Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory. Haymarket Books, 2013. Pbk £19.98, US$28.
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RATING: 80
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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This is a welcome re-issue of a classic (first published 1983), with a good introduction by Susan Ferguson and David McNally, and a later essay by Vogel herself ('Domestic Labor revisited', 2000) included as an appendix. I don’t consider the latter here. There is an excellent summary of the overall argument, pp. 154-6, which you may wish to read first.
Vogel’s objective was to develop out of Marxism ‘a theoretical framework in which to situate the problem of women's oppression and women's liberation' (2). The book, as much an intervention in contemporary revolutionary politics as a critical analytical text, reflected the optimism of a different time: 'objectively speaking', she remarked as she turned to her own position, 'the concerns of socialists within the modern women's movement and of revolutionaries within the socialist movement have converged. The relationship of women's struggles to social transformation, a question that is simultaneously practical and theoretical, once again appears as a pressing matter on the revolutionary agenda' (141-2).
As might have seemed appropriate, the initial agenda was wide-ranging: 'What is the root of women's oppression? How can its cross-class and transhistorical character be understood theoretically? … What is the relationship of [the] sex-divisions of labour to women's oppression? Given women's child-bearing capacity, how is it possible for women to be truly equal? Should not the very notion of equality be discarded or transcended in order for women to be liberated? ... Are sex, race, and class parallel oppressions of an essentially similar kind? Does female oppression have its own theoretically specific character? What is the relationship of the fight against women's oppression to the struggle for national liberation and for socialism?' (7).
There was something absolutely right and something just as wrong in the way the book set out and took up this agenda – and the two are equally instructive. What was absolutely right is Vogel’s analytical starting point: addressing 'the materialist foundations that underpin the oppression of women', she argues that 'Marxist efforts to address the problem of women's liberation have been haunted by a hidden debate between two perspectives, only one of which situates the problem within the framework of Marx's analysis of the processes of overall social reproduction' (8). This gives the text enduring value: the family is not the starting point, but rather the 'special character of women's oppression in capitalist social reproduction' must be understood before it becomes possible to analyse families in capitalist societies (9). What was wrong, though, is the idea that such an approach can throw light on the ‘cross-class and transhistorical character of women’s oppression’. The idea of ‘the special character of women’s oppression in capitalist social reproduction’ and the aspiration towards a cross-class transhistorical theory are incompatible, as is starkly revealed towards the end of the book.
Vogel’s own perspective, developed in the last two chapters, is preceded by a substantial critical review of socialist-feminist literature, the work of Marx and Engels, and later nineteenth century debates. This is very useful, but it means that the material reviewed follows a rather dissatisfying trajectory, as it peaks with a short chapter on Marx's mature work, then devotes a good chunk of the book (77-129) to work that took the debate in an unhelpful direction, although it is important and was enormously influential - Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Bebel's Women and Socialism (50 editions between 1879 and 1910), with its notable observation that 'the small private kitchen is, just like the workshop of the small master mechanic, a transition stage, an arrangement by which time, power and material are senselessly squandered and wasted' (Bebel, 1971: 338-9, cited p. 104), the pamphlet The Woman Question published by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling in 1886, a speech made by Clara Zetkin to the annual SPD conference in 1896, and various interventions from Lenin over the years, mostly as collected by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in The Emancipation of Women (1933) a decade after his death. Lenin's point of view was characteristically trenchant:
'The female half of the human race is doubly oppressed under capitalism. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly - and this is the main thing - they remain in "household bondage", they continue to be "household slaves", for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid and backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the individual family household' (Editorial, Pravda, 8 March 1921, cited p. 126).
These latter contributions reveal consistently 'progressive' attitudes, but relatively little theoretical development, and I do not consider them further. With Vogel, I 'abandon the idea that the so-called woman-question represents an adequate category of analysis' (142), and follow the path from socialist feminism in its classic period back to the Marx of Capital, Volume 1.
