On Patriarchy

Author(s): Veronica Beechey

Source: Feminist Review , 1979, No. 3 (1979), pp. 66-82
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

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 On patriarchy

Veronica Beechey

The concept of patriarchy has been used within the wczmenss movement to
analyse the principles underlying women's oppression. The concept itself is not
new. It has a history withm feminist thought, having been used by earlier femi-
nists like Yirginia Woolf, the Fabian Womenss Group and Vera Brittain, for
example 1. It has also been used by the anti-Marxist sociologist, Max Weber
(Weber, 1968). In trying to provide a critical assessment of some of the uses of
the concept of patriarchy within contemporary feminist discourse, it is impor-
tant to bear in mind the kinds of problems which it has been used to resolare.
Politically, feminists of a variety of different persuasions have seized upon the
concept of patriarchy in the search for an explanation of feelings of oppression
and subordination and in the desire to transform feelings of rebellion into a
political practice and theory. And theoretically the concept of patnarchy has
been used to address the question of the real basis of the subordination of
women and to analyse the particular forms which it assumes Thus the theory
of patriarchy attempts to penetrate beneath the particular experiences and
manifestations of women5s oppression and to formulate some coherent theory
of the basis of subordination which underlies them.

The concept of patriarchy which has been developed within feminist writings
is not a sinfe or simple concept but has a whole variety of different meanings.
At the most general level patriarchy has been used to refer to male domination
and to the power relationships by which men dominate women (Millett, 1969).
Unlike radical feminist writers like Kate Millett, who have focused solely upon
the system of male domination and female subordination, Marxist feminists
have attempted to analyse the relationship between the subordination of women
and the organization of various modes of production In fact the concept of
patriarchy has been adopted by Marxist feminists in an attempt to transform
Marxist theory so that it can more adequately account for the subordination of
women as well as for the forms of class exploitation.

The concept of patriarchy has been used in vanous ways within the Marxist
feminist literature. To take several examples: JuXet Mitchell (1974) uses patri-
archy to refer to kinship systems in which men exchange womens and to the
symbolic power which fathers have within these systems, and the consequences
of this power for the 'inferiorized * . . psychology of women (Mitchell, 1974:
402). Heidi Hartmann (1979) has retained the radical feminist usage of patri-
archy to refer to male power over women and has attempted to analyse the

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 On patriarchy

inter-relationship between this and the organization of the capitalist labour

process. Eisenstein (1979) defines patriarchy as sexual hierarchy which is mani-
fested in the woman's role as mother, domestic labourer and consumer within
the family. Finally, a number of the papers in Women Take Issue (1978) have
used the concept to refer specifically to the relations of reproductioll which
exist within the family.

The different conceptions of patriarchy within contemporary feminist theory

correspond to some extent to different political tendencies within feminist
politics. The concept of patriarchy in Sexual Politfes and in other radical aIld
revolutionary feminist documents grows out of the attempt to analyse the auto-
nomous basis of the oppression of women in all forms of society and to provide
a theoretical justification for the autonomy of feminist politics. Marxist feminists
have attempted to analyse not simply 'patriarchy' but the relationship between
patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production. This is because they do not
believe that the subordination of women can be absolutely separated from the
other forms of exploitation and oppression which exist in capitalist societies, for
example, class exploitation and racism; yet they reject the ways in which ortho-
dox Marxism and socialist organizations have marginalized women theoretically
and within their practice and have regarded the oppression of women as simply a
side-effect of class exploitation. It has become clear that sociaLism does not in
any simple way guarantee the liberation of women, as the experience of women
in socialist societies reveals. Theoretically Marxist feminists are committed to the
attempt to unravel those complications; politically they are committed to the
development of a socialist feminist strategy which could relate women's struggles
and other political struggles. In practice this attempt to marry feminist to Marxist
theory has been difficult, but it is still important to remember that the attempt
has come from a political stance; that there are feminists who recognize that in
present-day society-the world we have to live in and struggle to change-the
oppression of women is inextricably linked with the capitalist order and that
therefore to understand women's oppression necessarily means that we must
understand capitalism too, and be involved in the struggle to change it.

The concern of Marxist feminists to analyse theoretically the relationship

between patrsarchy and the capitalist mode of production, and the political
interest of socialist feminists in exploring the relationship between feminism and
forms of class struggle, in no way brings into question the autonomy of the
women's movement. Whether or not feminism organizes as an autonomous
movement cannot be deduced from theoretical arguments about the autonomous
nature of women's oppression. The decision to organize as an autonomous move-
ment and in autonomous groups is a political decision based upon a political
analysis of the forms of feminist and class struggle which exist in particular his-
torical conditions. I wish therefore to stress that in identifying myself meth the
Marxist feminist project of exploring the relationship between the subordination
of women and other aspects of the organization of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, I do not question our right to organize politically as an autonomous
women's movement.

