Toward a New Psychology of Women speaks to and from the advancement of female-biology adults in the United $tates
Toward a New Psychology of Women, 2nd edition
By Jean Baker Miller
Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. xxv + 154 pp.
Reviewed July 2009
Jean Baker Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women discusses the mental states of housewives, females in vertical and supposedly horizontal relationships with males in non-home settings such as workplaces, and career females subservient to male partners or with self-image problems; these females' struggles; and how these struggles are suggestive of the directions females and males need to go for development to be undertaken in a way that is beneficial for both females and males. By "development," Toward a New Psychology of Women means change in individuals and how they relate to each other. Drawing from psychoanalysis, making use of case studies, and touching on the "sexual revolution," the book calls for openness and building on the traits females already have. The book vaguely hints at socialism as a solution to problems that cannot be dealt with entirely by therapy while using the words "class" and "mutuality."
This 1986 edition of a 1976 book is still found on college syllabi all over the place -- women's studies, psychology, social work, sociology, nursing -- and is read as a contemporary theoretical and analytical work, not just as background or historical material. According to a National Library of Medicine biography of Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women was published in more than ten languages.(1) It continues to be read by intellectuals, not just non-intellectual female professionals who might find the book on a shelf in a chain bookstore. Yet, this reviewer imagines that most people studying gender today who have already rejected Freudianism and psychology in various contexts would give Toward a New Psychology of Women only a cursory look. The record of feminist therapy, as compared with other therapy or no therapy, in bringing about change even for individual First Worlders is at best unclear. At the same time, given the topics MIWS has published on recently, I would not be surprised if someone thought MIWS was on a mission to criticize Miller's book, that MIWS's review of the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper" (1973) or "Is Calvin human?" article for example was intended as a rejoinder to Miller. I would not want any fan of Toward a New Psychology of Women to think MIWS was criticizing the book in a passive-aggressive way, so this review addresses some of the specific ideas of Toward a New Psychology of Women, the source consciously and unconsciously of many people's ideas about gender today. I go back to the source instead of dealing with various derivative works here.
Temporary inequality
In comparison with other works, Toward a New Psychology of Women (TNPW) actually represents an advance on children questions. Out of more than 150 pages, TNPW devotes two pages to the substance of one question, which is more than I can say for others talking or not talking about youth oppression. TNPW considers the relationship between children and parents to be an example of "temporary inequality." The ideological justification of temporary inequality, TNPW says, is to serve a party having less of something, such as experience and physical abilities. In actuality, the lesser party frequently ends up serving the superior party.
"We have a great deal of trouble deciding on how many rights "to allow" to the lesser party. We agonize about how much power the lesser party shall have. How much can the lesser person express or act on her or his perceptions when these definitely differ from those of the superior? Above all, there is great difficulty in maintaining the conception of the lesser person as a person of as much intrinsic worth as the superior." (p. 5)
The notion that the situation of children is temporary, because people inevitably become adults, comes up at a rudimentary point in thinking about children questions. It is not something that revolutionary feminists should be having to confront on a frequent basis except among the masses, but rather something to be dealt with, rejected, and forgotten. Few people would openly say that child abuse is tolerable because children eventually grow up, but when it comes to discussion of children's oppression and not just child abuse, the seeming temporariness of children's situation becomes an issue. Of course children's oppression is temporary and so is any other oppression. In the long term, even adults oppressed as proletarians, oppressed nationalities etc. die. The oppression of children as a group, and proletarians a group, is not temporary, but an inherent aspect of a system. The oppression appears temporary only on an individual level, where everyone either changes status or dies eventually.
The temporariness of oppression is more important if one is concentrated on thinking about oppression in terms of individuals, in which context it does make perfect sense to deny the oppression of children as a group while viewing abuse of individual children as a source of problems in adulthood. Adjusting to some norm of adulthood does not require recognizing children's oppression and may require ignoring children's oppression. It may be absolutely necessary to see some condition of childhood as normatively temporary, something that adults with problems need to go beyond. As one might expect going into Toward a New Psychology of Women, the book's discussion of temporary inequality serves a purpose other than elucidating children's oppression. TNPW uses the idea of temporary inequality to explain the situation of housewives in terms of their conception of themselves and others' conception of them. The ideology of so-called temporary inequality, that some have more than others of something that is necessary, is applied to relationships between adult female and adult males, according to Toward a New Psychology of Women. "Such a model is obviously inappropriate between two adults, for it leads to covert expectations and [covert] demands that can undermine the man's psychological resources. There should have been an open attack on his position of dominance and greater privilege. This would have been ultimately beneficial to the man as well as to the woman" (p. 17). Whether the model is in any way appropriate for adults and children, or children and parents, is a question that Toward a New Psychology of Women leaves open.
Though it does not regard the inequality between adult females and adult males as a true example of temporary inequality, describes both temporary inequality and permanent inequality in terms of ideology, and views adult females as being subject to the ideology of "temporary inequality," TNPW seems to accept as valid a distinction between temporary inequality and permanent inequality. These two kinds of inequality exist objectively for TNPW. TNPW raises the idea that females remain in a situation of dependency as girls become adults, and TNPW raises, but does not dispute the idea, that adults have more to give than children, something for children to receive, thus perpetuating an ideological justification of the power of adults as a group over children as a group. TNPW only suggests in the vaguest way that the relationship between parents and children may be abused or exploited.
"Parents or professional institutions often tip toward serving the needs of the donor instead of those of the lesser party (for example, schools can come to serve teachers or administrators, rather than students). Or the lesser person learns how to be a good "lesser" rather than how to make the journey from lesser to full stature. Overall, we have not found very goods ways to carry out the central task: to foster the movement from unequal to equal. In childrearing and education we do not have an adequate theory and practice." (p. 5)
TPNW does not specify how parents "tip" toward serving the needs of themselves. Though TNPW is focused on individuals, there is no discussion of child abuse as a source of problems during adulthood or as anything else. (Reflecting on research in the decade after the publication of the first edition, Miller in the foreward to this second edition brings up sexual abuse perpetrated against children in the context of a threat of violence against females and adult females' fear.) No mention is made of oppression of children. The temporary inequality of people as children and the acceptance of assumptions surrounding this temporary inequality could actually be said to be the premise of the whole book. It is stated on the first page of chapter 1 that "the most significant difference is between the adult and the child," because "the child grows only via engagement with people very different from her/himself." The next two pages are the discussion of temporary inequality, in which TNPW raises the question of how children are to be controlled by adults. In the rest of the book, again and again the "development" of children by adults and only adults is extolled. One of TNPW's main contentions is that development is still needed in adulthood, not "independence," but TNPW takes much about childhood for granted.
Some will argue that children's oppression is beyond the scope of the book, perhaps that it is necessary to theorize in the context of homemakers before addressing children. True, some of the book's discussion of domination and its legitimation, if it is applicable to anyone, is applicable to children.(2) However, TNPW has the space to talk about the "sexual revolution," but not the "youth" movements and children's rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. TNPW not only raises concepts potentially useful for understanding the oppression of various groups; it purports to offer a concrete analysis of the family and change, but does not deal with children's role in the family, or children's role in change or even as an object of change. By concentrating in this way on progress for adult females as oppressed and subordinate people, TNPW lays the ideological groundwork for projects to raise adult females into a gender aristocracy, a privileged (global) minority of gender-oppressed or formerly gender-oppressed people.
Foreign nations and imperialist country unification
The issue is not that Toward a New Psychology of Women talks about white middle-class females or that it focuses on white middle-class females. It is fine to focus on the gender aristocracy, to analyze it as an enemy formation. The issue is that Toward a New Psychology of Women does not put U.$. adult females and their advancement in the proper concrete context, including oppressed children and people in the Third World. The Third World and even capitalism are simply absent in the book. In fact, TNPW has to go out of its way to not address topics such as revolutionary movements and transformations in the Third World and socialist countries, and though it mentions corporate careers, TNPW does not address capitalism as a system. This is relevant to TNPW's conception of change in the First World based on the spontaneous grasping of females, and its conception of progress, one that is based on individualism.
The last chapter of Toward a New Psychology of Women briefly discusses "class, race, gender" in the context of "valuing difference" and females' engaging in conflicts with each other productively. It does not say "class, nation, gender." TNPW does not say much about class and race concretely. What it does say suggests an alliance with the labor aristocracy.
"White advantaged women have understood more about the many ways in which they benefit at the expense of minority, working-class and poor women. They eat food and have clothes and many other basic necessities supplied by people working for subsistence wages, many of them women." (p. 137)
There is nothing there about workers and females in Third World countries or poor countries, only "working-class and poor" people, some supposedly receiving "subsistence wages." The frame of reference suggested by "minority" is the United $tates internally, because those without privilege are a majority on the world scale. The substitution of "race" for "nation" in the context of anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s represents a rejection of Marxism-Leninism, a denial of national oppression, and a rejection of anti-imperialism. Had the discussion of "class, race and gender" come at the beginning of the book, it would have clearer that Toward a New Psychology of Women was suggesting an imperialist country citizen unity or exploiter unity project. The foreward to this second edition adds some language about "women of color" "throughout the world" and that "women of the whole world are connected in an economic and political dynamic that continues to force the poorest women of the world into worsening conditions" (p. xiii), but the ideas do not figure into the book's discussion in a significant way. The effect, actually, is to hitch Third World females to the First World gender aristocracy, as Third World workers are hitched to the First World labor aristocracy by social-democrats and revisionists. The foreword says that U.$. females have made advances, and the implication in the context of the rest of the book is that U.$. females are showing the way despite some flattery of Third World females.
There are plenty of people in the Democratic Party who would say they are against "classism," "racism," and even "colonialism." For that matter, many people in the United $tates would say they are against "adultism" or at least "age-ism." Surrounded by such people in the big cities, one might come to believe that the United $tates is on the verge of a communist revolution. There are even communism-themed night clubs in New York complete with Chinese revolution imagery (not that this writer would seek out such places, but I am aware of them, like I am aware the soda Leninade, mocking the Soviet Union, is sold in big cities in the United $tates and I don't care for such products). In such large cities as New York, one can find a community for anything and fantasize that a cult one is in with like-minded people represents something larger in the rest of the world. There are many cult leaders and gurus to choose from in New York, San Francisco, etc. But, the United $tates is not on the verge of revolution. What is lacking is substance and action. Outside image and rhetoric, none of this has anything to do with revolution except as a gateway to infiltration of revolutionary movements. Besides infiltration and counterrevolutionary intelligence and diplomatic activity, what takes place instead of revolution is easygoing, Liberal unity between Amerikans while things like killing people in Afghanistan and Pakistan are treated as "complicated." Seeking to resolve conflicts between individuals in a non-"destructive" way and optimistically talking about people coming together in the United $tates, Toward a New Psychology of Women is suspect as contributing to chauvinist and patriotic unity in the big cities, with the various socials groups, openness to psychoanalysis and activism/organization that the book discusses. Among exploiters in First World nations, group struggle is a flip side of exploiter cooperation and generally does not signify progress, but one thing Liberalism does is to focus on individuals and smooth out differences between individuals through affect and speech, resulting in accommodation between groups of which individuals are members. In the big cities of the United $tates, there is relative unity and relatively intense sexual liberalism. Elsewhere, contradictions between the exploiter classes of Euro-Amerika and between Euro-Amerika and external and internal (U.$.) oppressed nations are more pronounced. In different ways, open conflict between individuals can lead to submerging group contradictions. In the First World, revolutionary struggle cannot be undertaken openly. Struggle that is carried out openly in the First World is or becomes something other than revolutionary struggle.
