Social Theory and the Family (RLE Social Theory) by D.H.J. Morgan

Author:D.H.J. Morgan [Morgan, D.H.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317651062
Google: 9oI9BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-07T02:43:52+00:00

The objective and the subjective

Robin Morgan, in her introduction to the collection Sisterhood is Powerful, argues that the Woman’s Liberation movement is the first movement to base its politics on experience.36 Mitchell also stresses the importance of the ‘politics of experience’, a phrase taken from the title of one of Laing’s most widely read books. Stated in these terms the argument seems to be a little unfair to all previous revolutionary political movements. The influential writings of Baldwin, Malcolm X, Cleaver, Fanon and many others are full of immediate accounts of what it is like to be black or oppressed in a white or colonial society. And while it may be true that the working-class movement has, to a large extent, become institutionalized in reformist political parties and trades unions, it is still true that the tone and strength of much working-class protest, even today, derives not from an abstract discussion of human rights but the direct experience of deprivations and inequalities.

Yet it is probably true that the Women’s Liberation movement lays greater overt stress on experience than most other movements. The phrase ‘gut reaction’ is a common one in the literature and there is often a refreshing suspicion of revolutionary or Marxist jargon which, it is felt, often serves to stand in the way of direct experience rather than as a means for its expression. The reason for this emphasis lies in the pervasiveness of woman’s experience, the basic quality of her role. The writings associated with the Women’s Liberation movement are not merely accounts of inequalities in education or in the occupational sphere or of overt ‘prejudice’ but also of the routine everyday experiences of being passed by men in the street, of seeing one’s image presented in the media, of housework and sex. Here, of course, the closest parallel is not so much the working class as the black experience which also has this pervasive character, such that boarding an integrated bus may be as much part of the black experience as boarding a segregated bus. So too, on a perhaps more trivial level, is the experience of going into a formally ‘mixed’ bar as much part of women’s experience as being excluded from one marked ‘men only’.

Stress is laid on the unequal character of this experience. It is not simply one of ‘sex roles’, the use of which term implies some degree of equality of experience. As Simmel notes:37

If we express the historic relation between the sexes crudely in terms of master and slave, it is part of the master’s privilege not to have to think continuously of the fact that he is the master while the position of the slave carries with it the constant reminder of his being a slave. It cannot be overlooked that the woman forgets far less often the fact of being a woman than the man of being a man.

And de Beauvoir points out that a man would not think it necessary to set out to write a book on ‘the peculiar status of the human male’.

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