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SEXUAL POLITICS.
By Kate Millett.
Published by Rubert Hart-Davis at £2.50
This book arose out of a short paper prepared for a women's lib. meeting and grew into a long thesis. In it, the writer traces the 'sexual revolution' (or 'reform rather than revolution'), examining not only what actually happened, such as the fight for the vote, but also the ideas that inspired it - or tried to hold it back. Kate Millett obviously attaches great importance to the literature of the period, but whether because she feels it influenced people, or was a mirror of prevailing attitudes, is not quite clear. She then investigates the 'counterrevolution', and here Freud is enemy no. 1. Kate certainly tears into him with a vengeance, and I found this one of the most interesting parts of the book. There is no doubt that we are all influenced by 'pop psychology', which is very invidiuus, but anyone reading this book has at least been warned. In this section, she also examines the post-revolutionry period in the USSR, as well as Nazi Germany. The last part of the book is concerned with the way various male writers display their psyche.
Kate Millett's main thesis is that 'sex has a frequently neglected political aspect'; by politics, she means 'power-structured relationships'. Now, this is fine as far as it goes, but her contention is that the most important point about our society - and 'all other historical civilizations' - is that they are patriarchies. '... the primary social and political distinctions are not even those based on wealth or rank but those based on sex. For the most pertinent and fundamental consideration one can bestow upon our culture is to recognize its basis in patriarchy.' In other words, that the poorest man is in some way more privileged than any woman.
The trouble is that Kate Millett lacks a scientific analysis of society; she sees only one of the more obvious manifestations of capitalism and attributes all our ills to it. Although she praises Engels, not only for his analysis of patriarchal marriage and the family, but al also because he showed that it was not a universal or inevitable system, she ignores the rest of Marxist analysis and this leads her into some serious mistakes and omissions.
For example, she says: 'It is rather disturbing how the great changes brought about by the extension of the franchise and by the development of democracy which the eighteenth and nineteenth century accomplished, the redistibution of wealth which was the aim of socialism (and which has even had its effect upon the capitalist countries) and finally, the vast changes wrought by the industrial revolution and the emergence of technology - all had, and to some degree still have, but a tangential and contingent effect upon the lives of that majority of the population who might be female.' Might, indeed! Even liberal economists have had to admit that the so-called 'redistribution of wealth'is an illusion; and it is
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the emergence of technology, whether in the factory, or as represented by the pill, which has been an important factor in the growth of women in the labour force.
And:'Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is possible to argue that women tend to transcend the usual class stratifications in patriarchy, for whatever the class of her birth and education, the female has fewer permanent class association than does the male. Economic dependency renders her affiliations with any class a tangential, vicarious and temporary matter.' In fact, it could just as well be argued that women were parasitic on their class and would therefore (especially upper-class women) cling to it the more. 'Thrown upon their own resources, few women rise above working class in personal prestige and economic power, and women as a group do not enjoy many of the interests and benefits any class may offer its male members. Women therfore have less of an investment in the class system' The same sort of thing could have been said about Jews in Hitler's Germany, yet many bourgeous Jews helped to betray the victims of the gas chambers. 'But it is important to understand that as with any group whose existence is parasitic to its rulers, women are a dependency class who live on surplus.' This is both meaningless and wrong. Even if the second part followed from the first, what she is really saying is that all women live on profit, i.e. that their husbands' pay-packets contain a little bit of the dividends for their wives! Not to mention those women who go out to work and who are paid 50% of a man's wage. It certainly is good of the boss to forgo some of his profits to provide employment for these parasites.
There are lots of good things in this book, but Kate Millett, like most of the popular writers on this subject (hence their popularity?) ducks the real issue - that our society is a class society which makes profit out of women's subordinate position, and that the only way to women's liberation is through an end to this profit system. (Which is not to say that liberation follows immediately on the overthrow of capitalism, but that is a pre-requisite.) Because she cannot see the real causes, she cannot pose real solutions. After all the anger has errupted, anger that will find many echoes in her readers, what has she to say about ending the 'root cause' of all our troubles? The ultimate paragraph reads: 'It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish it aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination - and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.'