Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  But while Firestone was writing The Dialectic of Sex, a sexually active woman stood in significant danger of unwanted pregnancy and of prosecution, injury or death in dealing with it. Compulsory motherhood was a very real prospect indeed.

  A manifesto

  The Dialectic of Sex was above all else a manifesto – a public declaration of intent. It is a book that declares that a feminist revolution must happen, and that it can happen now, since for the first time in human history the technology exists to enable the root cause of women’s oppression to be addressed just as the contradictions of women’s situation have emerged with such painful clarity. And like all manifestos it is characterized by ‘compression’ and ‘hyperbole.’27 It does not mince its words to make either itself or its author agreeable to anyone whom its analysis may offend. It rips into the Sixties romanticization of nature, for example, by describing the cult of natural childbirth as ‘only one more part of the reactionary hippie-Rousseauean Return-to-Nature, and just as self-conscious.’ It infamously describes childbirth as being ‘like shitting a pumpkin’ (181). It is a book that announces that anyone is wasting her time who thinks that an apologetic or deferential feminism is going to change anything.

  So why did Firestone argue as she did; and is she right? It is to these two questions that the next few chapters turn.

  3

  Women’s Oppression Is Natural

  Anyone observing animals mating, reproducing, and caring for their young will have a hard time accepting the “cultural relativity” line.

  (Firestone, p.9)

  Firestone’s daring move is to tackle head on a subject that feminists before her had often shied away from. For many other thinkers, to concede that women’s oppression could be natural in origin would be to give up the fight as lost. The reasons for this are perhaps obvious. Defenses of male dominance are almost always couched in the language of what is “natural.” For countless male philosophers of the Western tradition, women were “naturally” less capable than men of the kind of abstract rational thought required for participation in political decision-making, and as such could be justly excluded from it. Anti-feminists (both male and female) in the nineteenth century opposed the extension of suffrage to women on such grounds and argued that women’s natures suited them to the domestic and not the public sphere. In the twentieth century, second wave feminist demands to equalize the roles of the sexes in the home and workplace were met with the objections that women were the natural homemakers and carers of children and that men were the natural breadwinners. Today, we often hear that the overwhelming predominance of men in politics, business and in the higher echelons of almost all public organizations reflects natural differences between the sexes and the natural disposition of men to be more assertive and risk-taking than women.

  To allow “natural” differences to be the frame for thinking about the oppression of women therefore seemed to many feminists to be conceding the terms of the enemy. It is not surprising then, that so many of them eschewed nature as a possible source of women’s subordination, preferring instead to point to law (liberal feminists), economics (socialist feminists) or culture (other radical feminists) as the fundamental problem.

  The “natural” is not a human value

  Firestone’s distinctiveness is to recognize that what is natural is thereby neither necessarily good nor inevitable. She is implicitly drawing a distinction between explanation and justification (and this, as Stella Sandford also notes, is all too often overlooked in discussions of Firestone28). She agrees that women’s oppression is explained by natural conditions or differences. But she disagrees that these natural conditions justify that oppression. She does this in virtue of her claim that ‘the “natural” is not necessarily a “human” value’ (10). This is a concept central to Marxism, but also to the existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, and it is Beauvoir whom she quotes for a fuller elaboration: ‘“Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf”’ (10).

  What Beauvoir and Firestone are saying is that if “nature” is taken to mean something like “the physical environment as it exists without human intervention” then it is very clear that human beings do not for the most part consider nature to be an intrinsic good. It may be natural to die of exposure in a thunderstorm, or when one suffers severe blood loss from an injury, or when the cells of the body divide in cancer, but we rarely consider these things good. Nor do we consider them unchangeable. Instead we set about building shelters, making bandages and performing blood transfusions, and the manipulation of chemicals and radiation. Nothing, it seems, is less human than to let nature take its course.

  When it is claimed that inequalities between men and women are natural, and when such claims are used to oppose attempts to achieve equality, then however “nature” is being used not only to show how that inequality has come about (explanation), but also to justify it. It is to say that it should be allowed to continue without corrective efforts because what is natural either cannot be changed or ought not to be. And this is a view that no one really holds who has ever put up an umbrella in the rain.

