Marcuse and Feminism

Abstract

Not the least of the ironies and interesting paradoxes that constitute the significance of Marcuse for us is the fact that as an 81-year-old man and product of one of the deeply patriarchal and authoritarian of modem cultures, he turned and returned consistently in his late writings to the subject of feminism. He explained his reasons in one of his last public lectures delivered at Stanford in 1974: believe the Women's Liberation Movement is perhaps the important and potentially the political movement that we have even if the consciousness of this fact has not yet penetrated the Movement as a whole. Speaking as a woman and a feminist, I take Marcuse's serious engagement with the feminist project both as a testament to his enormous historical openness, his refusal of political resignation, and also as a moving gesture of respect and solidarity, which may turn out to be the important part of his legacy to the male Left in the United States today. I want first to explore why Marcuse thought that the Women's Liberation Movement is our most radical political movement and then, in a Marcusean spirit (evident always in his dialogue with Marxism), interrogate the tradition of Critical Theory itself, confronting it with the development of feminist theory and practice, in the hope of its emancipation from its own patriarchal bias and male-modelled assumptions. What Russell Jacoby wrote in relation to the New Left may be even more apt here with the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement, the gap closed between Marcuse's texts and the writing on the wall. So many recurrent Marcusean dreams and themes found their embodiment in the movement for women's liberation that came to be called socialist feminism: his vision in Eros and Civilization of love as revolution; his insistence on the possibility of a new reality principle as the promise of a socialism which could no longer be understood as a change in social institutions, but had to be deepened to include a vision of a change in consciousness and the very instinctual structures of human beings deformed by exploitation and domination; his understanding of socialism as a qualitative leap to a new system of needs which are sensuous, ethical and rational in one. Our recent