Ideology, Theory, and
Consciousness-Raising
As with Marxism, the key to liberation identified by the radical feminist
analysis is consciousness raising, the process by which the oppressed become
aware of their oppression, their role in perpetuating it, and of the possibility
of paralyzing the system of oppressor and oppressed by refusing to voluntarily
participate in its perpetuation any further.
Marxism, however, was a theory developed and proposed by intellectuals who
were not of the working class themselves, and attempts to spread the theory
to its intended beneficiaries have been attempts to introduce Marxist concepts
from the outside. In contrast, the feminist social movement has from the
start generated theory as part of the process of consciousness-raising,
and the concepts have originated from the self-described oppressed themselves,
from the inside. Women concerned about women's position in society coming
together to speak and listen to each other came to understand that women
were oppressed as women, through the operation of the social construction
of gender, and furthermore in many cases came to understand that there was
something fundamental to the complete understanding of society and oppression
in this realization. This understanding did not tend to develop from studying
gender as an analytical category and comparing data on gender to a definition
of "oppression"; instead, for the most part feminism and its theory
of oppression grew from individual women comparing notes about the qualities
of their lives (Johnson 1987). Such
women discovered that in a variety of ways their experiences were common
among women but tended to differ sharply from what they had previously considered
to be normative experiences, which they now realized were only generalizations
about the experiences of men. As they spoke, and compared experiences,
a good portion of what they spoke of dealt with their experiences with
men, and the commonality of collective experience led to the realization
that "the personal is political":
Both of these [women's consciousness-raising] groups have been called
"therapy" and "personal" groups by women who consider
themselves "more political". So I must speak about so-called therapy
groups from my own experience...
I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical
sessions are a form of political action. I do not go to these sessions because
I need or want to talk about my "personal problems"...the reason
I participate in these meetings is not to solve any personal problems. One
of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems
are political problems...
This is not to deny that these sessions have at least two aspects that are
therapeutic. I prefer to call even this aspect "political therapy"
as opposed to personal therapy. The most important is getting rid of self-blame.
Can you imagine what would happen if women, blacks, and workers would stop
blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems to me the whole country
needs that kind of political therapy...
We also feel like we are thinking for ourselves for the first time in our
lives...
(Hanisch 1970, pp. 152-154)
The politics of their lives included and quite often centered on their oppression
as women, and they found that from that beginning point, they could make
sense of everyday life as well as the global political issues and the turmoil
of the time with an unprecedented clarity.
The process of reaching these understandings
was described as intuitive and sudden, rather than linear and derivative.
Women began to understand, in a process described as "clicking",
that events and incidents that they might have previously accepted as normative,
everyday, and unproblematic were parts of an overall pattern:
Recently one of the feature stories on the Kansas City news was whether
women should be allowed to play golf on a public course on Saturday mornings,
when the course is usually invaded by several hundred men. One of the men
interviewed voiced this opinion: "Well, if she's got the meals cooked,
kids dressed, and all the housework and marketing done, I guess she can
be out there on the course at 7 A.M. with me, too!" CLICK!
-Margaret Guntert
(1973 Ms. Magazine letter to the editor, p. 4)
The resultant theory expanded, growing from the most specific and immediate
experiences to the most global; and as it did so, feminists began to understand
that they were, in fact, gaining an understanding of the entire world and
all of its problems in the process of understanding their own lives and
their oppression as women:
Growing up Mormon gave me a distinct advantage over those feminists who
grew up in "liberal" churchesfor them, patriarchy as a habit of
mind, a system of values, a method of operating in the world, has been camouflaged,
rendered murky and ambiguous, hard to pin down...Mormonism is patriarchy
at its most arrogant and blatant...
As I looked about myself with new eyes, I lost all illusions about organized
religion as a means to moral ends. I saw that all churches were the Mormon
churchI saw clearly that religion was the central pillar of patriarchy,
the means through which male supremacy became and remains dogma...One day,
shortly after I recognized all churches as the Mormon church in various
guises, I was surveying the national and international scenes through my
new wide-angle lens when suddenly everything clicked into place. Of course!
I should have known! The whole world is the Mormon church! Having studied
these habits of thinking and acting for so long and so thoroughly in the
microcosm of the Mormon church, I found their extrapolation to the macrocosm
a simple matter.
