Lucien Rey writes: The main purpose of Branka Magas’s article, as I understand it, is to show that there are a number of crucial theoretical shortcomings in the three books she is reviewing. For instance, they are confused about the concept of ‘equality’, they have an unrealistic historical perspective, they underplay the concepts of ‘class’ and ‘property’ and overplay ‘sexual politics’ and man-woman oppression—in short, none of them could be properly called Marxist. Subsidiary to this, and less explicit, I think the article has a second purpose, which is to claim that the theoretical bases for a correct analysis of women’s oppression are to be found in Engels’ Origins and in the writings of Freud.

It has become traditional on the left to contrast ‘Marxism’ with ‘feminism’ and this kind of contrast seems to me to colour the strategy Magas adopts towards these books, concentrating on their shortcomings and implying the existence (potential, perhaps, but not too distant) of an alternative Marxist model. I think this is far from the truth. As far as I can judge, there is little of value written on women’s oppression within the Marxist tradition and perhaps even less within the Freudian tradition. I am also extremely suspicious of the Marxism/ feminism contrast.

I would like to give an example to show why I am so doubtful. An important section of Magas’s article is devoted to Eva Figes’s attack on Rousseau. There is a good reason for this. Rousseau is widely regarded by Marxists as prefiguring the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Lenin. Yet Figes characterizes him as a particularly rabid sexist and it is obviously impossible to refute this. The temptation, which Magas avoids, without drawing the full conclusions from her own argument, is to separate the good, ‘revolutionary’ Rousseau from the bad ‘sexist’ Rousseau and weigh one against the other, balancing the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality against Emile, La Nouvelle Heloise, etc.

This seems to me to put matters the wrong way round. The fact that Rousseau was a rabid sexist surely casts doubts on the claim that he prefigures Marxism and Leninism, yet this is a problem which is totally ignored by Marxist commentaries on Rousseau, including those of Della Volpe, Colletti and Althusser. Figes remarks that reading the Social Contract you might imagine mankind was uni-sexual and you might still imagine this after reading Della Volpe, Colletti and Althusser as well.