Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  Firestone’s response to classical Marxism is typical of the audacity and irreverence of her book. Agreeing with other radical feminists that Marx’s is a reductive theoretical framework that it would be damaging for feminism to ‘squeeze’ itself into, she does not however reject it (7). Instead she aims to incorporate it into her own feminist analysis and hence to correct it – to correct its dialectic.

  Engels on the Origin of the Family

  Her starting point is the work of Friedrich Engels. Engels had offered a more systematic analysis of women’s oppression than had Marx, in an essay that was being taken up in the 1960s by socialist feminists. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) was written by Engels after Marx’s death, to systematize Marx’s notes on the work of American anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) was a treatise on the evolution of human society through three epochs of savagery, barbarism and civilization – thought to correspond broadly with changes in the form taken by the human family. For Morgan, the nuclear family first appeared in the final years of barbarism, becoming fully established only in the phase of civilization.

  The great value of this work for Engels was that it historicized the nuclear family, suggesting that it was not an absolute and unchanging fact of human existence, but only a contingent one. Even more than this, Morgan believed that transformations in human living arrangements were driven by economic factors – or in Engels/Marx’s terminology, changes in the modes of production. The different epochs which corresponded to different family structures were themselves characterized by successive ways of appropriating resources from nature. Morgan had, Engels believed, arrived independently at a materialist understanding of history that supported Marx’s own.

  Morgan’s anthropological work thus gave sustenance to Engel’s project of discursively destabilizing the nuclear family. As early as The Communist Manifesto (1848), Engels and Marx had identified the bourgeois nineteenth-century family as a viper’s nest of hypocrisy and unfreedom: an economic unit designed to manage the inheritance of property, that was shrouded in a veil of sentimentality. They considered that the unnaturalness of monogamy led almost inevitably to male adultery, while bourgeois wives had effectively to prostitute themselves to husbands, the sale of their sexual services in marriage being their only way of making a living. In showing that the nuclear family was but a contingent historical fact, developed out of economic conditions that themselves would prove impermanent, Engels was therefore able to show, he believed, that the family itself would disappear under conditions of communism, to be replaced by unions voluntarily undertaken and based on love.

  Engels’ materialist analysis of the family also enabled him, he believed, to show that the oppression of women had a distinct historical origin. He was here writing explicitly against the pronouncements of fellow Marxist thinkers August Bebel and Karl Kautsky, who held the oppression of women to be something that had existed ‘from the beginning of time’ (Bebel).30 Drawing on Morgan, Engels proposed that the earliest human communities had been characterized by a sexual freedom enjoyed by both women and men. Indeed, he believed that women had been endowed with a high degree of social authority, since the only reliable way of establishing a child’s lineage was through the mother. This was all to change, however, with the emergence of private property.

  Engels conjectured that these early human communities had been communistic, collectively owning those few goods that were not immediately consumed, and that had been hunted or foraged from the land, or later, produced through primitive agriculture. As the modes of production developed, however, more goods were produced that were surplus to subsistence requirements, and these became privatized as the belongings of particular individuals. The very shift to heavy agriculture that enabled this increase in production, also made it more difficult or dangerous for women to participate in production (which they had done previously to a very full extent), particularly if they were pregnant or accompanied by small children. Since production now had the capacity for generating wealth, it became valorized over reproduction; just at the same time that women were increasingly relegated to the latter.

  Engels believed that with private wealth now a reality, and conscious of their newly acquired superior status as producers, men sought to replace matrilineal with patrilineal inheritance. But the only way to do this would be if paternity could be known for certain. They therefore sought to eliminate women’s promiscuity by binding them within a strict monogamy (while continuing to enjoy sexual freedom themselves). As such, women became privatized as being among the possessions of a particular man, and their children and reproductive labor with them. The patriarchal nuclear family was born, and it represented what Engels emphatically called ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex.’31

  Firestone on Engels

  Socialist feminists in the 1960s had considered Engels’ account of an original human sexual equality giving way only with the emergence of private property to be both compelling and hopeful, since it identified not only the cause of women’s oppression but also a solution. They echoed Engels’ call for women to achieve economic independence from men by re-entering the sphere of productive labor, and argued for feminism as a necessary complement to Marxism, since both theories recognized the overthrow of private property as the necessary condition of human emancipation.

