1970s and An Analysis of Sexual Politics
In her talk, Kelly-Gadol investigated not only the male definitions of womanhood but the integrity of the category itself. She commented on the difficulty earlier feminists had to understand why women are a group and why that group is oppressed, as well as the importance they found in defining women’s oppression as its own unique kind, rather than analogous to other forms. She quoted Gerda Lerner, “All analogies—class, minority group, caste—approximate the position of women, but fail to define it adequately. Women are a category unto themselves. An adequate analysis of their position in society requires new conceptual tools.” Because of this, Kelly-Gadol argued, “Women have to be defined as woman, as the social opposite not of a class, a caste, or the opposite of a majority, since we are a majority, but the opposite of a sex—men. ” She argued that feminism has allowed for the seperation between the sex classification of female and social classification of womanhood. In her eyes, women at the time understood that it was not their sex that led to their subordination to men, but social roles and relations, and that sex class is not congruent to the social role of womanhood, which is man made.
The issue of male control was indeed a major topic of analysis in 1970s feminist circles, not only as it pertained to history and knowledge production, as Kelly-Gadol argued, but also society, social structures, and language. In her introduction to Audre Lorde’s 1979 talk on the power and importance of poetry, Domna Stanton shared a feminist analysis of language. She refered to a popularly shared feminist assumption of language. She said: “language, the primary system of human communication and signification, both reflects and determines our vision of the world, and of ourselves. Language, then, is not merely powerful, it is the system of power which inscribes and sustains all other discourses of power in a society…” She argued that because men have historically and socially governed language and its uses, they have also controlled female subjectivity: “Men have controlled what has been labeled and how it has been labeled. They have defined and ordered classifying systems. They have created the words which are catalogued in our dictionaries, and they have placed prohibitions against women naming. Naming ourselves and thus inscribing our difference.” Stanton quoted Adrienne Rich in her poem, “The Stranger’: “If they ask me my identity, what can I say but, ‘I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language,’” while in her poem “Implosions” [Rich] says, ‘“This is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you.’” Domna Stanton’s speech summarized the issues feminists at the time raised, not only of the methods used for interrogating female oppression, but the very language and social structures they used to articulate it.
Another major topic for discussion within feminist circles in the 1970s was the role biology played in constructing womanhood. At the second Scholar and Feminist Conference, biologist Helen Lambert argued that the development of sex differences is a continuum from genetic determinism to social conditioning, and it is up to society whether or not to minimize or reinforce those created differences. She noted that the concept of a biological basis of sex generates a lot of heat in both feminist and anti-feminist spaces, due to two ideas: one she described as biological inevitability—that biology cannot be changed—and the second, biological desirability—that one would not want to change one’s biology anyway. While the first, the inevitability of biology, she argued, can be investigated by science, the desirability of biology cannot, and is a social phenomenon based on value systems. She maintained that it is not the biological differences that subordinate women to men, but the desirability and value systems assigned to the male and female body. Because of this difference, she stated, admitting that there are biological differences between men and women is not a threat to feminism unless one accepts the female as inferior.