Radical feminism however, believes that patriarchy is still very much around in modern society. They say that patriarchy is universal and according to Firestone, the origins of patriarchy lie in women’s biological capacity to bear and care for infants, since performing this means that they become dependant on males. They also see patriarchy as the primary and most fundamental form of social inequality and conflict, that the key division in society is between men an women and that men are women‘s main enemy. They see all men oppressing women, an all men benefiting from patriarchy, especially from women’s unpaid domestic labour and from their sexual services.
For radical feminists, patriarchal oppression is direct and personal. It ours not only in the public sphere of work and politics, but also in the private sphere of the family, domestic labour and sexual relationships. Radical feminists see the personal as the political. All relationships involve power and they are political when one individual tries to dominate the other, so personal relationships are therefore political because men dominate women through them. Radical feminists refer to these power relationships as sexual politics. So therefore they focus on the ways in which patriarchal power is exercised through personal relationships, often through sexual or physical violence or the threat of it. This has the effect of controlling all women, not just those against whom it is exercised. Brownmiller notes, fear of rap is a powerful detergent against women going out alone at night.
Also radical feminists make light of the nature of sexuality. In general male stream sociology regards sexuality as a natural biological urge. By contrast radical feminists argue that patriarchy constructs sexuality so as to satisfy men’s desire. For example how women are portrayed in pornography as passive and submissive towards men. Rich argues that men force women into a narrow and unsatisfying heterosexuality, which becomes the only socially acceptable form of sexuality. Radical feminists have proposed a number of solutions for the problems women face under patriarchy, separatism, men and women living apart from each other and thereby creating a new culture of female independence, free from patriarchy, Greer argues for the creation of the all female or ‘matrilocal’ households as an alternative to the nuclear family. There is also consciousness raising, through sharing experiences with other women bout oppression, women come to see that thy are not alone, which may lead to collective action, such as ‘reclaim the night’ actions. And also, political lesbianism, many radical feminists argue that heterosexual relationships are inevitably oppressive because they involve ‘sleeping with the enemy’ and that lesbianism is the only non-oppressive form of sexuality.
However radical feminists fail to have an adequate theory of how to abolish patriarchy, and that ideas like separatism are too vague and are likely unachievable, and also while addressing male violence towards women they fail to address women’s violence against men and even violence within a lesbian family.
Marxist feminists dismiss the liberal feminist view that women’s subordination is merely the product of stereotyping or outdated attitudes; they also reject the radical feminist view that it is the result of patriarchal oppression by men. Instead, as Marxists, they see women’s subordination as rooted in capitalism.
For Marxist feminists, women’s subordination in capitalist society results from their primary role as unpaid homemaker, which places them in a dependant economic position in the family. Their subordination performs a number of important functions for capitalism. Women are the source of cheap, exploitable labour for employers. They can be paid less because it is assumed they will be partially dependant on their husband’s earnings, also that women are a reserve army of labour that can e moved in to the labour force during the economic boom and out at times of recession. They can be treated as marginal workers in this way because it is assumed their primary role is in the home. Also that women reproduce the labour force through their unpaid domestic labour, both by nurturing and socialising children to become the next generation of workers and y maintaining and servicing the current generation of workers, their husbands. They do this at no cost to capitalism. Also women absorb anger that would otherwise be directed at capitalism. Fran Ansley describes women as ‘takers of shit’, who soak up the frustration their husbands feel because of alienation and exploitation they suffer at work. For Marxist feminists, this explains male domestic violence against women. And because of these links between women’s subordination and capitalism, they argue that women’s interests lie in the overthrow of capitalism.
By contrast difference feminists do not see women as a single homogeneous group. They argue that middle class and working class women, white and black women, lesbian and heterosexual women have very different experiences of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and homophobia. Difference feminism argues that feminist theory has claimed a false universality for itself – it claimed to be all about women but in reality was only about experiences of white, western, heterosexual, and middle class women. For example by seeing the family only as a source of oppression, white feminists have neglected black women’s experience of racial oppression. By contrast, many black feminists view the black family positively as a source of resistance against racism.
Poststructuralist feminism seems to offer a theoretical basis for recognising the diversity of women’s experiences and struggles against oppression, critics argue that it has some weaknesses. Walby agrees that there are differences among women, but she argues that there are also important similarities, they are all faced with patriarchy. Similarly, celebrating difference may have the effect of dividing women into an infinite number of sub groups thereby weakening feminism as a movement for change. Segal criticises poststructuralist feminism for abandoning any notion of real, objective social structures. Oppression is not just the result of discourses it is about real inequality.
The feminist contribution to our understanding of society is very useful because all of the different aspects of feminism help to explain women and their role in society even in they are oppressed by men, it still gives an understanding of women and whether life for them is getting better as the liberal feminists would say our if women need to resort to political lesbianism in order to escape the oppression of men. Also difference feminism offers theories for minority women, that the other aspects of feminists neglected , and how they contrast from essentialism, they say that all women are different and have different experiences to one another.
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cathers95 (student)