Toward a New Psychology of Women's plagiarism of the Catholic Church
One of the things that may strike readers who are not used to postmodern, contemporary "sex-positive" and other individualist "feminism" is how much Toward a New Psychology of Women seems to try to avoid an appearance of hostility toward men. It is important to recognize that this is not a put-on, but reflects a central aspect of the book's thought. TNPW argues that the ideology infusing the dominant-subordinate relationship between females and males interferes with males' own knowledge of themselves and of females. TNPW makes the assumption that anything that limits the knowledge of any group, and others' knowledge of the group, is harmful to that group, so males despite being called "oppressors" by TNPW are hurt by the concomitant ideology of patriarchy. They are harmed in the context of seeking to develop themselves. The ideology of patriarchy, and patriarchy itself by dividing people and denying males the ability to participate in the development of others and therefore themselves, hold their development back. In knowledge of the truth, TNPW includes knowledge of others' and one's own emotions. Development at its fullest requires knowledge of the truth and expressing one's true inner feelings so that others can help with development. Males may benefit from an arrangement as capitalists etc., but they are deprived of something as humans by their own and others' lack of knowledge and openness. Some would argue that Toward a New Psychology of Women represents humanist philosophy as certainly psychoanalysis in general does, but there is a distinctly Catholic feel to what TNPW is saying. TNPW does not define the objectives of development. "Development toward what" is not a question that is answered. It requires, though, knowledge of the truth and relying on people around oneself, with whom relations should be harmonized or (if certain differences are not to end) optimized for mutual development. That adults must help children to develop is, for Toward a New Psychology of Women, one certainty requiring little examination, but a precondition of exchanges between adults leading to a future perhaps gradually conceived, but foggy. The end point of development is defined by what it is not: the end point cannot be found in the midst of deception and self-deception. Beyond this and beyond both females' and males' participating in the development of children, development is left open-ended, and that is precisely the point. ("[T]he simultaneous development of man's psychological and moral consciousness is demanded by Christ almost as a pre-condition for the reception of the befitting divine gifts of truth and grace."(3)) From an individual's perspective, the end point of development is always in the future; that is, there is no true end point. It is not that Toward a New Psychology of Womenis too cowardly to use words like "socialism" and "imperialism." Though TNPW raises in a general way a society without divisions and power over others as a way forward for development, TNPW's conception of development is rooted in the individual, and is it also rooted in an ideal wrapped in uncertainty and defined by indefiniteness.
Catholicism has a conception of the "development of the human person." It is not "development of the proletariat." Even where Catholicism talks about the development of groups, the principal unit is the person. In each person, there is an inherent longing for God. There is a drive in each person to search for truth, in oneself, in the world, everywhere -- in other words, in all creation, including humans made in the image of God. The supreme truth is God. The search for truth is a search for an individual's role in the world in relation to God, and by God's nature, the search for truth is necessarily infinite, bounded on earth only by an individual's death. Catholicism also has a conception of human relations. For example, the pontifical document "The Catholic School" (published in the year after the publication of Toward a New Psychology of Women) states: "Education is not given for the purpose of gaining power but as an aid towards a fuller understanding of, and communion with man, events and things. Knowledge is not to be considered as a means of material prosperity and success, but as a call to serve and to be responsible for others."(3) Serving others has a purpose for the serving individual. (Catechism of the Catholic Church par. 1879: " . . . Through the exchange with others, mutual service and dialogue with his brethren, man develops his potential; he thus responds to his vocation.") In Catholicism, human relations are a means to an end, and that end is the development of the individual in truth. Groups are groups of individuals. So-called difference figures in the Catholic conception of human relations, as it does in Toward a New Psychology of Women. In terms of culture, in the Catholic conception, culture gives meaning to human life and dignity to each person, and dialogue with other cultures benefits the search for truth. The search for truth changes culture, and it enhances culture inasmuch as culture reflects the individual's yearning for a transcendent truth. The search for truth is seen as benefiting both individuals and humans as a whole. Whether they know it or not, all individuals strive at some level to know God so that even the culture of oppressors contains the roots of salvation. The notion of truth's being grounded in experience is found in the Catholic conception of culture, which is seen as representing an attempt to explain human life in general and the particular experiences of individuals in communion with each other. (Today, uniting people at the level of their cultures is a neo-colonial project or an instrument of a capitalist phase of struggle. It can accomplish a salvific Catholic task or a therapeutic tension-relieving/defusing task, but it cannot get the proletariat beyond capitalism.)
That is what Catholics are supposed to believe. The question is what are these ideas doing in a supposedly secular scientific book to be accepted on the basis of reason alone. Though they may seem uncontroversial enough to be found in any humanist discourse (as Catholicism claims to be), they are present in Toward a New Psychology of Women with little modification and not merely as theology or philosophy, but as materialist description. Psychoanalysis has simply replaced the Catholic Church, and a particular notion of authenticity (itself seen as a condition of development) has replaced the infinite search for the divine. Instead of spiritual benefits, authenticity and psychological benefits are seen as trumping the benefits of capitalism for exploiters, and of patriarchy for gender oppressors. An unconscious and conscious search for authenticity is thus to win out over the pursuit of career, for example. TNPW argues that female liberation isn't zero-sum for males, that (chromosomal) males would benefit from female liberation (whereas this writer would emphasize that people who are socially men would not benefit, as men). Of course, if the only resources of true value are spiritual, there is no zero-sum situation for any oppression or liberation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church discusses "spiritual goods" "which can never be exhausted" shared between people with differences in "solidarity" with each other, differences being viewed as encouraging the sharing of spiritual goods. (Compare this with TNPW's discussion of difference being the basis of mutual development.) (If only material goods were infinite; then, ending hunger and preventable disease could be ended with willpower and an infinitesemal amount of charity. Alas, the notion of First World living standards' being based on miraculous productivity is a myth spread by imperialism and a deliberate lie spread by imperialism's pseudo-Marxist defenders who are leaders. First Worlders talk about charity, but stopping the flow of resources stolen from the Third World would put First World people in poverty.)
Advancement of individuals
In reality, like Catholicism, therapy and other talking have certain results. They have certain end points. In the decadent capitalist countries of the First World, those end points are in capitalism and patriarchy. More specifically, the end points are located in imperialist country privilege and gender privilege. As much as Toward a New Psychology of Women suggests that the pursuit of "high-powered career" is limiting, TNPW's discussion of female professionals, and males burdened by pressure not to be expressive, is revealing. The reader will find several statements in Toward a New Psychology of Women extolling female professionals, particularly those who retain their "womanly" qualities. On a more Catholic level, the foreward to this second edition claims that the first edition provided comfort to a Black female professional near death, who can now die with understanding, knowing that her "anger and anguish" did not reflect "personal deficiencies." That is not self-aggrandizement on Miller's part, but a reflection of the fact that the book is about individuals and how they feel. So if one Black female feels good about herself while Black males that Toward a New Psychology of Women does not mention are in prison, that is a victory. Perhaps more revealing than what TNPW says about females is what it says about males. TNPW discusses a Charles, a man who had the chance to take an administrative job, but who had anxieties about the job's demands that he did not express. Ruth, his wife, reached out to him, and he responded angrily and disparagingly.
"Fortunately, Charles is trying hard to overcome the barriers that keep him from acknowledging these feelings. His wife's attempts opened up the possibility of dealing with them. He could not have initiated the process himself. He could not even respond to her initiation immediately, but this time, fairly soon after the fact he was able to catch himself in the act of denying it. Ruth easily might have remained rejected, hurt, and resentful, and the situation could have escalated into mutual anger and recrimination at the very time he was feeling most vulnerable, helpless, and needy." (pp. 30-31)
So, an inability to recognize and express emotions and one's own weaknesses can be a burden to one male in his role as an exploiter. This writer doesn't particularly dispute this. It may very well be true that many males do not advance as far as they could advance in the corporate world because of attitudes and behavior preventing others from aiding them. Two observations are pertinent here. One is that the capitalist class as a whole is able to perform administrative jobs in one way or another. These jobs are not typically available to proletarians. There is no reason given in Toward a New Psychology of Women to believe that males who are successful at high levels in the corporate world closed to females are more psychologically suitable for high-level positions than other males in the same class. The second observation that needs mentioning is that even if males do have problems performing in the corporate world as a result of their psychology, it is hard to understand what the concern is about. Anyone who is concerned with global exploitation could care less about the career problems of a General Motors executive, or a labor aristocrat for that matter.
Whether they call themselves "feminist" or not, it would be reasonable to expect most female therapists today and even most male psychotherapists to have some familiarity with the ideas in Toward a New Psychology of Women. However, it might seem an accomplishment just to get a male to go see a feminist therapist. As TNPW itself illustrates, though, feminist therapy for males at this time leads to making career easier for males and making family life more satisfying for males. Therapy might cause a male to rethink pursuing a promotion, but leaving career to become an artist is not realistic for most males. Males may spend more time with their children, but they will stay in career. Children are still oppressed, and without progress in the decadent First World, the patriarchal oppression of children and imperialist oppression of oppressed nations will continue. Even if a First World male left career, he would probably still be an exploiter. Leaving the work world and not working at all even in an economically unproductive job means another kind of parasitism. TNPW supports therapy for U.$. people without mentioning the privilege of U.$. patients relative to non-patients. By contrast, "The Catholic School" states, "Since education is an important means of improving the social and economic condition of the individual and of peoples, if the Catholic school were to turn its attention exclusively or predominantly to those from the wealthier social classes, it could be contributing towards maintaining their privileged position, and could thereby continue to favour a society which is unjust." Neither therapy, nor education by itself, is liberating, but TNPW is nearsighted in the extreme.
A new feminine synthesis, or a new gender oppressor?
