Michèle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist Feminist Encounter. Verso Books, (1980) 2014.
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This classic text, first published in 1980 as Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis, was re-issued in 2014 with a preface by Kathi Weeks, and two other contributions from Barrett herself: the introduction to the 1988 edition (then as now renamed Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter), and a new Afterword. The original text itself is reproduced verbatim, with identical pagination. Its forensic examination of the attempt to bring Marxist and feminist approaches together remains unsurpassed, both in its scope and in its acuity, and its conclusions and implications as relevant (and perhaps more so) today. Barrett has taken some distance from the text, both in 1988 and in 2014. But except for the misprint on page 203, I would not change a word. The original text has a power and coherence that make it a classic.
Barrett's starting point is sympathetic but critical: 'In recent years attempts have been made to develop a theoretical perspective that might confidently be termed "Marxist feminist", yet the work so generated remains fragmentary and contradictory, lacking a conceptual framework adequate to its project' (8). She puts the obvious issue squarely, and the book unfolds from there:
'Marxism, constituted as it is around relations of appropriation and exploitation, is grounded in concepts that do not and could not address directly the gender of the exploiters and those whose labour is appropriated. A Marxist analysis of capitalism is therefore conceived around a primary contradiction between labour and capital and operates with categories that, as has recently been argued, can be termed "sex-blind" [reference is to Hartmann, 1979]. Feminism, however, points in a different direction, emphasizing precisely the relations of gender - largely speaking, of the oppression of women by men - that Marxism has tended to pass over in silence' (ibid).
It falls to Marxist feminism, then, 'to explore the relations between the organization of sexuality, domestic production, the household and so on, and historical changes in the mode of production and systems of appropriation and exploitation (9)'. This formulation may strike you at first as fairly bland, but in fact it is crucially important, simply because it focuses on the central aspects of historical materialism - the mode of production (capitalist, in this case) and systems of appropriation and exploitation - without assuming in advance a fixed relationship at any time or over time with any of the different aspects of women's identity, activity and experience.
Barrett first reviews the concepts of patriarchy (10-19), reproduction (19-29), and ideology (29-41). On patriarchy, she notes and regrets the shift from Weber's usage ('a particular form of household organization in which the father dominated other members of an extended kinship network and controlled the economic production of the household', 10), shared for example by Gayle Rubin (1975), in a classic text, to its use by some contemporary feminists to denote 'an over-arching category of male dominance' as an 'apparently universal and trans-historical category' (11, 12); she is particularly critical of the naturalism and biological reductionism implicit in the latter approach, especially when men's control over women's fertility is given explanatory prominence. Her diagnosis of a fundamental confusion between 'patriarchy as the rule of the father and patriarchy as the domination of women by men' (16), and her conclusion that the term 'presents insuperable difficulties to an analysis that attempts to relate women's oppression to the relations of production of capitalism' are convincingly argued. On reproduction too she pinpoints 'a rather crude juxtaposition and conflation of two very different processes - the biological reproduction of the species and the need of any social formation to reproduce its own conditions of production' (19-20), suggesting that even the discrimination by Edholm, Harris and Young (1977) between social reproduction, reproduction of the labour force and human or biological reproduction does not resolve the issue of their relationship to production, or remove the danger of lapsing into functionalism. She challenges the reductionist assumptions that the sexual division of labour at any time reflects the requirements of capital, or that the latter might relate to specific forms of male dominance (24). Addressing what has become known as the 'family wage', for example, she remarks that it is unclear 'why it should be in the interests of capital generally to pay women wages that require the payment of a larger wage to their husbands to enable them to support their wives', although it might be in the interest of an individual capitalist to do so. Here and elsewhere, she looks beyond the widespread assertion of a functional relationship to pinpoint underlying contradictions. 'Attempts to combine an analysis of social reproduction with an analysis of patriarchal human reproduction', she concludes, 'represent the fundamental problem Marxist feminism faces. The concept of social reproduction, as so far elaborated, is so closely tied to an account of class relations at the root of capitalist production that it cannot, by fiat, be rendered compatible with a serious consideration of male dominance' (29). On ideology, she takes up 'the exploration of familial relations and the development of masculine and feminine subjectivity, and the analysis of representations of gender difference in cultural production' (31) in a discussion that draws critically on Althusser's conception of ideology as a practice of imagining one's relationship to one's real conditions of existence. Proceeding largely by way of a much stronger critique of the anti-materialist bent of Coward (1977), though, she argues for a continued effort to explain 'determinate relationships in the real world', rather than to lapse into idealism. The chapter concludes with a summary of the analytical agenda for the rest of the book:
'The substantive material to be dealt with reflects the questions to which the women's liberation movement has paid attention. The oppression of women under capitalism is grounded in a set of relations between several elements. Of these perhaps the most crucial are the economic organization of households and its accompanying familial ideology, the division of labour and relations of production, the educational system and the operations of the state. Yet the continuance and the entrenched nature of this oppression cannot be understood without a consideration of the cultural processes in which men and women are represented differently - created and recreated as gendered human subjects. Nor can it be understood without an analysis of sexuality and gender identity, and the complex question of the relationship between sexuality and biological reproduction as it affects both women and men' (40-41).
