Click on title to link to "Women and Revolution" article ("Spartacist", Spring 2006) on "The Russian Revolution And The Emancipation Of Women".
March is Women's History Month
The following article was originally published in Women and Revolution, Summer 1974 and may be of more than historical interest to the radical public.
Women, Culture and Class Society, Helen Cantor
At first glance, it would appear that the problems of culture and women's contributions to it are somewhat removed from the immediate tasks of building a revolutionary party of the proletariat, and in a sense, these questions are. The struggle for women's creative and full participation in all aspects of society seems of concern only to the educated women of the middle class. Of what concern is this struggle to revolutionists?
The problem of culture and gaining access to it is a fundamental one for the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote: "The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture" (Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution).
Ever since the beginning of human development the iron necessity to survive has usually necessitated a division between hunting and child-rearing tasks. While this original division did not result in women's present oppression, the development of civilization, i.e., class society, did, by excluding women from many areas of social labor. Women have historically been kept pregnant most of their lives and, under advanced capitalism, isolated in individual households and thus impeded from attaining full expression of their creativity and social productivity. It is only comparatively recently (in the last 200 years) with the development of capitalism, that significant numbers of women (and at first only those of the upper classes) even learned to read or were allowed to attend school.
As Marxists, we are interested in human culture— our fundamental aim is to create a society in which all humanity, unimpeded by material scarcity, can develop its creative abilities freely and to the utmost.
There is a great deal of vulgar materialism and ignorance on the left regarding the relation of culture to the proletariat, due in part to the atrocities of "socialist realism" perpetrated by the Stalinists, including the Maoist variety. "Workerist" philistines glorify the lack of culture in the working class, justifying this by defining all standards of culture as inherently bourgeois. These currents are reflected within women's organizations, too, as shown recently by attempts to create a "women's culture" in opposition to "male-dominated" culture.
"Cultural feminism" has become a trend in what is left of the now largely dissipated outburst of feminist activity of the late 1960's. The women's movement left few organizations in its wake other than a string of women's studies departments on campuses across the country, and small clumps of women's schools or centers (like the Chicago Women's Liberation Union school), most of whose activities center around do-it-yourself gynecology, Volkswagen repair or some variant of "women's culture," such as women's rock and roll bands, poetry readings, paintings or displays of women's crafts. This strain of "cultural feminism" is also evident in recent publications of anthologies of women poets, journals (like Aphra or The Amazon Quarterly devoted to lesbian culture, or The Feminist Art Journal) and endless articles in almost all women's papers (and some liberal papers, like the
Village Voice and the New York Review of Books) on women artists, poets, etc.
The worldview of these cultural feminists is often shared by more political "socialist feminists" and even by many of the ex-New Left Maoists, and is tailed uncritically by groups like the SWP in precisely the same way that they tail black nationalism. To this worldview we counterpose a Marxist materialist understanding of the basis of woman's oppression and of culture in general. In order to seek to create a truly human culture, as Marx said, we must create the conditions in which humanity can, for the first time, make its own history.
Some Currents of Feminism Today
The "cultural feminists" propound several somewhat contradictory theories. First, there are the liberal academics, who argue that there really are great women artists, scientists, leaders, and so on, but that' they have been left out of history, so we don't know about them. This is the "herstory" liner-"write women back into history." As if wiping out centuries of oppression were merely a matter of altering a few textbooks.' "Teach the real contributions women have made in the past," they demand. This argument in effect denies the reality of women's oppression, because it denies that that oppression had any particular effect on women.
Another variant on the "herstory" concept is that the reason nobody noticed all this womanly creative activity was because all culture is male culture and thus the female aspects of creativity were ignored or neglected—like making quilts or weaving, for example (off our backs has had several culture pull-outs on quilt-making). Women's art must be judged by different standards than that of men, advocates of this position say. Women's crafts were not seen as great art simply because women did them—presumably if men had made the quilts they would be displayed in the museums along with the Rembrandts and Greek sculptures.