I shall in this paper consider a variety of different approaches to the analysis of

patriarchy. None of the existing literature provldes a satisfactory way of con-
ceptualizing patriarchy. This raises the questions of whether the quest for a
theory of patriarchy is a mistaken one, and whether the concept should be aban-

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 Feminist Review

doned. In assessing this,it is important to emphasize that the concept has been
used by feminists in an attempt to think through real political and theoretical
problems. So,if the concept is to be abandoned, it it essential that we find some
other more satisfactory way of conceptualizing male domination and female
subordination,and, for Marxist feminism, of relating this to the organization of
the mode of production as a whole. Until we develop such an alternative analysis,
the question of the usefulness of the concept of patriarchy for feminist politics
and theory remains an open one. Since the development of an adequate Marxist
feminist analysis of the relationship between female subordination and the orga-
nization of the capitalist mode of production is so difficult, I have decided in
this paper to identify a number of problems and to raise questions from some of
the existing literature which uses the concept of patriarchy. In the concluding
section of the paper I make some tentative and exploratory suggestions about
possible alternative ways of thinking about the problem.

Radical and revolutionary feminism

Radical feminism has been extremely important in developing an analysis of

women's oppression which has been influential among other currents of feminist
theory (for example, revolutionary feminism and Marxist feminism). In this sec-
tion I discuss aspects of Kate Millett's analysis of patriarchy in Sexual Politics
(1969) and the more recent form of analysis to have been developed from radical
feminist theory-revolutionary feminism. Clearly these are not the only expo-
nents of radical and revolutionary feminist analysis. I have decided to concentrate
upon these accounts since it is possible to raise a number of crucial problems
with radical and revolutionary feminist theory by reference to these works. I
also briefly discuss the analysis of Christine Delphy in The Main Enemy (1977),
which has been influential among contemporary feminist writings.

Kate Millett's Sex1lal Politics represents one of the first senous theoretical at-
tempts to come to grips with the specific nature of women's oppression within
the contemporary women's movement. For Millett, patnarchy refers to a society
which is organized according to two sets of principles: (i) that male shall domi-
nate female; and (ii) that older male shall dominate younger male. These princi-
ples govern all patriarchal societies, according to Kate Millett, although patri-
archy can exhibit a variety of forms in different societies. She focuses upon the
first of these pnnciples, the domination of women by men, arguing that this
relationship between the sexes exemplifies what the sociologist Max Weber calls
Herrschaft, that is, a relationship of domination and subordination. She analyses
the political aspects of the relationship between the sexes, using the notion of
'political' broadly, as it has been used within the women's liberation movement,
to refer to the power relationships between men and women. Women are con-
ceptualized as being a minority group within the dominant society, and dif-
ferences among women are considered to be insignificant by comparison with
the divisions between women and men; to be mere differences in 'class style'¢
The most fundamental unit of patriarchy in Millett's analysis is the family, which
she considers to be a patriarchal unit within a patnarchal whole; it functions to
socialize children into sexually differentiated roles, temperaments and statuses,
and to maintain women in a state of subordination.

Why, in Kate Millett's view, do patriarchal relations exist and persist throughout
history in all societies? What are their foundations? She rejects the view that

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 On pakiarchy

biologlcal differences between the sexes can explain gender differentiated tem-
peraments, sex roles and social statuses. (This is the view known as biological
reductionism or biological determinism 2.) While rejecting this explanation, Kate
Millett has no other theory of- the foundations of patriarchy apart from a fairly
generalized conception of power relationships. She states that there is a basic
division between men and women which involves relationships of domination
and subordination without explaining what it is about the organization of all
human societies which leads to the institutionalization of such power relation-
ships and to the different forms which male domination and female subordi-
nation assume in different societies. We must conclude that Sexual Politics
provides primarily a description of patriarchal relationships and some of their
manifestations (for example, in literary production) and is unable to provide a
satisfactory explanation of their foundations.

Radical feminism, then, introduced the concept of patriarchy into contem-

porary feminist discourse, but its analysis leaves unexplained specific forms of
male domination and female subordination; nor does it explain the relationship
between patriarchal social relations and the social relations of production, that
is, between sex classes and social classes. Politically, radical feminism has been
primarily concerned with struggles against male power and the social institutions
through which it is reproduced (mamage, heterosexuality, the family). Radical
feminism has also been concerned with struges around the woman's role in
biological reproduction - a concern which has been further developed by revo-
lutionary feminism. Where radical feminists formulate coherent demands, these
are demands which are made of men as sexual oppressors. Yet it is never made
clear what it is about men which makes them into sexual oppressors, nor, more
importantly, what characteristics of particular forms of society place men in
positions of power over women. This is one of the questions which an adequate
theory of patriarchy should be able to address.

Revolutionary feminism has recently developed the radical feminist analysis of

female subordination, and claims that gender differences can be explained in
terms of the biological differences between men and women. Revolutionary
feminism in fact develops a theory of patriarchy and sex class which is rooted in
women's reproductive capacities. It follows the analysis of The Dialectic of Sex
(Firestone, 1971) in which Shulamith Firestone tned to resolve the dilemma
posed by Sexual Politics by asserting that the basis of women's oppression does
lie in women's reproductive capacities insofar as these have been controlled by
men. I shall discuss some of the papers which have been reprinted in Scarlet
Women (Number Five) as an example of the revolutionary feminist tendency.

Sheila Jeffreys argues in 'The Need for Revolutionary Feminism' (Scarlet Women
Five:10) that there exist two systems of social classes: (i) the economic class
system, which is based on the relations of production; and (ii) the sex class sys-
tem, which is based on the relations of reproduction. It is the second system of
classes, the sex class system, which, according to Sheila Jeffreys, accounts for
the subordination of women. The concept of patriarchy refers to this second
system of classes, to the rule of women by men which is based upon men's
ownership and control of women's reproductive powers.

