Author's Note

Throughout this article I use male gender words like man and mankind to refer to men and women and to men alone. The meaning should be clear from the context in which the word is used. Although this is a remnant of male supremacy and the invisibility of women, alternative forms of expression are either awkward (he/she) or misleading (I use humankind and humanity to refer to something else in this article). Therefore, with my regrets, mankind for now will have to be adequate.

Foot binding is no longer practiced in China, but United States office workers limp through crowded streets in four-inch backless high heels. Women report television news in equal numbers to men, but all are young, thin, and decorative, as defined by male chauvinist standards. Birth control has freed women to experience sex purely for pleasure, but group libel of women in the form of pornography denatures her sexual fulfillment and mangles the very meaning of pleasure. Over 45 percent of the United States labor force is women, but on their way to work men everywhere whistle, grunt, or otherwise comment on the attractiveness (or, worse still, on the lack of attractiveness) of their legs, faces, and bodies. Women's household labor and its corollary, the transient labor force, may no longer be a pillar of bourgeois domination, but oppression is still here. In some respects, particularly in sexual objectification — a one-dimensional, stunted view of women's existence for man's pleasure — oppression has increased dramatically.

This section of Women and Modern Capitalism will examine why it is extremely unlikely that women will be able to throw off the yoke of male supremacy under capitalism, notwithstanding its tendency to erode the material basis of women's oppression and equalize the status of women and men within their respective classes. The essence of this apparent dichotomy lies in an understanding of alienation, "the hallmark of the modern age.1

Part I of this article examined the material effects of capitalist expansion and corresponding changes in women's traditional role as keeper of home and hearth.

First, capitalism, which historically provided the material conditions for women's oppression, has itself undergone vast changes. These changes have increasingly created the conditions under which women can achieve liberation. The decisive change has been women's emergence from the isolation of the home and entry into the social relations accompanying employment. Second, women's condition itself has vastly improved in the capitalist countries as capitalism has become more and more advanced. Universal public education, equal access to the universities, easily obtainable divorce, and a multitude of convenience products which have virtually done away with housework, all give women control over their lives unequalled anywhere else.2

This equalizing tendency of capitalism, however, is only one aspect of its development and expansion. Another, equally significant to women's condition, is its effect on the quality of life people lead. Analysis of the quality of life and changes wrought by World War II and by splitting the atom — decisive and closely related phenomena — is more subjective, and for that reason more difficult than analysis of raw economic change. It calls for answers to what humanity requires for fulfillment and continuity. Consideration of the quality of life demands that one isolate what is universal to the human condition from what can or should be altered by technological innovation or economic planning. These questions tend to be shunned by Marxist organizations as remote to the interests of the working class, and, for that reason, as bourgeois deviations from the task at hand for communists. In fact, however, they are considerations which percolate in the consciousness of every person, albeit in fragmented form, and which form the basis of working class resistance to the degradation of life at the workplace. It is the stuff of which proletarian revolution will be made.

Though alienation of labor (and its ramifications in all aspects of modern life) affects both men and women, it has uniquely affected women by transmogrifying male supremacy from an economic phenomenon with material roots, to a pervasive and entrenched cultural norm principally benefitting men. Whereas once woman had a roughly autonomous sphere of existence, albeit a subordinate one in the home, she is now depicted by an omnipresent and enormously influential mass media as existing principally for man's pleasure and comfort. Whatever other functions she may be granted — and her choices are greater than ever before — pleasing and titillating man is primary, influencing and shaping all other facets of her life. This section of Women and Modern Capitalism will examine this process of change and try to show how male supremacy is more than an ideological hangover from an era in which universal domestic servitude was essential to capitalist accumulation.

Degradation of Labor

While the direction of capitalism has been to improve women's condition as women, namely, to tend toward equalizing the status of women and men within each class, this tendency has as its basis the drive to expand capital by expanding the means of production. This growth is accomplished by innovations designed to make production faster, cheaper, and more efficient, and to make workers easier to control. The earliest of these capitalist innovations was the division of labor in manufacturing: the breakdown of the processes that go into making a product into separate and distinct operations performed by separate and distinct workers. Through this separation of the work of manufacturing into component parts and allocation of different parts to different workers, the capitalist was able to make the whole process more efficient by mechanizing each part. Eventual pooling of financial resources permitted technological improvements, from the assembly line to automation and beyond, to eliminate large numbers of workers and to transform the nature of work for those who remain.3

Though technological improvement has generally made jobs cleaner, physically easier, and more accessible to less skilled, less educated, and less strong workers, a fact which has potentially opened up whole new areas of work to women, it has accomplished this at the high price of mechanizing, routinizing and degrading those that remain. Though this process has produced greater material wealth and leisure for the working class, and though it has led to proliferation of consumer goods for their enjoyment, as a whole it has worked against the working class. A high standard of living has emerged at the cost of imposing rigid controls on human action, not just at the workplace but throughout society, dissociating man from the earth which supports his life and from the world which he himself has shaped. These assertions, which will be developed further shortly, are more than metaphysical ramblings or religious dogma (though man has, until the modern age, universally sought explanation of the nexus between nature and humanity through religion). What differentiates man from other mammals is his ability to fashion tools with which he himself can knowingly and intelligently shape his environment. While civilization by its definition demands that man abandon the state of nature (barbarism) to gather in communities, his acts of production — of transforming his environment — remain fundamentally internal to and under the control of his own actions. Transformation of man the toolmaker, whose tools were fashioned by and for the individual craftsman, into man the laborer, whose space and time are minutely and pervasively dictated by the rhythm of machines he operates both for existence (such as the time clock or the punch press) and for pleasure (such as the car or television), is the concrete reality of modern existence. This is the society in which women work, live, and reproduce, and the society which defines their oppression.

Division of Labor

Because numbers of feminist theorists see women's oppression as a direct result of the "oldest" or "original" division of labor — that between woman and man — it is important to distinguish social division of labor from the division of labor in manufacturing. Mechanical division of labor is not simply a refinement of the social division of labor. It is a wholly different category embodying fundamentally different social relations.

Both radical feminists and socialist feminists incorporate variants of the division of labor theory into their analysis of women's oppression. For the radical feminists, patriarchy created a hierarchy in which men controlled the labor of women in society. This was accomplished through force and control made possible by women's reproductive functions. Through history, the institutions and forms of control have changed, but the power relations have remained basically intact. Pivotal societal relations are those of reproduction, and the sexual division of labor is the principal method of control, with women as the oppressed class. Social change therefore begins with fundamental reorganization of sex roles.

Socialist feminists generally accept the premise that patriarchy created the original hierarchical ordering of society but add that this mechanism of control now operates as an essential, if not the essential form of political control for capitalist society.

When one states that capitalism needs patriarchy in order to operate efficiently one is really noting that male supremacy, as a system of sexual hierarchy, supplies capitalism (and systems previous to it) with necessary order and control. This patriarchal system of control is thus necessary to the smooth functioning of the society and the economic system and hence should not be undermined. This argument is to underscore the importance of the system of cultural, social, economic, and political control that emanates from the system of male supremacy. To the extent the concern with profit and the concern with societal control are inextricably connected (but cannot be reduced to each other), patriarchy and capitalism become an integral process; specific elements of each system are necessitated by the other.4

Whether the sexual division of labor in primitive society was by definition hierarchical or whether it sometimes assumed egalitarian and sometimes totalitarian forms is unclear from anthropological literature. Assuming, however, for the sake of argument that sexual division of labor was inherently hierarchical, it simply is not believable that primitive mechanisms of control — which initially would have assumed intensely personal forms and have been at least partially offset by major aspects of co-operation between men and women necessitated by surviving and surmounting the obstacles of nature — would have been even largely or basically kept intact through the ages. This conclusion assumes that actual techniques of control were learned and consciously retained by men, accepted by women, and adapted in isolation from all the co-operative facets of primitive life. Further, it assumes that such techniques were superimposed on hundreds of successive generations in a virtual vacuum, culminating in the impersonal, specialized, fragmented and near-totalitarian organization of society that increasingly characterizes the modern age. When all other forms of social relations and relations of production (which are themselves social relations) have changed, it would be extremely coincidental if this one had not. Further, nobody has presented convincing evidence or argument that capitalists purposefully adapted male supremacy at any point in capitalist development in order to divide or control the working class, as was done with white supremacy through Black slavery in the seventeenth century and the smashing of Reconstruction in the nineteenth.

What has happened is that the nature of division of labor has itself been transformed, which has changed both the form and content of women's oppression. Patriarchy, the organization of the family in which the male head controls reproduction and production of women and children, has been undercut by capitalism, not reinforced by it. In its wake other forms of social control have substantially, though not completely, replaced it. By the same token, what we now experience as male supremacy would at earlier times have been beyond the realm of imagination. What must be examined regarding the division of labor and women's oppression are the changes wrought by the division, segmentation, and resulting intensification of labor on the interdependent categories of (a) women as workers, (b) women as reproducers, and (c) cultural forms which increasingly not merely reflect but dramatically reinforce and reshape people's concepts of themselves, others, and relations among people. This task requires as a prerequisite a basic overview of the differences between social and manufacturing division of labor and the implications of these differences for society.

Alienation

Human work differs from that of other animals in the complexity of its possibilities.