From this point, successive chapters address femininity, masculinity, and sexual practice; ideology and the cultural production of gender; gender and class in the educational system; gender and the division of labour; women's oppression and the 'family'; and feminism and the politics of the state. The book then concludes with a summary review of capitalism and women's liberation. Barrett's procedure is to review the literature (widely, clearly, insightfully and with discrimination and occasional dry humour: I particularly liked footnote 9, p.120), and to question large generalizations, proposed invariant relationships relating to the logic or requirements of capitalism, and claims that Marxism explains everything. She invariably resists any line of argument that imposes any single logic, or fails to investigate specific circumstances and particular trajectories, or to consider 'contradiction, conflict and political struggle' (94). As a result, a wide range of received positions and widely shared assumptions come under scrutiny. So she questions the idea that there is a "functional" fit between industrial capitalism, with its need of a free, mobile labour force, and the nuclear family', 'since we can conceive of ways in which capitalist social formations might - and do - reproduce themselves without a nuclear family system' (49). Similarly, 'although domestic labour is vital to the present form in which labour power is reproduced, this need not necessarily be the case' (99). This historical approach to the question of gender and class leads to the following comment on the introduction of protective legislation on women's working conditions in the mid-nineteenth century [primarily in the Factory Acts that limited women's hours of work], which she sees as 'a material defeat of the interests of working women', but 'a defeat that is not simply explicable in terms of a proposed logic of capitalist development':
'It involved an assumption, shared by the labour movement among others, that the relegation of women to domesticity and childcare was natural and desirable. In this respect the eventual outcome was a product of gender division that was incorporated into the capitalist division of labour rather than spontaneously generated by it. If this argument is correct, it would suggest that although we may usefully argue that gender division has been built into the capitalist division of labour and is an important element of capitalist relations of production, it is more difficult to argue that gender division necessarily occupies a particular place in the class structure of capitalism. It has not, at least yet, been demonstrated that the sexual division of labour forms not simply a historically constituted but a logically pre-given element of the class structure that would automatically be reproduced by the reproduction of this class structure' (138).
Similarly, she argues later that to see women's domestic labour purely in terms of the functions it performs for capital absolves one of the responsibility to examine the family itself further, and 'tends to deprive us of any adequate analysis of family ideology' (172). Barrett's striking conclusion that the reproduction of capitalism does not necessarily depend upon the sexual division of labour or the (nuclear) family is for me the central point of the book; and she links it to the argument that men are not reproduced in a relationship of total dominance over women in the same way that the capitalist class is reproduced in a relationship of total dominance over the working class (139). From this perspective, she is able to give full weight to the impact of such things as the ideology of domesticity with which girls are confronted at school and in the family, the 'channelling' of boys and girls into different subject areas and their differential access to training and apprenticeships, the prevalent cultural imagery of men as rational, logical, numerate, and scientific versus women as literate, sensitive and insightful, and the concentration of women in particular industries at particular levels, with poorer pay and working conditions than men, without assuming a remorseless logic that will endlessly replicate these features of society. She follows Edholm, Harris and Young in arguing that the sexual division of labour 'is an object to be explained by further analysis and not in itself a key to the understanding of gender division': and her discussion of it 'refers back to the ideological construction of masculine and feminine categories, and looks forward to the consideration of the family (in my view the central locus of women's oppression) and to an analysis of the role of the state in organizing a particular relationship between domestic life and the labour force' (152). The connections between the division of labour at work and in the home therefore become the principal object of analysis. Barrett first highlights the gender pay gap (which incidentally has shrunk considerably since 1980 but still stands, on average, at just under ten per cent: see ONS, 2016), and the concentration of women in jobs that can be described as 'service work, the 'caring' professions and socialized forms of domestic service' (157). Household structure, family responsibility and family ideology necessarily become the focus of attention. An exemplary section on the gendered division of labour (162-72) moves from the labour theory of value and attempts on the part of capital to increase relative surplus value by introducing machinery and 'splitting the labour process into the smallest possible component parts' (164) to consider the contested processes at play in capitalism's separation of home and workplace, and the part played in it by 'an ideology of gender that pre-dated capitalism, in the interests of men' (165), illustrating the point with a discussion of the differential social recognition of the 'skills' of women and men respectively. A brief reference here to the likely effects of the 'new technology' (170) emerges much more strongly in the following section (initially focused on the then topical domestic labour debate), when she questions whether capital requires the 'privatization' (that is, location in the home) of the daily and generational regeneration of labour power, or whether it might be either 'collectivized' or 'capitalized' (or, if you like, socialized or commodified): 'it is, after all, strange to rule out the possibility of collectivized domestic labour when we know that periods of expansion and high female employment bring increased use of convenience foods, laundries, restaurants and so on, and that periods of recession bring an intensification of domestic labour in the home' (176 - Barrett here references Gardiner, 1975, but could equally have referenced Capital, I, 15, footnotes 38 and 39). The problematization of the functionality of domestic labour for capitalism leads Barrett to argue that it has 'yet to be proved that capitalism could not survive without the present form of domestic labour' (180-81), and to argue again for the relevance of the pre-capitalist sexual division of labour (and by extension against the idea that socialist revolution will necessarily abolish it).
She then returns to the idea (most strongly articulated by Talcott Parsons, as she notes) that 'the nuclear family form has developed because it is particularly well suited to industrial capitalism's need for a mobile labour force' (188). She critiques radical feminist (Firestone) and feminist psychoanalytical work for its naturalistic assumptions and its definition of women 'in terms of their anatomy' (199), and refuses to take 'the family' as a point of reference:
'"The family" ... does not exist other than as an ideological construct, since the structure of the household, definition and meaning of kinship, and the ideology of "the family" itself have all varied enormously in different types of society. It would in fact be better to cease to refer to "the family" at all, and in the following discussion I shall concentrate instead on households, and on familial ideology, as terms that avoid some of the naturalism and mystification engendered by "the family"' (199).
