describes, it is the concept of equality which
is invalid within our system. The abstract ideal
of equality, she demonstrates, provides the
philosophical basis for our laws. Our legal sys-
tem, at its best, functions as if each of its in-
dividual constituents were equal. If some
people have only their labor to sell, and this
labor produces more value than it returns to the
laborer, an unequal exchange has taken place.
The laborer, then, and the owner of the means
to produce that “surplus value” are not equal. If
some people are denied, by virtue of their color,
access even to the skills of labor, to whom are
they equal? If half of all people have babies and
half do not, are they all “equal”? Logical in-
compatabilities arise: what is different is not the
same, and gender (among other things) means
difference.

Radical feminism has tried to take on this
contradiction, indeed proclaimed it the essen-
tial contradiction in our form of social organiza-
tion. Between biology and destiny, it proposes,
stands consciousness. Woman’s oppression
vertically crosses class lines, crosses race lines;
women, armed with “consciousness,” would
speak to each other across a history of divisions
and change the world. Women’s groups would
not only clarify the areas of shared experience
which foster that consciousness, but would
serve as support communities. With sisterhood
for strength, women would hit male supremacy
where it lived: at home. Yet what, after all, has
changed? The quality of life for a few privileged
women —a small step. Was all that fervor, sister-
hood and revolutionary idealism that was meant
to reinvent the terms for a mass movement so
easily engorged, packaged and recycled?

For radical feminism too has been partially
co-opted. Since it had already dropped out of
the broader (sexist) political arena, it provided
support systems for women, but toward an un-
certain end. Seeing few alternatives and tanta-
lized by a taste of power, women often used
that strength to re-enter the dominant culture to
become as competitive, as “good” as men. Has
the women’s movement had so little concrete
impact on most women’s lives?

Certainly the patriarchy was sufficiently
threatened to let the feminist token into the
limelight. (Why co-opt without advertising the
co-opted product?) But she did not make it into
the statistics. The economic facts so far as most
women are concerned remain unchanged: un-
paid domestic labor; ill-paid labor in the work
force. The wage differential between men and
women in fact is now greater than it was ten
years ago. Even the hard-won victory of abor-
tion (for a price), even the possibility of “equal
rights” before the very laws which uphold a sys-
tem of inequality, are a slap in the face to an
ideology which aimed to alter the very “nature”
of human relationships. This too is a contra-
diction.

What kind of contradiction? It is a contra-
diction between an ideology and a system; an
ideology which has placed its profoundly hu-
manist hope in individual consciousness as
somehow separable from the structures in which
that consciousness is created. Demystifying the
contradictory elements of traditional feminism
itself, then, is part of our task. In capitalist
society, the process through which human labor
is translated into commodity, then capital, is a
process necessarily affecting not only the pro-
duction of tractors and bombs but the produc-
tion of ideology. This process puts intellectual
labor, like esthetic labor, like factory labor, like
reproductive labor, in the service of a system
which generates a surplus of wealth for the few
and subsistence for the many. This contradic-
tion—between the forces of production (labor)
and the property relations of production (own-
ership) is the contradiction which Marxists
claim moves history, because it produces class
struggle: the power of masses of people to labor
becomes the power to revolt.

This contradiction has moved history. But,
feminists ask, has it altered the basic relation
between woman and man, woman and child-
rearing, woman and psycho-sexual slavery? For
the hypocrisy of bourgeois ideology in relation
to bourgeois practice is paradigmatic within the
structure of the family. Marriage, ostensibly a
contractual agreement between consenting
equals, is in fact a property relation between an
owner and an exploited, isolated and powerless
worker.

It is the belief in the illusion that such social
contracts can be fulfilled that has hung femi-
nists on the horns of contradiction. Feminism
was born in the 17th century along with the
concept of equality of individuals. It was, as
Sheila Rowbotham has documented,? heated in
the cauldron of bourgeois revolution and sim-
mered in the idealism of 19th-century Utopian-
ism a la Fourier, who claimed that “the change
in historical epoch can always be determined by
the progress of women toward freedom.”3

Bourgeois feminism has begun, then, in its
history of leaps and starts, to identify and attack
its sexist enemy, and taken a few long strides
away from female feudalism for the benefit of
some bourgeois women. But the heart of the
problem remains. Feminists from Tennessee
Claflin to Isadora Duncan have scored high in
locating it. “At the ballot box is not where the
shoe pinches. . .1t is at home where the hus-
band is the supreme ruler that the little difficul-
ty arises; he will not surrender this absolute
power unless he is compelled,” wrote Claflin in
18714 Duncan, in her 1927 autobiography said,
“Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage
contract and then goes into it, deserves all the
consequences.”5 Here is the confounding point.
Monogamy asserts a situation in which one
individual “owns” another. It is not ownership

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