Originally posted by
[email protected] 28, 2007 09:42 am
So far I have recognized the most obvious - the media and other elements of popular culture which characterise women as being permanantly in a submissive role and establish how they should present themselves (in terms of physical appearence) to the opposite sex.
Children could also learn gender roles simply from an observation of the internal structure and power dynamics of the family unit in which they develop - which of their parents is most important in caring for children and performing domestic labour. Even things we may consider trivial - such as the clothing that parents dress their children in and the toys they are given to play with - are important in establishing the idea that we have to behave and appear a certain way that is fitting for our sex.
That might appear 'obvious' but only because we live in a capitalist society so we're inundated with bourgeois ideology that attributes causality to extremely superficial super-structual phenomenon like the media, rather than the reality of it as a structural, economic based construct.
Marxist feminism (i wont use the phrase 'socialist feminism' because its broader than this and less specific) is the application of historical materialism and cultural materialism to gender roles.
Just like in the economy in general, ones political and social consciousness and ideology is largely a product of ones labour (not just productive labour as in the case of proletariat but work and activity in genera), and how this is related to the economy (termed 'relations of production').
From a Marxist perspective, gender roles are neither arbitrary nor are they biologically innate, but rather they follow from the division of labour in the patriarchal family along gendered lines, just as the division of labour in society at large is what produces class roles.
In pre-capitalist agricultural society, labour was divided almost absolutely by gender, where men participated in all capital producing labour, and most women didn't produce much in the way of fungible assets that could be sold (the reasons for this are disputed among marxist feminists but the best functional explanation i've heard was offered by the marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris: the transition to animal driven iron plow based farming significantly advantaged people with considerable upper body strength and required fewer people to farm the same area). As a result, the status of women in these society was that of virtual property because, just as children are today, they produced no material assets so they were entirely dependent on their husbands and fathers, and this dependency amounted to an extreme discrepancy in power relations. Women were essentially traded from their patriarchal fathers to their patriarchal husbands as a property transaction because they couldn't do anything about it as the alternative would have been starvation. This is the material basis for patriarchal society.
In capitalist society however, because machinery is introduced, female (and child) labour is equally productive as adult male labour many factory settings. Because industrialist capitalists required a larger work force in order to increase their surplus value (and therefore their profit potential), they needed to expand their workforce to include women and children, and in doing so they radically altered the structure of society because they changed the social relations of production. Because women now had independent sources of income, they were able to have at least a degree of social and financial autonomy from men, and this substantially increased their power in society, as power follows from economic status. As a result, the state structure had to readjust itself to reflect this and women were given legal rights as citizens rather than defacto human property.
However, vestiges of patriarchy remained because while women became productive labourers so could no longer be treated as property in a free labour economic system, they produced less than men because they spent less time in the work place. The chief reason for this was the inability for women to control their reproduction, lacking reliable contraceptives and abortion, and pregnancy and infant care removed them from the workforce for long spans of time entirely, and reduced the hours they could work when they already had children. This is why abortion and birth control are such essential demands, because its impossible to have gender economic parity without them. Before reliable birth control was invented, many families practiced a strict division of labour where a wife spent all her time in the private sphere producing nothing of value and only watching children, and a husband worked exclusively giving him access to public society and money to allocate as he wished (though having any portion of women in the work force either before marriage or choosing not get married meant that the political and legal status of women in general was still vastly higher than in feudalism, the economic status of those women who were 'house wives' was not much improved, and this is why early feminists recognized that getting women into the workplace and away from childcare was so vital).
Reliable birth control provided the material conditions to avoid loss of work due to pregnancy and and infant care, which in turn increased the social status of women in the workforce of all classes, and being able to choose not to have children gave women more negotiating power in familial relationships. Division of labour in the family still persisted however, in that while women continue to work after marriage post 1960s, most women with children continue to spend more time in non-productive domestic labour than in paid work when compared to their husbands, so while the patriarchal family no longer provides absolute authority to husbands, it still provides superior socio-economic power in most cases. The relationship remains exploitive because a wife who reduces her workplace commitments to care for children allows her husband to increase his and work overtime, leading to the significant difference in earning capacity even for the same job. So when non-marxist feminists believe that if a husband and wife "of the same class" are not socially equal, it must mean that gender inequality has a non-economic base, they miss the fact that they may be of the same class, but not the same class strata due to differences in time allocation (and socially expected time allocation which leads employers to invest less in married women than married men). This is the material basis for the continued existence of gender inequality, and Marxist feminists analyize gender relations along these lines rather than providing mystical explanations based on belief in essential sexual characteristics as radical feminists do, or on superficial cultural explanations as some liberal feminists without marxist roots do.
The fact that gender based oppression like all oppression is economic and political not cultural in force, of course, does not mean that cultural sexism does not exist in order to ideologically support these oppressive relations just as other relations of production are manifested in the social superstructure, but it is a mistake to think that these cause them, or that everything perieved as 'sexist' or more likely simply offensive, is in fact the product of gender inequality. Conservatives and right-liberals a like constantly fetishize motherhood, attribute great importance to it (along with teaching, described as 'the most important job', which is a great way to try to persuade people to waste their lives in a "job" that makes them utterly unimportant), idealizing and romanticizing it, even to the point where women are made to think that if they can't be a good mother they can't be a good woman or person.
The converse of this is that both conservatives and supposed leftwing liberals will attack women's sexual autonomy and desire to be sexual without reproducing. This is seen both in the conservatives attacks on abortion, birth control, premarital sex, porn and sexualized physical presentation. Its also seen in the supposedly "feminist" leftwing liberals attacks on porn, sexually expressive young women, cosmetics, fashion, dieting, and other signs of sexual but not reproductive availability, as well as the leftwing liberals demands for breast feeding, co-sleeping, natural births, "bonding with children" general hostility towards hormonal contraceptives (which is to say, the effective kind) and fixation on women's reproductive health and paranoia about rape and sexual abuse. All of this is played out in the media because it serves to reinforce existing unequal social structures of society, and the backlash against women's sexual autonomy, both by conservatives and by a new wave of anti-sex "feminists" obsessed with a female identity largely around issues of reproduction and fertility, is a way of resisting the social change and potential for equality in contemporary material conditions.
Karl Marx said "Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness" and thats an apt description of the culture that reinforces economically constructed gender roles.