An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species.5

"Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly . . . " but man swims like a fish and fishes like a hear, hunts like a lion, flies like a bird, and weaves like a spider.6 Since each person cannot perform all tasks oven at their most basic level, it is characteristic of human society to divide them into distinct crafts. Such social division of labor historically tended to embody a high level of autonomy among the different crafts, in general dividing people as equals in the marketplace. Whether woman's unique craft of childbearing and childrearing enjoyed the equality and autonomy of others, including those embarked upon by women, or whether women were part of the decisions that divided the labor, are less important than the fact that the society as a whole tended to be egalitarian. At the very least, the household realm was organized by women, and within that realm they performed a large variety of tasks recognized as fundamental to existence and survival.

Division of labor in manufacturing, or detail labor, on the other hand, decomposes each step in the process of producing each item so that a laborer performs just one simple operation in its manufacture. What is decisive is not that the operation is separated into its constituent elements, but that different operations are assigned to different workers. It is as though one woman did the courting (in the biological sense), one had the intercourse, a third tended a gestating machine, a fourth transferred baby from gestation to world, etc., and each worker did the same task all the time. Technical innovation permits greater and greater refinement of operations and reduces the level of skill for most jobs so that workers can be trained in days, or minutes. Each step in the labor process is removed from specialized skill and knowledge. The process obscures the very difference between, say, hunter and weaver, by reducing both trades to a series of minute and roughly interchangeable tasks. The process of making the tools that go into killing an animal and the tools that go into fashioning the cloth (and both seem increasingly a product of petrochemicals) can be performed by the same set of workers. Hunter and weaver cease to exist as such.

This minute specialization characteristic of manufacturing division of labor increasingly pervades all jobs and occupations. Intellectual labor, seen by liberals and academics as the opposite of physical labor in its self-actualizing potential for the doer, has also been segmented by technological innovation, vast bodies of data, and resulting specialization. Although this tendency has been distorted by sociologists, often in an attempt to demonstrate increasing proletarianization of their non-proletarian jobs, it is a good indicator of the breadth with which capitalism distorts all aspects of work, even those generally considered sheltered from its encroachment. Today's physician, M. Deity that he is in the United States, barely even attempts to understand the complex interplay of homeostatic mechanisms that represent health to the whole person. There are heart doctors and heart surgeons. There are baby doctors, baby heart doctors, and baby heart surgeons. Physicians treat patients principally by prescribing drugs solely on authority of sales information from pharmaceutical companies who in turn hire house doctors to pump their products. Hoffman-LaRoche spent $200 million in ten years to promote valium and commissioned 200 doctors a year to write "scientific studies" about its properties.7 What causes human beings to need drugs is generally beyond the scope of the physician, who more and more functions by alleviating pain. (Contemporary dimensions of pain and its absence are uniquely modern and central to a society characterized by alienation and its cultural counterpart: hedonism. It's not just the doctors —it's everybody.

Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? It's not my department, says Werner Von Braun!8

The implications of the difference between social division of labor and detail division of labor in manufacturing are enormous. Social division of labor, characteristic of all known human society, assigns a person a job to do — a craft or occupation — and more or less leaves the methods of doing the job to the worker. The worker (or group of workers) retains some level of control over how the job is organized, over pace of work, and over what happens to the finished product, which he or his designate exchanges at the marketplace. Work and community are organized on a human scale. Not so with detail labor, which is a creature of capitalism. There, hierarchical organization is the order of the day, as the individual worker sells not the result of his carefully fashioned product, but his muscle and time — his labor power — and loses control over organization and pace of work, over what is made, and over how it gets distributed. This tendency affects the worker whether he is paid minimum wage at a candy factory or $9.50 an hour at an auto plant.

. . . within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor pro- cess to a despotism more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.9

This process is more than simple job dissatisfaction, though sociologists still dwell upon how to organize production to increase the workers' pride in their contributions (studies paid for by management to halt the tide of strikes, absenteeism, sabotage, and other assaults on production). What Marx is describing is the process of alienation: the essential degradation of labor which sets in motion a world which separates man not just from his product, but from himself (as his labor belongs to another) and to a significant extent from other people, as what binds person to person in society is common purpose achieved by common effort, largely absent in modern society except in times of crisis or collective resistance. The fact that Marx describes man as principal worker and "wife" and "child" as properly something else is a relatively minor point and, in fact, was true for its time. Child labor and factory work for women with small children, at a time when household functions were an essential and extremely time-consuming part of existence, meant a double shift for women.

Women's Alienated Labor

Part I of this article examined in general terms the ramifications of women's entry into the labor force. Part of this change for women has meant entry into a labor force increasingly characterized by detail labor and totalitarian organization. Whereas job sectors traditionally occupied by women were at one time characterized by a level of personal control over working conditions adequate to identify worker with management, this is less and less true. Clerical occupations have shifted from an arm of management to detail labor, rationalized and systematized much as with manufacturing industry. Office workers are, by and large, machine operators, and the relationship between boss and worker on the one hand, and work and worker on the other, has given way to the impersonal organization and intensification of modern industry. Clerical work in finance, insurance, and government bureaucracy has become highly proletarianized, as has work in communication. Other women's occupations have also been segmented and intensified, though less completely than in manufacturing or clerical labor. Nursing students take psychology courses to learn to "relate" to patients, but clinical instructors tell them to try to take a "minute or two" each day to establish contact with each patient. (To Credit: LNS Graphics the extent that any relating occurs, it is parcelled out to psychologists and social workers.) School teachers, whatever their skills and intentions, are part cop, a condition demanded by need for order and control in a society characterized increasingly by disorder and chaos.

One aspect of alienated labor and its increasingly impersonal content is its effect on the task of raising young children, still principally the province of women. Hours spent at work are not the crucial part. Rather, the content of such work and its effect on the wholly different pace and activity demanded by children is what is important. Household labor may be isolating and limiting. There is just so much fulfillment one can get from serving meatloaf, watching Sesame Street, or even partaking of a young child's unfolding accomplishments. The creativity once associated with women's sphere in household labor has been reduced precisely by those technical and social advances which have freed her from its confinements — from electrification to public education. Furthermore, the nurturance demanded of a woman is in vast disproportion to what she gets back, particularly from a man. But household labor, even in its present, relatively unrewarding form, is not alienated labor. In addition to the fact that it allows women control over the pace and organization of work, the essential humanity of pregnancy, childbirth, and nurturance of children can provide women with a sense of purpose, continuity, limited collectivity, and fulfillment which are fundamental human needs hard to find elsewhere in this society.

The self-actualizing component of child-rearing, however, is dramatically diminished by the alienation of the child-rearer. The human toll taken by degradation of labor at the workplace — the incessant noise, the fast pace, the monotony, the control — renders the worker barely adequate to the co-operative, open-ended, creative, and emotional demands of raising children. The jarring, anesthetizing, fragmenting effect of labor flattens the worker's affective responses, puts life on a rigid schedule, and demands that family life itself be rationalized and systematized. Alienated labor makes people cranky, crabby, and anxious. The patience and humor demanded of parents can be summoned by the worker only by a supreme effort of will. The educational functions of parenting are beyond the endurance of most workers, and television takes up the slack. All these things affect men as well as women, but it is women who have been conditioned and educated from childhood that raising children is their job. It is women who mourn the loss of the affective ties of parenthood.

Changes wrought by entry of women into this increasingly alienated mass of laborers have given women a substantial measure of independence from men and have put working class women in a strategic position to recognize their revolutionary potential as part of the class. At the same time, however, economic pressures toward uninterrupted labor not only alienate women as workers — and low paid ones at that — but increasingly dissociate woman from nature as experienced in her relationship to procreation. What is deforming to women is not household labor per se, but household labor in an alienated society.

A Question of Biology

Woman is designed to gestate, to bear children, and to nurse her young. It is a good design, it has worked effectively, and, judging from the number of unwanted pregnancies, it is hard to fight. Woman is also designed to do almost everything man can do. Throughout the period of capitalist development these basic facts have been molded, mangled, and made into monstrous myths to conform to the needs of the bourgeoisie vis a vis both working class and affluent women. What is more, a whole series of emotional qualities have been both extrapolated from and superimposed upon women's biological characteristics: inferior intelligence, superior nurturance (for men as well as for infants), gentleness, moodiness, and so forth. Scientific "evidence" of these truths came forth as though by spontaneous combustion. Women have smaller heads; therefore their brains hold less than men's. Women bleed spontaneously every month; therefore they are sick and need to stay close to home. Women lack penises; therefore they are defective men.

By the late nineteenth century the by-then-male medical profession had contributed substantially to male supremacist ideology by defining women not just as inferior and sick, but as medically dangerous to men as well.10 What is more, these theories managed to justify diametrically opposed views of women of different classes.11 Rich women were too frail to work. Poor immigrant women, however, had strong, robust bodies, especially Black women who worked in the fields. They were just dirty and disease-ridden: likely to infect meandering middle-class men. The myths come and go as they are needed and themselves affect women's behavior. Perhaps because the "everything else" of woman's design has until recently been denied to women, the fact that the modern age is increasingly characterized by degradation of women's childbearing functions rather than glorification of them has been denied or trivialized by feminists and Marxists alike. The gulf, however, between the ideology of earth-mothermadonna and the reality of woman's dissociated relation to her body and to herself as a sexual, reproducing being biologically equipped to nurture her young, is wide and deep.