(Johnson 1987, p. 3, 5, 8)
This process of arriving at understandings in sudden little intuitive clicks
meant that many feminist assertions about patriarchy were defended by the
women making them on the grounds that they felt them to be true. Along with
a general revalorization of human characteristics that have been
associated with the "feminine", feeling came to be valued
as a way of knowing (French 1985).
Women saw that denying the validity of feelings was crucial to maintaining
patriarchy, since only through emotion-driven processes was patriarchal
oppression discernible. No one had access to a non-patriarchal social system
in order to make comparisons, and therefore only through intuitive realizations
could the connections be made.
Schaef (1981) compares patriarchy to
pollution, noting that "when you are in the midst of pollution, you
are usually unaware of ityou are not aware that pollution is not natural
until you remove yourself" (pp. 4-5). Leaving New York City and going
to the mountains gives one a perspective on pollution, but getting away
from patriarchy isn't such a simple matter. Therefore, the processes by
which a person might realize that omnipresent conditions form a pattern
that is not inevitably embedded in any social scheme are not
likely to be simple processes. Intuition is a word commonly used for such
a process when it involves the conceptual interpretation of feelings. "To
define a judgment as one based on intuition draws attention[the agent's]
ideas and judgments are not reducible to a straightforward description of
the situation about which [the agent] is thinking" (McMillan
1982, p. 41). Intuition, which is particularly associated with women,
is commonly devalued (Belenky, Clinchy,
Goldberger, and Tarule 1986). Schaef
(1981) and McMillan (1982) consider
the valuing of so-called "rational", "logical", and
"objective" thinking over emotionally-based ways of knowing to
be an intrinsic part of patriarchy.
Comparing experiences with other women constituted an informal type of qualitative
research, to be sure, but it was not as if no one had ever before noticed
that men dominated women sexually, or got paid more to do the same work.
The assessment was made that the patterns of male-female interaction that
they noticed were, in fact, patterns of oppression rather than expressions
of natural differences between the sexes, i.e., the natural result of the
free interaction of free individuals (male and female) whose freedom has
always been (and by necessity always will be) limited by the context of
interaction with other, equally free individuals. There was a realization
that interaction should not ordinarily produce patriarchy, with all of its
hierarchical structures that limit interaction. "Should" in this
sense implies lack of inevitability as well as lack of desirability (Fisher 1979). This was not a deductive
conclusion.
In summary, radical feminism asserts that intuition is a viable process
of emotional cognition by which individuals can transcend the environment
in which they were socialized, and that society as we know it is revealed
by that process to be a pathological condition of deviation from the natural
behavior of our species.
Such assertions, embedded in radical feminist thinking and theorizing, raise
questions which are ultimately metaphysical and epistemological: are individuals
innately capable of developing independent concepts of reality and then
comparing notes, negotiating towards a consensus? If so, how do some individuals
manage to cause others to internalize the propaganda that leads them to
accept oppression? How do some individuals manage to pierce the veil of
ideology and transcend false consciousness and become aware of their oppression?
To what extent are the conceptual interpretations that any individual gives
to reality (especially social reality) at any given time simply the result
of "shared conceptual structures"-the belief systems that one
harbors as a result of socialization, in other words? And what is this "reality"
which is the subject matter of those "shared conceptual structures"?
If "culture", and perhaps the entirety of "society",
consists of "shared conceptual structures", where do the concepts
come from? Do the concepts give reality meaning, or does reality contain
meaning itself? Is it meaningful to distinguish between reality and concepts
of reality? If reality has self-evident meaning, where do mistakes and differences
of interpretation come from? If reality has a more problematic relationship
to meaning, what is the process by which people-individually or in collusion-arrive
at meaning?
These questions are unavoidable for any theory that seeks to do what both
radical feminism and Marxism set as their task: explain oppression and plan
for its demise. Oppression could be intrinsic to certain situations as an
objective (and therefore definable) phenomenon, and that to be completely
unaware of one's own oppression as a result of socialization is not necessarily
the same as being free of it. It could also be that oppression is an individually
subjective matter, in which inconsistencies exist between our concepts of
proper interaction and actual interactive experience, so that oppression
cannot be said to exist except where people consider themselves to be oppressed;
or perhaps in some way oppression has characteristics that make it both
objectively real and inevitably perceivable, and that we are naturally inclined
in such a way that we cannot be socialized to accept certain oppressive
conditions without experiencing resentment.