Vogel's critical review of socialist-feminist literature begins with Juliet Mitchell's New Left Review article published exactly fifty years ago (Mitchell, 1966), and proceeds through the contributions of Margaret Benston (1969) and Peggy Morton (1971), who together 'established the material character of women's unpaid domestic work in the family-household' (19) to Mariarosa Dalla Costa (1972), the domestic labour debate, and the subsequent turn to 'patriarchy', concluding with critiques from Veronica Beechey (1979) and Iris Young (1980). These are still essential readings, along with a number of other studies added below, and Vogel's sure-footed critical commentary (22-25, 31-39) still provides an excellent introduction to them. Her emphasis falls on the maintenance and reproduction of labour power in the context of social reproduction as a whole, the relationship between the capitalist wage and the household it supports, and the double relation of women in capitalist society to wage-labour, as both paid and unpaid workers.
This leads Vogel to a re-examination of classic Marxist texts, focused on 'the reproduction of labour-power and the process of social reproduction', and following the development of a small set of concepts: individual consumption, the value of labour-power, the determination of wage-levels, surplus population, and the industrial reserve army (39). Her method, for the most part, is to look for and analyse ‘important material’ on 'women's situation, on the family, on divisions of labour according to sex and age, and on the reproduction of the working class' (62). The last of these categories yields the most benefits, and Vogel draws effectively on the vitally important Chapter 23 of Capital, Volume 1, on ‘Simple Reproduction’, to focus on 'the production and reproduction of the capitalist's most indispensable means of production: the worker' (Marx, 1976: 718). She concludes that 'despite its generally schematic and unfinished character', this body of work 'provides the foundation for a theory of the relationship of women and the family to social reproduction in general and the capitalist mode of production in particular' (72-3).
Following the lengthy review of other material noted above, Vogel then develops her own position on the basis of the contrast between 'two distinct views of women's situation, corresponding to divergent theoretical positions' - the 'dual-systems' and 'social reproduction’ perspectives. For the first, 'women's oppression derives from their situation within an autonomous system of sex-divisions of labour and male supremacy'; for the second, it 'has its roots in women's differential location in social reproduction as a whole' (134). This perspective counter-poses patriarchy and capitalism as explanatory concepts, and follows her initial insistence that one must not start analytically with the family, but with 'class struggle over the conditions of production' and 'women's differential position with respect to generational replacement-processes', within which families figure as 'the historically specific social form through which generational replacement usually takes place' (135). She begins, therefore, with 'a theoretical problem of fundamental significance: the reproduction of labour-power in the context of overall social reproduction', and seeks to identify the material foundations of 'women's oppression' within it (142). She then reconstructs Marx's analysis of the problem of the reproduction of labour power through the concept of individual consumption, and explores the reproduction of labour power in a class (capitalist) society, recognising that in any given class-society, the circumstances and outcome of the processes of reproduction of labour power are essentially indeterminate or contingent' (149). 'Of the three aspects of necessary labour - maintenance of direct producers, maintenance of non-labouring members of the subordinate class, and generational replacement processes - only the last requires, in an absolute sense, that there be a sex-division of labour of at least a minimal kind. If children are to be born, it is women who will carry and deliver them' (150). So while women may also be direct producers, 'it is their differential role in the reproduction of labour-power that lies at the root of their oppression in class-society' (150). Here she draws on Paddy Quick (1977), on the consequences of childbearing for activity as direct producers, and the contradiction it involves for capital (as a trade-off between the production of future generations, and immediate availability as workers). As Vogel argues, 'Generally, women have greater responsibility for the ongoing tasks associated with necessary labour, and especially for work connected with children. Men, correspondingly, often have greater responsibility for the provision of material means of subsistence, a responsibility that is ordinarily accompanied by their disproportionately greater involvement in the performance of surplus-labour' (152). But 'it is not accurate to say that there is some universal domestic sphere separate from the world of public production', rather the domestic sphere is produced by capitalism (152). So
'It is the provision by men of means of subsistence to women during the child-bearing period, and not the sex-division of labour in itself, that forms the material basis for women's subordination in class-society. ... The social significance of divisions of labour and of individual differences is constructed in the context of the actual society in which they are embedded. In class-societies, women's child-bearing capacity creates contradictions from the point of view of the dominant class's need to appropriate surplus-labour. The oppression of women in the exploited class develops in the process of the class-struggle over the resolution of these constructions' (153).
