[page 23]
Femininity As Alienation, by Ann Foreman (Pluto Press, E2.40)
This would have been an casier book to read if its central argument had been clearly stated from the start. As it is, the reader is taken on a rambling tour of liberal thought, Marxist thought, existentialist thought, Freud and his followers through the domestic labour debate to the current women's movement. Like most package tours, you are dependent on the limited information your guide gives you. The range of Femininity As Alienation is too broad to give a satisfactory account of most of these topics; they are used mainly to illustrate the author's own position.
Ann Foreman's central argument is that because Marx's early theory of alienation was not developed and used by Marxists, their practice has been economic determinist and their theory of women's oppression inadequate. The First International was split even on the has seen the "woman question' in terms of drawing women into the organised labour movement - they have not considered the question of the family or women's roles as a "political issue.
All this has already been said by Zaretsky. What Foreman does, unlike Zaretsky, is to seeds of an analysis of women's oppression. In her view, the alienation of productive labour under capitalism depends on the oppression of women in the home. Alienation at work is made tolerable by the existence of 'family life', and by the specific role of women as people who recognise the subjectivity of men.
These generalisations are not particularly original or contentious. But Ann Foreman's weakness is that her eclecticism prevents her from providing a deeper analysis of such important questions as alienation and the family. The history of the family and its specific function under capitalism is subsumed under general observations on the split between "personal' and 'public".
In an interesting section on existentialism, Foreman shows how Sartre and De Beauvoir took up some of these themes, yet at the same time pointed to the failure of men's self-confirmation in the family, because to receive confirmation from someone who herself an object, not an equal subject, is unsatisfactory. Yet unfortunately the existentialists" insights were limited in their usefulness because they saw this as the human condition, not as something susceptible to human intervention.
The same criticisms are made of Freud - his observations of human sexuality were posed as timeless, universal laws of behaviour, and as of social change. Foreman goes on to develop this critique in relation to her views on alienation. She says that the Freudian concept of 'the unconscious" is a useful term if it is seen as the product of a specific social formation, i.e. capitalism. To her, the unconscious is synonymous with ideology, because ideology does not exist at the level of conscious thought - it is not a set of ideas or even a set of wrong ideas, but it is a representation of real experience under capitalism which is only partially understood. People do not understand that the reification and alienation they experience under capitalism is a historical phenomenon, so they repress parts of their experience into the unconscious.
I think these ideas are among the most interesting parts of the book, but it seems to me that this whole theory needs expanding if we are to thoroughly understand what Foreman is saying. We need concrete examples. For instance, because women have been economically dependent on men, they have had to live as sexual objects for men. What exactly iS repressed into the unconscious in this example? Secondly, this whole question of ideology is too important to be treated as sketchily as Ann Foreman does in this book. Her ideas need to be situated in the context of other thinkers such as Althusser, structuralist theory and so on.
Foreman also attempts to apply her theory to
----- pull-quotes -----
question of votes for women and the right of women to work, and since then the Marxist left