“Marxism & Women's Liberation” by Judith Orr, 2015
Orr is the sharp editor of Socialist Worker, the paper of the U.K.'s Socialist Workers Party. This book is an orthodox explanation of proletarian and revolutionary feminism and its differences with other kinds of feminism. The book is grounded in the working-class movement, the materialist foundations of capitalist society and the role of the bourgeois family in the oppression of women.
Orr points out that by 2015 women had made great strides in the central capitalist countries since the feminist movements of the 1960s, yet still suffered under heavy burdens at work and at home. Overseas the situation is worse – extreme poverty, illiteracy, murder, abuse, child marriage, exploitation, inequality, isolation, FGM. She understands the interrelation of class and gender means that damage extends to wealthy and middle-class women too, yet affects proletarian women the most. The Marxist kicker is that women will never be equal and fully liberated until capital is overthrown and a world society formed outside the rule of profit. This is all standard revolutionary Marxism and reads like a primer.
Of most import to Marxists and Orr is that our biological nature determines how humans reproduce, survive and produce the requirements of life. Reproduction, of course, is key and many women bear that initially. She discusses: 1) the role of labor, tools, language and consciousness in the making of human beings; 2) the original primitive communism that relied on group-tribal cooperation and equality; 3) In these hunter-gatherer and subsistence economies, matriarchy was not unusual; 4) the development of pastoralism and slash and burn horticulture, then more developed agriculture, led to the slow development of surpluses and classes; 5) class development led to the subservience of women, as men controlled the surplus while women were centered on reproduction; 6) This extended through tribute, slave, feudal and now capitalist societies. Or as Engels called this process “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.”
FAMILY TIES
The word 'family' comes from the Latin for servant or house slave, or a group of slaves. In Rome it eventually meant everyone – slaves, servants, wives, children - under the control of the 'head of the household.' Orr describes the feudal division of labor within rural peasant families, as women produced clothes, food, household goods and participated in agriculture. With the development of British capitalism, women worked at home doing piece work, or in textile factories on top of their other duties. Today the greatest number of women in history work outside the home, yet the 'trad-wife ideal' of the nuclear family, with women limited to the home, is relatively new. In a way it is a middle-class luxury.
Orr defends the right of women not to work, as some laws were passed in the 1800s that blocked women working due to the incredible strain on a working family of having two jobs. She denies these laws were the source of 'the patriarchy' as some feminists insist. The family as it stands now is useful to capital because of its economic and ideological character. It allows the reproduction and maintenance of the class for free through family labor, mostly women. It is an unpaid 'welfare' system that props up capital's needs. At the same time the home has become a center of individual consumption – the house, children, food, comfort, appliances, entertainment, decoration. It's not a 'sharing economy.'
Ideologically, as Thatcher put it, there is “no such thing as society” - but there are families! The meaning is that each individual family, with no support from the outside, must function alone. They are responsible for everything, society nothing. This induces a sense of isolation and disconnection from greater issues, while failure breeds guilt and prosecution. In reality families can be both helpful and loving or sites of gender and child abuse. Single parents especially are under the greatest financial and social pressure, and these are usually women. Elder care is sometimes located in the home, and its also done by mostly woman. The socialist goal is not about 'abolishing the family' so much has helping women and families connect to the rest of society.
GENDER & HISTORY
Orr has a chapter on gender roles, attacking biological determinism, sociobiology and others who basically claim 'biology is destiny.' Orr however does not ignore the significant biologic differences between men and women – hormones, body structure, the ability to have babies or produce sperm, milk in breasts, etc. She addresses 'discrimination' by some biologic feminists against trans-women at women-only events – though how many of these occur is debatable. Gender under capitalism has two aspects, biological and cultural. These are not identical. In a socialist future the former would be the only one that remains. Orr challenges the idea that 'female'-led capitalism would be kind and gentle as claimed by some bourgeois feminists. She notes how social gender roles don't just damage women, but men as well – especially through male suicide and health issues.
