Response to Harold Benenson’s “Victorian Sexual Ideology”

Abstract

Harold Benenson's important and convincing study of the limits of Marxism for analyzing working-class families is a splendid culmination of a decade and a half of critical feminist readings of Marx. Benenson clarifies and expands on the accom plishments of the large but scattered feminist literature, which has probed weak nesses and contradictions in Marx's treatment of women, families, and women workers, or tried to build new theoretical structures from his fragmentary comments on social reproduction.l As Marx becomes, in Benenson's essay, someone bound by his own history, he is demystified.2 His writing gains in richness as a guide for social historians as it ceases to be canonical. Feminists, meanwhile, continue to accumu late both empirical knowledge and hypotheses about the origins and perpetuation of women's subordination and its relation to other kinds of oppression. The feminist project has probably reached the point which political economy had attained with the physiocrats or Adam Smith, without whom Marx could not have written Capital. Ultimately, though, the study of gender and of class are intimately related. As Benenson shows so brilliantly here, Marx's understanding of the working class is distorted by his inability to abstract himself from Victorian givens on women and their social place. In my comments, I first want to outline some of the reflections on working class social history, especially in Britain, which this paper stimulated. I will then briefly look at the substantial body of writing on working-class women, families, and survival strategies which blossomed at the fringes of British Marxism after Marx's death.