Sex Class
성 계급
The radical-feminist concept of women and men as opposed classes on the model of economic classes. The Redstockings Manifesto of 1969 called women an “oppressed class”, and in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) Shulamith Firestone argued that, unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from the biological reality of reproduction, and that its abolition required the revolt of women and their seizure of control of reproduction. Juliet Mitchell criticised the theory as materialist but neither historical nor dialectical.
In depth
The concept of sex class grew out of American radical feminism in the late 1960s. Firestone and Ellen Willis founded Redstockings in January 1969 after the breakup of New York Radical Women. The group’s “Redstockings Manifesto” claimed women as an “oppressed class” and spelled out the class and political implications of their relationships with men; it named male supremacy “the oldest, most basic form of domination” and made its primary goal “to develop female class consciousness” by sharing experience and exposing the sexist foundation of all institutions. Redstockings held that all men oppress all women as a class. The manifesto was included in Sisterhood Is Powerful, Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology.
The concept was taken furthest in theory by Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, released in September 1970. Firestone held that Marx and Engels knew next to nothing of women as an oppressed class, recognising it only where it overlapped with economics, and proposed to borrow not their conclusions but their method in order to enlarge historical materialism. Unlike economic class, she wrote, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: difference itself did not make a class system necessary, but the reproductive function of difference did. Its origin in nature, however, could not justify a discriminatory sex class system, and the removal of its biological basis would not by itself free women and children.
Firestone therefore wrote that just as the elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass, the proletariat, and its seizure of the means of production, the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass, women, and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only women’s ownership of their own bodies but their (temporary) control of human fertility and of the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. As socialist revolution aimed at abolishing not only economic class privilege but the class distinction itself, the end goal of feminist revolution must be the elimination not just of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself, so that genital differences no longer matter culturally.
Marxist feminists answered the concept. In “Women: The Longest Revolution”, revised for Woman’s Estate (1971), Juliet Mitchell called The Dialectic of Sex the fullest development of radical-feminist theory and granted its insights, but argued that enlarging Marxist class analysis to incorporate the division of the sexes is materialist without being either historical or dialectical. To say that sex dualism was the first oppression may be true, she wrote, but it is a general, non-specific truth, “simplistic materialism”; as with master and servant classes, what matters is how sex operates within a given society. In 1979 Heidi Hartmann judged Firestone’s assertion of a material base to patriarchy impossible to overestimate, yet faulted its overemphasis on biology and reproduction: what had to be understood was how sex, a biological fact, becomes gender, a social phenomenon.