All of this leads to an excellent summary, already noted, running across pages 154-6. Vogel then turns to 'women's oppression in the context of capitalist social reproduction' (157), focusing on the emergent distinction between waged and domestic labour and arguing that as accumulation proceeds, 'the opposition between wage-labour and domestic labour sharpens' (159), giving rise to an ideology of separate spheres. At the same time, the introduction of machinery, technological developments, the reduction of domestic labour by the socialization of tasks, and the general process of commodification constantly modify the relationship between waged and domestic labour, while 'an ultimate barrier to the socialisation of domestic labour is constituted by biology'. So 'while domestic labour might conceivably be reduced to a minimum through the socialisation of most of its tasks, the basic physiological process of child-bearing will continue to be the province of women'. Over the long term however, within this constraint, 'the capitalist class seeks to stabilise the reproduction of labour-power at a low cost and with a minimum of domestic labour' (163 and ft. 7), and this important argument is developed at some length (165-8).
At this point, though, the analysis falls apart. Vogel has conspicuously not addressed the cross-class and transhistorical character of women’s oppression, but pursued her analysis strictly in the context of capitalist society. Reflecting the fact that such issues cannot be addressed within her adopted framework, she stops dead in her tracks, and switches quite unexpectedly to a liberal framework focused on democratic societies and democratic rights in order to cover all social classes, before lurching in the opposite direction to address in conclusion the 'proper management of domestic labour and women's work during the transition to communism' (182).
This is an important text, and it still makes one of the best starting points for an analysis of ‘overall social reproduction’. This makes it essential to try to figure out where it went wrong, and I do so in relation to two earlier points where Vogel distances herself from a classical Marxist approach, the embrace of liberal rights theory being a third.
The first point is Vogel’s response to the materialist foundation of the work of Marx and Engels, which she associates with Engels 'at his theoretical weakest' (34):
'According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of material life. But this itself is again of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the implements required for this; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and a definite country live are determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one hand, and of family on the other' (Engels, 1990, 131-2; Vogel uses an edition with slightly different wording, but I cite this one because of its ready availability).
Vogel argues that although this passage 'seems to situate the problem of women's oppression in the context of the theory of general social reproduction' (33), it is defective, primarily because of its dualist approach (and she elaborates further on the same point, 136-7). So, generally, she argues that
'Socialist-feminist theory has not yet overcome its tendency to analyse women's oppression in dualistic terms as a phenomenon that is independent of class, race, and mode of production. Nor has socialist-feminist theory moved far enough away from its over-emphasis on women's position within the family, and within ideological and psychological relations. The links, that is, between women's oppression, social production, and overall social reproduction have yet to be established on a materialist basis. Most important, socialist-feminist theory has not yet been able to develop the theoretical underpinning for its strategic commitment to uniting women across such differences as class, race, age, and sexual orientation' (34).
But to say that the production and reproduction of immediate life is of a twofold character is not to fall into a dualism. It is to say that there are distinguishable aspects to a single totality. Not only that, but Vogel makes exactly the same point when she distinguishes between 'class struggle over the conditions of production' and 'women's differential position with respect to generational replacement-processes', or when she argues that generational reproduction processes have a different character to the two other aspects of ‘necessary labour’ she identifies – the maintenance of direct producers, and of non-labouring members of the subordinate class. At the same time, the materialist framework developed by Marx and Engels is unitary, but it quite rightly does not intend to analyse women’s oppression either universally or across class, and it cannot share the socialist (?)-feminist ‘strategic commitment’ to uniting women across class.
The second, larger point concerns the allegation of ‘naturalism’:
'Marx and Engels were not ... capable of demystifying bourgeois notions regarding the natural status of historical divisions of labour according to sex and age, much less of replacing them with more appropriate concepts. Indeed, in this area, they come perilously close to a position that holds biology to be destiny. A quite damaging spectre of the 'natural' haunts their work, from the earliest writings to the most mature. It stamps their concept of a wage-minimum by assuming the obviousness of the division between mere physical subsistence and some more socially determined standard of living that might, for example, include generational reproduction or a family-household. It obscures their understanding of relationships within the working-class household, particularly where the wife is also a wage-labourer. And it undercuts their investigations of historical development by tying it to an unquestioned assumption of a natural division of labour between the sexes, originating in the biology of the sexual act' (65).
