33 Women Pitched against Power Structures and Male Prejudices: Kate Millet, Juliet Mitchell

Dr. Ratna Rao

Learning Objectives:

The learners will be able to

• Understand the various definitions of power and its meaning
• Understand and analyse various perspectives of power by different feminists
• Understand and differentiate between the power structures of Kate Millet and Juliet Mitchell
• Understand and evaluate the term patriarchy and its significance in today’s world.
• Create their own writings on power structures /patriarchy as seen, felt in today’s world as compared to Millet and Mitchell.

Introduction:

Power is often a contested word and it has different meanings in social, political and feministic circles. Sociologist and philosopher Max Weber defines power as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance…”  . According to Thomas Hobbes — power is a person’s “present means…to obtain some future apparent Good”  — and Hannah Arendt — power is “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert”. As noted by Hanna Pitkin, power is related etymologically to the French word pouvoir and the Latin potere, both of which mean to be able. She elaborates it as, “that power is a something — anything — which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability, or wherewithal”.

Lukes definition of power is more radical and according to him, power relations shape our conceptions of power. As he establishes in his definition, “How we think about power may serve to reproduce and reinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them. It may contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their principles of operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view. To the extent that this is so, conceptual and methodological questions are inescapably political and so what ‘power’ means is ‘essentially contested’…” .

Power according to Feminists

Many feminists claim the conception of the very word power is related to power relations and the word suggests male domination. The word power is understood by many feminists as power over, domination, subjection and oppression while some prefer the term power.

For liberal feminists power is a resource that can be used for social good which is distributed unequally right now between men and women. These feminists want to redistribute it so that both men and women have equal power. The basic idea of power in their view is the assumption that “a kind of stuff that can be possessed by individuals in greater or lesser amounts”.

In Justice, Gender and the Family (1989), Susan Moller Okin emphasises that the gender structured family unequally distributes the power between man and woman. She says that “When we look seriously at the distribution between husbands and wives of such critical social goods as work (paid and unpaid), power, prestige, self-esteem, opportunities for self-development, and both physical and economic security, we find socially constructed inequalities between them, right down the list”

Simone de Beauvoir the profounder of phenomenological feminist approach in her much acclaimed book The Second Sex (1949) argues that “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other” (Beauvoir, xxii). This difference between man and woman of being a ‘subject’ and the ‘other’ causes the main cause of disagreement in the distribution of power. Beauvoir also suggests that the main reason for the role of other for women is because they themselves give in to the role of other. Iris Young takes this thought forward and observes that in patriarchal society women are considered mere objects, as mere bodies. She also emphasizes that the physiological bodies and its various processes like menstruation, pregnancy, giving birth, tie women more closely to nature and thus to immanence.

Radical feminists understand power in terms of relations of dominance, for them it is the relation between a slave and a master. Mackinnon, the propounder of radical feminism says, “women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness….Power/powerlessness is the sex difference” (MacKinnon 1987, 123). MacKinnon, like Judith Butler (1990) and other critics of the sex/gender distinction, thinks that sex difference, no less than gender difference, is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power. If men are powerful and women powerless as such, then male domination is, on this view, pervasive. MacKinnon claims that it is a basic “fact of male supremacy” that “no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a gendered social system, and sex inequality is not only pervasive but may be universal (in the sense of never having not been in some form” (MacKinnon 1989, 104–05). Another radical feminist, Nancy Fraser suggests that, in order to understand women’s subordination in contemporary Western societies, feminists will have to move beyond the master/subject model to analyse how women’s subordination is secured through cultural norms, social practices, and other impersonal structural mechanisms.

According to Iris Young of Socialist Feminism “dual systems theory says that women’s oppression arises from two distinct and relatively autonomous systems. The system of male domination, most often called ‘patriarchy’, produces the specific gender oppression of women; the system of the mode of production and class relations produces the class oppression and work alienation of most women”

Foucault, the propounder of post-structuralist feminist analyses modern power as a mobile and constantly shifting set of force relations that emerge from every social interaction and thus pervade the social body. As he puts it, “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (1978, 93). Many feminists are inspired by the work of Foucault and base their understanding of power on the work and analysis of Foucault.

Every society in the world has distinguished the difference between the social roles of man and woman. The bias because of the gender is called prejudice that is a negative attitude towards the other gender because of some preconceived judgements held by society. It is a feminist belief that  to understand patriarchy is to understand the role of men and the subjugation of women by them. The biases of men are rubbed into women who look at the world and the gender roles through the eyes of a male. Woman is in the position of a servant, or a server and the man a master. Men are considered to be bold, strong, independent, analytical, logical and rational whereas the woman are considered to be shy, timid, gentle, dependent, self-sacrificing and emotional. Although all cultures claim to praise and value the womanly virtues yet there are several examples which degenerate women to the second position.

