Neglected or Misunderstood Page 5

  As I proposed in the Introduction, one must separate out Firestone’s explanation (of the cause of women’s oppression) from her proposed solution. Even if is she is right that pregnancy and childbirth lie at the origins of women’s oppression, is she therefore right that removing this oppression requires a transformation in biology?

  To better understand Firestone’s objections to pregnancy and childbirth, we will turn now to her engagement with Simone de Beauvoir.

  5

  Like Shitting a Pumpkin

  Let me then say it bluntly: Pregnancy is barbaric.

  (Firestone, p.180)

  These words occur in the final chapter, where Firestone is discussing the need to ‘free humanity from the tyranny of its biology’ (175). She is writing in frustration at what she sees as the Left’s failure to perceive the urgency of developing reproductive technologies that will not only liberate women from the bondage of traditional reproduction but will also enable the species to avert ecological disaster through over-population (a prominent concern in the late 1960s, and one that is woven throughout Firestone’s text). She notes approvingly the existence of artificial insemination and inovulation, comments acerbically that male as well as female oral contraception might be a reality were not male scientists such worshippers of male fertility, and looks forward to test-tube fertilization, sex selection, and the development of artificial placentas that could support a fetus through to viability. In advancing this program of controlled, artificial, reproduction, she understands that she is confronting a powerful set of cultural fears and taboos. Not least of the resistance will come, she knows, from within the WLM itself, where ‘many women … are afraid to express any interest in [reproductive technologies] for fear of confirming the suspicion that they are “unnatural”’ (180).

  We therefore return to one of the text’s dominant themes: that the “natural” is not a human value. For Firestone, that “nature” is frequently barbaric and something that human beings would do well to escape is never more evident than in the case of pregnancy and childbirth. Much of her objection has to do with the facts of physical suffering and pain. ‘[C]hildbirth hurts,’ she writes, ‘and it isn’t good for you’ (181). If The Dialectic of Sex is mostly remembered today for one other thing besides its proposal for artificial wombs, it is its (in)famous description of childbirth as being ‘Like shitting a pumpkin’ (181). Firestone tells us that this was related to her by a friend who is a mother. She then imagines a conversation continuing between this friend and what she calls the School of the Great-Experience-You’re-Missing: ‘What’s-wrong-with-a-little-pain-as-long-it-doesn’t-kill-you?’ retorts the School, obviously not envisaging that any satisfactory insistence on there being something wrong is possible (181). But the problem, as Firestone will insist, is that it is not a matter of just a little pain, and it not infrequently does kill you. In the distant past, she writes, childbirth involved both agony and risk to life; and this was explicitly recognized – and women were ‘admired in a limited way’ for enduring it (181). But in modern societies a ‘mystification of childbirth’ has taken hold, according to which its physical consequences are shrouded in sentiment, and women are obliged to adopt ‘proper’ attitudes – ‘as in, “I didn’t scream once”’ (181).

  Firestone is here taking aim at a dominant tendency of the counter culture to romanticize “nature” and an earlier, supposedly more primitive, simpler and more harmonious way of life. ‘Natural childbirth,’ she writes, ‘is only one more part of the reactionary hippie-Rousseauean Return-to-Nature, and just as self-conscious’ (181). In 1969, the same year that Firestone wrote these words, British novelist Angela Carter would publish her post-apocalyptic novel, Heroes and Villains, in which a renegade professor (modeled on Timothy Leary) reigns over a tribe of ‘barbarians’ whom he has fashioned after his reading of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Firestone’s point seems to be much like Carter’s – that ideas about the innocence of man in his natural state are dangerous fantasies; that the Nature that is to be Returned To is a misleading intellectual fabrication drawn up according to the demands of a philosophical or ideological system; and that the desire to replace complexity with simplicity tends towards authoritarianism.

  But Firestone is also writing against a tendency within the WLM itself, and one that will become more dominant as the 1970s progress, to celebrate the facts of sexual difference, and in particular, the biological processes of pregnancy and childbirth (on which, more shortly). She states that she cannot accept the view of many of her fellow feminists that pregnancy is beautiful; that, if it is not widely seen as such, this is only because of the distorting lens that patriarchal values bring to our perceptions. In a somewhat curious passage (curious not least for its apparent valorization of natural reactions over learned responses) she writes:

  The child’s first response, “What’s wrong with that Fat Lady?”; the husband’s guilty waning of sexual desire; the woman’s tears in front of the mirror at eight months – are all gut reactions, not to be dismissed as cultural habits. (180)

  Evidently, the issue here is not simply the pain and danger of childbirth, but the suggestion that an intuitive and almost aesthetic aversion to the pregnant body shared by men, women and children alike is revealing of something fundamentally important. Things are clarified in the next sentence, which is key to Firestone’s thesis in several ways: ‘Pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species’ (180).

