The concept of patriarchy has been used within the women's movement to analyse the principles underlying women's oppression. The concept itself is not new. It has a history within feminist thought, having been used by earlier feminists like Virginia Woolf, the Fabian Women's Group and Vera Brittain, for example 1. It has also been used by the anti-Marxist sociologist, Max Weber (Weber, 1968). In trying to provide a critical assessment of some of the uses of the concept of patriarchy within contemporary feminist discourse, it is important to bear in mind the kinds of problems which it has been used to resolve. Politically, feminists of a variety of different persuasions have seized upon the concept of patriarchy in the search for an explanation of feelings of oppression and subordination, and in the desire to transform feelings of rebellion into a political practice and theory. And theoretically the concept of patriarchy has been used to address the question of the real basis of the subordination of women, and to analyse the particular forms which it assumes. Thus the theory of patriarchy attempts to penetrate beneath the particular experiences and manifestations of women's oppression and to formulate some coherent theory of the basis of subordination which underlies them. The concept of patriarchy which has been developed within feminist writings is not a single or simple concept but has a whole variety of different meanings. At the most general level patriarchy has been used to refer to male domination and to the power relationships by which men dominate women (Millett, 1969). Unlike radical feminist writers like Kate Millett, who have focused solely upon the system of male domination and female subordination, Marxist feminists have attempted to analyse the relationship between the subordination of women and the organization of various modes of production. In fact the concept of patriarchy has been adopted by Marxist feminists in an attempt to transform Marxist theory so that it can more adequately account for the subordination of women as well as for the forms of class exploitation. The concept of patriarchy has been used in various ways within the Marxist feminist literature. To take several examples: Juliet Mitchell (1974) uses patriarchy to refer to kinship systems in which men exchange women, and to the symbolic power which fathers have within these systems, and the consequences of this power for the 'inferiorized . . . psychology of women' (Mitchell, 1974: 402). Heidi Hartmann (1979) has retained the radical feminist usage of patriarchy to refer to male power over women and has attempted to analyse the inter-relationship between this and the organization of the capitalist labour process. Eisenstein (1979) defines patriarchy as sexual hierarchy which is manifested in the woman's role as mother, domestic labourer and consumer within the family. Finally, a number of the papers in Women Take Issue (1978) have used the concept to refer specifically to the relations of reproduction which exist within the family. The different conceptions of patriarchy within contemporary feminist theory correspond to some extent to different political tendencies within feminist politics. The concept of patriarchy in Sexual Politics and in other radical and revolutionary feminist documents grows out of the attempt to analyse the autonomous basis of the oppression of women in all forms of society and to provide a theoretical justification for the autonomy of feminist politics. Marxist feminists have attempted to analyse not simply 'patriarchy' but the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production. This is because they do not believe that the subordination of women can be absolutely separated from the other forms of exploitation and oppression which exist in capitalist societies, for example, class exploitation and racism; yet they reject the ways in which orthodox Marxism and socialist organizations have marginalized women theoretically and within their practice and have regarded the oppression of women as simply a side-effect of class exploitation. It has become clear that socialism does not in any simple way guarantee the liberation of women, as the experience of women in socialist societies reveals. Theoretically Marxist feminists are committed to the attempt to unravel those complications; politically they are committed to the development of a socialist feminist strategy which could relate women's struggles and other political struggles. In practice this attempt to marry feminist to Marxist theory has been difficult, but it is still important to remember that the attempt has come from a political stance; that there are feminists who recognize that in present-day society - the world we have to live in and struggle to change - the oppression of women is inextricably linked with the capitalist order and that therefore to understand women's oppression necessarily means that we must understand capitalism too, and be involved in the struggle to change it. The concern of Marxist feminists to analyse theoretically the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production, and the political interest of socialist feminists in exploring the relationship between feminism and forms of class struggle, in no way brings into question the autonomy of the women's movement. Whether or not feminism organizes as an autonomous movement cannot be deduced from theoretical arguments about the autonomous nature of women's oppression. The decision to organize as an autonomous movement and in autonomous groups is a political decision based upon a political analysis of the forms of feminist and class struggle which exist in particular historical conditions. I wish therefore to stress that in identifying myself with the Marxist feminist project of exploring the relationship between the subordination of women and other aspects of the organization of the capitalist mode of production, I do not question our right to organize politically as an autonomous women's movement. I shall in this paper consider a variety of different approaches to the analysis of patriarchy. None of the existing literature provides a satisfactory way of conceptualizing patriarchy. This raises the questions of whether the quest for a theory of patriarchy is a mistaken one, and whether the concept should be abandoned. In assessing this,it is important to emphasize that the concept has been used by feminists in an attempt to think through real political and theoretical problems. So,if the concept is to be abandoned, it it essential that we find some other more