Women, Resistance and Revolution (9 page)

Historically Fuller connects the first hope of emancipation with the French Revolution. ‘As men become aware that few men have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.’
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She notes also the influence of the movement for the abolition of slavery. She hoped for the sympathy of men who loved liberty, but felt that despite their acquiescence the only hope lay in the mobilization of women.

Her own life, often compared to that of Mme de Staël, was far from happy. Emotionally they shared the longing for a man who could comprehend their ambitions, intellectually they were both profoundly influenced by romantic notions of desolate, lonely, but noble spirits, with the task of revelation to an ungrateful humanity. Margaret Fuller understood and expressed the tragic exhaustion of the French feminist socialists, who pitted themselves not only against the dominant economic and political values of early capitalism, but also against inhuman sexual relations. Like them she was battered and bruised terribly for her insolence. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Zenobia in
The Blithedale Romance
and Henry James’s Verbena Tarrant in
The Bostonians
are her epitaphs. But if she submitted in fiction, in history ‘Margaret-ghost’ refuses to be laid to rest. ‘Many women are considering within themselves what they need that they have not, and
what they can have if they find they need.’
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Unlike Flora Tristan, who still waited for man to liberate woman, Margaret Fuller believed change could come from the women themselves.

By the 1840s connection between social revolution and the liberation of women had been made. It had fixed in people’s minds. But the actual basis for connection was still only vaguely worked out. An alternative feminism to that aligned with socialism was beginning to develop. It was apparent that the interests and intentions of some women who spoke of freedom for themselves had nothing to do with the emancipation of the workers, and indeed was often explicitly opposed to the rights of labour. How did women as a group relate to the movement for a free and egalitarian society? How could they act to change society in this direction? These two were amongst the great unanswered questions of revolutionary feminism.

CHAPTER 3

Dialectical Disturbances

It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground.

F. Engels

… The first class opposition that occurs in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless together with slavery and private wealth it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully acting in that society can be already studied.

F. Engels, The Origin of the Family

Household management lost its public character. It no longer concerned society. It became a private service; the wife became head servant, excluded from all participation in social production.… The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules. In the great majority of cases today at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy, without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat.

F. Engels, The Origin of the Family

[Prostitution] demoralizes men far more than women. Among women prostitution degrades only the unfortunate ones who become its victims.… But it degrades the whole male world.

F. Engels, The Origin of the Family

By the 1840s the tales of Adam’s rib and the sighs of Clarissa had been overtaken by a body of theory in which it seemed as if the emancipation of women was an integral part of the emerging socialist movement. But as yet this socialism was still something that ought to be projected into the utopian future. There is no necessary connection worked out between the activity coming from the material situation of any social group or class and the creation of a socialist society. Far less in the writings of socialist feminism is there any concept of a way in which women as a group could act in this manner. Women’s oppression is described. The position appears as intolerable. Actuality is in conflict with an assumed potentiality. There is an historical concept of perpetual spiritual development. But there is no theory of who is to effect social change or how or why. True, there are solutions. There are new models for a new world in which women’s liberation will be achieved as one aspect of human liberation. But as to the means of making a new world and the part women will play in this process, there are only a few muffled theoretical mutterings combined with much experimenting in practice. It was a time when practical development broke repeatedly from old accepted formulas for action; when old ideas were caving in and the elements of new revolutionary theory beginning to emerge.

The crucial novelty of Marxism in the nineteenth-century context was to provide the monumental working out of the necessary relationship of the working class to the eventual dissolution of capitalism and the formation of a new communist society. An essential connection was already grasped by Marx in the forties philosophically, between the practical activity of the working class and the means of breaking the hold of private capital. The working class is seen as the agency for human liberation, the carrier of emancipation for all classes through its own efforts to control the external world of work. The
specific oppression of women was never studied in the exhaustive manner which Marx applied to the exploitation of the worker. He looked at women’s situation more tangentially. There is no sense of women’s agency for revolutionary change as there is for the worker. We find instead in Marx’s writings several approaches to an analysis of women’s oppression and the subsequent attempts of Engels, Bebel and other nineteenth-century revolutionaries to synthesize and elaborate on these.

