Rethinking Women s Oppression: A Reply to Brenner and Ramas

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1 comment Rethinking Women s Oppression: A Reply to Brenner and Ramas Michèle Barrett Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, in their extensive engagement with Women s Oppression Today 1, have provided an opportunity for a reassessment of the arguments made there. In this reply I want to comment on what I now consider to be the weaknesses of the book as well as responding to the criticisms and alternative arguments that Brenner and Ramas have put forward. I will deal first with what is undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of their piece, and this is the question of biology and the determination of the sexual division of labour by the consequences of childbirth and lactation. Brenner and Ramas (to recapitulate) argue that attempts to understand the reasons for the development in the nineteenth century of the pattern of male wage-labourer and female domestic-labourer have underplayed or ignored the extent to which this pattern is the logical outcome of reproductive biology. Women had children, partly through inadequate methods of contraception, and were obliged to breast-feed them if they were to survive in an era which had no satisfactory alternative method of feeding. Given the incompatibility between childcare and participation in capitalist production, there was a material determination of the family-household based on the division of responsibilities between men and women. Thus we have no need for arguments which rest principally on economic requirements at the level of a mode of production, nor for those resting on the supposed ideological foundations of these social divisions the explanation lies nearer to home in the necessary consequences of biology in that particular historical moment. Whilst in general I think it is true that feminists have been unduly squeamish in the face of biological arguments, I am not convinced that this one is as cogent as Brenner and Ramas claim. Feminists have tended to point to the social and cultural variation in the consequences of biology for the good reason that this variation itself demonstrates that the degree of determination of the social by the biological is a social or more precisely a political choice. Timpanaro s work, cited approvingly here in the context of considering the relation between the social and the biological, is in fact of little use on such matters as these, for it 1 New Left Review 144 March/April 1984, pp

2 is posed at too general a level and offers no conclusions. We cannot deduce from Timpanaro s general insistence on the need to reconsider biological determination whether reproductive biology acts as a determinant in this particular case. 2 In my view it would be more appropriate to speak not of biological determination but of a situation in which social and political choices were made concerning the effects of reproductive biology. This can be illustrated by taking the question of lactation, to which Brenner and Ramas attach considerable weight. Naturally anyone will agree that a woman attempting to combine working a long day in a factory or mill with breast-feeding a child will find this difficult if not impossible, and we are all familiar with the sufferings recorded from this situation. But the aristocracy have usually managed to avoid these problems through the institution of wet-nursing and, as Brenner and Ramas themselves acknowledge in passing, the adequacy or otherwise of this solution is determined by social class. The fact is that wet-nursing was dangerous when combined with disease and malnutrition and much less so when these evils were absent. It is also true that many societies which in general depend upon human lactation for survival have collectivized the procedure in order to mitigate the individual mother-child bond through a more co-operative approach. So we can see that even such a biological matter as lactation is a social phenomenon for the purposes of analysis. Similarly it seems to me to be unconvincing to argue that the sexual division of labour in the home and workplace was the logical consequence of the fact that women spent much of their married life bearing and rearing children, since this merely pushes back one step the explanation we need. Why did they? Other societies discovered that the age of marriage could be raised, that contraception could be practised even before the pill had been invented, that a surplus of women could be housed and fed. If demographic history can be said to teach us anything it is surely that the causes of family and population decisions at the social level are notoriously difficult to ascertain. 3 So if it is true that the majority of working-class women in the nineteenth century spent their lives in this way (and of course we should remember that those who did not still had the social consequences of the family wage imposed upon them), we should regard this as a matter to be explained rather than an explanation of something else. In short, to be at the mercy of reproductive biology is, at the social rather than the individual level, a political decision rather than a biological determination. To say this is not sheer feminist voluntarism, it is to emphasize the level of fatalism that creeps into discussion of this and no other issue where biology has an important role. Brenner and Ramas themselves point out that American women halved their birthrate during the nineteenth century, and it is undoubtedly true that from time imme- 2 See my review article Timpanaro: Materialism and the Question of Biology, Sociology of Health and Illness, Vol. 3 Number 3, November The argument made by Brenner and Ramas on child labour as a motivation for large families is contentious, since one can just as plausibly argue that this incentive was more or less ineffective by (New Left Review 344 p. 54.) 124

