PART THREE
FEMINIST FUTURES

Chapter Eight
Beyond Gender versus Class

To students in my feminist theory classes who have piqued my curiosity with the contrast between their relative enthusiasm at reading radical feminist texts and their relative boredom at assignments drawn from Marxist and socialist feminist literature—at the same time many were also concerned about the indifference toward inequalities of economic class so characteristic of capitalism. And to Heidi Pomfret, whose provocative senior thesis on women and the FBI made me wonder exactly what it was that caused J. Edgar Hoover—for all his paranoia—to think feminism wasn't sufficiently threatening to necessitate its own branch of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence programs be dedicated so assiduously to derailing Communists, socialists, and black nationalists (among others) .

While the impact of feminism has continued to increase over the last several decades, the American Left continues to occupy a relatively much more marginal position, the latter's experience of ongoing crisis only aggravated by the dramatic collapse of the Communist world. It thus would not be surprising if many socialists are now interested in gender politics both from conviction and from a deep sense of doubt about whether traditional Marxist ideas and class-based strategies have become outdated or inadequate to the hoped-for dismantling of capitalism. Groping for alternative perspectives, some leftists and left academics have interpreted "new social movements" centered on gender, race, sexual orientation, and the environment as displaced forms of class-related contradictions; others envisage these movements as autonomous

(or relatively so) from the realm of the economic, welcoming them under the rubric of a cultural radicalism seen to offer fresh answers and promise.^[1]

On the other hand, Marxist and socialist feminism also emerged as major theoretical and activist components of the second-wave feminist movement. Usually involving women whose political associations originated in left as well as feminist causes, these feminisms stressed the relevance of class and class-based differences inherited from the Marxist model. As they incorporated feminist insights, one of their major concerns has been to hold onto class as a central analytical construct, thereby avoiding idealizing the set of structural commonalities shared by women as a group.^[2]

But whether we consider leftists looking toward gender to resuscitate flagging notions of class, or feminists looking toward class to more precisely analyze gender, the precise specifications of a gender/class relationship remain confused and confusing in at least one respect. Obviously, feminist-oriented socialists and socialist feminists alike agree that both capitalism and male-dominated (or patriarchal) societies are pernicious; members of each group concur that any deep-seated collective change has to uproot dominant/subordinate relationships enacted along the lines of both sex and class. More complicated, however, is the issue of how class- and gender-based strategies for change interrelate, especially in terms of the long-term aims of each. Is it possible to live in a society so affected by calls for gender equality that it is in effect no longer male-dominated, even as this society continues to be organized around capitalist economic principles and social psychology?

The same question posed in reverse—namely, whether gender subordination would continue in a society where class inequality had been lessened—is much less germane. For one thing, the short history of twentieth-century communisms has already offered something of an empirical answer, demonstrating that women's subordination in the privatized realms of sexuality and the family does not necessarily wither away with social ownership of production or with class-conscious ideologies. As this experience has made obvious at a very concrete level, gender is rooted in power structures that connect with, but by no means reduce to, a function of class. However, no similar evidence exists for our original question, since it has been the rule that social orders as we know them were, and continue to be, generally male-dominated. Exactly how the world would look if societies, capitalist and otherwise, ceased to be "patriarchal" remains a relevant though elusive and neces-

sarily theoretical question.^[3] Clearly, then, it is from within capitalism—still the dominant system both in and outside the United States—that any discussion of the conceptual and practical dimensions of a gender/ class relationship at present takes place.

I intend to discuss how and why realizing feminist goals might (or might not) destabilize capitalist class relations. Such an analysis must rely on how those feminist "goals" are defined. But different branches of the second-wave feminist movement have had quite varying intentions and definitions: whether their particular form is liberal, radical, Marxist or socialist, or, most recently, postmodern greatly affects the way in which feminists conceive a connection with class. For this reason, it seems appropriate to begin with an overview of the gender/class relationship from the perspective of feminism as an unfolding and multifaceted social movement. The next and concluding section, which focuses on specifying what it is that radical and socialists feminists propose to alter when they/we make critical reference to "patriarchy," speculates on the implications of replacing the overly general usage of this term (including mine) with a more concrete set of antipatriarchal goals. Here, we return to the thorny and unavoidably hypothetical issue of whether such articulated antipatriarchal demands—if met—could subvert, or would arguably be compatible with, the ongoing strength of capitalism.

My own view is that, ironically, it is the ideas of early radical feminism —rather than, as one might expect, those arising from Marxist and socialist forms of feminism, which explicitly underscored the importance of class—that pose the most potential trouble for the ongoing tranquillity of capitalism on specifically gendered grounds . I emphasize this point because if a challenge is not posed "on specifically gendered grounds," what is the difference between a feminist movement and one based on class? Unless one presupposes some clear-cut conceptual distinctions between the contents of gender- and class-based movements, the two collapse into one another, rendering the theoretical goal of this chapter rather meaningless.

It was radical feminism that promulgated the idea of women as a class, favored the restructuring of a family system based on monogamous marriage, and stressed the need to overthrow a system of male domination grounded on the commodification and colonization of women's bodies. Taken together, these beliefs have enormous, indeed mind-boggling, implications for reordering the social world and our assumptions—still often taken for granted—about the connections

between intimacy, sex, family, community, and society. And, interestingly enough, it is just these aspects of early radical feminist thought that have vanished most from sight and memory, although feminism has profoundly affected American society in many other respects (from issues of work and pay equity to violence against women, among a host of other possible examples) from the late 1960s until now. Despite feminism's explosive cultural significance, visions of restructuring "the" nuclear family and removing sexual controls exercised over women's bodies, with exceptions, are still largely utopian in the United States and elsewhere. If anything, this part of the feminist agenda has been delegitimized and defused in the context of antifeminist "backlash" (to use Susan Faludi's very apt term) among social and economic conservatives who harp on the importance of maintaining traditional family values.

But it is also important to remember that just as gender is not reducible to a function of class, so too class cannot be reduced to a function of gender. Even if radical feminist ideas, if realized, would destabilize current structures, they do not automatically or deterministically equate with anticapitalistic positions unless a connection between the two is directly drawn. Indeed, the most far-reaching of specifically feminist ideas may be manageable to some extent within the boundaries of a capitalism that has shown itself again and again to be extraordinarily resilient.

Gender and Class in the REcent Development of Feminism

As we review the gender/class relationship in feminist theory, liberal feminism can be summarized with some rapidity. This type of feminism, associated with liberal philosophy in general, uses the vocabulary of post-Enlightenment thought to press for the individual rights (including equal access to the public sphere) denied women in the development of postindustrial societies. Liberal feminism thereby represents one pole along a possible continuum of responses to the theoretical query posed: according to its perspectives, equality for women is a potentially satisfiable goal within the framework of a reformed and enlightened capitalism. Since liberal feminists do not question the existence of economic stratification, their viewpoint amounts to a belief that gender equality is achievable within an unscathed framework of stratified classes.

As a matter of self-interest, the claim is not especially contradictory when we take into account the class (usually middle to upper) and race (usually white) of most liberal feminists—a limited range of backgrounds for which they have been frequently called to task. A generally liberal feminist organization like the National Organization for Women (NOW) has promoted political and economic reforms largely of benefit to its own class- and race-specific constituency. However, such an interpretation of liberal feminism is too simple and mechanistic. As Zillah Eisenstein has provocatively suggested in discussing its "radical future," liberal feminism is internally split, because its own partial interests cannot be served without reference to the structurally disenfranchised position of women as a whole.^[4] Paradoxically, for middle- and upper-class women to realize a position of equity with men of their own class requires more than entree to previously closed professions and the achievement of economic parity (more than just "equal pay for equal work," in other words). In The Second Stage (1981), a book imbued with her characteristically liberal feminist spirit, the homemaker/career woman envisioned by Betty Friedan cannot function unless both the domestic and corporate worlds have been at least slightly reorganized to embrace her. Friedan called for businesses to provide career women (and men) with flexible hours and reasonably accessible child care in order for feminism to be practicable in and beyond the workplace.^[5]

Other changes, too, would flow from a reformist demand for equality. How can women become competitive actors in the public sphere if they do not also possess reproductive rights (including, of course, abortion on demand), as well as legal and economic protection from sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence? These problems, too, have long been and continue to be raised by NOW. Thus, liberal feminism has taken stands of eventual—though perhaps unintended—benefit to all women, even across dividing lines of race and class; in this respect, blanket criticisms of it have been unjustified. To be sure, many liberal feminists do endorse measures that would to a degree relieve the discriminatory excesses of class. For instance, it is not surprising (either in theory or practice) to find liberal feminists favoring the removal of legislative restrictions on federal funding for abortions, a class-biased measure that has been in place since the Hyde Amendment of 1976 . Other liberal feminist stands approve of more generous provision of jobs and child care for women who are poor. Nonetheless, virtually by definition, liberal feminists hold that such reforms are realizable within

the framework of a capitalist economy. Even if its stands may have cross-class consequences, liberal feminism is not inclined to confront capitalism head on.