Barrett suggests that on the issue of whether the 'nuclear family' emerged along with industrial capitalism, 'it is more useful to pose these arguments in terms of a struggle between the familial ideology of the emergent bourgeoisie and the practices of other classes, than in terms of a strictly necessary logic of capital' (202). 'Families', she adds, following Flandrin (1979), 'are an achievement of industriousness, respectability and regulation, rather than a pre-given or natural entity, and it was only [in the mid-nineteenth century] that ... aggregations of co-residing kin came to be seen as the only natural form of household organization' (203). Familial ideology is (although she does not use the phrase), a ruling class ideology: 'At an ideological level the bourgeoisie has certainly secured a hegemonic definition of family life: as "naturally" based on close kinship, as properly organized through a male breadwinner with financially dependent wife and children, and as a haven of privacy beyond the public realm of commerce and industry'. But while this 'ideal' has been accepted by the industrial working class, 'there is a disjunction between the pervasiveness of this ideology (from about the mid-nineteenth century onwards) and the actual household structure of the proletariat in which it exists. Few working-class households have historically been organized around dependence on a male "breadwinning" wage and the earnings of other family members have usually been essential to maintain the household' (204). This is a fruitful approach, and the nuanced discussion that follows (204-223) is exemplary in its balance and good sense. While gender identity and 'the definition of masculinity and femininity that pervades our culture are pre-eminently constructed within the ideology of the family', it is 'an ideological nexus rather than any concrete family system which is involved here and there are many connections between these processes within and outside the locus of the family home,' and the construction of gender identity does not take place exclusively in terms of familial relations' (205); there is a distinction to be made, then, between 'the construction of gender within families, and the social construction of gender within an ideology of familialism, and we can conclude that the latter formulation is the more accurate one' (206). Current practices are not to be regarded as universal or unchangeable aspects of human reproduction.
Similarly, Barrett gives full weight to the significance of the household as a source of oppression, but sees considerable scope for change. It 'is not merely a site in which a division of labour exists, but a set of relations between household members by which women are systematically dependent upon, and unequal to, men' (209): the 'family-household system of contemporary capitalism' (a term introduced by Mary McIntosh, 1978) 'constitutes not only the central site of the oppression of women but an important organizing principle of the relations of production of the social formation as a whole', and 'the specific combination of gender and class relations that characterizes this system has entrenched gender division in the fabric of capitalist social relations in a particularly effective way' (211). This system 'provides a uniquely effective mechanism for securing continuity over a period of time', and has proved 'a stable (intractable) system both for the reproduction of labour power, and as an arrangement to contain personal life, in the face of major social upheavals' (212). All women are oppressed by it to some degree, but not only do 'female capitalists benefit materially from a system that enables them to employ cheap female workers and to employ men at wage levels that are lowered by their wives' unpaid domestic labour' (215), but bourgeois women since the 1830s have also challenged it, fighting for 'financial independence, control of their property, a right to share in the marital assets on divorce, for divorce itself, for contraception and abortion law reform, for the right to control over children after marital break-up, and also for political rights and access to the professions' (215-6). Equally, while it is 'clearly true that men benefit, as men, from women's oppression in general, it is not so clear that they benefit specifically from the present organization of the household': 'it is not self-evident that the role of "breadwinner" is intrinsically a desirable one' (216), for all that men have sought to retain it for themselves through various exclusionary practices; it locks them into wage labour, 'with considerable pressure to remain politically docile in order to safeguard their jobs and hence provision for their households' (217); and it deprives them of significant access to their children. As regards the working class, claims for the benefits arising from the 'family wage' (as made by Humphries, 1977) are questionable, not least because 'this "family-based" system has never been thoroughly established, and even if it had it would be severely constricting for working-class women' (218-19).
The key issue, though, is whether the organization of the household and its accompanying family ideology reflects the interest of capital. Barrett draws on Irene Bruegel's argument that the relationship of capitalism to the family is contradictory as it tends both to destroy and maintain it (Bruegel, 1978, which also argues that 'It is precisely the gender attributes of femininity which are oppressive of women and it is these which are maintained by capitalist relations of production'), and goes on to argue against the idea that the family wage - dependent housewife model is potentially the most beneficial to capital:
'If we compare it to a system where migrant workers live virtually in barracks with their costs of reproduction largely borne in the hinterland we can see that the overall costs incurred in reproducing the working class through the present system are not as low as they might possibly be. So from the point of view of capital's need for the reproduction of labour power, the family household system is perhaps a good one, but not necessarily the cheapest, although this partly depends upon the outcome of struggles over wages and state benefits' (221).
Equally, she argues (contra Engels), that 'it is not self-evident from Marxist theory that legitimacy and established paternity are in fact required for the reproduction of capital', and in general that it is 'difficult to argue rigorously that the bourgeoisie's interests lie with the family-household, either as the best possible system for the reproduction of labour power or as an essential structure of the reproduction of themselves as a ruling class' (222). The great value of this discussion does not lie primarily in the specific arguments made, cogent though they are, but in its persistent questioning of a supposed positive relationship between capital and the nuclear family or the family-household. It is more than ever relevant today, in view of the decline of the never entirely dominant nuclear family dependent upon the male wage, the preponderance of childless households, the rise of single or on a smaller scale shared singles households, and the inroads made by capital through commodification into domestic activities around provisioning in particular. The chapter concludes with a reference to Nancy Chodorow's call for 'a conscious break with the cycle of "mothering" by which contemporary femininity and masculinity are reproduced', an insistence of the need for a re-allocation of childcare, and the recognition that such a development is made difficult by the fact that the sexual division of labour of which relations of childcare are a part 'is now deeply entrenched in the relations of production of capital' (226).
