patriarchy.

Engels, Zaretsky, and Dalla Costa all fail to analyze the labor process with the family satisfactorily, according to Hartmann. Capitalists do receive the services women provide in the home, but so do men. The level of benefit may vary by class, ethnicity, etc., but all men receive some benefit. So, men have a material interest in women's continued oppression. This may be a form of false consciousness for men, but it gives them control over another's labor, which they are unlikely to give up easily.

The latter two approaches emphasize housework to an extent not found in early marxism, but all three approaches understand women's oppression as an aspect of class oppression and attempt to count women as part of the working class. They therefore do not analyze the relationship between men and women, which is the feminist objective. Hartmann argues that marxist methodology can be used by feminism, but these approaches do not do so. Marxism clearly dominates the feminism.

Hartmann argues that marxism allows us understand many aspects of capitalist society, but it is sex blind. It cannot explain why women are subordinate to men.

Towards More Useful Marxist Feminism

Marxism is a method of social analysis, historical dialectical materialism. This method can be used to answer feminist question. Juliet Mitchell and Shulamith Firestone argue that this should be the new direction for marxist feminists. Mitchell attempts, with the inspiration of Engels, to analyze both forms of production: production of the means of existence and the production of human beings themselves. Engels argues that both forms determine the social organization of an historical period. Hartmann argues that Mitchell's analysis is not completely successful because she identifies only market work as production. Work done by women in other spheres is considered ideological. So, patriarchy has no material base for Mitchell. She also focuses more on women's relation to capital rather than to men. For Mitchell, patriarchy is primarily psychological. Capitalism is the fundamental economic structure, patriarchy is the fundamental ideological structure. Firestone brings a materialist analysis to patriarchy. She gives patriarchy a material base, but overemphasizes biology and reproduction. She does not discuss how biological sex becomes gender (a social category). Marxists tend to dismiss Firestone as to subjective (she focuses primarily on reproduction and discusses the subjective consequences of patriarchy), but women tend to appreciate her analysis of the power men have over women. Hartmann argues that Firestone provides the most complete statement of radical feminism.

II. Radical Feminism and Patriarchy

Main radical feminist slogan: "the personal is political". The original and most basic class division is between the sexes. Women's psychological problems are not due to maladjustment, but are a response to a social structure in which they are oppressed, exploited and dominated systematically.

With this perspective, Firestone rewrote Freud in terms that address power. She characterizes males as seeking power and domination, individualistic, competitive, etc.- a "technological mode". The "aesthetic mode" is female - nurturant, philosophical, artistic. The error of radical feminism: it projects male and female characteristics as they are now back into all of history. Its greatest strength is its understanding of the present, but its greatest weakness is its psychological focus which is blind to history.

R.F. defines patriarchy as a social system characterized by male domination over women (pg.14). This definition is limited because it describes almost all societies and so does not allow us to distinguish between them. History is used by R.F. to provide examples of patriarchy in all times.

Marxists and mainstream social scientists defined patriarchy as a system of relations between men, which formed the political and economic outlines of feudal and some pre-feudal societies.(pg 14) It is a pre-capitalist form of social organization. None of these social scientists understand patriarchy, now or past, in the terms that R.F. defines it(men dominating women).

Towards a Definition of Patriarchy

Hartmann defines patriarchy as a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women (pg. 14). It is a hierarchy in which men have different places, but they are united by their dominance over women. No matter their position, all men are bought off by those in higher positions by being able to control at least some women.

The material base of patriarchy is men control of women's labor power. They maintain this control by excluding women from productive resources (such as jobs that pay enough to live on) and by restricting women's sexuality. Monogamous heterosexual marriage is a recent and efficient way that men control both of these areas at once. Controlling women's access to resources and sexuality allows men to control their labor power to serve men and rear children. This gender hierarchy is learned by the next generation since they are raised by women, and the inferiority of women is taught within and outside the home. The material base of patriarchy is not solely based on child rearing, but on all social structures that allow men to control women's labor.

Gayle Rubin's concept of "sex/gender systems" enhances our ability to identify the patriarchal elements of social structures. A sex/gender system is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied (pg. 16). How sex is transformed into gender (a social phenomenon) is the aspect of the mode of production Engels described (the production of human beings).

How people reproduce the species is socially determined, not biologically. The creation of two separate genders and a division of labor based on those categories is a social invention. The ways in which people meet their sexual needs, reproduce, and pass on social norms, learn gender, etc. These are what Rubin means by the sex/gender system. She argues for the importance of the influence of kinship and the development of gender specific personalities. The sex/gender system could be male or female dominated or even egalitarian, but Hartmann labels the current sex/gender system as patriarchy.

So, the social organization of any time and place is determined by the form of economic production and the form of the sex/gender system (Note that this goes back to Engels again). Any society can be understood in terms of these two systems. Currently, we have patriarchal capitalism. There do not appear to be connections in the changes of each system, any combination is possible, but Hartmann argues that the two systems are so interconnected that a change in one will necessarily create change, tension or contradiction in the other. Racial hierarchies are similar to gender hierarchies. We could refer to society, then, as patriarchal capitalist white supremacist.

Capitalism creates a hierarchy of workers but does not determine who goes where. Gender and racial hierarchies determine who fills which spot. Hartmann argues that the crucial aspects of modern patriarchy are: heterosexual marriage and homophobia, female child rearing and housework, women's economic dependence on men, the state and other institutions based on male social relations. "Both hierarchy and interdependence among men and the subordination of women are integral to the functioning of our society; that is, these relationships are systemic" (pg. 19).

