Judy,
You have on more than one occasion admitted to a lack of familiarity with
marxist literature. Your statement:
>class analysis . . . does not adequately address the
> conditions of women then or now, and that women's relations to men --
gender
> relations -- are also 'objective' and demand analysis --- but on what
terms?
is a good example of this. But both Marx and Engels were among the first to
consistently address "the subjugation of women" and considered the sexual
division of labor, with its distinction bewtween a public world of men's
work and a private world of women's household service, to be the first
instance of class society. Eleanor Burke Leacock's 1972 introduction to
Engel's "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" contains a
section titled: "The Emergence of Monogamy and the Subjugation of Women"
from which the following passage is taken:
"The signficiant characteristic of monogamous marriage was its
transformation of the nuclear family into the basic economic unit of society
within which a woman and her children became dependent upon an individual
man. Arising in conjunction with exploitative class relations, this
transformation resulted in the oppression of women that has persisted to the
present day."
Admittedly, Leacock's essay is an "old" source. At the time she wrote there
were few or no courses or academic programs devoted to women's studies in
American higher education. That in itself should say something and perhaps
might lead you to look a little more deeply into the matter. In 1881
Frederick Engels wrote: "the peculiar character of the supremacy of the
husband over the wife in the modern family . . . will only be seen in the
clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights"
but at the same time he understood that these legal rights would never serve
to gain full equality anymore than the legal rights of workers has helped
transform the conditions of their ongoing oppression.
Leacock also noted in 1972 that "The self-declared women's movement in this
country has historically been middle class and largely oriented toward a
fight for the same options as middle-class men within the system, while the
struggles of working class women have not been conceived as fights for
women's liberation as such." From everything I've seen during these
intervening 28 years, not much has been accomplished on that front -- a
testimony also frequently heard from Asian, African, and Latin American
women at international women's conferences.
The point being, as it should be very clear, that the particular interests
of any subjugated group cannot represent the interests of all subjugated
groups in capitalist society; the only appropriate framework for a social
transformation that might resolve all the specific instances is found in
class analysis. This is not to say that women or subjugated minorities
don't have their own particular, separate issues, but that those
particularities are not the essential basis of oppression in capitalist
society or the basis for any true liberation.
Paul H. Dillon
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