Neglected or Misunderstood Page 8
Equally problematic, however, is that the claim that sexism is causative of racism establishes sexism as the more urgent oppression to be addressed. Firestone nowhere says this directly, and yet it is clearly implied, since the cause-and-effect model proposes sexism as fundamental and racism as only a symptom. The assumption of many white feminists in the 1970s that sexism took priority over racism in the emancipatory struggle may be considered an aspect of what African American feminist bell hooks has argued was a widespread, albeit sometimes unwitting, racism of the women’s liberation movement itself.48 She argues that many African American women experienced racism as being an equal if not greater force of oppression in their lives than was sexism, and that white feminists’ neglect or merely token acknowledgment of this contributed to large numbers of black women becoming alienated from a feminist movement they had initially welcomed.
Unlike many other white feminists of the period, Firestone does at least attempt a substantial analysis of racism. And it is one that tries to think sexism and racism together, as interlocking oppressions: she writes that ‘sex and racism are intricately interwoven’ (95). In some respects, this might seem to foreshadow later theorizations of intersectionality, according to which systems of domination overlap and are mutually constituting, reflecting how identity itself is constructed at the juncture of different categorizations (so a US black woman experiences a racialized form of sexism, and a sexualized form of racism, for example). Theorists of intersectionality, however, do not posit one oppression as the bedrock of the others. That Firestone does, produces at least some of the profound problems with her account.
With Firestone, “sexism,” or perhaps more precisely, “the sexism of the biological family,” is elevated to a position where it is deemed to be the primary determinant of manifold social ills. It is a form of theoretical overreaching that sometimes produces reductive analyses in her text, and this is nowhere more evident than in her attempt to fit the complexities of American race relations into her rewritten Oedipal drama. It is an analysis that completely occludes, for example, the historical conditions of late-twentieth-century American racism in plantation slavery and its ongoing material and ideological effects. And the suggestion that “childhood” is the most useful lens through which to understand black American lives produces – however inadvertently – the very infantilization of black people that has been a key feature of racist ideology since slavery. As Spillers notes, ‘the parental possibility does not even exist for her black characters, is not even imaginable.’
Interrogating Firestone: is the family inevitably oppressive?
Earlier in this chapter I argued that Firestone illuminates the damage wrought by patriarchal family structures: by families predicated on domination, and on the particular inferiority of adult women and of girls. But is Firestone correct in supposing that this is the character of all families that consist of the unit mother/father/child? Is it the character of nuclear families today, when the very success of second wave feminist ideas has significantly transformed that unit, with many mothers also having paid jobs, and fathers being more involved in childcare than ever before? Was it even the case in Firestone’s day that all nuclear families were of this type – or was she describing only a particularly authoritarian and traditional version of the family?
The critique of the family is, for bell hooks, another aspect of white feminism that has alienated black American women. Black women, she argues, were likely to experience the family as being a site of resistance against racism, as much as, or more so, than as a site of gendered oppression.49 For her, the white feminist identification of the family as the chief site of a woman’s oppression was therefore yet one more example of false universalization, wherein white feminists falsely projected their specific experiences and interests as being the experiences and interests of all women. The British historian, Carolyn Steedman, has written of her childhood discovery that in the social world her working-class father was neither powerful nor respected – was not a patriarch.50 She argues that feminist accounts of the family and family psychology that proceed from middle class experience need to reckon with what happens beyond that experiential base – when, for example, the father’s authoritative status is not underwritten but instead undermined by the outside world.
The problem of a possible ahistoricism about Firestone’s work resurfaces here. She accuses Freud, as we have seen, of universalizing: of thinking that neurosis must be inevitable, because he failed to see that the problem was the family, and that the family was not an immutable structure. But is Firestone herself guilty of universalizing? Is she taking just one form that the family can take – an authoritarian form, and one in which the father’s status is validated by wider society – and imagining this to be the form that it always takes? Is she, as Assiter and Barrett have argued, downplaying the role of the social and historical context in shaping what the family is?
To repeat: Firestone thinks not. Her argument is that the biological family itself is based upon an unequal distribution of power, and therefore that in whatever form this family becomes socially institutionalized, it will inherit this fundamental inequality, and express it to some degree or another.
And this takes us to the nub of the matter. It is because Firestone thinks this that she also thinks that the only solution to women’s oppression is to dismantle the family itself, by undoing the biological unit upon which it is based.
