<SNIP>
>The power men have over
>women in a patriarchy is not based in anything fairly
>simple relationship like differential ownership of
>productive assets
Men's higher wages certainly contribute, but there's also the little issue that there's a lot of unpaid work going on (along with all the servitude), and men in general are benefitting disproportionately, not just capitalists.
> -- something that, with the proper
>amount of political force behind it, can be corrected
>by appropriate legislation reassigning property rights
>in different ways. (The kinds of male oppression of
>women that can be treated this way are precisely
>liberal democratic rights of equality, like equal pay
>for equal work.) Rather, male power over women in
>patriarchy is based in a much more amorphous and
>nonspecific set of relationships that require
>transfdormation of consciousness and culture, not a
>mere alteratiuon of legal rights backed by political
>force.
...
>Neither of these reflect your view as I understand it,
>which is rather that "gender" has to be abolished.
>Translated out of radicalese, I think that means that
>traditional sex roles have to be transformed and new
>kinds of relations, with different concepts of
>maleness and femaleness created. These might be, as
>some you say, androgynous, they might be just
>different from the ones we have now. This is an
>important point, because it goes to the amorphous
>basis of continuing patriarchy in a society where
>liberal feminism is in the main already enacted into
>law.
But there's a lot the law in this country does not touch on, and one of these things is the relationship between pay and work, and what work is paid and what is unpaid. I don't think this is finished business, it's not even really started. Women bear children, that's not regarded as work (neither the bearing nor the raising). Comparable work men do is. This peculiarly women's work is not compensated (except, supposedly, through male wages, which makes us doubly dependent, on him and on his employer). So it's not just a transformation of consciousness and culture that is needed to follow the 'liberal feminism enacted into law,' it's a transformation of the conditions of production in this untouched area. But it's also kind of hallucinatory to talk about equal pay for equal work and anti-discrimination law as though these are now enforced or real in our lives. If they were, it would certainly give us a more stable platform from which to fight for other things, but they aren't.
And, while the individual rights revolution is a mostly a mirage for workers in the U.S. (free speech? assembly? petition for redress of grievances?--you're fired) it is even further out of reach for women, since we're the proletariat of the proletariat, the breeders of the breeding class. Any attempt to gain individual rights for women requires control of reproduction, which is even more incompatible with maximization of profit than, for example, free speech on the job. It is deeply impossible to allow women to make the decisions about reproduction in a system that is so patently unfair and exploitative.
>I doubt, however, whether anyone remotely on the left,
>even most liberal feminists (male or female), would
>disagree that we need to change those gender
>conceptions and practices -- the differences would
>come with how they should be changed to realize
>feminist aims -- the liberation of women, whatever
>that means, and the liberation, secondarily, of men
>from the straightjacket of "manliness."
>
>I don't think it is productive at this point for women
>to say, We talk, you listen. There was a time when
>that was necessary -- the time of Marge Piercy's
>"Grand Coolie Damn," when second wave feminism was a
>big surprise. Now it's not, at least in the sectors of
>society where women would be inclined to say such
>thing. We need dialogue and common struggle -- and
>persuasion.
I thought Kelley was saying, no, we don't talk, already too much earnest conversation that doesn't go anywhere, go read up instead. We suffer from having to repeat ourselves.
> I put things that way in terms of "those sectors of
>society" because there are large swathes of American
>(and Latin, etc.) society where liberal feminism is
>far from common currency even among women. But there
>the problem is that women aren't at the stage where
>they demand to be heard, and many women in those
>circumstances actively reject such calls to speech and
>action.
Plenty of them are biting their tongues, you can bet.
>I don't think your suggested slogans and tone
>are necessary going to help much with changing those
>women's minds (though perhaps they are not meant to),
>but I have no more idea than anyone else what would.
>
>I suspect that the demands of practical life, the need
>to work, the resentment at being underpaid and abused
>at work (which Liza documents in her book in Wal*Mart,
>Selling Women Short, see also Barbar Ehrenreich's
>Nickled and Dimed), the pressure of balancing home and
>work life, etc., all will have more effect than
>anything we will say.
Both are necessary. It's not and never has been enough to just be oppressed as hell. Women are already using individual tactics, as we always have and always will, until we're free. The necessity of collective action has to be learned, taught, thought about, and argued for.
>Women who stand up to the (male)
>boss will be more likely, I hope, to stand up their
>husbands and boyfriends.
>But here I wonder how much
>firebrand rhetoric is going to be of use to them --
>unless they generate it themselves. I don't say you
>disagree.
>
>However, maybe all you are saying is that liberal and
>leftist men ought to know better and not require
>persuasion.
If men don't get with the program, sometimes it's just faster to make the price higher, that's why I say bitch, sister, bitch.
Jenny Brown