satisfactory way of conceptualizing male domination and female subordination,and, for Marxist feminism, of relating this to the organization of the mode of production as a whole. Until we develop such an alternative analysis, the question of the usefulness of the concept of patriarchy for feminist politics and theory remains an open one. Since the development of an adequate Marxist feminist analysis of the relationship between female subordination and the organization of the capitalist mode of production is so difficult, I have decided in this paper to identify a number of problems and to raise questions from some of the existing literature which uses the concept of patriarchy. In the concluding section of the paper I make some tentative and exploratory suggestions about possible alternative ways of thinking about the problem. Radical and revolutionary feminism Radical feminism has been extremely important in developing an analysis of women's oppression which has been influential among other currents of feminist theory (for example, revolutionary feminism and Marxist feminism). In this section I discuss aspects of Kate Millett's analysis of patriarchy in Sexual Politics (1969) and the more recent form of analysis to have been developed from radical feminist theory - revolutionary feminism. Clearly these are not the only exponents of radical and revolutionary feminist analysis. I have decided to concentrate upon these accounts since it is possible to raise a number of crucial problems with radical and revolutionary feminist theory by reference to these works. I also briefly discuss the analysis of Christine Delphy in The Main Enemy (1977), which has been influential among contemporary feminist writings. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics represents one of the first serious theoretical attempts to come to grips with the specific nature of women's oppression within the contemporary women's movement. For Millett, patriarchy refers to a society which is organized according to two sets of principles: (i) that male shall dominate female; and (ii) that older male shall dominate younger male. These principles govern all patriarchal societies, according to Kate Millett, although patriarchy can exhibit a variety of forms in different societies. She focuses upon the first of these principles, the domination of women by men, arguing that this relationship between the sexes exemplifies what the sociologist Max Weber calls Herrschaft, that is, a relationship of domination and subordination. She analyses the political aspects of the relationship between the sexes, using the notion of 'political' broadly, as it has been used within the women's liberation movement, to refer to the power relationships between men and women. Women are conceptualized as being a minority group within the dominant society, and differences among women are considered to be insignificant by comparison with the divisions between women and men; to be mere differences in 'class style'. The most fundamental unit of patriarchy in Millett's analysis is the family, which she considers to be a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole; it functions to socialize children into sexually differentiated roles, temperaments and statuses, and to maintain women in a state of subordination. Why, in Kate Millett's view, do patriarchal relations exist and persist throughout history in all societies? What are their foundations? She rejects the view that biological differences between the sexes can explain gender differentiated temperaments, sex roles and social statuses. (This is the view known as biological reductionism or biological determinism 2.) While rejecting this explanation, Kate Millett has no other theory of the foundations of patriarchy apart from a fairly generalized conception of power relationships. She states that there is a basic division between men and women which involves relationships of domination and subordination without explaining what it is about the organization of all human societies which leads to the institutionalization of such power relationships and to the different forms which male domination and female subordination assume in different societies. We must conclude that Sexual Politics provides primarily a description of patriarchal relationships and some of their manifestations (for example, in literary production) and is unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of their foundations. Radical feminism, then, introduced the concept of patriarchy into contemporary feminist discourse, but its analysis leaves unexplained specific forms of male domination and female subordination; nor does it explain the relationship between patriarchal social relations and the social relations of production, that is, between sex classes and social classes. Politically, radical feminism has been primarily concerned with struggles against male power and the social institutions through which it is reproduced (marriage, heterosexuality, the family). Radical feminism has also been concerned with struggles around the woman's role in biological reproduction - a concern which has been further developed by revolutionary feminism. Where radical feminists formulate coherent demands, these are demands which are made of men as sexual oppressors. Yet it is never made clear what it is about men which makes them into sexual oppressors, nor, more importantly, what characteristics of particular forms of society place men in positions of power over women. This is one of the questions which an adequate theory of patriarchy should be able to address. Revolutionary feminism has recently developed the radical feminist analysis of female subordination, and claims that gender differences can be explained in terms of the biological differences between men and women. Revolutionary feminism in fact develops a theory of patriarchy and sex class which is rooted in women's reproductive capacities. It follows the analysis of The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone, 1971) in which Shulamith Firestone tried to resolve the dilemma posed by Sexual Politics by asserting that the basis of women's oppression does lie in women's reproductive capacities insofar as these have been controlled by men. I shall discuss some of the papers which have been reprinted in Scarlet Women (Number Five) as an example of the revolutionary feminist tendency. Sheila Jeffreys argues in 'The Need for Revolutionary Feminism' (Scarlet Women Five:10) that there exist two systems of social classes: (i) the economic class system, which is based on the relations