More radical feminists call for the creation of an entirely separate "women's culture" because, given male dominance, it is supposedly impossible for women to create anything except by withdrawing, creating "their own space." This position asserts that women are inherently different from men, that their sexual identity is the most important thing about them and will inevitably (or should inevitably) determine their social behavior, ideas, creative expression and so on. This argument is quite close to that of the fake anthropologists like Lionel Tiger, who argues in Men in Groups that because of the original biological functions of men as hunters and women as child-raisers,-they have inherent and instinctual responses to life, see the world differently, and are thus naturally assigned to their present social roles (women aren't good at politics, men are more aggressive).
Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, goes somewhat further than the need for a separate women's culture. For her, culture, in the sense of aesthetics and art, is the expression of women's sexual nature. She writes:
"We have noted how those few women directly creating culture have gravitated to disciplines within the Aesthetic Mode. There is a good reason for this: the aesthetic response corresponds with 'female' behavior. The same terminology can be applied to either: subjective, intuitive, introverted, wishful, dreamy or fantastic, concerned with the subconscious.... Correspondingly, the technological response is the masculine response: objective, logical, extroverted, realistic, concerned with the conscious mind...."
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
For Firestone, the sexual division of humanity is the basis from which class divisions grew and from which the division between science and art (objective vs. subjective) developed as well. This division seems. particularly artificial and false, however, when it is noted that men have had less trouble in assuming the "feminine aesthetic" mode—most of the great novelists, poets, artists, etc., have after all been men. Why cannot women therefore equally easily assume the "masculine technological" model?
The most developed expression of "women's culture" (at least in the visual arts) is probably the male-exclusionist Womanhouse arts center created by Judy Chicago in California. Judy Chicago, an artist, has developed the theory that women's art has historically shown a preoccupation with womb-like shapes; 'holes, rounded organic forms (for example Georgia O'Keefe's enlarged flower parts)—the "dark inner space" of woman. Off our backs reviewed a women's art show in New York last November in an article called "another cuntree [sic]—at last a mainstream women's art movement," which enthused over the proliferation of gigantic female organs, erotic art, fruit-flower fertility themes, etc., and projected from these the creation of "a mainstream female art movement," whose emphasis was on woman's sexuality. This vision of the liberated creative woman as a flower/fruit/fecund moon-goddess/earth mother would be funny (in an intimidating kind of way), were it not the very same image of woman that has arisen as a result of her oppression and been used to "keep her in her place," creating with her womb, not her mind—the intuitive, irrational instinctive mother to be kept out of the 'light of day" of men's politics, creativity, social labor.
"Her story"
Obviously, these two beliefs—that women have made contributions but been unrecognized and that women are fundamentally different from men—are somewhat contradictory. The first asserts that women can entirely transcend their oppression in class society and rise above its effects to create an art which is "just as good" as "men's" art, the other that women are deep down different from men and therefore must reject all previous human achievement as "male culture" and create their own exclusionary culture and society. We deny both these assertions.
The "herstory" question is dealt with in an interesting and thoughtful article by Linda Nochlin (an art historian) called "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" (reprinted in Art News, January 1971). This article has created much controversy within the women's movement, not only because of its position on women, but also for its analysis of what art is.
Of course, one's immediate response to the question is a sharp reaction against the natural male chauvinist answer, "Women aren't great artists because they are incapable of it—all they can do is -make babies." But to say that women are potentially equally capable of true creativity is not the same thing as attempting to prove that they are in fact creative, as Nochlin points out. The truth is that women have not participated fully in the creation and development of human culture, because they have been excluded from social production and kept isolated in private occupations of child-rearing and housekeeping, tasks which were historically necessary and from which women could not escape until the development of modern capitalism which provided the technology and productive resources such that this primitive division of. labor was no longer necessary.
There have been exceptions to this general truth, of course, but they are almost exclusively from the middle and upper classes. To the extent that a few women have been able to be creative, it has been primarily in the arts, in writing novels, poetry and in painting, for instance. One could ask, "Why have there been no great women architects, bridge-builders, scientists, generals?" equally validly. The reason women have contributed in the arts is not due to some "feminine aesthetic" but because these occupations, being essentially individual and private, were more accessible.
But even within the arts, women have not been able to contribute as much as men. Why? As Nochlin puts it:
"... [conditions in the arts are] stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all who do not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle-class or above, males. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education...."