This tendency is most apparent in the treatment of Third World women. Attempts to halt the increasing birth rate among Third World people has taken a savage form in its degradation of Third World women. Sterilization abuse is the most blatant form, but there are others, More subtle but also pernicious is the related phenomenon of indiscriminately counselling new teenage mothers how to keep it from happening again. Even assuming good intentions, it seems beyond the comprehension of white medical personnel that a Third World teenage woman might want to have several children at a young age, have the assistance of her own still-young mother during the early years of their lives, and then move on to other things if possible or desirable. These examples would solely indicate oppression of Third World people, not degradation of women as a group, were it not for the fact that the degradation takes other less insidious, more indirect and subtle, but nonetheless compelling forms in relation to white women.

There is growing economic and cultural pressure toward late childbearing among all classes in the U.S. Fun during youth (before settling down, the culturally defined antithesis of fun), and self-fulfillment through education, work, and financial security are reasons why middle-class women in particular, but working-class women as well, delay childbearing. This trend exists in spite of abundant evidence that in contemporary society, child-bearing after age 30 is harder, riskier for the mother, less successful, and results in dramatically greater incidence of birth defects among infants. Even these studies, however, have a builtin cultural bias. As women's reproductive system matures in early teen years and the body has substantially reached full growth by age 16 or 18, it seems likely that late teens and early twenties, rather than 20-30, is the optimal biological period for child-bearing. The modern obsession with fun, youth, and self will be examined more closely in the following section on culture. Its liberating aspects for women, however, should not obscure its fundamentally alienated nature: that in spite of the biological detriments, mothering is something you do after you've enjoyed life — something separate from you as "you."

Perhaps the most blatant example of dissociation of women from the experience of reproduction is the way in which birth is handled in this society. For generations the medical establishment, itself a model of technical specialization and innovation, has saved a few lives at the cost of degrading all women and severing early and crucial motherchild bonds. An infant is born in a hospital (a place for the sick and dying) to a drugged mother, shaved, sterilized, and hooked up to several machines. Mother and infant are separated for 6 to 24 hours after birth, while the infant is kept warm in a plastic box under an artificial light. A whole generation or two were convinced they were physically unable to breast-feed their babies — they were too modern, too busy, and too high-strung — in spite of the fact that the formula fad was initiated by the middle classes, where women by and large were not employed outside the home during the infancy of their children. What is remarkable is that until recently these procedures were taken for granted. There is now a minor retreat from some of the most dehumanizing of these modern aspects of childbirth: fathers are permitted to observe deliveries on certain occasions, breast-feeding is encouraged, and babies are permitted to remain with parents for a short period before being whisked away in the plastic box. Also, drugs during delivery are no longer foisted upon unwilling women, probably more due to malpractice suits than to any understanding of the relation between pain, control, strenuous effort, and ultimate release during the birth process. Humane childbirth, however, is not the order of the day (though a movement has made it an alternative for some women), as the American College of Obstetrics will expel any member who performs a delivery at home. The fact of life has taken over entirely from the quality of life. It is true that hospitals save some infants' lives when they would not survive without modern technology. It is also true that this intervention itself sometimes harms infants and mothers, and that lives of all babies possible are saved regardless of the quality of life that a severely damaged infant can expect. What stands out among these facts, however, is that obsession with raw individual existence is unique to the modern age — a phenomenon which can be observed in attempts to extend the natural life span of humans indefinitely, the morbid dread of aging and death, and the absence of an accepted philosophical justification for suicide, which in many states and most religions is a serious crime.

This reification of life itself has a grotesque contradictory aspect in modern society, however. Lest any person have thought that life as the highest good overrides economic considerations of capitalism, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island would have set him straight. The increasingly greater attempts to strike a balance between cost and benefit were seen there in their most horrifying form — the balancing of the cost (in dollars and impact) of evacuating hundreds of thousands of people in central Pennsylvania versus the chance that things would be okay (meaning nothing immediately cataclysmic would occur). In a square-off between individual life and capitalism the individual is vanquished, a fact with revolutionary implications for a nation of people imbued with the ideology of the sanctity of life.

A humanly organized society would recognize that during the infancy of a child, a woman cannot live by a clock. After a year of paid "leave," it would provide another year or two of part-time work suitable in pace and control to nurturing children part-time. A humanly conceived vision of the new society should provide appropriate flexibility for fathers as well. Such demands would even be consistent with capitalism were it not for the curious notion of a property right in one's job made law by American trade unionism.

Like much of woman's oppression, dissociation from her bodily functions takes largely a psychological form, negatively shaping woman's self-concept in an age when a positive and happy "self" are the measure of one's worth. It is now known, for example, that postpartum depression, for years attributed to women's neurotic rejection of motherhood or to hormonal change, almost never occurs in mothers who deliver their infants at home with control over the birth process and over their subsequent relationship to the baby.

The biological self-contempt of women has been (and still is, to a large extent) truly remarkable. The contortions women go through for beauty is one example. No one likes her own body the way it is. What is more, it took a revolutionary movement to smoke out the universal self-doubt and get women talking and admitting to their best friends, let alone to men, that they feared they were frigid or built wrong or otherwise defective because they weren't having orgasms routinely or at all during intercourse. Such is not the case with men, whose biological function is glorified.

It is compelling testimony of the extent to which women's biological function has been degraded that a whole sector of the movement sees the liberation of women not in a balancing of reproductive tasks, on the one hand, and physical and mental labor (work) on the other, but on the annihilation of women as reproducers of children.12 That it is within the realm of human capability to create life artificially does not mean such techniques should be used. Such a vision is the quintessence of alienation and the attempt to escape the human condition as we know it. Though not intended as such, it is thoroughly consistent with totalitarianism, not just through the obvious mechanism of eugenics, but through the obliteration of all human differences in the name of equality.

Biological alienation of women has been a critical part of the transformation of male supremacy from an economic necessity for capital to an ideological crutch for men. Objectification of woman's body for man's pleasure and everything that follows from this mangled view of woman is utterly inconsistent with woman's natural relation to reproduction.

Force of Ideology

Ideology is a powerful social force. Once established it does more than justify prevailing economic patterns. It wends its way into law, religious dogma, norms and mores of a society. It invades and shapes individual consciousness. It takes on a life of its own and becomes firmly rooted in mass consciousness long after its material basis has disappeared. The Protestant ethic of work and frugality persists in the U.S. in spite of the fact that the economy runs on credit.

This relative independence of the superstructure cannot be underestimated. Ideas may be derived from material events, but ideas themselves are instrumental things. A powerful enough ideology becomes so firmly embedded in the minds of men through law, morality, art, science, religion, and philosophy, that it can itself help shape the further course of events of a civilization.

. . . an ideology gnawed at, worried to the bone, argued about, dissected, and re- stated by an army of essayists, moralists, and intellectuals becomes a force in its own right.13

Such has been the fate of male supremacy, which has persisted in spite of the erosion of its material base. Male supremacy is more than just a few centuries of accumulated prejudice. It is a few centuries of accumulated prejudice uniquely transformed and transmogrified to keep humanity afloat in a culture of nothing.

So far this article has tried to show how the relationship of the individual to his work is not a phenomenon that can be separated from other aspects of human existence. Fundamentally, work which satisfies no creative human urge, but is performed only to satisfy wants wholly unrelated to the nature of that work, and which at the same time belongs not to the worker himself, but to another, dissociates that worker from himself. Alienated labor transforms man's essential humanity into non-human property of another. The dissociation between one's work and any observable shaping of his world denies the essence of his human condition, for through the world one makes, one affirms his existence.

Man, who produces his living, has become in large part object: a product of his production. In the U.S., where capitalism has reached an advanced stage, the working class is on the whole monetarily affluent, at least by world standards. This affluence finds its outlet in an extreme form of mass consumption. Change in a fast-moving cycle of obsolescence and newness is not just the norm, but the objective. One positive and potentially revolutionary aspect of this basically alienated and alienating process — that of having rather than being or making — has been discussed in Part I. The feast of consumer goods in the U.S. has brought women, once essential to capitalism as homemakers, out of the home and into the working class in their own right. But a negative aspect exists as well. A culture of mass consumption has become a culture of hedonism: fun, excitement, glamour, and sunshine. California. It has gone a long way in freezing women as objects to consume.

Contemporary mass culture did not come to be simply because there were capitalists producing luxuries that had to be bought to keep their industries in business. The cultural transformation of modern society is a complex interaction of events and circumstances. Revolutions in technology brought electric appliances to most people's houses, simplifying the tasks needed for existence. Mass production on the assembly line made enough products available and low enough in cost to reach most workers. Development of advertising and marketing refined and institutionalized manipulation of people's tastes and wants. Growth of finance and the business of credit put previously inaccessible luxuries within reach of the entire working class. Television carefully packaged it all and delivered it to the homes of people who could receive wellresearched messages without being able to answer them. Vast road networks and air travel shrunk the globe, making small-town, independent culture a thing of the past. These circumstances transformed people's lives, glorified change and progress, and made the abstract principle of equality which had always been an ideological foundation of U.S. society an apparent material reality to the U.S. working class. A culture based on abstinence and future salvation through work was transformed into one of hedonism and fun now through consumption. It was the answer to the degradation of labor and alienation of modern man. The powerlessness and meaninglessness of people's lives found apparent power and meaning through consumption of goods and plain old fun.