  Let’s change nature

  Firestone’s response to the litany of claims that women’s oppression is natural could be characterized as “Yes it is, so let’s change nature.” In my view, it is a response that alone would justify her status as a foundational feminist thinker. Earlier feminist attempts to evade the question of nature, to say that there are no salient natural differences between men and women, or at least that we cannot know whether there are until men and women are treated in the same way, were always a hostage to fortune (however mistakenly). What if science were to prove that there really were natural differences and that these played a role in producing inequality? Firestone’s point is that this simply doesn’t matter, since human beings have the power (perhaps uniquely among animals) to intervene purposively in nature and to change it. On her view, people need to decide what kind of society is desirable and then act to bring that into being – “with” or “against” nature.

  Her recognition that the “natural” is without intrinsic value underpins the arguments of The Dialectic of Sex and explains her affirmation of the liberatory potential of technology – understood here as the process of intervening in nature in the name of human values and goals. Firestone might have made a slightly different argument against “nature,” namely that most cases of usage of the term are actually incoherent. As philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in his essay ‘On Nature’ from 1874, either “nature” means that which occurs spontaneously and in the absence of human agency, in which case there is very little that is natural; or “nature” means everything that unfolds according to the laws of nature, in which case everything that happens is natural, including all human action, and nothing could be unnatural, including all forms of human intervention in the physical world. The enormous value of Mill’s essay lies in his systematic unpacking of the utter absurdity of holding that one ought to do what is “natural,” and ought not to do what is “unnatural.” As he points out (along with Firestone, Beauvoir, and Marx), what is “natural” on the first definition is in most cases held by human beings to be contrary to our goals, and so the unnatural is precisely what we ought to do. And what is “natural” on the second definition makes doing something unnatural literally impossible.

  Firestone does not analyze the incoherence of the “nature” term in quite this way. Her usage seems to accord with the first of Mill’s senses that I have given above: human reproduction is ‘natural’ to the extent that it remains unaffected by forms of human intervention such as contraception (which are ‘technology’). It is in this sense that her feminism is pro-technology and antinature. She nevertheless mounts a remorseless assault on the functioning of “natural” and “unnatural” as terms that gain their force and meaning from the ideological systems that t
hey support rather than from real differences in the world. To give just one example, she describes how participants in a Harris poll had proved surprisingly open to considering new reproductive technologies such as test-tube fertilization when employed in the service of the traditional family, ‘to help a barren woman have her husband’s child,’ but rejected the proposal that they could be used to extend reproduction beyond the nuclear family (179). As Firestone notes, ‘it was not the “test tube” baby itself that was thought unnatural … but the new value system, based on elimination of male supremacy and the family’ (180). This is just as true today, when techniques such as surrogacy oregg transplantation are used to extend reproductive capacities to gay couples or to older women and are denounced as being “unnatural.” The term tells us nothing about the procedure or technology itself, but much about the moral disapproval felt by the speaker.

  But why does Firestone believe that women’s oppression is natural? The answer has to do with her acceptance of the radical feminist claim that male domination is transhistorical and transcultural: in other words, that all human societies that have ever existed have been patriarchal. Firestone argues that for this to be the case it must be that the cause lies in something deeper and more fundamental than law, economics, or cultural phenomena, since these can be expected to have varied across time and place. And what it is that is deeper and more fundamental, and shared across all human history as well as the animal kingdom, is the division of females and males into animals that do, and animals that do not, bear offspring.

  4

  Sex Class Is the First Class

  Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal.

  (Firestone, p.8)

  The core thesis is this: throughout most of human history women have been at the ‘continual mercy of their biology’ (9). Before the advent of reliable contraception or abortion, the postpubescent female could expect to spend perhaps 30 years of her life (should she live so long) pregnant, giving birth or nursing small children, as well as suffering the ‘female ills’ associated with her reproductive system (menstruation, menopause, etc.). These facts, together with the protracted period of helplessness of human infants and their consequent need for care and supervision, entailed a severe curtailment of women’s capacity to take part in the productive labor that produced food, resources and wealth. Because children were dependent upon women, women were therefore dependent upon men for provision of the things needed for physical survival. This division of labor is driven by ‘natural reproductive difference[s],’ but it quickly becomes reinforced by human action (9). Men, Firestone claims, seek to fortify the power they are granted through women’s dependence and then to extend that domination wherever possible to other men. Men and women have been divided into two distinct classes by biology (producers and reproducers), but this fact in turn produces a psychological formation – a desire or need for power – that leads to the incessant formation of further divisions of humanity into unequal classes, castes or ‘races.’ It is in this sense, then, that for Firestone the oppression of women is natural: it is rooted in a reproductive biology that, for millennia, it has not been within the power of human beings to control.

