Speech presented to Group Without a Name (Psychiatric Research Society): September 8-10, 1972, Seattle, Washington
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Woman as Leader: Double Jeopardy on Account of Sex." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 32-34). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2014. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The preposterous distinctions of rank. . .corrupt, almost equally, every class of people. . . Still there are some loopholes out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself, but for a woman it is a herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome which require almost superhuman powers.—Mary Wollstonecraft (1791)
Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. . . The term was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all.—Frederick Engels (1884)
In the beginning, in the matriarchate, woman was leader.* Because descent was reckoned in the female line, motherright prevailed. Because property was communally owned and distributed, social equality prevailed. And because the labor of managing the communistic household was as much a public and a socially necessary industry as the procuring of food, political equality prevailed—everyone’s labor was equally needed, respected, and equitably recompensed.
In a society of equals, woman was mother, producer and political policy-maker.
Then came the deluge. As wealth and exchange increased, and money evolved, the sexual division of labor caused a funny trick to be played on women. The first surplus, and therefore the first commodity—a use-value deliberately produced for the purpose of exchange—was cattle. And the men owned the herds! An inequality of ownership developed, and a new phenomenon—private property—emerged, snugly in the hands of the males. The primitive collective was destroyed, wrecked by the steamrolling power of the new private property relations.
“Household management lost its public character,” says Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. “It became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production.”
The destruction of the primitive commune and the matriarchal system involved a titanic cataclysm, lasting for centuries, and ranging around the world. The democratic matriarchate was smashed, and in its place was substituted patriarchy, monogamy (to insure the proper inheritance of the private property), classes, slavery and the state.
“The overthrow of the mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex,” Engels writes. “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude. . .this degraded position of the woman. . .has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.”
This is the historical career of woman—from leadership of a society marked by liberty, humanity, and equality to the degradation and ignominy of chattel status. Defeated, enslaved, and freely killed for transgressions in the world of Rome and then western Europe, her lot gradually improved until she was only exploited, oppressed and tormented under capitalism.
Hers is a story of slavery and serfdom, of double exploitation on the job and oppression as an entire sex, of prostitution legal and otherwise, of decreed inferiority because of biological destiny and intellectual deficiency. The designation of women as inferior results from the status of the mass of women, who are barred by economics and culture from involvement in public industry and are limited instead to private, isolated, household labor.
As long as most women are outside the labor force and are dependent on men for support, the female sex is viewed as second-rate and expected to play an exclusive role of domestic service.
From such a social position and backdrop, few leaders can emerge. Queens, witches and upstarts, yes—but no modern leaders.
“Now, just a minute, you fanatic feminists,” we are told at this point. “Male labor is also exploited by the capitalist.”
True, brother—but at 40% higher wages than woman receives, and 99% higher wages than the welfare mother and the unemployed woman worker. And 100% higher wages than the unpaid housewife.
“But everybody is oppressed by a cruel world,” claim the pundits.
Not as an entire sex, they’re not. Not as the second sex, judged to be biologically, emotionally, mentally and temperamentally inferior to men.
“Baloney! Who ever stopped you from being equal? You have been educated and you have freely chosen the domestic over the social leadership role!”
Thanks a lot, fellas, but no thanks. What you really did was miseducate us, brainwash us, and channel us like a herd of sheep into the corral you had ready and waiting.
And to add insult to injury, you did it all in the name of“Science,” alluding to the entrenched authority of Freud, that great sexual equalitarian; Talcott Parsons, the functional (what?) sociologist; Margaret Mead, of Super-earth-mother fame; the entire educational establishment; and Madison Avenue’s motivational research (whose motives?). You“educated” us just enough to intimidate us with your phony, reactionary authorities.
Cultural prejudice, vested interests, political expediency and sheer misanthropy were paraded before women students as science—irrefutable and unchallengeable.
In the dehumanizing process of being inculcated with this second-class education for second-class folks, women lost all historical memory of their once proud and heroic role. Whether they were poor or rich, workingclass militant or respectable colonel’s lady, they were forced to choose slavery, and then forced to pretend to like it, and then “educated” to fiercely resist any personal tendency to economic and political status in their own right. Female ambition was the sign of the devil, the dybbuk in all women, the acting out of penis envy, and the childish refusal to grow up and have the proper kind of orgasm.
Psychoanalytic therapy mushroomed into Big Business, because it served the needs of Big Business and forced women back into their place—the place of unpaid and cheap labor, an enormous source of profits for the capitalist class.