  For Firestone, however, this was a necessary but not a sufficient condition: it was required, but on its own it would not be enough. For her, Engels had not inquired sufficiently deeply into the material realities of how human beings sustain life. ‘There is a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic that Engels at times dimly perceives,’ she writes, ‘but because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate it in its own right’ (6). We might wonder if this is quite fair, since, as we have seen, Engels does make sexual reproduction a key part of his analysis. But Firestone’s point is that this is so only at the point that there is surplus production and therefore wealth to be inherited. Prior to that, questions of pregnancy, birth and childrearing do not appear to him to have been salient. Indeed, he does not consider them to have mattered for gender equality, claiming that while women have always taken predominant responsibility for children, under primitive communism this division of labor did not entail inequality (reproduction being no less valued than production during this economic phase). It is this view that Firestone finds untenable. For her, the different reproductive functions of women and men have always resulted in a division of labor that, since it entails a power imbalance, therefore generates domination. Thus, even in the primitive stages of human history, women constituted an exploited class. If Engels cannot see this it is because he ‘acknowledged the sexual class system only where it overlapped and illuminated his economic construct’ (7).

  Like other radical feminists, then, Firestone sees Engels’ understanding as fundamentally limited by his adoption of economics as the lens through which to view all aspects of life. She therefore rejects his supposition of an historical origin to gender inequality, holding that instead, since reproductive biology has always been the way it is, women have always been oppressed.

  Ahistorical Firestone?

  This is the major claim that has led to Firestone being criticized for being dehistoricizing in her analysis. Firestone, so the argument goes, takes features of her own society – the nuclear family, patriarchal relationships – and projects these back upon the past. In so doing, she fails to appreciate how human relationships are historically varying: how, for example, women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth are different under different social arrangements.32

  Is this a problem for Firestone? This is something that the reader should consider. To aid that reflection, however, there are two aspects of Firestone’s theory that must be clarified.

  The first is that in her own terms Firestone’s work is absolutely not ahistorical. Rather, she aim
s to show that the social unit within which reproduction takes place has changed; that these changes have gone hand-in-hand with changes in production; and that it is reproduction and production together that have been the drivers of history. The biological family is not the nuclear family. The former is something like the biological unit of male sperm-giver and female ovary/womb-provider and genetic offspring: this unit has remained unchanged throughout history (until, potentially, now). The latter, however, is just one form that the social institutionalization of this biological unit might take: married, (supposedly) monogamous parents with the father as head of the household and children in a position of legal minority. And this form of the biological family is historically fairly recent.

  The second necessary clarification is that Firestone is, however, committed to the view that beneath this historical variation certain ‘contingencies’ (10) have always been at work: that women have always been rendered less powerful than men through their role in reproduction. She is therefore not claiming that all societies have been male-dominated in exactly the same way. But she is claiming that all societies of which we have knowledge have evidenced some form of male domination (she includes matriarchies in this). And she is claiming that the reason this is so is that the biological family itself is characterized by power imbalance, which imbalance is then transmitted in some form or another to whatever social form the reproductive unit then takes. The nuclear family does, however, have a certain privilege in Firestone’s analysis, in that it particularly reveals – by intensifying – the inequality of the biological family itself.33

  Indeed, Firestone appropriates Marx in her attempt to outline an historical framework for understanding reproduction and the social injustice it leads to. She praises Marx for seeing how history evolves as a dialectical process, in which forces to do with how human beings maintain life in the face of particular environmental conditions, act and react upon one another. This materialist emphasis gives his account a scientific status that, she believes, is missing from earlier pre-Marxist socialisms and from the feminisms of her time. She aims, however, to offer an analysis that is more materialistic than Marxism. Where Marx and Engels see culture as being driven by economics (production), Firestone posits a material determinant beneath even this, and that is biology itself (reproduction). The penultimate chapter of her book offers a two-page diagram in which she maps out the progress of human history, showing how cultural forms and achievements have correlated with particular phases of production, and these in turn with different forms of social organization of the biological unit of the family. It is a schema that stretches, however, beyond a history of the past and the present, and into the periods of ‘revolution,’ ‘transition’ and ‘ultimate goal’ that she projects for the future (172–3).

  Revolution

  This revolution too is a modification of the Marxist schema. Where Marx and Engels posited that the proletariat must realize their oppressed condition and revolt against the ruling class by taking control of the means of production, Firestone amends this in her own distinctive terms. For her, any revolution that is a revolution of production alone and not also of reproduction will have failed to uproot the ultimate source of the problem. In common with many other radical feminists, she argued that the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century had failed because they did not ‘eliminate the family and sexual repression’ (190). Any revolution that leaves intact the basic structure of the family will see ‘any initial liberation’ quickly ‘revert back to repression’ (190), for the biological family is the ‘tapeworm of exploitation’ (12).