Cultural Transformations of Male Supremacy

Advertising and marketing are the most extraordinary phenomena of our time. Five hundred years from now (assuming we've not incinerated the planet before then) cultural anthropologists and historians won't bother much with our films, books, and articles. They will look at our colorful advertisements and catchy jingles to decipher what our culture was all about. The American mass media exists to sell: to sell audiences to advertisers, and social institutions and advertisers to audiences. The actual ads are only half the sale; television programming and magazine content are the other half. They merchandise ads that sell the products. Family shows sell fast foods and detergents. Late night detective shows sell fast cars and beer that tastes like detergents.

The content of the sales pitch, however, must to a large extent give the people what they want to hear. It must appeal to present motives and goals of the audience: youth, glamour, sex, romance and fun. Although the media reflects, maintains, and rigidly reinforces cultural values, it cannot fundamentally alter the audience's view of itself and its world. The extent to which these present "values" are reinforced, particularly among youth, at whom mass culture and media alike are largely aimed, is Orwellian. Teen-age youth were recently polled on attitudes toward parents and toward television figures. Seventy-five percent wanted to trade in their old parents for new models: Burt Reynolds for father and one of Charlie's Angels for mother.

Television is the principal source of information for a majority of the U.S. people. Alienated man, already dissociated from himself, from other men, from feelings, and ultimately from reality, anesthetizes himself in front of the tube. The average person spends something like six hours a day watching television. TV news presents data from all over the world, but that data is edited and re-edited to maintain the audience and to sell products. As such, it is flat, emotionless, unobjectionable, and banal. Murder and war are presented studiously and deliberately with less affect than sports. Exceptions are startling. In the final days before Somoza fled to the United States, the impromptu execution of an ABC news reporter by a Nicaraguan national guardsman was shown straight. It was hideous and chilling. The cameraman-turnedreporter by the luck of the position of the camera told the story in a shaking voice. Anchorpeople were rendered momentarily speechless. But such candor is extremely rare.

A young man at the time of Socrates would have far greater contact with the realities of life and death than would any of the TV wet-nursed generation. War, death, famine, sickness, indeed all of life's experiences, would have been very close to his perception every time he stepped out of the front door; life at its best and worst awaited him in the streets — real life, not ersatz illusions of real life misrepresented, in the words of Coca-Cola's latest banality as "The Real Thing!"14

Contemporary advertising, with contemporary TV shows, sells sex. More precisely, it sells commodities through the vehicle of selling sex. Even where the ad looks straightforward, chances are it is selling sex. An entrancing book, Subliminal Seduction, shows how it is done. Images of sexual activity and words like S E X and F U C K lurk in dark corners of most advertisements. The mind is quicker than the eye, and it receives these messages at the level of the sub-conscious Far from paranoid fantasy, it is proven that it works. Wind Song may whisper your message (to him) but it shouts FUCK at your subconscious. (Relax and look for K's in hair and folds of clothing. Turn the magazine around slowly. Gradually, the F U and C become clear to your conscious mind.)

Subliminal advertising is the norm and its message overwhelmingly is sale of skillfully prepared illusions about ourselves and our world. Primary among the illusions is that of abstract woman. Complaints have been made. The government is aware of the practice and refuses to acknowledge it, at least publicly. Privately it is no doubt spending millions to use this remarkable method of mass persuasion for its own ends and perfect similar techniques for aural penetration.

What has a world of hedonism, constantly maintained and reinforced at both conscious and subconscious levels through mass communication, done to the ideology of male supremacy? It has taken a powerful set of prejudices about women based on years of women's utility for capitalism and remodeled and marketed them. Shiny new cultural conceptions of women fit the modern age — one of fashion, travel and romance. Woman's role is still predominantly to serve man, but where it was once to serve, honor and obey by maintaining his home, children and parents, it is now to serve, prop and bolster by providing a judicious blend of sex, excitement and compassion. Where woman once was to serve man (and capital) by being faithful as a bird-dog and having babies, she now serves man by being his very own sex-kitten, free to come and go (with him) as she pleases, unfettered by children or job or sick parents. Women are sex objects — unthinkable less than 100 years ago — and sex sells goods.

TV programming irons women flat, though the woman is the latest polyester blend of modernity and femininity, and as the ads tell you, polyester doesn't need ironing. If she is mother and house-wife, she makes herself even more attractive (to him) by going back to school for a degree (Abby in "Eight is Enough"; Kate in "Family"). If she is defined by her job, she still is the nurturing and understanding character of the show — the one with common sense ("Alice," "Mary Tyler Moore," Billie of "Lou Grant"). Alternatively, she is fast and groovy ("Charlie's An- gels") or a zany kook ("Rhoda"). Even those shows that try to nourish the audience with some insight into humanity dwarf women. M*A*S*H has occasional moments of tenderness and real insight, but its women are (a) castrating bitches, (b) pretty faces, or (c) occasional gorgeous, capable, insightful perfection, overflowing with the milk of human kindness. "Lou Grant's" Billie is lovely. She is the new breed of actress, the model of what every middle-class working woman should be. She's so perfect she even has a few harmless flaws. Middle-class men fall in love with her (she's single, of course). And any woman who tried to be that perfect would break out in hives. Detective and crime shows are the worst. Women there are nothing but pretty faces. Girls want Charlie's Angel to be their mother. What do men want?

Movies, which provide slightly better possibilities for all characters because of length and absence of commercial interruption, aren't much better for women. An Unmarried Woman was highly praised for Jill Clayburgh's portrayal of a life crisis for a many-faceted woman. But though she certainly was trying to find her place in the world after a divorce (from a man so ridiculous it was incomprehensible that any woman, let alone a desirable one, would be upset at his leaving), and though she had a job and a child and warm friendships with other women and a divorced woman's typical crew of male companions, her entire world view was herself. What is more, within that frame of reference her relations to men were dominant. This is a big improvement over movies that show woman only as object (of man) but it is still woefully inadequate.

Women's fashion similarly demonstrates this change. Seductive dress, with annual planned obsolescence, is a sign of the time. While there is an increasing tendency to try to market men's clothes similarly, it has not taken hold in the way that women's fashion has. Women working in offices frequently replace large sections of their wardrobes annually. This year's item is dungarees, fashioned by Gloria Vanderbilt and others into designer jeans and sold for $50.00. Through products marketed to make women pleasing to men, from make-up to vaginal deodorants, women market themselves to be pleasing to men. Woman as object of exchange has returned, in new form.

The culture of hedonism is the culture of sex and beauty and fun. Absence of fun is cause for anxiety, depression and self-doubt. But for women, this fun is hard to come by — even harder than it is for men, who are by no means "happy" even on the illusory terms prescribed by contemporary culture. Birth control pills unleashed an era of sexual freedom for women, but in a culture where women are universally objectified sexually, this freedom has often meant coercion by men to be free and happy by having sexual relations with them. Someone discovered that women were capable of multiple orgasms, and the woman who doesn't want more than one is back where she started, before she discovered the fraud of the vaginal orgasm: lying and wondering what's wrong with her. Women's selfconcepts are colored by absence of fun in a culture where fun is a measure of worth. And the single greatest cause of funlessness is manlessness.

The culture of hedonism is the most recent expression of man's escape from the world. This flight into "self" is not inconsistent with dissociation of alienated man from himself. The category of "self" has changed from its zenith of harmony and oneness with the environment — through the interplay of individual thought, mutual dialogue, and collective action (as distinguished from normative behavior), all pointed toward shaping the future world — to disharmony and flight from the environment through exclusive concern with me and now. The escape may have originated with capitalism and the need to defer worldly enjoyment, substituting instead worry and concern about one's salvation. But it has reached its apogee in absence of concern beyond one's own lifetime and one's own thing.

Love

If alienation as embodied in contemporary culture has transformed male supremacy from an ideology with a material basis in utility for capitalism to one with a psychological basis in utility for men, in so doing it has transmogrified love. In its raw form, love is a closeness and intimacy between two people which demands privacy not just for its expression but for its existence. It is based on expression of one's inner self, and knowledge of the loved one's inner self, unfettered by considerations of one's achievements or shortcomings. It is the "expectation and need to be received as given."16

Transcendence of worldliness is a rare phenomenon in any society where one's existence depends on attention to the daily exigencies of living, whether it is "working" for a living or subsisting on man's own collective efforts. This is what makes love between adults at most a transitory phenomenon, if it is experienced at all. If love cannot be transformed by love itself into respect, compassion and friendship, the relationship between lovers in proximity to one another must end. Where successful transformation occurs, generally through the mutuality of successfully working through the joys and disappointments of living, love may resurface from time to time, enriching the lovers through its unique power of mutual selfrevelation and self-affirmation.

Because love transcends worldly considerations, it forges a powerful bond between lovers. But this bond, by its unique expectation of mutual self-revelation, depends on absolute trust between lovers. This mutual trust is what renders the actors equal. As soon as one doubts the strength of the bond, the relationship of love is transformed into one of power: a relationship between lover and lovee, with power vested in the lovee. For this reason, love can endure for much longer periods between adult and child than between adult lovers. Even there, however, parental duties of education and discipline, and the child's drive toward ever-increasing autonomy, must eventually weaken the bond and transform the relationship into one characterized principally by mutual friendship, respect, and tenderness. Failure to do so infantilizes the relationship, as illustrated by the male chauvinist and anti-semitic but nonetheless probing and revealing confessions of Portnoy's Complaint.