of production; and (ii) the sex class system, which is based on the relations of reproduction. It is the second system of classes, the sex class system, which, according to Sheila Jeffreys, accounts for the subordination of women. The concept of patriarchy refers to this second system of classes, to the rule of women by men which is based upon men's ownership and control of women's reproductive powers. Finella McKenzie outlines in her paper 'Feminism and Socialism' (Scarlet Women Five) the ways in which reproductive differentiation gives rise to male power and control. She argues that the first division of labour was between men and women and was developed on account of women's reproductive capacities and men's greater strength. Since women have throughout history been at the mercy of their biology, she argues, this has made them dependent upon men for physical survival, especially during menstruation, childbearing and so on. This female dependency established an unequal system of power relationships within the biological family - a sex class system. Finella McKenzie thus identifies three aspects of the subordination of women: women's different reproductive capacities; women's lack of control over them; and men who turned the dependency elicited by women's biology into psychological dependency. Thus, as Jalna Hanmer, Kathy Lunn, Sheila Jeffreys and Sandra MacNeill point out in 'sex Class - Why is it important to call women a class?', it is not women's biology which is in itself oppressive, but the value men place on it and the power they derive from their control over it. The precise forms of control change, in Sheila Jeffreys' view, according to the cultural and historical period and according to developments in the economic class system. However, it is the constancy of men's power and control over women's reproductive capacities which, revolutionary feminists argue, constitutes the unchanging basis of patriarchy. Strategically, revolutionary feminism is committed to developing the class consciousness of women - that is, women's consciousness of the operation of the sex class system. The papers in Scarlet Women Five emphasize the importance of consciousness-raising activities and of exposing male power and its mode of operation through activities around rape, sexual violence and violence within the family. The revolutionary feminist analysis, which roots patriarchy and female subordination in the reproductive differences between the sexes, raises many problems. First, it is biologically reductionist and is thereby unable to explain the forms which sexual differences assume within different forms of social organization. It takes these as given. Secondly, the concept of reproduction is defined extremely narrowly and is limited to the physical act of reproducing children. The reproductive differences between men and women are not located within any system of social relationships, and no explanation is provided of the characteristics of particular forms of society which give rise to male aggression and domination on the one hand and to female passivity and dependency on the other. The cause of women's oppression is represented as lying in the timeless male drive for power over women. Thirdly, revolutionary feminism assumes the existence of two autonomous systems of social classes, economic classes and sex classes, and says little about the relationships between these. The analysis of production upon which economic classes are based therefore remains untouched by feminist analysis, as by feminist struggles which are centred around reproduction. This has serious political implications. It is unclear what the revolutionary feminist conception of a non-patriarchal society would be and how such a society would reproduce itself. It is unclear what strategy revolutionary feminism would adopt in order to attain such a society. Finally, since it is assumed that men have an innate biological urge to subordinate women, how could women possibly be freed from male power and control sufficiently to struggle for such a non-patriarchal form of society? In her essays in The Main Enemy Christine Delphy develops an alternative form of analysis of patriarchy. She calls this materialist feminism. Since Christine Delphy's arguments have been systematically explored in Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh (1979), I shall only discuss them in this paper insofar as they are relevant to the theoretical problems involved in analysing the concept of patriarchy and patriarchal social relations. Christine Delphy's major arguments run as follows. There are in capitalist society two modes of production: (i) the industrial mode of production, which is the arena of capitalist exploitation; and (ii) the family mode of production, in which the woman provides domestic services, in which childrearing occurs, and in which some goods are produced for use and exchange although this occurs to a decreasing extent as the production of more commodities takes place within the capitalist labour process. The woman's exploitation and oppression within the family derives, according to this account, from the man's control over both the productive and reproductive activities which take place within the family mode of production. But in stating that the family has primacy over all other social relationships (arguing that by virtue of marriage women share a common class position) Christine Delphy reaches a theoretical position in which patriarchy and capitalism become autonomous spheres, each with its own system of exploitation and social classes. The consequence of this is that she does not appreciate the complex and contradictory ways in which the production process and the family are related to each other, and the ways in which in the final analysis the social relations of production transform all social relationships, including family relationships, in the course of the development of capitalism. This has implications for her analysis of waged work as well as for her account of the family, since she does not discuss the conditions which prevail in large-scale industry, the forms of labour which capital demands in particular historical conditions, and the ways in which women have been drawn into social production outside the family in response to certain of these demands. While she is correct to point to the double load which women have to undertake when they enter into social production as wage labourers, she misses the important point which Barbara Taylor has made in 'Our Labour and Our Power' (1975-6) that women's labour takes different