122 Book Reviews

WOMENINTHEFAMILYANDTHEE~ONOMY:ANINTERNATIONALC~MPARATIVESUR~EY. editedbyGeorgeKurianand Ratna Ghosh, 451 pages. Contributions in Family Studies, No. 5. Greenwood Press. Westport, Conn., 1981.

This book is a whirlwind trip around the world and through an array of specific topics concerning women and society. The 28 papers include several done in Canada and in the United States and studies done in socialist societies: East Gennaay, Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union (represented by interviews of Jewish emigrants from the USSR). There are also reports of research done in Venezuela, Barbados, Trinidad, Australia, Korea, India, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Israel, West Germany, and France.

Part I is titled ‘Women in the Family’, although it also includes papers on religion and education; Part II is about women in the economy. However, this is an arbitrary division, and there are studies of employed wives and mothers in both sections. In many of the studies responses were gathered from both women and rcn, and respondents varied in ethnicity, religion, class, education, occupation, and political ideology. Although a wide array of methodologies is represented, many of the studies are of attitudes toward women in the work force and in families.

One of the most interesting papers is by George Kurian and Miriam John, who assessed the attitudes of rural women in Christian, Hindu and Muslim communities in a village in Kerala State, India. Although religion influenced marriage rituals, it apparently made no difference with regard to dowry systems, aspiration toward children’s education and profession, and chddren’s decision-making.

Monica Boyd examined the reactions of French-Canadian and English-Canadian Gallup Poll respondents toward female professionals. married women in the work force, the mother role and male dominance in the family, equal opportunity of women and men, and attitude change due to liberation. Women in general were found to be more egalitarian than men. French-Canadians tended to be more egalitarian in attitudes toward women in the public sector, but more traditional in their attitudes toward working women and husband domlaance.

Exploring relationships between attitudes and behavior. Ludwig Geismar. Benedicte Caupin and Neil DeHaan compared France and the United States and found that, in spite of the more liberal and feminist attitudes of the Americans they studied, the action orientation of the American factory and clerical workers did not consistently differ from that of the French. They concluded that culture in general. and work situation in particular, mediate between attitudes and advocacy of social action.

When one considers the burgeoning scholarship of today, a few of the studies seem out of date. For example, some research is framed around the 1950s theories of Robert BLood and Donald Woife, and Talcott Parsons. Robert R. Bell’s paper on attitudes about marital sex among Negro women isiempirically dated.

In a useful overview of the book’s contents, Rataa Ghosh concludes that sex segregation in the work force is universal, that women who earn have more power in the home than those who don’t, and that employed women, even in socialist countries, carry a double work burden because of home responsibilities. Modermzatloa has unproved matters somewhat, but ifd &imination is to be lessened, there must be changes in attitudes and behaviour on the part of both men and women.

On the whole this is an interesting book. The sheer variety of comparative detail makes It a good resource for pondering what questions we should be asking about women in family and economy. Ratna Ghosh’s concluding bibliographic essay IS well written and includes the significant references. This book provides useful illustranve material for courses in women’s studies and the sociology and anthropology of the family.

At.lso~ C. TH~RNE

LA CONDITION FEMININE. edited by the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes. Editrons Sociales, Paris, 1978.

La Condition f6minine is a collection of writings produced by the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes This is 3 research center created and funded by the French Communist Party. All of the essays, with the exception of the one by Angela Davis, were written by members of the French’ Communist Party.

Within this text there is quite a diversity of approaches and analyses. The most conservative or ‘orthodox’ Marxist approach is taken by a leader of the CGT (France’s largest labour confederation), Jean-LouIs Moynot, in his essay ‘La&e de nauailfbninine dans la production et la sucih~ In this essay, which is the longest in the book, Moynot commits himself to several interesting propositions. Among them are: (1) in no case is the wife of a worker ‘exploited’ by her husband, that dominant and subordinate relations within the couple are not willed by the male worker but imposed by his boss; (2) that the lack of sexual equality in the Eastern European countries is due to (first) their level of development and (subsequently added) ‘the policy followed in this domain’; (3) the feminism of the 1960s was largely superstructural because it was cut off from class analysis.

Moynot’s essay does not go unchallenged. Of the twenty in the book, those written by Maurice Godelier, Madeleine Cohn, Georges Labica, and Solange Mercier-Josa are the most interesting to this writer. None of these writers content themselves with the facile and technical way of dismissing the possibility of a wife’s exploitation at the hands of a worker husband, with the facile and tautological way of dealing with sexism in Eastern Europe. or with the all too easy recourse to the base-superstructure metaphor which can become 3 ploy to avoId the msufficiency of one’s own analysis-.