But is she right? Once again, this turns out to be a question with many parts. It is possible that Firestone is right in her critique of at least one form that the nuclear family can take – the authoritarian, patriarchal, variety; but wrong that this is the character of all nuclear families. It is also possible that she is right in her critique of the family (of some or all forms of it); but wrong in her historical account of how women’s oppression originated. And it is possible that she is right in her account of how women’s oppression originated, but wrong in thinking that the only solution to a biologically caused problem is the eradication of that biology.
In Chapter 8 we shall explore her proposals for dismantling the biological family, and for its replacement by a radical alternative unit for the raising of children. But first, we must consider the issues raised by her championing of technology as a means of overcoming the problems she attributes to biology.
7
The 1984 Trope
We are all familiar with the details of Brave New World: cold collectives, with individualism abolished, sex reduced to a mechanical act, children become robots, Big Brother intruding into every aspect of private life, rows of babies fed by impersonal machines, eugenics manipulated by the state … all emotion considered weakness, love destroyed, and so on.
(Firestone, p.188)
Firestone knows that part of the resistance to her proposals will result from the ‘“1984”’ trope – the widespread cultural theme according to which any future technological society must be a dehumanized, dystopian, one (188). This fear of a technologized future is not unreasonable, she suggests, since it responds to the direction that technology has taken in the current male-dominated culture. But for her it is vitally important to distinguish between technology per se, and the particular uses to which technology may be put. In her analysis, the political Left’s uncritical acceptance of the 1984 trope means that it has failed to make such a distinction. The result of this failure is the Left’s adoption of an anti-technology, pro-nature stance that leaves the Left grievously ill-equipped to tackle either the oppression of women or the looming crisis of global over-population.
She therefore does not deny that there are particular uses of technology that are destructive: indeed, she lambasts the way that these and other technologies have been put to use to entrench forms of oppression. In terms of production, she gives the example of the conditions of modern factory work. In terms of reproduction, she cites the eagerness of the US government to dispense birth control to poor and African American women, and to women of the so-ca
lled “Third World,” as a form of population control. But the purport of her discussion is to show that these are examples of the misuse of technologies that could be, and should be, used to further the cause of human emancipation.
Exactly what claim is being made here? One possibility is that Firestone is simply insisting on a distinction between the particular uses to which any technology is put and the potential that it may have for other kinds of usage. This seems perfectly fine. Sterilization, for example, has been used in coercive and abusive ways: as it was for many years in the US when between 100,000 and 150,000 low income women were sterilized annually under federally funded programs, with many of those forced into accepting the procedure through threats to remove their welfare benefits.51 But this does not mean that sterilization can’t be used in beneficial ways, to enable a woman or man to enjoy a sex-life without fear of unwanted pregnancy or the inconvenience of contraception. Firestone, however, often seems to want to say more than this: to say that a particular technology or perhaps even technology in general is intrinsically liberatory; that it is liberatory in itself. She explicitly avows this in the case of a range of particular technologies that were highly controversial when she was writing: ‘atomic energy, fertility control, artificial reproduction, cybernation, in themselves, are liberating – unless they are improperly used’ (179; the first and third set of italics are mine).
Is this idea about intrinsically liberating technology sustainable? Perhaps it is in a purely technical sense. Firestone’s very definition of technology is that it is the ‘accumulation of skills for controlling the environment [which enables] the realization of the conceivable in the possible’ (155). In other words, human beings encounter a natural world that operates entirely indifferently to their needs, interests and goals, often to the detriment of human welfare. Technology, however, frees us from the necessity of these natural processes; it gives us the capacity to intervene into them not only to minimize their harmful effects, but also to harness their powers in order to achieve certain “goods” that we have conceived. In a strictly non-normative (descriptive, value-free) sense of “allowing for the breaking of natural patterns,” technology can then perhaps be said to be “liberating.” Firestone, however, seems precisely to mean “liberating” in the normative sense of “freeing people from oppression”: technology in this account is therefore a “good” in itself. When she writes of technology being misused in order to harm, abuse, or oppress, she therefore tends to characterize such usages as being perversions of what technology essentially or properly is. This use, I think, is more difficult to defend (although it might have benefits as political rhetoric). Clearly, technology can be just as easily used to further as to combat oppression, so to suggest that it is intrinsically “liberating,” in this normative sense, seems to be a matter of smuggling one’s views about what ought to be the case into a purportedly objective description.
But if this is a problem with Firestone’s treatment of technology, it is one that is easily addressed. Perhaps Firestone need only to have said that technology is potentially liberating, or can potentially be employed in the struggle against oppression. That, surely, is indisputable; and it is already implied in her distinction between a technology itself and the particular uses to which it is put. Firestone’s affirmation of the potential of technology is, I think, an enormously valuable intervention into a form of 1960s politics that, confronted with technological horrors such as the nuclear threat, was perhaps too keen to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall present a – qualified – defense of Firestone’s position on technology by reading her work as an early example of feminist critique of science.
