a socialist view of women's studies: a reply to the editorial, volume 1, number 1

A Socialist View of Women's Studies: A Reply to the Editorial, Volume 1, Number 1Author(s): Linda GordonSource: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1975), pp. 559-566Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173067 .

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LETTERS AND COMMENTS

A Socialist View of Women's Studies: A Reply to the Editorial, Volume 1,

Number 1

Linda Gordon

The emergence of a new journal of women's studies prompts some reflection on the scope, and the essence, of the field of study. The de- lineation of the field has a political aspect. Women's studies did not arise accidentally, as the product of someone's good idea, but was created by a social movement for women's liberation with a sharp political critique of the whole structure of our society. By its very existence, women's studies constitutes a critique of the university and the body of knowledge it imparts. Universities play a political role in this society, and women's studies programs do also. Thus, a wise decision to keep the journal broad and open to many aspects of this new scholarship should not mean avoiding important political questions.

While keeping in sight the relation of women's studies to the women's liberation movement, we should also remember to distinguish them. I was astonished to be asked recently whether women's studies is a revolution. Clearly it is not. Revolutions are mass movements in which political power is taken from one social class by another; revolutions do not happen in universities. Scholars can help in revolutionary struggles only through unity with much larger groups of people. It seems to me that it is important to preserve the meaning of the word "revolution." Many forces in our culture, such as advertising agencies and electoral campaigns, try to deny the meaning of the word by speaking of "rev-

This article is adapted from a speech given at a conference on women's studies at the University of Pennsylvania in November 1974.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1975, vol. 1, no. 2] ? 1975 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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olutionary" new auto models and by pretending that nearly identical alternatives are real choices. In making everything "revolutionary," they try to make nothing revolutionary, to deny that radical change is possi- ble. We should resist this dilution of the word, because real revolutions can and do happen through large social movements.

Women's studies in fact marks the renaissance of a field of scholarly inquiry which began in the mid-nineteenth century with the feminist movement and had a second period of blossom in the early twentieth century. The content of the field, however, has been changed by the changed content of the feminist movement. As anyone employed in a women's studies program can attest, what should be the content of these programs is not obvious.

My own views on women's studies were formed by my participation in the women's liberation movement (and more recently in the socialist- feminist tendency within it) and by my professional status as a historian. In trying, with some close friends, to delineate and define the field of women's history, my thinking has been influenced by the ideas of one of my favorite historians, C. L. R. James,1 on black studies. Let me quote (and paraphrase) directly from James so that readers can decide for themselves whether his ideas are useful. James outlined two attitudes toward change that might serve as models for black studies. The first is integrationist. He quotes from one of its chief spokesmen:

... at this minute we Negroes have 11% of the population. Our minimum objective must be to capture 11% of the jobs in the mid- dle and 11% of the jobs at the top ... through higher education.

Blacks should hold 1 out of every 9 vice-presidencies of GM.

How is one to be ambassador to Finland or Luxembourg-jobs which American Negroes have already held with distinction-if one is uncomfortable in white company?

In this model it is assumed that large-scale social change will not remove the necessity of educating blacks to these goals. "Revolution takes power from one set of persons and gives it to another, but it does not change the hierarchical structure of the economy. Any kind of America that you can visualize whether capitalist, Communist, Fascist, or any other kind of ist, is going to consist of large institutions like GM under one name or another." This concept of black studies not only anticipates integrating blacks into a society essentially unchanged but also denies the possibility of a society designed fundamentally differently from today's

1. James is a West Indian Marxist historian and theorist. These excerpts are from a speech he gave about six years ago on black studies while teaching at Federal City College in Washington, D.C., and published in Radical America 5, no. 5 (September-October 1971): 79-96. I am indebted to Ellen DuBois for first bringing this speech to my attention.