Book Reviews 123

At the level of practice, CGT leader Colin’s essay is extremely interesting. She argues. against the men she has encountered who react negatively to women’s participation m struggles at the workplace, that it is only through such struggle that women can signal to men that they intend to share fully and at all levels of society in material benefits and powers of decision-making. It is also only through such struggle that women can develop as autonomous human beings. Men who react negatively to this, including proletarian men, are fully complicit in a structure of dominance and subordination which subjugates women and inhibits their development as full human beings. Unlike her fellow CGT leader Moynot, Colin is not about to waste time demonstrating to such male workers. whose consciousness is part of a patriarchal ideology which associates women with the particularism of the family, that their attitudes and behaviour do not amount to ‘exploitation’ as defined by Marx in Capital. There is a more pressing problem to be dealt with and some male workers are very much a pan of that problem.

That concern over the association of women with particularity is a theme that Solange MercierJosa hits hard. A philosopher with a particular interest in phenomenology. she traces that association from Aristotle, through Kant and Hegel, and into Marx and Engels. She faults the analyses of both of the latter for not overcoming this association in an adequate way because they do not examine the social relationships between men and women either at the level of social production or at the level of domestic labour and reproduction. Even Engels, who draws the analogy between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat at the level of social production and husband and wife within the family, never follows up on it analytically. Since there is no analysis of either exploitation or alienation from a sexual perspective, i.e. an analysis of social relations within the family and its relationship to the world of external productive social relations, the simple resolution of socializing domestic tasks does not rest upon an adequate theoretical foundation. It is a sledge-hammer approach-rather than one of conciliation or mediation-to a problem involving an intricate and not yet satisfactorily analyzed web of social relationships at the level of both the particular and the general. Is it certain, she asks, that sc&shxed child care will produce future generations with a sufficient sense of individuality? Will not the family continue to be an important economic umt in the consumption of goods and services available in the highly productive societies Marxists foresee? If one is not simply to beg these questions, is it not crucial to examine social relations within the family with the same kind of rigour that was applied by Marx to general productive relations? Indeed. can one be successful in investigating the latter without investigating the former and the interrelations between the two domains? Mercia-Josa responds implicitly to Moynot that the analyses of Marx and Engels remain as superficially compartmentalized as Mo_ynot’s portrayal of the feminism of the 1960s because they ignore ,structural relationships central to human production and reproduction.

L4 Condirion feminine demonstrates that, at least at the intellectual level, Marxists in the French Communist Party do not simply whistle uniform orthodox Marxist tunes. It is a work rich in ideas and diversity of approaches.

A. BELDEN FIELDS

THE HIDDEN FACE OF EVE: WOMEN IN THE ARAB WORLD by Nawal El Saadawi. 212 pages. Edited and translated by Sherif Hetata. Beacon Press, Boston. 1982. Price $8.25.

The translation of The Hidden Face ofEw into English could well be a milestone in international feminist studies. Its author, Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian doctor and novelist, is an outspoken advocate of women’s rights in the Arab world. Her non-fiction works include Women nndSex (she was sacked from her position as Egypt’s Director of Public health after the publication of this book). Men and Sex. Female is rhe Origin, and Women und Psvchologicul Corzzicr. The Hidden Face ofEue is her first book to be translated in English. Her books are banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Saadawi’s searing critique of the process of growing up ‘female’ in the Islamic Middle East is thus a rare document. She speaks in graphic detail of everything from the genital mutilation of girls to the inhuman marital and divorce laws adult women are subject to.

Saadawi’s account is an unusual blend of the personal. social, religious, and historical aspects of the exploitation of Arab (especially Egyptian) women. This is a part autobiographical, part medical (‘scientific’), part sociological treatise, and part literary text. Its particular impact on the reader is because of the interweaving of these various generic strands which evolve quite vividly the complex structures of patriarchal domination. Saadawi’s socialist feminist methodology can be traced back to Engel’s location of the ascendency of patriarchy (male domination) at the juncture of the rise of monogamy and the rise of private property. More importantly, for Saadawi, socialist feminism implies feminism in the context of larger national and international issues. Her quest for women‘s liberation is inextricably bound with her quest for a ‘free and just’ society. Thus, her call for a closer look at the different levels of exploitation Arab women are subjected to is simultaneously a call for a radical re-examination of an essentially ‘capitalist, patriarchical class society’ which derives its sustenance from economic, social and sexual hierarchies. She never loses sight of the ‘economics’ of women’s oppression, which she analyses in terms of male dominance. e.g. fathers and husbands, on the one hand. and the oppression of the State. e.g. marital laws, on the other. Hers is an analysis which. while scoffing at notions of ideal Arab ‘womanhood’, e.g. women are naturallyfimo (seductive) hence they are evil, have to be circumcized, covered up, etc.. carefully foregrounds the underlying economic and ideological Imperatives which necessitate such thinking.

The Hidden Face of Erie does not however focus exclusively on the Islamic Arab world. it is also a powerful