But this critique of liberal feminism's limitations, and the relatively privileged class position of its proponents, is by now standard in the growing lexicon of feminist theory. Not so well known are radical feminist attitudes toward capitalism, perhaps a topic more deserving of attention since the two groups' overlapping class and race backgrounds have occasionally caused their ideas to be misleadingly aligned. For example, while bell hooks's critiques of contemporary white feminism in Ain't I a Woman? (1981) and Feminist Theory (1984) have supplied sharp and important correctives to class and race biases in liberal and radical feminist texts alike, she and other critics have sometimes too readily dismissed the importance of differences in the two strands' evaluations of capitalism.^[6]

For there are three reasons for claiming that radical feminism—unlike its liberal counterpart—is, as a brand of feminist thought, at least implicitly anticapitalist and cognizant of class. First, for a number of women, association with 1970s radical feminist groups such as Red-stockings and the Feminists in itself demonstrated a conviction that one was in principle against all types of oppression. Feminism's appeal was that it recognized gender as a form of dominant/subordinate relationship that other social movements—especially those of the Left—were determined to deny and with which they were often (consciously or unconsciously) in collusion. But that recognition did not render invalid those different movements' claims about class or racist or heterosexist discrimination in American society; on the contrary, for many early radical feminists, it was virtually a given that these other oppressions also had to be addressed and somehow gotten beyond.

The second reason for arguing that a latent anticapitalist orientation characterizes radical feminist thought can be culled from its early theoretical writings. An often-noted example is The Dialectic of Sex (1970), premised around Shulamith Firestone's assertion that a "sex class" system between men and women constitutes the deepest and most fundamental form of enslavement. Firestone came to this conclusion after having first objected to Friedrich Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in what is likewise, by now, a well-worn critique. Firestone did not take Engels to task because he emphasized class, but because his insights into class were not thoroughgoing enough .

Even if capitalist relations of production were overthrown, she posited in this early reading, relations of reproduction that maintain women in a secondary position would not necessarily follow suit. She argued that sexual politics are rooted in biology; they are not connected with the level of the economic by any simple relationship of causality. By extension, Marx and Engels were incorrect and indeed naive to presume that any critique based on class alone—even on the nearly universal expropriation of workers' wealth—could eliminate oppression in general: contrary to their imaginings, labor is not a sufficiently inclusive category to bring about this desired goal.

Instead, Firestone substituted the alternative proposition that full abolition of the sex class system would bring broader human liberation in its wake. Sexual subordination precedes that of labor, she reasoned, and thus may be the paradigmatic model out of which all future relations proceed . Why, then, wouldn't a more universal (and generalizable) radicalism be one based on calling for the complete elimination of gender as an elementary structure of social organization? With this interpretation, Firestone emerges as perhaps the first "standpoint theorist" of second-wave American feminism, convinced that the overthrowing of unacceptable conditions as experienced from the position or perspective of women would lead beyond capitalism to a genuinely more classless world.^[7]

Finally, a third anticlass interpretation can be culled from radical feminism, albeit (again) indirectly. In a similar vein as Firestone, Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey (1974) set forth the notion that women are a class by a particular set of criteria that unites this group in certain respects despite other social differentiations like economic class, race, ethnicity, nation, age, or sexual orientation. In so doing, not only did Atkinson seek to advance feminist theory, but she also rebelled from a Marxism that devalued gender by according legitimacy only to economic differentiations of "class."^[8] But while Atkinson did not make the connection plain (and may not have been interested in doing so at a time when the concept of gender seemed so much more deserving of attention), the vision she associated with women-as-a-class could not be achieved unless there were also major alterations in the capitalist class system indicted by Marxists. Just as liberal feminists are forced in spite of themselves to fall back on a radical feminist concept like treating women as a group (because pressing for their partial interests requires referring to the structural situation of women generally), so a

radical feminist like Atkinson would have to invoke economic class—whether or not she actually did so—for her theoretical argument in favor of gendered class to be consistent.

Just as Eisenstein titled her thesis about political paradoxes within feminism The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism , so I might analogously call my argument "The Socialist Future of Radical Feminism." For if women really are in some respects conceivable politically as a class, and feminism à la Atkinson seeks for women to be "liberated" as such, then measures to eradicate discrimination suffered by all that class's members—women across economic class, women of color, women of different sexual orientations—would have to be included in any genuinely radical feminist program. Given the concerns that continue to be more and more pressing in the 1990s, there can be little doubt that such a program would have to address poverty as it affects huge numbers of women. Logically, wouldn't it minimally have to include day care and health care made universally available at some reasonable level of quality, affordable housing guaranteed, family allowances provided to single mothers now in onerous dilemmas that foreclose their chance to feel free, viable long-term alternatives offered the millions of battered women who currently have nowhere to go, and prostitution legalized and no longer frequently chosen as a matter of economic survival? Clearly none of this would be possible without commitment to a fairly substantial redistribution of class resources such as socialists.

But even if radical feminist theory is thus presumptively anticapitalist, there are good reasons to object that this position needed, and needs, more explicit articulation. It makes little sense to recognize, as did most radical feminists, that leftist men downplayed sexism by subordinating women's concerns to calls for class solidarity but not also to acknowledge that radical feminism was similarly at risk of (unconsciously) subsuming class and race bias under the theoretical aegis of women-as-a-class. In both cases, injury is done when reflexive analysis stops short of itself, when we treat as obvious what can only become fully clarified by being brought quite self-consciously to our attention. Thus, allowing anticapitalist beliefs to remain largely implicit depoliticizes radical feminism by contributing to an overly general and nonspecific usage of the word "patriarchy." If women really are a class, then the programmatic question of what needs to happen for all women to enjoy a collectively greater share of social wealth is too important for radical feminists to leave obscure or taken for granted.

A further disadvantage of leaving this issue unexamined becomes clear when we ask another question: what about men? A problem with deriving anticapitalist leanings solely from our third interpretation—from Atkinson's positing of women-as-a-class—is that there is then no justification for asserting that radical feminists would also support socialism because men should likewise be its beneficiaries. Would this branch of feminism advocate large-scale redistribution of income even if it could be shown that such a change would affect women's interests only minimally? If indeed radical feminists are opposed to all oppression, then the answer will be yes. Yet to arrive only indirectly, secondarily, at the oppressiveness of economic class leaves radical feminist theory vulnerable to a problem of essentialism also faced by other social movements that base themselves on what has come to be called "identity politics"—namely, how does one get from the interests of the part to the whole? For if a conceptual foundation for moving from specific to generally human concerns is not explicitly laid at a movement's inception, how will it ever arise? And how does a movement avoid maintaining or creating other forms of human suffering in the course of eradicating its own?

These issues are pertinent for any leftist—say, a male—insofar as incorporating them would also place him on firmer theoretical ground. For him, a related set of considerations includes awareness of the following. First, it cannot implicitly be presumed that other modes of discrimination like gender and race will disappear with a dissolution of class stratification. For attaining socialism cannot be counted on to dispel these other forms of discrimination more generally or in any simple manner. Second, social movements are most internally consistent when desirous of their own eventual eradication, when they wish that the "other," as a party inimical to themselves, will one day disappear. In the leftist's case, this latter consideration contains the idea of some mutual human ground being an ongoing potentiality even between "capitalists" and "workers" as currently constituted. And it might also include the open airing of concerns about excessive repression during periods of social transition, repression that should be avoided so that new rounds of resentment are not reproduced and a sense of common humanity precluded or destroyed.

