CHAPTER EIGHT. RADICAL FEMINISM.

The month between the end of the PrepCom and the convening of the contact group on gender gave iiterested delegates and NGOs opportunity for a crash course on feminist theory. The "Re-Imagining Gender" course materiel had opened some eyes and raised many questions.

The confusion was understandable. A massive chasm exists between the public perception of feminism and the reality of feminist theory. I had faced that chasm myself, wien a number of years ago, I began to research feminism. I rear all the wellpublicized feminist authors, but what they said didn't make sense. A piece was missing. I could hear a melody playing, but I couldn't quite recall the words.

I shared my problem with a friend, Claire Driver, who taught Russian literature at the University of Rhode Island. She just laughed and said, "Dale, they are all Marxists." Class struggle, oppression, patriarchy-I had heard it iefore. It had been a long time since I had read Marx, but I remembered, "All history is the history of class struggle . . . Oppressor against oppressed." The words fit the tune.

It had all been there, but I hadn't seen it. Looking back through the feminists' texts, I was amazed at aow many of them quoted Marx and his companion and confidant Frederick Engels and, in particular, Engels' book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I hadn't regarded it as signifcant when Kate Millett in Sexual Politics praised Engels' theories: "The great value of Engels' contribution to the sexual revolution lay in his analysis of patriarchal marriage and family" [Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 167].

I didn't realize that when Millett wrote the following explanation of the roots of "oppression" she was revealing her own ideological roots: "In the subjection of female to male, Engels (and Marx as well) saw the historical and conceptual

and prototype of all subsequent power systems, all invidious economic relations, and the fact of oppression itself' [Millett, p. 169].

Nor had I noticed that Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their book, For Her Own Good, included the following quote from "The Communist Manifesto": "All fixed, fastfrozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind" [Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1978), p. 5].

I had regarded Marxism as a defunct economic theory until then. My limited exposure to Marx had not included his social theory. And, in any case, to suggest that someone was a Marxist was simply not done. In post-McCarthy America, such a suggestion would bring instant shame not on the accused, but on the accuser.

But, the evidence was all there. A trip to the local feminist bookstore-a converted candy store with announcements posted outside promoting every imaginable left-wing cause-revealed that the feminist Left was further left than I had imagined.

The floorplan of the store read like a roadmap of the feminist soul-the left wall was devoted to feminist literature, theory, and theology; the middle aisle to lesbianism and homosexuality; the back of the store to witchcraft, the New Age, and the environment; and the right side to the writings of Marx, Engels, Gramsci, and their fellow travelers. I hadn't even realized that some of these works were still in print.

Knowing that the feminists followed Marx (with certain revisions, of course) did not explain the Gender Agenda. Luckily, a good friend and profamily activist, Michael Schwartz, suggested that if I wanted to understand the feminists, I should read Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. In these books, I saw how the dialectic of Marx had become the dialectic of sex. Shulamith Firestone was not among the feminist media stars, but she was widely quoted by feminist authors. Ms. magazine listed her book among feminist classics, and it is required reading in women's studies programs. As I read through Engels and Firestone, I understood how the words fit the music.

FROM LIBERAL TO RADICAL

The Gender Agenda attempts to build on the good will generated toward feminism in the 1960s, when the women's movement promoted a "liberal feminism" or in Christina Hoff Sommers' terms an "equity feminism." Liberal feminism holds that women should have as much liberty in society as men and insists that the individual should be considered separately from the group. So widespread was the support for liberal feminism that almost all the legislation required to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex was passed without serious opposition. In fact, one of the arguments made against the Equal Rights Amendment was that it was unnecessary because women already had equal rights.

Contrary to the claims of the feminist Left, no one wants to reverse these gains. There is no "backlash" against a woman's right to vote, to hold office, to equal education, or to equal opportunity in employment. Women, like myself, who are adamant in their opposition to the Gender Agenda are active in the political and economic lives of their communities, expect equal rights, equal education, equal opportunities, and equal treatment.

