It is still a fact that these moves dealt a blow to women’s chances of overcoming their subordinate social position. Capitalism had presented the potential for equality, but that equality could not come to fruition within the system. In the interests of the reproduction of labour power, women were isolated and atomised in the home. Their work was seen as serving their husbands and their families. They were denied financial independence. This “ideal” was never the reality for all working class women; many always engaged in wage labour. But the ruling ideas propagated the notion of the family as sacred, projecting the stereotype of the bourgeois family on to the working class as a means of ensuring reproduction. And the stereotype was what working class women and men accepted as the “norm” even if it did not match their own personal reality. Even today, as the development of capitalism has drawn the majority of women into the labour market, this view of women has not disappeared although it has been severely eroded. Attitudes to women, and of women to themselves, have advanced enormously under the combined impact of control over contraception and entry into the workforce. The way changed material conditions have changed attitudes is itself an argument against seeing oppression as the result of some mystical male ideological hold that never changes.
(...) To suggest otherwise is to deny that material conditions can change ideas or structures of society. Sheila Rowbotham makes the same mistake when she argues that the capitalist family contains elements of feudal forms of production and so is a “mode within a mode”.19 Yet vestiges of pre-capitalist society that endure within capitalism do not remain at all the same as previously. The monarchy is a remnant of feudal society but has been so totally transformed by capitalism that it bears really little relation to its previous role. So with the family. It may look the same (although even that is dubious) but its role and functions, its foundations have been transformed by capital. Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system – a revolutionary overthrow of society – means that the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact.
(...) The Marxist theory of the family tries to explain women’s continued oppression in the context of women’s role as childbearer and rearer. Hartmann claims that Marxism is ‘sex-blind’; in other words can explain why people are in certain places but cannot explain why these people are women. Yet the theory does precisely that. It locates women’s oppression historically, or locates its continued existence in the individual responsibility for reproduction, which in turn structures the whole of women’s lives. It also puts a solution to that problem in terms of a socialism which would begin to break down both the material conditions which create women’s oppression, and the ideas which have arisen from them – ideas with which we are so familiar, about the family and childcare being natural, women in the home being natural. It can do so by switching responsibility for childcare from the individual to society as a whole. That on its own would open up a new world for millions of women and allow us to behave as equals in a new society.
(...) The feeling is that nothing can be done, so all we can do is sort out our own ideas. Consequently, arguments about changing the whole of society are replaced by exhortations to change our own lifestyles. Instead of activity we are confronted with an abstract moralism which demands that the small number of men (and women) who accept the ideas of women’s liberation purge themselves of ‘deviations’ as a substitute for changing society. The logic is that if we change the attitudes of men we can change the world – as though it were men, not capitalism, which is the problem. It is from these ideas that the theory of patriarchy has developed and which now in turn reinforces these ideas.