An analogy can also be made between the radical feminist and a minority group member—again, perhaps, a male—who sees his primary political identification as based on race. He, too, is unable to presume that any automatic relation exists between class- and race-based forms

of discrimination (or, for that matter, between gender- and race-based forms of discrimination). Clearly, eliminating the former bias relates to, but is not identical with, overcoming the latter. Yet the same pitfall arises for this person were he to support socialism only because it could improve the lives of minorities, and not because of advantages that bring potential benefits to all human beings across race as well. In the example of race, too, we need to find formulations that fulfill several simultaneous requirements. Certainly identity politics have legitimacy: after all, minorities and other discriminated-against groups designate "others" because they themselves have been so designated and are obviously the persons most affected by, and likely to challenge, the particular "ism" of race. But it is also important to reflect on how theories constructed in response about "race" (or "gender" or "class," for that matter) can explicitly include provisions aimed at allowing for these concepts to themselves eventually pass away.

Coming back to radical feminist thought, this analysis may itself help in clarifying this brand of feminism's general perspective on the relationship between gender and class. The promulgation of notions like a "sex class" system (Firestone) and "women-as-a-class" (Atkinson) have been crucial—probably indispensable—to feminism's theoretical development into a social movement grounded in experiences of oppression shared by women as a group. Without ideas such as these, little basis exists to distinguish the contents of gender- from class-related movements. But while most radical feminists were also implicitly anticapitalist, this opposition to economic structures needed elaboration for an insistence on ending oppression in general to be most consistent.

For there is always a leap required, for any social movement, between believing in particular and in general interests—between the possibility of ever forging common human ground between women and men, between the economically dispossessed and the possessors, between one subordinated race and another—which can only be resolved in one (or both) of two ways. Either a given social movement admits that being against oppression in general requires moving beyond narrow definitions of self-interest, or it redefines self-interest in a way that encompasses a general humanity. It may attempt to do both at once, though such theoretical efforts are not difficult. In this respect, a weakness of standpoint theories (whether as implied in Firestone, or later explicitly framed in the writings of Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding, or Patricia Hill Collins) may be a tendency to seek conceptual solutions that avoid confrontation with the apparent impossibility of ever entirely

closing this gap between self-interest and the interests of an other. For it may be useless, like aiming at an infinitely regressing target, to search for the "deepest" oppression, the person who has been most victimized, or the perfect standpoint that—once eliminated or attained—will eliminate all isms in a domino effect: the problem is that some "deeper" oppression can always be found. When we come back to the instance of our gender/class relationship, therefore, it is critical to insist in this present case of radical feminism on both the validity of women-as-a-class and the recognition that human well-being requires a much more equitable redistribution of resources than currently exists in our class-and race-divided society. Both explicitly specified beliefs have to coexist as components of a radical feminist theory serious about its opposition to women's and human oppression .

But it was precisely into this relative omission within radical feminist theory—this apparent lack of explicitness—that Marxist and socialist feminists leapt by calling for the class side of the gender/class balance to be addressed more overtly. Without doubt, neither Marxist nor socialist feminisms can be faulted for failing to acknowledge the importance of class. On the contrary, a major goal of both strands was to compensate for the relative silence about class in the liberal and radical feminisms that came before them (one of their corollary goals, conversely, being to compensate for the absence of gender in the priorities of Marxism and socialism). Marxist as well as socialist feminists underlined a need for integrating class- and gender-related perspectives, and each agreed on what they mutually took to have been radical feminism's chief flaw: its inattention to issues of "historical specificity." By this they meant that radical feminist references to male-dominated societies were objectionable not so much because of any lack of specificity about "patriarchy" and its programmatic ramifications, but because the term had been employed as though universally valid to describe a transhistoric feature of societies across space and time.

Against this usage, Marxist and socialist feminists counterposed their commitment to examining how patriarchy has operated in historically specific settings, and especially how it has meshed with those societies' varying class structures. These branches have been highly influential in the history of feminist theory itself, bequeathing an emphasis on difference that has continued to be a dominant theme of the feminist movement as a whole in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to radical feminism, though, this approach concentrates less on the differing experiences that separate women-as-a-group from men and is relatively

more focused on differences between women. In the opinion of Marxist and socialist feminists, a problem with radical feminism was that it did not discuss, as Rosemary Tong puts it, how "The wife of a Carrington (Dynasty ) does not experience patriarchy in the same way as an Edith Bunker (All in the Family ) or a Claire Huxtable (The Bill Cosby Show )."^[9] Not only consciousness of class but race as well are thereby brought quite explicitly back into feminism, both by virtue of these groups' clearly anticapitalist positions and through their concern about recalling that indeed the needs of all women do not equate with the needs of those who are upper class and white.

But important differences exist between Marxist and socialist feminists themselves, as well as within socialist feminism. For one thing, Marxist feminism has been criticized for having gone so far in the direction of remembering class that it loses the distinctively gendered rationale for its existence. It is a criticism that seems justified insofar as Marxist feminists have taken on more class- than gender-related causes—for example, a campaign in favor of "wages for housework" and, later, the issue of comparable worth.^[10]

From this theoretical angle, Marxist feminists have also been accused of recycling Engels's reductionism, which dates back to The Origin of the Family . Like his work, theirs echoes the claim that public ownership of property would uproot gender subordination to a greater degree than seems reasonably supportable. From this reiteration, perhaps, comes Marxist feminists' tendency to devote more attention to issues of production than to those of reproduction, sexuality, biology, and the body. And, though undoubtedly concerned about Marxism's reliance on allegedly gender-blind categories, this branch of feminism does not question the efficacy of the categories themselves. Thus, the older concept of "labor"—was opposed to sex, say, as argued by radical feminism—continues to be placed in an elevated and primary position. To be sure, Marxist feminists do incorporate earlier feminist reservations about the nuclear family into their analyses, attempting to increase the value accorded women's labor in private as well as public spheres. Still, the overall effect may have been to turn back in the direction from which radical feminism initially rebelled when it broke away from Engels and the Left. From radical feminism's vagueness about issues of class that are partially separable from those of gender, Marxist feminism reverts to lack of specificity about gendered issues that are partially separable from those of class.

I should observe that the above critique is hardly my own but one

proffered by other feminists, particularly "socialist feminists" who have therefore attempted to differentiate themselves somewhat from their Marxist sisters. For many socialist feminists, a major problem of Marxist feminism was that it did not take the persistent endurance of patriarchy seriously enough . Within socialist feminist writings, then, one finds the development of the concept of "capitalist patriarchy,"^[11] employed in such a way that it serves several distinguishing functions. By reinserting the emphasis on "patriarchy" taken from radical feminist thought into its own gender/class equation, socialist feminists sought to move an unstable theoretical pendulum closer to the middle. Their desire was this time to correct for that relative inattention being paid by the Marxist strand to specifically gender-based notions like those set forth in earlier works by Firestone, Atkinson, or Kate Millett.^[12] Probably, they suspected that to omit in-depth study of sexuality and the body—of reproductive and sexual controls exerted by men over women—tripped Marxist feminism of most of what could be dubbed distinctively (or radically) "feminist" about it.

At the same time, the idea of capitalist patriarchy attests to socialist feminists' wish to theoretically meld together the two traditions of class-and gender-based analyses, particularly since the concerns of each were thought to intersect and overlap in actual social life. Yes, patriarchal structures seemed to reappear across cultures and class systems, perhaps more repetitively than feminists intent on emphasizing "difference" admitted. But these structures nonetheless assumed historically distinct forms, with varying consequences for women and men in different positions. Consequently, the proper focus of socialist feminism ought be on patriarchy's incarnation in its specific interaction with capitalism: we live neither solely under patriarchy, nor under capitalism, but within a social system that is a hybrid form. One result of this focus is speculation within socialist feminist writings about "dual" versus "unified" systems theory—a debate that has been resonant of doctrinaire disputes, slightly reminiscent of analogous arguments over textual interpretations between (usually male) Marxists. For some, as exemplified in Juliet Mitchell's psychoanalytically influenced interpretation, patriarchy is taken to be more ideological or psychological than material in comparison to capitalism. For others, as Heidi Hartmann's account demonstrates, both patriarchy and capitalism are viewed as materially grounded structures.^[13]

In addition, dual and unified systems theorists differed over the degree to which they saw patriarchy and capitalism operating together or

apart. If they are so intertwined as to be inseparable, as on one side Iris Young suggests, shouldn't there be unifying concepts that reflect this merging (such as taking the term "division of labor" to describe the simultaneously class and gendered forms of work as it is experienced in both the public world of jobs and the domestic world of families)?^[14] Or, as Hartmann contends, perhaps it is more significant to note that even if gender and class oppression overlap, they are still based in "dual systems. "Without this addendum, Engels's reductionism might be repeated not only among Marxist but among socialist feminists as well. The significance of this last point should be emphasized, since it relates to practical questions of strategy in addition to theory. An advantage of Hartmann's argument is that by insisting on a dyadic approach (and thereby on the mutual irreducibility of gender and class), socialist feminism still preserves the conceptual distinction Marxist feminism threatened to blur. And since the roots of capitalist patriarchy are taken to be dual, theoretical legitimacy is accorded the strategic tenet that feminist organizations will continue to require autonomous status for quite some time in any pre- or postsocialist society. (Paradoxically, it may be the very ease with which a given society accepts this autonomy—not just in relation to feminism but for any social movement that similarly has suffered past discrimination—that indicates preconditions for a movement's eventual obsolescence in a pre- or postsocialist world.)