Yet, after centuries of domestic retreat or silent death in the factories and the streets, women erupted and roared out their rage and defiance; the psychoanalysts were aghast. This novel manifestation of pussy-power in the context of political action was abhorrent to them. So they sneered.
“Well, young lady, where are your leaders? What do you do besides talk? If you’re so liberated, why aren’t you equal?”
“We aren’t leaders because we aren’t yet equal”
The jailers always deride us for our lack of freedom. Our executioners condemn us because we died. Our seducers sneer at our gullibility.
We live under a system of capitalist patriarchy, ruled by a class composed of old, white, male scions and their hired bureaucrats. Capitalist political economy and the bourgeois culture it disseminates super-exploit women and ruthlessly suppress our protests. We are the objects of a universal contempt, paternalism, fear and hatred.
Like all victims of idiotic prejudice and institutionalized discrimination, women became what you said they were— inferior. Men defined us, and men were the authorities. Women did, and continue to do, all the things that oppressed races, exploited classes, or tyrannized colonies did—women grew to hate themselves, to denigrate themselves, to be so consumed with alternating guilt and resentment that they paralyzed themselves. Women courted favors from their overseers and further demeaned and humiliated themselves in the process. Women perpetuated their own prolonged adolescence because men found this attractive and reassuring. Women employed guile and cunning, shuck and jive, manipulating and maneuvering to gain position. And women competed fiercely with each other for the available goodies— security, jobs, status, marriage, and men.
Trained rigorously to be followers, to be “feminine” (frothy and dependent and illogical), to be private and sentimental and narcissistic, to be weak and charmingly ambivalent and contradictory—how in hell are we now supposed to blossom forth as instant marvels of maturity and responsibility—as leaders??? How in hell can we suddenly metamorphose ourselves into the strong, self-reliant, consistent, stable and authoritative ilk from whence leadership derives?
We can’t. Not en masse, and not overnight. So long as all women are specially oppressed as a sex, few women leaders can emerge, and those who do will reflect and express this general oppression of their sex. To be a women is to be afflicted. To escape the general affliction is a rarity, but some women leaders seem to have so escaped. The majority of woman leaders, however, have grown out of the struggle itself. To protest and mobilize against the general affliction of women, and its source in the socio-economic system, is a much more prevalent reflex than individual separation from the sex and the struggle. From out of the milieu of protest and confrontation, scores of women leaders are emerging.
When solidarity supplanted middleclass, individual careerism and singular stardom, at that moment in the late ’60s, a female leadership began to be born, a leadership buoyed by the tremendous currents and tides of a living mass movement.
Still, for every leader who skyrockets into prominence or consistently carries through vanguard responsibilities, three leaders drop by the wayside. For to be a woman leader —a leader of women, or of women and men—is to face a double jeopardy on account of sex, a double danger and a double cost.
The woman leader as a social abnormality
All the qualities classically necessary for leadership have been specifically prohibited, denied or abridged for women.
The woman leader consequently faces not only the ordinary and expected pitfalls and prices of an up-in-front role, but extremely unusual penalties as well, for she is“different”—atypical, strange, mysterious.
Unless she is a widow performing the proper tribute to the deceased by “carrying on his great and noble work” (the contemporary form of suttee), she is usually regarded as insane, sick, distorted, childless, lesbian, unsexed or consumed with flaming sexual frustration. Even those who admire her allude frequently to her uniqueness as a human type—a mutant on the evolutionary tree.
She copes with this nervous response to her in one of three ways:
1. The super-feminine compensation game
To look at this adorable, petite, melting-eyed doll, you would never dream she’s a community mover and shaker and a demon organizer. Easily half of her energy is expended in negating her identity as a leader, and indeed, her game does effectively subdue the wrath and deflect the hostility of the sexists.
Eventually, however, one or the other identity has to go, and if the leadership role doesn’t come to predominate, she will lapse into mediocrity and become petrified in a rut. Her super-femininity compromises her feminism and reinforces sex role-playing. Her credibility suffers, and then her performance declines.
2. The grand sacrifice syndrome
Hounded on all sides by overwhelming pressures, she relinquishes her role and steps back into obscurity “for the good of the movement” or to retain her “sanity.”
This is especially prevalent among Black and minority women, who are mercilessly intimidated by their own race/ ethnic movements for their out-front status. The rhetoric of“Black manhood,” “machismo,” and “get behind your man” widely expresses Stokely Carmichael’s famed pronunciamiento,“The proper position of women in the movement is prone.”