One of the most depressing aspects of the following chapter is how much of its critique still applies to the present day, whether in relation to cuts to welfare entitlements and measures to force women into work (reflecting the policies of the first Thatcher administration), or a discriminatory attitude towards women in education, law, and social and health policy that amounts to active oppression by the state. It revolves around the general relationship between the state, the family household and the wage-labour system, considering a variety of perspectives on state involvement: is it concerned, for example, with motherhood and the reproduction of labour power, marriage and the interests of men, labour and women as a reserve army, or welfare cuts and women as domestic carers. Barrett initially references three then current arguments on the ways in which 'the state is currently involved in different aspects of women's oppression' (228) - that welfare provisions from 1942 onwards 'created a more efficient structure for the reproduction of labour power based on the family unit and women's labour as wives and mothers' (Weir, 1974), that it constructed the male breadwinner nuclear family model as essential element of its ideology (Wilson, 1977); and that its doing so denoted precisely a recognition of the inadequacy of the family as a means for the reproduction of the working class (Mary McIntosh). After a review of labour market and social policies, she pinpoints 'the role of the state in maintaining the myth of a separation of the public from the private sphere' (240), highlighting the 'coercion of privacy' thesis advanced by Snare and Stang-Dahl (1978), which argues that the state constructs the home as a private prison for women. She concludes that the state 'is involved in the endorsement and enforcement of a particular household structure which in its turn is entrenched in the division of labour that capitalist relations of production have historically developed' (242-3), but dismisses debate over the state as representing the interests of capital or of men, or whether it sees women primarily as mothers or wives, as unproductive. Instead, she recognizes the 'elements of male domination that have been incorporated into the particular family-household system that the state has supported and structured' (243), without assuming that the resulting situation is either functional or permanent, and ends the chapter with a warning against the seductive charms of reformism ('there is the justified view that if feminism were to engage in the systematic infiltration of hierarchies of power it would become vulnerable to careerism on the part of women who selected it as a platform for personal advancement' 243-4), along with an insistence on the need for 'major assaults on aspects of state policy' in areas where the charge of reformism does not apply (such as the campaign for free, legal and safe abortion), as the state is 'a site of struggle and to some extent at least responsive to coercive pressure' (245, 246).
The conclusion returns to the relationship between women's oppression and the reproduction of capitalism, rejecting an analysis in terms of the 'supposed needs of capitalism itself' (248): such an explanation leaves many aspects of oppression unexplained and is therefore reductionist; it wrongly assumes that the household in which wife and children are dependent on a male breadwinner is the only possible form for an efficient reproduction of labour-power; and it deals too mechanistically with the complexity of the ideological construction of gender as it has developed in capitalism. Still, 'a model of women's dependence has become entrenched in the relations of production of capitalism, in the divisions of labour in wage work, and between wage labour and domestic labour' (249), so that 'an oppression of women that is not in any essentialist sense pre-given by the logic of capitalist development has become necessary for the ongoing reproduction of the mode of the production in its present form' and 'has acquired a material basis in the relations of production and reproduction of capitalism today' (249). A transhistorical conception of patriarchy cannot be the basis of an independent analytical system: the 'valorization of the female principle that a biologistic use of the concept of patriarchy encourages should be rejected at all levels', while the term patriarchy should be reserved for contexts 'where male domination is expressed through the power of the father over women and over younger men' (250). And while oppression is not solely located at an ideological level, the analysis of ideology is essential as it is only through it that 'we can grasp the oppressive myth of an idealized natural "family" to which all women must conform'. At the same time, 'we have little knowledge of the form such personal needs [for intimacy, sexual relations, emotional fulfilment, parenthood and so on] have taken in the past, and still less of what form they might take in a future society' (251). So Barrett moves to insist again on the importance of historical analysis - 'there is no programmatic answer to the question of whether women's liberation might be achieved within capitalism' (254). The superb ensuing discussion (254-5) proceeds from a sober assessment of the challenges posed by division of labour and responsibilities for childcare, the actual or assumed dependence of women on the male wage, and the ideology of gender, to the anticipation nevertheless of possible change: 'It is not altogether impossible that capital might wake up to the "wastage of talent" involved in the present educational system and attempt to reduce the channelling of girls away from useful technological subjects. The effects of new technology may create a situation where the relationship between the household and wage labour is less crucial for social production, and hence create conditions for a more equal distribution of childcare' (255).
Barrett herself describes the book as reflective rather than angry, and it displays some of the most important virtues in academic writing - clarity, good judgement, along with that rarest of academic qualities, common sense in abundance. It has another great virtue. It is very hard to avoid being drawn into the fashions, assumptions and received wisdom of any field of study one enters with a broadly sympathetic or committed perspective, and to keep a clear head, yet if progress and renewal are to achieved, it is essential. The reappearance of this wise and wonderful book is an event to celebrate.
References
Bruegel, Irene (1978), 'What Keeps the Family Going?', International Socialism, 2, 1, available at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1978/no2-001/bruegel.html
Chodorow, Nancy (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, University of California Press.
Coward, Rosalind and John Ellis (1977), Language and Materialism, Routledge.
Edholm, Felicity, Olivia Harris and Kate Young (1977), Conceptualising Women', Critique of Anthropology, 9/10, 101-130.
Federici, Silvia (2004), Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia.
Flandrin, Jean-Louis (1979), Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press.
Hartmann, Heidi (1979), 'The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union', Capital & Class, 8, 1-33.
Humphries, Jane (1977), 'Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family', Capital & Class, 1, 3, 241-258.
Macintosh, Mary (1978), 'The Welfare State and the Needs of the Dependent Family', in Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Office for National Statistics (2016), Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2016 Provisional Results (released 26 October).
