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Women are more strenuously conditioned
toward upward cultural mobility or “gentility”
than men, which often results in the woman
consciously betraying her class origins as a mat-
ter of course. The hierarchies within the whole
span of the middle class are most easily demar-
cated by lifestyle and dress. For instance, the
much-scorned “Queens housewife” may have
enough to eat, may have learned to consume
the unnecessities, and may have made it to a
desired social bracket in her community, but if
she ventures to make art (not just own 1t), she
will find herself back at the bottom in the art
world, looking wistfully up to the plateau where
the male, the young, the bejeaned seem so at
ease.

For middle-class women in the art world not
only dress “down,” but dress like working-class
men. They do so because housedresses, pedal
pushers, polyester pantsuits, permanents, the
wrong accents are not such acceptable disguis-
es for women as the boots, overalls and wind-
breaker syndromes are for men. Thus young
middle-class women tend to deny their female
counterparts and take on “male” (unisex) attire.
It may at times have been chic to dress like
a native American or a Bedouin woman, but it
has never been chic to dress like a working-
class woman, even if she’s trying to look like
Jackie Kennedy. Young working-class women
(and men) spend a large amount of available
money on clothes; it’s a way to forget the rats
and roaches by which even the cleanest tene-
ment-dwellers are blessed, or the mortgages by
which even the hardest-working homeowners
are blessed, and to present a classy facade.
Artists dressing and talking “down” insult the
hardhat much as rich kids in rags do; they insult
people whose notion of art is something to work
for—the pink glass swan.

Yet women, as evidenced by the Furies’ publi-
cation, and as peinted out elsewhere (most not-
ably by Bebel), have a unique chance to com-
municate with women across the boundaries of
economic class because as a “vertical class” we
share the majority of our most fundamental
experiences—emotionally, even when econom-
ically we are divided. Thus an economic analy-
sis does not adequately explore the psychologi-
cal and esthetic ramifications of the need for
change within a sexually oppressed group. Nor
does it take into consideration that women’s
needs are different from men’s—or so it seems
at this still unequal point in history. The vertical
class cuts across the horizontal economic class-
es in a column of injustices. While heightened
class consciousness can only clarify the way we
see the world, and all clarification is for the
better, | can’t bring myself to trust hard lines
and categories where fledgling feminism is
concerned.

Even in the art world, the issue of feminism
has barely been raised in mixed political groups.
In 1970, women took our rage and our energies

to our own organizations, or directly to the
public by means of picketing and protests.
While a few men supported these, and most
politically conscious male artists now claim to
be feminists to some degree, the political and
apolitical art world goes on as though feminism
didn’t exist—the presence of a few vociferous
feminist artists and critics notwithstanding. And
in the art world, as in the real world, political
commitment frequently means total disregard
for feminist priorities. Even the increasingly
Marxist group ironically calling itself Art-
Language is unwilling to stop the exclusive use
of the male pronoun in its theoretical publica-
tions.6

Experiences like this one and dissatisfaction
with Marxism’s lack of interest in “the woman
question” make me wary of merging Marxism
and feminism. The notion of the non-economic
or “vertical” class is anathema to Marxists and
confusion is rampant around the chicken-egg
question of whether women can be equal be-
fore the establishment of a classless society or
whether a classless society can be established
before women are liberated. As Sheila Row-
botham says of her own Marxism and feminism:

They are at once incompatible and in real need
of one another. As a feminist and a Marxist |
carry their contradictions within me and it is
tempting to opt for one or the other in an effort
to produce a tidy resolution of the commotion
generated by the antagonism between them.
But to do that would mean evading the social
reality which gives rise to the antagonism.”

As women, therefore, we need to establish far
more strongly our own sense of community, so
that all our arts will be enjoyed by all women in
all economic circumstances. This will happen
only when women artists make conscious ef-
forts to cross class barriers, to consider their
audience, to see, respect, work with the women
who create outside the art world—whether in
suburban crafts guilds or in offices and factories
or in community workshops. The current femi-
nist passion for women'’s traditional arts, which
influences a great many women artists, should
make this road much easier, unless it too be-
comes another commercialized rip-off. Despite
the very real class obstacles, | feel strongly that
women are in a privileged position to satisfy the
goal of an art which would communicate the
needs of all classes and sexes to each other, and
get rid of the we/they dichotomy to as great an
extent as is possible in a capitalist framework.
Our sex, our oppression and our female experi-
ence—our female culture, just being explored
—offer access to all of us by these common
threads.

1. Class and Feminism, ed. Charlotte Bunch and Nancy
Myron (Baltimore, 1974). This book contains some ex-
crutiating insights for the middle-class feminist; it raised
my consciousness and inspired this essay (along with
other recent experiences and conversations).