The Working-Class Woman and Marx

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Negative Pole ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Body Theory ◽  
Cover Up

“The Working-Class Woman and Marx: Biased Constructions” shows that Marx, a thinker whose political thought aims to challenge hierarchical oppositions, reinforces hierarchical thought in his writings on the working-class woman. This exposes that oppositions concern deep unconscious structures in capitalism that are gendered, classed, sexed, and raced. It argues that we can only theorize a mediated relationship between hierarchical oppositions (such as mind/body, theory/practice, subject, and subject/object), if we make the unconscious link of women, racial and sexual minorities as well as the working-classes to the negative pole of oppositions conscious and delink groups of people from these oppositions. This is necessary, because such links are used to justify and cover up the division of labor and exploitation along class, gender, racial, and sexual lines. This chapter also discusses the moment when working-class women can rebel against their exploitation.

Disrupting the Fantasy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Status ◽  
Unconscious Fantasy ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Identity Thinking ◽  
Cover Up

“Disrupting the Fantasy: Adorno and the Working-Class Woman” exposes Adorno’s identity thinking in his figurations of the “working-class woman.” The forms in which she appears in Adorno’s texts (the phallic, castrating, and castrated woman) correspond to the three dimensions (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) through which Lacan mapped his thought. In all of these forms she advances to object petit a (Lacan)—the unconscious fantasy object that promises to cover up the fears and desires that non-wholeness incites. That the thinker of non-identity reinforces identity thinking exposes some of the challenges to realizing the idea of a (feminist) political subject-in-outline. For such a subject to be able to transform the status quo and remain inclusive, it must deal with the (unconscious) desires and fears the remaining-with-holes incites.

scholarly journals Annie Kenney and the Politics of Class in the Women’s Social and Political Union

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Significant Support

Abstract This article argues that an analysis of Annie Kenney’s public representation and private relationships offers a new way of evaluating how class was understood, experienced, and negotiated within the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Annie Kenney was a well-known suffrage activist from Lancashire, usually described as the only working-class woman to achieve prominence in the organization. This article analyses how the WSPU initially made much of Annie Kenney’s social origins, attracting significant press attention. However, it also demonstrates that their assumption that she could effectively speak for all working-class women was problematic, since it assumed a homogeneity of working-class experience. As the WSPU shifted its focus to recruiting more middle-class women, it sought instead to celebrate Annie Kenney’s commitment to the cause. Ironically, she was often more effective in building relationships with wealthier women, forming substitute families that provided significant support and benefits. Yet though the depth of these relationships was extraordinary in the context of contemporary class relations, they remained exceptional rather than typical. This article thus develops the work of scholars including Sandra Stanley Holton, Sue Thomas, and Laura Schwartz, who have analysed how class fragmented and shaped the women’s movement. It demonstrates that the significance of class within the WSPU was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static and indicates both the potential for, and barriers to, meaningful and lasting cross-class collaboration.

Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Working Class Women

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sociopolitical Change ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Feminist Agency ◽  
The Moment

This book provides answers for the questions of the when, who, how, and what of sociopolitical change and finds solutions to the dilemmas inherent in the idea of the political subject. It introduces the idea of the moment of the limit to theorize the moment when feminist agency is possible in late capitalist societies despite the ways in which power subordinates people. It introduces the idea of the political subject-in-outline to theorize the who of sociopolitical change, which challenges political and feminist thought that aims at giving up on the subject or theorizing it as a “constantly shifting” identity. Such a political subject moves within the tension of a certain coherence (the subject) necessary to effect change, and permanent openness (the outline) necessary to counter its exclusionary character. It shows that theory and practice are equally important tools of how people can change the world, and that they must conceptualize theory and practice as never finished, but rather as ongoing projects, to become transformative. It conceptualizes a new concept of suffering that envisions what spurs on social change in the bodily moment of suffering that tells people that things should be different. It also explains the ways in which the idea of the political subject-in-outline embraces the concept of the unconscious, and rejects the language of recognition. Finally, it shows that for theorizing a mediated relationship between oppositions, people must make the unconscious link of the working classes, women, racial, and sexual minorities to the negative pole conscious.

scholarly journals Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 236-248
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Unconscious Fantasy