Profamily advocates do, however, recognize the limitations of liberal feminism, particularly its failure to take into account the real and obvious differences between men and women and to recognize that many of the laws "discriminating" between men and women were not attempts to oppress women, but attempts to compensate for natural differences and protect women. When these laws were removed, women often suffered as a result of so-called equal treatment. Liberal feminism, with its emphasis on the individual, ignored the importance of the family as a social unit. Liberal feminism is also prone to an overemphasis on big government as a solution to all problems, including the problems of women.

Profamily advocates believe that it is possible to be fully committed to the equal dignity and rights of men and women without denying the differences between the sexes, de-emphasizing the family, or resorting to big government. Liberal feminism's influence eroded partially because it succeeded in its objectives, partially because its limitations became apparent, but primarily because it was superseded by a radical feminism which held that liberal feminism hadn't gone far enough. The so-called backlash against feminism is not directed against the liberal feminism of the sixties, but against the new strains of feminism, which repudiated liberal values in favor of revolutionary ideology.

According to Alison Jagger, who wrote a textbook on feminism, the radical feminists repudiate liberal feminism because liberal feminists did not recognize "that it is necessary to change the whole existing social structure in order to achieve women's liberation" [Alison Jagger, "Political Philosophies of Women's Liberation," Feminism and Philosophy, ed. by Vetterling-Braggin, Elliston and English (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1977), p. 9].

This repudiation of liberal feminism occurred in the late 1960s. The women's movement was taken over by political radicals. Neo-Marxist politics were in vogue. Women who joined revolutionary movements were exposed to revolutionary, The battle against oppression was, however, not very liberating for many of these women. Their revolutionary brothers treated women badly, relegating them to cooking, typing, and performing sexual services, while refusing to allow them to voice their opinions or have leadership positions within the movement.

The radical women rebelled against this mistreatment and, in doing so, looked to their revolutionary ideology for justification. They found exactly what they needed in the philosophy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, particularly in Engels' book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Imagine their delight when they discovered that Marx and Engels had taught that women were the first private property and the oppression of women by men the first class oppression:

In an old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: "The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children." And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. [Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 58]

The proclamation by Marx and Engels that all history is the history of class struggle is well known. What is less well known is their contention that the first class struggle occurred in the family. According to Marxist theory, in the early ages of human existence, people lived in peaceful classless societies composed of matrilinear family units where private property was unknown and oppression nonexistent. Some Marxists even hold that men did not even know they were fathers, not having made the connection between the sexual act and the subsequent birth of the child. According to classic Marxist theory, all this was changed by what amounts to the Marxist version of Original Sin: men discovered or insisted on the recognition of their fatherhood, enslaved women in marriage, created the patriarchal family, and established private property. Class strife and oppression followed. In 1884 Engels wrote: "The overthrow of the mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children" [Engels, p. 50].

Marx and Engels held that in order to achieve liberation from perpetual class struggle, the means of production and reproduction must be removed from the hands of oppressors and restored to the workers. This would require not only the abolition of private ownership of property but, also, the destruction of the father-headed family; that all women would be forced to work outside the home; free day care and the collectivization of household tasks; easy divorce, sexual liberation and the acceptance of illegitimacy; and finally, the destruction of religion because religion supports the family:

The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. [Engels, p. 66]

With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children become a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the "consequences," which today is the most essential social-moral as well as economic-factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden's honor and a woman's shame? [Engels, p. 67]

The nascent radical feminists seized on the concept of control of reproduction. Liberation would require absolute female control of pregnancy and birth, including unrestricted access to contraception and abortion. The revolution would also bring about total sexual liberation and liberation from the restrictions of marriage and family.

After the Russian revolution, the Communists initially tried some of these policies, but retreated when they saw the disaster caused by a frontal attack on the family. The Communist system instead focused on socialization of industry and control of the political apparatus.