Finella McKenzie outlines in her paper 'Feminism and Socialism' (Scarlet Women
Five) the ways in which reproductive differentiation gives rise to male power and

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Feminist Review

control. She argues that the first division of labour was between men and women
and was developed on account of women's reproductive capacities and men's
greater strength. Since women have throughout history been at the mercy of their
biology, she argues, this has made them dependent upon men for physical survi-
val, especially during menstruation, childbearing and so on. This female depen-
dency established an unequal system of power relationships within the biological
family-a sex class system. Finella McKenzie thus identifies three aspects of the
subordination of women: women's different reproductive capacities; women's
lack of control over them; and men who turned the dependency elicited by
women's biology into psychological dependency. Thus, as Jalna Hanmer, Kathy
Lunn, Sheila Jeffreys and Sandra MacNeill point out in 'Sex Class-Why is it
important to call women a class?', it is not women's biology which is in itself
oppressive, but the value men place on it and the power they derive from their
control over it. The precise folnls of control change, in Sheila Jeffreys' view,
according to the cultural and historical period and according to developments in
the economic class system. However, it is the constancy of men's power and con-
trol over women's reproductive capacities which, revolutionary feminists argue,
constitutes the unchanging basis of patriarchy. Strategically, revolutionary femi-
nism is committed to developing the class consciousness of women-that is,
women's consciousness of the operation of the sex class system. The papers in
Scarlet Women Five emphasize the importance of consciousness-raising activities
and of exposing male power and its mode of operation through activities around
rape, sexual violence and violence within the family.

The revolutionary feminist analysis, which roots patriarchy and female subordi-
nation in the reproductive differences between the sexes, raises many problems.
First, it is biologically reductionist and is thereby unable to explain the forms
which sexual differences assume within different forms of social organization. It
takes these as given. Secondly, the concept of reproduction is defined extremely
narrowly and is limited to the physical act of reproducing children. The repro-
ductive differences between men and women are not located within any system
of social relationships, and no explanation is provided of the characteristics of
particular forms of society which give rise to male aggression and domination on
the one hand and to female passivity and dependency on the other. The cause of
women's oppression is represented as lying in the timeless male dnve for power
over women. Thirdly, revolutionary feminism assumes the existence of two auto-
nomous systems of social classes, economic classes and sex classes, and says little
about the relationships between these. The analysis of production upon which
economic classes are based therefore remains untouched by feminist analysis, as
by feminist struggles which are centred around reproduction. This has serious
political implications. It is unclear what the revolutionary feminist conception
of a non-patriarchal society would be and how such a society would reproduce
itself. It is unclear what strategy revolutionary feminism would adopt in order to
attain such a society. Finally, since it is assumed that men have an innate bio-
logical urge to subordinate women, how could women possibly be freed from
male power and control sufficiently to struggle for such a non-patriarchal form
of society?

In her essays in The Main Enemy Christine Delphy develops an alternative form
of analysis of patriarchy. She calls this materialist feminism. Since Christine
Delphy's arguments have been systematically explored in Michele Barrett and
Mary McIntosh ( 1979), I shall only discuss them in this paper insofar as they are

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 On patnarchy

relevant to the theoretical problems involved in analysing the concept of patri-

archy and patriarchal social relations. Chnstine Delphy's major arguments run as
follows. There are in capitalist society two modes of production: (i) the industrial
mode of production, which is the arena of capitalist exploitation; and (ii) the
family mode of production, in which the woman provides domestic services, in
which childrearing occurs, and in which some goods are produced for use and
exchange although this occurs to a decreasing extent as the production of more
commodities takes place within the capitalist labour process. The woman's
exploitation and oppression within the family derives, according to this account,
from the man's control over both the productive and reproductive activities which
take place within the family mode of production. But in stating that the family
has primacy over all other social relationships (arguing that by virtue of marriage
women share a common class position) Christine Delphy reaches a theoretical
position in which patriarchy and capitalism become autonomous spheres, each
with its own system of exploitation and social classes. The consequence of this
is that she does not appreciate the complex and contradictory ways in which
the production process and the family are related to each other, and the ways
in which in the final analysis the social relations of production transform all
social relationships, including family relationships, in the course of the develop-
ment of capitalism. This has implications for her analysis of waged work as well
as for her account of the family, since she does not discuss the conditions which
prevail in large-scale industry, the forms of labour which capital demands in
particular historical conditions, and the ways in which women have been drawn
into social production outside the family in response to certain of these demands.
While she is correct to point to the double load which women have to under-
take when they enter into social production as wage labourers, she misses the
important point which Barbara Taylor has made in 'Our Labour and Our Power'
(19754) that women's labour takes different forms within the capitalist labour
process and in the family. Women are exploited in both conditions, but in dif-
ferent ways and with different advantages both to capital and to their husbands.
To assume, as Christine Delphy does that patriarchy resides only in the family is
to provide a one-sided picture which is unable to explain why, in the last instance,
women are exploited both within the labour process and within the family.

