The language of oppression may seem outdated but second-wave feminists presented powerful accounts of some of the ways in which male dominance can constrain and (mis)shape women’s bodies. In Friedan’s (1965) iconic call to arms for feminism, The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, she bears testimony to the embodiment of ‘the problem with no name’. The problem was that educated married women were feeling dissatisfied with ‘the feminine mystique’, an ideal promoted by women’s magazines in the 1950s proposing that women should find fulfilment as wives and mothers. Many did not, and yet had no name for what they were feeling. Friedan’s account of the problem is mired in a liberal, dualistic, and ethnocentric view of a ‘civilized’ society as ‘one in which instinct and environment are increasingly controlled and transformed by the human mind’ (Friedan, 1965: 124). Yet there are interesting claims about what ‘the feminine mystique’ does to bodies:
A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. ‘I call it the housewives’ blight’ said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. ‘I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five and six children, who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t cured by cortisone.’ (Friedan, 1965: 16)
She also notes the extreme tiredness many young housewives experience, somewhat ‘matronizingly’ claiming that this is not real fatigue, but a result of boredom (Friedan, 1965: 27—8). Nevertheless, such ideas were insightful and feminist sociology has continued to deal with ‘material’ ways in which women’s bodies are made ill (for example, Doyal, 2002), starved (for example, MacSween, 1993;Whitehead, 1994) and damaged, for example by sexual violence (for example, Kelly, 1988), within patriarchy. Many of these now taken for granted aspects of feminist thinking can be seen in fledgling form in Kate Millet’s (1972/1970) Sexual Politics.
Millet’s brilliant argument establishes that relations between women and men are socially constructed power relationships that oppress women, partly via myths about women’s bodily weakness. She dismisses
the idea that men’s supposedly superior strength has produced male supremacy. Male muscles may have some biological basis, but have also been ‘culturally encouraged, through breeding, diet, and exercise’ and physical strength is no longer really politically relevant within ‘civilization’ (Millet, 1972/1970: 27). Millet is aware of gender as a concept that describes the cultural character of differences between women and men. The concept came from the work of Robert Stoller on gender reassignment and she takes his examples as evidence of the socially constructed nature of gender. So strong is this construction that a gender identity may form that is contrary to one’s sex (Millet, 1972/1970: 30). This is a spurious argument based on substituting social for biological determinism. Gender as a concept arises precisely to describe disjunctions between sexed bodies and the socially enacted gender expressed through bodies, but to say that an identity may form contrary to one’s sex assumes that ‘normally’ femaleness leads to femininity and maleness to masculinity. Only with a lot of social effort will other identities emerge, and often a realigning of bodies will be demanded to make the body fit the identity. There was little thinking on these matters at the time and these limitations do not detract from her central point that ideologies of women’s weakness maintain patriarchy as power-structured relationships which oppress women. Other classic work more directly connects this oppression to women’s bodies.
Shulamith Firestone argues that recognition of women only as bodies, not as rounded individuals, causes their oppression and this can only be overcome by artificial reproduction. Firestone wants to understand the historic conditions from which conflict between women and men has arisen, by extending Marx and Engels’ methods to develop ‘a materialist view of history based on sex itself’ (Firestone, 1972: 15). In this endeavour she adapts Freudian psychology, proposing that children learn that a woman’s embodiment limits her, while the father embodies — or his body symbolizes — the valued world of travel and adventure. Such views are promoted through racism, a culture of romance, and indeed culture generally. Following de Beauvoir, Firestone (1972: 149) argues that men’s point of view is seen as the universal point of view, but sexism is fundamentally about seeing women as sexualized bodies available to men, and the concentration on women as bodies means a lack of recognition of women’s individuality, of which the physical is only one part. Thus in order to bring about a revolution that will liberate women she argues it is necessary ‘to free humanity from the tyranny of its biology’ (Firestone, 1972: 183) so that women no longer need to suffer pregnancy and childbirth. Most feminists have tended to be sceptical of reproductive technologies as placing too much control in the hands of the male-dominated medical profession (for example, Corea, 1985;
Oakley, 1980; Stanworth, 1987). In contrast, Firestone thinks that if women no longer bear the children childcare will become shared and women and children will be fully integrated into society. Doing away with the biological family could allow a return to polymorphous perversity, a free flow of desire around anyone or anything that Freud argues young infants enjoy. But her solution is based on a dualism which assumes that individuality is mostly in the mind. Firestone seems to fall victim to the very tendency to view men as the standard of individuality of which she is critical. Like de Beauvoir, she often presents the female body as disgusting, for example employing a poorly evidenced essentialist argument about pregnancy as ‘barbaric’ and ugly, claiming that ‘[t]he child’s first response,“What’s wrong with that Fat Lady?”; the husband’s guilty waning of sexual desire; the woman’s tears in front of the mirror at eight months — are all gut reactions, not to be dismissed as cultural habits’ (Firestone, 1972: 188).Yet in recent years pregnancy has arguably come to be considered very sexy. For example, a very pregnant Demi Moore appeared naked on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991.This suggests that attitudes to pregnancy might be ‘cultural habits’. Firestone describes pregnancy as ‘the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species’ (Firestone, 1972: 188), but most feminist work on reproductive bodies tries to challenge representations of pregnant or menstruating bodies as ill, hideous, or ‘abnormal’ (see for example, Laws, 1990; Martin, 1984; Shildrick, 1997). Despite these pieces of essentialism, Firestone is radically constructionist. If we construct a society in which women no longer have babies, then new ways for women and men to relate to each other as individuals will arise. Change social conditions and relations between people will change — that is her dialectic of sex. Yet Juliet Mitchell (1973: 89) argues that it is not a true dialectic because it is based on a dichotomous view of a conflict between male and female, whereas dialectic materialism understands conflict in terms of more complex contradictions between all aspects of a structure. Also, Firestone returns at crucial points to a classic liberal (and dualist) position which implies that the ideal individual is one free from bodily distractions. This is a position of which other feminists have been critical.