TNPW makes the systematic error of failing to make cross-national considerations, including in gender. To begin with, the gender relationship between First World males and Third World females living in their respective areas is not like the relationship between a husband and a wife living together in the same home. And, even if there were equality between females and males on various scales within a First World nation, First World females and First World males may still have power over, and contradictions with, Third World people. This power and these contradictions have a bearing on whether First World females can change and lead change along the lines TNPW suggests.
TNPW endeavors to undo the devaluation of females to show how progress can be accomplished on the basis of what are actually females' strengths, not weaknesses. TNPW rejects the idea that the goal is for females to become like males as males currently are. Females lack power, but it is males who are lacking something. According to Toward a New Psychology of Women, adult females are encouraged to have characteristics of children, "immaturity, weakness, and helplessness" (p. 7) and are suppressed when they exhibit other characteristics. On the other hand, people who identify with the dominant group come to "treat others destructively and to derogate them, to obscure the truth of what you are doing, by creating false explanations, and to oppose actions toward equality" (p. 8). However, the work that females do in child care is of utmost importance and social value (even if it is denied), and females' capacity to perceive others' need for help and capacity to provide that help are strengths. Another quality of females is a potential willingness to engage in conflict, as dominants steer away from conflict. Even avoidance of conflict is seen as a weakness of dominants hurting themselves. In passing, TNPW specifically addresses white workers, saying that male white workers despite being members of a dominant group, males or whites, are themselves subordinates as members of the "working class" and therefore inflict injury on themselves by their tendency to avoid conflict. (In actuality, Euro-Amerikan workers are a labor aristocracy and were a labor aristocracy in 1976, an enemy of the proletariat.)
For many females, Toward a New Psychology of Women will serve an ego-stroking function. There is, however, an analysis of difference in Toward a New Psychology of Women and a theory of change based on that analysis. This theory says that, instead of becoming like men, adult females as a group will keep their old laudable qualities, because those qualities are useful despite being historically a mark of subservience; females will pursue open conflict because open conflict is in their development interests, and because they are not averse to conflict as much as males are; females are at the forefront of struggle for a higher level of cooperative living, because they have more practice trying to create cooperation; females are at the forefront of creating new visions of self because the constant struggle they already engage in trying to survive; and females will acquire power and use it for their own development and to help others, without subordinating others. TNPW states: "Women do not come from a background of membership in a group that believed it needed subordinates. Also, women do not have a history of believing that their power is necessary for the maintenance of self-image" (p. 116).
That all sounds plausible in the abstract. Yet, the theory is premised on the assumption that there are not groups to become new objects oppression as one group (U.$. females in this case) rise out of oppressed status. This assumption is clearly mistaken. The expressed focus of Toward a New Psychology of Women is U.$. females. The majority of U.$. females in 1976 were Euro-Amerikan. They were whites in a dominant position over non-whites. They were Euro-Amerikan settlers, dominant over oppressed nations in North America. They were imperialist country people and oppressor nation people, privileged and dominant over oppressed nations. In addition, they were adults, dominant over children. So, the fact is, there were these other groups, and what's more, most U.$. females did come from a background of membership in a group (multiple groups) with subordinates. In terms of TNPW's own concepts and logic, even if U.$. females attain a "capacity to implement" equal to males' power and experience "joy," there is no reason to believe that they will develop an increasingly advanced progressive consciousness. They will still be a situation of privilege and power over other groups, and this privilege and power will be legitimized. TNPW itself raises that as long as there are people to use as objects, there is a basis for continuing oppression. TNPW poses the questions:
"As women change, they will create severe challenges. To suggest just one, when more women refuse, thoroughly and totally, to allow themselves to be used as objects, either in the grossest commercial form or in the most intimate personal encounter whom will society then use as objects? If there is no one to use, what kinds of revolutionary personal transformations will the dominant group have to make for itself? Will this not end in liberating some of the creative potential in men?" (p. 45)
In some ways, these aren't the right questions. By "using objects," TNPW means something more narrow than oppression. However, to the first question this writer can answer, "children, oppressed nationalities, and proletarians."
There is an underlying idea in Toward a New Psychology of Women that equality between U.$. females and U.$. males and the new psychology corresponding to this equality will come with the elimination of the psychological basis of other oppressive relationships. So, if U.$. males stop disparaging the females around them and start being more expressive, class and national oppression will collapse. The first page of the book puts forward that "the most basic difference is the one between women and women" (p. 3), consistent with seeing gender as the fundamental contradiction. (In a colloquium talk in the early 1980s, the author of Toward a New Psychology of Women said that direct communication and new conceptions and practices of anger for females and males might prevent nuclear war.) Yet, the distance between U.$. people, and workers, oppressed nationalities and gender-oppressed people in other countries, makes the "interaction" that TNPW discusses more difficult to conduct.
TNPW makes an interesting admission. It has to do with whether females accept the myths about themselves. The admission is that "it seems to work best [for women] when women are to a large degree conscious of what they are doing -- if they are really moving out of this model, but keeping up the pretense that they are not. They cater to the picture of the superior importance and claims of men" (p. 14). TNPW criticizes this duality as being deceptive and manipulative, "not based on increasing openness and mutual understanding," and discerns a caricature of this in TV sitcoms representing females as inherently devious and treacherous. For this writer, the family sitcoms TNPW mentions with housewives are not as interesting as "Charlie's Angels," which is particularly relevant because of the year in which TNPW was published. (Fawcett appeared as Jill Munroe on television a month before TNPW was published, I believe.) Like it or not, Farrah Fawcett raised the idea of a female using "feminine" and sexual "wiles" in combination with traditionally male positions and real power. Perhaps it was cog-in-the-machine power -- certainly, it was not power used to make revolution -- but it was power. Like it or not, both females and males accepted the Farrah Fawcett model, because it was acceptable to the patriarchy. And, like it or not, the Farrah Fawcett model reflected an actual reality. U.$. females were moving into a new model with greater status, power and privilege for adult females than before, but with continuing sex distinctions, continuing gender oppression of other adult females and children, and a relinquishing of progressive leadership to other groups and classes. U.$. females were moving from one bad model to another, and the new bad model is captured in TNPW's own discussion of a duality. In actuality, the practice of clinging to the old model outwardly while living a new model is a strategy and its own potential model.
U.$. females were moving out of the old model not just mentally, but socially, both as individuals and as a group. Aside from TNPW's psychological approach and limited outlook by which TNPW focuses on mental states and interactions between selected individuals in a particular country, much of TNPW's description of female-male relationships strikes this writer as accurate historically. Not only does Jean Baker Miller deserve her reputation as being seemingly omniscient toward people whom she never met before writing her book, but who identified with what she said; the words in Toward a New Psychology of Women could describe actual oppression, particularly where they concern females without jobs outside the home. In theory, females in an imperialist country could be oppressed; not all oppression is class or national oppression. But, TNPW's description applies to few females younger than forty today, and the generations to which TNPW's description does apply are dying and will all be gone in a few decades, suggesting that some of U.$. females' apparent gains as a group can be understood in terms of demographic change -- the death of females and males with certain histories, mental states, and other attributes. The median age of females in the United $tates is under forty.
Statistically a majority of U.$. people, U.$. females are a minority in a global system of patriarchy. U.$. females have made gains as a group, and as a minority already privileged by nation and class. As a minority group in the world, it is possible for U.$ adult females to make gains and then enter into a condition of privilege in the patriarchy, something that is not true of adult females in the world as a whole (unless children, but not adult females, are a majority of the gender-oppressed in the world). Today, it is no longer necessary for survival for any cohort of U.$. females to marry or have children. For most in every cohort, marriage and having children are no longer necessary even to stay in the same class, as opposed to descending into the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat, or the petty-bourgeoisie. U.$. females left behind coerced marriage and coerced child care for careers in corporations oppressing females and males in other countries and for optional ownership of children. (Some U.$. females with unplanned avoidable pregnancies do give birth under pressure of social expectations and put off career because of child care costs, but this is not the situation of adult Euro-Amerikan females in big U.$. cities, and it is different than the situations TNPW discusses in which negative attitudes about females and career may have resulted in becoming pregnant or giving birth in the first place and legal abortion may not have been available. If I'm not mistaken, the words "abort," "abortion," "pregnancy" and "pregnant" do not appear even in this second edition of TNPW published thirteen years after Roe v. Wade.) After and in the midst of gaining these things, there has not been a large-scale or sustained feminist movement with a high level of consciousness; yet, U.$. females have expressed a willingness to move into their new situation. Without mentioning socialist countries, TNPW's esteemed forebear said thirteen years before the publication of Toward a New Psychology of Women:
"Secondly, the part that women are now playing in political life is everywhere evident. This is a development that is perhaps of swifter growth among Christian nations, but it is also happening extensively, if more slowly, among nations that are heirs to different traditions and imbued with a different culture. Women are gaining an increasing awareness of their natural dignity. Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument, they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons."(4)
It is true that U.$. females took hold of career. As TNPW mentions, though, it took World War II to upset relationships between females and males in the United $tates and corresponding ideas about females. Since the end of the World War II, one of the main things behind gains for U.$. females has been the needs of corporations that have use for sex equality domestically, but make use of sex inequality in other countries. Without an accompanying progressive movement, gains for U.$. females became delinked from progressive movements and opposed to them. These gains are analogous to the gains of males in the U.$. working class, which is now a labor aristocracy. Some of the origins of this disconnect are located in the old mode of relationship between females and males that TNPW discusses. These origins are obscured by TNPW's positive reevaluation of females' qualities in which everything females do is either a manifestation of oppression of females, resistance to that oppression, or a prefiguration of more advanced relations between females and males. As much as TNPW claims it doesn't suggest that an inherent female virtuousness, readers must rely on that notion to arrive at the conclusion that certain qualities, but not others, will be preserved as U.$. females leave the old model. TNPW discusses conscious mutual deception between females and males:
"With some couples, the mythology [with males' claiming to not have needs, while females are expected to meet males' needs without being asked so that the existence of those needs does not need to be openly confronted] may seem to "work." Both partners know what is going on to some extent, and a balance is struck so that the arrangement is sufficiently satisfactory to sustain the status quo. The woman, considering the alternatives that faced her outside of marriage, was often willing to accept the situation." (p. 34)
The thing that needs stressing here is that the conscious mutual deception, wherein males deceives females about their needs and females deceive males about knowing those needs, does not occur just during females' transition to a more advanced position. The lie has always contradicted what was objectively the case, that males needed females as much as, or more than, females needed males (as capitalists needed workers more than workers needed capitalists). If females are "practiced in cooperation" as TNPW says, they are also practiced in deception. The common situation where even rich females with Ph.D.s and institutional power flatter males' abilities and play "dumb" and powerless to take advantage of the patriarchal sexual fantasies of heterosexual males has its origins in history. It is not a question of females' being inherently "tricky" or more "tricky" than males.