Love between citizens of the polis was said to be the highest form of love in Athenian Greece. The structure of Greek society freed its citizens, all men, from the banal necessities of existence, which were performed in the private realm of the household by women and slaves, This opportunity for a life shaped by thought and political action gave the Greek citizen the time and space to experience love, which in subsequent societies up to the modern age has been principally reserved for poets and artists. It was not until the development and refinement of the private life ushered in by the modern age that the whole range of subjective human emotions and private feelings could be fully developed.17

During the eras when the household was an economic unit and marriages were arranged by parents, woman was an object of exchange. Love, if it existed at all between spouses, was not part of the culture. Later, when there was more apparent freedom of choice in selecting partners, women still tended to seek out mates for economic security, and marrying within one's social milieu as well as one's class was the norm. Free choice had a narrow meaning, and love was subordinated to expediency, whether that took the form of survival or comfort. A woman may no longer have been crudely sold by her father but she sold herself through her promise of domestic ability. It is the modern age that in theory permits both marriage based on mutual love and mutual love elsewhere than in marriage. But contemporary culture twists and de- forms this apparent equality between the sexes, so that while the potential for love is within reach, woman again is objectified — this time sold as the ideal-girl-next-door-sex-bunny-earth- mother and now, wage earner as well.

In the words of Enjoli, Charles of the Ritz perfume, she can

. . . feed the kids and the gerbils. Pass out the kisses. And get to work by 5 of 9. [She] can bring home the bacon. Fry it up in a pan. And never let him forget he's a man! Because [she's] a woman!18

What is unique to the contemporary notion of love is its public character, where by its nature love is private. The other side of this distortion is that the whole panoply of human affective ties is merged into the now-deformed category of love, which loses its transcendental meaning. This change is more than the deterioration of language (as in "I love my Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich"). It is a sophisticated, well-marketed response to material conditions which have alienated man from man and so thoroughly flattened emotional responses of the vast majority of adults that the rich nuances of feeling of which human beings are capable are lost in a sea of isolation and self-estrangement. In their place is glamour, fun, and, at best, romance (which, unlike love, is public: the illusion of love created by external excitement and adventure).

What man accepts as love is flattery on one hand, and compassion and sacrifice on the other. What woman accepts as love is flattery on one hand, and the chance to <>i>give compassion on the other. The latter, however, is an opportunity she rarely gets, as man cannot receive compassion unless he is demonstrably vulnerable, something men don't like to be. Thus, the emotional tempo, dynamics and rhythm of the relationship follow the needs of the man.

Although women are entering the labor force in greater numbers than ever before, cultural definitions and expectations still peg them as society's compassion-givers. Tenderness, compassion, and altruism are noble emotions when freely given and received. What deforms women is not just the fact that so often they are a one-way ticket to intimacy, but that culturally enforced compassion often emanates not from genuine understanding or deeply felt tenderness, but from feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and low selfesteem.19

Society characterized by alienation and a culture of hedonism distorts and denatures humanity, not just women. But its transformation of the ideology of male supremacy already present in capitalist society has affected women uniquely and ruthlessly. A world of men rendered powerless by their relation to their own labor and its products is a nation of men possessing some highly unattractive qualities. The remnant of male supremacy's functional base — power — has been replaced by sexual prowess and material wealth. One result has been fear of inadequacy and corresponding selfconsciousness, fear, and hatred of women. That men's hatred and fear of women has always found some form of cultural expression, whether by degrading religious dogma or by torturing women in difficult labor, does not take away from its present form. Man's self-affirmation is overwhelmingly centered in his sexuality, and the desirability of "his" woman (measured, of course, by male chauvinist standards) is its public proof. For women, this means conforming to a standard presented as physically attractive and psychically fulfilling to a man. Man's present insecurity has led to boundless emotional greed, to be fulfilled by women, and to an illusion of inner strength, manifested by denial of emotional vulnerability. All the fuss contemporary psychologists make about how men can't cry may in one sense be warranted (dissociation from one's feelings is a painful condition, leading to more generalized depression and anxiety), but a person conceals his emotions to maintain power over others.20 To reveal sadness, humility or despair on the one hand, or great tenderness or ecstasy on the other — those feelings which lend themselves to emotional catharsis — is to reveal part of one's humanity: one's fundamental need for other human beings. What men could gain in mutuality and universality by revealing their essential selves, they sacrifice for power — the illusion of mastery and control of feelings, and its corresponding autonomy.

These inhuman qualities are peculiar to the modern age. What is more, they are increasingly affecting women as well as men. In one rather narrow respect this is a progressive step for women. To the extent that these traits are equalized among men and women, woman will no longer be the one-sided emotional prop for society, with its attendant objectification and relegation to a subordinate place in the world. At a more profound level, however, loss of affect is yet another symptom of increasing alienation and immiseration of people in a capitalist or at least a capitalist-dominated world. And its effects are felt most keenly by children, who are denied the full range of human emotions and feelings by parents unable to react to them spontaneously and fully.

Escape From Earth

This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy, if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal; it was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which filled the hearts of men, who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold there a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction . . . was relief about the first 'step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth.'21

Flight from the confines of earth to the infinity of the universe is the other side of flight from the world into the me and now of self. Realizing the construct of centuries of Christianity before it, with belief in immortality of the soul which literally flies into the great beyond upon death of the worldly creature, flight from earth gives man the potential to escape the human condition. Man's flight from worldly concerns into a narrow and present self provides the cushion for an alienated world in which neither man's labor nor his product is part of himself, nor he part of them. Man's flight from the planet itself provides hope that what has been lost on earth can be rediscovered among the constellations. It provides a vision of yet a new age: the return of pioneering exploration, this time directed at conquering the universe, now that earth has been explored, conquered, expropriated, and used up. This fantasy world of escape is the negation of the negation: alienated man once again becomes part of his environment. But the environment is beyond himself, and self is a virtually new being, bearing almost no relation to the present condition of humankind. This vision explains the popular appeal of science fiction, which captured the human imagination years before its realization in space exploration on the one hand, and creation of life, now in experimental stages of recombinant DNA research, on the other.

This uneasy duality of a concrete present which knows no past or future and a visionary future which transcends present knowledge is where comfortable resting ground is found in man's dissociation from his environment. Modern man has gone a long way toward destroying earth that supports his life. He can no longer rely on the elements necessary for survival: air, food, and water. What is more, he knowingly not only continues the process but escalates it. This process would be unthinkable among people in touch with their environment. Yet it is a worldwide phenomenon that knows no political distinctions. The average, seat-of-thepants philosophical justification is (a) it won't affect my life; (b) when things get bad enough, we'll find a new technology to reverse the damage; and (c) by that time we'll probably be able to move on out to the universe and leave earth behind, anyway. Psychologists call it denial (of reality by repression of its presence into the subconscious), but it is more than that. It is a political phenomenon which allows capitalist expansion to eke out the last few generations of its existence. What humanity gives up in a future as we know it, individual man takes back in consumer goods and a culture of fun. Though the situation is most advanced in the United States, it is a worldwide and planetary problem.

Modern political, economic, and scientific events are global in scope. A few examples of this shrinkage of earth should suffice. The most obvious is military technology. In 1945 the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and over 100,000 human beings met gruesome, deaths. It had taken 600,000 people to produce the bomb and capital expenditures for atomic power had already been made.22 The atomic age was here to stay. Today much deadlier bombs are poised and ready to go, by virtual automation. The U.S. Navy's newest floating cities can be operated with crews of 28 and such bombs launched. Every country economically capable is part of this global arms industry of planned obsolescence, each at the mercy of all others' ability to destroy by remote control organic life on earth.

Five tons of plutonium settled into earth and water of the northern hemisphere between 1953 and 1963 during atomic bomb testing by the United States and Russia. More has been added since then in both northern and southern hemispheres by France and China.23 Plutonium, whose "acceptable body dose" is less than one millionth of a gram (which can still cause cancer 10-30 years after it is inhaled), has a half-life of 24,300 years!

Finally, on a less immediately apocalyptic scale, the universal drive toward modernization required in a world where no country is selfsufficient any longer and each must compete in the world market (or markets — whether there is one or several is controversial) has led to efficiency as a criterion for development. And placing a priority of efficiency is antithetical to democracy and workers' control. Alienation of modern labor characterizes all countries, including those generally defined as socialist.

Is This Socialism?

In the U.S.S.R. women account for more than 80 percent of the doctors, the fact most frequently presented, in contrast to a meager 7 percent in the U.S., to demonstrate equality for women in the Soviet Union. The fact that any occupation is composed of 80 percent rather than roughly 50 percent women should make one ask why.

Medicine is a nurturing profession. It is also a dirty and smelly one. At some levels and at some times in modern society it can be stimulating, such as diagnosis, and if a doctor makes a sick person well, it can undoubtedly be rewarding for her. But medicine, in spite of its unnecessarily long education and apprenticeship is not an unusually attractive job per se. It is unique to the U.S. that the doctor is viewed — and paid — as a god, which may explain the unconscionably high cost and poor quality of U.S. health care. If one looks further, occupational segregation in the U.S.S.R. and other "socialist" countries is the order of the day. In Czechoslovakia, women form 98 percent of nursing students, 87 percent of office work students, and 98 percent of education majors.

