ABSTRACT
Feminist theory is today bringing about a major advance in social vision. If we take as an index of the reemergence of feminist theory Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay on the four structures by which to assess “woman’s estate,” 1 we can appreciate how our understanding of women and society has developed. For more than a decade, the women’s movement has been confronting sex oppression in the domains she helped name for us–production, reproduction, sexuality, and socialization. Since 1966 we have struggled personally, intellectually, and politically against the socializing of girls/women into the servicing, mother role, and against the socializing of boys/ men into requiring it. We have moved in thought, feeling, and action against the restriction of female sexuality to phallus and family. We have struggled to understand how and why male-dominant institutions control biological and social reproduction, and we have been fighting that control. And we have moved in several ways against an organization of work that fosters and profits from the sexual division of labor and the unequal relation of the sexes that flows from it. In practice and consciousness, this phase of the women’s movement is no longer where it was when Juliet Mitchell marked out the paths along which we did indeed move; and our theoretical understanding has developed accordingly.