The production of great art, as Nochlin points out, is not "the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience. the language of art is neither a sob story or a hoarse, confidential whisper "but has rather involved a self-consistent language of form, teaching, building on the experience of past generations of artists, long apprenticeships and intense and lengthy periods of personal experimentation. Women have in most cases been denied access to these artistic necessities. For example, prior to the twentieth century, women were unable to study the live nude, which was absolutely necessary to an artist's education, and were then accused of being incapable of understanding the male form. Upper-class "ladies" were at most encouraged to paint flowers on velvet or China, and were then accused of being unable to develop large, heroic sculptural forms. Almost all women artists up to the end of the 19th century were either the daughters of artist fathers or fathers sympathetic to their intellectual development; or else were associated with a more dominant male artistic personality (for example, Rosa Bonheur, Victorian painter of animals; Maria Robusti, daughter of Tintoretto, Lavinia Fontana, Renaissance painter; Mary Cassatt, associated with Degas).
To face clearly the fact that only a tiny percentage of privileged women, in exceptional circumstances, have succeeded in becoming successful artists or scientists or whatever they wish is not to despair. Instead of denying the reality of women's oppression, we recognize how this oppression came about and we see a road to end it in the real world through action, instead of retreating to wishful dreaming and academic pursuit of the alleged unappreciated great women geniuses of the past.
Women's Studies and Idealism
The current proliferation of women's studies departments and women's schools implies an underlying philosophy of idealism, which ignores both the actuality and historic necessity of women's oppression and therefore refuses to understand how this oppression must be finally overcome.
Marx asserted that inequality and oppression are historically necessary and can be overcome only through the total development of society, centering on the raising of the productive forces. In Theories of Surplus Value he writes, "... at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even 'classes...." and in The German Ideology he insists that "in general people cannot ‘be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act...."
But for the women's studies departments, liberation is "a mental act." This belief is characteristic of educated petty-bourgeois academics seeking" to rise above the. uncomfortable harsh realities of class society because they are caught in the middle. On the one hand, they sympathize with the sad plight of the poor, yet still admire the resourcefulness and cunning (and presumably superior intelligence) of the capitalist and hope that maybe they too will be like him someday. Knowledge is power for these dreamers, because to them it seems that ideas rule the world and that if women can only learn the truth about themselves, this will somehow automatically free them.
"Women's Culture"
Those who advocate the creation (or announce the existence) of a separate women's culture also share this idealism, in that they believe it is possible to withdraw from an oppressive society and thus escape its effects. They are either extremely naive, cynically selfish or simply opportunist in advocating this for the mass of women, because it is possible for only a few privileged women with a sufficient financial base to create a relatively pleasant and isolated personal milieu, in which they can concentrate on discovering what their "true sexual essence" may be.
What the "true nature" of men and women is-whether or not men and women have different social needs and expectations because of their biological differences-r-is a question which cannot be answered objectively under the hideously deforming pressures o»f class society.
Attempts to create a separate women's culture therefore tend to end up imitating or using the most extreme caricatures of womanhood—like the fruit/ flower/moon goddess. The attempt to discover a separate "woman's aesthetic" in art of the past, too, is rather difficult. It is obvious that the work of artists within a particular period or school (Baroque, Rococo, Impressionism, German Expressionism, Cubism, etc.)
resembles that of others in the same school far more that the work of individual men and women within each particular school differs.
Stalinism and Art
It's not accidental that some of the proponents of a women's culture reprint Stalinist works or admire Mao's "proletarian" art theories (see for example the paper Women and Art, Summer/Fall, 1972, and its supplement on "Art and Society" devoted entirely to works by Stalinist art historians). The caricatures of "womanhood" (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda. They need very obvious symbols to mark their work as clearly identifying itself with a particular viewpoint, and also, in their condescending opinion, in order to be immediately understood by the masses. This "socialist" ^art which requires "realism" as its medium drags all art down to the- level of crude propaganda and clichés of brawny-armed workers, factory chimneys, red flags, etc. Likewise, the cultural feminists need to show "female" symbolism—and in this society no other symbols are available which would be immediately understood by "the masses" except sexual imagery, traditional images of womanhood, round, organic, "warm-tender" qualities, etc.