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. As we have seen, Vogel herself argued that 'an ultimate barrier to the socialisation of domestic labour is constituted by biology' (163), and further reflection prompts the conclusion that she, rather than Marx and Engels, embraces a form of naturalism. Marx did say that while the ‘the maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital’, ‘the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker's drives for self-preservation and propagation’ (Capital, I, 718), and Ferguson and McNally take him to task for this in their introduction (xxvii). But this is not to be taken as reflecting a latent theory of human nature. It simply registered an empirical fact in the period, and one that relates to the more extended discussion in Chapter Ten, on the working day, which argues that while capital as a whole in principle has an interest in the production of future generations of workers, experience generally shows the capitalist ‘a constant excess of population’, with the result that ‘Capital ... takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so’ (ibid, 381). In other words, it is a statement about the general and conjunctural logic of capital, not about human nature. Although it does point to a fundamental contradiction, it does not suggest that this specific response is good for all time.
Again, Marx does not say much about biology, let alone speculate about the possible impact of subsequent technological innovation on sexual reproduction. But his general position, laid out in Capital, Chapter Fifteen, that the principle of modern industry, ‘is to view each process of production in and for itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes’, applies equally to the male and female reproductive apparatus, and anticipates in principle the new reproductive technologies which were developing rapidly when Vogel wrote, and which ‘have qualitatively changed the biological conditions of reproduction by entirely separating procreation from heterosexuality’ (Gimenez, 1991, 343). If anything, it is Vogel rather than Marx who endorses naturalism here. The lesson is a broader one - that the method of exploring what Marx and Engels had to say on 'women's situation, on the family, on divisions of labour according to sex and age, and on the reproduction of the working class' is not enough. Rather, the issue of women's oppression, insofar as it can be addressed from a Marxist perspective, must be set in the context of the totality of the theory, and particularly with as great a focus on the forces behind and the consequences of the constant revolution in production as on 'social reproduction' however broadly framed.
References (items particularly recommended are marked with an asterisk)
*Armstrong, Pat, and Hugh Armstrong (1983) ‘Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism’, Studies in Political Economy, 10, 7-43.
Beechey, Veronica (1979), 'On Patriarchy', Feminist Review, 3, 66-82.
*Benston, Margaret (1969), 'The Political Economy of Women's Liberation', Monthly Review, 21, 4, 13-27.
*Dalla Costa, Mariarosa (1972), 'Women and the Subversion of the Community', in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Falling Wall Press, Bristol.
Engels, Friedrich (1990), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 26, Engels: 1882-1889, Lawrence & Wishart, London, pp. 129-276.
*Gimenez, Martha (1991) ‘The Mode of Reproduction in Transition: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Effects of Reproductive Technologies’, Gender & Society, 5, 3, 334-50.
*Gimenez, Martha (1997), The Oppression of Women: A Structuralist Marxist View’, in Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds, Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 71-82.
*Holmstrom, Nancy (1981) '"Women's Work," the Family and Capitalism', Science & Society, 45, 2, 186-211.
*Holmstrom, Nancy (1984), 'A Marxist Theory of Women's Nature', Ethics, 94, 3, 456-473.
*Laslett, Barbara and Joanna Brenner (1989) ‘Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives’, Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 381-404.
Marx, Karl (1976), Capital, Volume 1, Penguin/New Left Review, London.
Mitchell, Juliet (1966), Women: the Longest Revolution', New Left Review, 40, November-December, 11-37.
*Molyneux, Maxine (1979), 'Beyond the Domestic Labour Dispute', New Left Review, 116, July-August, 3-27.
*Morton, Peggy (1971), 'A Woman's Work Is Never Done, or: The Production, Maintenance and Reproduction of Labour Power', in Edith Altbach, ed, From Feminism to Liberation, Schenkman, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 211-27.