But self-sacrifice to a false god is not only blasphemous, it boomerangs. Which is why minority women comprise the most explosive and dynamic sector of the feminist movement, even if they are largely underground. Oppressed as a race, as a class, and as a sex, they are destined for leadership of the entire human race. The Angela Davises point the way.
3. Keep on truckin’
That so many women leaders actually manage to keep going is a remarkable tribute to the intensity of the oppression against women. The whip of the counterrevolution never stops, and the very turbulence of the struggle creates a centripetal force that fixes the leadership firmly in the center of the political cauldron.
In this variant of response to pressure, the double jeopardy serves as a spur, as double reason and justification for carrying on the struggle. Indignation, outrage and compassion can be extremely energizing, and a dual oppression often redoubles the responsive energy. This is the remarkable dialectic of women’s leadership, wherein her motion and drive are resultants of the fierce contradictions involved in her position.
The woman leader as political radical
Woman is nigger. Woman is dybbuk. Woman is cheap labor. Woman is unpaid domestic labor. Woman is bitch. Woman is whore. Woman is cunt. Woman is no lady.
Woman is the lowest item on the social totem pole. The political alternatives for her are consequently polarized. Because of the integral relation between women’s rights, monogamy, and private property, the movement for woman’s emancipation is an equivalent to, and a corollary of, the class struggle. Woman is either a part of, or ideologically and spiritually aligned with, the proletariat. Life forces her to the left, or into the far right.
The logical extension of the feminine mystique is fascism (kinder, kirche, küche), which explains the large numbers of middleclass women in the John Birch Society, anti-abortion and Fascinating Womanhood groups (both church-inspired), and anti-ERA formations (corporate-financed). But the woman in the feminist movement turns left, for Marxist philosophy corresponds to her actual, objective place in the sun—outside, underneath, and seething.
The role of the liberal moderate is virtually excluded for women leaders (as distinct from women politicians in the twoparty system, who do not lead but follow the polls and the whims of voters). The logic of woman’s situation in life, added to her personal experiences within the system, impels her to a radicalization that is truly remarkable in scope and intensity.
The woman leader accordingly tends to become a political radical. And if straight political life is one of routine jeopardy, radical politics is jeopardy compounded. She is not only a female libber, she’s a goddam commie who refuses to go back where she didn’t come from. She exults in taking on the power structure, and the populace, with a multi-issue, revolutionary double-barreled blast.
Then, after being recognized and sometimes even respected by the media and the public as an outspoken and intransigent feminist and radical, she finds herself half torn to shreds by her own movement—a New Left still fraught with lingering sexism and a ferocious anti-leadership mystique. Born of ideological anarchism, the current network of collectives, “alternative institutions” and free service projects deplore and detest organization and leadership, which they label as anti-human, Leninist-machine, imperialistic constructs.
The New Left still supplants program and leadership with the cult of “human relations,” “relating to people,” and following after the spontaneity and given level of consciousness of the masses. The functions of leadership—to guide, coordinate, supervise, initiate, advise, teach, organize—is anathema to them. The woman leader is double anathema. She has a program, operates within a structure, views the world sociologically and objectively. The New Left pontificates that“lifestyle is our politics” and “lifestyle humanism means no leaders.”
The coping mechanisms of the woman leader as she confronts her floundering comrades are similar to the three options previously indicated.
She can pretend not to be a leader, and lead—that is, assume responsibility quietly, clandestinely, and with super modesty, as indicated for women. Or she can give up in disgust or be broken down. Or she can wait them out, knowing that the lessons of history and the inevitable growing up process of the New Left itself are on her side.
Leadership and privation
Assuming our woman leader has survived the first two instances of double jeopardy—social abnormality and political radicalism—how does she survive economically?
Neither the woman’s movement nor the radical movement can, as a rule, support her. With the exception of a tiny handful of publicly supported or liberal-establishment/ church-subsidized feminist centers and academic-research projects, no outlets exist that will pay her a living wage for her talents and expertise.
The regular workaday world is terrified of her. Business and industry, government on all levels, academia and social agencies shudder and turn faint when she appears at the personnel departments. (“Our funders, our Board, our clients, the media—what would they think?”)
Where she is able to locate a niche—on a campus, in the anti-poverty program, in social agencies—she will be ruthlessly exploited, underpaid and overworked, as the price paid by a feminist and a radical for that coveted “meaningful” job. Her energy will be thoroughly sapped; her availability for community, regional or national leadership is harshly restricted, both by apprehensive executive directors and by her own exhausting work schedule.
