Re: Women's Oppression

[Diane Monaco <dmonaco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pritha, thank you for taking the time to forward your theses on the
oppression of women.  I like what you have written and I find each
point a lucid and worthy thesis in itself.  I would like to offer
the following thoughts if I may. 

Pritha Chandra wrote:

>  1.
> A cursory look at the statistics demonstrate that there is a direct
> relation between a steep rise in the emancipatory consciousness for/among
> women within the society and the quantitative leap in the incidences and
> varieties of atrocities on women.

Perhaps the emancipation of consciousness only increases a RECOGNITION of
the incidences and not the actual number of incidences.
   

>  2. Violence against womanhood has
> generally been superficially analysed. It has been considered natural
> when it occurs regularly in wedlock, or else deviant for which legal
> provisions may suffice. Even, the feminist discourse generally offers a
> simplistic analysis of the problem by stooping down, firstly, to
> subjectivity, and secondly, to a-historicism. It stresses on the
> bourgeois concept of freedom based on individualism and the principle of
> social atomism. Further, it refuses to recognize the qualitative
> differences between the patriarchies or patriarchal forms in different
> socio-economic formations 

I'm not so sure there is or ever was a single feminist discourse and
certainly not one that could possibly recognize the intricacies of ALL
patriarchal forms.  This argument is so overused by so many -- and
for what purpose?  It seems rather counterproductive to put so much
emphasis on how one feminist discourse has failed to address the issues
of another perhaps unfamiliar patriarchal form when the larger issue
still remains that women are oppressed throughout the world -- today as
we speak.  All feminists have something valuable to add to the
discourse. I can't tell you how much I have learned from RAWA these past
few months. 


>  6. ... Non-Marxist
> Feminists envisaging the contrary are utopians, the most radical of whom
> cannot go beyond demanding women s right to property. They do not
> question the material base on which the capitalist patriarchy sustains,
> and thus cannot provide any permanent solution to its crisis which lies
> in the socialisation (not even the state ownership) of means of
> production.

There are noncapitalist patriarchal modes of production.  What
guarantee is there that the RULES of the "socialization of the means
of production" process will be patriarchal free?  And why is
this any less utopian than "demanding women's right to
property"?

Diane Monaco
Manchester College