Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, in their extensive engagement with Women’s Oppression Today footnote1, have provided an opportunity for a reassessment of the arguments made there. In this reply I want to comment on what I now consider to be the weaknesses of the book as well as responding to the criticisms and alternative arguments that Brenner and Ramas have put forward.
I will deal first with what is undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of their piece, and this is the question of biology and the determination of the sexual division of labour by the consequences of childbirth and lactation. Brenner and Ramas (to recapitulate) argue that attempts to understand the reasons for the development in the nineteenth century of the pattern of male wage-labourer and female domestic-labourer have underplayed or ignored the extent to which this pattern is the logical outcome of reproductive biology. Women had children, partly through inadequate methods of contraception, and were obliged to breast-feed them if they were to survive in an era which had no satisfactory alternative method of feeding. Given the incompatibility between childcare and participation in capitalist production, there was a material determination of the family-household based on the division of responsibilities between men and women. Thus we have no need for arguments which rest principally on economic requirements at the level of a mode of production, nor for those resting on the supposed ideological foundations of these social divisions—the explanation lies nearer to home in the necessary consequences of biology in that particular historical moment.
Whilst in general I think it is true that feminists have been unduly squeamish in the face of biological arguments, I am not convinced that this one is as cogent as Brenner and Ramas claim. Feminists have tended to point to the social and cultural variation in the consequences of biology for the good reason that this variation itself demonstrates that the degree of determination of the social by the biological is a social or—more precisely—a political choice. Timpanaro’s work, cited approvingly here in the context of considering the relation between the social and the biological, is in fact of little use on such matters as these, for it
In my view it would be more appropriate to speak not of biological determination but of a situation in which social and political choices were made concerning the effects of reproductive biology. This can be illustrated by taking the question of lactation, to which Brenner and Ramas attach considerable weight. Naturally anyone will agree that a woman attempting to combine working a long day in a factory or mill with breast-feeding a child will find this difficult if not impossible, and we are all familiar with the sufferings recorded from this situation. But the aristocracy have usually managed to avoid these problems through the institution of wet-nursing and, as Brenner and Ramas themselves acknowledge in passing, the adequacy or otherwise of this solution is determined by social class. The fact is that wet-nursing was dangerous when combined with disease and malnutrition and much less so when these evils were absent. It is also true that many societies which in general depend upon human lactation for survival have collectivized the procedure in order to mitigate the individual mother-child bond through a more co-operative approach. So we can see that even such a ‘biological’ matter as lactation is a social phenomenon for the purposes of analysis.