Sociology, generically speaking, has placed a
heavy stress on the role of culture and socialization in determining the
thoughts, values, and concepts of reality of each individual. An extreme
position was taken by structuralist theorist Orville
Brim (1960) who rejected the notion that an individual could bring anything
into an interactive setting which was anything other than the composite
results of previous socialization. Like a social onion, the individual self
was described as layer upon layer of socialization with no core personality,
intrinsic values, or other sources of behavior that could not be explained
in terms of social structure and socialization processes. This was echoed
by the behavioral determinist B. F. Skinner
(1971) who identified environment as the sole cause of individuals'
behaviors, and who denied the existence of intentions, values, or individual
free will as relevant factors. Oppression, according to the Skinner model,
is subjective and corresponds to experiences with unpleasant aversive forms
of behavioral control. Those who are not aware of and resentful of the forms
of control to which they are exposed are not oppressed.
Structuralists are criticized for promoting theories which cannot address
or explain social change (Sternberg
1977). Their theories emphasize stability and equilibrium, and they
tend to take the larger social context for granted while considering the
function of phenomena within that context for its structural stability (Erikson 1985). Brim's denial of the existence
of an independently cognizant and critically conscious individual, while
especially explicit, is reflected in structuralist theory generically. Skinner,
on the other hand, moved beyond status quo conservatism and called for social
change in the form of planned total social control by means of deliberate
macrosocial behavior modification (arguing rather inconsistently that by
some method we, who are but passive puppets of our environment and who lack
intentions, values, or free will, can assess human behavior and "induce
people not to be good but to behave well" (p. 63) by intentionally
redesigning the system of behavior reinforcements).
Marxism, like structuralism, works at a composite level of analysis (classes
of people) which makes individual consciousness of oppression a problematic
construct. Nevertheless, as a conflict theory, it attempts, by necessity,
to explain consciousness of oppression. Consciousness is generally conceptualized
as caused by the social environment, as in structuralism and behaviorism,
but under certain circumstances people attain class consciousness which
allows them to pierce through the veil of ideology and see matters as they
really, materially, are (Marx 1844;
1872; 1888).
(Material reality is asserted to be self-evidently, unproblematically real.)
The distinction between false consciousness and accurate class consciousness
explains both oppression and the ability of oppressive systems to exist
unrecognized, but the explanation of the distinction between falsity and
accuracy of consciousness is thin enough to be considered tautological:
false consciousness is that which corresponds to internalization of capitalist
ideology, and class consciousness liberates the proletariat from that ideology
so that they see their circumstances as oppressed people. The qualitative
difference in consciousness lies in the correctness of the latter and the
falsity of the former, which can be discerned by those who have attained
the latter but not by those who are in the grips of the former. The macrosocial
level of analysis makes an interactive analysis of oppressed person, oppressive
social context, individual assessment of reality, and ideological socialization
difficult.
The trend towards social determinism within conventionally accepted sociological
theory is strongest in the structure-oriented "macro" theories.
Exceptions that offer more of a role for individual consciousness in explaining
human behavior are most common among the class of theories called "interactionist",
which are "micro" theories focusing on small groups of people
and generalities about their interaction. Among the interactionist theories,
on the other hand, there are none which purport to explain the particular
social systems that form the backdrop against which individuals must do
their interacting; analysis of the specific structures of modern society
which our interaction has formed, and the effect of those structures on
our consciousness and further interactive processes were not a part of the
first wave of interactionist theories (Coser
1977) and for the most part have not played a major role in the theories
of their more modern conceptual offshoots (Turner
1986). And yet, faced with the political problem of how one might either
be oppressed by ideology or come to recognize ideology as a tool of oppression,
we find ourselves in need of a sociological approach to individual conceptual
activity that does not depend solely on exterior causes. Such can be found
among the interactionist theories. For example, Homans
(1964) took note of the socialized-puppet model of the individual as
a trend in sociology and traced it back to the Durkheimian tradition of
insisting (for reasons having to do with the staking out of academic turf)
that sociology not be conceptualized as a mass form of psychology. Posing
the question "If there are norms, why do men conform to them?"