III. The Partnership of Patriarchy and Capital

It seems as if each women is individually oppressed by her own man, but Hartmann argues that the oppression is systematic. She argues that patriarchy does exist in capitalism, in fact, patriarchy and capitalism have a strong and healthy partnership. This partnership, however, was not inevitable. Men and capitalism often have conflicting interests, especially over the control of women's labor power. Hartmann examines this particular tension historically in order to identify the material basis of patriarchal relations in capitalist societies and the basis of the capital/patriarchy partnership.

Industrialization and the Development of Family Wages

Marxists underestimated the strength of patriarchal forces. The wage labor of women and children would undermine patriarchal authority and keep wages low for all. Male workers resisted the entrance of women and children into the work force. More than simple competition was at work because the work of women and children could have been organized, it was the disruption of the family that was most problematic. The family wage system was designed to solve this conflict between patriarchy and capitalism. Instead of fighting for equal wages for all workers, male workers, wanting to retain their wives' labor at home, opted for the family wage, which paid men higher wages in order to support their families. It was patriarchy that prevented the working class to unite in confrontation with capitalism. It divided the workers by allowing men to be bought off at the expense of women.

The family wage system secured the material base of patriarchy in two ways. 1) men have better jobs and higher wages, women's lower pay reinforces men's material advantage and encourages women to seek marriage as a career. 2) Women do housework, child rearing, etc which directly benefit men. These home responsibilities reinforce women's inferior labor market position.

The family wage system also benefits capitalist interests. It stabilized the reproduction of workers, creates women as consumers, and teaches dominance and submission in the home which prepares workers. Capitalism adjusted to patriarchy with the family wage system, but patriarchy has also adjusted to capitalism, the changing status of children, for example.

The Partnership in the 20th Century

Hartmann argues that early marxists underestimated the strength and flexibility of patriarchy, and overestimated the power of capital. Capitalist shaping of the workforce depends on the requirements for accumulation as well as the social forces that exist within a society. Capitalism is not all-powerful, but it is extremely flexible. It both destroys and adapts to existing social forms. Its adaptations are a testament to the strength of these preexisting forms.

The Family and Family Wage Today

The family wage, according to Hartmann, is the foundation of the patriarchy/capitalism partnership. Despite the rapid increase of women's labor force participation since WWII, it is still the cornerstone of the sexual division of labor. It is the reason that women are responsible for the home and men primarily for income. Women's lower wages and child rearing needs maintain the family as an income pooling unit and continues to allow men to control the labor of women within and without the family. The increased labor force participation shifts the material base of patriarchy from family-based to industrially-based, or the wage differential. Industrial based patriarchal relations are enforced in many ways - union contracts, sexist attitudes, etc. Hartmann, however, points out that this does not mean that patriarchy no longer exists in the family. The wage differential ensures the perpetuation of patriarchy, defining women's work as secondary to men's. She disagrees with the idea that capitalism destroys the family, because patriarchy has shown itself to be adaptive to capitalism. Divorce is not a promising option for women, even though it is more common today, because the wage differential means they will not be able to support themselves and their children well. In addition, the family still fulfills many of the psychological needs of many people.

Ideology in the 20th Century

"Patriarchy, by establishing and legitimating hierarchy among men (by allowing men of all groups to control at least some women), reinforces capitalist control, and capitalist values shape the definition of patriarchal good" (pg. 27-28). Going back to Firestone's psychological descriptions of men and women, we see that these characteristics are the result of men's power and shaped by capitalist society. Descriptions of men's characteristics are very similar to capitalist values. Two reasons for this: 1) men are more completely absorbed in capitalist social relations at work and so absorb these values 2) men claim for themselves the valued characteristics even when the behavior of men and women do not fit the norms. So sexist ideology glorifies male characteristics and capitalist values while at the same time denigrating female characteristics and social needs. The values fit the society. For example, only in capitalist society does it make sense to look down on women as emotional or irrational. In other societies, other rationalizations would be necessary.

IV. Towards a More Progressive Union

More work is necessary, particularly on patriarchy. Patriarchy is still more descriptive than analytical. It is hard to isolate the mechanisms of patriarchy, but that is what is necessary.

Feminism and Class Struggle

Now and historically, feminism and class struggle have been completely separate discussions, or ones in which marxism dominates feminism. The dominance of marxism over feminism is attributed to the analytical power of marxism and the power of men within the left.

Most radical feminists agree that the movement has lost momentum while the liberal feminists have forged ahead. We see parts of the movement being coopted and "feminism" being used against women (in court, for example). Attempts to use marxist theory has sidetracked R.F. from feminist objectives.

Hartmann argues that a struggle against capitalism alone will fail because it overlooks the supporting patriarchal relations. An analysis of patriarchy is necessary to a definition of socialism that is useful to women. It not clear that the socialism being struggled for is the same for men and women. A humane socialism would require men to relinquish their privilege.

Two strategic considerations for women: 1) a struggle for socialism is one in which groups with different interests form an alliance. Women must have their own organization and power base. Women cannot depend on men to liberate them. 2) The sexual division of labor gives women practice in understanding human interdependence and needs. Men's position in patriarchy and capitalism prevents them from understanding these needs. In the end, they may decide that the potential gains of socialism are not greater than the potential losses and choose the status quo.

"As feminist socialists, we must organize a practice which addresses both the struggle against patriarchy and the struggle against capitalism. We must insist that the society we want to create is a society in which recognition of interdependence is liberation rather than shame, nurturance is a universal, not an oppressive practice, and in which women do not continue to support the false as well as the concrete freedoms of men" (pg. 33).

Key Words:

- marxism and feminism

- patriarchy and capitalism

- definitions of patriarchy

- Woman Question vs. Feminist Questions

- early marxists

- Every Day Life school

- marxist feminists

- radical feminists

- family wage

- ideology vs. material base

Discussion:

- good discussion of various marxist and feminist approaches

- shows how patriarchy and capitalism support and reinforce each other