The deception existed in a context of coercion, but so did the "cooperation" that TNPW discusses. There are reasons to believe that even on an individual level the cooperative tendency will not be dominant as females leave coercion. The coercive context in which child care was done could lead to child care's being associated mentally with coercion even where child care can be avoided. In corporations, like it or not, there is competition from other individuals, and there is competition in the small business female ownership context as well. Undertaking this competition does not require pursuing "high-powered career," and if it is true that females are not knowledgeable about high-powered career because they have been excluded from it, females may be less averse to career than some males who are already in career.
Sexual liberalism
Toward a New Psychology of Women poses the problem that continued cooperation can be or become continued subservience. As a solution, TNPW proposes serving one's own needs while serving others' needs. A third possibility that TNPW leaves out is a whole group of people's becoming the dominant, not just a few individuals or a minority of white U.$. females. This is a possibility as U.$. females make gains without revolution. Seemingly addressing the desires of both females and males to leave sexual restrictions, sexual liberalism has played a particular role in the accommodation between U.$. females and U.$. males. In terms of enjoyment, sexual liberalism could conceivably be a non-zero-sum proposition for both females and males in one nation, but missing from the picture may be children and people in other nations.
Today, the vast majority of oppression does not take place directly between individuals. The fact that oppressors do not have to face the oppressed as individuals is most obvious in the context of international exploitation, though stupid and dishonest so-called Marxists are in denial even about this and persist with saying that individual Amerikans who don't own a factory on paper can't be exploiters. Some political conceptions of sexual liberalism suggest that peace is possible if people are busy having sex, but it is clear that Amerikans will more often have sex with other Amerikans than with Third World people, even if Amerikans oppress Third World people via sexuality in other ways. And, even with the Internet, it is not as easy to have a dialogue with people hundreds of miles away as it is to have a dialogue with people whom one is forced to live with or near in the short term.
Amerikans have sex and talk with each other. The order of that should actually be reversed: talking and then having sex with each other. No longer forced, sex became something to be exchanged for other things, and cajoled from others through smooth-talking, proclamations of love in radio music, other cultural insistences that sex is pleasurable for females, etc. -- a reason why books like Toward a New Psychology of Women itself, which emphasize sex and verbal interactions between individuals, have to be suspect in perpetuating some aspects of gender oppression, even though the majority of U.$. females are gender oppressors today. TNPW suggests two directions: 1) adult females' "owning" their sexuality and using what they "got" in a leisure-privileged way and against children and Third World people (realistically, there is a fine line between this and trying to build on U.$. adult females' existing characteristics), and 2) adjusting to sex as it is.
In terms of concrete content, TNPW starts by talking about children, and marginalizing the topic, and ends by talking about problems of adult females' sexual desire and enjoyment. The last two chapters of Toward a New Psychology of Women are discussions of power and conflict in general. The third-to-the-last chapter deals with specific goals, including sexual authenticity. TNPW discusses a Jane, who developed a sense of "a center that is myself" (p. 98). Previously, Jane had pent-up anger and didn't deal with conflicts with female co-workers directly. She was condescending toward her female co-workers and avoided them. Jane interacted with male co-workers at her factory because she could use her identity as a woman as a shield. "I got along with them. Men were easy. You never had to deal with directly. I could always hide out under the "woman thing" with them" (p. 99). Because of her looks, Jane could "get" the man she wanted nearly every time. Jane avoided confrontation with the male co-workers because of internalized sexism that males could not be wrong. Having gained a "center" and relating with her female co-workers in a new way, Jane wonders whether any male will want to be with her now that she is assertive. Returning to Jane later in the chapter, TNPW says, "She appeared to be, in fact she described herself as, a weak woman clinging to a strong man" (p. 103). To Jane, the alternative seemed impossible for her: "the totally strong, self-sufficient person who was freed forever from weakness or neediness, and, most of all, from the effects of other people . . . in short, her image of a man" (p. 103). According to TNPW, Jane could not be assertive among her male co-workers because she had difficulty identifying as a man, and she could not be assertive among her female co-workers because she was trying to be like one of the guys. Jane ended up being more open with her female co-workers, but Jane expressed discomfort with her new assertiveness in sexual relationships with males, whom she kept dating. Jane worried that she might fall into an old pattern, conforming to males' desires instead of her own. Jane is not certain that she really likes a male she is seeing. Is what she is doing really her? TNPW raises. However, "[s]he has been able to be freer and more sexually involved with a man who knows both her strengths and vulnerabilities and who is likewise able to share with her the varied sides of himself" (p. 107). TNPW discusses another, Emily, who said that by having sex (with males) she was going back to being her old self.
It may be surprising to hear this so-called feminist book suggest that sexual oppression is in the female's head. After all, though, TNPW is a psychology book. TNPW does not discuss asexuality or even homosexuality as an alternative for the Janes and Emilys of the world. This confirms this writer's suspicion that Toward a New Psychology of Women is partly about conforming to sex as it is or was in the 1970s. But TNPW is more than that. It is also about females transitioning or adjusting to gender aristocracy status. The whole Jane story is suggestive of what has happened on a global scale. The Amerikan female did manage to become like one of the guys, a man socially. Being a social (as opposed to biological) male was not out of reach for Amerikan females as a global minority group. It was not an impossible ideal. And, the Amerikan female acts in an alternately contemptuous and patronizing way toward Third World females. Furthermore, the heterosexual Amerikan female is ambivalent about sex with males, and she is ambivalent about children. The heterosexual Amerikan female is still contemplating whether she can have it all: a career, a man, and children. What is more certain than before is that she wants career, which is compatible with the occasional casual sex. Sex does not require monogamy.
Like many could in words, TNPW opposes the treatment of females as "objects." To replace attitudes to females, in the context of intimate relationships, as mere potential sex partners is a romance ideology of mutuality in intimate relationships. In terms of children, TNPW substitutes the equal participation of females and males in child care with a surrounding emotional connectedness, for unequal female/male participation in child care. In present First World society, in which children are not valued as useful except for what they are becoming (future workers etc.), what that means is females' and males' using dependent children for their own emotional gratification. Both females and males are capable of caring for children when thrown into the situation, doing so with emotion, and seeing themselves differently in the process, but children are viewed as either a source of burden and trouble or a source of self-satisfaction.
The transition to the gender aristocracy
One thing to keep in mind while reading Toward a New Psychology of Women is that TNPW touches on several different groups of adult females, such as homemakers who never went to college, homemakers who gave up career to take care of children and perhaps have a chance to pick up career again, female factory workers, female professionals with career difficulties, and individual females who have "made it" in the corporate world but might be seeking reassurance. Perhaps Jean Baker Miller (who passed away a few years ago) would have said that TNPW reflected the complexity of females as they existed in the United $tates in the early 1970s, and no doubt that would have been true. Also, TNPW alternates between a normative and a positive mode of discussion. However, TNPW made a prediction based on females' characteristics, their comparative strengths, and this prediction in the 1970s about the future turned out to be wrong even in its own terms. The evidence seems lacking that U.$. females sustained a progressively higher level of cooperation.
Perhaps this is to give Toward a New Psychology of Women too much credit, but TNPW appears to anticipate, on an individual level, some of the issues contemporary revolutionary feminists have been discussing in terms of groups and social forces. For example, TNPW discusses the demerits of seeing males (at different ages) as the model for females' development. Love it or not, though, U.$. females became a gender aristocracy and joined U.$. males as people with gender privilege. The question arises, where does TNPW go wrong. One of the points where TNPW may goes wrong is in its conception of individual females' success as progress. It may be success on females' own terms and with new pathways, but it is analogous to seeing individual workers' ascent into the capitalist class as progress, a notion that would immediately be dismissed by any "Marxist" regardless of their views on the labor aristocracy. The reason the analogous idea in gender is not subject to instantaneous rebuke is that gains for an increasing number of females in a country is seen as progress for females as a whole. Whatever they do and whatever they become as individuals or as a group, double-X-chromosome people retain a female identity. The problem with this is so basic that it should not be worth mentioning in 2009, but the notion that female advancement equates to feminism dies hard. Feminism should be the liberation of gender-oppressed people, whether they are chromosomal females, children, homosexual males, or even heterosexual Third World males.
If "wimmin" is understood to mean gender-oppressed adult females, U.$. females in general have ceased to exist as wimmin. They can be women only in the chromosomal sense and the sense of primate adult development, or in a legal sense. (Obviously, ideas are attached to females classified "women" according to these senses, but the fact that adult females are called "women" regardless of context implies that those definitions are invoked.) TNPW's discussion of the old model still seems to apply to many U.$. females -- and even males in same-sex relationships -- and I believe Toward a New Psychology of Women will continue to be seen as relevant for at least two more decades (until people who are now in their forties are in their sixties); overall, however, U.$. females are an oppressor gender aristocracy, people who are not or no longer wimmin but who nonetheless reside within a gender system in a privileged position with respect to children and oppressed nation people.
The anti-war movement in the United $tates, which was largely driven by the draft anyway, fizzled after the Vietnam War ended. Less obvious is that the feminist movement, coinciding with the absence and potential absence of males because of the Vietnam War, also petered out after the Vietnam War ended, and as the female-male ratio and the spatial movement of males stabilized. (The feminist movement also coincided with the repeal of laws banning miscegenation between whites and Blacks and whites and Asians -- which resulted in some Euro-Amerikan females' regarding Black and Asian females as impacting Euro-Amerikan females' situation in intimate relationships -- and coincided with the perceived greater prospects during the 1960s generally for the redistribution of imperialist super-profit.) The decline of feminism in the United $tates even as a militant chromosomal-female-advancement project, in combination with the perception of continuing differences between females and males and a notion of females as being a vehicle for liberation, led to a situation where the gropings and commotions of U.$. females, however minute or narrow, are considered spontaneous resistance to oppression and a reflection of spontaneous consciousness. There are differences still between females and males in the United $tates, but they are differences between oppressors, and the contradictions corresponding to those differences are contradictions between oppressors. There are social differences, as there are social differences between the labor aristocracy and the imperialists in the United $tates, but they are differences among oppressors. There are style differences between females and males, and females assert "woman" styles and a "woman" identity in competitive contexts. These differences and this assertion in conjunction with still-existing patriarchal ideology often result in anti-female motions and utterances, but these are not the basis for a feminist movement in the United $tates. The struggle between the adult female gender aristocracy and the other gender oppressors in the United $tates commonly called "men" is like the struggle between labor aristocrats and imperialists -- not progressive.