  Instead, a revolution of production must go hand-in-hand with a revolution in reproduction, which would consist of women taking direct control of the means of reproduction through reproductive technologies. Just as Marx believed that only a particular historical juncture would make possible a successful communist revolution (industry must have progressed to the point where nature can be made to yield the resources needed for all), so Firestone believes that a feminist revolution can happen only now, at the stage of technological development witnessed by the advanced capitalist societies of modernity. These have delivered first of all reliable and safe contraception and abortion, and are on the cusp, she thinks, of a technological innovation that could liberate women altogether from the burden of the biological reproduction of the species.

  TFTFY

  Firestone’s first chapter finishes with a literal rewriting of Engels.

  She has quoted earlier his definition of historical materialism from his book, Socialism: Utopian or Scientific:

  Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes of the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. (5)

  She now represents this ‘strictly economic definition’ (5) in a form corrected in light of her own thesis that it is biology and not economics that is the material stratum of history:

  Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and child care created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically-differentiated classes [castes]; and in the first division of labor based on sex which developed into the [economical-cultural] class system. (Words in square brackets are in Firestone’s original.) (12)

  It is a tactic of quoting and editing that is now familiar in the age of Internet forums – TFTFY: There Fixed That For You. Firestone has now laid out the full scope of her ambition, which is for a feminist incorporation of Marxism that, rather than rejecting its conclusions, will see these as being true within a limited field of application, rather as (she somewhat grandiosely says) ‘the physics of relativity did not invalidate Newtonian physics so much as it drew a circle around it’ (7). This is therefore also an incorporation of socialist feminism within radical feminism.

  Firestone’s biologism?

  What is quite distinctive about Firestone is that she supplies a materialist explanation for the apparent ubiquity of male domination. In so doing, she demystifies it. She explains it in a manner that in no way justifies it or sees it as immutable. She says that male domination is a result of how women’s ability to take part in wider social life has, historically, been severely curtailed by their role in reproduction. And she says that this is something that can be changed.

  Firestone is therefore claiming that there is a biological component to something that other feminists have taken to be purely cultural. For this, she has been criticized for biologism, or biological determinism. Donna Haraway, for example, has charged Firestone with making ‘the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects’; which mistake – Haraway thinks – then leads Firestone into a dangerously reckless championing of technological control over nature (see Chapter 7 for more on this).34 Michelle Barrett has also worried that Firestone’s account falls into ‘biologistic assumptions,’ wondering whether ‘“feminist biologism”’ can escape the problems of other biologisms – such as suggesting that there is little hope for change.35

  But for Firestone, precisely the point is that without attributing biology some causal role, the ubiquity of male domination remains unexplained. And, I would add, because it is unexplained it precisely is therefore mystified. There is no accounting for why it should be the case that all societies (or even, if one wants to argue for exceptions, most societies) are, and have been, male-dominated. And precisely because there is no explanation, this phenomenon becomes available to other explanations that do seek to claim the correctness and immutability of male rule: to propose, for example, that it i
s the consequence of an innate male superiority.

  Interrogating Firestone

  My question for the reader is whether Firestone’s explanation of the emergence of male domination is plausible. To count as plausible, it does not need to be capable of proof beyond doubt. It does need, however, to account for all relevant observable facts, to offer conclusions that follow logically from its premises and to be without internal contradiction.

  What might be weaknesses in her argument? We have seen that it relies upon particular steps in its etiology of oppression. The first is the claim that bearing children makes women dependent upon men, to the extent that men are required to supply resources such as food and shelter. I think Firestone should be interpreted as making a fundamentally historical argument here: that this was the case, in the past, when fertile women were in an almost constant cycle of pregnancy, birth and nursing, and in which this inevitably limited their capacity to participate in production on equal terms with men. Is this a reasonable supposition? Are there grounds on which it might be contested? The second step is the claim that this dependency then leads to the development of particular psychological formations: men, experiencing the dependence of women on them, seek to reinforce the power that this gives them, and to extend it to other men as well. For me, this is perhaps the more vulnerable of the two argumentative moves. Why might men not have responded to women’s reliance on them with tenderness or compassion? Why might they not have recognized their own reciprocal dependence upon women, for the bearing and raising of their children? Is Firestone here relying upon an implicit claim that there is only one kind of likely response to the dependency of women and children: that having power, men get used to having power? How secure is this supposition? And is it a claim about how each and every individual man might respond? Or is it a claim about the kind of culture – the set of general assumptions, attitudes and values – that might develop under such conditions?