3 morial women have had more control over their fertility than a fatalistic reading of demography indicates. My point is that although biological reproduction is, transparently, a biological matter, it does not further our analysis much to consign all these questions to the reassuringly scientific category of biology. Most of us would agree that starvation and obesity are physiological phenomena, but most socialists tend to take the analysis one stage further back and consider how inequalities in world food distribution are the real causes of them. This point is put very clearly by Kate Soper when she writes: The human race is biologically determined in the sense that it has the kind of lungs which will be destroyed by over-exposure to a certain form of asbestos; and it is naturally determined in that asbestos has the physical and chemical properties that it does; but the incidence of asbestosis is a socially determined fact that it is within human capacities to alter. These determinations should be kept distinct. 4 If it is accepted that social class transforms the consequences of childbirth, as is accepted in relation to infant mortality and in relation to the effects of childbirth on the mother, then it must follow that the determinations most relevant to our analysis are the social rather than the biological ones involved. To regard these as biological questions would be reasonable if we regarded the global questions of food distribution as biological, since famine and obesity also spring from consequences of human biology. Perhaps the most telling point against accepting the argument from biology is that it ignores the consequences of social class. For bourgeois women in the nineteenth century were also human and subjected to the dictates of reproductive biology, but it is not biology that is held to account for the similarities there undoubtedly were in respect of familial obligations and (as was to be revealed later in the century) exclusion and disadvantage at work, and they rest mainly on women s economic dependence on men. Of course it is possible to explain this in biological terms, but the ascription of hunting to men and home-making to women has now been definitively challenged and this type of biologistic reading of gender discredited. In comparison, it is clear that the type of argument floated by Brenner and Ramas is one that has its real explanation in the category of the economic. Following some aspects of the position argued by Jane Humphries, 5 they stress the economic logic of the woman s exclusion from wage labour to the proletarian household. Yet this argument is difficult to maintain when the comparison is made between proletarian and bourgeois women and the economic factors held to apply to the former cannot be seen in the case of the bourgeois family. The more convincing explanation of the congruence between proletarian and bourgeois family ideology and division of labour must surely lie at the level of ideology and in the legacy of history, and it is to this that I now want to turn. The central thrust of the argument put forward by Brenner and Ramas against that of Women s Oppression Today concerns the nature of a 4 Kate Soper, Marxism, Materialism and Biology, in J. Mepham and D.H. Ruben, editors, Issues in Marxist Philosophy. Volume 2: Materialism, Brighton Jane Humphries, Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 1 Number 3,

4 materialist understanding of gender division. They see my analysis as one that courts idealism in the weight it attaches to ideology, which at times threatens to displace the economic from its canonized role as in the last instance determinant. So although they agree that dualistic analyses, such as the capitalist patriarchy approach of Hartmann 6, remain a problem for materialism, they make the point that ideology can be hypostatized as an explanation in its own right in a similarly dualistic fashion. It is in the context of this critique of my use of the concept of ideology that their insertion of biology, and their restatement of certain economic arguments, must be seen. The explanation they seek, in order to qualify as materialist, must be couched in terms that identify a material basis for women s oppression in capitalism. Ideology in the Construction of the Economic I want to respond to this by arguing that no such explanation is possible without encountering the reductiveness I have argued against at some length. Brenner and Ramas in fact illustrate this point in their own argument, since they are obliged to underplay and neglect the ideological in order to make the economic case retain water. In part, this involves a rejection of one of the arguments of Women s Oppression Today: that many of the categories we call economic are constituted historically in ideological terms. In their analysis we find that the wage occupies a privileged position, analytically superior to that of mere ideology, but the ideological character of the wage form in capitalism is systematically ignored. Marx s insight into the illusion that is the labourer s wage in capitalism is forgotten, and the wage is treated by Brenner and Ramas as if it really were a rational system in which work done is appropriately rewarded. Priority is attached to the male breadwinner s large wage-packet (seen as economic and real ), but the ideological configuration that has supported the moralism and pretensions of this wage is denied. There is some slippage in their argument between the conceptual role of the economic in an analysis of capitalism and women s oppression and the appearance of the wage form in that system (money, cash, the pay-packet). This can be seen most clearly in a central passage where Brenner and Ramas state as self-evidently true something that seems to me to be quite wrong: that ideology could not determine wage levels. They write that... all else being equal, ideology alone could not have forced women to accept lower wages. Of course, all else was not equal women s intermittent participation in waged labour, the supplementary character of their wage earning, their ultimate destination as wives and mothers, distinguished them from men. 7 It hardly needs pointing out that definitions of skill, on which much wage bargaining rests, frequently incorporate ideological assumptions, and that the ascription to all women of the ultimate destination of wife and mothers, distinguished them from men. 7 It hardly needs pointing out that definitions of skill, on which much wage bargaining rests, frequently incorporate ideologi- 6 Heidi Hartmann s essay is reproduced, with a collection of discussion pieces, in Women and Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, L. Sargent, editor, London Op. cit., p