As much as a huge militant female-centered movement in the United $tates might divide the exploiter population there and be of use to the proletariat, in reality such a movement does not exist. The U.$. gender aristocracy is in an alliance with U.$. adult males. Attempts to create such a large female-centered movement in the United $tates inevitably result in pseudo-feminism and white nationalism or imperialist country chauvinism, because what unites U.$. females is not what can unite the majority of the world's females. It is important, though, to notice the particular ways in which the gender aristocracy is behaving, to understand the gender aristocracy more fully and its trajectory. Recent efforts to unite First World females and Third World females literally on the basis of cosmetics -- whether a Muslim womyn has the "choice" to wear Estee Lauder, Lancôme, and Clinique, for example -- illustrates what U.$. females are already seeking. They are seeking gender privilege through style, and as individuals they are seeking career.
In case there is somebody out there who might take this article personally even though I don't know you, I intend no harshness toward anyone's grandmother, great-grandmother, or great-aunt. It is a little hard to fault seventy-year old females, denied career in their younger days, for now trying to find a way out of their situation through fashion and fragrance, particularly as there are more females than males in their seventies. The real issue is females who are educated, have career in front of them and open to them, and yet still cling to style -- sometimes consciously as the be-all-and-end-all of female liberation. The notion of people in their twenties still being "youth" needing to "express" themselves and find out who they "are" needs to be shot down for the sake of clarity on First World gender questions.
But why do U.$. females hold onto style, and relatedly why do U.$. females continue to have sex with U.$. males. One of the reasons is history, not just in the sense that beauty has been associated with females in the past. Males hold positions that they acquired when sex inequality was greater. In addition to and intertwining with this legacy are informal networks. One of the reasons U.$. females have sex with U.$. males is to gain access to the good ol' boy network. There is an intersection with class here, because even if sexism and sex discrimination were not factors the good ol' boy network might be disproportionately male for reasons of history. Individual females pursuing career advancement may face contradictions with males that are actually class contradictions. Nonetheless, it may be said that U.$. females pursue membership in/transformation of the good ol' boy network through gender.
One hypothesis, consistent with what some Freudians envision, is that as females make gains their sex drive will come closer to the sex drive of males, so that U.$. females will eventually have, and may already have, a sex drive equal to U.$. males' sex drive. Actually, having a sex drive equal to the historical male average sex drive is not necessary to be a gender oppressor. It is a sufficient in the current gender system that a group uses sexuality to reproduce their gender privilege or obtain desired leisure-time lifestyles. The gender aristocracy has styles, sexualizes those styles, and has sex with males of the same nation, but in fact the gender aristocracy's sex drive is less than the males'. The idea -- which is really uncontroversial and not uniquely feminist or revolutionary -- that U.$. females have higher sexual desire and pleasure than females in the Third World should not obscure the particular ways in which the gender aristocracy interacts with other gender oppressors.
Maoist revolutionary feminists say that female gender oppressors are socially men. The term "social man," though, is not unique. There actually is a long tradition among First World alleged feminists of concern regarding females' becoming or trying to become what males have been. That tradition, which is not controversial within "feminism," does not acknowledge the possibility of a whole group of females with gender (not just class or national) privilege and should not be confused with what Maoist revolutionary feminists are saying. Additionally, becoming a gender oppressor does not entail becoming like adult males have been in every way. There are different ways of being a gender oppressor. Female gender oppressors in the United $tates behave and relate in particular ways, which this article only partially addresses.
In the midst of higher educational attainment by U.$. females compared with U.$. males, different extensive and massive deceptions are necessary for what the gender aristocracy is trying to do to work. One involves desire. The other involves males' self-image. The really interesting thing today is imperialist country males' self-image as it pertains to female-male differences. There are different ways to look at U.$. females and education. According to figures reported by the NSF Division of Science Resources Statistics, for several years now the number of doctoral degrees awarded to female U.$. citizens has been greater than the number granted to male U.$. citizens.(5) From another direction, one can look at educational institution drop-out rates. Despite the notion that high school drop-outs are typically mothers, the high school drop-out rate for U.$. females is lower than the drop-out rate for males. Even if one assumes as is commonly claimed that females have to get more education to obtain the same pay and positions as males (discrimination), and even if one assumes that all the male high school drop-outs go into occupations requiring brawn and not brains, the educational difference between U.$. females and U.$. males will impact U.$. males' self-image. The opportunity to use "brawn" does not come up on a daily basis for U.$. males. Most U.$. males do not work in agriculture, construction, logging, manufacturing, mining, or transportation. OK, males are usually preferred to move large pieces of furniture around, but how often do people move anyway. U.$. males can take more pride in the fact that they can open a can of spaghetti sauce. To create the impression that better-educated females still need males in a modern imperialist country -- with a small goods-producing sector, automation in that sector, and a large police apparatus making personal bodyguards unnecessary -- a deception must occur. U.$. females offer sex and style even though they have more than those. They flatter the muscles of U.$. males, even where brawn is useless. They flatter the power of U.$. males, even when it was not obtained by anything U.$. females don't currently have in ability, and in doing so sexualize power. They flatter the style of U.$. males even where it is not accompanied by anything of substance. For their own part, U.$. males increasingly try to make up with style what they lack in brains.
In culture, U.$. males alternate between offering females sex for money, on the one hand, and opposing gold-digging but encouraging females to be interested in style instead. To hear recent Canadian rap sensation Drake's song "Best I Ever Had," it's like U.$. males are in a pandemonium, throwing everything at the wall in a desperate bid for sex with females: offering females any price for a relationship, even offering forever-monogamy and promising not to cheat, offering females their preferred lifestyles implicitly in exchange for sex, offering females the idea that they are pleasing and pleasuring a man, offering females romantic ideas such as that they are only one "I ever wanted," offering females a relationship from a prostrate position (that is, on terms favorable to females), referring to females as "hoes," seemingly contradicting the 'ho concept for females by saying females would buy a blank disc if it had Drake's (a beautiful male's) picture on the case, offering to pleasure females in ways they didn't know were possible, and saying that they would have sex with them regardless of their fashion efforts (possibly to avert competition from other males). The 'ho-I-was-meant-to-be-with idea is actually an advance in some ways, but it belongs to the romance culture. It is not more advanced for political correctness reasons; the 'ho idea is correct when females and males as groups in society still do not have equal interest in the same sexual lifestyles, but both partake in them.
"'Cause she holds me down every time I hit her up
When I get right I promise that we're going to live it up
She makes me beg for it till she gives it up
And I say the same thing every single time
" . . .
"Always felt like you were so accustomed to the fast life
Have a nigga thinking that he met you in a past life
Sweat pants, hair tied, chilling with no make-up on,
That's when you're the prettiest, I hope that you don't take it wrong" --"Best I Ever Had"
The point is not that all males who have sex with females or all U.$. males are "pussy-whipped." Rather, U.$. males (individually and as a group) give U.$. females the lifestyles they prefer (or money) in return for sex -- another lifestyle. It is tempting to say that U.$. males are controlled by their sex drives (and in fact some have sought voluntary castration). In some ways, males' sex drive is a liability to them. Yet, historically it has corresponded to males' preferred leisure-time activity -- in some cases the only leisure-time activity apart from activities involving the whole community. If one does not have a concept of leisure time in gender theory and only thinks of gender in terms of sex, it can be difficult to understand contemporary female-male interactions.
Of course, there are national differences among U.$. males, since the United $tates has internal colonies. The same ideas that might lead to transactions between gender oppressors could turn Black males into females socially, because sex is not the only valued lifestyle in 2009 and Black males have less gender privilege than Euro-Amerikan males. (If not, it would be because the females whom Black males date have less gender privilege than the average U.$. female.) "Pussy-whipped" is not the appropriate term for being a womyn socially. "Pussy-whipped" is more appropriate where Black male revolutionaries are dating females who have a good chance of being spies, because regardless of gender privilege issues sex is compromising revolutionary goals. The whole idea of sex being an integral part of a "revolutionary" lifestyle needs to bite the dust. The sexually active macho revolutionary in the First World is pussy-whipped.
Party-building and passive-aggressiveness
It is likely that some females "of color" pursuing academic careers will read this article. Issues of diversity on campus tend to be most interesting to the super-profit-redistribution coconut/Oreo/Twinkie crowd. However, I do not mind pointing some things out about the NSF statistics. Not only are more female U.$. citizens receiving doctorates than male U.$. citizens, more white female U.$. citizens recently are receiving doctorates than white male U.$. citizens, and it is also true recently that more female U.$. citizens are being awarded doctorates than male U.$. citizens for every specified major "race" and "ethnicity." This means that, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, there is increasingly less basis for oppressed nation female academics to be concerned about male-biology people as a whole. In many disciplines, it is female-biology Euro-Amerikans who are the issue, not males in general or even Euro-Amerikan males. There is an ol' boy network problem among college faculty and administration, but if oppressed nation females do not handle the problem correctly they can end up contributing to ol' boy network problems, chauvinism, and racism.
That being said, this writer does not want to say that females and males won't have problems talking with each other in intellectual contexts in today's world. Some of what Toward a New Psychology of Women says about females unsure about their own abilities, and males unable to admit errors for example, resonates even in 2009. One of the benefits of anonymous discussion such as on the Internet is that the anonymity can prevent identity-connected problems. MIWS has been criticized in typically racist ways, but readers will notice that MIWS does not put forward individuals with identities, one of the reasons being that MIWS has no need for "political capital"; people who are fundamentally trying to be bourgeois leaders do put forth identities. There is nothing stopping a Euro-Amerikan female with a Ph.D. who has something of substance to say, or even a Black lesbian female with children, from putting it on a Web page and saying it. Repulsive-looking males with speech impediments can engage with MIWS's content, too.
More often than not, criticisms on the Web of revolutionary feminists are stories about one individual as if one individual could disprove an analysis or theory, lazy or contrived objections not dealing with main points, Hallmark-card-style sentimentalism, or otherwise substanceless responses. Outside the Internet, it is easy to call someone a misogynist or a "white bitch" to sidestep struggle or commitment -- venting without theorizing, strategizing, and acting. It's not just remaining silent or being subdued and dwelling in victimhood that displaces the class or group struggle that needs to happen, it is vocally and openly releasing frustration in non-revolutionary ways. It becomes clearer with the Internet that lazy decadent Amerikans just have little of substance to say and avoid commitment whether identity is a factor or not. The phenomenon with Facebook and WordPress where people put their name and picture on the Internet and do a hit-and-run on a topic by slinging a few sentences is illustrative of another way identity is used to circumvent scientific discussion. With the Internet, the stress should not be on the gendered communication problems Toward a New Psychology of Women discusses, because there should not be identities on the Internet in the first place outside dating sites.
