Page 126 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

SOCIALIST FEMINISM

exclusion of women from these definitions which it takes as an
accurate account of subjectivity rather than as a historically
constructed ideology. 34

There were undoubtedly real strengths in the Marxist-feminist
approach: they were right, surely, to refuse the obvious post-Marxist
temptation simply to substitute gender for class, and to insist, to the
contrary, that cultural forms such as the novel, drama and poetry are
“discourses in which the fused language of class, race and gender are
both produced and re-represented”. They were right, surely, to insist
35
on the crucial relevance to the analysis of gender ideology of an
elaborated account of the modes of material and cultural production.
But if feminists are to make use of Marxist concepts, then why not of
those which provide more, rather than less, scope for creative human
initiative? In short, why not of Williams’s reading of Gramsci, say,
rather than that of Althusser? The obverse of this theoretical predilection
for structuralism was often a practical suspicion of popular feminist
writing inexplicable except as a function either of avant-gardiste cultural
élitism or of vanguardist political immobilism. Witness Rosalind
Coward’s notorious dismissal of novels like Marilyn French’s The
Women’s Room as essentially unfeminist simply by virtue of their
fidelity to the conventions of realist literary narrative: “women-centred
novels are not the product of a feminist audience. Nor can we say that
the structures of the realist novel are neutral and that they can just be
filled with a feminist content… It is quite clear that there are compelling
similarities between ‘novels that change lives’ and contemporary
fictional conventions, which should warn us against any simple
designation of these novels as feminist”. 36
While Coward happily described her own position as coming “from
37
within Marxism and feminism”, the major theoretical resources,
both here and elsewhere in her work, very obviously derived not simply
from Althusserianism, but from the structuralist tradition more
generally, as for example in her resort to Barthesian semiology. This
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conflation of Marxist and structuralist categories marked one of the
defining features of British socialist feminism as much as of British
Marxism during much of the 1970s: as we observed in Chapter 4, the
British reception of French structuralism was, as it were, over-
determined by the prior reception of Althusserianism. Socialist feminist
analysis was thus increasingly preoccupied with the mechanisms by

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