Socialist feminism, then, deserves credit for coming closer to giving adequate expression to the two sides of a gender/class relationship than one finds in the respective versions proffered by liberal, radical, or Marxist feminisms. Liberal feminists, it may be recalled, believe gender liberation possible within capitalism; radical and Marxist feminists would not, though for different reasons that have different strategic implications. For radical feminists, the question is absurd because gender liberation, if achieved, would already have pointed beyond capitalism; for them, one should focus on the need to eliminate patriarchy in order to be rid of capitalism and women's subordination. Marxist feminism, however, tends to rely primarily on eliminating capitalism to overcome patriarchy's ills. For both, attacking one system first is hoped to bring down the other later . But for socialist feminists, it is capitalist patriarchy that must be transcended: the two systems interrelate, and therefore must be simultaneously and mutually opposed in order for gender-based oppression to end.

On the other hand, I am not sure that the "unhappy marriage" between Marxism and feminism, a union Hartmann and Young criticized

in a volume of the same name, really ends up all that much happier after divorce and remarriage with socialist feminism. For one thing, references to the workings of "capitalist patriarchy" instead of "patriarchy" do not go very far toward a concrete definition of what it means to desire the undoing of either or both forms of social organization. It is unclear whether "patriarchy" is clarified, or made even vaguer, by being re-wed with class in a way that is arguably rather mechanical. And regardless of their undoubtedly good intentions, did socialist feminists' writings about "capitalist patriarchy" really constitute the substance of a new theory, unified or otherwise? Or perhaps instead of a whole new theory they offered a perspective , one constituted mostly by juxtaposing two traditions' previously more developed sets of ideas within a worldview opposed to both capitalism and patriarchy.

Moreover, it is unclear whether socialist feminist formulations in fact succeeded at redressing Marxist feminism's proclivity to place more emphasis on the "Marxist" than "feminist" part of its name. Again, such redress was certainly socialist feminists' intention. But language found in such formulations as even Hartmann's definition of patriarchy could be taken to signify otherwise: "we define patriarchy as a set of social relations which has a material base. . .. The material base of patriarchy is men's control over women's labor power. That control is maintained by excluding women from access to necessary economically productive resources and by restricting women's sexuality ."^[15] The quotation suggests that the issue of women's sexuality is contained within that of their labor power by asserting that "restricting" the former is part of a larger project aimed at controlling the latter. But while in one sense this is true (and Hartmann immediately adds that this control includes "access to women's bodies for sex"), it is also the case that the statement's form reproduces the same subordination of gender to class that was its very purpose to avoid.

Moreover, why is patriarchy's "material basis" control over women's labor power rather than, say, control of and over their/our bodies? The implications of the two contentions would not be identical, though in a sense Hartmann is right. Sex can and does often involve women's labor. This is true indirectly, as at a workplace where harassment is experienced, but also directly: in marriage and other intimate noneconomic relations that often provide services revolving around housework and child rearing as well as "access to women's bodies"; and in economic relations (in which women are "sex workers" or models in pornographic or commercial enterprises) aimed at providing similar access.

Yet sex goes beyond this as well, as would the meaning of an alternative definition of patriarchy if it also included the element of controls exercised over women's bodies . For such controls are likewise exerted by virtue of the phenomenon of objectification, the reification of women's bodies that is the opposite of labor, entailing not doing but treatment as though one were a thing . Sexual domination includes what has been called the male "gaze" coming to pervade the images of, and life under, patriarchal culture; it involves delimiting women's reproductive and sexual freedom and choices, including their/our access to each other's bodies; it entails violence actual or threatened that may take place outside as well as within homes or jobs—all of which relates to, but is not exhausted through, the concept of labor. This suggests that it would have been more theoretically defensible to subsume labor under sex rather than the other way around—sex in this regard appearing to be the more overarching category. That instead sex is made once more a subset of labor (as gender had been made a subset of class) hints at socialist feminist ideas, too, having been influenced more by the dominant assumptions of traditional Marxism than by radical feminist thought. In spite of socialist feminism's criticisms of Marxist feminism and of its conscious intentions, then, even here the "socialist" half may have come to take precedence over the "feminist"—leaving the gender/ class split not so equally distributed after all.

Of course, and again in socialist feminism's defense, an analysis of several authors' essays does not necessarily reveal the characteristics of a strand of feminism as a whole. Moreover, topics addressed by socialist feminists did tend to include feminist concerns related to sexual as well as economic controls, expressed not only theoretically but through political activism. A case in point was CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse), a New York City-based socialist feminist group with which I was involved for a short period of time in the late 1970s. CARASA sought to link two issues originating obviously from more feminist than socialist concerns—the right to abortion and the right not to be sterilized—under the common rubric of guaranteed reproductive freedom for all women. Consciousness about gender, class, and race was thereby incorporated through the recognition that forced sterilization has very disproportionately affected poor (and minority) women, reflecting attitudes that go back in American history to the eugenicist leanings of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger herself. Simply noticing this problem markedly differentiated CARASA from pro-choice organizations of liberal feminist leanings like NOW

and NARAL (then the National Abortion Rights Action League), as did the socialist feminist group's early and consistent concern about the class-skewed consequences of the halt in federal funding for Medicaid abortions.

However, while "socialist" and "feminist" impulses were both commendably apparent in such political-theoretical efforts, it again strikes me that the "socialist feminist" form is somehow intrinsically problematic. Not only does the conjunction still appear to favor the socialist side, but it also subtly dilutes the strength of its radical feminist contents. To the extent such dilution in fact takes place, it clearly does so without intention—but why does it occur at all?

I can think of two causes that may be more important, because more deeply rooted, than reasons already mentioned. The first could be characterized as more political, the second as theoretical in character. Returning to the reproductive rights activism example just cited, we might note that NARAL has had relatively greater staying power and influence over time than a group like CARASA, which dissolved. Certainly, one obvious explanation for this relative marginality is that CARASA was handicapped to some degree right from the start: neither socialism nor the plight of poor women attracts much sympathy in the United States; moreover, the comparable affluence of their constituency overall tends to accord organizations like NARAL or NOW increased social influence and power. But I believe that national groups such as NOW and NARAL reap additional benefits simply from being built around unadulteratedly feminist platforms . Perhaps their relatively more direct stress on issues of major concern to women, such as sexuality and sexual freedom, has worked much to their advantage.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine some advantage not accruing from emphasizing women-as-a-group, particularly when feminist theory and practices are surveyed in the developmental context I have been sketching. If feminism has been distinctive in its insistence on structural characteristics of women's experience that unite women's experience across other categories like economic class, race, or ethnicity, then that very focus on commonalities rather than differences was the sine qua non for the movement's emergence and initially constituted its most radical core. After all, a fundamental criterion for becoming a movement—any movement, arguably—is escaping the influence of ideologies inculcating the belief that one's situation is merely individual, one among many outcomes, and not a sign of collective tendencies and structures that can be generalized. In the case of feminism, women had to break from

the particular mythologies of patriarchy—but the same principle should hold true for any attempt to escape conditions imposed by a dominant group on subordinates who are encouraged to perceive only their separateness.