And by the mid-1960's, when women accounted for 60 percent of the medical students and 90 percent of pharmacology students, the average doctor's pay was lower than that of a worker in heavy industry, where women comprise only 8 percent of the workforce.24

Examples of both inequality at the workplace and extra burdens for women in the home abound for "socialist" countries. In the U.S.S.R., from the time of the first 5-year plan (1928), need for labor demanded recruitment of women into all sectors of the workforce. This need was intensified by collectivization, purges and World War II, and by 1959, 30 percent of Soviet households were headed by women and virtually all women worked. Notwithstanding these facts, patterns of employment are remarkably similar to those in western capitalist countries. Women fill jobs in "women's" occupations: teaching, health, and other services. Fifty percent work in agriculture, but very few in agricultural specialties.25 The high number employed in engineering (roughly half the engineers) is likely a result of the extremely heavy emphasis on fast scientific development throughout the Soviet Union. There, like elsewhere in the economy, women are concentrated at the lowest levels of skill and authority.

On the homefront, women work a double shift. Early revolutionary promise of a new social order freeing women from domestic drudgery by socializing housework was never fulfilled. Furthermore, emphasis on rapid modernization and heavy industry relegated consumer industries to a very minor place. Electrical appliances are not yet universal. In many places refrigerators are luxuries, not to mention automobiles or convenience foods. Laundry is washed by hand. In 1973 in Czechoslovakia 70 percent of the households had refrigerators and 85 percent had washing machines (much higher than in Poland or Hungary)26, but they were spotty in functioning and hard to service, involving waits of three months. Apparently nationalization of small businesses, such as electricians and mechanics, occurred without socialist substitutes for them.

In the U.S.S.R. women's participation in industry and throughout the economy is not reflected in higher levels of government. Though women participate heavily at the local level, only one woman has served on the Politbureau (the highest governing body), less than 4 percent sit on the central committee, and almost none serve in upper-level ministry functions. Sixty years and three generations after the revolution, in a society governed so totally from the top, this fact speaks volumes about women's condition.

Nowhere in the Soviet bloc countries has the revolutionary goal of shifting domestic work from family to society happened. The only communal service that has been widely developed is public child care, which varies substantially from country to country. Czechoslovakia gives mothers a six-month paid maternity leave and six additional months without pay. Nurseries take children at six months, but in 1966 only 9.7 percent of children under age 2 attended them. Further, extensive studies on their effects questioned the wisdom of nurseries for children under 18 months and were largely negative on use for children under one year. Hungary, on the other hand, provides three years of allowance for mothers, so infant care need not be socialized at all.

Cuba has perhaps come closer in its circulo program to freeing women from traditional restraints than other countries. Such was its principal goal.

Circulos infantiles permit a great majority of mothers to free themselves partially from tedious housework which frequently impedes their permanent development and improvement. Women who are tied down by housework end up enclosing themselves in a world so limited that they lose contact with life itself — living at its margins and reducing their scope of interest to the solution of never-ending daily needs. In this way they daily narrow their vital areas, hold back their development and exchange living for routine vegetating.27

Cuban circulos take infants at 45 days (when the mothers' maternity leaves end) and attempt from the beginning to instill values of the revolution in them. Cognitive development, behavioral maturation, and group socialization are emphasized, as are nutrition and cleanliness. A more free-wheeling but less effiicient experiment in creative, less structured nurseries (jardines) was abandoned in 1971. Under direction of the Federation of Cuban Women (itself a telling fact), the number of centers has grown gradually since 1961.

Despite the shortcomings, gains in child care, particularly in a nation where such large numbers of trained personnel in all fields grabbed the first plane to Miami after the revolution, have been impressive. Less impressive is the extent to which this change has affected women's unequal status, both at home and at the workplace. As in other countries, women are concentrated in women's occupations and do the housework at home.28 In addition, one must ask whether it is truly liberating for a woman to take her six-week-old infant to a school with a ten-to-one staff ratio so that she can return to her job, or whether need for labor rather than a vision of a new society determines what passes as liberating for women.

Perhaps the most interesting changes in women's condition have occurred in China, precisely because government policies have twice changed so radically within a relatively short period of time. During the period of the Great Leap Forward, the People's Communes had considerable success socializing some areas of housework, as sewing centers and dining rooms, as well as nurseries, were part of the Commune. Cultural Revolution fighters fought against the custom of peasant women marrying out to their husband's village because the custom discouraged education and technical training for women (who would take their skills and knowledge elsewhere, in contrast to men of the village). All aspects of inequality were challenged, and both sex-role signs and coupling behavior began to disappear. Now, in what is called women's "second liberation" by Chinese officials, the campaign of marrying out (a project of purged Chiang Ch'ing) has fallen, romantic relationships are again in existence (not in itself a bad sign, as repression of sexuality is generally nothing but an attempt to increase workers' productivity) and women wear make-up and curl their hair. As part of China's policy of economic development and modernization, Western consumerism has been imported to instill in the population a picture of an attractive new world and to provide workers goods to buy with their newly earned yuan. What is so startling is the almost instantaneous change in consciousness that appears to have taken place by the smashing of the Gang of Four and the new economic policy of the ruling party.

These few observations and examples cannot themselves prove much. The lot of women in these countries, however, does not appear to differ qualitatively from that of women in the capitalist countries. And quantitatively, consumer goods provided by advanced capitalism have made women's condition in those countries less burdensome than elsewhere. What emerges as a pattern as one reads about women particularly in the U.S.S.R. and China, but in other "socialist" countries as well, is that during a period of revolutionary upsurge consciousness changes. A vision of a new and better society is projected and people want to take chances and try ways of living to realize that vision. In the U.S.S.R. new laws gave women formal legal equality and more. Marriage and divorce were simple registration processes. Either partner could adopt the name of the other or both could retain their own names. There was free abortion on demand. Experimental living arrangements replaced the rule of the family, and the expectation expressed in the 1919 program of the Bolshevik Party was that all household work would be socialized. For a short time people seized control of their lives and all ideas were in flux.

Gains of the revolution, however, were reversed almost from the beginning. By the 1930's motherhood and family life were again made official policy. Abortions were made illegal and criminal sanctions imposed. Fast modernization demanded efficiency, and efficiency triumphed over democracy, experimentation, and workers' control. Women as well as men were needed as workers in heavy industry, and developments of both services and consumer industry were put on the back burner. Society in general, not just the condition of women, lost its revolutionary character and assumed totalitarian form. A generation of Bolsheviks was eliminated by purges, and millions of peasants were slaughtered during collectivization of agriculture. Art and propaganda became synonymous, as the art form became reactionary and the content ascetic and compulsively anti-pornographic.30 Strict laws were passed against homosexuality. The promise of socialism was never realized. The U.S.S.R. is still a totalitarian state, though its form is not as extreme as it was under Stalin. A privileged class still governs and workers' power, the definition of socialism, is at least as remote in the U.S.S.R. as in the U.S.A.

Such seems to be the case in China as well, though the process fifty years later is different. The modern age has shrunk the globe, technologically, economically, and culturally. What was accomplished in the U.S.S.R. by extreme brutality and repression bordering on fascism can be much more smoothly and efficiently achieved in the modern age. Ironically, what repression occurred seems to have been a byproduct of the Cultural Revolution — the attempt to keep China out of the world economy through revolutionary internal development, particularly disappearance of distinctions between town and country and physical and mental labor. This general upheaval and challenge to the existing order of things created conditions of motion and change. Under these conditions, inequality in social relations among women and men was ripe for attack. In the process, however, what was excessively repressed was mental labor and, therefore, individual difference and independent thought.

The political choices required of a country entering what has become a world market greatly facilitate rapid economic growth. U.S. investments and trade, eagerly lavished upon China, are accompanied by U.S. culture and consumer goods. (There is no abstract reason why Coca-Cola and feminine Western fashions had to be imported along with International Harvester.) Modernization is further facilitated by a remarkable combination of an ethic of hard work instilled during the Cultural Revolutions (Chinese tourists in the U.S. are reported to like McDonald's because it lets a worker take a short lunch break), and a newly imported Western culture promising glamour, romance, and fun. Feminist visitors report that people in Chinese cities spend Saturday night browsing and buying in the People's Department Stores. In choosing to take the fastest and easiest path to modernization, China has forfeited its potential as a proletarian state. The emerging proletariat is laboring and buying while the Party is organizing production and distribution, now a worldwide phenomenon. Other emerging aspects of class society, such as back pay for scientists and technicians sent to the countryside to do agricultural labor during the Cultural Revolution, are a part of the very efficient process of organizing production. So are rollbacks in the attacks on male supremacy.

Faced with the prospect of lives with less physical hardship, and a higher standard of living, not to mention the promise of fun and glamour, it is not likely Chinese women will want to challenge it — or men — for equality. Class struggle in China for the time being has ended. In its absence such a challenge would demand action, not routine behavior. And the Cultural Revolution seems to have spawned a nation of very hard-working and docile people. At least for now.

Whether socialism (as distinguished from the fight for socialism) can liberate women is still an open question. What seems clear, however, is that the need for rapid modernization and the corresponding need for greater and greater efficiency is not conducive to women's emancipation. In the absence of either socialization of housework or widespread consumer goods to take the burden off domestic work, women are likely to remain oppressed by their household tasks.

Autonomous Women's Movement

If any independent thinker doubts the validity of an autonomous women's movement, an exchange between a feminist member of a 1978 women's tour to China and a Chinese host should set him straight. During a briefing on the crimes of the Gang of Four — a lecture which denounced the "bad and evil counter-revolutionary crimes" of Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's fourth wife, while revising history to deny similar left policies of Mao himself — a member of the tour group asked (on the last night) "What was the matter with old man Mao? Couldn't he control his wife?"31 When tour after tour of U.S. leftists, M-L, returns from China, its members uttering not a critical syllable, the independence of the women's movement is ample evidence of its validity.