TNPW argues that emotion is an integral part of interaction, but discussion and learning on the Internet needs to be distinguished from building relationships between individuals. Emotion should not substitute for facts and reasoning. Thousands of U.$. females are trained in sociology, mathematics, and statistics; there is nothing stopping one of them from writing scientific articles about class, gender, and nation, except imperialist country exploiter tendencies making them just as decadent as U.$. males. Within social sciences and the humanities, U.$. females don't just major in English and psychology. By far, most U.$. sociology undergraduate and graduate degree recipients are female, and cheating aside, I do not see how one could receive a doctorate in sociology in the United $tates and not have passed a statistics or quantitative methods course at some point. It is even the case that most new U.$. psychology doctorates will have completed statistics or quantitative methods coursework. To the extent that U.$. females lack requisite skills, the adjustment if any needs to be from U.$. females to the needs of the revolutionary struggle in countries like the United $tates. The revolutionary struggle cannot be tailored to fit the skills of females who majored in art, English, foreign languages, and psychology. In opposing the "feminine wiles" idea, books such as Toward a New Psychology of Women go too far in the opposite direction and end up calling emotional awareness and interpersonal sensitivity premium qualities in contexts where they are not. There are reasons why a disproportionate number of females study psychology in the United $tates, but it has to do with neither traits inherent in females nor a particularly advanced social consciousness.
In the 1970s, "feminists" alleged that the Black Panthers were exclusionary toward females. On the other hand, other "feminists" wrote books as if females and males would have problems working in the same organizations anyway. (On top of this, "feminists" said that females needed to prove their worthiness to themselves through career and decried militancy as masculine, and then "feminists" wondered why there was not 50% females in the leadership of revolutionary organizations. There is a situation in the First World where most capable people are females, but for various reasons they may not be half or more of an organization's membership or leadership and strange dynamics result.) Some of Toward a New Psychology of Women may seem related to the question of whether there should be female-only revolutionary organizations, but applying what Joreen said on structure would do much to prevent possible problems in small organizations or organizations that for whatever reason do not have an equal number of females and males in their membership and leadership.
TNPW's discussion of conflict may also be perceived as having a bearing on the communist movement, though again TNPW's ideas are inappropriate. This writer does not particularly dispute that openly addressing differences may help relationships between U.$. females and U.$. males to function, but to go from a relationship between two people as TNPW does to situations involving groups of millions of people is simplistic, particularly as TNPW does not discuss the details of its view of society and social change. Readers will notice that there are scattered references to "arrangements" and institutions oppressing females, and a vague suggestion that a radically economically different society would be necessary for females and males to participate in child care equally, but there is literally not a single reference to "China" or "Soviet Union" in the book despite their direct relevance. TNPW discusses "class" as many Amerikans could, but TNPW is at pains to avoid addressing whether capitalism is necessary. And, apart from labeling females' alleged weaknesses strengths and suggesting them as the basis for change, there is little discussion of strategy in TNPW to go from point A to B. TNPW does not address whether a political party is necessary or not, for instance. Regarding conflict, TNPW discusses passive-aggressiveness, without using the term "passive-aggressive." There is some specificity and examples, but this discussion of passive-aggressiveness is mostly abstract. In reality, there are different contexts and modes of passive-aggressiveness.
1) Black youth and Euro-Amerikan youth having a frank discussion about race on the subway in New York is not going to do the least bit to end the national oppression of the Black people and is more often than not connected to an exploiter unity or political correctness refinement movement. In the First World, there should be revolutionary passive-aggressiveness, not talking with random friends about revolution, for example.
2) With revolutionary passive-aggressiveness, opposition to imperialism is ongoing, but involves an awareness of one's environment, a particular kind of self-control, purpose, and direction. Revolutionary passive-aggressive isn't careerist passive-aggressiveness, where instead of going to college just to learn useful skills one might go years without opposing imperialism supposedly to get academic tenure and then oppose imperialism in that position, with "revolutionary" verbal outbursts along the way. Some alternatives are also inappropriate passive-aggressiveness: saying one thing among academic friends and doing another in academic work; deliberately watering down one's views in face-to-face conversations instead of deciding not to discuss revolutionary ideas with acquaintances showing no particular promise; and saying one thing in books and journal articles and doing another thing in practice.
3) There should not be passive-aggressiveness in mass organizations. Revolutionaries should not hide their line from people in mass organizations and then try to lead those organizations. The general idea is actually true both inside and outside mass organizations, whether in the First World or in the Third World. Deceiving the oppressed, true masses is opportunist, and deceiving First World exploiters to lead them as a majority leads to fascism. People who join mass organizations on various bases, obscure their politics, and try to lead them, are opportunist, not being passive-aggressive in a revolutionary way. Passive-aggressiveness can ruin mass organizations for the sake of party-building that could be accomplished in other ways if there were a basis for it in the class structure.
4) There should not be passive-aggressiveness within a communist party, which is based on democratic centralism, or within a party-building context where there should be a progressive development of struggle and unity. Those who harbor both petty and fundamental disagreements, do not address them for years when they had the opportunity to do so, voice them only during sectarian moments, shy away from struggle and accumulate unresolved differences by going along with what a dominant figure says, consciously or unconsciously undermine struggle, derail struggle when it becomes uncomfortable and "explode" later, etc., etc. -- such people do not yet belong in the communist movement. Such people who have managed to stay around for a while and do not mend their ways are often cops or revisionists and are best expelled from the communist movement. If they happen to be females or males (they will be one of those), psychological ideas ought not be used to shield them from criticism or purges. This is a matter not of psychopathology, but of behavior objectively disruptive to the proletarian revolutionary struggle.
Toward a New Psychology of Women discusses passive-aggressiveness in both females and males. According to Toward a New Psychology of Women, females defy and attack their intimate partners covertly while remaining subordinate; between males, conflict is suppressed and then "explodes," one consequence being that females are discouraged from pursuing any conflict even when they need to engage in, advance and resolve conflict.
" . . . conflict itself can appear threatening and destructive. It is more likely, however, that it becomes dangerous when its necessity has been suppressed. It then tends to explode in an extreme form -- on the societal and on the individual level. This tendency of conflict, when suppressed, to turn toward violence, acts as a massive deterrent to subordinates." (p. 130)
At this point in the text, TNPW would as well quote Fanon's Wretched of the Earth to criticize it. Without a doubt, Wretched jolted many people like a slap to the face, and it might strike readers as being a product of conventionally defined passive-aggressiveness in oppressed nation intellectuals, but Wretched makes a distinction between aggressiveness serving one's own individual interests or serving short-term catharsis, on the one hand, and "collective aggressiveness" manifesting as a war of resistance to colonialism. As Fanon suggests, the societal level is precisely the level on which aggressiveness must be expressed. (In the First World, the revolutionary struggle is a protracted legal struggle at this time, but still the struggle exists on a societal level.) Doing a dance, listening to music, listening to poetry, kissing white people's ass and moaning about whites later, engaging in yet another spat with individual whites, engaging in yet another turf battle, assertions of masculinity, energetically condemning violations of political correctness (and allowing mainstream oppression and causes of strife to go on), etc. -- done over a long period of time without revolutionary struggle these things become done instead of revolutionary struggle. Add therapy to the list. Even people supposedly inspired by Fanon, who gutted Fanon's work, ended up making suggestions such as that females could find liberation through back rubs and chants. Ideas such as those found in Toward a New Psychology of Women are partly to blame. Works such as Toward a New Psychology of Women, critiquing Freudianism from within psychoanalysis, raised that libido can be (and is) feminine. Yet, TNPW suggests, war and underground struggle are masculine. Stuck in a haze of identity-related concerns, TNPW does not discuss revolutionary armed struggle concretely and asserts that war results from deficient communication and understanding.
Therapy itself is a culprit, but the historical context of Toward a New Psychology of Women includes "consciousness raising," in which females were encouraged to communicate without restraint in view of the state. Some of those who participated in consciousness raising ended up working for or with the CIA, the State Department, the White House, and lesser institutions. While they manifested fierce outbursts that would alienate most U.$. females today, consciousness raising practices are not a problem for the National Organization for Women, an imperialist bourgeois organization. They are a problem for the proletariat. TNPW illustrates how the communication practices of 1970s female consciousness raising are inappropriately transferred to other contexts.
Epistemology and children's oppression
Toward a New Psychology of Women is one of many books that discusses feminine epistemology, the female perspective, "ways of knowing," etc. To illustrate, TNPW states:
"Some of the areas of life denied by the dominant group are relegated and projected onto all subordinate groups, not solely women. This partakes of the familiar scapegoat process. . . . These are the special areas delegated to women. Based on their intimate experiences with them, women feel the problems in these areas most acutely, but they are even further diminished if they mention the unmentionable, expose certain key problems. . . . In this, women can indeed be seen to be "ahead" of psychological theory and practice -- and of the culture that gave rise to present theory." (pp. 47-48)
I actually agree with part of the above. If one counts females outside the United $tates as "women," it is clear that millions of females in China and the U.S.S.R., who made advances in child care and opposed romance culture while making revolution, are indeed more advanced than U.$. female psychology majors wondering whether females' problem was a lack of therapy.
In Marxism, the conception closest to what TNPW says in the rest of the above is the mass line. U.$. citizen females are generally exploiters and gender oppressors, so the mass line is not applicable to them. To investigate the conditions of U.$. citizens is not identical to carrying out the mass line with U.$. citizens. Besides this, leadership, science and theory are aspects of the mass line. Though it contains theory itself, TNPW puts forward the idea that change lies in individual females' articulating and sharing their experiences and the knowledge gained from those experiences with other individual females near them. Furthermore, TNPW raises that theory is an epiphenomenon of change already taking place. True, when Karl Marx wrote Capital, the class struggle it described was already going on, but TNPW raises that females will arrive at the truth because it is in their interests as individuals, that they will produce conceptions of their struggles as individuals that will be the truth or approximate the truth. The point of therapy seems merely to facilitate self-actualization without introducing anything to what the female client already knows. Confirmation of what they already know may be sufficient.
" . . . it is the woman who is motivated to make the just society come about. It is she who is hurting and who deeply feels the need for change; for her it is not merely an intellectual theory about justice. She must find a solution in order to live her life satisfactorily." (p. 69)
It is not surprising that Catharine MacKinnon wrote that she realized some time after the mid-1970s that then-hitherto existing feminism was atheoretical. The question arises, why. By encouraging readers to focus on themselves as starting points, books such as Toward a New Psychology of Women encouraged females and even some males to focus on their identity as female or male and their individual problems and constitution as a female or male. This problem was not confined to non-Marxist feminism. The book Feminism As Therapy published before Toward a New Psychology of Women says feminism in China is "linked" to Marxism-Leninism through Mao Zedong.(6) Feminism As Therapy literally claims to be "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Fanonist." Feminism As Therapy raises Maoism and "age" oppression, but then steers readers toward eclectic therapy. With standards being set this low in the Bay Area, it is not totally easy to criticize Toward a New Psychology of Women, which at least does not purport to be Marxist.