  The influence of Simone de Beauvoir

  Firestone is here drawing heavily upon Simone de Beauvoir (to whom the Dialectic is dedicated) and her account of female embodiment in The Second Sex (1949). Beauvoir’s book is a landmark text of the feminist tradition, and Firestone was not alone among second wave feminists in crediting it as a major source of inspiration. Beauvoir argues that women in contemporary society are secondary beings – creatures who are in actuality inferior to men, who are defined through their relationships with men (fathers, lovers, husbands) and who allow men to establish for them their roles in life. But she also argues that this condition – femininity – is neither essential nor innate: it is not the “nature of women.” ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,’ wrote Beauvoir in her famous formulation, meaning that anatomical females are induced to assume femininity through a process of social conditioning that starts from infancy.36 And crucially for Beauvoir, this becoming-woman is not determined. Beauvoir was bringing to bear upon her analysis of the situation of women the existentialist philosophical framework of her friend and intellectual collaborator, Jean-Paul Sartre. According to this, whatever the concrete circumstances into which human beings are born, they retain a freedom to think, feel and act according to goals and values that they establish for themselves. She thus argued that whatever the pressures exerted upon women to assume femininity (inferiority) these could not have the force of necessity: women retained the capacity to resist such conditioning and to assert themselves as full human beings on an equal footing with men. The Second Sex was a rallying call for women to do just that.

  Much of Beauvoir’s account of women’s biological being occurs in an early part of the (800 page) book, where she is trying to show that neither biological, economic nor psychological factors can causally determine women’s social condition. It is therefore designed to show that nothing about a woman’s physical makeup makes it inevitable that she should be subordinated to men. It is a discussion that was to prove deeply controversial, and its bearing on Firestone’s ideas makes it worth exploring in some detail.

  The purport of Beauvoir’s account is that their reproductive functions make women the ‘victim of the species’ (52). The basic idea is that there exists a conflict between the needs of the particular individual and the needs of the species to which they belong. Evolution has it that the species needs the individual to procreate; but this may come at a cost to the individual themselves, either in terms of physical health, or, in th
e case of human beings, in terms of interfering with their life goals. The individual cost of species perpetuation is not, however, borne equally by men and women. Beauvoir’s judgment is stark: women are sacrificed in this conflict by their biologies; a woman’s reproductive system afflicts her as a series of crises which work against her individual interests at almost every stage of life.

  She proceeds to prove this by cataloguing the physical and emotional ailments associated with menarche, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and menopause. Periods are ‘a burden, and a useless one from the point of view of the individual’ (60). Of fertilization, she writes, ‘First violated, the female is then alienated – she becomes, in part, another than herself’ (54). She consistently depicts the growing embryo as a parasitic and alien presence that drains the woman of vital nutrients and strength (‘gestation is a fatiguing task of no individual benefit to the woman’) and understands miscarriage and morning sickness as more or less successful rebellions against ‘the invading species’ (62). She emphasizes the ‘serious accidents or at least dangerous disorders [that frequently] mark the course of pregnancy’; on childbirth, she observes that ‘the infant … in being born … may kill its mother or leave her with a chronic ailment’; and describes breastfeeding as a ‘tiring service’ in which the ‘mother feeds the newborn from the resources of her own vitality’ (62–3). Beauvoir’s point throughout this discussion is to establish that in enduring the trials of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding a woman’s body almost ceases to be her own: it is hijacked by the species for the assertion of its own claims. The words she uses most frequently to describe a woman’s role in reproduction are violation and alienation – expressing on the one hand a sense of the rupturing of bodily integrity, and on the other the estrangement or expropriation of one’s body from oneself.

  When Firestone writes that pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species she is surely channeling Beauvoir. To deform is to make misshapen. Neither Firestone nor Beauvoir can see the pregnant body as just one form that a woman’s body may take, and they certainly cannot see it in a positive light. Instead, it has about it the character of distortion and aberration: its meaning is that the woman has fallen victim to the species.

  But there are also crucial differences between Beauvoir and Firestone. Beauvoir never goes so far as to propose that reproduction could or should be removed from women’s bodies. One might suggest that a reason for this is the different historical moments in which the two texts are written: Firestone’s was produced during a period of accelerated development in reproductive technologies, which perhaps allowed such a radical solution to become conceivable in a way that it hadn’t been 20 years previously. But there are theoretical differences that also have a bearing.