Therefore, historically speaking, the importance of having managed to achieve a common identity means that reintroducing considerations of difference would have to be undertaken with some degree of caution lest doing so reproduce, play into, or somehow (however unconsciously) feed this ideological desire of parties in power to prevent the relatively powerless from realizing their similarities with one another. In no way does this statement imply that just as careful attention ought not have been paid—as it has—to opposing interests between women (as in the case of divergences of class, race, or sexual orientation among various feminists themselves). To the contrary, confronting these issues is and has been a historically important necessity. Nor should this be taken to suggest that feminist theory should not be rich and diversified in the currents it contains (a very positive aspect of the evolutionary stress on difference), or that feminists do not need to organize separately in many instances precisely because women's experiences diverge in highly significant ways.

Rather, what I am contending is simply that the legitimacy of difference needs to be insisted on in such a way that the radical moment of asserting commonality is also neither lost nor diluted. In order to preserve second-wave feminism's original power, then, the women's movement may have to acknowledge (as here) its commitment both to ending class and race oppression and to an some overarching framework that continues to declare the conceptual necessity of women-as-a-group.^[16] With regard to the gender/class relationship focused on here, then, there is an advantage to referring to this movement as (radically) feminist and socialist, rather than as relying on the labels "Marxist feminist" or "socialist feminist" per se.

Otherwise, there is a risk that in its eagerness to correct for past omissions (say, its relative inattention to issues of class, traditionally defined), the movement may also fall into an old habit of apologizing for having at last realized some sense of common cause. Ironically, for women, this "mea culpa" mode is overdetermined, reinforced by the debilitating processes of gender socialization itself. At the same time, not surprisingly, such apologies threaten to weaken feminism politically. For the 1980s and 1990s backlash so thoroughly depicted by Faludi can also be viewed as a slightly shaken male-dominated order defending

itself against fledgling gains made collectively by women-as-a-class during the 1960s and 1970s; a countermovement came into being determined to deny the truth of a commonality that had been perceived and acted on.

Given this contemporary context, it seems especially critical for feminists to be sensitive toward the possibility of this enormous backlash seeping into feminism itself in extremely subtle ways. Optimally, however, it seems possible to understand "difference," politically as well as theoretically, in a way that neither (a) dilutes the power of women acting in concert for their collective interests, (b) denies the importance of accepting and politically acting on the significance of simultaneous differences, nor (c) reinforces the confidence of a male-dominated and capitalistic society in its ability to perpetuate the gender, class, and race divisions maintained between people in general that it finds so useful.

But there is one other subtle reason why, as a political matter, referring to a movement as radical and socialist may have advantages over the conjunction "socialist feminist." This last consideration takes us back one more time to theory and to Engels's Origin of the Family , as well as toward some concluding thoughts.

Engels Again, and Notes Toward an Antipatriarchal Conclusion

That Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1845) has been so often cited, including here, attests to the influence of its thesis on the theories about gender and class of the feminist strands investigated above. As seen, Firestone's critique of Engels served to further radical feminist ideas, while Marxist feminists agreed with and directly expanded on many of his observations. But socialist feminists too, while critical of Engels's reductionism, were affected by his position to the extent that the concept of labor came to subsume that of sex.

I would like to use Engels myself: perhaps Marxist and even socialist feminists have interpreted The Origin of the Family in a way that, though accurate, does not emphasize a potentially radical feminist kernel that could be culled even from Engels's own argument. Indeed, highlighting this kernel allows us to avoid the theoretical dilution of feminism that to this point has resulted from incorporating his orientation—an orientation that tends to subordinate gender to class. In offering this interpretation, I will also show its closer compatibility with radical fem-

inism, employing this altered conception to begin to define a more specific antipatriarchal program, and to suggest a final clarification of the gender/class relation with which we began.

Let us go back to one aspect of Engels's argument, very briefly. According to Engels, women's oppression originated early on, with the amassing of surplus in the hunting sphere occupied by men. Once the embryonic basis of private property was in place because surplus now existed, men had an inheritance to provide a legitimate heir. But "legitimate" sons could only be ensured, and patrilineal/patriarchal relations embarked on, if women were forced into monogamous marriages to which they (but not necessarily their partners) remained loyal. From this came the overthrow of mother right, which, in Engels's oft-quoted description, was also "the world historical defeat of the female sex . The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children."^[17]

The theory, then, provides not only an analysis of the origins of a family form that enslaved women but also a strategic implication for how change could be accomplished. If gender subordination arises with private property, so it might end when conditions surrounding the social organization of labor and production were transformed. According to Marx and Engels's logic, women's subordination should wither as women moved out of the degraded realm of the household and into the public sphere: then, their economic dependence on men and sexual prostitution within marriage could be eliminated. And gender oppression ought also fade if, analogously, women's labor in the home (including child rearing and household chores) were socialized.

But the problem with this analysis is that once more, the concept of sexual reification has been submerged within an overly encompassing category of labor. Look closely again at Engels's words: the woman becomes a slave; she is forced to provide sexual services and to bear children. Engels has characterized her situation more as a laborer than as an object . As we saw when considering Hartmann's definition, however, the distinction is by no means an insignificant one. To envisage her as an object, as objectified, has quite different ramifications than seeing her as a worker in or outside the home. For one thing, woman's objectified status doesn't just go away when she moves spatially from one site to another, from domestic to public places. Rather, as previously noted, it is her, according to the socially constructed claims of any reifying ideology that leads to treating people more as things than

as human. This tendency to reify the other as "object" has certainly been a key element of women's subordination, as Simone de Beauvoir described in The Second Sex . Thus, objectification may be present wherever she goes, whether on the streets or in a kitchen or office or restaurant or bar, thereby referring to a larger reality than her laboring personae alone reveal.

Second, and even more critical, the failure to emphasize woman's reification into a thing obscures a related reality—namely, that with the arrival of patriarchy, women themselves become a type and extension of private property. Given his cynicism toward marriage, it is hard to believe that Engels would dissent from this interpretation; yet significantly, the point was left mostly implicit and given relatively short shrift in the Origin of Private Property . Nonetheless, we can deduce from Engels's argument that male domination turns women into objects of exchange. It is not just that women are subordinated for procreative purposes (though this factor is evidently present as well), but they have also become valued possessions in themselves, a source of asserting power between men . Moreover, above all, it is their bodies that patriarchal property holders now seek to dominate, to control, and ultimately to own. Thus women are forced into constituting a major form of capital: what we might call here "sexual capital." As Pierre Bourdieu has observed, capital can clearly be incarnated in shapes other than the economic, narrowly construed—from social and cultural to bodily manifestations (see chapter 4's discussion of beauty).^[18]

But for Engels, what this interpretation augurs is that his strategic blueprint for change indeed is likely to fail. If sexual capital resides in women's bodies, then it is hard to see how merely moving women into the workplace, or socializing their labor in the private sphere, could fully resolve the more complex character and origins of gender subordination. Though these changes are important in their own right, as I have been arguing all along, they nevertheless do not go to the heart of patriarchal authority. Rather, women have to take back their own identities and bodies (a collective action quite irreducible to labor, spatially or otherwise), reappropriating the sexual capital that has been expropriated from them. This conclusion is a distinctively radical feminist one, and implies that Marxist and socialist feminisms' analyses might have started to merge with the radical strand's had this latent notion in the The Origin of the Family been brought to the surface. That neither Engels nor Marx developed the connection between gender subordination and the objectification and commodification of women's

bodies may point both to their writings' own historical specificity and to profoundly repetitive patterns of patriarchal bias through history.

With this, we arrive back at the question of the gender/class relation in feminist theory. It remains radical indeed for women to take back ownership of their/our own bodily integrity—a sense of bodily freedom still elusive, given ongoing fear of crime, the reality of violence against women, and continuing sexual objectification. Yet, to do so necessarily entails a challenge posed to both men-as-a-group and capitalism (since capitalism remains largely male-dominated worldwide). If women's bodies really have come to constitute capital—sexual capital—then a radically feminist movement intent on repossession might have a destabilizing effect on capitalism systemically just by threatening to dismantle a property relationship so strongly desired, so still vested and invested in. It might well be disturbing for propertied men to feel unsure about their ability to show off "their" attractive women to one another, or to be unsure if access to women's bodies could still be proffered as a reward for, and concomitant to, entrepreneurial initiative. And what if working-class and poor women (the latter still disproportionately also minorities in the United States because of racism) were to rebel from their oppression as women? Might not such a rebellion catch capitalism off guard by undermining gender-based domination as a compensation for the disaffection of poor and working-class—that is, otherwise unpropertied —men? (Again, see chapter 4's discussion of beauty as currently constructed to often comprise a form of capital in and of itself.)