In 1968 New York radical feminists protested and picketed the Miss America Pageant. Women threw high heels, girdles, and "other instruments of female torture" into a freedom trash can, and women's liberation exploded all over the world.32 No aspect of male supremacy went unchallenged, from inequality at work to oppression in bed. Consciousness-raising freed a whole generation of women (not just those who participated in consciousness-raising groups) from self-doubt, as women stopped worrying and started acting. Nobody even peripherally connected to the early years of the movement will ever forget how good it felt!

The women's movement, like most of the predominantly white left of the 1960's, was never a working class movement, though working class women participated in some sections of it. Unlike the Marxist left, however, it didn't pretend to be (at least not until later, when attacked by the left as reformist because of its class composition, and when entered by the left at the same time looking for recruits). This fact should not obscure its revolutionary content, however. Women's liberation in its early years was militant, angry, and thoroughly political. It penetrated every aspect of its members' lives and shook their conception (and practice) of personal and social relations to the roots. The excitement and dynamism of this activity generated new activity, and new members, as hundreds of thousands of women seized control of part of their lives and confronted the world as subject rather than as object.

What gains for women have been made in the last decade are attributable to the early radical feminists and to the example set by the Civil Rights movement shortly before. Legal abortion and the right to sexual enjoyment are just two of the areas where the gains have so far remained (though abortion has been made very burdensome and difficult for poor and disproportionately Black and other Third World women by laws denying Medicaid payment for abortion). Others have been in part eroded, such as liberation from oppressive dress codes, as women once again are wearing high heels and feminine fashions.

Radical feminism of the 1960's began with the rage of left women at their treatment within the movement. Its contribution to revolutionary thought was recognition of the fact that because the personal is political there are no individual solutions to male supremacy and its unique invasion of all aspects of social relations. It was the tactic of consciousness-raising that brought this realization to large numbers of women, who found an organizational form for collective challenge to male supremacy in the rebirth of the autonomous women's movement. As if to justify its existence, the left savagely ridiculed the women's movement in its early days. Later, the male-dominated left learned the movement was here to stay and took a different approach toward it.

Although the practice of radical feminism provided the most advanced form of challenge to male supremacy per se, it faltered when it tried to justify its existence theoretically. Because women's oppression is demonstrable in every arena of life, feminists concluded that women comprise an oppressed class. Because Engels said male supremacy pre-dated capitalism, feminists concluded that it was the model for and principal cause of hierarchical division of labor under capitalism. The strategic conclusions that flow from the conception of women as an oppressed class, however, are not compatible with those necessary for revolutionary change needed to free women from their oppression. There is no evidence or even reason to believe that the relatively privileged women of the middle classes, living and working separately from working-class women, but jointly with middle-class men, their oppressors, are inclined to renounce their comfortable lives to join a movement of working-class women. Nor is there evidence or reason to believe that working-class women, let alone Black or other Third World women, see their oppression as defined primarily by their gender.

This article has suggested a perspective from which women's condition can be understood as a complex and interrelated set of changes occurring within the confines of developing capitalist society. Most of these changes have tended to equalize the status of women and men within their respective classes. Entry of women as a group into social relations of production, technological advances, development of consumer goods, erosion of the need for child labor and large families, and universal public education all have made instrumental changes in women's material condition and women's consciousness. These changes themselves, however, have led to increasing degradation of all labor with its inevitable result of alienation and dissociation of humanity from the shaping of its world. Women's condition is affected as much by the latter, negative aspects of change as by the former, positive ones. And while alienation dehumanizes men as well as women, it has taken a particularly degenerate and oppressive form in objectification of women.

What is left of male supremacy as it once existed is this conception of woman as man's object. The form this objectification takes is milder in terms of toil than in any previous period. Women born and raised in the U.S. since World War II rarely, if ever, expect to live a life serving men by their domestic labor. What they do expect, however, is to make attracting and keeping a man (or series of men) a principal component of their existence — the aspect of their lives around which all other aspects center. This oppression is most apparent in teen-age and pre-teen women and girls. Their pre-occupation and obsession with their bodies, their hair, their clothes, and their ability to find boy-friends obscures all other facets of their lives.

Present cultural definitions of women, in turn, have an impact on all other aspects of women's existence. Although capitalism has gone a long way toward materially equalizing the status of women and men, the process is not yet complete. What is more, it is slowed down and held back by omnipresent propaganda about women. Alienation of sexuality takes its most extreme form in the high incidence and media glorification of rape: the ultimate degradation of woman. Media images of women as (1) sexy, (2) compassionate, and (3) nothing much else except victims, affect women and conceptions of women. These, in turn, reinforce a still-sex-segregated job market and women's access to positions of power and control.

Women are not now, nor have they ever been, a class. Although advanced capitalism and contemporary culture have eroded some of the gross class distinctions of the early period of rapid industrial expansion, where rich women were idle and pampered, and poor, immigrant women worked 14 hours a day, women still are not uniformly oppressed. All women are, however, victims of some form of male supremacy. Beyond the state of objectification, women's condition is a special case of mankind's state of alienation. Degradation of women as childbearers is its unique contribution to women's condition. In other ways, women experience alienation in qualitatively similar ways to men, though childrearing tasks, still more women's sphere than men's, are made more difficult and less rewarding in a society characterized by alienation.

There is no super-theory of women's liberation separate from liberation of a whole society defined, transformed, and rendered powerless by degradation of labor. The single most significant factor contributing to women's overall oppression under advanced capitalism, including her oppression as woman, is alienation of labor. At the same time, however, present forms of sexual and emotional objectification of women constantly reinforced by a uniquely manipulative and ever-present mass media, potentially transcend capitalism, frozen in the minds of men. Male supremacy, despite its diminishing utility for capitalism, has taken on a life of its own. It is for this reason that women as revolutionaries sometimes have to fight along with men as workers or as members of other autonomous movements, and sometimes against men as women. The notion that women's only legitimate struggle is for power as women ignores the reality even of women's oppression. At its root it is based on assumptions — sometimes implicit and subtle, and sometimes bold and straightforward — of women's moral superiority, something which empirically seems false, which is not susceptible to measurement, and even if it were, which disregards the fact that women are poorly situated to lead and carry out a revolution as women.

On the other hand, the notion that women's only legitimate struggle is as part of the working class also ignores the reality of women's oppression. Male supremacy benefits men. What is more, it is deeply rooted in culture and psyche. Most of what once was male supremacy has withered away, but what remains is powerful and hard to shake off. There is no evidence that men will give up their remaining privileges as men without being forced to. If they were inclined in this direction, the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960's would have led to much more lasting and much more widespread changes, particularly in personal relations. Furthermore, because male supremacy is not the hub of world oppression, it is generally relegated to secondary or tertiary status as a revolutionary issue. To be challenged at all, male supremacy must be fought by women.

Perhaps most important to understanding the significance of the independent women's movement is that socialism is not primarily a government or a way to organize society. It is not something that liberates anybody. Socialism cannot be separated from the fight for socialism. Through action and collective struggle, people regain contact with themselves as human beings. The struggle becomes one's labor, and the modern chains of alienation are broken by a new form of individual control over one's immediate life situation and through acting in concert with other people. It is as part of this process that an autonomous women's movement has revolutionary potential both for challenging male supremacy and as a separate part of a working-class movement.

The decisive importance of this self-activity of women's struggle has been underplayed by contemporary Marxists. Following Lenin's lead, they see women's emancipation as a result of socialism, not as part of the process of fighting for and building it.

Women are crushed by their domestic drudgery, and only socialism can relieve them from this drudgery, when we shall pass on from small household economy and to social tilling of the soil.33

It is in part this conception of socialism as a state which frees women, which allowed Lenin in his time and others at present to relegate women's concerns with social and personal relations to the indefinite future.

The record of your sins, Clara, is even worse. I have been told that at the evenings arranged for reading and discussion with working women, sex and marriage problems come first. They are said to be the main objects of interest in your political instruction and educational work. I could not believe my ears when I heard that. The first state of proletarian dictatorship is battling with the counterrevolutionaries of the whole world. The situation in Germany itself calls for the greatest unity of all proletarian revolutionary forces, so that they can repel the counter-revolution which is pushing on. But active, Communist women are busy discussing sex problems and the forms of marriage — 'past, present, and future.' . . 34

This is a position which is particularly offensive, given the pressures of selflessness which have burdened women for centuries. While Lenin's argument may have been reasonable for the time, given the fact that the country was plagued by starvation and disease, as well as by counterrevolution, it was fundamentally wrong. It is only during periods of major upheaval, where people's attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs about everything are in a state of flux, and where people are taking control of their lives, that the effects of male chauvinism on women can be fully recognized and analyzed, and where male supremacy can be successfully challenged. Revolutionary history of women as feminists and as leaders bears out this point. Women's oppression is everywhere relevant early on in revolutionary periods when all prevailing ideas are challenged. After seizure of state power, when the party attempts to consolidate its victory, women have frequently been criticized, stifled, or purged for ultra-leftism as well as for feminism. In China it was Ting Ling in '42 and Chiang Ch'ing in '76; in Russia, Kollontai and Zetkin; in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg.