Offhand, another book that is relevant in this context is A Married Feminist, published in the same year as Toward a New Psychology of Women and dealing with some of the same transition questions.(7) A Married Feminist explicitly addresses "children's rights." A Married Feminist doesn't deal with the substance of the questions involved. Instead, it makes an ad hominem attack against children's rights by referring to the male identity of adult males in communes upholding children's rights. Supposedly, the men upheld children's rights to shirk responsibility for child care, ascribing the independence of traditional personhood to children when they still required care. In "Is Calvin human?," MIWS addresses the Liberal connotations of "rights" and "person" and the difficulty of trying to end children's oppression without abolishing certain social structures, but what is important here is that the book's discussion of conflict between adult females and adult males from the females' perspective and exploration of self easily gave way to a focus on psychology.
Even psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray was shooting down the biographical approach to understanding lines more than twenty years ago. (When Irigaray psychoanalyzes psychoanalysis, she is not psychologizing individual psychoanalysts, even when Irigaray discusses "Freud" in Speculum of the Other Woman. Some of the present article's criticism of Toward a New Psychology of Women is applicable to parts of Irigaray's work.) But a female who persistently (but not in a watered-down or passive-aggressive post-structuralist way) opposes children's oppression and puts the spotlight on oppression of children by adults of both sexes will be pummeled from all angles and eventually encounter all of the following suspicions in the Western academy today even among so-called feminists, steeped in Freudianism and heterosexual breeder/whore politics/games and infused with lazy biographical/ad hominem habits mistaken for a heuristic procedure.
- that she was molested by her father
- that she was molested by her mother
- that she fantasizes about having sex with her mother
- that she was adopted
- that she is homosexual
- that she is frigid
- that she is infertile and jealous of mothers -- that she has a female kind of womb envy
- that she is "negligent" or "overbearing" toward her own children and is guilty about it (consistent with the mother-blaming trope or the notion that there are more "child-centered" parenting styles that some mothers have not learned)
- that she had a "weak" father, or else she would focus on adult males and not adult females and males both
- that she has internalized misogyny
- that she subscribes to the patriarchal maternal ideal of femininity, because she is a female and expressing a kind of concern for children
- that she failed to identify with her mother psycho-sexually
The origins of the above are not found in one book or another. Broadly, one contributing factor is the therapeutic ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, of which Toward a New Psycology of Women is representative, that coalesced with feminism to form one of the bases of political correctness, in which people scrutinize the language and motivations of individuals in relatively minor matters (like one presentation). In addition to political correctness connected to therapy, opposing adultism is not a part of political correctness the way opposing sexism is, despite recent attention to children's issues in Western academia and "youth" as a force for change. And, as it incorporated and in some cases emerged with feminism, therapy did not abandon all forms of Freudianism. Therapy aside, Amerikan college students still study Freud in the original, and their interpretation of Freud's work is influenced by ambient pop-Freudianism despite sophisticated lectures given by professors. So then college students, who think they understand Freudianism, approach disturbing ideas about gender with a mix of political correctness and homophobic and misogynst garbage, because these unsettling, unflattering or mentally inconvenient ideas are not what attracted them to the classroom. Apart from higher education, political correctness and notions seeking to harmonize politics and lifestyle distort understanding of feminism.
A Married Feminist raises that a male who is married to a female feminist becomes a male feminist. With the decline in the United $tates of marriage simultaneous with the decline of "feminism," the contemporary equivalent of what A Married Feminist raises is that males who are in short-term relationships with female Democrats become feminists. So, boyfriends of female Democrats do support abortion rights and are even vegetarians sometimes, put the toilet seat down as even boyfriends of female Republicans could, claim concern for the rights of individual Muslim females, and are perceived as more advanced than people who have left behind straight U.$. female politics and are criticizing the gender aristocracy, but they support police and prison repression in the United $tates and mass murder of people in the Third World. This sometimes involves a paternalistic double standard, wherein anything discontented females do in Muslim countries is considered objectively feminist or revolutionary even when they are pro-Amerikan and pro-capitalist, but male Islamists are considered reactionary despite being repressed and fighting the United $tates. Such an attitude is supported by Toward a New Psychology of Women, which, despite discussing different-sex couples' problems extensively with a reconciliatory thrust, suggests at different points that females' banding together in their own individual interests separately from and in opposition to males is itself progress and happens before unity of the sexes, a point that Amerikans think they reached after the 1970s and which they think Third World people have not reached. Such is U.$. male "feminism" stemming from a relationship with female identity. The situation of feminism even as a nominally feminist movement of females became so bad in the United $tates that it became necessary for U.$. "feminism" to write a whole book(8) taking a cue from Georg Lukács, alleging the false gender consciousness of U.$. females overlaying objectively feminist support for particular issues, and claiming that verbally supporting abortion "choice," equal pay (imperialist-super-profit-redistribution), and females to be executives and U.$. presidential candidates, is sufficient to be a "de facto feminist," in which case Barack Obama -- who will probably be tried for war crimes -- is a "de facto feminist." By such a standard, I suppose Obama is a "de facto Marxist" -- someone who does not call himself "Marxist" publicly, but who is viewed as a friend of the working class by many so-called communists.
True feminism requires understanding difficult-to-arrive-at hard truths. Notions of the truth as being more accessible to individuals of particular identities -- notions from which the mass line is distinguishable -- lead to doing and saying what is comfortable for individuals. Recognition of children's oppression is not comfortable for anyone.
Emphasizing identity too much in epistemological questions puts children in an impossible situation. We do not already live in a society where educational differences are unimportant. Probably, there are some nine-year-olds capable of grasping advanced ideas about gender, but whether for developmental reasons or because they have been denied intellectual resources, children are unable to struggle intellectually on par with adults, and that does matter if one is implying that knowledge of children's oppression must originate among ordinary children who will play a leadership role. Instead of doing cutesy stuff like interviewing six-year-olds, celebrating the oppressed's lack of social science education and access to data and text collections, and watering down science so as not to appear to claim a position of epistemic privilege relative to the oppressed group, those who are prepared should carry out the intellectual tasks that need to be accomplished until the oppression is gone or education is more even.
It is "understandable" that some children faced with adults with more factual knowledge, literacy etc. than them (whether this difference is real or to some extent only apparent) and sense their powerlessness will devalue intellectual things as a way to gaining self-respect. This attitude should not be adopted or encouraged by adults. It can actually be exploitive: for example, college graduates' teaching youth, whose art, street smarts and technological know-how they flatter, to despise theory and then exploiting them for sectarian purposes.
One could have held held beliefs about children's oppression since they were a minor. Nonetheless, one does not have to be in diapers and a onesie to recognize that even infants are oppressed in particular ways, and not from a patriarchal child welfare viewpoint or a care or protection viewpoint as conventionally conceived. Even apart from infants, the coincidence of childhood with education and development differences cannot be denied. I say that not to justify children's powerlessness and oppression, but to critique epistemological notions centering on identity or being a member of an oppressed group. The issue cannot be resolved by expanding the definition of "youth" to include everyone under thirty or even forty, or by excluding people younger than fourteen from "youth," to avoid dealing with the issue of oppressed people who are unable to go toe-to-toe with the apologists of their oppression without resorting to ad hominem. This is not to say that the oppressing group is epistemically superior, but knowledge of oppression must be based partly on an understanding and rejection of opposing rationales or it will become false.
Even Karl Marx was not a proletarian. Marx did not make speeches celebrating English and German workers' lack of education, shy away from writing Capital because he could not find proletarians to talk with him about political economy in an increasingly deep way together, or label capitalists proletarians as some label adults with doctorates and even college professors "youth." In theory, the truth about oppression could emerge in any group, but for the proletariat it emerged in the bourgeoisie. The proletariat in other countries seized the truth about class as its own -- first as a group and then in a more thorough way as it won more literacy and education -- and made revolution. The relationship between knowledge and practice, and between leadership and movement, can be sustained in the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie, which is not striving for liberation. At the same time, before the seizure of power, knowledge of class oppression among the bourgeoisie is neither only a reflection of the proletariat's struggles nor produced without the proletariat's struggles testing theories.
Historically, the accumulated knowledge of class oppression has resided in the bourgeoisie and in institutions of the proletariat funded by the proletariat cooperatively. Except for whole generations in China and the former Soviet Union who are old enough to have lived during socialism, it does not reside in proletarian households in general even in the form of mythology. Arghiri Emmanuel's work that MIWS holds in high esteem is not sitting on the shelves of workers with US$2-, $3-per-hour wages. It is sitting in bourgeois libraries. MIWS is preventing some of this work from being lost forever. Arghiri Emmanuel himself was not a proletarian, and the reader may assume that MIWS is run by petty-bourgeoisie at least given that people maintaining and writing for a Web site like MIWS are unlikely to be exploited workers as exploitation is understood in MIWS's theory and analysis. (In China, the proletariat produced theory and drew the world's attention to it. That was in the course of a revolution. Proletarians now come into contact with that theory via intellectuals in their own nations.) None of this means that the bourgeoisie as a class or the labor aristocracy is more advanced than exploited workers.
Nor is education class-neutral, but one of the contradictions of capitalism is that some of the intellectual weapons the proletariat needs are entangled in education. (I have bracketed issues of the principal contradiction and the global class structure. None of the aforegoing should be construed as saying that First Worlders can lead Third World proletarians. It will typically be a bourgeois in a Third World nation who will introduce that nation's proletariat to scientific theory, and so attempts by First Worlders to lead foreigners pre-scientifically are totally inappropriate. People trying to have things both ways, regarding communists of the bourgeois class and vanguard-formation in Third World nations, are spreading confusion on these questions. Aside from this, the national bourgeoisie of the Third World as a class is playing a role in global class struggle that First World exploiters are not.)
If the condition of not have a mass of knowledge persisting throughout multiple generations is true for proletarians, it is even more true for children. When one is a minor, one's beliefs about children's oppression could be class-centered and incorporate the Liberalism that "Is Calvin human?" criticizes: a fusion of reductionist "Marxism" and Liberalism that is more advanced than the ideas of most people talking about "youth oppression," "adultism," or "age-ism," but not correct. Such a view might have been appropriate in 1905 in Russia, but it is inappropriate in the First World, where it leads to parasitic chauvinism and glorifying the "youth culture" of megacorporations. More correct ideas and approaches might not form until one reads Catharine MacKinnon and Foucault in the original, authors who would be hard to find in a high school library, though one might go in a different direction than MacKinnon and Foucault. The point is that conceptualizing and theorizing children's oppression is a highly intellectual undertaking. Books supposedly on gender have been written that do not discuss children, who now number in the billions, or any non-conventionally defined children. On the other end, there are whole books about children's rights and youth oppression that do not discuss gender. The gender oppression of children as a group does not appear at the level of individual children's relationships with adults perceptually, and it may take years to develop a correct view of children's oppression independently.
