File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-22.073, message 12


Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 21:00:51 -0500
From: Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi)
Subject: M-I: Feminist Demands (was Re: With Friends Like These....)


Well, Adolfo, I have nothing but sympathies for long-suffering yet brave
women revolutionaries in Peru who have had to put up with male idiocy that
rusults from the *lack* of proper dialectical thinking. Now let me
reproduce an article by Jose Carlos Mariategui--your countryman!--for your
and other virtual marxists' enlightenment. The article is entitled
"Feminist Demands" and was written originally in 1924. This article makes
clear that your thinking is quite out of touch with the tradition of
Peruvian Marxist thoughts as well as more retrograde than that of a male
thinker born more than one hundred years ago!

Yoshie Furuhashi (furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu)

-----------------------------------------------------

Jose Carlos Mariategui. "Feminist Demands." _"The Heroic and Creative
Meaning of Socialism": Selected Essays of Jose Carlos Mariategui_. Ed. and
Trans. Michael Pearlman. NJ: Humanities Press International Inc., 1996.

The first signs of feminist restlessness are reverberating through Peru.
Some feminist cells and nuclei now exist. The proponents of
ultra-nationalism will probably think, "Here is another exotic, foreign
idea that is being grafted onto the Peruvian mentality."
        Let us calm these apprehensive people a bit. We should not see
feminism as an exotic or foreign idea. We need to see it simply as a human
idea--an idea that is characteristic of a civilization, peculiar to an
epoch--and therefore, an idea with the right to citizenship in Peru, as in
any other part of the civilized world.
        Feminism has appeared in Peru neither artificially nor arbitrarily.
It has appeared as a consequence of the new forms of women's intellectual
and manual labor. The women with a real connection to feminism are the
women who work, the women who study. The feminist idea flourishes among
women with intellectual or manual professions: university professors,
working women. It finds a propitious environment for growth in university
classrooms, which attract more and more Peruvian women, and in the trade
unions, where women from the factories join and organize themselves with
the same rights and duties as the men. Apart from this spontaneous and
organic feminism, which recruits its adherents among the different
categories of women's work, there exists here, as elsewhere, a feminism of
dilettantes, some a bit pedantic, others a bit mundane. Feminists of this
type turn feminism into a simple literary exercise, a mere fashionable
sport.
        No one should be surprised that all women do not unite in a single
feminist movement. Feminism necessarily has various shades and diverse
tendencies. We can distinguish three fundamental tendencies, three
substantive shades of feminism: bourgeois feminism, petty bourgeois
feminism, and working-class feminism. Each of these feminisms formulates
its demands in a distinctive manner. The bourgeois woman, as a feminist,
solidarizes with the interests of the conservative class. The working-class
woman combines her feminism with the faith of the revolutionary multitudes
in the future society. The class struggle--a historical fact, not a
theoretical assertion--is reflected on the plane of feminism. Women, like
men, are reactionaries, centrists, or revolutionaries. They consequently
cannot fight the same battle together. In the current human panorama, class
differentiates individuals more than sex.
        But this multiplicity of feminisms does not result from the theory
itself. It depends, rather, on its practical deformations. Feminism as a
pure idea is essentially revolutionary. The ideas and attitudes of women
who consider themselves both feminist and conservative thus lack internal
coherence. Conservatism works to maintain the traditional organization of
society. This organization denies women the rights that women wish to gain.
Bourgeois feminists accept all the consequences of the prevailing order
except those opposed to women's demands. They tactically maintain the
abusurd thesis that the only reform society needs is feminist reform. The
protest of these feminists against the old order is too exclusive to be
valid.
        It is true that the historical roots of feminism are found in the
liberal sensibility. The French revolution contained the first seeds of the
feminist movement. The question of the emancipation of women was then laid
out in precise terms fo the first time. Babeuf, the leader of the
Conspiracy of Equals, was a proponent of feminist demands. Babeuf harangued
his friends in this way:

                Do not force silence on this sex, which does not
                deserve to be disdained. Rather, cultivate the
                better part of yourselves. If women count for
                nothing in your republic, you will make them
                lovers of the monarchy. If, on the contrary, they
                count for something, you will make of them
                Cornelias and Lucretias. They will give you
                Brutuses, Gracchi, and Scaevolas.

        Polemicizing with anti-feminists, Babeuf spoke of "this sex that
men's tyranny has always sought to humble, this sex that has never been
useless in a revolution." But the French revolution did not wish to accord
women the equality and freedom proposed by such Jacobin or egalitarian
voices. The Rights of Man, as I once wrote, could better be called the
Rights of the Male Sex. Bourgeois democracy has been an exclusively
masculine democracy.
        Born of the liberal womb, feminism has not been put into effect
during the development of capitalism. It is now, when the historical
trajectory of democracy is reaching its end, that women are gaining the
political and legal rights of men. And it is the Russian Revolution that
has explicitly and categorically granted to women the equality and freedom
that Babeuf and the egalitarians demanded in vain from the French
revolution more than a century ago.
        But if bourgeois democracy has not implemented feminism, it has
involuntarily created the moral and material conditions and premises for
its realization. It has given women value as an element of production, as
an economic factor, making increasingly extensive and intensive use of
their labor. Work radically changes the female mentality and spirit. By
virtue of her labor, woman gains a new idea of herself. Formerly, society
destined woman to marriage or concubinage. It now principally destines her
to work. This fact has changed and elevated the position of women in life.
Those who impugn feminism and its progress with sentimental or
traditionalist arguments claim that women should be educated only for the
home. But, in practice, this means that women should be educated only for
the role of female and mother. The defense of the poetry of the home is
actually a defense of woman's servitude. Instead of ennobling and
dignifying the role of women, it diminishes and lowers it. A woman is
something more than a female and a mother, just as a man is something more
than a male....
        This subject is quite vast. This short article merely aims to point
out the nature of the first manifestation of feminism in Peru and to
attempt a very quick and summary interpretation of the physiognomy and
spirit of the international feminist movement. Men who are sensitive to the
great passions of the epoch should feel neither foreign nor indifferent to
this movement. The woman question is a part of the human question....

-----------------------------------------------

As Mariategui admits, this is a short article that could not possibly
encompass all aspects of feminism and socialism. But it does show that
Mariategui understood feminisms materially and dialectically, as Marx
analyzed capitalism materially and dialectically.

Yoshie




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