ters, the picture is very different from that painted by the feminists. There was no conspiracy between male workers and capitalists. In as far as workers accepted the family, it was because they expected it to bring an improvement in their living standard. There is no separate power structure of patriarchy. The capitalists and their allies in the middle classes fought for and won very important changes in order to take the system forward. To workers at the time, it seemed like a gain for them too. And in some ways it was. Given the low level of production at the time, the poor methods of contraception and the absence of state welfare, it is ahistorical and utopian to expect that workers could have had expectations very different from those of the right to a family wage, and the supposed shelter of the family home.
Marx warned in his writings of three consequences of seeing society as an undifferentiated whole, of not putting production at the centre of our analysis. First it can lead to the view that society is unchanging, seeing society in an ahistorical way, with social relations governed by eternal laws. Second, it can lead to idealism, with the dynamic of society lying in some mystical force outside it. And third, it can lead to the view В«that what exists today can only be grasped in its own terms, through its own language and ideas В».
It is popular today to try to graft structuralist and post-structuralist theories onto Marxism. This has been the road to accepting the theory of patriarchy for many Marxists. However, all these theories display the problems Marx talked about. Foucault, who has become popular with many feminists, equates every relationship between humans with a power struggle, a completely ahistorical concept, and certainly not a new one. Thomas Hobbes, the bourgeois philosopher of the seventeenth century, was convinced that the basic drive in society was the В«war of all against allВ».
The epitome of the problem is the fascination with «discourse» or language. It has taken on an explicitly idealist content. Chris Weedon, an American feminist makes these typical comments: «Feminist post-structuralist criticism can show how power is exercised through discourse. »And« power is invested in and exercised through her who speaks. »Consequently some feminists see literary criticism as their main area of ​​struggle.
Rosemary Pringle takes up the theme here in Australia, illustrating what it means to accept what exists in its own terms, through its own language and ideas. She argues that we have to find a way to В«privilegeВ» the В«feminine discourseВ». Women should find ways to use their femininity to В«disempowerВ» men. She doesn't know how. But is it any wonder she can't tell us how? Ideas do not come from out of the blue, they are not divorced from the material conditions which give rise to them:
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men - the language of real life.
Femininity is part of the ideological baggage of capitalism and the family. It is part of the way women's oppression is reinforced day in and day out. It cannot be used to undermine women's oppression. The most apt reply to Pringle is that made by Marx to the idealist Young Hegelians in the 1840s:
This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, ie, to recognise it by means of a different interpretation.
Women's femininity means flirting, passiveness, being В«sexyВ», available and yet chaste. Such behaviour reinforces the idea that women are trivial, passive and purely of decorative value. For it to В«disempowerВ» men (assuming they have power, which I don't), women would have to somehow convince men to interpret such behaviour to mean women are serious, aggressive and valuable human beings. So instead of arguing to challenge the stereotypes, of fighting for liberation as the early women's movement did, feminism has gone full circle to espouse a profoundly conservative outlook.
This is the dead end to which the ideas of male power and patriarchy have led. Feminist articles in journals and papers are very good at documenting the horrific conditions most women endure. But they have precious little to say about how to begin to change the society which creates them. Take Gender at Work by Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle. It catalogues very well the problems of women at work. It is very good at searching out offensive behaviour by male workers. But nowhere, not once, is there a mention of the possibility of solidarity between men and women in struggle to change the situation. In 1981, only two years before it was published, there was a strike of 200 women textile workers in Brunswick, Melbourne. The Kort...