Rubin, Gayle (1975), 'The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex', in Rayna R. Reiter, ed, Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press.
Snare, Annika and Stand-Dahl, Tove (1978), 'The Coercion of privacy: A Feminist Perspective', in Carol Smart and Barry Smart, eds, Women, Sexuality and Social Control, Routledge.
Wilson, Elizabeth (1977), Women and the Welfare State, Routledge.
Barrett's starting point is sympathetic but critical: 'In recent years attempts have been made to develop a theoretical perspective that might confidently be termed "Marxist feminist", yet the work so generated remains fragmentary and contradictory, lacking a conceptual framework adequate to its project' (8). She puts the obvious issue squarely, and the book unfolds from there:
'Marxism, constituted as it is around relations of appropriation and exploitation, is grounded in concepts that do not and could not address directly the gender of the exploiters and those whose labour is appropriated. A Marxist analysis of capitalism is therefore conceived around a primary contradiction between labour and capital and operates with categories that, as has recently been argued, can be termed "sex-blind" [reference is to Hartmann, 1979]. Feminism, however, points in a different direction, emphasizing precisely the relations of gender - largely speaking, of the oppression of women by men - that Marxism has tended to pass over in silence' (ibid).
It falls to Marxist feminism, then, 'to explore the relations between the organization of sexuality, domestic production, the household and so on, and historical changes in the mode of production and systems of appropriation and exploitation (9)'. This formulation may strike you at first as fairly bland, but in fact it is crucially important, simply because it focuses on the central aspects of historical materialism - the mode of production (capitalist, in this case) and systems of appropriation and exploitation - without assuming in advance a fixed relationship at any time or over time with any of the different aspects of women's identity, activity and experience.
Barrett first reviews the concepts of patriarchy (10-19), reproduction (19-29), and ideology (29-41). On patriarchy, she notes and regrets the shift from Weber's usage ('a particular form of household organization in which the father dominated other members of an extended kinship network and controlled the economic production of the household', 10), shared for example by Gayle Rubin (1975), in a classic text, to its use by some contemporary feminists to denote 'an over-arching category of male dominance' as an 'apparently universal and trans-historical category' (11, 12); she is particularly critical of the naturalism and biological reductionism implicit in the latter approach, especially when men's control over women's fertility is given explanatory prominence. Her diagnosis of a fundamental confusion between 'patriarchy as the rule of the father and patriarchy as the domination of women by men' (16), and her conclusion that the term 'presents insuperable difficulties to an analysis that attempts to relate women's oppression to the relations of production of capitalism' are convincingly argued. On reproduction too she pinpoints 'a rather crude juxtaposition and conflation of two very different processes - the biological reproduction of the species and the need of any social formation to reproduce its own conditions of production' (19-20), suggesting that even the discrimination by Edholm, Harris and Young (1977) between social reproduction, reproduction of the labour force and human or biological reproduction does not resolve the issue of their relationship to production, or remove the danger of lapsing into functionalism. She challenges the reductionist assumptions that the sexual division of labour at any time reflects the requirements of capital, or that the latter might relate to specific forms of male dominance (24). Addressing what has become known as the 'family wage', for example, she remarks that it is unclear 'why it should be in the interests of capital generally to pay women wages that require the payment of a larger wage to their husbands to enable them to support their wives', although it might be in the interest of an individual capitalist to do so. Here and elsewhere, she looks beyond the widespread assertion of a functional relationship to pinpoint underlying contradictions. 'Attempts to combine an analysis of social reproduction with an analysis of patriarchal human reproduction', she concludes, 'represent the fundamental problem Marxist feminism faces. The concept of social reproduction, as so far elaborated, is so closely tied to an account of class relations at the root of capitalist production that it cannot, by fiat, be rendered compatible with a serious consideration of male dominance' (29). On ideology, she takes up 'the exploration of familial relations and the development of masculine and feminine subjectivity, and the analysis of representations of gender difference in cultural production' (31) in a discussion that draws critically on Althusser's conception of ideology as a practice of imagining one's relationship to one's real conditions of existence. Proceeding largely by way of a much stronger critique of the anti-materialist bent of Coward (1977), though, she argues for a continued effort to explain 'determinate relationships in the real world', rather than to lapse into idealism. The chapter concludes with a summary of the analytical agenda for the rest of the book:
'The substantive material to be dealt with reflects the questions to which the women's liberation movement has paid attention. The oppression of women under capitalism is grounded in a set of relations between several elements. Of these perhaps the most crucial are the economic organization of households and its accompanying familial ideology, the division of labour and relations of production, the educational system and the operations of the state. Yet the continuance and the entrenched nature of this oppression cannot be understood without a consideration of the cultural processes in which men and women are represented differently - created and recreated as gendered human subjects. Nor can it be understood without an analysis of sexuality and gender identity, and the complex question of the relationship between sexuality and biological reproduction as it affects both women and men' (40-41).