Abstract This paper brings core concepts coined by Karl Marx in conversation with Jacques Lacan to analyse some of the mechanisms that have mystified subjects’ consciousness, and contributed to a scenario where the (white) working-classes in the United States and elsewhere turned to the far right that further undermines their existence, instead of uniting with the raced and gendered working class to overthrow capitalism. It explains that the money fetish, which we find at the centre of the American Dream of wholeness (on earth), serves as the unconscious fantasy object petit a to deal with the desires and fears subjects fundamental non-wholeness creates, which have been heightened by the insecurities of neoliberal capitalism and exploited by the far right. It also shows how religion offers the illusion of wholeness in the sky, which produces subjects who endure rather than rebel against their suffering. Finally, it explains how the far-right brands the sexed and raced working-classes as inferior to uphold the illusion of the white working-class subjects as whole, which further undermines the creation of a revolutionary proletariat.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sociopolitical Change ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
The Moment

“Introduction” introduces the reader to the tensions inherent in theorizing the when, who, how, and what of sociopolitical change and the controversial debates it has created. It shows how the ideas of the “moment of the limit” and the “political subject-in-outline” allow one to creatively engage with these tensions and solve the dilemmas inherent in the idea of the political subject. It furthermore introduces the reader to the figures that are central in the book: Marx, Adorno, and Lacan. It explains why these figures have been kept at the margins of political and feminist theory, and why people need to engage with these thinkers to theorize sociopolitical change. Finally, it explains the structure of the book in two parts, where the first part develops the idea of the political subject-in-outline, and the second part applies this idea to the feminist political subject and the working-class woman as a political subject.

Class Analysis and the Killing of the Newborn Child: Manchester, 1790–1860

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Ian Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Newborn Child ◽  
Witness Statements ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Moral Frameworks ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Town

Abstract This article explores the practice of neonaticide – the killing of an infant at the moment of birth – in Manchester during the first decades of the industrial revolution. Using a set of previously unexamined pre-trial witness statements, the author makes the case that newborn-killing was practised by working-class women in the town as a known and even accepted form of birth control. There is quite suggestive evidence that women had a language for this practice, shielded other women from having it reported, and in certain circumstances, assisted one another in carrying it out. This finding resonates with similar moral frameworks that have been studied from high-medieval England to early colonial Mexico. Nonetheless, it has also been well established that middle-class people throughout the nineteenth century in Britain abhorred infant killing, associated it strongly with stigmatized stereotypes of working-class maternity, and sought to suppress it using the punitive weight of the law. Period diaries and publications show that this ‘moral panic’ was as potent in Manchester as anywhere else. Taking these contrary patterns together, the author suggests that neonaticide and practices like it allow historians to observe the profound cultural divisions and frictions along class lines which structured life in the early industrial city.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
The Law ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Safe Working

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

White Working-class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: ‘Purified’ Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against ‘Mixed’ Marriages, 1934–9

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hyslop
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
South African ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
White Women ◽  
Mixed Marriage ◽  
Combined Effects ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Nationalist Government

The South African white general election of 1938 was largely fought around a poster. The poster was published by the supporters of D. F. Malan's hard-line Afrikaner Nationalists, who were attempting to unseat the more pro-imperial United Party (UP) government of Hertzog and Smuts. The poster portrayed the alleged threat of ‘mixed’ marriages to Afrikaner women, and attacked the UP for failing to legislate against it. Rejecting J. M. Coetzee's contention that such racist manifestations can solely be understood in terms of the unconscious, the paper argues that shifting gender relations amongst Afrikaners were crucial to this agitation. As young Afrikaner women moved into industry on a large scale during the 1920s and 1930s, men experienced women's greater economic and social independence as a challenge to their authority. Nationalist leaders played successfully on this insecurity by appealing to men to ‘protect’ women against supposed black threats, including ‘mixed’ marriages. The particular campaign of 1938, however, backfired somewhat on the Malanites. The Hertzog and Smuts supporters were divided over the proposal for legislation. But even their liberal faction was against ‘mixed’ marriages; they simply did not see a law as the best way of preventing it. The UP responded to the Nationalist campaign by arguing that white women were being insulted by the mere suggestion that they would marry across the colour line. They used this particular strand of racism to mobilise white women and men against the Nationalists. But the whole affair ultimately smoothed the way for Malan to legislate against ‘mixed’ marriage after he came to power in 1948. The combined effects of both Nationalist and UP campaigns was to strengthen racist opinion about the issue. In order to avoid the divisions in his party on the marriage question, Hertzog handed it over to a Commission of Inquiry. The 1939 De Villiers Report recommended in favour of legislation, but was not acted on because of the break-up of the Hertzog–Smuts government. Yet this UP appointed commission was ultimately used by the Nationalist government as the basis of its own racist marriage legislation.

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