forms within the capitalist labour process and in the family. Women are exploited in both conditions, but in different ways and with different advantages both to capital and to their husbands. To assume, as Christine Delphy does, that patriarchy resides only in the family is to provide a one-sided picture which is unable to explain why, in the last instance, women are exploited both within the labour process and within the family. Marxist feminism Unlike the radical and revolutionary feminist work, Marxist feminist analyses of patriarchy are committed to the attempt to understand the relationship between patriarchy and other aspects of the organization of modes of production. Thus the same problem - of relating the family to production - arises within Marxist feminism as is found within Christine Delphy's essays in The Main Enemy. Marxist feminists have defined patriarchy in a number of ways and have explained in different ways the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production. There also exists within Marxist theory more broadly a whole variety of different approaches to defining modes of production. Marxist feminists therefore find themselves grappling with many of the debates within Marxism as well as the feminist theoretical disputes. In this section I shall discuss two kinds of Marxist feminist analysis of patriarchy. The first defines patriarchy in terms of ideology and grounds the analysis of ideology within concepts which are derived from psychoanalytic theory. The second defines patriarchy in terms of the relations of reproduction, or the sex gender system. Both approaches attempt to spell out the relationship between patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production. I have in this section selected a number of texts and papers which I consider to raise central questions in the analysis of patriarchy, but my survey is by no means complete. My intention is to try and examine several different approaches to the question and to consider some of the problems which are raised by them, rather than to provide a comprehensive review of the Marxist feminist literature. I hope that this does not prove to be unfair to particular writers. (i) Patriarchy as ideology: Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalysis and feminism One of the clearest proponents of the view that patriarchy can be defined as ideology is Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). At one level psychoanalysis provides a theory of the complex process whereby the child with a bisexual disposition is initiated into human culture, thereby acquiring the specific forms of femininity and masculinity which are appropriate to her or his place within the culture.3 One of the contributions of Juliet Mitchell's work has been to provide a theoretical account of the development of femininity and the constitution of womanhood which is grounded in psychoanalytic concepts and which has been of great importance in the formation of psychoanalytic theories of femininity. There is a second level of analysis in Psychoanalysis and Feminism which has been influential among feminist writings about patriarchal ideology. This is an outline account of the origins and foundations of patriarchy within human culture. Juliet Mitchell links the two parts of her analysis with the assertion that for Freud the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is a concept of mankind's transmission and inheritance of cultural laws. She argues that by understanding how the unconscious operates it is possible to gain some insight into the functioning of patriarchal culture. The defining characteristic of a patriarchal culture for her is that within it the father assumes, symbolically, power over the woman, and she asserts that it is fathers and their 'representatives' and not men (as in radical and revolutionary feminist analyses) who have the determinate power over women in patriarchal culture. Juliet Mitchell argues against biological forms of explanation of why the father should be endowed with this power (that is, she argues against biological reductionist forms of analysis) and asserts that the father assumes this power symbolically at the inauguration of human culture. Why should this be so? In answering this question she turns to Levi-Strauss' analysis of kinship systems (1969). According to Levi-Strauss, exchange relations lie at the foundation of human societies, and the exchange of women by men is a fundamental form of exchange which accounts for the particular social position in which women are placed in all human societies. Underlying this analysis of the reasons why it is women and not men who are used as exchange objects is Freud's account of the universality of the incest taboo (Freud :1950). This negative rule gives rise to the rule of exogamy, which dictates that people must marry outside of their own nuclear family. It is this necessity, in Levi-Strauss' theory, which determines the use of women as exchange objects. Using Levi-Strauss, Juliet Mitchell argues that the universality of patriarchy is rooted in the exchange of women by men, the necessity for which is in turn located in the universality of the incest taboo. In this way patriarchy is postulated as a universal structure in all human societies. She does argue, however, that each specific mode of production expresses this universal law of patriarchy in different ideological forms. It is at this point that she attempts to tie her analysis to a Marxist analysis of modes of production. She suggests that in capitalist society the conditions for the disappearance of the incest taboo and kinship structures have developed, but that these structures have nevertheless remained. Capitalism has, in her view, made the patriarchal law redundant; there exists a contradiction between the organization of the capitalist economy and the continuing existence of patriarchy. Women in their role as reproducers stand at the crux of this contradiction. Women remain defined by kinship structures while men enter into the class-dominated structures of history. Juliet Mitchell suggests that feminist struggle should be directed against the ideological mode of patriarchy which has become increasingly redundant. Feminist struggle is thus conceptualized as a form of cultural revolution whose object is to transform the foundations of patriarchal culture. Juliet Mitchell's analysis of patriarchy seems problematic in a number of ways. These can be related to her reliance upon Freud's social theory, upon LeviStrauss' analysis, and to her use of Althusser's theory of ideology (1969, 