Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xlv
of masculinity and femininity are mythic and the associations they have
with bodily morphology are merely arbitrary.
Materialist feminisms have their basis in the work of Fredrich Engels,
specifically his The Origins of the Family, Private Property and
the State (1884). Here Engels argues that women were the first oppressed
class. In order for men to consolidate private property and pass
it on through privately controlled families, they must first control the
sexuality of “their” women, in order to ensure the patrimony of their
children. Therefore, through the social contract of marriage and through
an array of formal and informal social rules, a woman’s sexuality was
made the private property of the men in her family—first her father,
who then effectively bartered her to her husband. Heterosexuality then
is a system of power, rather than a biologically preferred state. French
feminists have recognized the exploitative nature of the marriage contract
since the 18th century. In 1791 Olympe deGouges proposed an entirely
new and radically fairer marriage contract. Her work, focusing on
the relation of female subjects to the Enlightenment idea of the social
contract, engendered a French feminist tradition that continued into the
late 20th century lesbian-feminist writings of Monique Wittig.
A strong socialist feminism, kept alive throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries, saw the oppression of women as part of the maintenance of
power by European, male global elites. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir articulated
a decidedly materialist, but more specifically single-issue,
feminism in The Second Sex. This work had a tremendous influence on
lesbians and other feminists after World War II. Here, de Beauvoir famously
claimed that one is not born, but rather is made into a woman.
She therefore popularized the idea that femininity, as separate from biological
sex, was a socially constructed set of imperatives and prohibitions
to which women were held in order to keep them in a subordinate
social, political and economic position. It was only a small step from
here to the realization that heterosexuality, depending as it does on essentialist
notions of masculinity and femininity, is also a social construct
that supports gender hierarchy. Interestingly, though she was the
acknowledged site of origin for many of the most important and radical
ideas of postwar lesbian feminism, her own chapter on lesbianism depends
heavily on sexology and paints a troubled portrait. An understanding
of the relationship between the economic and the sexual oppression
of women characterizes both lesbian and other feminist