The form that rollback of militancy has taken previously has been exclusive concentration on worn-en's participation in production, while extolling virtues of the family (previously condemned as bourgeois) as the stable base from which to engage in production. As has been shown, this situation cannot be duplicated in advanced capitalist countries, where women's entry into production has occurred as part of the development of capitalism. Its likely form, seen capsulized already, is exclusive concentration on protecting the environment from further pillage. With all air, water, and food in various states of contamination, it is a situation of primary need to reverse the damage. However, the technological developments of advanced industrial capitalism which have raped the environment, have also substantially liberated women from domestic drudgery. Electrification demands massive use of energy, as does production of consumer goods. Fifty percent of Chicago's energy needs are met by its nuclear power plants, while wastes pile up and poison earth and water. Automobiles,permit shopping in quantity, while exhaust pollutes the air. Pampers, paper plates, and no-care clothing all take energy to make and are wasteful, and paper products deplete the land of trees faster than they can be replaced. Cheap plastic goods are not biodegradable and in part remain forever solid litter, giving off noxious fumes when burned.

There is a strand of feminism that addresses these questions. It is composed largely of middle-class women in their 30's who were part of the early women's movement in the '60's and who are now having children. These are women who promote home birth as women's control over a critical part of their lives. They also frown upon bottlefeeding for infants and use of Pampers, as unnatural and wasteful. There is an obvious humanizing and therefore progressive aspect to this movement, though it is a form of cultural feminism which sees individual solutions to political problems. Its potential, however, is scary. Energy conservation, safety, and environmental clean-up will require real and substantial sacrifices. Women, presently degraded as childbearers, are in a vulnerable place, and return to a more human form of childbearing and child-rearing could easily serve as the ideological justification for returning women to a subordinate place in the home, waiting until later to challenge male supremacy. The spectre of Earthmother- for-the-revolution is not a pretty one. Only an independent women's movement composed of women from all classes can safeguard women's interests as women and challenge as oppressive what limits women's choice regarding reproduction and childbearing.

Strategy for Revolution

Because women's condition is inextricably tied to the state of society in general, women, to gain liberation, must be part of any movement for revolutionary change. At the same time they need a movement that speaks to the needs of all women, something the present women's movement — largely white and middle-class — fails to do. For these reasons the present movement for women's equality must develop a strategy oriented toward maximizing the possibility that (a) a period of revolutionary upheaval will come about and result in successful realignment of class forces, and (b) that women will at that time be in a position decisively to challenge male supremacy.

The strategic importance of Black and other Third World liberation movements for womenhas been analyzed in previous publications of Sojourner Truth Organization.35 Of all possible struggles in which a popular victory would fatally weaken capitalism, the Black movement has the greatest potential for success. For this reason the women's movement should develop a strategy which supports the Black and other liberation movements and increases their likelihood of success, maximizing potential for alliances with Black and other Third World women. A second reason for such an orientation — and one which is important if one disagrees with the previous estimate of revolutionary forces in the U.S. or with the concept of revolutionary upheaval as the principal time in which male supremacy can be defeated ideologically — is that a movement that successfully challenges male supremacy must be a movement which includes Black and other Third World women, most of whom define their oppression as mainly national or racial. General strategy for revolution determines how an independent women's movement picks its issues and tactics. Practical work should optimally be focused on areas which disproportionately affect Third World women, whether or not Third World women choose to participate at this time. Issues which in any way undermine the potential of Black and other Third World liberation movements must be rejected whether or not they have organizing potential for women, because in so weakening those movements, they retard the struggle against male supremacy as well.

The movement of white women against rape is an example of organizing which, though sincerely addressing real issues of male supremacy, undermines Black and other Third World liberation movements. This estimate is explained and analyzed in detail in the afterword to the second edition of Rape, Racism, and The White Women's Movement: An Answer to Susan Brownmiller.36 Briefly, although rape is the ultimate form of objectification of women, it is not susceptible in this society to a political solution. Mass movements can close shops, stop wars, and topple governments. They cannot, however, end individual crime. There are only two ways to stop rape or even halt its rapid increase. One is to end male supremacy so that men do not want to rape women. The other is by force: physical force of defense, which is not possible all the time, or a police presence so overwhelming and enforcement so total that nobody dares commit any crime, including crime within his own house. Mass movements such as the present "Take Back The Night" actions do neither. What they do is lend credence to police demands for larger budgets, more personnel, more jails, and more efficient courts, whether or not they explicitly make such demands. The anti-rape movement has made a few contributions to women's welfare, notably pressuring hospitals to deal in a humane manner with rape victims. Recently, women have been attacking media images of women as deserving victims of macho violence, a good approach to fighting male supremacy. At the same time, however, it has buttressed "safe streets" campaigns which in a racist society mean more Black people getting arrested by white cops, more police shootings, and more Third World people going to jail whether or not they have committed any crime.

When the majority of rape victims in cities are Black, and the bulk of the movement against rape is white, this organizing amounts to using racism to build up the ranks of the movement. Such is not the case when Black or other Third World women organize in Third World communities to end crime. This organization is a move toward a united community and is generally accompanied by justifiable demands not for more police, but for more Black police, who are presumed less likely to shoot and themselves incite violence (though this is not always the case).

Fighting male supremacy at its most outrageous point is not necessarily the best way to end it. On the contrary, it will require an upheaval of revolutionary proportions to challenge deeply rooted ideas of male domination and to redefine thoroughly people's conceptions of community and collective responsibility. Without such a revolution, women's liberation means nothing. With it, male supremacy and the crime of rape will be buried by women, once and for all.

Footnotes

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), page 254.[return to text]

2. Alison Edwards, "Women and Modern Capitalism," Urgent Tasks, No. 5 (Summer 1979), pages 15-16.[return to text]

3. Martin Glaberman and George P. Rawick, "The American Economy" in Mary M. Robischon et al., eds., Work and Society (Detroit: University Studies and Weekend College, College of Lifelong Learning, Wayne State University, 1977), pages 203-4.[return to text]

4. Zillah R. Eisenstein, "Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy" in Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pages 27- 28.[return to text]

5. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ed. and with an introduction by Dirk J. Struik (New York, 1964), page 113.[return to text]

6. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), page 72.[return to text]

7. Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1977), pages 65-66.[return to text]

8. Tom Lehrer, "Wernher Von Braun," song on album entitled That Was the Year That Was (Reprise Records, 1965).[return to text]

9. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. from third German ed. by S. Moore et al., and ed. by F. Engels (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), page 604.[return to text]

10. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Glass Mountain Pamphlet No. 2/The Feminist Press, 1973), pages 45-73.[return to text]

11. Ibid., pages 11-14.[return to text]

12. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1970), pages 232- 237.[return to text]

13. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1976), page 61.[return to text]

14. Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction (New York: New American Library/Signet, 1974), page 72.[return to text]

15. Op. cit. This whole book is worth reading to understand the depth and breadth of the subliminal advertising process and its importance in mind control.[return to text]

16. "Letter to a Lover When She Left Him," reprinted in Feminist Revolution, writings of Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement (New York: Random House, 1978), page 125.[return to text]

17. Eli Zaretski, Capitalism, The Family, and Personal Life (London: Pluto Press Ltd., 1976), pages 137-143.[return to text]

18. Advertisement for Enjoli Perfume, reprinted as graphic for A. Edwards, "Women and Modern Capitalism," Urgent Tasks, op. cit., page 11.[return to text]

19. Phyllis Chester, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1972), page 266. See also Margaret Adams, "The Compassion Trap," Psychology Today, Vol. 5, No. 6, November 1971.[return to text]

20. Carol Hanisch, "Men's Liberation," in Feminist Revolution, op. cit., page 75.[return to text]

21. Hannah Arendt, op. cit., page 1.[return to text]

22. Anna Gyorgy et al., No Nukes: Everyone's Guide to Nuclear Power (Boston: South End Press, 1979), page 4-5.[return to text]

23. Ibid., pages 76, 89.[return to text]

[return to text]

25. Gail W. Lapidus, "Changing Women's Roles in the U.S.S.R.," in L. Iglitzin and R. Ross, eds., Women in the World: A Comparative Study (Santa Barbara: Clio Books, 1978), page 306.[return to text]

26. Hilda Scott, op. cit., page 196.[return to text]

27. Clementine Serra, "Report on Circulos Infantiles," pages 8- 10, quoted in Marvin Leiner, Children Are the Revolution: Day Care in Cuba (Middlesex: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1974), page 15.[return to text]

28. Leiner, ibid., pages 14-15.[return to text]

29. Batya Weinbaum, "Chinese Women's Second Liberation, But From Mao's Wife?" in Off Our Backs, August-September 1979, page 2.[return to text]

30. Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art, pages 235-244 (commentary by editor on Zhandovism).[return to text]

31. Weinbaum, op. cit., page 2.[return to text]

32. "MS. Politics and Editing: An Interview," in Feminist Revolution, op. cit., page 169.[return to text]

33. V. I. Lenin, The Woman Question (New York: International Publishers, 1973), page 43.[return to text]

34. V. I. Lenin, The Emancipation of Women (New York: International Publishers, 1966), page 11.[return to text]

35. Alison Edwards, Rape, Racism, and The White Women's Movement: An Answer to Susan Brownmiller (Chicago: Sojourner Truth Organization, 1976). See also B. Henson, "Socialist Feminism and Revolution," in Urgent Tasks, No. 3 (Spring 1978).[return to text]

36. Alison Edwards, Rape, Racism and The White Women's Movement: An Answer to Susan Brownmiller (Chicago: Sojourner Truth Organization, second edition, 1979), Afterword by the author.[return to text]