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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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