From this point, successive chapters address femininity, masculinity, and sexual practice; ideology and the cultural production of gender; gender and class in the educational system; gender and the division of labour; women's oppression and the 'family'; and feminism and the politics of the state. The book then concludes with a summary review of capitalism and women's liberation. Barrett's procedure is to review the literature (widely, clearly, insightfully and with discrimination and occasional dry humour: I particularly liked footnote 9, p.120), and to question large generalizations, proposed invariant relationships relating to the logic or requirements of capitalism, and claims that Marxism explains everything. She invariably resists any line of argument that imposes any single logic, or fails to investigate specific circumstances and particular trajectories, or to consider 'contradiction, conflict and political struggle' (94). As a result, a wide range of received positions and widely shared assumptions come under scrutiny. So she questions the idea that there is a "functional" fit between industrial capitalism, with its need of a free, mobile labour force, and the nuclear family', 'since we can conceive of ways in which capitalist social formations might - and do - reproduce themselves without a nuclear family system' (49). Similarly, 'although domestic labour is vital to the present form in which labour power is reproduced, this need not necessarily be the case' (99). This historical approach to the question of gender and class leads to the following comment on the introduction of protective legislation on women's working conditions in the mid-nineteenth century [primarily in the Factory Acts that limited women's hours of work], which she sees as 'a material defeat of the interests of working women', but 'a defeat that is not simply explicable in terms of a proposed logic of capitalist development':
'It involved an assumption, shared by the labour movement among others, that the relegation of women to domesticity and childcare was natural and desirable. In this respect the eventual outcome was a product of gender division that was incorporated into the capitalist division of labour rather than spontaneously generated by it. If this argument is correct, it would suggest that although we may usefully argue that gender division has been built into the capitalist division of labour and is an important element of capitalist relations of production, it is more difficult to argue that gender division necessarily occupies a particular place in the class structure of capitalism. It has not, at least yet, been demonstrated that the sexual division of labour forms not simply a historically constituted but a logically pre-given element of the class structure that would automatically be reproduced by the reproduction of this class structure' (138).
Similarly, she argues later that to see women's domestic labour purely in terms of the functions it performs for capital absolves one of the responsibility to examine the family itself further, and 'tends to deprive us of any adequate analysis of family ideology' (172). Barrett's striking conclusion that the reproduction of capitalism does not necessarily depend upon the sexual division of labour or the (nuclear) family is for me the central point of the book; and she links it to the argument that men are not reproduced in a relationship of total dominance over women in the same way that the capitalist class is reproduced in a relationship of total dominance over the working class (139). From this perspective, she is able to give full weight to the impact of such things as the ideology of domesticity with which girls are confronted at school and in the family, the 'channelling' of boys and girls into different subject areas and their differential access to training and apprenticeships, the prevalent cultural imagery of men as rational, logical, numerate, and scientific versus women as literate, sensitive and insightful, and the concentration of women in particular industries at particular levels, with poorer pay and working conditions than men, without assuming a remorseless logic that will endlessly replicate these features of society. She follows Edholm, Harris and Young in arguing that the sexual division of labour 'is an object to be explained by further analysis and not in itself a key to the understanding of gender division': and her discussion of it 'refers back to the ideological construction of masculine and feminine categories, and looks forward to the consideration of the family (in my view the central locus of women's oppression) and to an analysis of the role of the state in organizing a particular relationship between domestic life and the labour force' (152). The connections between the division of labour at work and in the home therefore become the principal object of analysis. Barrett first highlights the gender pay gap (which incidentally has shrunk considerably since 1980 but still stands, on average, at just under ten per cent: see ONS, 2016), and the concentration of women in jobs that can be described as 'service work, the 'caring' professions and socialized forms of domestic service' (157). Household structure, family responsibility and family ideology necessarily become the focus of attention. An exemplary section on the gendered division of labour (162-72) moves from the labour theory of value and attempts on the part of capital to increase relative surplus value by introducing machinery and 'splitting the labour process into the smallest possible component parts' (164) to consider the contested processes at play in capitalism's separation of home and workplace, and the part played in it by 'an ideology of gender that pre-dated capitalism, in the interests of men' (165), illustrating the point with a discussion of the differential social recognition of the 'skills' of women and men respectively. A brief reference here to the likely effects of the 'new technology' (170) emerges much more strongly in the following section (initially focused on the then topical domestic labour debate), when she questions whether capital requires the 'privatization' (that is, location in the home) of the daily and generational regeneration of labour power, or whether it might be either 'collectivized' or 'capitalized' (or, if you like, socialized or commodified): 'it is, after all, strange to rule out the possibility of collectivized domestic labour when we know that periods of expansion and high female employment bring increased use of convenience foods, laundries, restaurants and so on, and that periods of recession bring an intensification of domestic labour in the home' (176 - Barrett here references Gardiner, 1975, but could equally have referenced Capital, I, 15, footnotes 38 and 39). The problematization of the functionality of domestic labour for capitalism leads Barrett to argue that it has 'yet to be proved that capitalism could not survive without the present form of domestic labour' (180-81), and to argue again for the relevance of the pre-capitalist sexual division of labour (and by extension against the idea that socialist revolution will necessarily abolish it).
She then returns to the idea (most strongly articulated by Talcott Parsons, as she notes) that 'the nuclear family form has developed because it is particularly well suited to industrial capitalism's need for a mobile labour force' (188). She critiques radical feminist (Firestone) and feminist psychoanalytical work for its naturalistic assumptions and its definition of women 'in terms of their anatomy' (199), and refuses to take 'the family' as a point of reference:
'"The family" ... does not exist other than as an ideological construct, since the structure of the household, definition and meaning of kinship, and the ideology of "the family" itself have all varied enormously in different types of society. It would in fact be better to cease to refer to "the family" at all, and in the following discussion I shall concentrate instead on households, and on familial ideology, as terms that avoid some of the naturalism and mystification engendered by "the family"' (199).