1970, 1971) for her basic sociological framework. Since the framework which she develops for analysing patriarchy has been influential among some feminist writings, I wish to comment upon some of the implications of its use. It does not provide any satisfactory theory of the foundations of patriarchy, since it rests on the poorly formulated theory which Freud develops in Totem and Taboo and on Levi-Strauss' account of exchange relations lying at the foundation of human culture and the subordination of women. The problem with this is that LeviStrauss does not provide any account of why it is men who exchange women, and hence of the foundations of male domination over women.4 A further set of problems concerns Juliet Mitchell's conception of ideology which is derived from an Althusserian conception of society. In his earlier writings, For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital (1970), for example, Louis Althusser develops a conception of society which consists of a number of analytically distinct levels or practices - the economic, the political, the ideological. The economy is presumed to determine the other levels 'in the last instance', and the ideological level is assumed to have a 'relative autonomy' from the economic base. In his essays in Lenin and Philosophy (1971), and especially in the paper entitled Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser develops this notion of ideology further in two ways. First, he analyses the functional relationships between specific ideological institutions (which he calls ideological state apparatuses), the reproduction of labour power, and the social relations of production in the capitalist mode of production. In this way he links the ideological level to the economic level of the mode of production by arguing that the ideological structures - for instance, schools - are necessary for capitalism. But this form of theory - functionalism - does not explain why ideological institutions and practices take a given specific form, nor does it take account of class struggle. The 'needs' of capital determine everything that happens. Secondly, he develops a general account of ideology. In this account he suggests that the 'constitution of subjectivity', that is, the way in which the subject conceives herself or himself and her or his place in the world is a central feature of ideology, which is a set of 'lived relations'. Juliet Mitchell bases her own argu-' ments on this theoretical approach and on the approach of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to whom Louis Althusser is also indebted for this way of looking at the relationship of what we commonly think of as the individual and the world. All three assume that Freud's theory can provide a materialist account of the constitution of subjectivity. Within the main body of her text, Juliet Mitchell discusses patriarchy as the symbolic law of the father which, following Freud and Levi-Strauss, she argues is a universal law which exists in all societies. But it remains unclear what is meant by the symbolic order and what is the relationship between this and the analysis of ideology. This problem emerges particularly poignantly in the concluding section of Psychoanalysis and Feminism in which Mitchell shifts from analysing the symbolic order to analysing ideology, redefining the symbolic order as ideology as she attempts to tie her Freudian analysis into a Marxist one. Mitchell's account of patriarchy is grounded in Freud's theory which attempts to explain how individual subjects become 'masculine' and 'feminine'. This is essentially a universalistic theory which is assumed to apply to all forms of human culture, and it is difficult to integrate satisfactorily this with a Marxist analysis; there exists a tension in Mitchell's analysis between a universalistic theory of patriarchy which is grounded in the subordination of women to the law of the father and a Marxist account which claims to provide an historically specific theory of modes of production and of the forms of state and ideology which emerge within specific modes of production. Mitchell claims that the origins of patriarchy are rooted in the incest taboo and the exchange of women by men to which this gives rise. She ignores the historical development of patriarchy and the concrete forms which this assumes. In the course of her discussion, Mitchell's analysis of ideology shifts from being a theory of the relative autonomy of ideology to a theory of the absolute autonomy of ideology. Furthermore, since she represents the subordination of women within patriarchal social relations as inescapable, the origins of the subordination of women being identified with the origins of human culture, it remains unclear how feminist struggle could change the position of women. Some of Althusser's and Mitchell's critics, for example Hirst (1976) and contributors to the journal m/f nos.l and 2 (1978), have recognized that it is contradictory to adopt both a universalistic conception of the constitution of the gendered subject which is derived from the analyses of Freud and Levi-Strauss and an historical materialist conception of modes of production. They have attempted to resolve the contradiction by embracing openly what Juliet Mitchell only implies. The journal m/f has developed a form of discourse theory to explore this problem. Their interpretation argues that the social construction of woman must be analysed in relation to the discourses within which it is constituted, with the implication that all forms of practice are conceptualized as discourses and that no single discourse has primacy over others. Although this would be one mechanism of resolving a major theoretical contradiction which besets Psychoanalysis and Feminism, its relationship to historical materialism virtually disappears. If all forms of discourse are analysed independently from each other, the primacy of the social relations of production, which has been one of the characteristic features of a Marxist analysis, vanishes from the theoretical framework. Juliet Mitchell's conception of society as consisting of a set of distinct practices has implications for her conception of the capitalist mode of production as well as for her analysis of ideology. For, like Christine Delphy, and like some of the other Marxist feminist writers whom I discuss in the following section, she distinguishes between 'the economic mode of production [and] . .. the ideological mode of reproduction' (Mitchell, 1974:412). Although she says very little about the economic mode of production, it is clear that underlying her account is an economistic definition of the mode of production, a definition that is in terms of a narrow conception of the labour process rather than in terms of the social relations of production and the organization of the capitalist mode of production in its totality. The relations of reproduction, which are defined as ideological relations, are then analysed as independent structures which are functionally integrated within the (economic) mode of production. It is true that she refers to a contradiction between the ideological mode of patriarchy and the capitalist mode of production when she argues that the conditions for the existence of patriarchy have ceased to exist, but this contradicton is analysed in formal rather than historical terms and is by no means central to her analysis. I shall return to some of the problems involved in analyzing reproduction in the following section of this paper, since some of the problems that arise in Psychoanalysis and Feminism can be identified more sharply in some of the more recent Marxist feminist literature. (ii) Patriarchy and the social relations of reproduction Some of the recent Marxist feminist literature on patriarchy has focused upon the social relations of reproduction, and has discussed the relative emphases which should be placed upon production and reproduction within Marxist feminist theory. I think that the interest in studying women's oppression in terms of the concept of reproduction, and in locating patriarchy within the social relations of reproduction, stems from a number of sources: (i) Developments from the radical feminist analysis, which has produced numerous insights into specific aspects of women's oppression which are concerned with reproduction (childbirth, abortion, motherhood, for example). (ii) Recognition that aspects of the oppression of women go beyond the capitalist mode of production. In some feminist anthropological writings this takes the form of asserting the universality of the woman's domestic, mothering and reproductive roles. (iii) The belief that patriarchal social relations cannot be derived directly from capital, and the consequent desire to flesh out, complement and develop the Marxist account of the production process with an account of the process of reproduction. (iv) A return to Engels' assertions in his Preface to the First Edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that: The determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life ... this itself is of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence . . . on the other, the production of human beings themselves. The social institutions under which men of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labour on the one hand, and of the family on the other. (Engels, 1968:455) This much-quoted section of Engels' Preface has provided a classical justification within Marxism for analysing the sphere of repduction as one aspect of the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. (v) The publication in France of Claude Meillassoux's book Femmes, Greniers et Capitaux (1975) whose central concern is with the question of why social relations based on the family (or the domestic community) continue to have such great importance for the capitalist system. A number of the papers that have recently elaborated upon the theory of reproduction have been engaged in a critical debate with Meillassoux's arguments - see O'Loughlin (1977), Mackintosh (1977), and Edholm et al. (1977). As Edholm et al. have pointed out in 'Conceptualizing Women', reproduction has been used extremely imprecisely within the Marxist feminist literature. But I believe that most of the writings which use the concept of reproduction share, at a general level, a number of characteristics, and I wish to discuss these briefly. It seems to be a shared assumption among a number of writers, for example McDonough and Harrison (1978), several of the articles in Women Take Issue (1978), Hartmann (1979a and 1979b), and the articles by Eisenstein in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1979) that the specificity of patriarchy lies in the relations of reproduction, which are in turn located within the family. Writers differ, however, as to whether they define the social relations of reproduction as material relations deriving, for example, from control of women's labour, or as ideological or cultural relations. Thus, to take one example of a paper which defines the relations of reproduction in materialist terms, McDonough and Harrison argue that patriarchy is concerned with the control of the wife's labour in the family and the wife's sexual fidelity and procreation. In a statement that reads very much like an assertion from Delphy's The Main Enemy, McDonough and Harrison argue that the specific forms of control over reproduction which characterize patriarchy arise at marriage, in which the wife gives both her labour power and her capacity to procreate in exchange for a definite period: life. Although the forms of patriarchy vary according to class, they argue - the control of the wife's sexuality and fertility in the bourgeois family being concerned with the production of heirs, while in the proletarian family it is concerned with the reproduction of labour power - the basic form of patriarchal relations remains the same. McDonough and Harrison argue that the further development of the concept of patriarchy must lie in the interrelationship between the relations of production and the relations of reproduction. Their specific arguments, however, tend to reproduce a split form of analysis which separates out the sphere of reproduction from production, as the following passage illustrates: Although as Marxists it is essential for us to give analytic primacy to the sphere of production, as feminists it is equally essential to hold on to a concept such as the relations of human reproduction in order to understand the specific nature of women's oppression. (1978:28) Some papers, for example Lucy Bland et al. 'Women "Inside and Outside" the Social Relations of Production' (1978) do consider the relationship between the woman's role in both spheres, but only in terms of the consequences for women's wage labour of their reproductive role. The family is thus considered to be the crucial site of the subordination of women, and the mode of reproduction to be functionally necessary to capital's desire for cheap and flexible labour power. Zillah Eisenstein states that the problem is how to 'formulate the problem of woman as both mother and worker, reproducer and producer' (1979:1). She argues that male supremacy and capitalism are the core relations which determine the oppression of women: The ... dynamic of power involved... derives from both the class relations of production and the sexual hierarchical relations of society. (1979:1) Eisenstein depicts society as comprising on the one hand the capitalist labour process, in which exploitation occurs, and on the other hand the patriarchal sexual hierarchy, in which the woman is mother, domestic labourer and consumer, and in which the oppression of women occurs. Patriarchy is not analysed as a direct outgrowth of biological differentiation, as it is in Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1971), nor as a result of the universal existence of the oedipus complex, as in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, but is conceptualized as resulting from the ideological and political interpretations of biological differentiation. This is what is meant by the social relations of reproduction, or the sex gender system5. For Zillah Eisenstein these relations of reproduction are not specifically capitalist relations, but are cultural relations which are carried over from one historical period to another. While the economic organization of society may change, patriarchy, which is located in the social relations of reproduction, provides a system of hierarchical ordering and control which has been used in various forms of social organization, among them capitalism. In the two examples of theories of social reproduction which I have looked at, these are defined in the first instance in terms of control over the wife's labour, fertility and procreativity, that is, in materialist terms, and in the second instance as ideological relations which are centrally involved in the transformation of sex into gender. In each case priority is given to the social relations of reproduction in defining women's oppression. These may be seen to have consequences for the organization of production, or as functionally related to it, but the specificity of the position of women is perceived primarily in terms of reproduction relations. I shall in the next section attempt to point to some of the problems posed by this mode of analysis. A note on production, reproduction and patriarchy One of the themes which I have attempted to pinpoint in discussing a selection of the literature on patriarchy is that much of this literature develops a form of analysis in which society is conceptualized as consisting of two separate structures. These are variously described as: the economic class system/the sex class system (revolutionary feminism and Firestone); the family mode of production/ the industrial mode of production (Delphy); capitalism/patriarchy (Hartmann, 1979a); social relations of production/social relations of reproduction (McDonough and Harrison, Women Take Issue). These separate structures are either conceptualized as distinct determinants of historical change which interact, accommodate or come into conflict with each other (Hartmann, Eisenstein), or as functionally related to one another (Bland et al.). I wish by way of a conclusion to spell out some of the problems that arise if patriarchy and capitalism, or the social relations of reproduction and the social relations of production, are treated as independent structures in this way. First, as Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young have pointed out in 'Conceptualizing Women', the concept of reproduction has been used in many different ways. They suggest that we should separate out three forms of reproduction: (i) social reproduction, that is, reproduction of the total conditions of production; (ii) reproduction of the labour force; and (iii) biological reproduction. Among Marxists the debates about the first of these forms of reproduction, social reproduction, have been closely associated with debates about the concept of mode of production, while the analysis of the reproduction of the labour force has been of central concern to Marxist feminists engaged in the 'domestic labour debate'. I still find it difficult to give any rigorous meaning to the various uses of the term reproduction - to sort out, for example, whether biological reproduction should be included within the category of the reproduction of the labour force (or reproduction of labour power), and to understand how to make sense of the control of women's sexuality in terms of the concept of reproduction. I think we have tended to turn to analyses of reproduction in order to avoid a mechanistic version of Marxism which concentrates solely upon the production/ labour process, and in order to deal specifically with women's familial activities which Marxism has consistently ignored. However, as Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris and Kate Young (1977:111) suggest, maybe we are wrong "to argue for the development of a whole set of new concepts in order to understand human reproduction". Maybe our desire to do this merely reflects the way in which we ourselves fetishize reproduction. The second problem is that the separation of reproduction or patriarchy from other aspects of the mode of production has tended to leave the Marxist analysis of production untouched and uncriticized by feminist thinking. Yet theoretically the Marxist analysis of the production process has been quite unsatisfactory analyses of production are frequently economistic, the labour process has been divorced from the social relations of production as a whole, and female wage labour has frequently been left out of analyses of production. This is a theoretical deficiency which has serious political implications. The working class is generally defined by male Marxists by reference to the labour process (that is, wage labourers lacking ownership of the means of production and subsistence) and by.some even more narrowly, by reference to productive workers who directly produce surplus value within the capitalist labour process. This conception of class follows from a conception of the capitalist mode of production which only concentrates upon the production process. However, it is impossible to comprehend the complexity of the differential relationships which men and women have to production, and the different forms which their consciousness assumes, by reference to production alone. The analysis of production must be located within the social relations of production as a whole, and the position of all categories of labour cannot satisfactorily be understood without reference to the family and the state. Recent