Marxist feminism

Unlike the radical and revolutionary feminist work Marxist feminist analyses of
patriarchy are committed to the attempt to understand the relationship between
patriarchy and other aspects of the organization of modes of production. Thus
the same problem-of relating the family to production-arises within Marxist
feminism as is found within Christine Delphy's essays in The Main Enemy. Marx-
ist feminists have defined patriarchy in a number of ways and have explained in
different ways the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of
production. There also exists within Marxist theory more broadly a whole variety

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Feminist Review

of different approaches to defining modes of production. Marxist feminists

therefore find themselves grappling with many of the debates within Marxism as
well as the feminist theoretical disputes.

In this section I shall discuss two kinds of Marxist feminist analysis of patriarchy.
The first defines patnarchy in terms of ideology and grounds the analysis of
ideology within concepts which are derived from psychoanalytic theory. The
second defines patriarchy in terms of the relations of reproduction, or the sex
gender system. Both approaches attempt to spell out the relationship between
patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production. I have in this section selected
a number of texts and papers which I consider to raise central questions in the
analysis of patriarchy, but my survey is by no means complete. My intention is
to try and examine several different approaches to the question and to consider
some of the problems which are raised by them, rather than to provide a com-
prehensive review of the Marxist feminist literature. I hope that this does not
prove to be unfair to particular writers.

(i) Patriarchy as ideology: Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalysis and feminism

One of the clearest proponents of the view that patriarchy can be defined as
ideology is Juliet WIitchell's Psychoanalysis and Beminism (1974). At one level
psychoanalysis provides a theory of the complex process whereby the child with
a bisexual disposition is initiated into human culture, thereby acquiring the
specific forms of femininity and masculinity which are appropriate to her or his
place within the culture. One of the contributions of Juliet Mitchell's work has
been to provide a theoretical account of the development of femininity and the
constitution of womanhood which is grounded in psychoanalytic concepts and
which has been of great importance in the formation of psychoanalytic theories
of femininity. There is a second level of analysis in Psychoanalysis and Feminism
which has been influential among feminist writings about patriarchal ideology.
This is an outline account of the origins and foundations of patriarchy within
human culture.

Juliet Mitchell links the two parts of her analysis with the assertion that for
Eireud the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is a concept of mankind's
transmission and inheritance of cultural laws. She argues that by understanding
how the unconscious operates it is possible to gain some insight into the func-
tioning of patriarchal culture. The defining characteristic of a patriarchal cultur
for her is that within it the father assumes, symbolically, power over the woman
and she asserts that it is fathers and their 'representatives' and not men (as in
radical and revolutionary feminist analyses) who have the determinate power
over women in patriarchal culture. Juliet Mitchell argues against biological form
of explanation of why the father should be endowed with this power (that is,
she argues against biological reductionist forms of analysis) and asserts that th
father assumes this power symbolically at the inauguration of human culture.
Why should this be so? In answering this question she turns to Levi-Strauss'
analysis of kinship systems ( 1969). According to Levi-Strauss, exchange relations
lie at the foundation of human societies, and the exchange of women by men i
a fundamental form of exchange which accounts for the particular social position
in which women are placed in all human societies. Underlying this analysis of
the reasons why it is women and not men who are used as exchange objects is
Freud's account of the universality of the incest taboo (Freud :1950). This
negative rule gives rise to the rule of exogamy, which dictates that people must

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 On patriatchy

marry outside of their own nuclear family. It is this necessity, in Levi-Strauss'

theory, which determines the use of women as exchange objects.

Using Levi-Strauss, Juliet Mitchell argues that the universality of patriarchy is

rooted in the exchange of women by men, the necessity for which is in turn
located in the universality of the incest taboo. In this way patriarchy is postu-
lated as a universal structure in all human societies. She does argue, however,
that each specific mode of production expresses this universal law of patriarchy
in different ideological forms. It is at this point that she attempts to tie her
analysis to a Marxist analysis of modes of production. She suggests that in
capitalist society the conditions for the disappearance of the incest taboo and
kinship structures have developed, but that these structures have nevertheless
remained. Capitalism has, in her view, made the patriarchal law redundant;
there exists a contradiction between the organization of the capitalist economy
and the continuing existence of patriarchy. Women in their role as reproducers
stand at the crux of this contradiction. Women remain defined by kinship
structures while men enter into the class-dominated structures of history. Juliet
Mitchell suggests that feminist struggle should be directed against the ideological
mode of patriarchy which has become increasingly redundant. Feminist struggle
is thus conceptualized as a form of cultural revolution whose object is to trans-
form the foundations of patnarchal culture.

Juliet Mitchell's analysis of patriarchy seems problematic in a number of ways.