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A second view of black studies, in James's opinion, is nationalist. What is black is beautiful, what is white is corrupt. It seeks the roots of an independent black culture from which a renaissance will emerge if given the proper nourishment. Sometimes separatist, sometimes not, it argues that black culture is morally superior to white culture, and therefore that giving power to blacks will automatically improve the whole society. Both alternatives are unacceptable, according to James. Indeed, he does not believe in black studies at all. He is, however, glad that "there are studies in which black people and black history, so long neglected, can now get some of the attention they deserve."

Before drawing out some of the obvious analogies between these speculations and women's studies, I want to register some qualifications about the extent to which the analogy is accurate. Actually, the oppression of white women (or of black women as women) and that of blacks have little in common. In an exploitive society, all oppressed groups have their exploitation in common, but women and blacks are not paral- lel categories. Women are more integrated into male culture than blacks are into white culture. Thus, although we may question the existence of a female culture, we cannot deny the fact of an Afro-American culture with its own language, folklore, and social patterns. Blacks have faced the threat of the annihilation of their culture, and in some cases of physical annihilation. Black studies programs face the special challenge of struggling against years of systematic denial of educational oppor- tunities to blacks, denial of even decent primary and secondary education, a problem much less severe with white women. Women should not use the existence of black studies programs as ajustification for women's studies programs.

Still, the two types of black studies programs that James defined exist in women's studies too. We have our integrationist models. There are influential people with money encouraging women to prepare themselves for careers in banking, industry, and government on the terms set by male supremacy. The Women's Bank in New York has, as far as I know, the same interest rates as all men's banks, and it will undoubtedly foreclose on mortgages the same way. It is also an accepted practice to measure sexual inequality by the ratio of women to men in given occupa- tions, not considering that if women are not by and large employers and landlords, this may be a good thing. The fact that women have not traditionally had power over other people may be a virtue to preserve. Just as the spokesman for integrationist black studies programs argued, there are those who believe that women should struggle for a fair share of the current pie and not allow our demands to be absorbed and thus potentially smothered by those who want to bake another pie altogether. The problem with this model, of course, is that it leaves most women at the bottom because the men with whom they would have gained equality are mostly on the bottom as well.

Winter 1975 561 Signs



There is also a model of women's studies comparable to black nationalism. It finds female/male the most fundamental and constant dichotomy and contradiction in the society. Politically, it encourages women to consider their femaleness as uniting them more closely with all other women than with any men. Intellectually, it tends to categorize cultural and cognitive forms as female and male, sometimes asserting the superiority of the female forms, sometimes pleading for the reinte- gration of the two into the fully human. Either way, these distinctions oversimplify. They deny or minimize the importance of class and race divisions, for example. One suspects, therefore, that this view reflects the interests of women for whom class and race exploitation and oppression are not dominant problems. It seems clear that the vast majority of the women in the world do not experience their femaleness as uniting them, even potentially, with all other women, because other differences loom larger. For this reason it cannot succeed as a strategy for uniting women, since it flies in the face of their own experience.

There are elements in both definitions of women's studies that are not only valuable but absolutely essential. Women have a right to equity and the training necessary to it, even in banking, if they want it. And women have a right to an education that holds up the female mode -physical, psychological, and intellectual-as something to cling to, if they wish, and to defend against integration into male-defined stan- dards.

But women's studies need not be a halfway point, a compromise, or an amalgam of various elements. Women's studies should and could be much more than either model. It could be an attempt to transform the contemporary study of human life and culture by rescuing it from the culture of male supremacy. In saying that scholarship has been trapped by male supremacy, I am implying of course that I see women's studies as, ultimately, remedial. I hope that the remedial work we do can achieve a new equality, in which it is universally understood that humanity con- sists of two equal sexes. The problem that we are remedying is, however, very deep and very old. Ours is not a remedial program to accomplish its goals in a few years. The male supremacist hold on scholarship is not a question of some leftover bad ideas to be combated by reeducation. Male supremacy is a system constantly being renewed by material reality, in which men get material benefits from their privileged status. I suspect that it will plague us as long as we have any form of class society at all. Thus, although I think women's studies is remedial, it should not end as long as any forms of exploitation exist.