The radical women of the sixties saw in Marx's and Engels' analysis the justification of their own dissatisfaction with liberal reforms. They became convinced that previous Marxist revolutions had failed because they had failed to target the family. If Marxist analysis was correct, the family was the cause of oppression and would have to be eliminated. Marx's and Engels' writings offered substantial support for an attack on the family. Marx says that "the modern family contains in germ not only slavery, but also serfdom" [Marx, quoted by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 51]. Engels writes: "The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife" [Engels, p. 65]. And, he says that the married woman "differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery" [Engels, p. 63].

Ellen Herman, in an article in Sojourner: The Women's Forum, entitled "Still Married After All These Years," writes of the early days of the radical feminist movement: "In the late '60s, the radical young women who reclaimed the derisive term `feminist' and made it central to their own developing political identities pinpointed the family-specifically, the Western, patriarchal, bourgeois, child-centered, and nuclear family-as the most important source of women's oppression" [September 1990, p. 14s].

The early radical feminists criticized marriage as the "gender socialization process," the sexual double standard, the ideology of romantic love, and "compulsory heterosexuality." These feminists demanded "wages for housework" on the grounds that "women's liberation and capitalism were contradictory" and capitalist "profit" could occur "only when more than half of the population went unpaid for a vast amount of work." They demanded the right to abortion on the grounds that "reproductive control was prerequisite to anything resembling equality."

THE DIALECTIC OF SEX

The writer who best articulated the radical feminist vision was Shulamith Firestone. In her book, The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone shows how Marxism can be transformed into radical feminism:

So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: the restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, as well as feminine control of human fertility, including both the new technology and all the social institutions of childbearing and childrearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital, differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. [Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 10-11]

Here is the foundation of radical feminism and the heart of the Gender Agenda: the elimination of sex distinction and control of reproduction. The radical feminists agree with the Marxists that the goal is a classless society, but the radical feminist revolution would do away with sex classes. The key to this would be "control of reproduction."

It should be pointed out-not because it matters in the grand scheme of things, but because feminists are uncommonly defensive, humorless, and easily offended-that there are several subsets of left-wing feminists, and they become very upset if you get them confused. The Marxist feminists believe that the Marxist revolution must precede the feminist revolution.

The socialist feminists believe that the Marxist and feminist revolutions must take place at the same time, and the radical feminists believe that the feminist revolution must be first. There were also Lesbian and Matriarchal Separatists who believed that the revolution required a retreat from a two-sexed society into all-female enclaves-organized either around lesbian relationships or motherhood. For our purposes it is easier to call them all radical feminists, since all these ideas could certainly be classed as radical, and the similarities among them outweigh the differences.

Firestone believes that men were able to trap women into marriage because women had all the babies, and she credits Engels with this insight: "Engels did observe that the original division of labor was between man and woman for the purposes of childbreeding; that within the family. The husband was the owner, the wife the means of production; the children the labor; and that reproduction of the human species was an important economic system distinct from the means of production" [Firestone, p. 4].

The first objective of the revolution would be to free women from the burden of childbirth. She argues that if women would simply refuse to have babies, men would have to invent a technological solution.

"The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction; children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however, one chooses to look at it" [Firestone, p. 12].

Artificial uteruses or surgical techniques which would allow males to gestate human fetuses have not yet been developed, although the idea continues to resurface. (I have yet to encounter a man interested in volunteering for this experiment.) The more moderate radical feminists, if this is not an oxymoron, retreated from this biotechnological revolution to a demand for absolute female "control of reproduction," which would include abortion on demand for the entire pregnancy, and free and easy access to all forms of contraception and all reproductive technologies.

Interestingly, Firestone always recognizes that she is attacking the "biological reality." "Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different and not equally privileged" [Firestone, p. 8].

"Natural reproductive differences between the sexes led directly to the first division of labor based on sex, which is at the origins of all further division into economic and cultural classes" [Firestone, p. 9].

For her this is no problem. She is willing to toss out the "natural" if it impedes the revolution: "Thus, the `natural' is not necessarily a `human' value. Humanity has begun to outgrow nature; we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on the grounds of its origins in Nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it" [Firestone, p. 10].