These can be related to her reliance upon Freud's social theory, upon Levi-
Strauss' analysis, and to her use of Althusser's theory of ideology (1969, 1970,
1971) for her basic sociological framework. Since the framework which she
develops for analysing patriarchy has been influential among some feminist
wAtings, I wish to comment upon some of the implications of its use. It does not
provide any satisfactory theory of the foundations of patriarchy, since it rests on
the poorly formulated theory which Freud develops in Totem and Taboo and on
Levi-Strauss' account of exchange relations lying at the foundation of human
culture and the subordination of women. The problem with this is that Levi-
Strauss does not provide any account of why it is men who exchange women,
and hence of the foundations of male domination over women.4

A further set of problems concerns Juliet Mitchell's conception-of ideology which

is derived from an Althusserian conception of society. In his earlier writings, For
Marx (1969) and Reading Capital (ls7a) for example, Louis Althusser develops
a conception of society which consists of a number of analytically distinct levels
or practices-the economic, the political, the ideological. The economy is pre-
sumed to determine the other levels 'in the last instance', and the ideological
level is assumed to have a 'relative autonomy' from the economic base. In his
essays in Lenin and Philosophy (1971), and especially in the paper entitled
Ideology and Ideological State A pparatuses, Louis Althusser develops this
notion of ideology further in two ways. First, he analyses the functional relation
ships between specific ideological institutions (which he calls ideological state
apparatuses), the reproduction of labour power, and the social relations of pro-
duction in the capitalist mode of production. In this way he links the ideological
level to the economic level of the mode of production by arguing that the ideo-
logical structures-for instance, schools-are necessary for capitalism. But this
form of theory-functionalism-does not explain why ideological institutions
and practices take a given specific form, nor does it take account of class struggle.
The 'needs' of capital determine everything that happens.

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Feminist Review

Secondly, he develops a general account of ideology. In this account he suggests

that the 'constitution of subjectivity', that is, the way in which the subject con-
ceives herself or himself and her or his place in the world is a central feature of
ideology, which is a set of 'lived relations'. Juliet Mitchell bases her own argu-
ments on this theoretical approach and on the approach of the French psycho-
analyst Jacques Lacan, to whom Louis Althusser is also indebted for this way of
looking at the relationship of what we commonly think of as the individual and
the world. All three assume that Freud's theory can provide a materialist account
of the constitution of subjectivity.

Within the main body of her text, Juliet Mitchell discusses patriarchy as the sym-
bolic law of the father which, following Freud and Levi-Strauss, she argues is a
universal law which exists in all societies. But it remains unclear what is meant
by the symbolic order and what is the relationship between this and the analysis
of ideology. This problem emerges particularly poignantly in the concluding
section of Psychoanalysis and Feminism in which Mitchell shifts from analysing
the symbolic order to analysing ideology, redefining the symbolic order as ideo-
logy as she attempts to tie her Freudian analysis into a Marxist one. Mitchell's
account of patriarchy is grounded in Freud's theory which attempts to explain
how individual subjects become 'masculine' and 'feminine?. This is essentially a
universalistic theory which is assumed to apply to all forms of human culturet
and it is difficult to integrate satisfactorily this with a Marxist analysis; there
exists a tension in Mitchell's analysis between a universalistic theory of patri-
archy which is grounded in the subordination of women to the law of the father
and a Marxist account which claims to provide an histoncally specific theory of
modes of production and of the forms of state and ideology which emerge within
specific modes of production. Mitchell claims that the origins of patriarchy are
rooted in the incest taboo and the exchange of women by men to which this
gives rise. She ignores the historical development of patriarchy and the concrete
forms which this assumes.

In the course of her discussion, Mitchell's analysis of ideology shifts from being a
theory of the relative autonomy of ideology to a theory of the absolute auto-
nomy of ideology. Furthermore, since she represents the subordination of women
within patriarchal social relations as inescapable, the ongins of the subordination
of women being identified with the origins of human culture, it remains unclear
how feminist struggle could change the position of women.

Some of Althusser's and Mitchell's critics, for example Hirst (1976) and contri-
butors to the journal m/f nos.l and 2 (1978), have recognized that it is contra-
dictory to adopt both a universalistic conception of the constitution of the gen-
dered subject which is derived from the analyses of Freud and Levi-Strauss and
an historical matenalist conception of modes of production. They have attempted
to resolve the contradiction by embracing openly what Juliet Mitchell only im-
plies. The journal m/f has developed a form of discourse theory to explore this
problem. Their interpretation argues that the social construction of woman must
be analysed in relation to the discourses within which it is constituted, with the
implication that all forms of practice are conceptualized as discourses and that
no single discourse has primacy over others. Although this would be one mecha-
nism of resolving a major theoretical contradiction which besets Psychoanalysis
and Feminism, its relationship to historical materialism virtually disappears. If all
forms of discourse are analysed independently from each other, the pnmacy of

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 On patnarchy

the social relations of production, which has been one of the characteristic fea-
tures of a Marxist analysis, vanishes from the theoretical framework.

Juliet Mitchell's conception of society as consisting of a set of distinct practices

has implications for her conception of the capitalist mode of production as well
as for her analysis of ideology. For, like Christine Delphy, and like some of the
other Marxist feminist wnters whom I discuss in the following section, she dis-
tinguishes between 'the economic mode of production [and] . * . the ideological
mode of reproduction' (Mitchell, 1974:412). Although she says very little about
the economic mode of production, it is clear that underlying her account is an
economistic definition of the mode of production, a definition that is in terms
of a narrow conception of the labour process rather than in terms of the social
relations of production and the organization of the capitalist mode of production
in its totality. The relations of reproduction) which are defined as ideological
relations, are then analysed as independent structures which are functionally
integrated within the (economic) mode of production. It is true that she refers
to a contradiction between the ideological mode of patriarchy and the capitalist
mode of production when she argues that the conditions for the existence of
patriarchy have ceased to exist, but this contradicton is analysed in formal
rather than historical terms and is by no means central to her analysis. I shall
return to some of the problems involved in analyzing reproduction in the follow-
ing section of this paper, since some of the problems that arise in Psychoanalysis
and Feminism can be identified more sharply in some of the more recent Marxist
feminist literature.