By this juncture, I hope it is clear that, as I initially suggested, radical feminism's focus on women-as-a-class may have more promise than traditional class politics for troubling capitalism on specifically gendered and antipatriarchal grounds . But making this claim less vague and general remains a complicated matter, one that deserves an essay all its own. Here it must suffice to note that the project of "taking back the body," or reclaiming sexual capital, would have to include elements familiar as well as new. Certainly, anything that involves women maintaining control of their/our bodily integrity is critical. This includes, quite obviously, continuing what perforce has become a very passionate fight to maintain abortion rights. Also significant, though little discussed since CARASA, would be preventing sterilization abuse, as well as ensuring broader antipoverty measures (including universally available child care) to enable women to support the children they do wish to bear. And a focus on control of our bodies just as clearly has to entail concern for lesbian rights and freedoms, both legally and culturally.

This widening circle also would have to encompass protection from sexual harassment at the workplace, as well as from sexual violence in the home. Providing every woman who needs it with a shelter from domestic abuse would itself take a fairly large redistribution of social resources.

Perhaps less obvious than the above measures would be those directed at combating the connection between sex and sexism, so closely intertwined in patriarchal societies as to be virtually indistinguishable. Thus, a reconstituted new wave of feminism will have both to be pro-sex and pro-pleasure (so that taking back our bodies is the opposite of repressing them, or reinforcing a culture in which sexual expression is denied), and to be bent on breaking current ties between sex and sexism .^[19] This might mean using consciousness-raising groups (too infrequent since the 1960s) as well as education and demonstrations about the homogenized and age-discriminatory images of women's bodies that predominate in popular culture, from film to magazines to pornography. Women should also own much more of these media than yet at present, so that women themselves can increasingly determine how they are represented—again, across the board, from mainstream to pornographic images. A radical feminist movement taking back ownership of expropriated sexual capital may also wish to have far more explicit control of the sex industry itself. The resulting changes could include support for women who presently work in this industry (especially since prostitutes, or sex workers, are probably among the least protected and most ignored women in patriarchal cultures, even by other women) and, at the same time, measures to enable women to leave this industry if they so desired (i.e., if they originally entered not from choice but because there were no other economic options).

While these prescriptive "notes toward an antipatriarchal conclusion" are proferred in only sketchy form here, they are by no means merely utopian. In retrospect, surely many of radical feminism's ideas about gender must have seemed even more utopian in the heyday of groups such as Redstockings and the Feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And while much of that early vision has not been realized, those ideas had enough impact to teach us not to frown upon dreaming. Both radical feminist consciousness toward women's potential as a group, and the explicit advocacy of socialist aims that address the depth of class and race subordination, will be required if oppression in general is to be opposed. Had such a consciousness existed before, the otherwise paranoid J. Edgar Hoover might not have been so secure in his

conviction that feminism posed no potential disturbance to the gendered and classed relations of power he sought illegally to protect. Yet it is with the future that this chapter is most concerned, having been inspired not only by a student's suspicions about Hoover's lack of interest in feminism but by many young people whose own feminist contributions remain to be felt in decades to come.

Chapter Nine
Third-Wave Feminisms and Beyond

In 1991 I wrote a column in the Village Voice calling for a "third wave" of feminism.^[1] At the time, many friends, colleagues, students, and activists with whom I discussed feminist politics shared the belief that new inspiration was needed to reverse the debilitating effects of the Reagan-Bush years. Thus, the potential of third-wave feminism was that it augured the revitalization of a movement, not merely the renaissance of a term. It symbolized the possibility of shifting from the defensive posture of the 1980s and 1990s to a collective assertiveness much more characteristic of the feminist movement during the 1960s and 1970s.

But feminist "collectivity" itself needed to evolve in the direction of broader participation and democratization. A third wave of feminism would be continuous with and yet different from its predecessors, reflecting its unique historical moment. It would not abandon but would further realize transformative hopes expressed by many early radical feminists and feminist radicals (many of whom had backgrounds more diverse in class, racial, and sexual orientation, and were concerned about these diverse forms of discrimination, than is usually recognized in dominant media depictions of an allegedly only middle- to upper-class women's movement).^[2] Yet issues concerning race, class, and sexual discrimination would be placed at the core of a feminist program even more publicly and thoroughly than the overall movement has succeeded in doing previously;^[3] its leadership would reflect a third wave's renewed determination to base itself on the concerns of all women (thereafter

bringing immense benefits to all human beings, as befits hopes for a world in which feminism itself would eventually become unnecessary).

Simultaneously, and just as important, whereas the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a patterned splitting of sex from sexism over specifically gender-related debates on which this book centers—particularly pornography, beauty, prostitution, sadomasochism, and violence against women—third-wave feminism would incline toward developing more synthetic political positions to which large numbers of women could relate across other social divides. Our need for a gender-based movement continues because controls still exerted over women's bodies—from objectification in media to experiences of violence in many women's everyday lives—also unite persons who are exposed to such discriminations as "women." Consequently, a revitalized movement would certainly applaud the development of the varied feminisms that have grown over the last several decades; at the same time, it would not in reaction minimize or apologize for the significance of feminist convictions held in common. On the one hand, it would not hold onto an essentialized vision of "woman" as if for dear life (thereby forgetting feminism's goal of not only achieving its own eventual obsolescence but also transforming the meaning of deeply gendered binary distinctions themselves). Nor, on the other hand, would this movement simply deny that the ongoing sociological category of women exists, imposed from outside as an "identity" that still brings predictably patterned inequities in its wake. Commonalities and differences, differences and commonalities: perhaps a third wave of feminism in the future can succeed in recognizing both these dimensions of the movement's joint needs than has yet been achieved in waves of the past.

So I argued in 1991 when the notion of a "third wave" was still fresh. The phrase has since lost its novelty, lately producing a range of new associations. Some of the hopes expressed in that column have begun to be acted on and, at least in part, realized. For instance, "third-wave feminism" has come to connote a younger generation of women—age thirty-five and under—who are committed to democratizing and improving an inherited feminist legacy. The essays in To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), a volume edited by Rebecca Walker, introduced by Gloria Steinem, and concluded by Angela Davis, express a wide range of dissatisfactions with the perceived narrowness of a second-wave feminism that did not adequately reflect the complexity of diverse women's lives.^[4] The contributors stress the importance of difference while also reflecting a commitment to

avoiding either/or dichotomies by also remaining connected to the truths of earlier feminist insights. At the same time, it appears that the relative emphasis of this interesting volume is to underline differences rather than commonalities. Second-wave feminism sometimes seems to be under attack, not only for not fully understanding women's diversely layered social experiences but also for having asserted the importance of commonalities at all.^[5]

Since 1991, too, a very different connotation of "third-wave" feminism has surfaced in references to the alleged achievements of "postfeminist" politics. For example, as detailed in previous chapters, a line of argument that differentiates Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire (1993) from her earlier Beauty Myth (1991) is the assertion that a new burst of feminist activism ought be based on acknowledging that women have made significant gains in social, economic, and cultural power. No longer are women predominantly "victims," Wolf writes; rather, "power feminism" is a description that better suits this stage of feminist development. But have women indeed become "empowered" agents, and by what criteria? As I write these concluding words, six years after penning that Voice column, no basis exists for asserting that all or even most women have managed to escape structurally based experiences of dependency and victimization. The election and reelection of Bill Clinton brought certain benefits but also immense losses for women in the late 1990s. On the one hand, abortion rights were relatively secured; on the other, the federal welfare system was dismantled with nothing to replace it, exposing millions of women, men, and children who are poor and working class to even more economic impoverishment than was already part of their day-to-day lives (and posing special problems for women who, because of gender asymmetries, are left with differential responsibility for children). In this example, then, a call for an invigorated third burst of feminism—in Wolf's terminology, for "power feminism"—makes full consideration of existing differences among women unlikely. Whether intentionally or not, her immediate vision has the analytic effect of emphasizing a supposedly achieved commonality , which is presumed rather than demonstrated through a political commitment to link all women.

