PARTISAN REVIEW
199
change in the structure of consciousness and society which is what I un–
derstand by revolutionary socialism. It is not simply that the liberation
of women need not wait for the advent of socialism, so defined.
It
cannot
wait.
I do not think socialism can triumph unless big victories for fem–
inism have been won beforehand. The liberation of women is a neces–
sary
preparation for building a just society - not the other way around,
as Marxists always claim. For if it does happen the other way around,
women are likely to find their liberation a fraud. Should the transfor–
mation of society according to revolutionary socialism be undertaken
without a prior militailit independent women's movement, women will
find that they have merely passed from the hegemony of one oppressive
moral ethic to another.
8. Do you consider that the family is an obstacle for the liberation
of woman?
Certainly the modern "nuclear family" operates to oppress women.
And
l~ttle
consolation is to be had by considering other shapes that the
family is known
to
have taken in the past and
has
today outide the
societies of "European" type. Virtually
all
known forms of 'the family
define women in ways that subordinate them to men - keeping them
w~thin
the "home" while investing public power exclusively in the hands
of moo, who organize in all-male groups outside the family. In the
chronology of ihum!aJIl lives, the family is l.'he first and psycllologically the
most irrefutable school for sexism. It is as small children, through the
systematically contrastJing ways in which girls and boys are treated
(dressed, talked to, praised, punished), that the norms of dependency
and naroissism are instilled in girls. Growing up, children learn the dif–
ferent expeotations they may have for themselves from the models of
mother and fauher: the fundamentally dissimilar geography of commit–
ment that women and men make to family life.
The family is an instiJt:ution ol1ganized around the exploitation of
women as full-time inhabitants of the family's space. Hence, for women
to work means relieving at least some part of their oppression. Working
at a paid job, any job, a woman is no longer just a family creature. But
she can still continue to be exploited, as a now part-time family creaJture
still saddled with nearly full-time duties. Women who have gained the
freedom to go out into "the world" but still have tl1e responsibility for
marketing, cooking, cleaning, and the children when they return from
work have simply doubled their labor. This is the plight of almost all
married working women in both capitalist and Communist countries.
(The oppressiveness of women's double load is particularly stark in the
Soviet Union: with more diversity in the jobs open to women than in,
