JULIET MITCHELL
rights at all. They were the chattels of their fathers and husbands.
They were bought and sold in marriage. They could not vote. They
could not sign contracts. When married, they could not own
properry. They had no rights over their children and no control
over their own bodies. Their husbands could rape and beat them
without fear oflegal reprisals. When they were not confined to the
home, they were forced by growing industrialization
to
join the
lowest levels of the labour force.
Since then, progress towards equal
rights for women has been very slow indeed.
(My italics)
375
The authors go on to document how in work, education, social
facilities and under the law women are treated as men's inferiors and,
despite appearances such as equal pay acts, equality is never attained:
"We have an Equal Pay Act but we don't have equal pay."
Equal Rights are an important tip of an iceberg that goes far
deeper. That they are only a tip is both a reflection of the limitation of
the concept of equality and an indication of how profound and
fundamental is the problem of the oppression of women. The position
ofwomen in any given society can be taken as a mark of the progress of
civilization or
humanization
within that society. There may be slave
societies, such as that of the Ptolemies, in which there is an elite of
privileged women, but it is not such an elite that we are talking about
when we consider the position of women in general as the index of
human advance: men and women actually become human in relation
to
each other and if one sex is denigrated then humanity itself is the
loser. I don't mean this in the simple sense that any exploitation or
oppression diminishes the dignity of the whole society-though that
is, ofcourse, the case-but in the rather special sense that it is precisely
in his transformation of the functions of sexuality and reproduction
into human communication (language and emotional relationship)
that at a basic level man as an animal becomes man as human being.
That is the depth of the nature of the problem of the oppression of
women. The position of women as a social group in relation to men as
another social group goes far deeper, then, than the question of equal
rights, but equal rights are an important part of it and, furthermore,
the struggle for these rights has an intimate connection with the whole
history of feminism as a conscious social and political movement.
But first, what are the strengths and limitations of the concept of
equality? I want to give a parallel account: first, the meaning of the