Barrett suggests that on the issue of whether the 'nuclear family' emerged along with industrial capitalism, 'it is more useful to pose these arguments in terms of a struggle between the familial ideology of the emergent bourgeoisie and the practices of other classes, than in terms of a strictly necessary logic of capital' (202). 'Families', she adds, following Flandrin (1979), 'are an achievement of industriousness, respectability and regulation, rather than a pre-given or natural entity, and it was only [in the mid-nineteenth century] that ... aggregations of co-residing kin came to be seen as the only natural form of household organization' (203). Familial ideology is (although she does not use the phrase), a ruling class ideology: 'At an ideological level the bourgeoisie has certainly secured a hegemonic definition of family life: as "naturally" based on close kinship, as properly organized through a male breadwinner with financially dependent wife and children, and as a haven of privacy beyond the public realm of commerce and industry'. But while this 'ideal' has been accepted by the industrial working class, 'there is a disjunction between the pervasiveness of this ideology (from about the mid-nineteenth century onwards) and the actual household structure of the proletariat in which it exists. Few working-class households have historically been organized around dependence on a male "breadwinning" wage and the earnings of other family members have usually been essential to maintain the household' (204). This is a fruitful approach, and the nuanced discussion that follows (204-223) is exemplary in its balance and good sense. While gender identity and 'the definition of masculinity and femininity that pervades our culture are pre-eminently constructed within the ideology of the family', it is 'an ideological nexus rather than any concrete family system which is involved here and there are many connections between these processes within and outside the locus of the family home,' and the construction of gender identity does not take place exclusively in terms of familial relations' (205); there is a distinction to be made, then, between 'the construction of gender within families, and the social construction of gender within an ideology of familialism, and we can conclude that the latter formulation is the more accurate one' (206). Current practices are not to be regarded as universal or unchangeable aspects of human reproduction.
Similarly, Barrett gives full weight to the significance of the household as a source of oppression, but sees considerable scope for change. It 'is not merely a site in which a division of labour exists, but a set of relations between household members by which women are systematically dependent upon, and unequal to, men' (209): the 'family-household system of contemporary capitalism' (a term introduced by Mary McIntosh, 1978) 'constitutes not only the central site of the oppression of women but an important organizing principle of the relations of production of the social formation as a whole', and 'the specific combination of gender and class relations that characterizes this system has entrenched gender division in the fabric of capitalist social relations in a particularly effective way' (211). This system 'provides a uniquely effective mechanism for securing continuity over a period of time', and has proved 'a stable (intractable) system both for the reproduction of labour power, and as an arrangement to contain personal life, in the face of major social upheavals' (212). All women are oppressed by it to some degree, but not only do 'female capitalists benefit materially from a system that enables them to employ cheap female workers and to employ men at wage levels that are lowered by their wives' unpaid domestic labour' (215), but bourgeois women since the 1830s have also challenged it, fighting for 'financial independence, control of their property, a right to share in the marital assets on divorce, for divorce itself, for contraception and abortion law reform, for the right to control over children after marital break-up, and also for political rights and access to the professions' (215-6). Equally, while it is 'clearly true that men benefit, as men, from women's oppression in general, it is not so clear that they benefit specifically from the present organization of the household': 'it is not self-evident that the role of "breadwinner" is intrinsically a desirable one' (216), for all that men have sought to retain it for themselves through various exclusionary practices; it locks them into wage labour, 'with considerable pressure to remain politically docile in order to safeguard their jobs and hence provision for their households' (217); and it deprives them of significant access to their children. As regards the working class, claims for the benefits arising from the 'family wage' (as made by Humphries, 1977) are questionable, not least because 'this "family-based" system has never been thoroughly established, and even if it had it would be severely constricting for working-class women' (218-19).
The key issue, though, is whether the organization of the household and its accompanying family ideology reflects the interest of capital. Barrett draws on Irene Bruegel's argument that the relationship of capitalism to the family is contradictory as it tends both to destroy and maintain it (Bruegel, 1978, which also argues that 'It is precisely the gender attributes of femininity which are oppressive of women and it is these which are maintained by capitalist relations of production'), and goes on to argue against the idea that the family wage - dependent housewife model is potentially the most beneficial to capital:
'If we compare it to a system where migrant workers live virtually in barracks with their costs of reproduction largely borne in the hinterland we can see that the overall costs incurred in reproducing the working class through the present system are not as low as they might possibly be. So from the point of view of capital's need for the reproduction of labour power, the family household system is perhaps a good one, but not necessarily the cheapest, although this partly depends upon the outcome of struggles over wages and state benefits' (221).
Equally, she argues (contra Engels), that 'it is not self-evident from Marxist theory that legitimacy and established paternity are in fact required for the reproduction of capital', and in general that it is 'difficult to argue rigorously that the bourgeoisie's interests lie with the family-household, either as the best possible system for the reproduction of labour power or as an essential structure of the reproduction of themselves as a ruling class' (222). The great value of this discussion does not lie primarily in the specific arguments made, cogent though they are, but in its persistent questioning of a supposed positive relationship between capital and the nuclear family or the family-household. It is more than ever relevant today, in view of the decline of the never entirely dominant nuclear family dependent upon the male wage, the preponderance of childless households, the rise of single or on a smaller scale shared singles households, and the inroads made by capital through commodification into domestic activities around provisioning in particular. The chapter concludes with a reference to Nancy Chodorow's call for 'a conscious break with the cycle of "mothering" by which contemporary femininity and masculinity are reproduced', an insistence of the need for a re-allocation of childcare, and the recognition that such a development is made difficult by the fact that the sexual division of labour of which relations of childcare are a part 'is now deeply entrenched in the relations of production of capital' (226).
