Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 13:40:02 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Through a Glass Fuzzily


malgosia askanas wrote:

>David wrote, quoting Engels:
>
>>  The modern individual family is based upon
>> the open or disguised domestic enslavement
>> of the woman; and modern society is a mass
>> composed solely of individual families as
>> its molecules... In the family, [the man]
>> is the bourgeois; the wife represents the
>> proletariat.
>
>OK, but then what if I say: the choice of the word "proletariat"
>in the above quote is ideolocally misleading; its purpose is to
>suggest that there is a natural solidarity between the emancipatory
>struggles of women and the emancipatory struggles of the industrial
>proletariat.  But from the perspective of the women's oppression,
>this is an artifact of a false consciousness: as long as woman is
>oppressed by man, there can be no solidarity between the two sexes.

I think the formulation allows for lots of intraclass conflict between the
sexes. In a bourgeois family, the woman is exploited; in a proletarian one,
both are, but the man outside his four walls, a woman both inside and
outside her four walls. You may object to the use of class language as the
model for the man-woman relation in the household, but by definition
classes are in conflict, and so by definition there is anything but a
natural solidarity between men and women, or a simple equivalence of
women's and workers' struggles.

There can be solidarity between the sexes in the workers' struggle, but
always a troubled one while the relations between men and women are
exploitative.

Doug