Kate Millet and power structures (1934- )

Kate Millett, an American feminist and activist, born in Minnesota, in September 1934, was politically active in the anti-war and civil rights movements. Later she became an active member of feminist politics. She received her Ph.D. with distinction in 1970. Her doctorate thesis completed in September 1969 was published as Sexual Politics in August 1970. This dissertation not  only became popular but also provided a theoretical foundation to the newly organised women’s movement. It is also perceived as the first book of academic feminist criticism. Its unique form of criticism was described as ‘a polemic suspended in academic traction.

In Sexual Politics, an important work of Second Wave Feminism, Millet analyses power structures ad “the ancient and universal scheme that prevails in the area of sex’. She believes that sexual identity renders a man power and dominance whereas it makes woman weak because of the system of patriarchy. The ruling sex maintains power over the subordinate sex, wherein the ruling sex is the male, and the subordinate is the female. She like other feminist literary critics, is against the historicism of the new critics. To her a literary text is not a ‘verbal icon’ independent of social and historical reality. Analysing the works of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller and in later chapters D.H.Lawrence she exposes their patriarchal biases and sexual harassment of women. Men do whatever they want, and women never object. The “pimp” feels his superiority through sexuality, which is associated with power. A man likes his own pleasure, and he imposes pain and humiliation on his partner “who is nothing but an object to him in the most literal sense.” Patriarchy continued for centuries and is still in practice in the society. According to Millet, violence should not be practised in patriarchy as patriarchy is quite efficient without violence. The power relation between men and women is of the dominant and the dominated. According to Millett, male and female are considered as being part of two different cultures that are constructed from childhood. Another feature of patriarchy is that men were in charge of the family and its fortune, which was naturally passed on to the eldest son of the house and with the fortune, power was also transferred to the sons. The role of mothers and daughters was to only take care of the kitchen and the children. Marriages were a contract between men and women. There is an “exchange of servitude for protection,” and to be a male “is to be a master, hero, brute, and pimp […] stupid and cowardly” . When a woman gets married, she has to do domestic service in exchange for financial support given by a man. Men and women’s conditions are different because men have power and women submit to them. Women are part of a “minority group,” and are treated like slaves because they do not have many rights, and they are not equal to men, “they live for differential and unequal treatment”. In traditional patriarchy, women cannot be in charge of the economics of the family. Then, “they could neither own nor earn in their own rights,” and hence treated as “non-persons without legal status.” 

With change in the century the position of power has not changed as still woman is not equal to  man at home or at the work place, as they do not earn the same salary. In contemporary patriarchy, men dominate, they “form groups of their own level” whereas women need the approval of men, in church, and so on, to do something. Finally, the domination between a man and a woman is mostly sexual. Millet has coined the term ‘politics’ to introduce the term power in the domain of sexuality. Sexual dominion provides the most fundamental concept of power is what Millet thinks.

Sexuality is power because the man reduces the woman to nothing, to pain and humiliation. Men exert their power through sexuality because they show their performances in intimacy. Men have power; women do not have the right to object because they cannot oppose a man. It is the “battle of sexes.” Women are mere commodities in sex as they are over powered by men and they own their bodies and make them act according to their wishes.

Millet emphasizes that patriarchy was a political institution which relied on subordinate roles of women, and that Western social institutions manipulate power in coveted ways. Like de Beauvoir, Millet believed that women were subjected to artificially constructed ideas of the feminine, and that all aspects of society and culture functioned according to a sexual politics that encouraged women to internalise there inferiority unit it became psychologically rooted in them. Future Millet argues that  human  personality  is  strictly  ‘masculine’  or  ‘feminine’.  A  masculine  personality  shows “aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy”; a feminine personality shows “passivity, ignorance, docility, ’virtue,’ and ineffectuality.” Millett further identifies the male/masculine role as typically involving leadership and ambition and the female/feminine role as involving domestic servitude and childbearing. She also adds that patriarchy and male domination is total, which is taught to a woman from her birth. Women must be pretty so as to entertain men. The whole structure of male and female personality exists because of social conditioning, which provides the birth right priority whereby males rule females. Through this system a most ingenious form of “interior colonisation” has been achieved. It is one which tends moreover to be sturdier than any form of segregation, and more rigorous than class stratification, more uniform, certainly more enduring. However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology  of  our  culture  and  provides  its  most  fundamental  concept  of  power.  The  heavier musculature of the male which is biological and is common in all mammals is culturally encouraged and becomes a value system where in males are considered superior and more powerful.