Thus it remains difficult to forge a renewed feminist movement that simultaneously incorporates commonalities and differences into a vision of contemporary feminist politics overall. To be sure, such joint emphases inform many women's feminist politics already, and concern for commonalities as well as differences have characterized groups and

types of feminisms in the past. To overlook them is to overlook the mind-boggling growth and achievements of a national, and now an international, feminist movement of which there is tremendous reason to be proud. However, the problem of balancing the two persists insofar as tendencies toward either/or political positions continue to divide even feminists—"even," because feminist theories and practices make special, explicit efforts to think and feel outside such deeply embedded habitual dichotomies. It remains easier at present to find examples of differences receiving more attention than commonalities, or presumed commonalities stressed more than differences, than instances in which both are at once accorded equal intellectual and political emphasis. And yet, as I have been arguing throughout this book, the feminist movement may remain on the defensive and vulnerable to conservative backlash unless such simultaneous recognition of feminism and feminisms occurs. Why?

For a reader may still be wondering why such recognition is so crucial to feminism(s), and why it still is so difficult to achieve. Responding to the second question may assist in addressing the first. When looking back at the 1960s and 1970s, historians are likely to agree that for many founders of "second-wave" feminism, their original impetus arose from gender discrimination encountered in civil rights and New Left groups already cognizant of (and protesting) inequitable race and class "differences" in U.S. society. As chapter 8 detailed, many early radical feminists were certainly opposed to racism and capitalism while realizing that sexism persisted within 1960s and 1970s left and antiracist organizations. Think, for example, of Shulamith Firestone's clearly implied opposition to capitalism in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), where she contended that eliminating gender might go further than eliminating class toward overcoming all human oppressions. Thus, early feminist theory aimed at describing sexist biases experienced by women across different classes, races, and ethnicities, even within movements devoted to fighting other social relations based on systematic experiences of dominance and subordination.

Consequently, even though collective memory of its birth has faded, early feminist theory emerged precisely because class- and race-related theories were inadequate to understand specifically gender-based biases. These gender-based biases took wide-ranging and distinctive forms, which had not yet been fully defined when the second wave was itself freshly emerging: they varied from violence against women (including

the all-too-common experiences of rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence) to restrictions placed on women's sexual and reproductive freedom (these, too, ranging along a gamut, from what Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality" to sterilization abuse and restrictions on abortion rights, which were never fully made available to all).

With second-wave radical feminist thought, then, the historical pendulum swung toward the immense task of defining commonality through the development of a "sexual politics" for which there was little theoretical precedent. In the process, it may have been difficult indeed to focus with equal intensity on race and class differences (even though, again, many radical, socialist, and Marxist feminists managed to do so). Still, whether some feminists succeeded more than others at incorporating multiple sociological dimensions into their perspectives, there seems little question that indispensable to second-wave thought was the act of specifying that which did not yet exist: a shared set of beliefs that would form the basis of a recognizable feminism , without which the later emergence of feminisms would literally be inconceivable. Put slightly differently, later interest in difference depended on a prior detailing of commonalities; these two moments were, as they remain, dependent for their existence on each other.

But in the initial process of defining commonalities, it is hardly surprising that questions of difference were relatively de-emphasized by many, though clearly not by all, feminists. Nor, for that matter, is it at all astonishing to find that later feminist works soon sought the centering of the pendulum yet again. In this dialectical sense, one effect of 1980s works authored by bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins (among other influential feminist theorists who have called attention to differences between women) was to correct for what had already been an attempt at correction. In Ain't I a Woman (1981) and Feminist Theory (1984), hooks expressed dissatisfaction with the emphasizing of commonalities rather than differences, which started to emerge out of early second-wave feminism's own dissatisfaction with prior social movements' inadequate understanding of gender.

A major contribution of these early works by hooks and others, including Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Paula Giddings, and Deborah Gray White,^[6] was therefore to warn against still another loss of collective memory: now divergences in experience might be in danger of being forgotten, overlooked, or belittled by feminists deeply immersed in the

theoretical forging of commonalities. Just as gender discrimination could not be subsumed or reduced to the workings of class or race inequities, so feminists were now reminded that race and class differences could not be subsumed or reduced to the workings of gender. Of course, this did not mean that writers like hooks and Collins did not themselves retain a strong sense of commonality while calling attention to differences (why else would Patricia Hill Collins have entitled her now well-known text Black Feminist Thought? ), any more than many early radical feminists were completely unaware of differences between women while engaged in delineating commonalities. Once more, the theme at hand throughout these chapters is that of recurring divergences in relative emphases , presenting future feminisms with the challenge of regularly pursuing several worthwhile political and personal goals at once.

But perhaps now we are in a better position to reconsider the first question raised above—why any of this matters. Why is it critical for future feminism(s) to recognize and respect both commonalities and differences among women? And why is such simultaneous recognition important in order for "third-wave" feminism (or whatever diverse groups might wish to call it) to be able to provide renewed inspiration for a feminist movement?

Let us consider the ramifications of one possible course: placing a greater stress on commonalities relative to differences . Its disadvantages are clear from a contemporary example already raised above, namely, the effects of eliminating "welfare as we know it" at the end of the first Clinton administration. I believe that in order to become a movement genuinely concerned about the lives of all women, any satisfactory third wave would have to view a question supposedly "sexual" like reproductive rights and a supposedly "economic" issue like women's ongoing impoverishment with equal political seriousness and alarm. Both problems—the realizing of sexual and economic freedoms so that genuine choices are possible in both arenas—should be occasioning huge demonstrations and protests led by large numbers of feminists committed to bettering all women's lives. Yet, at present, it is mostly "sexual" issues with which feminism as a mass social movement is generally associated in mainstream cultural consciousness—in part because those economic issue that liberal feminists addressed in the past (such as equal pay for equal work, or glass ceilings) have often not sufficiently addressed the problems of poor and working-class women.^[7] As a consequence, women who face multiple forms of discrimination may find

it especially difficult to identify and defend feminism inside their own community by the 1990s, even though in other respects a gender-based movement should and does apply to problems of sexism commonly encountered in their day-to-day lives.

But what about the opposite possibility: placing relatively greater stress on differences relative to commonalities ? If we do not retain an insistence on the importance of commonalities among women, I fear that we may also fail to recall why feminism initially emerged as an influential political movement: here, too, the result is a no-win situation. For as has been elaborated in the previous chapters, severe sexism remains an ongoing reality with deep roots in institutionalized social structures; in particular, it can be encountered in the supposed "privacy" of nuclear families that remain traditionally organized across a range of differing class, race, and ethnic situations. Another example involves the problem of sexual repressivéness: traditionally sexist controls often seek to mandate compulsory heterosexuality and double standards of sexuality for all women. Again, this problem cannot be confined in its complex effects to any one group of women. Rather, such controls aim at restricting the ability of lesbian and heterosexual women alike to enjoy sexual freedom without guilt or fear of discriminatory reprisals. Similarly, to the extent that men still hold differential and often sexist power within communities as well as households, domestic violence continues all too frequently to haunt and endanger many women's lives across an otherwise wide range of social categories. For violence against women in general—from fear of and actual experiences of rape to sexual harassment on the streets or at workplaces—still tends to create common vulnerabilities for large numbers of women. Thus, feminisms of the future need to be even more committed to understanding and transforming these deep-seated roots of violence in psyches and societies, since ongoing gendered divisions are created and re-created both in the "privacy" of nuclear families and at the "public" level of cultural images, institutional practices, and community reactions.

Commonalities clearly exist. Indeed, they remain remarkably persistent, although women experience these very commonalities differently across other social divisions such as class, race, and sexual orientation. Yet, to the extent that differences are stressed relatively more than commonalities, feminists' collective ability to argue against the structured character of sexism is likely to become politically and organizationally

weakened. It may become increasingly difficult to indict sexism in general if claims made on behalf of "all women" are labeled as only class-and race-biased, all the while these claims were based on gender discrimination as well . For, as I am arguing, general claims about sexism are indeed also valid (even if only in part) at one and the same time. But if it becomes relatively unpopular to assert commonalities rather than differences, then "difference" can become a weakness rather than a strength of the movement. Unless we simultaneously stress commonalities, it is harder to amass precisely the kind of collective strength needed to challenge vestiges of male-dominated power that can or do affect most—and in some respects all—women's lives.