Women's studies can play an important role in attacking the culture of male supremacy. By male supremacy I mean a total social system, with material benefits for men its motive force. In this system, ideas and economic forms of exploitation are clearly in a constant, mutually reen- forcing relation with each other. Besides, culture is more than mere

Women's Studies 562 Gordon



ideas. By culture I mean the forms of human relationships, the often subconscious way in which people view their world, or in the case of sexism, the means of perpetuation of exploitive relationships.

I would like to mention specifically two contributions that women's studies could make. First, we could take on the task of putting women and the female experience at the center of the whole human experience. Traditional scholarly approaches have seen men in the center and women, if included at all, in the periphery of the area which each disci- pline illuminated. In history, for example, we were told of kings, dip- lomats, and revolutionary leaders; some exceptional historians also showed us the labor of the male working class and, if we were lucky, gave us a glimpse of a few mothers, mistresses, or female saints. So far the net impact of women's studies on sympathetic teachers of non-women's studies courses has been to push women slightly closer in from the very edge of the disciplinary boundaries but leave them still far from the center. To put women at the center would be to turn the disciplines literally inside out.

C. L. R. James argues, for instance, that black slavery was the basis of capitalism-that the system owes its worldwide dominance to the labor of slaves, not to the cleverness of magnates. I think we can make similar assertions about capitalism's dependence on female labor, slave and "free." Social historians noticed that the factory operative was the characteristic working-class worker of the industrial period; not only did they omit female operatives, but they omitted female houseworkers -wives and domestic servants. The housewife is as much at the center of the industrial capitalist economy as the factory worker.

In saying that women are at the center, we must not indulge in bravado and exaggerate female power. We must show that the female experience is as much the human experience as the male. In arguing that women's studies should put women at the center, I am arguing against the notion that we should focus exclusively on women. On the contrary, by looking at the human experience from the point of view of women, we can understand the male experience and the whole culture much better. But we need to focus exclusively on women at first for several reasons: in order to stimulate people to do long-neglected research about women, to prepare them to do that research, and to demonstrate that paying attention to women will produce new social understandings. But more and more we should try to let the light we focus on women throw a wider circle of illumination which takes in men as well, seen from the women's point of view. James pointed out that Wendell Phil-

lips, a white abolitionist, should be as much the subject of black studies as Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist. Both Phillips and Douglass should be the subject of women's studies, for they were both feminists.

The second aspect of the transformation of scholarship that women's studies should aim to accomplish follows from the first: by

Winter 1975 563 Signs



placing women at the center, we can transform the methodology of scholarship itself. I can speak about this best in my own field. History has traditionally been divided into subfields: political history, diplomatic history, intellectual history, social history, economic history. The division involves dividing up human experience in a way that has made the central problem of history-to explain what happened-more difficult. It is useful to analyze the various parts of human experience, but only in order to put them together again more clearly. Most historians leave the parts separated.

Now where did women fit into this set of categories? Since they had no political, economic, or intellectual power, they naturally were squeezed into "social history" and the "social life" of civilization. Social became a euphemism for frivolous, trivial, not serious. But this is not what social should mean: it refers to all human relations, including political, economic, and intellectual ones. Seeing history from the point of view of those of us who have been relegated to the category of "social life" can provide the impetus for reintegrating the parts of human history.

