PARTISAN REVIEW
191
4. Do you think the fact that the work of a housewife is unsalaried
and has no exchange value on the labor market makes women a sep–
arate class existing apart from other .economic classes? Do you view
patriarchal oppression as a principal or secondary contradiction in mod–
ern society?
No. The fact that "housework," which is defined as women's work,
is physical and, unlike work done in .the "world," unpaid, does not put
women into a separate economic class. Women do not form a class any
more than men do. Like men, women make up half the membership of
every class. The wives, sisters, and daughters of rich men participate in
the oppression of the poor; by virtue of their class membership rasther
than their sex, a minority of women oppress other women.
If
a label is
needed, women could perhaps be considered a caste. But this is only an
analogy. There is no suitable label to be borrowed from other vocabu–
laries of social anal'Ysis. To suppose that women constitute a class makes
no more sense than to suppose that blacks are a class. The human
species
is
divided into two sexes (and "caste"-type relations based on
sexual
ident~ty),
as well as a plurality of races (with "caste"-type rela–
tions based mainly on color). The oppression of one class by another is
only one form of oppression. The structures built around the existence
of two sexes, like those built around the existence of many races, are
irreducible to structures built around the existence of social classes–
although, obviously, oppressions can and often do overlap.
I deteot in this question a pious hope that the oppression of women
could be blamed on a particular form of society, a particular set of
class arrangements. But it can't.
If
socialism - at least as it exists so
far - is not self-evidently the solution, neither is capitalism self-evidently
the culprit. Women have always been treated 'as inferior, have always
been marginal politically and culturally. The oppression of women
constitutes the most fundamental type of repression in organized so–
cieties. That is, it is the
mo~t
ancient
form of oppression, pre-dating
all oppression based on class, caste, and race.
It
is the most primitive
form of hierarohy.
Because this is so I do not see how "patriarchal oppression" (your
term) can
be
considered as any kind of contradiction, either principal or
secondary. On the contrary, the struoture of this society is precisely
based on patriarchal oppression, the undoing of which will modify the
most deeply rooted habits of friendship and love, the conceptions of
work, the ability to wage war (which is profoundly nourished by sexist
anxieties ), and the mechanisms of power. The very nature of power
in
organized societies is founded on sexist models of conduct. Power
is
defined in tel'IllS of, and feeds on, machismo.
Modern industrial society certainly contains many contradictory