(ii) Patriarchy and the social relations of reproduction

Some of the recent Marxist feminist literature on patriarchy has focused upon
the social relations of reproduction, and has discussed the relative emphases
which should be placed upon production and reproduction within Marxist femi-
nist theory. I think that the interest in studying women's oppression in terms of
the concept of reproduction, and in locating patriarchy within the social relations
of reproduction stems from a number of sources:

(i) Developments from the radical feminist analysis, which has produced
numerous insights into specific aspects of women's oppression which are
concerned with reproduction (childbirth, abortion, motherhoodf for
example).
(ii) Recognition that aspects of the oppression of women go beyond the capi-
talist mode of production In some feminist anthropological wntings this
takes the form of asserting the universality of the woman's domestic,
mothering and reproductive roles.
(iii) The belief that patriarchal social relations cannot be derived directly from
capital and the consequent desire to flesh out, complement and develop
the Marxist account of the production process with an account of the pro-
cess of reproduction.

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 Feminist Resqew

(iv) A return to Engels' assertions in his Preface to the First Edition of The
Ongin of the FamiZy, Private Property and the State that:

The determg factor in history is, in the last resort, the production
and reproduction of immediate life . . . this itself is of a twofold charac-
ter. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence . . .
on the other, the production of human beings themselves. The social
institutions under which men of a definite country live are conditioned
by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labour on
the one hand, and of the family on the other. (Engels, 1968:455)

This muchsuoted section of Engels' Preface has provided a classical justiF

fication within Marxism for analysing the sphere of repduction as one
aspect of the analysis of the capitalist mode of production.
(v) The publication in France of Claude Meillassoux's book Femmes, Greniers
et Capitaux (1975) whose central concern is with the question of why
social- relations based on the family (or the domestic community) continue
to have such great importance for the capitalist system. A number of the
papers that have recently elaborated upon the theory of reproduction
have been engaged in a critical debate with Meillassoux's arguments - see
O'LoughliII (1977), Mackintosh (1971), and Edholm et al. (1977).

As Edholm et al. have pointed out in 'ConceptuaZzing Women', reproduction

has been used extremely imprecisely within the Marxist feminist literature. But I
believe that most of the wntings which use the concept of reproduction share, at
a general level, a number of characteristics, and I wish to discuss these briefly.

It seems to be a shared assumption among a number of wnters, for example

McDonough and Harrison (1978), several of the articles in Women Take Issue
(1978), Hartmann (1 979a and 1 979b), and the articles by Eisenstein in Capitalist
Patnarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1979) that the specificity of
patriarchy lies in the relations of reproduction, which are in turn located within
the family. Writers differ, however, as to whether tlley define the social relations
of reproduction as material relations deriving, for example, from control of
women's labour, or as ideological or cultural relations. Thus, to take one example
of a paper which defines the relations of reproduction in materialist terms,
McDonough and Harrison argue that patriarchy is concerned with the control of
the wife's labour in the family and the wife's sexual fidelity and procreation. In
a statement that reads very much like an assertion from Delphy's The Main
Enemy, McDonough and Harrison argue that the specific forms of control over
reproduction which characterize patriarchy arise at marriage, in which the wife
gives both her labour power and her capacity to procreate in exchange for a
deEmite period: life. Although the forms of patnarchy var according to class,
they argue-the control of the wife's sexuality and fertility in the bourgeois
family being concerned with the production of heirs, while in the proletarsan
family it is concerned with the reproduction of labour power-the basic form
of patriarchal relations remains the same. McDonough and Harrison argue that
the further development of the concept of patriarchy must lie in the inter-
relationship between the relations of production and the relations of repro-
duction. Their specific arguments, however, tend to reproduce a split form of
analysis which separates out the sphere of reproduction from production, as
the following passage illustrates:

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 On patnarchy

Although as Marxists it is essential for us to give analytic primacy to the

sphere of production, as feminists it is equally essential to hold on to a
concept such as the relations of human reproduction in order to under-
stand the specific nature of women's oppression. (1978:28)

Some papers, for example Lucy Bland et al. 'Women "Inside and Outside" the
Social Relations of Production' ( 1978) do consider the relationship between the
woman's role in both spheres, but only in terms of the consequences for women's
wage labour of their reproductive role. The family ls thus considered to be the
crucial site of the subordination of women, and the mode of reproduction to be
functionally necessary to capital's desire for cheap and flexible labour power.

Zillah Eisenstein states that the problem is how to 'formulate the problem of
woman as both mother and worker, reproducer and producer' (1979:1). She
argues that male supremacy and capitalism are the core relations which deter-
mine the oppression of women:

The . . . dynamic of power involved . . . derives from both the class relations
of production and the sexual hierarchical relations of society. (1979:1)

Eisenstein depicts society as compnsing on the one hand the capitalist labour
process, in which exploitation occurs, and on the other hand the patriarchal
sexual hierarchy, in which the woman is mother, domestic labourer and consu-
mer, and in which the oppression of women occurs. Patriarchy is not analysed
as a direct outgrowth of biological differentiation, as it is in Shulamith Fire-
stone's The Dialectic of Sex (1971), nor as a result of the universal existence
of the oedipus complex, as in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, but is conceptual-
ized as resulting from the ideological and political interpretations of biological
differentiation. This is what is meant by the social relations of reproduction,
or the sex gender system5. For Zillah Eisenstein these relations of reproduction
are not specifically capitalist relations, but are cultural relations which are
carried over from one historical period to another. While the economic organi-
zation of society may change, patriarchy, which is located in the social relations
of reproduction, provides a system of hierarchical ordenng and control which
has been used in various forms of social organization, among them capitalism.