By the end of the century the terms in which people could discuss the nature of women’s oppression and the possibility of emancipation showed a significant advance from the discussions of the 1840s. There had been valuable general developments in the relatively new areas of sex psychology and anthropology, as well as a great accumulation of historical and sociological work which had not existed in the 1840s. Even more important, there was a much more developed labour movement, as well as the strong challenge of bourgeois feminism, which inevitably affected the way in which socialist feminism was conceived. Marxist theory about women’s liberation developed in this context and the problems Marx and Engels confronted were contemporary problems which arose from the particular experience of nineteenth-century capitalism and its immediate effect on women of all classes. Both Marx’s and Engels’s ideas came out of the earlier tradition of romantic revolution and utopian socialism. Though they made decisive breaks with these earlier ideas, they shared, nonetheless, many of the preconceptions of utopian socialism. This is as true of their writing which dealt specifically with women as with their general theory. Their ideas about the liberation of women are obviously inseparable from their thought as a whole. However, they still contributed enough to the specific study of women’s oppression to change radically the bases from which revolutionaries argued and to make much of the romantic rhetoric of utopian socialism appear relevant no longer. There are many contradictions in their writings on women’s liberation. Some of these can be explained by general changes of emphasis in their thought. But others come out of the sheer complexity of the issues and questions involved. They took the woman question seriously enough to change their minds when new data didn’t fit old theories. They observed many developments the implications of which they could not possibly comprehend. They both went far beyond their time in grasping theoretically aspects of a
reality not yet born. We inherit from them the dilemmas they were never able to answer fully. Much of what they left us has still to be worked out in history, and disentangled and understood as theory.

To take their conclusions as in any sense final would be to ignore this and to abstract them from their own space and time. Despite the depth of their historical analysis, the range of their knowledge, and the extent of the commotion their writing has helped to create, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were still a couple of bourgeois men in the nineteenth century. They saw a particular world through particular eyes. This is not to suggest that if they had happened to be women they would have had the last word on women’s liberation, but that they were bound to see women’s situation through the eyes of men, and working-class women through the eyes of middle-class men. Inevitably this affected how they saw and where they looked.

In the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
written in 1844 Marx developed a theme generally discussed in utopian socialist writing on women’s liberation, but expressed in a well-known form by Fourier. This was the connection of the emancipation of women with the general historical development of society:

The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman.… Thus in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature to him. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as a species-being, a human being.… It also shows how far man’s needs and consequently how far the other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, to what extent he is his individual existence [and] at the same time a social being.
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Marx is not using ‘nature’ as a mysteriously hidden essence. He saw man as at once part of nature, and a natural being. At the same time man was a human natural being – a species-being. Human nature was not therefore something implanted; man had natural appetites and propensities, but the manner in which man satisfied these was social and historical, involving both art and morality. When man relates to woman only as slave, or as the person who feeds him, part of his own capacity, of his own ability to create his own nature as a social being, is denied. Affection between the sexes
is not seen as being naturally implanted. A personal consciousness of the opposite sex is an historical achievement, part of man’s creation of his own nature. By perceiving the woman as another human being with a distinct consciousness, he has moved towards a need which is not simply natural but human natural. Thus the ability to transform is linked closely to the ability to appreciate, know, be conscious of. Following Fourier Marx saw women’s position here rather as an historical index of the ability of human beings to be conscious of and thus control the external environment, a gauge of the movement from necessity to freedom in society. But the existing relationship between human beings was a feature of their alienation from nature and from each other. Man’s human part has become animal and his animal part human. He has become a stomach and an abstract activity. His natural functions such as procreation become animal instead of human. The actual condition of women reflects this distortion.

Marx presented a means of human self-consciousness overcoming alienated social relations. A purely philosophic transcendence was not possible; the philosopher can only philosophize from his point of alienation. His idea of woman thus is only a projection of his own self-division. The ability to understand, to control and act creatively must be expressed through practical activity to change the world, or it must be forever commenting on its own inability to comment. Ultimately, only through a transformation of the way property was owned and the social relations which came from this ownership could the real appropriation of human nature, through and for man, be historically achieved. The most general expression of human alienation was in the situation of the worker. Woman’s general relation to man, prostitution, was only a specific expression of the universal prostitution of the worker. Both could only be changed in a communist society.