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NANCY MILFORD
not of men - who are surely co-responsible for the creating of the
species? And why has the structure and function of the family become
an instrument of inequality between the sexes
Marx understood that the position of women was an index to
society's advancement, yet he so abstracted woman into a kind of
symbol th<llt later
in
his life when he came to write about the family
he managed to do so without mentioning her.
It
was up to Engels to
reduce the problem of women to their physiological weakness, which
gave them a lesser work capacity. (Mitchell suggests that it was not
exactly "lesser" but another sort of working, equally demanding; it
also importantly gave them a lesser opportunity for violence, for they
did not bear arms.) He felt that if women were introduced into public
industry in great numbers the individual family would no longer be the
economic unit of society. But that turned out to be a far too simple
and limited explanation. Women in our country now form more than
forty percent of the labor force, but we have come cheap. As Shulamith
Firestone pointed out, "There is a level of reality that does not stem
direotly from economics. . .."
The radical feminists have taken Freud's anatomy
is
destiny and
stood it (as well as Papa Freud ) on i,ts ear. For if the ability to bear
children is the distinction that has led to the oppression of women
by men, and if it is admitted to be "a brutal, painful experience" let
us revolt against Nature himself. Let us exercise our scientific tech–
nology to overcome him. "Embracing the feminist and ecological revo–
lution would mean that cybernation and other technological advances
would end all joyless labor; the labor of the factory and of the child–
bed." There is no more consideration given here to woman in her
entirety, her complexity, than Marx or Enae\s gave her when she was
their economic symbol. Now she is someone else's, someone of her own
sex who believes in either/ or propositions: either joyful labor or the
elimination of labor altogether. Such reasoning has a very limited ap–
peal to me, and to be fair to Mitchell she too rejects the proposal, but
she rejects it because it is "simplistic materialism"; she wants it but–
tressed by "historical materialism." What she does not object to is the
notion of theory divorced from people, of a vast and stunning range of
choices for women reduced to ideology about them.
"Perhaps in the future , the biggest single theoretical battle will
have to be that between the libera tionists with a socialist analysis, and
feminists with a 'radical feminist' analysis. But that future has come
too soon. The conflict is premature because neither group has yet
developed a 'theory.''' Mitchell further worries that if only the feminist