(p. 814), Homans rejected the reductionisms of functionalist sociology and
formulated his exchange theory on the premise that individuals acted and
reacted as conscious rational creatures with wants and intentions from which
independent value judgments could be made. "I now suspect that there
are no general sociological propositions, propositions that hold good of
all societies or social groups as such, and that the only general propositions
of sociology are in fact psychological" (p. 817). Socialization, including
the process of indoctrinating subject peoples towards an acceptance of oppressive
conditions, would have to occur as a process of interaction in which independently
cognizant individuals participated, and oppression could easily be discerned.
The principle of interaction in Homans' theory is rational calculation of
the desirability of the results of that interaction.
The shortcoming of this formulation is that it attributes an amazing degree
of innate analytical ability and an intrinsic taken-for-granted understanding
of reality to the individual. Psychological propositions are considered
to be adequate for explaining how a person is able to interpret a range
of complex experiences and calculate outcomes, make predictions, and behave
accordingly. Meaning is considered unproblematic: a teacup is a teacup,
oppression is oppression. Reducing sociological processes to a matrix of
calculated exchanges between psychologically constituted individuals is
as much of a simplistic strategy as reducing individual tendencies to the
results of socialization.
Neither of these opposed binary positions provides a convincing explanation
for the struggle between feminism and patriarchy, in which periods of omnipresent
and consistent patriarchal world-views (Schaef
1981) have been periodically challenged by interrupted and discrete
waves of feminism (Morgan 1982),
in which women have risen up against oppression. Structurally based social
determinism cannot convincingly explain feminism, or conceptualize oppression
beyond subjectivity, and rational-choice exchange theories such as that
of Homans cannot explain the possibility of patriarchy, or any complex system
of oppression.
The classic interactionist Mead (1934) established
the microsociological tradition of social behaviorism, in which the temporal
and logical location of the social process prior to the self-conscious individual
sets the stage for interaction. Meaning and knowledge are produced in the
individual through interactive processes in which the body of shared conceptual
structures, which exist prior to any given individual, are passed along
but not simply internalized whole; the individual search for gratification
operates as a critique which allows for flux, growth, and change in the
socially shared conceptual structures. This model could account for social
change from the conceptual level onward, but needs elaboration. It is not
apparent how the individual searching for gratification is to recognize
it, or know where to search for it, apart from concepts learned along with
(and embedded in) the language to which Mead attaches so much importance.
Radical feminism, with its emphasis on emotionally-driven intuitive processes
and validation of experience through small-group interactive processes such
as the consciousness-raising group, can be understood as an interactionist
theory; certainly, it is qualitatively different from Marxism and structuralism,
which do not effectively focus on microsociological processes. Going back
to the three categories of sociological theory used by the introductory
textbooks, we could place radical feminism along with other interactionist
theories, whereas Marxist theory would be categorized as "conflict"
theory (and structuralist theory represents the third major category itself).
But in the beginning, I said that radical feminism was most easily understood
by analogy to Marxism, since both are self-evidently conflict theories.
Radical feminism is, in fact, both of these things. It is a conflict theory
with a microsocial focus that is lacking in most other conflict theories;
and, more than that, it is actually a radical interactionist theory.
Clearly, then, radical feminism has the potential for offering to the discipline
of sociology an explanatory framework that addresses important issues in
a way that other, more conventional sociological theories do not do well.
There is reason, however, to believe that sociologists would find two aspects
of this model problematic: the centrality of emotions and intuition in the
model by which individuals are said to be able to transcend ideology and
see the circumstances of their oppression; and the apparent contradictions
of causality implied by trying to simultaneously explain social structure
as the result of the interaction of individuals whose perceptions are not
necessarily determined by socialization and social-contextual location,
and yet explain the circumstances of individual social experience in terms
of a massively global system called patriarchy, which is said to be the
cause of all subsequent oppression.
One simple solution to the latter problem, which is to see patriarchy as
the result of the intentional behavior of men but the exterior
cause of women's oppression, is widely associated with radical feminists
and their alleged tendency to hate men and blame men for everything. This
solution does in fact exist in the form of a branch or sphere of thought
within radical feminism; but, as I shall shortly proceed to show, it is
not the only one, nor, I daresay, the most elegant one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
Forward to Next Section