*Quick, Paddy (1977), 'The Class Nature of Women's Oppression', Review of Radical Political Economics, 9, 3, 42-53.
*Young, Iris (1980), 'Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory', Socialist Review, 50-51, 169-88.
Vogel’s objective was to develop out of Marxism ‘a theoretical framework in which to situate the problem of women's oppression and women's liberation' (2). The book, as much an intervention in contemporary revolutionary politics as a critical analytical text, reflected the optimism of a different time: 'objectively speaking', she remarked as she turned to her own position, 'the concerns of socialists within the modern women's movement and of revolutionaries within the socialist movement have converged. The relationship of women's struggles to social transformation, a question that is simultaneously practical and theoretical, once again appears as a pressing matter on the revolutionary agenda' (141-2).
As might have seemed appropriate, the initial agenda was wide-ranging: 'What is the root of women's oppression? How can its cross-class and transhistorical character be understood theoretically? … What is the relationship of [the] sex-divisions of labour to women's oppression? Given women's child-bearing capacity, how is it possible for women to be truly equal? Should not the very notion of equality be discarded or transcended in order for women to be liberated? ... Are sex, race, and class parallel oppressions of an essentially similar kind? Does female oppression have its own theoretically specific character? What is the relationship of the fight against women's oppression to the struggle for national liberation and for socialism?' (7).
There was something absolutely right and something just as wrong in the way the book set out and took up this agenda – and the two are equally instructive. What was absolutely right is Vogel’s analytical starting point: addressing 'the materialist foundations that underpin the oppression of women', she argues that 'Marxist efforts to address the problem of women's liberation have been haunted by a hidden debate between two perspectives, only one of which situates the problem within the framework of Marx's analysis of the processes of overall social reproduction' (8). This gives the text enduring value: the family is not the starting point, but rather the 'special character of women's oppression in capitalist social reproduction' must be understood before it becomes possible to analyse families in capitalist societies (9). What was wrong, though, is the idea that such an approach can throw light on the ‘cross-class and transhistorical character of women’s oppression’. The idea of ‘the special character of women’s oppression in capitalist social reproduction’ and the aspiration towards a cross-class transhistorical theory are incompatible, as is starkly revealed towards the end of the book.
Vogel’s own perspective, developed in the last two chapters, is preceded by a substantial critical review of socialist-feminist literature, the work of Marx and Engels, and later nineteenth century debates. This is very useful, but it means that the material reviewed follows a rather dissatisfying trajectory, as it peaks with a short chapter on Marx's mature work, then devotes a good chunk of the book (77-129) to work that took the debate in an unhelpful direction, although it is important and was enormously influential - Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Bebel's Women and Socialism (50 editions between 1879 and 1910), with its notable observation that 'the small private kitchen is, just like the workshop of the small master mechanic, a transition stage, an arrangement by which time, power and material are senselessly squandered and wasted' (Bebel, 1971: 338-9, cited p. 104), the pamphlet The Woman Question published by Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling in 1886, a speech made by Clara Zetkin to the annual SPD conference in 1896, and various interventions from Lenin over the years, mostly as collected by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in The Emancipation of Women (1933) a decade after his death. Lenin's point of view was characteristically trenchant:
'The female half of the human race is doubly oppressed under capitalism. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly - and this is the main thing - they remain in "household bondage", they continue to be "household slaves", for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid and backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the individual family household' (Editorial, Pravda, 8 March 1921, cited p. 126).
These latter contributions reveal consistently 'progressive' attitudes, but relatively little theoretical development, and I do not consider them further. With Vogel, I 'abandon the idea that the so-called woman-question represents an adequate category of analysis' (142), and follow the path from socialist feminism in its classic period back to the Marx of Capital, Volume 1.