evidence about the differential responses of male and female workers in industrial disputes has begun to teach us a little about this process. Beatrix Campbell and Valerie Charlton discuss in 'Work to Rule' (1978) the different demands that male and female workers have made at Fords, the men arguing for higher wages and the women wanting a shorter working week, abolition of contractual distinctions between part-time and full-time workers, and sabbaticals. These different demands can only be understood if the position of workers within the production process is conceptualized more broadly than is usually the case within Marxist theory. It is in my view vital that Marxist feminist work does not concentrate upon questions of ideology, reproduction and patriarchy without extending the implications of the feminist critique to the Marxist analysis of production. The third point I wish to make is that it is impossible to have a notion of production which does not also involve reproduction. Any mode of production involves production and reproduction, both historically and logically. It is important therefore that we attempt to understand the inter-relationships between production and reproduction as part of a single process, and consider the ways in which these have been transformed historically. I believe it is necessary to analyse the development of the labour process, the family and the state, and the relationship between them as capital accumulation has developed. Just as capitalism did not create the capitalist labour process but developed it in a prolonged and uneven process on the site of historically given forms of organization of labour power,6 so it did not create the patriarchal family but developed on the basis of the patriarchal domestic economy which was already in existence. We need to analyse the historical development of these institutions, the inter-relationships between them, and the ways in which the structure of the family and our experience of family life have been transformed as the capitalist mode of production has developed. I stated at the beginning of this paper that the concept of patriarchy had been introduced into contemporary feminist discourse in an attempt to answer important questions about our experience of oppression and to provide some comprehensive analysis of this. I have discussed throughout this paper some of the ways in which particular strands of feminist theory do not succeed in this. It is important to emphasize, however, that Marxism itself has proved totally inadequate to the task of analyzing the oppression of women. As Heidi Hartmann has pointed out, Marxism has had an analysis of 'the woman question' but has been quite weak on the subject of 'the feminist question'.7 Although I have been critical of a number of uses of the concept, I wish to conclude by outlining some of the ways in which I think it might still be useful to develop and utilize it. First, I think that a satisfactory theory of patriarchy should be historically specific and should explore the forms of patriarchy which exist within particular modes of production. This would suggest that the forms of patriarchy which exist in capitalism are different from the forms existing in pre-capitalist or socialist societies. I do not think that the existence of a biological differentiation of the sexes across modes of production should invalidate this argument, since biological differentiation is less significant than the different forms of social construction of gender and the forms of social institution in which patriarchy exists in different societies. Secondly, the forms of patriarchy which exist in particular social institutions have to be investigated. I think we are wrong to assume that domination assumes the same form in all social formations and in all kinds of social institutions within a society. For example, the forms of patriarchal domination which existed when the domestic economy was the primary producing unit are different from the forms which emerge as capital seizes control over the production process. Women, having previously been subject to the control of their husbands within the household, become subject to capitalist control if they are wage labourers. They are thus subject both to the domination of their husbands within the family and to the domination of capital and its agents if they also perform waged work. I think we should expect to find that the forms of domination and women's experience of it would be different in different institutions, depending upon the role of the particular institution within the organization of the capitalist economy as a whole, the form of its material organization, and the form of ideology and power relations which prevail within it. Finally, I think we are left with a difficult task. How can we utilize a materialist method of analysis in such a way that we can satisfactorily integrate production and reproduction as part of a single process, and which will reveal that gender differentiations are inseparable from the form of organization of the class structure? 1 I am grateful to Sally Alexander for pointing out to me the history of the concept within feminist writings. 2 Biological reductionism. Political conservatives and anti-feminists have often used this argument to suggest that because women give birth and can breastfeed they are therefore biologically endowed with emotional and psychological characteristics associated with motherhood, such as nurturance and self-sacrifice; and that because the male tends to be the aggressor in sexual intercourse, women are therefore emotionally and psychologically passive. These arguments are often supported by suggestions that hormones play a key role in causing these psychological differences. Such explanations fail to make the important distinction between biological sex and gender, which is socially constructed. Nor can they explain why sex/gender differences assume different forms in different forms of social organization. 3 I do not wish to underestimate the importance of Juliet Mitchell's writings about the development of masculinity and femininity, and the influence these have had on subsequent feminist writings. I am not concerned with these particular questions, however, but with Mitchell's arguments about patriarchy and ideology which she formulates somewhat schematically in the conclusion to Psychoanalysis and Feminism. 4 Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that in matrilineal societies it is maternal uncles and not fathers who 'exchange' women. 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