queerbychoice | Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig

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Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig

I've just had the following email exchange with a stranger whom I know nothing about other than that he wrote to me after visiting my website and he calls himself Tim:

Tim: Do you believe the reproductive system oppresses women?
Gayle: No, I believe laws and attitudes regarding it oppress women. Why do you ask? I find it weird that you'd need to.
Tim: Shulasmith [sic] Firestone and Monique Wittig thought that the reproductive system was the problem when it came to the oppression of women. And I noticed that you had a section on your web page on lesbian feminism.

Is this true? I haven't read any Shulamith Firestone, but I've read Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body and a few other shorter pieces by her, and I never got that impression at all.

Edit: I'm still confused about exactly what Firestone said, but have received an excerpt from Wittig that directly contradicts this assertion.

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I've never read Monique Wittig (don't tell anybody!), but I can confirm that Shulamith Firestone thought that women were oppressed by their reproductive systems. She thought that a truly liberating society would, among other things, be one in which machines took over the reproductive process.

I find myself inclined to agree. I also expect this to happen, work on hepling premature infants is clearly leading to artificial wombs and I'm guessing they will become popular once they are available, especially for women with high-powered careers. Once the wealthy and powerful embrace something it can easily spread to be a social norm.

If nothing else, this might also help further reduce the population

I actually disagree with Firestone's analysis. It's a great idea-- in theory. But I worry about the class and racial implications of artificial wombs. If those in possession of wombs do not control reproduction (and many would say that they already don't, given laws and legal situations that prosecute women for refusing c-sections, or that bring prosecution down on poor women with crack problems for endangering their unborn babies; limited access to certain forms of birth control; and the like), who will? Who will be in charge of producing babies, and who will get to decide who is "fit" to be parents? I also see in my head a Gattaca-like scenario in which people who are mechanically produced attain a higher social status than those "untouchable" types who are conceived the old-fashioned way. That, or mass sterilizations and the return of the eugenics movement.

Once the wealthy and powerful embrace something it can easily spread to be a social norm.

This sounds suspiciously like trickle-down reproduction to me, and though I understand your argument in theory, I don't think that any revolution like this can be so easily cut and dried.

I suppose that my PoV is a bit unusual, since I do not consider the right to reproduce to be a right on anywhere near the same scale as the rights to be safe and have access to adequate food, medical care, and education (and all the other basic needs that the US mostly does not provide for many of its citizen). Given the degree to which reproduction impacts the entire planet (wrt overpopulation) I don't have much problem with it being fairly well regulated, as long as regulating it does not force anyone to bear or father children against their will. OTOH, I'm also a childfree ecofreak, so my views are fairly far off-norm.

I agree with you that overpopulation is a problem, but I don't necessarily think control of reproduction on such a scale is the answer. If I thought that such a level of control could be wielded by people with only the best interests of the entire planet in mind, and that whoever controls the technological means of production could be trusted to control them in a completely non-racist, non-classist way-- sure, I'd agree with you. But I have trouble believing that reproductive control on that scale would not be informed by personal economic and political interest-- and a highly conservative, white supremacist, classist, misogynistic, heterosexist form of interest at that. The control of reproduction alone will not help the planet, given that in order to survive, we need a small, sustainable but diverse population of humans to thrive.

I am inclined to agree. Intrinsically, I think it's an excellent idea, but likely to be applied remarkably badly.

Mmm...Gattaca! ;)

>>is not really a ditz, just acts like it<<

Good point.

Oh, I believe Adrienne Rich and Marge Piercy, among others, have written about machines taking over the job of pregnancy. Certainly it's always nice to have other options available, and the more options we have available to achieve anything, the more liberated any person can be, but I find that different from arguing that pregnancy is inherently oppressive. Some people want to be pregnant. Some people who cannot get pregnant feel deprived because in order to have children they have to give somebody else custody and control over the child for nine months. For example, single women and lesbians who want to have children without having the children's father involved in their lives can much more easily accomplish that than single men or gay men who want to have children without the children's mother involved in their lives. Being able to get pregnant oneself is an advantage there. So I don't think having either form of reproductive system can be considered inherently oppressive - they both become similarly unpleasant if you'd prefer to have the other kind.

Personally, I'm more worried about the prospect of having machines take over the work of pregnancy. It's not that I think good old-fashioned bodily pregnancy is an empowering part of women's identity-- though I would certainly not argue that there is anything inherent about the female body and its abilities that causes oppression, because that's a lazy argument. As I said to heron61, though, I worry that pregnancy by machine will place the means of (re)production even more in the hands of government and big business than it already is, and in so doing intensify race and class inequities. I think we need to liberate biological wombs from the tangle of sexist and racist messes they're currently in (see the recent c-section case and Dorothy Roberts' Killing the Black Body for more on this), and work on the socioeconomic situation in this and other countries first, before we even consider machine-based reproduction.

Yes, I've heard those worries too, and they're legitimate certainly, but I just have difficulty getting very worked up about them until the machinery to accomplish them actually gets invented. In theory, mechanical wombs could be either liberating or oppressive; but until they actually get invented, I tend to prefer to spend my time worrying about what actually exists already instead.

I will go look up Dorothy Roberts' book now, though.

Again: theoretically, yes. But I tend to think that after mechanical wombs are invented is too late to wonder what the possible pros and cons of them are-- especially since I would expect them to be invented by a major company with strong ties to a government, not simply a scientifically disinterested body of individuals. Mechanical wombs could theoretically be liberating, but I remain suspicious until our actual existing political and (socio)economic system changes.

Firestone said that the reproductive system was *used* to oppress women not that it itself oppresses women. She argued that men claimed ownership over the bodies of women in order to control reproduction and control the next generation and appropriated the value of pregnancy and childbirth from women (children). She was a Marxist and she was informed by the Marxist analysis of labor value (workers are exploited by capitalists who expropriate most of the value of what they make from them as profit, because they claim ownership over the bodies of workers).

Her analysis is still very very widely accepted, even in more moderate and liberal circles. Lots of mainstream pro-choice arguments talk about men controlling women's bodies as the basis of the anti-abortion people's ideas.

So Shulamith Firestone did not feel that pregnancy oppressed women, she just declared that pregnancy and childbirth were expropriated from women by husbands and this was the source for the oppression of women. She believed people who become pregnant and give birth should have autonomy over their bodies and the products of their labor. I don't think she would have opposed males becoming pregnant in the future either, because she was a big secular Marxist type, but her issue was with who does what v. who gets what, not who can't do what and who can.

I think she might still be around, actually, and deep into mad-liberation these days.

well at least i think this is what she said, but i might be mistaken about this.

Hah, this is such an ultimate stereotypical female disclaimer to add.

I like such disclaimers. (-: I tend to regard the ideas of people who use them far more seriously.

my email is dierker@usc.edu

Obviously I don't, since I plainly stated here that I've never read anything by her.

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Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig

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do you know anything current about Shulamith Firestone?

Re: do you know anything current about Shulamith Firestone?