In order to get a job, she must usually lie—underplay her qualifications and skills and job history. But the employment agencies are skittish of her anyway, and it is difficult to be the quiet secretary or new factory hand or cheerful waitress when her name is turning up in the papers, or the boss’s wife catches her on television, or the CIA, FBI, Civil Service investigators, etc., grill the neighbors. So she’s always getting fired, or “laid off,” and the endless job-hunting drains her energy and nerves even more.
Women professionals with their own businesses, or women who are supported or assisted by husbands and boyfriends, are few and far between in the roster of women leaders. In the United States, radicals are rarely crucified, shot or systematically tortured, give or take a few police raids and mass arrests. Instead, dissidents and rebels are systematically blacklisted and half-starved to death. Welfare is rarely a solution for women leaders, because the privation involved is so enervating and so demoralizing, and the brunt of this grinding poverty is borne by the children.
The survival mechanisms, then? Again, these are similar to the previously indicated options.
She may suddenly, or gradually, change her ideology and social concepts. She may capitulate utterly to social acceptability—or just move over a bit to allowable limits of non-conformity. Sometimes unemployment will serve as the trigger, and at other times, affluence and a good job will do it. The hunger of the establishment to co-opt, to buy off militants, is truly insatiable.
She may elect to retain her theory and her ideas as an individual, while dropping her public role and organizational/ group affiliations. She retires to private, wage-earning life.
If she’s lucky, or gifted, or indomitable and dedicated, or just ornery—and if she can count on a little help from her friends and her sisters—she will manage to keep it all going, somehow: the movements and the struggles, external and internal, the job, the family, the personal study, the house, and maybe even the yard. Endowed with health, humor and a horror of injustice, the woman leader persists, galvanized daily by the mounting outrages of a decadent and putrefying society.
Special oppression creates a bold new leadership
The bondage of women crippled them, but it also, finally, motivated women to rebel, to expose, to resist and to organize.
Helpless anguish and rage at the plight of their sisters in poverty, in despair, in desperation, animated women to rise out of passivity and ambivalence, to raise the eternal cry of the unrepresented and unenfranchised—power!
Women leaders created a brand new movement, and the movement in turn engendered more women leaders, up from slavery, up from demoralization, up from the lower depths.
Women leaders shouldn’t be here, but they are. Women leaders really can’t exist, but they do. Women leaders cannot conceivably survive, but they will.
Women leaders will prevail because it is historically and sociologically necessary they do so. Women’s leadership and the women’s movement will survive precisely because the jeopardy facing them is so great. All women, and some men, recognize clearly the difficulty of maintaining a consistent assault on the bastions of American capitalism; yet the very difficulty of the task creates a heightened radicalization and an expanding revolutionary orientation.
For when any system becomes so repressive to advocates and spokespeople and organizers for the oppressed, that system has already placed itself into deep jeopardy. It is hated, resented, despised—and it will be tumbled onto the ash bin of history. Its callousness and depravity are its own gravediggers; the system itself creates its nemesis.
The very issue of female leadership, then, is a revolutionary question. The double and triple burdens borne by women leaders are a product of a dysfunctional and sadistic society, and women are learning once again how to relieve their burdens by means of involvement in the enormously liberating process of social struggle. The end result will be revolutionary mass action, revolutionary political action that will transform the power structure in this country and usher in a new epoch of socialist economic relations and democratic human relations.
And at the forefront of this international army of humanists will march a huge phalanx of women—women of all colors, all ages, all nations, and even all classes—because women as a sex have been brutalized for too long and are becoming the ultimate revolutionaries.
We are so far down on the bottom, we have nowhere to go but up. And as we move upward, because we are principled and not opportunists, because we have never been rich or powerful enough to learn corruption, we shall push everyone up with us as we go. Because we live in double jeopardy, we shall eliminate all jeopardy from human relations. In our surge to survive, we shall speak for all the oppressed.
This is the timeless essence of true leadership. This is the principle and the practice of the matriarchy—where it all began.
* I use the term “leadership” in the political, rather than the professional or business-tycoon sense. Leadership connotes a relationship between a movement, group or bloc, and its vanguard. The vanguard is composed of a cadre that is voluntary and is democratically selected. The boss or general who hires or drafts a staff is not a “leader,” nor is an expert in some field who does not create a movement. A leader leads others, expresses and influences the ideas and feelings of others, and acts in concert with others to change the social and cultural climate.