For the ultimate goal of the transformation of gender relations there are two logical candidates. One is the abolition of gender, the other its reconstitution on new bases. Along the first track some bold spirits have proposed the abolition of sexual reproduction. David Fernbach, in a recent and sophisticated version of this argument, goes so […]

The Present Moment Hegel invented, and Marx made popular, a way of schematizing history in which there is an origin, a dialectic of necessary stages and a culmination — the ethical state, the classless society. It is tempting to schematize the history of gender relations the same way. Thus the story of primitive matriarchy, disrupted […]

The articulation of interests in the women’s liberation movement differs from the articulation in working-class feminism in a number of ways. Its main feature has been the construction of a collective project whose theme is the generalization of women’s struggles across different settings, relationships and areas of life. It arose on a much narrower social […]

In plain language, both in law and in popular morality, the wife is still the inferior in the family to the husband. She is first without economic independence, and the law therefore gives the man, whether he be good or bad, a terrible power over her. Partly for this reason, and partly because all sorts […]

The crucial moment in the social dynamic of politics is the constitution of interests. In chapter 6 interests were defined in terms of the inequalities constructed by gender relations. At that level the interests are inert, and though they structure practice it is only as the external conditions of practices which are directed to other […]

The Scope of Sexual Politics In ordinary speech ‘politics’ is a narrow and faintly disreputable term, meaning elections, parliaments, presidents and party antag­onisms. ‘Politician’ can be a term of abuse,.‘political’ a label for distrust. Social science has found the negative overtones unneces­sary and the narrow definition untenable. In what follows ‘politics’ is assumed to be […]

If the strategic argument is even partly correct, it highlights the importance of the people who are engaged in remaking cultural forms. Discussions of sexual ideology have to a remarkable extent ignored the ideologists. The main exception is Viola Klein in The Feminine Character. Her approach from Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge led to a concern […]

The historicity of sexual ideology is seen not only in details like the content of heroism, but in its organization on the largest scale. In pre-capitalist and early modern Europe sexual ideology was organized as part of a religious world-view. The issues of sexual politics were framed as moral questions, to be decided by appeal […]

Gender relations involve the structuring of social practice around sex and sexuality. The commonest process in sexual ideology involves collapsing that structure, merging the elements into one by ‘naturalizing’ social practice. The interpretation of gender relations as natural facts is extraordinarily widespread. Sexual divisions of labour are con­stantly interpreted this way. Cockburn, for instance, notes […]

Discourse and Practice When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to vindicate the rights of women, it was mainly questions of ideology that she had in mind: morals, manners, education and religion. These topics have been constant friends in the literature of gender since, .and few authors have doubted the power of ideology. Even so vigorous a materialist […]