5 cal assumptions, and that the ascription to all women of the ultimate destination of wife and mother is scarcely immune from ideology. Most importantly, perhaps, it can be argued indeed has been by many feminists including myself that the limitations of women s participation in wage labour are related to ideology and in particular familial ideology. So we cannot counterpose ideology on the one hand to women s economic situation on the other, because to do so is to ignore the degree to which the two are analytically related. In considering these issues that bear on the rival explanatory power of the categories of biology, the economy and ideology I would still defend the weight attached, in Women s Oppression Today, to the ideological. I suggest that Brenner and Ramas do not fully justify their appeal to biology and that the real explanation underlying their analysis is a traditional Marxist one which suffers from a degree of economic reductionism in its account of women s oppression. This seems to me to be clear in the discussion of the historical arguments about the family wage, trade unionism and protective legislation in the nineteenth century. I find their approach unconvincingly exculpatory of the male craft unions, and one that denies the political damage of the exclusion of women workers. Although I do not wish to engage here with the detail of these arguments, I think it is salutary to reflect on why these varying interpretations of nineteenth-century history are of such interest. It is surely because the debate polarizes us on the question of whether men take responsibility for these exclusionary practices and their male privilege or whether they hide behind the supposed logic of a system which was not of their choosing. I do not find the denial of agency to men or to women very useful in the long run, since it occludes the political choices that, however inauspicious the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we have to make. I have not dealt here with the considerable number of points raised by Brenner and Ramas in their comprehensive response. I believe there to be a disagreement over the question of the state and women s oppression, and indeed do not accept their characterization of my position, but the issues are too complex for me to add profitably to the debate at this point. Equally, I do not accept the criticism that the ideology I invoke is not adequately specified, and in fact I suspect that no specification would ever be adequate for those who are so sceptical of the existence and power of the ideological. Although in general I would defend the theses of Women s Oppression Today against their critique, and against their alternative account of the processes at stake, I would like to record my appreciation of their work. Rarely does one encounter such a thorough, yet solidaristic and generous, treatment in a review article. In conclusion I want to take the opportunity to raise two points that Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas do not deal with in their discussion but which I believe to be of overriding political importance. The first is the question of race and ethnicity, considerably more in the political foreground than it was five years ago when the book was written. It would, I hope, be impossible to write in 1984 a book that so systematically failed to recognize its own ethnic specificity, presenting 127

6 (as the critique of white feminism has so rightly stressed 8 ) as universal analyses that do not necessarily apply across the boundaries of ethnicity. I say this not merely to make a polemical point about the importance of white feminists taking on board the reality that we live in a racist society, nor to engage in a bit of therapeutic breast-beating though I do think that both of these are necessary. I say it because many of the substantive questions dealt with in Women s Oppression Today are based on the situation and experience of white women and ignore the difference made by ethnicity and racism to both the empirical situation under discussion and the mode of analysis. Most if not all of the topics of the book gender socialization, the ideological representation of gender, the educational system, social class, the household economy, familial ideology, the role of the state should properly be discussed in terms which allow us to see the ways in which these differences operate. Much of the analysis of the book, whether in terms of concepts such as an industrial reserve army, or of the notion of women s financial dependence on men for example, are in need of an overhaul from this point of view. 9 Secondly I think comment is required on a key difference between myself and my reviewers the salience of feminism as an autonomous political movement. For Brenner and Ramas the project is to develop a materialist analysis of women s oppression, and to do this they believe that Marxist categories are the best and most appropriate ones. Yet this ignores the dichotomy from which my analysis starts the tension between Marxism and feminism as an explanation of the world and a guide to political priorities. Although I and others have been engaged in an attempt to develop a specifically socialist-feminist analysis, we have sought to engage with feminism on its own terms rather than by subsuming the issues with which it deals into a socialist position. The intervening five years suggest to me that, if we are to have any political credibility, this is now more necessary than less. Many women who regard themselves as both feminists and socialists are now much less confident of an integrationist socialist-feminist position, and of course the recognition of race as an independent issue has contributed to this as well. In a wider context it must be recognized that feminism in its non-socialist forms is immensely more powerful and influential than we are. The political resonance of feminism lies in the women s peace movement, in women s culture and literature, in women s increased public visibility in the media and none of these can be captured for a distinctively socialist-feminist perspective in any easy way. Indeed it seems to me that our most pressing political project should be to try and win back what is effectively lost ground for socialist-feminist ideas in the women s movement. It is more than ever clear that this will not be done through a re-statement of classic arguments, but will require a real engagement with feminist politics as they are now rather than as we might think they should be. 8 See, for example, The Empire Strikes Back, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, London 1982, and Feminist Review, Number 17, Summer I hope to explore these issues at greater length elsewhere in an article to be written with Mary McIntosh. 128