Woman's Estate by Juliet Mitchell
"Woman's Estate" by Juliet Mitchell is a significant compilation of essays that emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflecting on the women's liberation movement as a key force in radical political activism of the era. The work is structured into two parts: the first provides a historical context and overview of the women's liberation movement, while the second offers a theoretical framework informed by socialist-materialist perspectives. Mitchell draws parallels between the struggles of women and other social movements, particularly highlighting the similarities between women's liberation and the black radicalism of the time.
She critiques mainstream feminist organizations, positioning women's liberation as a more revolutionary, separatist movement focused on collective action and consciousness-raising. Central to her argument is the assertion that women’s oppression is rooted in both biological and historical contexts, with significant emphasis on the roles of production, reproduction, sexuality, and socialization in shaping women's lives. Mitchell’s work stands alongside other influential feminist texts of the period, contributing a critical analysis that seeks to understand the mechanisms of patriarchy within individual experiences, rather than merely advocating for rights. Her scholarly approach offers a nuanced perspective on women's oppression, making "Woman's Estate" a pivotal text in the discourse of feminist theory and history.
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Subject Terms
Woman's Estate by Juliet Mitchell
First published: 1971
Type of work: Social criticism
Form and Content
Woman’s Estate is a compilation of several essays written by Juliet Mitchell in the late 1960’s and in 1970, combined with new material that both connects the older essays and elaborates upon the implications of Mitchell’s arguments. Mitchell describes the women’s liberation movement (the term she uses to designate the most progressive wing of the women’s movement) as the vanguard of radical political activism in the late 1960’s. She likewise sees it as the key element in a new revolutionary political movement. The text itself is divided into two related sections. Part 1, entitled “The Women’s Liberation Movement,” gives a general description of the background and politics of the movement itself. Part 2 provides a theoretical discussion of a movement grounded in a combination of materialist and feminist theory.
Because the text is obviously a product of the intellectual and social climate of the 1960’s, Mitchell appropriately begins part 1 with a chapter on the background of the 1960’s. She argues that the women’s liberation movement can only be understood in relation to the other major political movements of the period, those of blacks, students, and youth. Of these three movements, Mitchell finds the shift from the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960’s to black radicalism in the late 1960’s to be that most closely analogous to the struggle of women. Women’s liberation, she theorizes, owes less to historical feminist movements, such as women’s suffrage, than it does contemporaneous social struggles. Just as blacks suffer from economic and social oppression, so do women, and as many blacks shift from calls for reform to calls for revolution, so too does a sizable segment of the women’s movement. Unlike the most radical elements of the black liberation movement, however, the majority of those involved in the women’s liberation movement come from middle-class backgrounds. Thus the movement also shares many similarities with the various youth and college student movements.
The remainder of part 1 is devoted to a description of women’s liberation politics and a cataloging of organizations as they existed in the late 1960’s. Mitchell highlights the differences between various national movements and the effects of the “reformist” organizations that try to work within the existing structure. She does not include the National Organization for Women (NOW) in her discussion because she considers it to be merely a “feminist” or mainstream political group. Instead, women’s liberation follows the separatist pattern set by Black Power activists. Mitchell describes the similarities between various international women’s groups to be “women only” membership, collective work, and a small-group emphasis. Key concepts include consciousness-raising and the insistence upon the deleterious effects of patriarchy. Groups that do not fit within this women’s liberation paradigm are dismissed by Mitchell as being either accommodationist or sectarian.
Part 2, “The Oppression of Women,” provides a theoretical explanation of the women’s liberation movement. Writing from a socialist-materialist perspective, Mitchell outlines the primary structures that control women’s lives: production, reproduction, sexuality, and socialization. Traditional socialist theories have been preoccupied with the predominance of production as a “base” for a “superstructure” of culture. Mitchell places reproduction on the same level as production, claiming the division of labor among the sexes as the origination of the division of labor. Likewise, she places an equivalent emphasis on sexuality and socialization. Her innovative theorizing of previously secondary levels of socialist thought serves as a precursor to Mitchell’s later work on psychoanalysis and the importance of socialization in the lives of women.
Context
Along with Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Mitchell’s text represents one of the culminating products of the women’s movement of the 1960’s. Mitchell’s theories are thoroughly grounded in the European and British traditions of radicalism and socialism. Thus her argument concentrates on class and social struggle instead of the American concentration on individual rights and spontaneous protest. She also presents a skeptical account on the important questions of a feminine essence, or an essential feminism.
Millett and Greer present a socialist and an anarchist view of women’s oppression, respectively. Mitchell criticizes both for what she sees as an overgeneralizing tendency particular to American writing and ideology. While Millett presents a convincing and necessary critique of patriarchy and its prevalence in contemporary society, Mitchell criticizes her work for its antihistorical and undialectical approach. Mitchell prefers to demonstrate how patriarchy works in the individual lives of women instead of proving that it does indeed have an affect. Greer’s theories are dismissed by Mitchell as being the female equivalent of the hippie and yippie movements, middle-class misbehavior that is easily reassimilated into a consumer culture increasingly based on the consumption of images (including those of entertainingly outlandish behavior).
Mitchell is even more equivocal on the issue of the essential nature of women’s oppression. She asserts that all women are oppressed and that women’s oppression is the oldest fact in human history, but she draws short of claiming a unique women’s psyche or women’s language, as many continental or American feminists have done. She eschews the term “feminist” in favor of the term “woman” in order to highlight the biological basis of women’s oppression. By insisting on and accounting for both the biological and the historical nature of women’s oppression, Mitchell adds a scholarly and political facet to women’s studies that was previously absent or buried by abstraction.
Bibliography
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Darshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. The early influential work on women based on the theory of historical materialism. An important source for Mitchell’s work.
Engels, Friederich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. 1884. Reprint. Moscow: Progress, 1977. The paradigmatic work by one of the founders of socialist theory. Based on the anthropological findings of American writer Henry Lewis Morgan, Engels argues that the family is the basis of all social structures.
Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982. A groundbreaking work in materialist feminism and historicism. Hayden presents convincing historical evidence indicating that the women’s movement has been much less discontinuous than Mitchell asserts. Her emphasis on architectural design provides fascinating proof of the materialist interest of nineteenth century feminists.
Miller, Casey, and Kate Swift. Words and Women: New Language in New Times. New York: Anchor Books, 1976. A work that argues for a linguistic, instead of a materialist, approach to women’s issues. The authors share Mitchell’s interest in the linguistic traces of women’s oppression.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. A influential work on women’s issues contemporaneous with Woman’s Estate. Millet shares Mitchell’s materialist paradigm but pays much less attention to the question of dialectical and historical development.