KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
of women’s labour and their exclusion from wider society and from Marxist theory and politics have been what energised diverse feminist movements—liberal, radical, and Marxist—as part of their critique of the family.
Feminism and the Patriarchal Family
There have been diverse feminist views of familial arrangements, but feminists agree that families are ideological and political structures where humans become gendered. The central focus in feminist criticism is on the effect the family has on women. Feminist theory critiques the traditional family as a patriarchal unit. The patriarchy thrives through unequal treatment of men and women in family and society. For example, men benefit from women’s service in the family, and they are also privileged by a lack of competition in the relative absence of women in wider society. Women’s oppression under their assumed natural roles as wives, mothers, and daughters creates ways in which they are disadvantaged in public spheres through being given work akin to their familial obligations. Feminists claim these roles are ‘not natural but grow out of and are the expressions of a complex series of social relations: patriarchy, economic systems, legal and ideological structures, and early childhood experiences and their unconscious residues’.56 In other words, gender roles are learned and therefore can be changed in favour of an egalitarian family and society.
By focusing on women’s conditions in the family, feminists challenge patriarchal ideology, operating as a means of ‘holding together and legitimising the existing social, economic, political and gender systems’.57 The feminist critique of the family therefore puts extant social, political, economic, and patriarchal systems into question. In their critique, feminists analyse sub-systems of family such as marriage, pregnancy, childrearing, and domesticity as key to the construction and eradication of gender inequalities. Each feminist movement has critiqued ←41 | 42→the family as a site of female oppression and gender inequalities. Although feminist critiques of the family vary in their orientations and emphasis, they all, with their distinctive and specific concerns, look at the ways in which family and its obligations are central to women’s oppression and so, the creation of an unjust society. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the feminist perspectives called for equality in all spheres of life. These calls ‘contributed greatly to the changes in family law’ such as The Abortion Act 1967 and The Divorce Reform Act 1969 in the UK, which successively enabled women to have control—though limited—over their sexuality and made divorce relatively easier.58
All feminist movements agree that gender roles have shaped human behaviours in a way that disadvantages half of society (women). On the other hand, behaviours that are not generated by gendered extremes, such as strong men and weak women, would relieve the pressures on men, women, and children, and enable them to focus more on their individual capacities rather than gendered ones. For example, a family where parenthood and domesticity are shared equally would not only lessen the burden on women, but it would also contribute to men’s capacities as nurturers. This would in return mean equal participation in wider society, enabling women to fully enter the public sphere and develop their human potentials. Variations in feminist movements are not due to ambivalence, but rather suggest that what is a problem for women is a problem for the entire society, requiring multiple solutions from distinctive perspectives.
The recognition of the family as a subject of feminism dates back to the early years of liberal feminism in the late eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft advocated an egalitarian transformation of family and society where women could have the same rights as men. She critiqued patriarchal relations and inequalities in the family. With the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft called for equality in marriage, access to paid work, and women’s education. She argued that men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and therefore men need to follow the same moral and virtuous values expected of women.59 In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, in his ←42 | 43→The Subjection of Women (1869), highlighted family ‘as a school of despotism, in which virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished’.60 These virtues can be transformed into freedom with a just family: ‘The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom’.61 Mill sees the family as a sphere where women need to spend their energies to gain equalities in wider society. This is because a virtuous family, for Mill, is a prerequisite for justice in other social and political spheres. Both Wollstonecraft and Mill acknowledged family as central to women’s development as much as it is to do with their oppression.
The eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal feminists acknowledged women’s oppression in the family, but their solutions still confined women to the domestic situation. In her Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf’s position on the family significantly differed from those of Wollstonecraft and Mill. She viewed the patriarchal family to be a prototype of fascism for creating a male-dominated sex-gender system, and hence producing unequal distribution of power between the sexes. Woolf explores the ideological connection between private (family) and public (society) spaces: ‘the tyrannies of and servilities of the one are the tyrannies of and servilities of the other’.62 Therefore, the eradication of tyranny in the private sphere is key to ending it in public. Woolf illustrates that the exclusion of women from public affairs, denying them representation in public positions of prestige and power, renders society far from democratic. She goes on to contend that the continual relegation of women to the family and domestic sphere is the reason for their absence from public affairs as well as their lack of power within their families.
In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) challenged the ways in which femininity is constructed. Her argument that ‘[o];ne is not born, but rather, becomes, a woman’ explains that femininity and the traits attributed to women (for example passive, nonessential, and secondary) are not the result of biological, psychological, and intellectual differences between men and women, but rather are the products of differences in their situations.63 Questioning the validity of women’s ‘biological role’ as carers and nurturers would mean putting the biological family under scrutiny. The call to overthrow the myth of the ‘happy ←43 | 44→housewife’ and involve women in ‘meaningful works’ for self-fulfilment came in the early years of second-wave feminism. With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan challenged hegemonic sexism in the United States by exposing the myth that the roles ascribed to women were natural. For Friedan, the marketing industry and companies that sold household products benefited from the myth of the ‘happy housewife’, creating the ways in which familial problems are ignored. The ‘feminine mystique’, which resulted from women’s confinement to unending domestic responsibilities, was the reason for the ‘problem that has no name’, a term Friedan employed to explain women’s ongoing dissatisfaction in the family during the 1950s and 1960s. She encouraged middle-class educated women to minimise their familial obligations and involve themselves in ‘meaningful works’ such as careers, with the aim to develop their talents and potential. The argument was that the inclusion of women in public affairs and the workplace would solve their unhappiness and create a more egalitarian society.64 Since the 1960s, liberal feminism has been key to women’s demand for equal rights in wider society.
Marxist feminism critiques the family as a site of women’s exploitation under the economic system of capitalism and gender oppression under patriarchy. The writings of first-generation Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx determined that women’s liberation was dependent upon the economic transformation from capitalism to socialism. However, Marxist feminists such as Heidi Hartmann consider this to be unrealistic and suggests that ‘women should not trust men to liberate them after the revolution’.65 This is because it would mean the acceptance of women’s ongoing oppression until a particular yet undefined stage, one determined by men. Therefore, Hartmann calls for a synthesis of Marxism and feminism, abstaining from a relationship in which the latter is subordinate to the former.66 In