Vogel's critical review of socialist-feminist literature begins with Juliet Mitchell's New Left Review article published exactly fifty years ago (Mitchell, 1966), and proceeds through the contributions of Margaret Benston (1969) and Peggy Morton (1971), who together 'established the material character of women's unpaid domestic work in the family-household' (19) to Mariarosa Dalla Costa (1972), the domestic labour debate, and the subsequent turn to 'patriarchy', concluding with critiques from Veronica Beechey (1979) and Iris Young (1980). These are still essential readings, along with a number of other studies added below, and Vogel's sure-footed critical commentary (22-25, 31-39) still provides an excellent introduction to them. Her emphasis falls on the maintenance and reproduction of labour power in the context of social reproduction as a whole, the relationship between the capitalist wage and the household it supports, and the double relation of women in capitalist society to wage-labour, as both paid and unpaid workers.
This leads Vogel to a re-examination of classic Marxist texts, focused on 'the reproduction of labour-power and the process of social reproduction', and following the development of a small set of concepts: individual consumption, the value of labour-power, the determination of wage-levels, surplus population, and the industrial reserve army (39). Her method, for the most part, is to look for and analyse ‘important material’ on 'women's situation, on the family, on divisions of labour according to sex and age, and on the reproduction of the working class' (62). The last of these categories yields the most benefits, and Vogel draws effectively on the vitally important Chapter 23 of Capital, Volume 1, on ‘Simple Reproduction’, to focus on 'the production and reproduction of the capitalist's most indispensable means of production: the worker' (Marx, 1976: 718). She concludes that 'despite its generally schematic and unfinished character', this body of work 'provides the foundation for a theory of the relationship of women and the family to social reproduction in general and the capitalist mode of production in particular' (72-3).
Following the lengthy review of other material noted above, Vogel then develops her own position on the basis of the contrast between 'two distinct views of women's situation, corresponding to divergent theoretical positions' - the 'dual-systems' and 'social reproduction’ perspectives. For the first, 'women's oppression derives from their situation within an autonomous system of sex-divisions of labour and male supremacy'; for the second, it 'has its roots in women's differential location in social reproduction as a whole' (134). This perspective counter-poses patriarchy and capitalism as explanatory concepts, and follows her initial insistence that one must not start analytically with the family, but with 'class struggle over the conditions of production' and 'women's differential position with respect to generational replacement-processes', within which families figure as 'the historically specific social form through which generational replacement usually takes place' (135). She begins, therefore, with 'a theoretical problem of fundamental significance: the reproduction of labour-power in the context of overall social reproduction', and seeks to identify the material foundations of 'women's oppression' within it (142). She then reconstructs Marx's analysis of the problem of the reproduction of labour power through the concept of individual consumption, and explores the reproduction of labour power in a class (capitalist) society, recognising that in any given class-society, the circumstances and outcome of the processes of reproduction of labour power are essentially indeterminate or contingent' (149). 'Of the three aspects of necessary labour - maintenance of direct producers, maintenance of non-labouring members of the subordinate class, and generational replacement processes - only the last requires, in an absolute sense, that there be a sex-division of labour of at least a minimal kind. If children are to be born, it is women who will carry and deliver them' (150). So while women may also be direct producers, 'it is their differential role in the reproduction of labour-power that lies at the root of their oppression in class-society' (150). Here she draws on Paddy Quick (1977), on the consequences of childbearing for activity as direct producers, and the contradiction it involves for capital (as a trade-off between the production of future generations, and immediate availability as workers). As Vogel argues, 'Generally, women have greater responsibility for the ongoing tasks associated with necessary labour, and especially for work connected with children. Men, correspondingly, often have greater responsibility for the provision of material means of subsistence, a responsibility that is ordinarily accompanied by their disproportionately greater involvement in the performance of surplus-labour' (152). But 'it is not accurate to say that there is some universal domestic sphere separate from the world of public production', rather the domestic sphere is produced by capitalism (152). So
'It is the provision by men of means of subsistence to women during the child-bearing period, and not the sex-division of labour in itself, that forms the material basis for women's subordination in class-society. ... The social significance of divisions of labour and of individual differences is constructed in the context of the actual society in which they are embedded. In class-societies, women's child-bearing capacity creates contradictions from the point of view of the dominant class's need to appropriate surplus-labour. The oppression of women in the exploited class develops in the process of the class-struggle over the resolution of these constructions' (153).