The danger is that as women become defensive about asserting commonalities, as if doing so necessarily implies that one does or cannot simultaneously understand the importance of recognizing differences, the very term "feminist" may—indeed, has—become a cause for wariness or apologia. A catchphrase of the late 1990s, used by many women on and outside college campuses, at workplaces and in communities, may in part be traced back to this asymmetry of emphases. "I'm not a feminist, but . . ." expresses a profound ambivalence. Clearly, on the one hand, the speaker perceives feminism as relevant across categories; on the other, a deeply defensive fear interferes with her ability to feel that asserting political commonalities among women is socially legitimate—which itself, ironically enough, affects the ability of feminism(s) to advocate on behalf of differing groups of women.

This defensiveness does not only arise from the mainstream feminist movement not yet addressing the multifaceted concerns of many working-class and poor women with sufficient commitment so that issues like welfare, child care, and jobs become—as they must—just as important to a third-wave vision as "traditional" feminist issues involving gender-specific problems of sexuality and control over women's bodies. But many women's hesitation to identify as feminists may also stem from their inner realization that somehow, some way, women who strongly assert commonalities by reaching out and across to one another are likely to be perceived as threatening.

So where does all of this leave feminism and feminisms in relation to where we began—that is, with the ongoing challenge of how to recognize differences and commonalities, commonalities and differences, simultaneously? In this revitalized movement, a number of complex political needs that transcend overly simple either/or distinctions will have to be encompassed. The next waves of feminism will have to incorpo-

rate both/and thinking and feeling even more profoundly and habitually than has already become common within many types and organizations of feminisms, in and outside the academy.

For one thing, the relationship of a feminist movement to other social movements—to class- and race-related organizations, for instance, or to gay and lesbian groups interested in queer theory and politics—is perhaps best conceived in terms of connection and autonomy. As suggested theoretically in chapter 8, it makes sense for future waves of feminism both to advocate the need for separate feminist politics (since gender biases cannot be subsumed within other discriminations based on class, race, and sexual orientation) and to advocate joint coalitions that maximize collective power to protest other forms of biases (since class, race, and homophobic biases cannot be subsumed, either, within the specific form of discrimination structured around gender).

Similarly, a revitalized movement should encompass both feminisms and feminism. There is no reason to think that the need for and desirability of diverse women's groups and organizations will or ought to disappear at any time in the foreseeable future. Rather, women who are lesbian and bisexual are likely to desire both connection with and autonomy from a collective movement; women of color (whether, say, groups of African American or Latina women, of Native American or Asian American women) may wish explicit association with feminisms sometimes and in some ways, while preferring to remain autonomous to varying degrees; and so on. Of course, this is already the case, as feminisms have indeed now become much more varied and inclusive—of women of different hues, desires, incomes, opinions, cultures, and nations and sometimes of just as varied men—than was generally true in the past. In each of these examples, then, one complex form of discrimination cannot simply be reduced to another. Because of complex social differences , the feelings and needs of some women connect with but cannot be identified with the needs and feelings of all . At the same time, this registering of differences need not threaten the utility of political strength amassed through the assertion of feminist commonalities. Again, commonalities exist and persist in relation to differences; logically, each renders the other possible so that both dimensions remain present even when only one is relatively emphasized.

Moreover, it is indeed the special role of a now-maturing feminist movement to inaugurate innovative modes of thinking and feeling and to imagine possibilities for a transformed society. Certainly within academic feminism, and within feminist theory, either/or categories are

already and rapidly being replaced by more creative both/and conceptions. But the time has come to ensure that this incorporation of complexity takes place outside as well as inside the academy, in public as well as in private. It falls to a third wave to turn the second wave's now famous adage on its head (though not, in so doing, discarding the earlier slogan altogether). By now, many women and men, stirred by "the personal is political," have proceeded to demonstrate that power pervades intimate, "private" relations. But isn't the political personal as well— doesn't the inability to separate the social and structural from the psychic and individual apply both ways?

For it is not only our inner worlds that have to change but the outer society as well. Thus the call to preserve commonalities and collective political strength is not merely a luxury, or a theoretical nicety employed in academic investigations of people's differing experiences. Rather, such preservation is intimately connected with the ability to summon influence en masse, motivating large numbers of women (and men) to believe it is in the collective interest of third-wave feminism that, for example, child care and adequate income provisions are provided universally. For it strikes me that questions alleged to be only "political," like those pertaining to welfare and child care, are just as properly feminist, and just as intimately personal in their ramifications , as any of the more obviously "private" issues with which gender has long become itself conventionally associated.

Yet we must not overreact in the opposite direction, thereby continuing a historical process of flip-flopping from one relative emphasis to another—in this case, away from "sexual" issues (narrowly defined) to "economic" ones (narrowly defined). For there is no reason why a new wave of feminism will not also envision a more sophisticated form of sexual politics that incorporates understandings of both differences and commonalities, and which conceives of "sex" economy and "political" economy as interrelated. Nor is there any reason why, within third-wave politics, challenges to ongoing structures of sexism cannot simultaneously respect diversities of sexual agency that differ from person to person (see the argument made in chapter 2). Indeed, if we do not respect people's needs and rights to find happiness now, there are likely to be rebellions against moralistic strictures. On the other hand, if we do not equally keep in mind that some of those choices have been informed by the structured constraints of sexist discriminations, previous problems may be simply recycled rather than slowly but surely redressed.

Perhaps, then, a next wave of feminism will be able both to alter the economic status quo of the pornography industry, which has long remained largely under the control of men, and to eschew moralistic judgments of women who enjoy pornography (or who resent it, for that matter; see chapter 3). Perhaps future feminisms will manage both to demand changes in oppressive beauty standards that permeate cultural practices and ideals and to anticipate that women and men are likely to remain concerned about looks for some time to come (see chapter 4). A third wave of feminism(s) may be able both to call for economic assistance for all women so that sex workers are not pushed to those jobs by the lack of other options and to oppose the discriminatory criminalization that now endangers women because of persisting sexist realities (see chapter 5). Perhaps it will become possible both to protest the sadomasochistic character of a given culture and to understand sadomasochistic desires as they have come to shape many individuals' social psychology (see chapter 6). And, finally, perhaps it is possible both to protest (rather than deny) the all-too-common occurrence of actual violence against women and to acknowledge (rather than deny) that our fantasy lives are complex and deeply affected by the eroticization of violence in American and other still male-dominated societies (see chapter 7).

Clearly, it is not my own goal to divide feminists or feminisms from one another, though the very process of calling attention to the habitual ease of either/or distinctions runs the risk of re-creating them—again, quite unwittingly. Yet it is also a serious problem not to identify such divisions, leaving feminism in a compromised position from which there appears little possibility of escape. My hope has been that by subjecting these patterned divides to analysis and bringing them more fully to consciousness, we can avoid their recurrence in contemporary feminist politics. As this book suggests for third-wave feminism, my aim has also been to accomplish several things at once. For we have every reason to acknowledge and appreciate the achievements and courage of the many diverse feminists and feminisms who have shaped contemporary history well beyond the imaginings of most women and men only a century ago. Simultaneously, there is no reason to hold back from understanding and shaping that legacy anew, building on its serious mistakes as well as its striking successes.

But what I will certainly admit to being guilty of throughout this book is a particular kind of greed: not for money or wealth or fame, which are greed's most clichéd connotations, but for the kind of heady

excitement that comes from participating in building a world better than the one left behind. I wish for myself and other women of all ages, sexualities, classes, and races that we become able to experience a sense of imagined possibilities and possible transformations—to feel convictions and shared meaning similar to, and yet different from, those experienced by participants in earlier and ongoing progressive social movements (from civil rights to the Left, from feminists to lesbian and gay rights activists).

Maybe, then, a next wave will be able to continue the process of creating such a movement by and for all women, cognizant of commonalities that weave people together while respectful of diversities that keep people apart. Such a movement will bring advantages to both sexes, benefiting all human beings whether or not men choose to participate. For it is the special gift of feminism(s) to think beyond unnecessary dichotomies, beyond commonalities or differences, structures or agencies, sex or sexism. We should not believe that only two options are possible—that feminists must either protest systematic subordinations left over from the past or comfort ourselves only with sexual or psychic pleasures to be found now . Richer and more nuanced options exist, dependent on a multifaceted awareness which the next wave of feminism is even more likely than the last to keep vibrant in our hearts, our bodies, and our minds.