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The most obvious effect of the Marx/Engels/Firestone influence is the demonizing of "patriarchy" as the great evil. Patriarchal has become an allpurpose curse word. It is interesting that many people have accepted that patriarchy is evil without considering the ideological roots of this accusation.
Marxist feminist Heidi Hartman defines patriarchy as
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men's control over women's labor power. That control is maintained by excluding women from access to necessary economically productive resources and by restricting women's sexuality. Men exercise their control in receiving personal service work from women, in not having to do housework or rear children, in having access to women's bodies for sex, and in feeling powerful and being powerful. [Heidi Hartman, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism," Women and Revolution, ed. by Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 18]
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According to Hartman, the "elements of patriarchy as we currently experience them are: heterosexual marriage (and consequent homophobia), female childrearing and housework, women's economic dependence on men (enforced by arrangements in the labor market), the state, and numerous institutions based on social relations among menclubs, sports, unions, professions, universities, churches, corporations and armies.
The institution in which men "have access to women's bodies for sex," "receive personal service work from women," and don't have "to do housework or rear children" is, of course, the one-income/two-parent family. Many women would contend that the division of labor between men and women in the one-income/two-parent family is just and serves their interests as much as their husbands'. But, for the radical, Marxist, and socialist feminists, the one-income/two-parent family is a patriarchal evil that must be destroyed by a radical change in the relationship between men and women.
While radical feminists see patriarchy as the great evil, patriarchy could also be seen as men accepting responsibility for their wives and children. A society which is suffering from an epidemic of father-absent families ought to consider whether the war on "patriarchy" has benefited women. Women who want to make motherhood their primary vocation need men who are willing to commit to fatherhood and a society where men take responsibility for protecting and providing for women and children.
For the radical feminists, it is not just that the one-income/two-parent family oppresses women. They see the family as the cause of all other forms of oppression and the foundation of "patriarchal, hierarchical, sexist, racist, homophobic society." It is not enough for them that some women reject the patriarchal relationships. They believe that as long as some women choose this form of association, all women are threatened.
According to Nancy Chodorow, in the father-working/ mother-athome family, the child is psychologically conditioned to believe that the two sexes are different. Girls identify with their mothers, and boys realize that they are not going to grow up and be mothers. According to Chodorow, the differences between men and women are created (socially constructed) by these early experiences. Once the concept of two different sexes is ingrained in the child's mind, the child will see other "class" divisions, and the evil of class thinking will have been transmitted to another generation.
Thus, in the radical feminist world view, motherhood is the problem, specifically women as primary caregivers to young children. How can this be overcome? For Chodorow, it is not enough to get all women into the workforce and all children into daycare because day-care workers are predominantly female. Men must accept 50 percent of the care for children:
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If our goal is to overcome the sexual division of labor in which women mother, we need to understand the mechanisms which reproduce it in the first place. My account points precisely to where intervention should take place. Any strategy for change whose goal includes liberation from the constraints of an unequal social organization of gender must take account of the need for a fundamental reorganization of parenting, so that primary parenting is shared between men and women. [Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 215]
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Chodorow's analysis has received widespread support among feminists. For them, it pinpointed the problem: Women care for children. It pointed to the solution: Make men care for children. It explained why women hadn't embraced the revolution: They were brainwashed because they were raised by mothers. And, it explained how men had kept control of everything: They were raised not to mother.
GENDER
By combining these theories, the feminists were able to create an ideology which explained everything to their satisfaction. Now, they needed a plan. They could agree with Firestone that men are the primordial oppressor class, women the first and most oppressed class, and that the only answer is total abolition of the sex class system, but how does one create a classless society when class differences are rooted in biology? You can't strip away manhood the way you can take away private property. The feminists couldn't, as their Bolshevik brothers had done, take the oppressor class out and shoot them or ship all men off to Siberia, although occasionally reading radical feminist and lesbian separatist literature, one gets the feeling that they wish they could. On the bus to the NonGovernmental Organization Forum during the conference on women in Beijing, feminists were overheard musing about how wonderful it would be when there were all-women cities and only girl babies. Nevertheless, most feminists recognize the impracticability of promoting a world without men. There would have to be another means of removing the oppression of the class "men" over the class "women."
Feminist theorists solved this problem by inventing a new meaning for gender. The redefinition of gender allowed them to claim that they accepted biological "sex" differences and were only rejecting social and cultural "gender" roles. Gender became the focus of the feminist revolution. An INSTRAW booklet explains the new definition of gender:
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What is gender? Gender is a concept that refers to a system of roles and relationships between women and men that are determined not by biology but the social, political, and economic context. One's biological sex is a natural given; gender is constructed .... gender can be seen as the ". . . process by which individuals who are born into biological categories of male or female become the social categories of women and men through the acquisition of locally defined attributes of masculinity and femininity." ["Gender Concepts in Development Planning: Basic Approach" (INSTRAW, 1995), p. 11]
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Using "gender analysis," feminists avoided being perceived as attacking biology. They could admit that sex differences were natural and fixed, but insist that all the important differences between men and women were gender differences. And, artificial gender differences can be transformed.
Gender analysis is not a scientific study of the relative influence of biology and culture in the creation of the differences between men and women. Indeed, gender feminists vigorously oppose serious research into biological differences between men and women. The Gender Agenda is predicated on the unproved assumption that masculinity, femininity, manhood, womanhood, motherhood, fatherhood, and heterosexuality are artificial, arbitrary, culturally created "gender roles."
The goal is statistical equality between men and women in all activities and achievements. The major obstacle to statistical equality is mothering-the vocation of women as primary caregivers for children. If the majority of women or even a significant percentage of women choose mothering as their primary vocation, then statistical equality becomes statistically impossible, since the number of women available for work outside the home is substantially reduced. Thus, the major thrust of "gender perspective" is the deconstruction of mothering as the unique vocation of women.
Nothing more clearly illustrates the real nature of the gender perspective than the following quote from the INSTRAW booklet: "Nothing in the fact that women bear children implies that they exclusively should care for them throughout childhood" [Maureen Mackintosh, "Gender and Economics" quoted in Gender Concepts, p. 18].
According to this view, women's desire to mother-that is to be intimately concerned with the day to day care of their children, particularly their newborns-is regarded as something imposed upon them by a patriarchal society.
It is not surprising that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a speech in New York, called motherly love a myth: "Motherly love ain't all it has been cracked up to be. To some extent, it's a myth that men have created to make women think that they do this job to perfection" [Joan Biskupic, "Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Feminist Justice," Washington Post reprinted in Providence journal, 20 July 1996, p. 13 ("Hers" section).
GENDER JUSTICE
The feminists had solved their problem-radical feminism was transformed into the "gender perspective." In her book, Justice, Gender, and the Family, feminist writer Susan Okin lays out how the gender perspective can be implemented; and it all sounds very reasonable, very compassionate, very just:
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A just future would be one without gender. In its social structures and practices, one's sex would have no more relevance than one's eye color or the length of one's toes. No assumptions would be made about "male" and "female" roles; childbearing would be so conceptually separated from child rearing and other family responsibilities that it would be cause for surprise, and no little concern, if men and women were not equally responsible for domestic life or if children were to spend much more time with one parent than the other. It would be a future in which men and women participated in more or less equal numbers in every sphere of life, from infant care to different kinds of paid work to high-level politics. [Susan Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 170]
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Okin insists that "shared child rearing is a prerequisite of justice between the sexes" because female childrearing:
(1) "is immensely time-consuming, and prevents those who do it singlehandedly from the pursuit of many other social goods, such as education, earnings, or political office,"
(2) is the cause of "sex stereotyping in children" [Okin, fn.p. 116].
Okin recognizes that many women find child care pleasurable. However, since female childrearing renders women economically vulnerable, it must be eliminated. According to Okin, "Because asymmetric vulnerabilities create social obligations, which may fail to be fulfilled, and because they open up opportunities for exploitation . . . they are morally unacceptable and should be minimized" [Okin, p. 136].
It is certainly true that pregnancy and childrearing make women vulnerable. Precisely for this reason societies have offered various forms of protection to women. These protections have been predicated on the differences between the sexes, and it is these very protections that feminists have condemned as restricting women. Unwilling to acknowledge women's need for special protection, the only solution Okin can accept is one which denies the differences between the sexes. She insists that "any just and fair solution to the urgent problem of women's and children's vulnerability must encourage and facilitate the equal sharing by men and women of paid and unpaid work, of productive and reproductive labor. We must work toward a future in which all will be likely to choose this mode of life" [Okin, p. 170].
The last sentence is crucial. While the radical feminists speak of liberation and choice, they do not extend that freedom to women who choose to make mothering their primary vocation. Okin wants a world where every woman will be forced to work full-time.
These daughters of Marx may have rejected their ideological father's economic agenda, but they have inherited his totalitarian soul. The liberation they promote is not a personal freedom, but a single-party state where some women decide what is best for all women. The Soviet system controlled the political and economic structures; the feminists want control of intimate and family relationships.
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
All this theory may seem very far from the reality of ordinary women, but it is closely related to what is happening at the U.N. Feminist theory explains why the INSTRAW, the U.N. agency in charge of research on women, isn't interested in helping women solve their real problems. The INSTRAW booklet discourages such help since it might keep them in their current positions as wives and mothers: "Most development work dealing with women focuses on women's condition, emphasizing such immediate needs as access to credit, basic services, housing and attention to their responsibilities as mothers .... Exclusive attention to improvements in women's condition can reinforce patterns that perpetuate inequalities" [Gender Concepts, p. 27].
INSTRAW recognizes that women need help in their work in the home, but doesn't want to give women that help because it might keep them at home: "Women's practical needs are generally derived from existing gender roles assigned to them by traditional patterns of division of labour .... Satisfying practical needs alone reproduces divisions of labour and power that maintain the status quo" [Gender Concepts, p. 27].
Instead, INSTRAW supports programs which will force women into the workforce. All this is based on gender feminist theory. The booklet contrasts women's needs with women's "strategic interests":
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Strategic interests, in contrast, challenge existing gender roles and stereotypes, based on the premise that women are in a subordinate position to men as the consequence of social and institutional discrimination against them .... Strategic gender interests seek such objectives as political equality between women and men, elimination of institutionalized forms of discrimination against women, abolition of the sexual division of labour, freedom of reproductive choice, and prevention of violence against women. [Gender Concepts, p. 28]
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There is no evidence that INSTRAW asked the poor women of the world if they wanted their gender roles changed or preferred more practical help. The INSTRAW booklet follows the totalitarian spirit of feminism revealed by Simone de Beauvoir, who told Betty Friedan: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children . . . . Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice too many women will make that one" [quoted by Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 256].
According to Alison Jagger, "If individual desires and interests are socially constituted . . . people may be mistaken about truth, morality or even their own interests" [quoted by Sommers, p. 258]. In other words, ordinary women should not be allowed to decide what they want because they have all been socially conditioned to want the wrong things. All this demeans women, as Christina Hoff Sommers, an outspoken critic of gender feminism, points out: "In the end, the gender feminist is always forced to show her disappointment and annoyance with the women found in the camp of the enemy. Misandry moves on to misogyny" [Sommers, p. 256].
Profamily advocates oppose the gender perspective not because they are against women's progress, but because they are for women. Should the feminist future ever arrive, it won't be more just, but less free and less human.
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