One of the most depressing aspects of the following chapter is how much of its critique still applies to the present day, whether in relation to cuts to welfare entitlements and measures to force women into work (reflecting the policies of the first Thatcher administration), or a discriminatory attitude towards women in education, law, and social and health policy that amounts to active oppression by the state. It revolves around the general relationship between the state, the family household and the wage-labour system, considering a variety of perspectives on state involvement: is it concerned, for example, with motherhood and the reproduction of labour power, marriage and the interests of men, labour and women as a reserve army, or welfare cuts and women as domestic carers. Barrett initially references three then current arguments on the ways in which 'the state is currently involved in different aspects of women's oppression' (228) - that welfare provisions from 1942 onwards 'created a more efficient structure for the reproduction of labour power based on the family unit and women's labour as wives and mothers' (Weir, 1974), that it constructed the male breadwinner nuclear family model as essential element of its ideology (Wilson, 1977); and that its doing so denoted precisely a recognition of the inadequacy of the family as a means for the reproduction of the working class (Mary McIntosh). After a review of labour market and social policies, she pinpoints 'the role of the state in maintaining the myth of a separation of the public from the private sphere' (240), highlighting the 'coercion of privacy' thesis advanced by Snare and Stang-Dahl (1978), which argues that the state constructs the home as a private prison for women. She concludes that the state 'is involved in the endorsement and enforcement of a particular household structure which in its turn is entrenched in the division of labour that capitalist relations of production have historically developed' (242-3), but dismisses debate over the state as representing the interests of capital or of men, or whether it sees women primarily as mothers or wives, as unproductive. Instead, she recognizes the 'elements of male domination that have been incorporated into the particular family-household system that the state has supported and structured' (243), without assuming that the resulting situation is either functional or permanent, and ends the chapter with a warning against the seductive charms of reformism ('there is the justified view that if feminism were to engage in the systematic infiltration of hierarchies of power it would become vulnerable to careerism on the part of women who selected it as a platform for personal advancement' 243-4), along with an insistence on the need for 'major assaults on aspects of state policy' in areas where the charge of reformism does not apply (such as the campaign for free, legal and safe abortion), as the state is 'a site of struggle and to some extent at least responsive to coercive pressure' (245, 246).
The conclusion returns to the relationship between women's oppression and the reproduction of capitalism, rejecting an analysis in terms of the 'supposed needs of capitalism itself' (248): such an explanation leaves many aspects of oppression unexplained and is therefore reductionist; it wrongly assumes that the household in which wife and children are dependent on a male breadwinner is the only possible form for an efficient reproduction of labour-power; and it deals too mechanistically with the complexity of the ideological construction of gender as it has developed in capitalism. Still, 'a model of women's dependence has become entrenched in the relations of production of capitalism, in the divisions of labour in wage work, and between wage labour and domestic labour' (249), so that 'an oppression of women that is not in any essentialist sense pre-given by the logic of capitalist development has become necessary for the ongoing reproduction of the mode of the production in its present form' and 'has acquired a material basis in the relations of production and reproduction of capitalism today' (249). A transhistorical conception of patriarchy cannot be the basis of an independent analytical system: the 'valorization of the female principle that a biologistic use of the concept of patriarchy encourages should be rejected at all levels', while the term patriarchy should be reserved for contexts 'where male domination is expressed through the power of the father over women and over younger men' (250). And while oppression is not solely located at an ideological level, the analysis of ideology is essential as it is only through it that 'we can grasp the oppressive myth of an idealized natural "family" to which all women must conform'. At the same time, 'we have little knowledge of the form such personal needs [for intimacy, sexual relations, emotional fulfilment, parenthood and so on] have taken in the past, and still less of what form they might take in a future society' (251). So Barrett moves to insist again on the importance of historical analysis - 'there is no programmatic answer to the question of whether women's liberation might be achieved within capitalism' (254). The superb ensuing discussion (254-5) proceeds from a sober assessment of the challenges posed by division of labour and responsibilities for childcare, the actual or assumed dependence of women on the male wage, and the ideology of gender, to the anticipation nevertheless of possible change: 'It is not altogether impossible that capital might wake up to the "wastage of talent" involved in the present educational system and attempt to reduce the channelling of girls away from useful technological subjects. The effects of new technology may create a situation where the relationship between the household and wage labour is less crucial for social production, and hence create conditions for a more equal distribution of childcare' (255).
Barrett herself describes the book as reflective rather than angry, and it displays some of the most important virtues in academic writing - clarity, good judgement, along with that rarest of academic qualities, common sense in abundance. It has another great virtue. It is very hard to avoid being drawn into the fashions, assumptions and received wisdom of any field of study one enters with a broadly sympathetic or committed perspective, and to keep a clear head, yet if progress and renewal are to achieved, it is essential. The reappearance of this wise and wonderful book is an event to celebrate.
References
Bruegel, Irene (1978), 'What Keeps the Family Going?', International Socialism, 2, 1, available at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1978/no2-001/bruegel.html
Chodorow, Nancy (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, University of California Press.
Coward, Rosalind and John Ellis (1977), Language and Materialism, Routledge.
Edholm, Felicity, Olivia Harris and Kate Young (1977), Conceptualising Women', Critique of Anthropology, 9/10, 101-130.
Federici, Silvia (2004), Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia.
Flandrin, Jean-Louis (1979), Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press.
Hartmann, Heidi (1979), 'The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union', Capital & Class, 8, 1-33.
Humphries, Jane (1977), 'Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working Class Family', Capital & Class, 1, 3, 241-258.
Macintosh, Mary (1978), 'The Welfare State and the Needs of the Dependent Family', in Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Office for National Statistics (2016), Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2016 Provisional Results (released 26 October).
Rubin, Gayle (1975), 'The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex', in Rayna R. Reiter, ed, Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press.
Snare, Annika and Stand-Dahl, Tove (1978), 'The Coercion of privacy: A Feminist Perspective', in Carol Smart and Barry Smart, eds, Women, Sexuality and Social Control, Routledge.
Wilson, Elizabeth (1977), Women and the Welfare State, Routledge.