Family is a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole, the society. The family encourages its members to conform and adjust and the females, though citizens of the country or the government, continue to be ruled by the family alone. In the archaic patriarchal family “the group consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves, land and goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest male.”

Class that is divided strictly based on economic conditions also belittles woman. Women do not enjoy any benefits  which  men  enjoy.  As  a  group  they do  not  enjoy many of  the  interests  and benefits that are offered to its male members. Women have therefore less of an investment in the class system. Women are parasites and their survival depends on the prosperity of those who feed them in short the males/ husbands. Liberating themselves from this dependency is too farfetched and unimaginable to them.

Like war is justified by nations that are participating in it, the same way the imposition of male authority which is euphemistically labelled as ‘the battle of sexes’ is justified. The force is used by men to  show their power over  women  and is  continuing since  ages.  The  traditions  of stoning to death, suttee, feet binding, purdah, clitoridectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women, involuntary and child marriages, concubine and prostitution, still take place, which are also clear indications of the subjugation of women. Many myths and religious beliefs also strengthen the power equations carried out in society. In many countries women are not allowed to eat food with the men, they eat the leftovers after the men. The religious objects, weapons, and food are also not to be touched by the women when women are menstruating. Even in the story of Adam and Eve, god curses the woman: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to thy husband. And he shall rule over thee.”  This mythological story leads the way to the power structure of the world. Woman is still denied sexual freedom and biological control over her body through  the cult of virginity, the double standard, the prescription against abortion, and in many places because contraception is physically or psychically unavailable to her.

Millet analyses Sigmund Freud’s theory that elaborates the fact that because of the biological reproductive organs the male and the female possess, the male is superior and the female is inferior and states that this has led to greater discrimination between males and females. Freud in his discussions, according to Millet, has considered women negatively for the only reason that they lack the male organ and hence they are frustrated.

Kate Millet through history, literature, anthropology, psychology, and myths brings out the power relation between men and women and clearly illustrates how men reinforce their power over women.

Juliet Mitchell and Power Structures

Juliet Mitchell, who was born in 1940 in New Zealand and later moved to England when she was four years old in 1944, is an author, psychoanalyst and a research professor. Her avant-garde work.

Women: The Longest Revolution was the first sustained analysis of women’s oppression in Britain. Her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974) helped the understanding of gender and identity. In the United Kingdom, Juliet Mitchell’s ground breaking Women: The Longest Revolution (1966), initiated the revision of traditional Marxist accounts by analysing the position of women in terms not only of relations of production and private property but also of psychoanalytically based theories of sexuality and gender. The significance of Juliet Mitchell’s work for feminist literary theory is fundamental. Mitchell focuses on questions concerning the family and child rearing by means of a feminist critique of psychoanalytic theories of sexual development largely based upon a literary-critical examination of texts within the Freudian and Marxist tenets.

Mitchell takes a great leap in proposing that the oppression of women must be seen as coming from a matrix of origins: production, reproduction, socialization of children and sexuality. She describes how advances in one of these areas are offset by losses in another. Thus, women’s liberation can only be achieved by fighting on all fronts.

Conceived of making a visual chart. Along one side are the four major roles into which women are placed in American society – roles which oppress us. First is our role in production (as surplus, menial, malleable labor force; domestic workers and keepers of the work force); second is reproduction (being responsible for the reproduction of the race); third is sexuality and fourth is our role as socializers of children.

Thus, production, reproduction, sexualityand socializers are Mitchell’s four categories of the sources of oppression. The Midwives recognized that an understanding of women’s oppression must be coupled with a strategy to fight that oppression, and so they added dimensions of struggle (service, education, direct action) to complete the chart, drawing upon André Gorz’s Strategy for Lobor (1964; English edition 1967). Juliet Mitchell in Women: the Longest Revolution writes that the oppression of women is different to the oppression of any other group as they are not the minority but half of the human species. In some cases, the oppression is similar to that of the minority and other oppressed groups like the blacks or the working class. Women are exploited at their workplace as well as at home, which multiplies their woes. Women according to Juliet Mitchell are alike and different at the same time, eternally there are changes which have taken place inside the woman. The key structure of a woman consists of Production, Reproduction, Sexuality and the Socialisation of Children and each unit might have undergone different changes and combined together in a different way to form a new interconnection. In early stages of social development men were considered far more superior to women on the basis of their physical attributes and women were accorded humble tasks. The

woman, who could be preserved like a property, becomes an asset to the men. In spite of woman’s degradation, she has performed tasks in every period in history, though the kind and form of work is a question.

