Woman’s Estate
- Author:
Juliet Mitchell
Pelican, 25p
The estate is one of double bondage ? women expected to maintain a family structure that is exploding about them, offered equal pay but not equal work, encouraged to express their sexuality but denigrated as they do by advertising whose main purpose seems to be male titiilation.
The thesis is familiar ? and well laid out here; the solution offered is revolution, and that’s where the confusion starts. Much of the book is given over to the differences between radical feminism and abstract socialism, and if that sounds turgid, it often is.
The first sees woman’s estate as the simple result of male domination ? but female domination in its stead is no solution for the male population. Socialism attacks capitalism, identifying the economic bondage of women with that of the American Negro, and her emotional and mental servitude with those of students and other young people.
Miss Mitchell argues the ills of capitalism with spirit, but again, theory is not enough. Socialist countries don’t take much notice of women’s liberation and there are plenty of people in the capitalist world content to remain within the ranks of the oppressed.
So what sort of revolution and towards what? Miss Mitchell wants us to ask feminist questions and come up with some Marxist answers, but her plea for the solidarity of the oppressed gives way to calling liberation of other groups (like men?) Utopian, and even limiting the struggle to Western woman. The revolution must start somewhere, but does it lose some value if so particular?
Concrete proposals are thin on the Marxist ground. Expanding the concept of a career unit rather than simply doing away with the family, bringing women into production ? familiar enough suggestions.
But in the end, the central questions still seem blurred in theory. How to find a social organisation that allows for free expression and fulfilment for both oppressed halves of the human race? Is the materialist solution big enough for the question?
Ann Shearer
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