Class and gender
This article has discussed TNPW's omission of concrete discussion of class. Yes, this writer did notice TNPW talking about unions. "It is not that men do not serve others, in fact, and in many ways. . . . Will is a strong union member, very concerned about his co-workers. The point is, however, that the need to serve others is not central to a man's self-image." (pp. 69-70) (TNPW represents the labor aristocracy as a potential ally of females. "Her husband, Will, a skilled worker, understands parts of the situation intellectually. He recognizes that the strictures on her are unfair and says that in a more just society she will receive equal pay for equal work." (pp. 68-69)) There is, though, little discussion of exploitation and class struggle as they exist concretely. Instead of concrete discussion, there is controversy-averse rhetoric focusing on the characteristics of the most privileged people in any Western society in the last thousand years -- rich, powerful, and male -- rhetoric for which TNPW finds support in "a deluge of recent writing in many fields in the dominant culture bemoaning men's entrapment" (p. 77). "All social structures that male society has built so far have included within them the suppression of other men. . . . What a relatively few men in our advanced society have been able to build has been at the great expesne of other men." (p. 77) Even when a whole other nation is subordinate, the culprit is "a small group of men." Yet, notwithstanding TNPW's omission, most criticisms of writers for ignoring class are not interesting. Most attempts to include class in discussions, and attempts to include gender in discussions by Marxists, are reductionist -- or atheoretical and essentially flattery of females (or the labor aristocracy).
Maoist revolutionary feminists hold that class and gender are two strands of oppression. Consequently, this writer is not inclined to dismiss Jean Baker Miller simply for ignoring class. The number of writers in the English language who have successfully integrated class and gender in theory and analysis is minuscule, so a dismissive approach becomes nihilist. Even Catharine MacKinnon was not successful ultimately, but I recognize a difference between a Catharine MacKinnon at her best and those who locate gender oppression in the mental space of individuals, for example, or only in legal sex inequality. When people lazily raise Liberal ideas about gender and dovetail with mainstream ideas, it is obvious that they have not read even MacKinnon.
Theorizing gender separately from class and nation, though, tends to not lead to the most correct results. Not everything that relates to females and males (or adults and children) differentially is gender, and I have to add provisionally that not everything that appears to be class is class. Class and gender are distinct but entangled, and they need to be untangled in analysis. Then there are issues of cross-national analysis that are important in terms of not only putting things in perspective and understanding the configuration of contradictions relative to and interacting with each other, but also identifying global contradictions.
I was curious and dusted off a copy of the first edition of Toward a New Psychology of Women to see if there was an improvement over the first edition that would be worth talking about. The foreward to the first edition acknowledges that the book puts aside class -- to talk about the experience in common between females regardless of class. This exactly captures what not to do: focus on what is the same among females in a complex situation cross-class and cross-nationally without locating what is supposedly the same in the context of concrete contradictions. Tacking on more identities with universal experiences is not a solution, because the way the universal experience of females was conceived was methodologically incorrect in the first place. A particular sexist attitude may be universal at this time, but that does not mean it is the substance of gender. The majority of U.$. females are gender oppressors despite continuing sexism in the United $tates and in fact rely on sexism in certain ways to exchange sex for other lifestyles and status. U.$. females know that sexism is false, but U.$. males remain self-deluded.
Karl Marx wrote Capital, but discussed wimmin peripherally. The result was still good overall. That was possible because the principal contradiction within England was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The principal contradiction within England today is not between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, because there is no English proletariat as a class. Within England today, the principal contradiction is gender, fascist outbursts by the English labor aristocracy notwithstanding -- the main class contradiction involving the English labor aristocracy is between the bourgeois exploiter English labor aristocracy and the Third World proletariat. Since the principal contradiction within England is in gender, there actually is some basis there to talk about gender without talking about class, simply because leisure-time dynamics are more apparent there. For that matter, this writer does not deny that theories of children's oppression have apparently arisen mostly in oppressor nations, where not much is going on in terms of movements against imperialists and alleged oppression of females and hence "Marxism" and "feminism" are less interesting. (There is a whole children's studies trend in Western academia -- that is socially connected to juvenile delinquency prevention, school violence prevention, psychiatry, educational and social work concerns, and counterinsurgency, neo-colonial and specifically anti-Islam concerns more obviously reminiscent of how "feminism" has been appropriated by imperialism and NGOs claiming sensitivity to the "voice of the voiceless" -- but which has produced a large amount of writing and data. The onslaught of Liberal, Freudian, pseudo-feminist and pseudo-/quasi-Marxist discourse regarding "children" -- who by a standard definition (not to mention "youth") comprise more than two billion of the world's people and are more than half of the population of many Third World countries -- needs to be combated, perhaps in part using some of its own weapons. Anyone wondering how ideas about "youth" might play out in the absence of science need only look at the treatment of the 27-year-old individual called "Neda" as a "youth," "young girl," "beautiful young girl," "beautiful innocent girl," "young woman" (as if "young women" were more in need of rescue or sympathy than older adult females), etc., by First Worlders and lackeys, opportunists who alternately suggest that the principal contradiction in Iran (with a median age less than thirty years) is Islam or age. The ideas of over-the-hill people obtained from hard-core pornography and the ideas of young adults generated by MTV do not belong in international politics.)
Problems arise when people talking about gender in the First World separately from class venture into strategy (and then strategic conceptions may shape theory in a way that they shouldn't) and into international contexts. It is true that the vast majority of females in the world do not have access to unlimited and unrestricted abortion upon request -- a "universal" experience of females -- and recognition of such a "fact" (which concretely may be immaterial) may not do much harm in certain contexts in the United $tates, but if people approach the question in the wrong way the result can be pro-imperialist. And, what started out as a strategy in the United $tates centering on abortion can come to influence theory.
Scientific communists apprehend the actual configuration of contradictions, in order to make advances in changing society. Integral to this is a dialectical structuralist approach, not a contemplative materialist approach or postmodern excursions. At the most general level, there are strands of oppression. Contemporary Maoists say that there are three strands of oppression: class, gender, and nation -- not one strand for every identity or contradiction. This writer holds that the oppression of children as a group is a gender oppression, but one could argue (taking up an Althusserian or some other angle) that children's oppression is a class oppression or a phenomenon of class. The important thing is that one take a stand on this matter eventually. A third possibility is to argue that social-children belong to a fourth strand of oppression -- the implicit position of some writers critiquing the situation of "children" or "youth."
So-called feminists, postmodernists, post-structuralists, anarchists, and people who never agreed with dialectical materialism and other points but started calling themselves some kind of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist in order to wreck Maoism, will have some criticism of this article to make on epistemology, language, or something else. Crucially in 2009 -- more than three decades after the heyday of radical feminism and movements claiming to be against "youth oppression" in the United $tates -- they will have no contribution to make, and will not have made a contribution in the past, to the theory of children's oppression or "youth oppression," but when expedient they will have a few words about children's rights, "youth oppression" and even "adultism" as a patina. Scientifically the majority of these people belong in the trash, the "revolutionaries" among these stuck in a haze of opportunism befitting fascist movements and other movements of imperialist country exploiter interests. The point of some critiques will be to preclude forming a theory of children's oppression, as postmodern critiques of feminism in the past have ruled out forming a theory of gender, with the effect of drowning children in a sea of Liberalism individualism. Much current thinking about children and females is headed in the wrong direction, so some older works besides Toward a New Psychology of Women will be interesting.
Notes
1. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_225.html
2. For example, the notion raised by Toward a New Psychology of Women that oppressors normalize oppression and devalue the oppressed, and that the oppressed internalize this, could be applicable to children.
General discussions of power and domination tend not to be interesting. Class, gender and nation have specific motions. Often, discussion of power and domination in general take place while whole portions of concrete oppression continue to be ignored.
Foucault is frequently accused of ignoring wimmin, but the real elephant in the room today is children. Their relative omission from so-called feminism, including Foucault-influenced feminism and Fanon-influenced feminism, bespeaks the unscientific nature of so-called feminism.
3. Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education, "The Catholic School," 1977, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_19770319_catholic-school_en.html
4. Pope John XXIII, "Pacem in Terris," 1963 April 11, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem_en.html
Spokespeople of the labor aristocracy and the gender aristocracy rarely make statements much more advanced than what the Vatican can say. And on a variety of questions, what those spokespeople do say is often a regression in comparison.
Trying to pass off religious ideas as just secular when they are not merely secular is a step backward. So is adding specifically anti-Islam statements while claiming to be radical-feminist.
It is not the Vatican that is responsible for the furor over Neda Agha-Soltan in the First World. It is hedonistic "atheists" and Christian-on-holidays people who dumped religion while in college before working for the media and government in the First World in an intellectual capacity -- and people who used religion for a political career advancement purpose -- who are most responsible. And it is those who embraced Wilhelm Reich in the 1960s and 1970s, ended up working in the public sector as the anti-war movement and "the Flow" dried up, and said that the way forward for Third World Muslims was through Reich, not anti-Amerikanism. Also responsible and intersecting with the aforementioned groups are people who never really confronted Catholicism except as an image to be ridiculed or a lifestyle to be declined, combined Freudianism and feminism with ambient Christian ideas about individuals and hypocrisy, and treated the modern, pop-Freudian real-world Archie Bunker as some kind of de facto feminist for thinking politically-correct thoughts while fucking his girlfriend and supporting abortion rights in polls.
5. Jaquelina C. Falkenheim and Mark K. Fiegener, "2007 Records Fifth Consecutive Annual increase in U.S. Doctoral Awards," InfoBrief SRS, 2008 November (National Science Foundation Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, Arlington, Virginia, NSF 09-307), http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf09307/nsf09307.pdf
6. Anica Vesel Mander and Anne Kent Rush, Feminism As Therapy (New York: Random House Inc., 1974; Berkeley: The Bookworks, 1974).
7. Angela Barron McBride, A Married Feminist (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976).
8. Patricia S. Misciagno, Rethinking Feminist Identification : The Case for De Facto Feminism (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Praeger, 1997).
Bibliography
"Clarity on what gender is," http://sungate.webhop.net/xanthus/mimar/et200704/www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/wim/cong/gender98b.html