All of this leads to an excellent summary, already noted, running across pages 154-6. Vogel then turns to 'women's oppression in the context of capitalist social reproduction' (157), focusing on the emergent distinction between waged and domestic labour and arguing that as accumulation proceeds, 'the opposition between wage-labour and domestic labour sharpens' (159), giving rise to an ideology of separate spheres. At the same time, the introduction of machinery, technological developments, the reduction of domestic labour by the socialization of tasks, and the general process of commodification constantly modify the relationship between waged and domestic labour, while 'an ultimate barrier to the socialisation of domestic labour is constituted by biology'. So 'while domestic labour might conceivably be reduced to a minimum through the socialisation of most of its tasks, the basic physiological process of child-bearing will continue to be the province of women'. Over the long term however, within this constraint, 'the capitalist class seeks to stabilise the reproduction of labour-power at a low cost and with a minimum of domestic labour' (163 and ft. 7), and this important argument is developed at some length (165-8).
At this point, though, the analysis falls apart. Vogel has conspicuously not addressed the cross-class and transhistorical character of women’s oppression, but pursued her analysis strictly in the context of capitalist society. Reflecting the fact that such issues cannot be addressed within her adopted framework, she stops dead in her tracks, and switches quite unexpectedly to a liberal framework focused on democratic societies and democratic rights in order to cover all social classes, before lurching in the opposite direction to address in conclusion the 'proper management of domestic labour and women's work during the transition to communism' (182).
This is an important text, and it still makes one of the best starting points for an analysis of ‘overall social reproduction’. This makes it essential to try to figure out where it went wrong, and I do so in relation to two earlier points where Vogel distances herself from a classical Marxist approach, the embrace of liberal rights theory being a third.
The first point is Vogel’s response to the materialist foundation of the work of Marx and Engels, which she associates with Engels 'at his theoretical weakest' (34):
'According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of material life. But this itself is again of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the implements required for this; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and a definite country live are determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one hand, and of family on the other' (Engels, 1990, 131-2; Vogel uses an edition with slightly different wording, but I cite this one because of its ready availability).
Vogel argues that although this passage 'seems to situate the problem of women's oppression in the context of the theory of general social reproduction' (33), it is defective, primarily because of its dualist approach (and she elaborates further on the same point, 136-7). So, generally, she argues that
'Socialist-feminist theory has not yet overcome its tendency to analyse women's oppression in dualistic terms as a phenomenon that is independent of class, race, and mode of production. Nor has socialist-feminist theory moved far enough away from its over-emphasis on women's position within the family, and within ideological and psychological relations. The links, that is, between women's oppression, social production, and overall social reproduction have yet to be established on a materialist basis. Most important, socialist-feminist theory has not yet been able to develop the theoretical underpinning for its strategic commitment to uniting women across such differences as class, race, age, and sexual orientation' (34).
But to say that the production and reproduction of immediate life is of a twofold character is not to fall into a dualism. It is to say that there are distinguishable aspects to a single totality. Not only that, but Vogel makes exactly the same point when she distinguishes between 'class struggle over the conditions of production' and 'women's differential position with respect to generational replacement-processes', or when she argues that generational reproduction processes have a different character to the two other aspects of ‘necessary labour’ she identifies – the maintenance of direct producers, and of non-labouring members of the subordinate class. At the same time, the materialist framework developed by Marx and Engels is unitary, but it quite rightly does not intend to analyse women’s oppression either universally or across class, and it cannot share the socialist (?)-feminist ‘strategic commitment’ to uniting women across class.
The second, larger point concerns the allegation of ‘naturalism’:
'Marx and Engels were not ... capable of demystifying bourgeois notions regarding the natural status of historical divisions of labour according to sex and age, much less of replacing them with more appropriate concepts. Indeed, in this area, they come perilously close to a position that holds biology to be destiny. A quite damaging spectre of the 'natural' haunts their work, from the earliest writings to the most mature. It stamps their concept of a wage-minimum by assuming the obviousness of the division between mere physical subsistence and some more socially determined standard of living that might, for example, include generational reproduction or a family-household. It obscures their understanding of relationships within the working-class household, particularly where the wife is also a wage-labourer. And it undercuts their investigations of historical development by tying it to an unquestioned assumption of a natural division of labour between the sexes, originating in the biology of the sexual act' (65).
