Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression, and Revolution
By Anne Ferguson
Allen and Unwin, 1991. $24.95
Reviewed by Vivienne Porzsolt
Ann Ferguson attempts to construct a materialist explanation of women's oppression which takes into account all the complex factors involved. In addition, she develops a theory of the politics required to overthrow that oppression.
In general, explanations of class, sex and race oppression account for oppression either in terms of consciousness and ideas or in terms of structures of material relationships between members of a society.
Those with idealist explanations seek social change by exhortation, education or "personal growth". Materialists seek to replace oppressive social structures and practices with egalitarian ones. They believe that, ultimately, the ideas prevalent in society are produced by these structures. This view of social change requires political organisation and collective action.
Historical materialism asserts that human history is ultimately based on the dynamic development of the relationships formed to produce the means of sustaining and reproducing human life. It is thus firmly rooted in the biological substratum of the requirements for material survival, but the course of development is historically determined.
In Marxist theory, political structures and ideologies are, in the last instance, determined by the forces and relations of production in their totality. "In the last instance" is very important, because the interactions of political, ideological and economic elements are dynamic and reciprocal.
The classical Marxist explanation for sex oppression is that it is, along with the family and state, a historical by-product of class oppression and that it did not exist prior to class society. Sex oppression is not seen to have sufficient weight to exert a force of its own on historical development.
However, it is evident from the non-class societies which survive that sex oppression and domination are not confined to class societies. While there is no evidence that it is universal, the prevalence of sex oppression across widely differing social formations needs further explanation.
Ferguson rightly notes that there are cross-cultural and cross-historical constants — that all women can be mothers and that, empirically, the vast majority of human beings are "mothered" rather than "fathered".
Efforts to explore sexism (and racism) within a historical materialist tradition have developed a variety of approaches. One view is that economic, sexual and racial oppression are essentially independent and intertwine with each other in ways which are historically observable but not necessarily systematically or theoretically explicable. This view moves away from the notion of a h all parts have a systematic, if conflicting and dynamic, relationship to each other. If the systematic nature of society is denied, the outlook for successful political action is bleaker.
Ferguson takes the view that the three key oppressions interact, but are semi-independent. Alongside the concept of a mode of production, she posits a mode of sex/affective production. Ferguson identifies the family or kin system as a significant (but not the only) site of sex/affective production. The qualification is important because, particularly in capitalist society, the sexual division of labour and authority are constructed in the paid workplace as much as in the family.
Ferguson argues against notions of "mode of procreation" and "mode of reproduction" because she says that they overemphasise the physical production of human beings and neglect the social construction of sexuality. Her general approach, it seems to me, overemphasises and misconceives issues of sexuality and affection (as opposed to the sexual division of labour). She writes of the production, distribution and exchange of "sex/affective energy" as if such energy were a constant trans-historical reality.
It is quite fallacious and idealist to treat it as analogous to economic production, distribution and exchange. Sexual issues have come to the fore in a conscious way only at this very specific period, when the western middle class has sufficient prosperity to contemplate its own subjective experiences in a way which is not a universal human concern historically or globally.
This is not to say that the construction of sexuality is irrelevant. The nuclear family builds the unconscious through the shaping of sexuality and patterns of desire differentiated by gender. This social structure will clearly need to be replaced if we are to be free of oppressive sexual identities.
Ferguson also argues for concepts of individual class, family class, sex/class and race/class. She asserts that a single class position for each individual does not capture the complexities of economic, sex and race relations. That is true, but it does not resolve the dilemma to suggest that race and sex oppression are analogous to class oppression.
Ferguson, in line with many feminists, challenges the ways in which women's class membership is defined. They protest that because the wife of the bourgeois man has not the same access to power or to economic goods as her spouse and may have a paid job of her own, it is inappropriate to identify her with the class of her husband.
But this view flies in the face of reality. While the wife of the bourgeois man has little control over resources or people in her own right, her livelihood is based on the surplus value extracted from the working class through her husband's membership of the owning class. Her material interests are tied to those of her husband just because she is dependent on him and controlled by him.
To say this is not to deny her oppression, but to say that the analysis of her oppression requires non-class concepts. There is an element of gendered power which, while it ultimately has its roots in the economic dependence and inequality of women, is mediated through psycho-social patterns constructed in the family. This family pattern exists regardless of minor individual variations from the social norm of female economic dependence.
The force of class in the economic sense has a far stronger impact on gender relations than vice versa. It is more useful to see gender and race relations as aspects of a single mode of production, aspects which have not been adequately explained by classical Marxist theory.
Ferguson observes that the largely middle class second wave feminists believed that a movement could be built on gender politics alone, but they failed to take into account racial, ethnic and class interests which could vary and conflict. In the United States, issues of rape were notoriously intertwined with racism.
On the basis of her analysis, Ferguson argues for political action based on pluralist coalitions of various autonomous radical interest groups. She identifies the need to build a broad culture of general resistance which nevertheless permits a variety of perspectives. The Alliance led by the NewLabour Party in New Zealand may be an example of what she is suggesting.
The strengths of Ferguson's work are her concrete historical examples and a strongly historical approach to gender, race and class categories. Her analysis is, however, weakened by a degree of entrapment in the more subjective concepts and politics of the modern feminist and lesbian movements.