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per se that is in question now, but again, the
mystification of what the individual is and can
control. In participating in the compromised
“equality” of marriage, each individual agrees
to propagate the species in the context of the
values of patriarchy. Values are learned, sex-
uality is formed, ideology is maintained —within
the family.

When feminists claim that “the personal is
political” they refer, in a sense, to this problem.
Their hypothesis is that one can generalize from
the individual, internal dynamics of sexist op-
pression, to a general rule. Freud’s revelation of
the structures of the unconscious confirms to an
extent the validity of that enterprise. But up to
now feminists have not taken it far enough.
Having accepted the existence of subconscious
structural analogues which mirror the differ-
ences between the sexes in the world, we can
now proceed with the knowledge that, as a
group, we are bound not only by the manifest
political forms of our oppression but by these
internal psychic monsters. In attempting to
combat these monsters, however, feminists
have often mistaken the cart for the horse. The
personal is political —but with few exceptions,
this invocation has simply generated a longer
list of symptoms of the sexist disease. We must
locate the causes of this disease if we are ever to
cure it. We must exploit Freud’s science of the
mind, but only insofar as it is conjoined with
the science of history; that is to say out of the
context of individualism.

Sisterhood is really powerful only insofar as it
is armed with a coherent theory and a mass
strategy. We are in and of our culture; so is the
feminist ideal. We must pursue, with maximum
scientific rigor, the vanguard theories of culture
which culture has produced. We must use the
best available tools to locate the incoherence —
the contradictions—in extant phallocentric
models and generate predictive models based in
the experience of both halves of the human
race. Feminists who wish to throw Freud out the
window because of simplistic readings of “penis
envy” current in popular psychology might well
take a look at Mitchell’s Feminism and Psycho-
analysis for a re-examination of the usefulness
of psychoanalysis to feminist analysis. Her ef-
fort there is exemplary. We cannot just look
back nostalgically to ancient matriarchies. In-
deed, fantasies about matriarchy in our era are
pure science fiction. But their existence does
suggest that alternate models for culture can
exist.

Recent controversy over Mitchell’s book,
among feminists and male psychoanalytic theo-
rists here and abroad, suggests the “hotness”
of this issue. Interestingly, this relation of sexu-
ality to political economy is also being strongly
developed outside a feminist context, most
prominently on a major intellectual front—in
the tradition of French structuralism. European

feminists, especially in England and France,
have thus been drawn to that tradition as height-
ened contradictions impel them to seek out
means for their resolution. The main tendency
in this area is necessarily phallocentric: it is still
being written largely through the cipher of a
male experience of the world. But if we as wom-
en don't begin to write ourselves into history,
who will? For so far, compared to the scope of
the theoretical, strategic and practical task
ahead, the “woman question” has really only
been given lip service by the most advanced
intellectual sciences—not surprising since they
are “man-made.”

Engels, Marx and others have, of course,
identified the monogamous, patriarchal family
as the central prison for woman. Mechanistic
Marxists therefore claim that releasing her from
this singular prison into the work force (under
socialism) must guarantee her freedom. Does it?
Has it?

Not significantly; not yet. The major 20th-
century socialist revolutions have made some
progress, removing, as in China, the most bar-
baric manifestations of sexist domination. Im-
mediately following the Soviet revolution,
Lenin’s program included not only the training
of women to join the work force at all levels,
but the legalization of abortion, free, accessible
divorce, communal daycare, etc. Within ten
years, however, Stalinist backlash hit these fam-
ily issues hardest; much harder, predictably,
than the building of an extra-domestic women’s
work force. In China, with the Cultural Revolu-
tion and before, ideological struggle against the
values of patriarchy has at least begun. But in
the U.S.S.R., in the context of their drive to
quickly meet economic priorites which created
the bastard known as “state capitalism,” it was
easier to fall back on the ingrained behaviors of
the traditional family unit for free work by
women in the home.

The American Communist Party reflects this
tendency, still defending the “fighting family
unit” as a revolutionary force—in America, a
reactionary notion. In fact, mothers have been
strong revolutionaries. The strength of the wom-
en of Viet Nam in the long battle to defeat
American imperialism is a case in point. But, as
in Algeria, where fighting European imperialism
also meant the reassertion of the heavily patri-
archal values of Arab and Islamic culture, wom-
en’s fate has most often been: off the battle-
field and back to the kitchen. The contradic-
tions of the double standard apparently are
so heightened during periods of revolution that,
as with Bolsheviks like Alexandra Kollontai, the
preaching and practice of “free love” (and all it
implies) becomes acceptable—for a brief time.
Despite Lenin’s great sympathy and work for
women, his Victorianism won out in the area of
sex. Even the Soviet woman engineer comes
home to work that is still hers, and still never