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. As we have seen, Vogel herself argued that 'an ultimate barrier to the socialisation of domestic labour is constituted by biology' (163), and further reflection prompts the conclusion that she, rather than Marx and Engels, embraces a form of naturalism. Marx did say that while the ‘the maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital’, ‘the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker's drives for self-preservation and propagation’ (Capital, I, 718), and Ferguson and McNally take him to task for this in their introduction (xxvii). But this is not to be taken as reflecting a latent theory of human nature. It simply registered an empirical fact in the period, and one that relates to the more extended discussion in Chapter Ten, on the working day, which argues that while capital as a whole in principle has an interest in the production of future generations of workers, experience generally shows the capitalist ‘a constant excess of population’, with the result that ‘Capital ... takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so’ (ibid, 381). In other words, it is a statement about the general and conjunctural logic of capital, not about human nature. Although it does point to a fundamental contradiction, it does not suggest that this specific response is good for all time.
Again, Marx does not say much about biology, let alone speculate about the possible impact of subsequent technological innovation on sexual reproduction. But his general position, laid out in Capital, Chapter Fifteen, that the principle of modern industry, ‘is to view each process of production in and for itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes’, applies equally to the male and female reproductive apparatus, and anticipates in principle the new reproductive technologies which were developing rapidly when Vogel wrote, and which ‘have qualitatively changed the biological conditions of reproduction by entirely separating procreation from heterosexuality’ (Gimenez, 1991, 343). If anything, it is Vogel rather than Marx who endorses naturalism here. The lesson is a broader one - that the method of exploring what Marx and Engels had to say on 'women's situation, on the family, on divisions of labour according to sex and age, and on the reproduction of the working class' is not enough. Rather, the issue of women's oppression, insofar as it can be addressed from a Marxist perspective, must be set in the context of the totality of the theory, and particularly with as great a focus on the forces behind and the consequences of the constant revolution in production as on 'social reproduction' however broadly framed.
References (items particularly recommended are marked with an asterisk)
*Armstrong, Pat, and Hugh Armstrong (1983) ‘Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism’, Studies in Political Economy, 10, 7-43.
Beechey, Veronica (1979), 'On Patriarchy', Feminist Review, 3, 66-82.
*Benston, Margaret (1969), 'The Political Economy of Women's Liberation', Monthly Review, 21, 4, 13-27.
*Dalla Costa, Mariarosa (1972), 'Women and the Subversion of the Community', in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Falling Wall Press, Bristol.
Engels, Friedrich (1990), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 26, Engels: 1882-1889, Lawrence & Wishart, London, pp. 129-276.
*Gimenez, Martha (1991) ‘The Mode of Reproduction in Transition: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Effects of Reproductive Technologies’, Gender & Society, 5, 3, 334-50.
*Gimenez, Martha (1997), The Oppression of Women: A Structuralist Marxist View’, in Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds, Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 71-82.
*Holmstrom, Nancy (1981) '"Women's Work," the Family and Capitalism', Science & Society, 45, 2, 186-211.
*Holmstrom, Nancy (1984), 'A Marxist Theory of Women's Nature', Ethics, 94, 3, 456-473.
*Laslett, Barbara and Joanna Brenner (1989) ‘Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives’, Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 381-404.
Marx, Karl (1976), Capital, Volume 1, Penguin/New Left Review, London.
Mitchell, Juliet (1966), Women: the Longest Revolution', New Left Review, 40, November-December, 11-37.
*Molyneux, Maxine (1979), 'Beyond the Domestic Labour Dispute', New Left Review, 116, July-August, 3-27.
*Morton, Peggy (1971), 'A Woman's Work Is Never Done, or: The Production, Maintenance and Reproduction of Labour Power', in Edith Altbach, ed, From Feminism to Liberation, Schenkman, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 211-27.
*Quick, Paddy (1977), 'The Class Nature of Women's Oppression', Review of Radical Political Economics, 9, 3, 42-53.
*Young, Iris (1980), 'Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory', Socialist Review, 50-51, 169-88.