women inside - instead the radical feminists waul to keep the world out.
The radical feminists have contributed important insights into what is wrong with capitalism. One of the most sophisticated radical feminist writers. Shulamith Firestone, analysed important questions, such as love, children, and the relationship between sex and racism. But Firestone, as do all the others, continued to suffer from the lack of a strategy. They had no idea of ​​what to do. In the search for something to do, for social power, radical feminism looks towards models in past societies, where women ruled, or female groupings were powerful. Alternatively, the «key» is thought to lie in lesbianism, vegetarianism, or the occult.
In «The First Sex», by Elizabeth Gould Davis, the idea of ​​the «noble savage» is given a new twist. This book very popular with Radical Feminists, advances the theory that the prehistoric matriarchies were ruled by physically and psychically superior, vegetarian women. Unfortunately, meat-eating, lustful men took over, and today we see the consequences.
Medieval (And modern) witches and midwives are idealised, with their В«great healing powers of skill in midwifery - (they) obtained skills through inborn psychic gifts, generations of experimentation - or perhaps being attuned to their natural instincts by living a quiet life in the woods. В»
Again we find the Radical Feminists arguing that women are closer to nature!
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world!
Short cut theories, proposing a single universal key to open the door to feminist heaven, abound.
Last year the key was Lesbianism. A large number of Radical Feminists became lesbians, not out of sexual interest, but as a point of political principle. It was argued simply that В«feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.В» Lesbians maintained that they were the real revolutionaries, being women who had refused to submit to the female role. The realization was, however, not long in coming that relating to a woman can still be highly role-defined.
This year the key is fashion has been the question of health/nature healing/vegetarianism. Alienation, or lack of harmony between mind, emotions and body can be overcome by the amazing healing qualities of food. Furthermore, В«Meat eating and male violence seemed locked together. В»Institutional medicine will be superseded by astrological birth control, female nature healers and the healing crisis (or in more female terms, suffering).
The theories of matriarchy and witches, of lesbianism and nature healing lead naturally into an ideology enjoying growing popularity - female superiority. This is a very convenient solution to the search for power, since it suggests women are in fact powerful now.
More recently, female superiority is advocated quite openly. One writer has only minor reservations В«about saying straight out that there are important innate differences between men and women, that biology is destiny, and that biology has made women infinitely superior to men. В»
The advocates of female superiority lend to hesitate because of one consequence - if men are naturally inferior, it gives them a cop-out - they can't help being bastards. However there are more serious political implications than this. Advocacy of female superiority is no less sexist or potentially oppressive than male chauvinism. It is authoritarian, elitist and reactionary. Furthermore, one logical conclusion is inescapable: if the female role epitomises all that is good in human nature, and females are superior to males, then women are not oppressed. How long will it be before we see an article pushing this line?
Before the industrial revolution, the family's economic function was conspicuously productive. The family farm was the fundamental unit for production of basic necessities. But with the industrial revolution, the point of production was moved to the factory, and the family, at least in urban areas, lost any obvious productive function. The only remaining one, the production of labour power (the production and maintenance of the worker him or herself) is invisible, disguised as a personal service a wife does out of love for her husband. The function of the family, apart from the economic one of consumption, became mainly political. Training in authoritarian attitudes and sexual repression, socialization of children into the competitive, super-individualistic psychology of capitalism - that is the major task of the family.
Based on the apparent divorce of the family from economic production, the myth grew of the family as В«outsideВ» society, as a refuge, where personal life is carried on and where the man may recuperate from the pressures of the world. Despite the large numbers of women (and children who worked, this theory was developed particularly during the ...