Two cultures
In her ambitious chapter, ‘Dialectics of Cultural History,’ Firestone analyses examples of misuse of technology as the consequence of the way that science and technology have been shaped within a male-dominated culture. Drawing upon C. P. Snow’s influential Two Cultures formulation (from his 1959 Rede lecture, and then developed into a book) she argues that it is indeed the case that a schism has been created between science and the humanities, such that the two fields have become so separate as to constitute independent cultures virtually ‘incomprehensible to each other’ (154). For her, however, this is in turn an effect of a much deeper schism within human culture – that which is created by the sex dualism itself and the distortions in male and female psychology that arise as culture reinforces a biological inequality.
In actuality, she suggests, technological science and artistic creation ought to be compatible: they have shared origins as aspects of ‘culture,’ which she defines as ‘the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible’ (154). Uniquely among animals, human beings are able to ‘project mentally states of being that do not exist at the moment’ and thus are capable of experiencing a tension between the world as it is and the world as they would like it to be (154). Art and technology are both attempts at resolving this tension: art is the practice of imagining ‘objects and states of being’ that do not currently exist and rendering them through forms of representation (visual, linguistic, etc.); while technology is the accumulation of knowledge and skills in relation to manipulating the physical environment, in order to create such objects in reality (154). There therefore exists a dialectic between art and technology, where art anticipates in fantasy what technology is only subsequently able to produce in reality (her example is the moon landing), but where technology itself often first suggests new directions for the artistic imagination. These two modes, however (the Aesthetic and the Technological), correspond closely to female and male behaviors as they have developed in a male-dominated society; the Aesthetic Mode requires intuitiveness, introversion and dreaminess while the Technological requires a rational, objective, pragmatic response. The realm of science and technology has therefore become the almost exclusive domain of men (in contrast, women are represented in the fields of artistic production, although they are outnumbered by men and subjected to male aesthetic standards). In consequence, the familiar ‘catalogue of scientific vices … duplicates, exaggerates, the catalogue of “male” vices in general,’ since ‘if the technological mode develops from the male principle then it follows that its practitioners would develop the warpings of the male personality in the extreme’ (165). The current scientific culture of empiricism (which seeks the ‘total understanding of Nature’ (163)) is, as such, beset by internal contradictions. The scientist is obliged to suppress all feelings (about the impact of his discoveries, or the suffering of his experimental subjects) and to pursue scientific discovery for its own sake. Technology thus takes on ‘a life of its own’ – resulting in such horrors as the atomic bomb (163). The problem is that science and technology have been alienated from what for Firestone is their true goal – that of the improvement of life for (all) humanity.
Firestone’s pro-science and pro-technology stance was another aspect of her thought that set her at odds with many other feminist activists at the time. It contradicted the calls prevalent within the counter culture for a “return to nature,” and women had good reason to be critical of a scientific tradition that for centuries had not only excluded women from its ranks but had often also colluded in their oppression. (Victorian scientists, for example, never stopped expostulating about the female biological weaknesses that required men chivalrously to protect women from burdens they could not bear – such as voting or owning property.) On this view, Firestone’s embrace of the masculine domain of science can appear as an aspect of her alleged male-identification (see Chapter 5’s discussion of pregnancy).
Her views on technology have also been criticized subsequently, by those for whom she evinces a form of technological determinism. Mary O’Brien, for example, suggests that readers ‘might well feel some misgivings about Firestone’s rather naive reliance on technology,’ questioning why mechanized reproduction should be expected to be liberating when mechanized production has contributed to
domination and alienation.52 Donna Haraway fears that in positing nature as the ‘enemy,’ Firestone ‘prepare[s] for the logic of the domination of technology – the total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future.’53 These and other similar criticisms vary in their emphases, but they tend to propose that Firestone shows an unwarranted optimism about the emancipatory potential of technology; and even that she risks encouraging a kind of political quietism by suggesting that we can stand back and calmly have faith in technology’s unfolding towards our liberation.
For me, however, this accusation misses its mark. As Sarah Franklin and other more recent commentators have argued, Firestone is not the naive champion of technology that she is sometimes taken to be, but a thoughtful critic of how a practice that has the potential to contribute to human freedom gets made into its opposite.54 She is in no way suggesting that we can somehow leave it to technology to put things right. Instead, she is very clear that feminist agency is needed, and that it must take the form of women gaining direct control over reproductive technologies. In her analysis, Orwellian 1984 scenarios threaten only when “male” attitudes to science are given free rein.