In the two examples of theories of social reproduction which I have looked at,
these are defined in the first instance in terms of control over the wife's labour,
fertility and procreativity, that is, in materialist terms, and in the second instance
as ideological relations which are centrally involved in the transformation of sex
into gender. In each case priority is given to the social relations of reproduction
in defining women's oppression. These may be seen to have consequences for the
organization of production, or as functionally related to it, but the specificity of
the position of women is perceived primarily in terms of reproduction relations.
I shall in the next section attempt to point to some of the problems posed by
this mode of analysis.

A note on production, reproduction and patriarchy

One of the themes which I have attempted to pinpoint in discussing a selection

of the literature on patnarchy is that much of this literature develops a form of
analysis in which society is conceptualized as consisting of two separate struc-

F.R. Vol. 3-F

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 Feminist Review

tures. These are variously descnbed as: the economic class system/the sex class
system (revolutionary feminism and Firestone); the family mode of production/
the industnal mode of production (Delphy); capitalism/patnarchy (Hartmann,
1979a); social relations of production/social relations of reproduction (Mc-
Donough and Harrison, Women Take Issue). These separate structures are either
conceptualized as distinct determinants of historical change which interact,
accommodate or come into conflict with each other (Hartmann, Eisenstein)? or
as functionally related to one another (Bland et al.).

I wish by way of a conclusion to spell out some of the problems that anse if
patriarchy and capitalism, or the social relations of reproduction and the social
relations of production, are treated as independent structures in this way.

First, as Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young have pointed out in
'Conceptualizing Women', the concept of reproduction has been used in many
different ways. They suggest that we should separate out three forms of repro-
duction: (i) social reproduction, that is, reproduction of the total conditions of
production; (ii) reproduction of the labour force; and (iii) biological reproduction.
Among Marxists the debates about the first of these forms of reproduction, social
reproduction, have been closely associated with debates about the concept of
mode of production, while the analysis of the reproduction of the labour force
has been of central concern to Marxist feminists engaged in the 'domestic labour
debate'. I still find it difficult to give any ngorous meanin8 to the vanous uses of
the term reproduction-to sort out, for example, whether biological reproduc-
tion should be included within the category of the reproduction of the labour
force (or reproduction of labour power), and to understand how to make sense
of the control of women's sexuality in terms of the concept of reproduction. I
think we have tended to turn to analyses of reproduction in order to avoid a
mechanistic version of Marxism which concentrates solely upon the production/
labour process, and in order to deal specifically with women's familial activities
which Marxism has consistently ignored. However, as Felicity Edholm, Olivia
EIarris and Kate Young (1977:111) suggest, maybe we are wrong "to argue for
the development of a whole set of new concepts in order to understand human
reproduction". Maybe our desire to do this merely reflects the way in which we
ourselves fetishize reproduction.

The second problem is that the separation of reproduction or patriarchy from

other aspects of the mode of production has tended to leave the Marxist analysis
of production untouched and uncriticized by feminist thinking. Yet theoretically
the Marxist analysis of the production process has been quite unsatisfactory-
analyses of production are frequently economistic, the labour process has been
divorced from the social relations of production as a whole, and female wage
labour has frequently been left out of analyses of production.

This is a theoretical deficiency which has serious political implications. The

working class is generally defined by male Marxists by reference to the labour
process (that is, wage labourers lacking ownership of the means of production
and subsistence) and by.some even more narrowly, by reference to productive
workers who directly produce surplus value within the capitalist labour process.
This conception of class follows from a conception of the capitalist mode of
production which only concentrates upon the production process. However, it is
impossible to comprehend the complexity of the differential relationships which

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 On patiiatchy

men and women have to production, and the different forms which their con-
sciousness assumes by reference to production alone. The analysis of production
must be located within the social relations of production as a whole, and the
position of all categories of labour cannot satisfactorily be understood without
reference to the family and the state. Recent evidence about the differential
responses of male and female workers in industrial disputes has begun to teach
us a little about this process. Beatrix Campbell and Valerie Charlton discuss in
'Work to Rule' (1978) the different demands that male and female workers have
made at Fords, the men arguing for higher wages and the women wanting a
shorter working week, abolition of contractual distinctions between part-time
and full-time workers, and sabbaticals. These different demands can only be
understood if the position of workers within the production process is con-
ceptualized more broadly than is usually the case within Marxist theory. It is in
my view vital that Marxist feminist work does not concentrate upon questions of
ideology, reproduction and patriarchy without extending the implications of the
feminist critique to the Marxist analysis of production.