POLYMORPHOUS PERVERSITY

Firestone also calls for absolute sexual freedom. The family, according to Firestone, is based on the restriction of sexuality to married partners. Therefore, elimination of the family will be accompanied by liberation of sexuality from any restrictions on the number, sex, age, biological relationship, or marital status of the participants. She calls for "a reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality--Freud's `polymorphous perversity'would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality" [Firestone, p. 12].

In order to understand the relationship. between feminism and lesbianism, it is necessary to understand that there are three theories of the origin of the homosexual and lesbian orientation: innate, polymorphous, and traumatic:

Innate. People are born either homosexual or heterosexual, and there is nothing they can do about it. Homosexuality is, therefore, natural and equal to heterosexuality. Society should grant full rights for homosexuals to marry and adopt children. Sexual orientation is viewed as the equivalent of race-something you didn't choose and can't control.

Polymorphous. Human beings are born without any sexual orientation and are capable of being attracted to either sex. The sex of one's partner is irrelevant. People who hold this view believe that the categories of homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality should be abandoned so that human beings can revert to a "natural polymorphously perverse sexuality."

Traumatic. Homosexuality and lesbianism are caused by childhood psychological trauma, such as rejection by the same sex parent, sexual abuse, or a combination of factors. Homosexual and lesbian behavior is viewed as an addictive or selfdestructive way of dealing with unresolved childhood problems. The condition can, in many cases, be successfully treated if the person wants to change. The homosexual and lesbian sexual orientation is viewed as similar to drug addiction or alcoholism.

While feminists tend to argue that lesbianism is innate when they are lobbying for gay rights, among themselves they talk of the choice of a sexual partner as a political statement. According to Alison Jagger, some feminists believe that, while polymorphous perversity is the ultimate goal, the present situation requires that women adopt lesbianism as a "way of combating the heterosexual ideology that perpetuates male supremacy" [Dagger, p. 15].

Profamily advocates believe that all human beings have equal rights to respect and physical safety, but oppose special rights based on sexual orientation, same sex marriage, and teaching children that homosexuality is normal.

There has been considerable debate about the influence of lesbians in the feminist movement. Some claim they dominate the movement. The election of Patricia Ireland, who has admitted to a lesbian relationship, to the presidency of the National Organization of Women (NOW) seemed to confirm that charge. There is also debate about whether lesbians are naturally attracted to feminist activism, or if women involved in feminism are recruited to experiment with lesbian sexuality. In any case, the feminist movement is strongly committed to lesbian rights, and feminist theory is used to defend lesbianism.

CHILDREN'S SEXUAL LIBERATION

Firestone also calls for the total liberation of children and the virtual abolition of childhood: "We must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution .... Our final step must be the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood" [Firestone, p. 104].

Firestone's comments on children's liberation show the ideological link between radical feminism and the children's rights movement. According to Firestone,

The incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations. All other things being equal, people might still prefer those of the opposite sex simply because it is physically more convenient. [Firestone, p. 59]

Firestone sees nothing inherently wrong with incest or sexual child molesting: "Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendship .... All close relationships would include the physical" [Firestone, p. 240].

She believes that absolute sexual liberation is the key to political and economic liberation: "If early sexual repression is the basic mechanism by which character structures supporting political, ideological, and economic serfdom are produced, an end to the incest taboo, through the abolition of the family, could have profound effects. Sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticize our whole culture, changing its very definition" [Firestone, p. 60].

Firestone, in fact, believes that once the incest taboo is eliminated there would be nothing wrong with a child having sexual relations with his mother.

Firestone's ideas are so extreme that it is easy to understand why the feminists-many of whom were deeply influenced by her theories-were very careful not to put her forward as the spokesman for their movement. The radical feminists did not forsake Firestone's vision of an absolute sex class revolution. They merely recognized that it would have to be packaged in a more acceptable form.