Helpsheet created for Phi 383W, Spring 2002.
HARTSOCK Summary
Nancy Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a
Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism" (1983):
The insight feminists can most usefully draw from Marx is a "metatheoretical" insight,
namely, his "proposal that a correct vision of class society is available from only one of
the two major class positions in capitalist society" (463).
Hartsock holds that since women's lives differ structurally from those of men (just as
workers lives differ structurally from owners' lives), it may be that the structure women's
activities provide a basis for a feminist standpoint [this term will be defined below] just
as the structure of workers' activities provide a basis for a proletarian standpoint.
A "standpoint," in the technical sense intended here, is not merely a "perspective" in
some vague sense. It is a perspective as understood in accordance with the "metatheoretical" belief that when two social groups have their activities structured in opposing
ways, then a correct vision of human relations in that society is available from only one
of those groups' social positions.
The focus on "activity" here is crucial. The assumption is that humans are what they do-especially what they do in producing their means of subsistence. An example of a society
structured such that two social groups are fundamantally opposed is capitalist society,
which opposes the interests and activities of capitalists to those of workers.
- From the perspective of the capitalist (the perspective of exchange), labor is just another
commodity.
- From the perspective of the worker (the perspective of production), labor is life activity.
Standpoint epistemology makes the following claims:
1. Material life structures consciousness and limits one's understanding of social
relations.
2. If material life is structured in opposing ways for two groups, their visions of reality
will be inversions of one another. Furthermore, the vision of the dominant group will be
both partial and perverse.
3. Yet, the vision of the dominant group will not be simply false, because that group has,
after all, the power to structure life for everyone in the society.
4. The vision available to the oppressed group doesn't come clear automatically; it is an
achievement, reached by a combination of theoretical analysis and political struggle (as,
for example, in "consciousness raising").
5. When achieved, the understanding of the oppressed exposes the fact that human
relations in the society are inhuman, and points toward future liberation.
Marx's account of production in capitalist society amounts to an elaboration of the five
claims that make up the concept of a standpoint. Thus:
1. Material life structures understanding: those who live the life of exchange develop a
dualist way of thinking; those who live the life of production develop instead a dialectical
epistemology.
2. The dominant standpoint is partial and perverse: the exchange perspective is partial (it
ignores the workers' lives) and is perverse in that it treats exchange as more important
than use whereas use is really the purpose of exchange.
3. Yet the capitalist class, the exchangers, have the power to determine the structure of
society, so even though their standpoint is perverse, it reflects the current reality and is in
that sense true.
4. The exchange class controls the production of ideas in the society too, so the opposing
standpoint (that of the producers) develops only as a result of analysis and political
struggle.
5. When achieved, the standpoint of the producers reveals that capitalism have produced
abundance for all, but in fact is not doing that.
Marx developed his critique of capitalism by focusing on "life activity." Hartsock makes
a similar move, but she focuses on women's life activity. She does this by beginning her
analysis with the sexual division of labor. Marx did not really see the importance of the
sexual division of labor; but Hartsock insists on it. Moreover, she does find some
indications in Marx's texts that he may have occasionally glimpsed the point. Hartsock
sees women's activities as sharing many characteristics with the activities of the
proletariat (industrial workers). However the following traits characterize women's world
even more intensely than the proletarian world (women are immersed in this world not
only during those hours spend working for the capitalist, but continually):
- interaction with nature, natural substances
- quality and qualitative changes are more important than quantity
- the activities performed are activities which unify mind and body
Specifics of women's activity, under the sexual division of labor:
- women produce both goods (commodities and use-values) and human beings
- women are, however, institutionally defined by their production of use-values in the
home
- women as a group work more than men
- a larger proportion of women's labor time is devoted to production of use-values than
men's
- women's production is structured by repetition in a different way than men's
- women's immersion in the world of use-values is more complete than men's
-women produce not just subsistence use-values, but also people; and this aspect of their
work exposes the inadequacies of the concept of production for describing women's
activities
- this work is not easily categorizable into play or work
- it involves change and growth, of a sort that requires avoiding excessive control
- it involves relational and interpersonal skills
- it results in the construction of female existence as centered on a complex relational
nexus--i.e. women tend to define themselves relationally
- one aspect of this is the experience of living in a female body, with challenges to body
boundaries
- object-relations psychology argues also that girls grow up with less starkly
differentiated ego boundaries
Male and female experience replicate themselves as epistemology and ontology, that is,
as frameworks of thought and as social institutions. The difference between male
experience and female experience generates the difference between "abstract
masculinity" and "the feminist standpoint."
- the boy's construction of self in opposition to unity with the mother sets up a dualism at
the center of the masculinized world view
- this hierarchical dualism includes a division of reality into the abstract and valuable on
the one hand, the concrete and demeaning on the other hand; it devalues work or
necessity and gives primacy to "purely social interactions." These dualities are then
overlaid with gender connotations. Nonetheless, all these assumptions are counterfactual;
they are contrary to lived experience.
The same set of hierarchical dualisms that make up the epistemology and society of
abstract masculinity also describe the effects of commodity exchange. I.e., abstract
masculinity shares much with the exchange abstraction. Female construction of self-inrelation leads in the opposite direction: opposition to dualism, valuation of the concrete, a
sense of connectedness. This world-view reflects women's activity under the sexual
division of labor, characterized by:
- activity of transforming both material objects and human beings
- issues of change rather than stasis
- the importance of qualities, of both things and people
- conjoint action beyond the instrumental cooperation of the workplace
- women's bodies themselves as instruments of production
Women's activity does meet the criteria for a standpoint:
1. Women's material life activity does have epistemological and ontological
consequences, i.e. consequences for the understanding and construction of social
relations.
2. On the basis of women's experience, one can see that abstract masculinity is both
partial and perverse:
- Partial because it acknowledges as valuable only male activity
- Perverse because it "substitutes death for life," as Bataille describes it in his
analysis:
- Rigid ego boundaries mean a self that is discontinuous with others.
Continuity, penetration of ego-boundaries, fusion with another can then be
experienced as violent.
- Then desire for fusion can take the form of domination, or a call for the
death of the other.
- Hence the links among violence, death, and sexual fusion--cf. rape and
pornography.
- In reproduction, the sperm is what dies
- In reproduction, growth does occur, but the male experiences it as "only
impersonal"--unlike the female experience of reproduction and birth.
- Cf. de Beauvoir: 'it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is
raised above the animal"
3. But men structure social relations in their own image, so women too must participate
in social relations that express abstract masculinity:
- cf. devaluation of women's work
- structuring of women's work so that it destroys minds and bodies
- isolation of women from each other in domestic labor
- female pathology of loss of self in service to others
- concealment of all this beneath layers of ideology
4. Need for struggle and analysis in order to achieve the feminist standpoint
5. The feminist standpoint is a basis for moving beyond these relations, toward a nonproblematic social synthesis:
- Capitalism enabled the proletariat to raise the possibility of society without class
domination
- Feminism should enable women to raise the possibility of society without any
forms of domination
What is necessary is "the generalization of the potentiality made available by the activity
of women--the defining of society as a whole as propertyless producer both of use-values
and of human beings" (477). What this requires is:
- abolition of private property
- seizure of state power
- lengthy postrevolutionary class struggle