Many feminist artists are quite hostile to abstract art because it doesn't fit their concept of art as propaganda. It's not immediately obvious what the ideological viewpoint is, or even in fact whether a man or woman painted it.' Thus such work must be under constant suspicion as not being "correct." This vulgarity has nothing in common with what art is, which is not propaganda (not the "hoarse whispered confession" or "sob story"), but rather an attempt to extend consciousness, to break new ground, and is therefore often difficult to understand at first.
Women artists have begged to be judged by the same standards as men, for there is one standard in art. Different standards in this case, as in all other areas, only mean disguised contempt. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance, to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman" (A Room of One's Own). The question of standards in art is important. As Trotsky said, "proletarian art must not be second-class art" (Literature and Revolution)—the proletarian revolution will lay the basis for creating a culture which must build on (and will eventually supersede the best of all past cultures.
Male Chauvinism
But isn't the concept of culture being used in too broad a sense? What about male chauvinism? Isn't there, after all, such a thing as "bourgeois culture" which can poison the minds of the workers? The uprooting of bourgeois ideology requires not a purge of bourgeois art, a la the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," but the elimination of the material conditions (the repressive nuclear family, social inequality, unequal access to education and jobs, absorption in child-raising and housework, etc.) which have given rise to male-chauvinist ideology. If these conditions are changed, reflections of this change will ultimately appear in literature and art. That is the only way to thoroughly and forever abolish false conceptions of reality. As Orwell said about Salvador Dali (and he loathed Dali, believing him to be a truly sick individual who spread fantasies of necrophilia), it is a dubious policy to ban much of anything, particularly in the fields of art or science. Lenin continually warned comrades not to become too self-assured, too self-righteous, because Marxism is a science of economic and political life which applies only indirectly to other disciplines. Essentially Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all insisted on the autonomy of art.
Of course there is a dominant "bourgeois culture." But it is based on the entire accumulated experiences of all human societies since the beginning of man. Thus it would be more accurate to speak of "human culture in a bourgeois epoch," for it is this entire range of human culture which the bourgeoisie has taken as its exclusive possession and which the proletariat must conquer. Socialist society must and will base itself upon this entire accumulated experience.
Socialist Humanity
Since the beginning of class society the social roles of men and women have never been equal—that is the goal of communist society. Until such a society is achieved, it is almost impossible to untangle the results of social training and education, which reflect the inequalities of class society, from what may possibly be real differences among peoples, sexes, etc. We are justly suspicious of the uses to which research in "social sciences" is put in capitalist society. As Trotsky said in a speech to a scientific gathering in Russia in 1925:
". .the greater the trust of socialism devoted to direct study of nature, the greater is its initial distrust in approaching those sciences and pseudo-sciences which are linked closely to the structure of human society, its economic institutions, its state, laws, ethics, etc."
—"Dialectical Materialism and Science” in Problems of Everyday Life
Much of these "pseudo-sciences" end up simply justifying the status quo, i.e., capitalism with its attendant evils, because they begin with the assumption of some kind of "eternal human nature" which produces society, and thus that's the way it has to be, forever and ever." Further, all past alleged differences between races and sexes have at one time or another been used by reactionaries as an ideological excuse for the purpose of justifying the oppression of (or even seeking to destroy) the supposedly "inferior" grouping.
But suppose some real aptitudinal differences do exist between men and women and could be proven? Our response would be "so what?" A free society must require absolute equality of opportunity and access to all areas of human life and culture. A proletarian state developing toward communism (the classless society) will have no reason to fear investigation and exploration of all potential differences, because our society will be based upon the absolute equality and freedom of all humanity, regardless of any such differences.
As Isaac Deutscher said at a Socialist Scholars Conference on the subject of "socialist man":
"We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man's making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex, and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labor movement have taken on.
"Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these. And if his nature remains aggressive, his society will give him immeasurably greater and more varied opportunities than bourgeois man has for sublimating his instinctual drives and turning them to creative uses.... The average member of socialist society may yet rise, as Trotsky anticipated, to the stature of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx.... And we assume that 'above these heights new peaks will rise.' We do not see in socialist man evolution's last and perfect product, or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning of history." •
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