  However, this also means that, while in an important sense women’s oppression is natural, it is also not simply natural, since it has always involved the fortification of a natural inequality through the decisions that men have made to consolidate their power. We can see this, for example, in the case of childrearing. Pregnancy and childbirth may be biologically given, and so too may be the nurturing of infants, to the extent that until recently natural breast milk was the only food source for babies. But the delegation to women of caring responsibilities for older children is a cultural artifact, a non-biological extension of their “natural” reproductive roles.

  Indeed, more importantly still, I think, one can read Firestone as arguing that since technological development has now reached a stage where it is possible to intervene in and change human reproduction, even the contribution to women’s oppression made by those biological facts can no longer be characterized as “natural.” It may be clearest to demonstrate this by analogy. For as long as human beings lack the technological knowledge and/or resources to prevent, for example, a flood, then the destruction of a village by flooding may be described as a “natural disaster.” In a situation in which the expertise exists, however, to build dams and other flood defenses, but this has not been done, or not done sufficiently well, then the flooding of the village can no longer be characterized in this way since the disaster has come about as a result of human decisions, actions and inactions. If “nature” means for Firestone something like “that which lies outside of the scope of human control,” then it may be true that for millennia human reproduction and thus the sexual inequality she thinks it entails have been natural. But in the late twentieth century, with medical science having advanced to the point that it has, her claim is that reproduction and hence the inequality it spontaneously produces do now lie within our control. If that is so, then, just like a village flooding when the technology exists to prevent it, the continuation of sexual inequality is not natural – it is cultural and political, since it is the result of human decisions, actions and inactions.

  Why dialectic?

  Why is a book that puts forward this thesis entitled The Dialectic of Sex? The answer lies in Firestone’s relationship to the dialectical or historical materialism of classical Marxism. Among the feminists of the 1960s who had turned away from the liberal tradition, judging its supposed solutions too superficial, were many who had turned instead to Marxism. In the theory of historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century, the movement of human history could be explained as the product of class struggle. The young Karl Marx had been heavily influenced by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, who saw world history as evolving through a process whereby a social or cultural formation, proving flawed in some way, generated an opposing formation which nonetheless preserved aspects of the former one, before itself yielding to a new formation which again arose in contradiction. But where Marx had agreed with Hegel that history progressed through a dynamic interplay of opposing forces (the dialectic), he rejected Hegel’s ‘idealist’ conception of this as consisting in the coming to self-realization of some kind of universal rationality (Hegel’s ‘Geist’). Instead, Marx had insisted on a materialist understanding of the dialectical movement of history, arguing that the forces concerned were economic, having to do with how human beings produced the physical resources they needed in order to live. Marx’s materialist philosophy held – in contrast to that of Hegel and many others – that it is not primarily ideas that dictate the concrete forms in which human beings live; rather, it is these material conditions which determine the ideas and values that people hold (being precedes consciousness). He believed that material conditions under advanced capitalism had reached a point where the exploited majority (the proletariat) could achieve consciousness of themselves as an oppressed class in whose interests it was to overthrow their rulers and seize direct control of the means of production.

  Quite whether Firestone’s theory is dialectical has been a subject of debate by commentators, as has the issue of whether her idea of sexual class works, in Marxist terms.29 What is clear, however, is that she calls it dialectical in order to signal both her ambition to produce a materialist account of history, and her sense of a schism that is inaugurated by biology and then played out in myriad ways throughout human culture.

  Marxism and second wave feminism

  Marx’s theory held out hope to many of the feminists of the 1960s who had come to believe that the oppression of women ran so deep that nothing short of revolution could remove it. But his insistence on the principal role of economics provoked more ambivalent responses. On the one hand, feminist thinkers already alert to the multiple ways in which women were economically exploited in capi
talist society found that aspects of Marx’s work offered powerful tools for illuminating this. His concept of a reserve army of labor, for example, could express the way that women formed a pool of surplus laborers capable of being brought into industry when male labor was scarce (for example in times of war) and then easily expelled back into the home when it was not. Feminists also noted how the labor of women assisted capitalist production in another way, which had not been fully recognized by Marx: that their unpaid reproductive labor in the home both provided the capitalist with the next generation of workers in the form of children, and maintained the current adult labor force by providing male workers with the food, clothing and emotional care that they required in order to labor efficiently each day in factory or office. But on the other hand, many feminists – even some who identified as Marxist or socialist feminists – felt that classical Marxism was too hamstrung by its economic framework; too reductive in its insistence that oppression came down in the final instance to economic factors; and too blinded, therefore, to the facets of a woman’s oppression that could not be revealed through the lens of economics.