The man says to his wife, "You're a millstone around my neck! If it hadn't been for you I could have been a sea captain in the Caribbean. Your current browser isn't compatible with SoundCloud. Please download one of our supported browsers. Need help? Speakers Marlene Dixon. Streaming Media. Notes Marlene Dixon, professor in human development and sociology at the University of Chicago and later at McGill University, centered her work and political activism on Marxism and feminism.
Original Format Reel to reel, 3. Rights This digital access copy is made available as streaming media for personal, educational, and non-commercial use only. Description Transcript added June 15, Find Enter search terms:.
Digital Commons. The origin and importance of the small consciousness-raising group is to be found in the basic organizing tool of the autonomous movement: organize around your own oppression. There were many foundations for such a position. First, the major task faced by early organizers was to get women to admit that they in fact were oppressed.
For many new recruits, consciousness raising was the end-all and be-all of the early movement, a mystical method to self-realization and personal liberation. Early organizers had correctly understood that women could be organized on a mass scale in terms of their own subjective oppression and by appealing to the common oppression of all women irrespective of class.
They talked much less about the fact that the common oppression of women has different results in different social classes. What radicals had not taken into account was the fact that middle class and wealthy women do not want to identify with their class inferiors; do not care, by and large, what happens to women who have problems different from their own; greatly dislike being reminded that they are richer, better educated, healthier and have more life chances than most people. Certainly, participants at the time often were not consciously aware of the true nature of their struggle, but from the vantage point of hindsight, the true meaning of these struggles is manifestly clear.
Nevertheless, the politics of psychological oppression and of invoking the injustice of discrimination were aimed at altering the consciousness of women newly recruited to the movement in order to transform personal discontent into political militancy. Women, being in most cases without a political vocabulary, could most easily respond to the articulation of emotion.
This, of course, explains the impassioned, personal nature of the early polemical literature. Explaining the necessity for the abolition of social classes, the complexities of capitalism and its necessary evolution into imperialism, etc. On the other hand, the stress on discrimination and psychological theorizing aimed directly at the liberal core of North American politics. In turn, sex discrimination affects all women, irrespective of race, language or class but the fact that it does not affect all women in the same way or to the same degree was often absent from discussion.
The primacy of ideologies of oppression and discrimination and the absence of class analysis exposing exploitation and the ethic of sisterhood, facilitated the recruitment of large numbers of women from certain strata of the middle class, especially students, professionals, upper-middle class housewives and women from all sections of the academic world. Given the predominantly apolitical disposition of women in general coupled with their initial fearfulness and lack of political experience, the task of revolutionary political education was an uphill battle from the beginning.
The articulation of a class analysis in both Canada and the U. However, the anti-male line had its difficulties too, rooted in a fundamental contradiction which faces all women. On the other hand, women were unwilling and unable to actualize anger against sexism into a hatred of men. Because of this contradiction there existed a predisposition to take a rhetorical anti-male stand throwing men out of meetings to keep them from being obstructionist, expressing anger and contempt towards men to display defiance and thus give moral support and courage to new women, etc.
The result was a situation which might be termed dual leadership, made up of the early left activist organizers, the politicos, and the newer level of middle class women, the feminists, the latter seeking, by virtue of their class position, wealth and education, to bring the goals, ideology and style of the movement into line with their politics and class interests. The ethic of sisterhood publicly smoothed over these two opposing conceptions of the enemy, i.
The class conflict seething under the nominal agreement on the basic tenets of feminism was ideologically expressed in two contradictory lines of analysis corresponding to the dual leadership situation. The politico line stemmed from the assertion that the male supremacist ruling class is the principal enemy and that the primary contradiction exists between the exploited and exploiting classes, in which women bear the double burden of economic exploitation and social oppression.
The leftist line stressed that the object of combat against male-supremacist practices was the unification of the men and women of the exploited classes against a common class enemy in order to transcend the division and conflict sexism created between them. The position on men was explicit: men in the exploited classes, bribed through their privileged position over women, acted so as to divide the class struggle.
The source of divisiveness was not men per se but the practice of male supremacy. One can immediately see that the leftist analysis, pointing to class and property relations as the source of the oppression of women, was much more difficult to propagandize than the feminist anti-male line.
In everyday life what all women confront is the bullying exploitation of men. From the job to the bedroom, men are the enemy, but men are not the same kind of enemy to all women. For the middle class woman, particularly if she has a career or is planning to have a career, the primary problem is to get men out of the way i.
The system of sexual inequality and institutionalized discrimination, not class exploitation, is the primary source of middle class female protest. Given this fact, it is men, and not the very organization of the social system itself, who stand in the way. Consequently, it is reform of the existing system which is required, and not the abolition of existing property relations, not proletarian revolution — which would sweep away the privileges of the middle class woman.
The left line held that equalization of the status of women is not, nor could it be, the cause of the decomposition of the nuclear family. The organization of the family is a result of the existing economic structure; just as the origin of the contemporary nuclear family is to be found in the rise of capitalism, so it is perpetuated in the interests of monopoly capitalism. Furthermore, equalization of the status of women would be no more likely to introduce an era of beautiful human relationships than did the introduction of Christianity bring obedience to the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments.
Gloria Steinem might build a corporation, a woman might become a general or a corporation vice-president, but the factory girl would remain the factory girl. The tactical and ideological error of the left in this struggle was to try to win the entire mass movement to their position.
The failure to recognize class struggles led to the defeat of the leftist position not only because of the predominant middle class background of the movement, but also because the left had not only to fight the petty bourgeois reformers, but also the anticommunist, cold war ideologies with which almost all North Americans have been so thoroughly infected.
Without disciplined organization and a working class base, a left position will always lose in a mass movement, or be reduced to self-defeating opportunism. The politics of oppression and the politics of discrimination were amalgamated and popularized in the ethic of sisterhood.
Sisterhood invoked the common oppression of all women, the common discrimination suffered by all. It was the call to unity and the basis of solidarity against all attacks from the male-dominated left and right, based on the idea that common oppression creates common understanding and common interests upon which all women can unite transcending class, language and race lines to bring about a vast movement for social justice — after first abolishing the special privileges enjoyed by all men, naturally.
0コメント