JULIET M ITCH ELL
was in the home whilst man's duty was to protect and provide for
her.
377
Certainly both the history of feminism and the ideology of equality in
general and for women in particular offer a monument to the law of
uneven development. It is a monument I shall largely pass by in
selecting the continuous track.
Equality as a principle-never as a practice-has been an essential
part of the political ideology of all democratic capitalist societies since
their inception. In being this it has expressed both the highest
aspiration and the grossest limitation of that type of society. The mind
of liberal and social democratic man soars into the skies with his belief
in equality only to find that it must return, like the falcon, chained to
the wrist whence it came . For it is not only that capitalist society (which
produces its own version of both liberal and social democratic thought)
cannot produce the goods or practice what it preaches but that the
premise on which it bases its faith in equality is a very specific and a very
narrow one . The capitalist system under which, in different ways, we
live establishes as the premise of its ideological concept of equality the
economic fact of an exchange of commodities: a commodity is
exchanged for another of roughly equal value . In overthrowing the
noble landlords of a preceding period the newly arising and revolu–
tionary bourgeoisie made free and equal access to the production and
exchange ofcommodities the basis of man's estate: individual achieve–
ment replaced aristocratic birth .
In England in the late fifteenth century, the absolutist monarchy
first overcame the multiplicity offeudal lords and the multifariousness
of competing jurisdictions of secular and temporal powers . As hap–
pened later in France , for example, the central power of the still largely
feudal monarch created and integrated large economic areas and
established an equality of duties. The notion of equality of duties
stands midway between a system of privilege asserted by feudal
landlords and the concept of equality of rights propounded by the
capitalist middle classes in the seventeenth century in England and the
late eighteenth century in France. The legal edifice which enshrined
the new equality of rights replaced the harmony between a law of
privilege and economic privilege with a complete disjuncture between
legal equality and economic disparity-if disparity is not too mild a
word to fit the bill.