Furthermore, I think that women's studies can help change what I consider a disturbing trend in the social sciences away from explanation or analysis of events and institutions toward mere description. In an essay on social history, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm pointed out three years ago a similar trend in labor history.2 A new professionalism had entered the field, defined the subjects of inquiry more and more finely and microscopically, until the study of working-class people had become so removed from its total context, its political context, that it was merely descriptive. Few asked why or how this happened, and those who did were criticized for overgeneralizing. The collection of data is important, and I am not advocating giving up research. But unless we risk hypotheses at every stage of our investigations we lose the point of what we are doing. There is a politics behind this tendency to shy away from explanation. Part of this flight from explanation, fear of probing into ultimate causes, is a backlash against the women's movement and against the whole outburst of radicalism of the 1960s. Those of us who came to scholarship from a social movement, from the women's liberation movement for example, want to learn about women so that we can help to improve our situation. We need to understand causes because they will help us understand how to change the world. Those to whom history is an abstract search for knowledge do not have this need.

The fact that many of us approach women's studies with an "axe to grind," so to speak, produces certain dangers. The first wave of women's consciousness has always produces among scholars a desire to reject the

2. Eric Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," Daedalus (Winter 1971).




Winter 1975 565

study of the powerful altogether in favor of the study of the poor, weak, and powerless women. This shift produces a distortion of the opposite kind-seeing women as victims, or seeing only half of the struggle between the sexes. The system of male supremacy is a participatory and a dynamic system. Women accept and sometimes even defend some of the conditions of their oppression, usually in order to protect themselves from worse penalties. At the same time they not only resist but usually succeed in fundamentally altering, in having some constant effect on, the terms of their subjugation. Sex relations, like class relations, can only be understood dialectically. The ultimate domination of male power and sexist ideas is only a net domination, not an absolute one; every aspect of male supremacy is affected by women's accommodation and resistance to it.

Such a dynamic view of society and culture must also end another distortion in women's studies-a search for heroines. To focus on great, exceptional individuals must be done with great care if it is not to distort the broader picture. There is equal danger of distorting the biographies of individuals if we do not show how even Queens were changed by their experiences of male supremacy.

Of course there are dangers in being partisan scholars. But there are worse dangers in posing as objective. The first is that since no one can achieve real political neutrality, those who claim it are misleading people. In the academic world, we still need to repeat that those who accept the traditional academic assumptions are in fact as political as those who reject them. The second danger is that those who seek neutrality will not be able to understand anything. To claim neutrality is to surrender any critical distance on one's own culture, to accept as permanent and natural traditions which are in fact disintegrating. Women's studies scholars who frankly and unapologetically see and accept their own place as part of a social movement need not be uncritical of their movement and their own biases.

In short, I am arguing for a political conception of women's studies. It seems to me that we ought to see ourselves forthrightly and unpreten- tiously as the academic wing of the women's liberation movement, and that we ought to understand that the only chance for the liberation of all women lies in the socialist transformation of the whole society. To do less means to accept ourselves as tokens in an academic establishment that continues to represent the interests of those who created and maintain this male supremacist society. To represent women's interests against this establishment requires gaining enough detachment from our own personal situations to comprehend the situation of all women. We can gain this detachment by recognizing our own class and political position as scholars, striving toward objectivity by understanding and accepting our historical place rather than by denying it. Furthermore, we should not remove the abstract category "women" from the totality of social

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relations. A clearheaded look at real women will show that for women, as for men, relations of the production and reproduction of the necessities of life are ultimately the sources of all social relations, including male supremacy. Class relations have divided women as well as men, and have made sexual divisions complex. They make it impossible to study women in isolation from men, or to isolate sexism from other social relations.

Yet both class and sexual divisions are only ultimately determined by productive relations, for in the actual experience of individuals these divisions vary and are affected by many other factors-biological, cultural, and political. One of the most important of them is human free will, the power of people to change the course of their own lives. It is important for women's studies to emphasize a dialectical sense of the interaction of historical forces and people's struggles against them. Feminism as a social movement calls attention to the integration of personal and social, cultural and economic, voluntary and involuntary factors in making history. Women's studies ought to be able to contribute that kind of total comprehension of society to an academic tradition weakened by an increasingly narrow focus and specialization, a pose of objectivity that denies the historicity of our world.

University of Massachusetts, Boston




a socialist view of women's studies: a reply to the editorial, volume 1, number 1

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