  Beauvoir, as I said earlier, holds that none of these facts about a woman’s embodiment determine her to become inferior. They are not the cause of her oppressed condition. This might seem a surprising conclusion, so rhetorically powerful is the litany of female ills that she provides. But Beauvoir is able, or perhaps compelled, to argue this because of the existentialist position she adopts in relation to the facts of biology. Biological facts, for her, do not have intrinsic value. That is to say that the meaning of any particular fact of biology is not contained within the fact itself, but is dependent upon the context within which the fact appears – and that context is irrevocably at least in part the outcome of human decisions and goals. For example, it may be a physiological fact that women on average have less muscular strength than men, but in a society where ‘violence is contrary to custom’ (67) this will have no significance and will not be to women’s disadvantage. She makes exactly the same argument in relation to women’s reproductive biology, claiming that ‘The bearing of maternity upon the individual life … is not definitely prescribed in woman – society alone is the arbiter … [and] individual “possibilities” depend upon the economic and social situation’ (67). Societies can choose to lessen the burden of reproduction on women by demanding fewer births and by providing better medical care during and after pregnancy and childbirth.

  Firestone would of course agree that this should be so, but for her such measures will almost certainly be insufficient. For Firestone, contra Beauvoir, the value really does reside within the fact. For her, the fact that it is the woman’s body and not the man’s that must bear the burden of reproduction does deterministically set up a power hierarchy and as such it is the fact itself that must be altered. In the Dialectic’s opening chapter she warmly praises Beauvoir for being ‘the only one who came close to … the definitive analysis’ of women’s oppressed condition and for recognizing that economics could not be the explanation (7). But claiming that ‘sex class sprang directly from a biological reality,’ she goes on to write that:

  Although, as De Beauvoir points out, this difference [biological difference between men and women] of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system – the domination of one group by another – the reproductive functions of these differences did. The biological family is an inherently unequal power distribution. (8)

  For Firestone, then, men’s and women’s different reproductive functions, rooted in biology, necessitate domination, and the biological family is inherently unequal. Biology is causal; it is therefore the explanation. She will not accept Beauvoir’s own ultimate explanation of female oppression, which is that women have elected to accept their Othering by men because it procures certain compensations for them: the economic compensation of having their living provided, and more importantly the existential one of having men determine for them their goals and values (a flight from the absolute freedom that on an existentialist account is commonly experienced as anxiety and burden). Indeed, Firestone views the Hegelian concept of Otherness on which Beauvoir’s explanation depends as just one more obfuscating philosophical category whose emergence must itself be explained through a materialist analysis that starts with sex and reproduction, and she considers The Second Sex’s reliance on its existentialist framework to be the book’s weakness (as have many subsequent feminist commentators). For Firestone, since it really is biological reproduction that is the cause of women’s oppression, it is biological reproduction that must be changed.

  Abjecting the pregnant body?

  Neither Firestone nor Beauvoir can see anything positive about a woman’s role in reproduction. Although Beauvoir does not agree that women’s reproductive role is ultimately causative of their oppression, she does admit it to be a serious limiting factor in a woman’s life and the best she can say of it is that its deleterious effects can be ameliorated through social and economic choices. But is either thinker justified in construing pregnancy and childbirth in such deeply negative terms?

  A charge frequently made against both Beauvoir and Firestone is that they are viewing pregnancy and childbirth from a patriarchal perspective. Indeed, a persistent criticism that has been made of The Second Sex is that many of its arguments proceed from an identification with masculine values and culture. Something that is frequently advanced as evidence of this is Beauvoir’s view of mothering (the raising, rather than the bearing of children). She says explicitly that mothering is not a project – the existentialist term for those human actions that are undertaken with the conscious design of bringing about substantial change, of opening up a new future. It is instead about stagnation and repetition – the maintenance of the species – and as such is mere animal activity. It lacks the creative import of those acts by which the existential hero transcends the given conditions of his existence (among which Beauvoir controversially includes acts of killing and war). Here and elsewhere Beauvoir – or so critics have argued – values activities associated with men, and sees little value in those behaviors or qualities that have been traditionally the preserve of women. Her vision of equality is one in which women would become more like men. It is a charge that has ironically led to the author of one of th
e founding texts of feminism being accused of misogyny.

  Much of Beauvoir’s characterization of female biology is certainly very contestable. She is keen to establish, for example, that the existential meaning of sexual intercourse is different for men and women. Men, she thinks, discover a sense of their power over the world through penetration and thus intercourse is for them an affirmation of their individuality and autonomy. For women, however, penetration (even when desired) means submission and violation: ‘In this penetration her inwardness is violated, she is like an enclosure that is broken into … Her body becomes, therefore, a resistance to be broken through’ (53). Although such descriptions occur in a chapter entitled ‘The Data of Biology,’ suggesting objective, neutral description, they are disturbingly reminiscent of certain fantasies that structure male-authored pornography. And she seems in this discussion to have forgotten her own existentialist insistence that the value of a biological fact is not intrinsic to it: for Beauvoir, female embodiment hinders women from achieving their goals. Different social circumstances might enhance or diminish this effect but there is no circumstance in which the meaning of their biology is not limitation.