Orr details the various waves of the feminist movement in the U.S. and the U.K. from the Left – the Suffragettes in the late 1800s and early 1900s and their debates with socialists; the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1950s and 1960s; lesbian feminism; anti-male feminists; and the arrival of bourgeois 'lean in,' corporate feminists. The older Communist organizations and the New Left both failed to deal with feminism in the 1960s, but in the U.K. women strikers brought a clear labor orientation to the movement. As an example, anti-male British feminists claimed that trade union and Leninist men could not be trusted in the 1979 abortion fight. Orr points out that it was in the material interests of union men to be for the right of abortion too. This even showed up in the recent Irish referendum. As to the socialist organizations, attacking them was part of the weakening of the feminist movement in the early 1980s, with a wing turning to interpersonal issues, identity feminism and anti-maleness. That was the end of the second 'wave' as a movement.
SAD 'WAVE'
Orr shows how many feminists retreated into academia, with arguments taking place absent a mass movement. Cultural feminism became more prominent to the point of endorsing brutal capitalist leaders like Thatcher as examples of 'empowerment.' This eventually devolved into 'post-feminism' and 'state department feminism' which backed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as 'liberating' Muslim women. In response came 'third wave' feminism – intersectional, hip and sexy according to Orr. It was sort of the feminist equivalent of post-modernism, as feminists unmoored from a materialist standpoint could be on opposite sides of the same struggle. A 'hierarchy of oppression' and privilege theory were adopted by some, which she analyzes as incomplete, individualist and failed strategies. All this led to further splitting of the women's movement into smaller and smaller academic bits, as women's oppression was now only a matter of bad ideas, not a capitalist economy. It became pro-capitalist reformism by another name. Eventually you can get to 'trad wife,' Republican mother cults and be-your-own-female-boss MLM schemes as legitimate 'feminist' solutions following that road.
Orr revisits theories of whether 'surplus value' is produced by reproductive labor in the home and the concept of 'wages for housework' promoted by some feminists. She opposes this as bad theory and not a solution. These views insert the individual capitalist wage relation into the home instead of limiting and socializing the labor.
Orr discusses the widespread occurrences of rape, domestic violence and murder against women and embraces a concept of sexual freedom for women. In early Bolshevik Russia this became the issue of 'free love.' Orr objects to how capital has turned this human desire into a crude, oppressive commodity forms – porn, pole-dancing, strip clubs, plastic surgery, cosmetics, prostitution, child abuse, etc. In more conservative societies female genital mutilation is practiced on young girls – it's answer to stopping the sexual desire of women and promoting the patriarchic desires of men. Almost 98% of women in Somalia are cut for instance, the highest in the world. In the U.S. South and Plains states sex education, contraceptives, GLBT issues, sexual violence, trad families, home-schooling and abortion mirror the attitudes in Somalia. Orr insists that it is key that sexual pleasure is seen as separate from procreation in order to liberate women.
Finally Orr as a socialist says that women's full liberation can only be achieved under a socialist society that gets rid of the class, color & religious caste and gender systems based on profit and private property. Reformism as a method eventually comes up against the needs of the bourgeois economic and political system, which can reverse any gains. This has been seen in the rejection of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. but is evident across the world. While the modern women's movement has existed since the beginning of the 1900s, most women are still second-class citizens. Orr makes the point that a class approach promises the strongest challenge to capital and sexism. She shows how this worked out in various revolutions across the globe, including in Russia, along with the recent 'square' revolts in the Middle East.
This book could serve as a detailed primer on the issue of sexism from a Marxist perspective, though it is a bit dated. If that is your interest, certainly get a hold of it.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: ““Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Mistaken Identity,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?” “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Without Apology,” "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici), “FGM.”
May Day Books carries many on feminism from many points of view.
And I got it at the UGA Library!
Red Frog / March 29, 2024
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