The Dialectic of S3x: The Case for Feminist Revolution

4 Down with Childhood

FOR NECHEMIA

who will outgrow childhood before it is eliminated

Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath ('Women and children to the forts!'). The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and – vice versa. The heart of woman's oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role. And in turn children are defined in relation to this role and are psychologically formed by it; what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form determine the society they will ultimately build.

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I have tried to show how the power hierarchies in the biological family, and the sexual repressions necessary to maintain it – especially intense in the patriarchal nuclear family – are destructive and costly to the individual psyche. Before I go on to describe how and why it created a cult of childhood, let us see how this patriarchal nuclear family developed.

In every society to date there has been some form of the biological family and thus there has always been oppression of women and children to varying degrees. Engels, Reich, and others point to the primitive matriarchies of the past as examples, attempting to show how authoritarianism, exploitation, and sexual repression originated with monogamy. However, turning to the past for ideal states is too facile. Simone de Beauvoir is more honest when, in The Second Sex, she writes:

The peoples who have remained under the thumb of the goddess mother, those who have retained the matrilineal régime, are also those who are arrested at a primitive stage of civilization ... The devaluation of women [under patriarchy] represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man's weakness, that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarnated all the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature ... Thus the triumph of the patriarchate was neither a matter of chance nor the result of violent revolution. From humanity's beginnings their biological advantage has enabled the males to affirm their status as sole and sovereign subjects; they have never abdicated this position; they once relinquished a part of their independent existence to Nature and to Woman; but afterwards they won it back. (Italics mine)

She adds:

Perhaps however, if productive work had remained within her strength, woman would have accomplished with man the conquest of nature ... through both male and female ... but because she did not share his way of working and thinking, because she remained in bondage to life's mysterious processes, the male did not recognize in her a being like himself. (Italics mine)

Thus it was woman's reproductive biology that accounted for her original and continued oppression, and not some sudden patriarchal revolution, the origins of which Freud himself was at a loss to explain. Matriarchy is a stage on the way to patriarchy, to man's fullest realization of himself; he goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it. Though it's true that woman's lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good; for despite all the nostalgia it is not hard to prove that matriarchy was never an answer to women's fundamental oppression. Basically it was no more than a different means of counting lineage and inheritance, one which, though it might have held more advantages for women than the later patriarchy, did not allow women into the society as equals. To be worshipped is not freedom.1 For worship still takes place in someone else's head, and that head belongs to Man. Thus throughout history, in all stages and types of culture, women have been oppressed due to their biological functions.