The third point I wish to make is that it is impossible to have a notion of produc-
tion which does not also involve reproduction. Any mode of production involves
production and reproduction, both historically and logically. It is important
therefore that we attempt to understand the inter-relationships between produc-
tion and reproduction as part of a single process and consider the ways in which
these have been transformed historically. I believe it is necessary to analyse the
development of the labour process the family and the state, and the relationship
between them as capital accumulation has developed. Just as capitalism did not
creste the capitalist labour process but developed it in a prolonged and uneven
process on the site of historically given forms of organization of labour power,6
so it did not creste the patriarchal family but developed on the basis of the patri-
archal domestic economy which was already in existence. We need to analyse
the historical development of these institutions, the inter-relationships between
them, and the ways in which the structure of the family and our experience of
family life have been transformed as the capitalist mode of production has
developed.

I stated at the beginning of this paper that the concept of patriarchy had been
introduced into contemporary feminist discourse in an attempt to answer impor-
tant questions about our experience of oppression and to provide some compre-
hensive analysis of this. I have discussed throughout this paper some of the ways
in which particular strands of feminist theory do not succeed in this. It is impor-
tant to emphasize, however, that Marxism itself has proved totally inadequate to
the task of analyzing the oppression of women. As Heidi Hartmann has pointed
out, Marxism has had an analysis of sthe woman questions but has been quite
weak on the subject of 'the feminist question'.7 Although I have been critical of

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Feminist Review

a number of uses of the concept, I wish to conclude by outlining some of the

ways in which I think it might still be useful to develop and utilize it. First, I
think that a satisfactory theory of patriarchy should be historically specific and
should explore the forms of patriarchy which exist within particular modes of
production. This would suggest that the forms of patriarchy which exist in capi-
talism are different from the forms existing in pre-capitalist or socialist societies.
I do not think that the existence of a biological differentiation of the sexes
across modes of production should invalidate this argument, since biological
differentiation is less significant than the different forms of social construction
of gender and the forms of social institution in which patriarchy exists in dif-
ferent societies.

Secondly, the forms of patriarchy which exist in particular social institutions

have to be investigated. I think we are wrong to assume that domination assumes
the same form in all social formations and in all kinds of social institutions within
a society. For example, the forms of patriarchal domination which existed when
the domestic economy was the primary producing unit are different from the
forms which emerge as capital seizes control over the production process. Women,
having previously been subject to the control of their husbands within the house-
hold, become subject to capitalist control if they are wage labourers. They are
thus subject both to the domination of their husbands within the family and to
the domination of capital and its agents if they also perform waged work. I think
we should expect to find that the forms of domination and women's experience
of it would be different in different institutions, depending upon the role of the
particular institution within the organization of the capitalist economy as a
whole, the form of its material organization, and the form of ideology and power
relations which prevail within it. Finally, I think we are left with a difficult task.
How can we utilize a materialist method of analysis un such a way that we can
satisfactorily integrate production and reproduction as part of a single process,
and which will reveal that gender differentiations are inseparable from the form
of organization of the class structure?

Notes

Veronica Beechey teaches sociology at Warwick University. She is writing a book

on Feminism and Marxism for Virago and doing research on part-time women's
work in Coventry.

The ideas for this paper grew out of two talks I gave, the first to the Communist
University of London in 1977 and the second for Feminzst Review in 1978. Bea
Campbell and various members of the Feminist Review Collective persuaded me
to write them up more coherently, and I am grateful for the encouragement and
support of all of them. In addition, Sally Alexander, Colleen Chesterman, Simon
Clarke, the Feminist Review Collective Simon Frith, Stuart Hall, Richard Hyman,
Terry Lovell and Barbara Taylor gave me detailed comments on an earlier draft
which have been very helpful. I am grateful to all of them for sparing the time to
do so, and to Michele Barrett and Elizabeth Wilson for their help with the final
version.

1 I am grateful to Sally Alexander for pointing out to me the history

concept within feminist writings.

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 On patnarchy

2 Biological reductionism. Political consenatives and anti-feminists have often

used this argument to suggest that because women give birth and can breast-
feed they are therefore biologically endowed with emotional and psycho-
logical characteristics associated with motherhood, such as nurturance and
self-sacnfice; and that because the male tends to be the aggressor in sexual
intercourse, women are therefore emotionally and psychologically passive.
These arguments are often supported by suggestions that hormones play a
key role in causing these psychological differences. Such explanations fail to
make the important distinction between biological sex and gender, which is
socially constructed. Nor can they explain why sex/gender differences assume
different forms in different forms of social organization.
3 I do not wish to underestimate the importance of Juliet Mitchell's writings
about the development of masculinity and femininity, and the influence these
have had on subsequent feminist writings. I am not concerned with these par-
ticular questions, however, but with Mitchell's arguments about patriarchy
and ideology which she formulates somewhat schematically in the conclusion
to Psychoanalysis and Feminism.
4 Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that in matrilineal societies it is
maternal uncles and not fathers who 'exchange' women. This casts doubt
upon Juliet Mitchell's argument that it is the power of the father to exchange
women which lies at the roots of women's subordination and of patriarchal
social relations.
5 The term 'sex gender system' was used by Rubin (1975) and is adopted as an
altemative means of conceptualizing the social relations of reproduction in
some of the other essays in Eisenstein, ed. (1969).
6 See samuel (1977)*

7 By this she means that it has been unconcerned with the forms of male domi-
nation and female subordination.

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