Women’s physique has never permanently or even predominantly, relegated them to menial domestic chores. In fact, women have worked in the fields as much as, or more than, men. The socialists think that the women were subordinates because of their capacity to do less work but Mitchell emphasizes that it is not as simple as this; women’s subordination is because of women’s less capacity for violence and work. Because of her biological capacity for less violence and work , men are able to coerce women and they have been restricted to only certain kind of work, termed by Mitchell as ‘Women’s work’. Coercion was necessary as women were made to do the gruelling job of tilling and cultivation and with industrialization coercion became a part of their lives as men with higher physical strength were not required to work on machines but women and children were sought by the capitalists.

Mitchell gives the example given by Rene Dumont of African villages where the servitude of women is three fold: by forced marriage; through dowry and polygamy; and by unequal division of labour. This exploitation is woven into the role structure of society and every woman does it as her duty. This coercion of women is more political. She says, “Coercion implies a different relationship from coercer to coerced than does exploitation”. Women are subjugated not because of their physical weaknesses but because she is doing women’s work that is not so productive and that makes her a major slave. Mitchell claims that this fact has been ignored by the social feminists and they think that the only cause for the subordination of women is their biological incapacity towards hard work. However, Mitchell argues that had this been the case, women would have been liberated after the industrial revolution. Woman’s subordination is  also because of the maternity leave in the job, which creates her absence and it leads to her social subordination. “The causal chain then goes: maternity, family, absence from production and public life, sexual inequality.” Women were condemned to social exploitation till reproduction remained a natural phenomenon, and they were not masters of their own lives. They had no choice on matters of conceiving and giving birth, and hence their lives were under control essentially by the biological processes. Reproduction is a replica of a product in the factory, but the difference here is the alienation of woman from work is worst, as legally and emotionally the child and the mother are subjects to the father. The mother loses her economic freedom and is alienated from society and her socio-economic powerlessness becomes profound. The man receives psychological and practical benefits out of this situation.  Maternity forces woman to alienate herself and home becomes a substitute for action and creativity for women, whereas for men the home becomes a zone to relax and enjoy. This becomes a reason for women to become confined to her species, to her universal and natural condition.

Sexuality of  women  is another factor that adds to the oppression of women. Unlimited polygamy has led to extreme forms of exploitation.

Juliet Mitchell advocates reforms to strengthen the women’s position in society, namely, equal education, Free State provision of oral contraception, legalization of homosexuality, and the abolition of illegitimacy. In Juliet Mitchell’s view, patriarchy creates and recreates the psychic conditions for women’s subordination, which is not the thin veil of false consciousness but the very flesh and blood of female subjectivity.

Kate Millet and Juliet Mitchell’s take on feminism, patriarchy and power structures differ a lot. According to Kate Millet, the men women relation is of the dominant and subordinate, and this is biological, financial, and sexual. Class, family and sexuality, all are responsible  for the master and servant relation between the man and the woman. Woman does not have sexual freedom and the biological control over her body and that gives way to her subjugation. She disagrees with Freud’s analysis that women are frustrated because of their reproductive organs and feels this theory of Freud has led to more discrimination between men and women.

Juliet Mitchell believes that production, reproduction, socialization of children and sexuality leads to the powerlessness of women and men take advantage of the absence of women for maternity and after childbirth, both the child and the mother become his subjects. She also stresses that it’s not that women are not capable of hard work that makes them low but it is because of the kind of work they do(women’s work) that relegates them to their lowly stature. She supports  Freud  as  against  Millet  and  feels  that  Freud’s Psychoanalysis  was  one of  the earliest attempts to make feminism interdisciplinary, and overtly political. She reasons that to  condemn Freud would be disadvantageous to the feminist cause as Freud’s work was an analysis of patriarchal society. She tries to defend Freud’s theory and argues that in primitive societies the exchange of women in marriage as a property or object unites the society. In Mitchell’s words, women’s identities are determined by their “cultural utilization as exchange objects.”

The anxiousness of women because of the lack of the male organ and the castration of the male organ is only symbolic.

Reference

• Allen, Amy, “Feminist Perspectives on Power”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall    2016                                   Edition),   Edward          N.                 Zalta (ed.),                     URL=<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/feminist-power/>.
• Beauvoir, Simone de (1974). The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.
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• Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
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