As for postmodern feminists, they consider the tradition of the Enlightenment
and liberalism to be hopelessly abstract. Not only is liberalism oblivious to the
importance of difference – both between women and men and within women
themselves – but the notion of freedom and autonomy as universal values reflects
a prejudice which is part of the modern as opposed to the postmodern tradition.Socialist feminism
Socialist feminism arose out of the belief that feminism is not simply a legal and
political question – though socialists (by which we mean socialist feminists) do
support the case for the legal and political emancipation of women. Socialists take
the view that women’s emancipation is also – and primarily – a socialquestion so
that the movement for women’s freedom needs to be linked with the struggle to
transform capitalism itself.
Early socialists like the Frenchman Charles Fourier saw the liberation of women
as integral to redefining the labour process so that it becomes pleasurable and
fulfilling, and he saw, as Marx did, the position of women as symptomatic of the
level of civilisation of a given society. Marx tended to see women as the victims of
market forces, and he argues in an early text that the prostitution of women is only
a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer (Marx and Engels,
1975: 295). In the Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx takes the view that
women under capitalism are mere instruments of production, but Marx showed
little interest in the position of women and regarded the relation of men and women
as ‘natural’ rather than moulded by class relationships.Engels’s contribution
Engels was much more interested in women and in his celebrated work, The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1894, he argues that in
early tribal societies men, women and children lived together as part of larger
households in which production was for use rather than exchange. Decision-making
involved both men and women and because paternity or the position of a particular
man as father could not be established in group marriage, collective property
descended through women (i.e. matrilineally). ‘The world-historical defeat of female
sex’, as Engels graphically describes it, occurs when men begin to domesticate
animals and breed herds. Women seek monogamous relations in marriage (one
wife–one husband) and the family is privatised. In the later bourgeois family, the
woman’s formal right to consent to marriage is neutralised by her lack of economic
independence, and in the working-class family, the husband represents the bourgeois
and the wife the proletarian – what nineteenth-century socialists liked to call the
‘slave of a slave’.
In Engels’s view, male domination would only disappear with the socialisation
of production. With women involved in paid employment outside the home,
housework itself would become a public and collectivised activity (Sacks, 1974:
207).318 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies