Sexual Democracy

Women, Oppression, And Revolution

Ann Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000311310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In a book that is both a critical analysis of contemporary society and the record of a feminist intellectual odyssey, Ann Ferguson, one of the most influential socialist-feminist theorists, develops a new theory of social domination. Tracing the development of socialist-feminist theory from its roots in the politics of the New Left to its present p

One
Introduction: A Personal and Political Feminist Odyssey

For the last fifteen years I have been engaged in developing a theory of male dominance that creates a feminist-materialist methodology and categories for understanding systems of patriarchy. Feminist-materialism¹ assumes that male power (a) is based on social practices rather than simply in biological sex differences; (b) connects to systematic inequalities in the exchange of work between men and women in meeting material needs; and (c) involves historically specific rather than universal systems of male dominance. Though my work borrows some ideas from Marxism, it is quite different in its political and theoretical conclusions. For one, I reappropriate the Freudian Marxist theory of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, arguing that male dominance is based on the social organization of sexuality and parenting, which involves material needs. For another, I reinterpret the radical feminist view (Firestone, 1970; Small, 1975; Delphy, 1984) that the gender division of labor at home and work makes women a social class exploited by men. Though I accept the relevance of this insight to contemporary North America, I maintain that the political implications of sexual divisions are not universal human truths but are historically specific to the advanced capitalist system of the United States. In Chapter 2 of this book, then, I argue that the contemporary women's movement in the United States can be explained by the development of women as a radical social class here, much like Marx's conception of the working class in advanced capitalist societies. But this argument does not imply that women are a radical social class in all countries at the moment, and, indeed, Chapter 6, which discusses racial and class differences among women, discusses the limitations that these place on the radical potential of the women's movement.

This book is a collection of essays from the last fifteen years that together document the development of my feminist-materialism. It includes papers from both before and after the publication of my book Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance. In the time span represented here, my ideas changed in emphasis and meaning, depending both on my political practice and on developments in the feminist theoretical debates of the times. Thus my focus shifts from a critique and expansion of Marxism (Chapter 2) to a critique of the lesbian separatist implications of Adrienne Rich's paper on compulsory heterosexuality (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, on motherhood and sexuality, I argue for a multisystems approach to social domination. Though I use the same category of sex/affective production as in the earlier chapter on "Sex and Work,"² in my multisystems approach it. is no longer obvious that women are a revolutionary class by themselves. Rather, radical changes can only occur on the strength of coalitions that approach the three main social domination systems in the United States today, those of gender, race, and class, as equal and independent. In subsequent chapters I develop some of the implications for a theory of self of a multisystems approach and expand a theory of racism adapted from a recent book by Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986). In Chapter 6 I study variations across lesbian cultures to explore the political implications of differences between women for feminist theory. In the last three chapters, I evaluate the future of U.S. socialist-feminist visions and politics in the light of the successes, failures, and radical changes in state socialist countries such as the USSR and those of Eastern Europe.

Why call the book Sexual Democracy? In a way this title anchors the intellectual and personal odyssey that I and many other left-wing feminists have made since the beginning of the second-wave women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did I begin to see personally and theoretically that heterosexual sex is a site for male dominance that Marxism had ignored, I also had to come to terms with the absence of a sufficient theory of the importance of political democracy in all its forms, either in mainstream or in leftist political theory. In the process of coming out as a lesbian, I had to develop a theory that justified supporting a pluralist coalitionist politics for feminism rather than a lesbian separatist position. Finally, because my life as the mother of an adopted black child is always on the margins of the white and the African-American communities, I had to understand how the visions of sexual democracy of peoples of color differ from those of white, middle-class feminists and need to be respected and understood if any effective progressive coalitions to fight sexism, racism, and capitalism are to be built.

Because stages of my theoretical development mirror the historical changes in U.S. feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s, this book may be seen as a personal odyssey through the major feminist disputes of the period. The theoretical is the personal in the sense that the creation of a social theory is a creation of a self-meaning for the author and her intended audience.³ Thus I decided to write this introduction on two levels: first giving a history of my personal and political experiences as background to my theoretical development, and then outlining how the theoretical and political positions I take in these essays connect to a history of the major feminist disputes during the period.

Stage 1: 1961–1977

Personal: Experiences with the Civil Rights and New Left Movements

I spent the period from 1961 to 1973 involved with the New Left, supporting the civil rights, student, and anti-Vietnam War movements. In order to make sense out of the Vietnam War and of imperialism in general, I studied Marxism and became convinced that U.S. and international capitalism had structural tendencies that not only created class exploitation at home but also made it impossible for the United States to support full democratic rights to self-determination for peoples in the underdeveloped world who resisted U.S. imperialist exploitation. From the Marxist perspective, racism and sexism are secondary effects of the capitalist system used to divide and conquer the population in order to maintain ruling-class hegemony. I was a rebel who needed a simple, unitary system of thought with a tidy "unite and fight" politics. To think of capitalism as the basic enemy allowed me a comforting political strategy, overwhelmed as I was with the magnitude of the problems of social domination I was discovering. I could keep my family and male and female friends located in one undivided counter-culture from which I did not have to separate in order to fight social domination in all of its forms.

Through the early 1960s I was involved primarily with the civil rights movement. I worked on fair housing issues when I was a graduate student in Providence, Rhode Island, went to the 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., "I have a dream" rally in Washington, D.C., and when I got my first teaching job at the University of Massachusetts in 1964, I spent a summer working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Springfield. That was not easy for a white woman, especially a young academic in a working-class neighborhood; black men who wanted to go out with me were constantly testing me to see if I was racist. Because I had a (white) boyfriend at the time, I had what I thought was a good excuse, but it didn't prevent sexual advances by my black male acquaintances, which I found alternately annoying, frightening, and exciting. From my own experience, there is no denying the special attraction between white women and black men that caused frictions in civil rights organizations (cf. Evans, 1980) and problems for sisterhood between white and black women because of sexual jealousies and rivalries. I found myself a subject of jealousy because married black men were flirting with me, and unattached black men also paid more attention to me than to the black women in the organization. At the same time, all of us, as women, were expected to defer to black male leadership. (There were very few white men in the organization in Springfield.)

As an antiracist and feminist, I have been faced with two sorts of moral dilemmas in my erotic interactions with black men. First was being able to separate what I wanted—was I really attracted to a particular man who was putting the make on me or was my motive simply white liberal guilt? The second problem was dealing with black women in relation to black men. Though I avoided involvement with black men in CORE, in my later role in New Left politics I did have an affair with a married black man who believed he had the right not to be bound by his wife's foolish insistence on monogamy. My not really knowing his wife didn't alleviate the moral dilemma I faced. Did my responsibility as a feminist, my commitment to sisterhood, mean I should end my affair with him? At the time, I didn't believe in monogamy either but decided I couldn't support what amounted to a double standard, especially given my white-skin privilege.

As I was making these hard personal decisions, I was troubled that even my sexual feelings were immersed in racist assumptions. Black men were more attractive to me than white men. At the same time they were also scary: I felt a strong taboo against interracial sex because of my upbringing in the very racist 1950s. I lived in a racially divided atmosphere in Maryland: Neighborhoods, schools, and my summer girls' camp were segregated. There was no way to get to know black people—aside from the domestic maid who came once every two weeks and was treated as a servant—on a personal level. Black men seemed erotic not because of their individual personalities but because they symbolized the forbidden sexual Other (Stember, 1976). They represented sexuality itself, as did black culture, which reached me in the form of blues music (the only sexual music I had access to because it was part of the folk tradition that was popular when I went to college).

The sexual racism of our contemporary situation is still based on fundamental asymmetries. The sexual double standard of monogamy for women and nonmonogamy for men still prevails across the race line. Furthermore, sexual desires are coded in racial gender terms. That is (speaking in generalities), there is not an equally powerful attraction between white men and black women as there is between black men and white women. We can speculate about the reasons, which are many. For one, white standards of beauty put down black women, whereas looks are not so important in male sex appeal to women. For another, black women are not perceived as a sexual challenge because the legacy of slavery suggested they were there for the taking; thus they are at the bottom of the race and gender status heap (Stember, 1976; Aptheker, 1983). Though the Black Power movement, with the attendant "Black is beautiful" ideology, has changed the situation somewhat and the number of interracial couples has increased in the last twenty years, there is still a racist and sexist asymmetry in sexuality to the disadvantage of black women. This makes it difficult for heterosexual black and white women to work together in interracial coalitions without the emergence of the sexual dynamics discussed above.

From 1965 on I became heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. I was one of the faculty advisers for the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), which on our campus was allied with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), We organized rallies and sit-ins on campuses, marches on Washington, and, in 1970 and 1972, took part in major campus strikes. Informal networks of New Left faculty participated in these activities, and after the shutdown of the campus in the 1970 strike, ten of us who were on the faculties at the University of Massachusetts and Amherst College organized a group pretentiously called The Collective.

It was here that I experienced early bouts with New Left sexism. Some of the men in the group were clearly sexist and fancied themselves leaders of a faculty-student movement. Their narcissism and put-downs of women were not easy to combat. After all, there were only three women in the group, each different and all either married to or lovers of men in the group. We were thus treated as wives, and our input was not taken as seriously as that of the men in the group. It was the combination of this experience and that of the sexism of the men in my department when I came up for tenure in 1971 that turned me toward feminism. Before that, I had considered myself one of the boys and had rather looked down on women who did "women's work," particularly housewives. Now I found that being a philosophy professor did not exempt me from sexist treatment, even by fellow Marxist radicals.

Many other women had had similar experiences with the New Left in the civil rights and antiwar movement, and in the early 1970s the socialist-feminist wing of the autonomous women's movement was born. Very influential in the development of this tendency was the model theorized and practiced by the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU, 1973) and replicated by women's groups in Berkeley-Oakland, Columbus, Dayton, Boston, and Chapel Hill, among other places. Patriarchy and capitalism were described as two separate but intertwined systems to be fought simultaneously. CWLU organized autonomous women's work groups around particular local issues in order to empower women through radical reforms in such areas as childcare, unionization, and women's presses. These local groups were to send a spokesperson to a steering committee but to make their own political decisions and do their own organizing. The goal was nonhierarchical consensus decisionmaking, with the whole membership of the union meeting once a month to do internal education and to discuss projects of its associated work groups that required support by the entire union. In 1973 the Valley Women's Union (VWU), fashioned after this model, came into existence; I was a member of the organizing collective of this group, which lasted four years and was one of the formative experiences of my feminist theory and politics.

In our political discussions at the VWU, we debated the view that compulsory heterosexuality was the political base of patriarchy (Myron and Bunch, 1975), Though this theory was compelling to me in some ways, it didn't easily fit into my Marxist world view. I became determined to find a way to expand Marxist political and economic categories so as to understand both how women as a social group did not correspond to the traditional Marxist concept of class and how to expand Marxist categories of exploitation to deal with the organization of sexuality and parenting—a topic not undertaken in any systematic fashion by Marx and Engels.

I was then, as now, juggling autonomous women's movement politics with mixed left politics. As I mentioned above, my own experiences in a mixed left faculty and staff collective forced me to acknowledge the sexism of the men I worked with and their refusal to prioritize parenting and sexuality as political issues. On the other hand, I was uncomfortable with the mostly white, middle-class bias of the women in the Valley Women's Union and wanted some theoretical approach that would make classism and racism live forces in our thinking and organizing.

Racism in particular had become quite a personal issue for me, as I struggled to raise an adopted mixed-race child while co-parenting with a white (later ex-) husband. I rejected liberal feminism but wanted to incorporate some of the insights of radical feminism (e.g., Firestone, 1970; Dworkin, 1974; Small, 1975) into Marxism so as to create a distinctive socialist-feminist position. Chapter 2 shows the result of that effort.

Theoretical and Political: Women as a Radical Class

Chapter 2, "Sex and Work: Women as a New Revolutionary Class in the United States," represents a feminist critique of Marxism, still within the Marxist paradigm of social explanation. It argues that Marxist categories must be expanded to deal with women as a sex class, that is, as a social group with an oppressed status cutting across racial, ethnic, and economic-class lines. This socialist-feminist position is an attempt to reconcile the insights of early 1970s radical feminism that women's oppression by men was analogous to the oppression of the working class by the capitalist class—that is, that there is a material conflict of interest between the sexes ignored by male Marxist theorists of historical materialism (cf. Firestone, 1970; Small, 1975; Flax, 1976).

Though this chapter appears to critique Marxism from a feminist perspective, it does not so much distance itself from Marxism as it does attempt to expand the application of Marxist concepts so as to incorporate an analysis of male domination. The basic claim, that U.S. women are historically coming to form a revolutionary sex class, still assumes two Marxist ideas: (1) that certain classes are revolutionary vanguards of radical social change and (2) that changing material conditions can develop a revolutionary consciousness in these groups, I now think that the idea that sexuality, social bonding, and parenting are involved in what I call "modes of sex/affective production" should be taken independently of the Marxist model, without assuming any analogy between a traditional Marxist and a feminist model of revolutionary change.

My theoretical voice of the mid-1970s was part of a dialogue importantly based on New Left politics. Feminist theory at the time had two separate political traditions, the reformist politics of liberal feminism—Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and their political organizations, the National Organization of Women (NOW) and Ms.—and radical feminism. Radical feminism developed among women activists initially involved in the student, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s who were disillusioned with the male chauvinism of these movements (Willis, 1984).

The New Left had proposed an anarchist conception of democracy, participatory democracy, that critiqued hierarchical political decision-making. It was a short step from that critique of leaders who form political elites to the perception that the men in the movements were a privileged sex class. The feminist slogan "The personal is the political" was born out of the understanding that the sexual interactions between men and women created gender power for men in the political sphere. Hence, just as Marxism proposed to shatter the appearance of fairness of a capitalist system based on market exchanges in the sphere of circulation by exposing the power relations in the supposedly nonpolitical sphere of production, so radical feminists argued that gender exploitation in the private, supposedly apolitical world of sex and love supported male dominance in the public world of politics.

Stage 2: 1974–1981

Personal: The Lesbian-Straight Split in the Women’s Movement

The lesbian-straight split in the women's movement initially occurred in the Northampton-Amherst area from around 1974 to 1976. This was profoundly upsetting to me. Though I believed in the necessity of an autonomous women's movement, I was disturbed by the separatist conclusion that men and straight women alike were feminism's enemies. Not only did this split between straight and lesbian feminists finally destroy the Northampton V...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: A Personal and Political Feminist Odyssey
• PART ONE THE THEORY OF SEX/AFFECTIVE PRODUCTION
• PART TWO FEMINIST POLITICS AND VISIONS
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index