Sexuality and Socialism. Sherry Wolf

      The capitalist mode of production brought about the rise of an entrepreneurial class—and with it, the notion of personal achievement and individuality as a social ideal. At the same time, the increasing prosperity of a new middle class and the broader accumulation of personal wealth and transferable inheritances demanded strict sexual morality, especially for women. British historian Jeffrey Weeks describes the contradictions of this new family structure: The bourgeois family was “both the privileged location of emotionality and love…and simultaneously an effective policeman of sexual behavior.”²⁶

      In contrast to the prosperous middle class, industrial life was literally killing the working class in mid-nineteenth century England. Middle-class men in the rural area of Rutland, England, lived to be fifty-two, while working-class “men” died at the average age of seventeen in industrial centers like Manchester, sixteen in Bethnal Green, and fifteen in Liverpool.²⁷ Textile mill owners employed mostly women and children at far less pay than men for long hours of arduous labor, which led to illness and mortality rates that threatened to cut into owners’ profits.

      Frederick Engels described the near-collapse of working-class family life in The Condition of the Working Class in England. He detailed the crowded and filthy conditions in working-class homes and quoted one report by the Ministry of Health: “In Leeds, brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, are found occupying the same sleeping-room with the parents, and consequences occur which humanity shudders to contemplate.”²⁸

      A reinvention of the working-class family was urgently needed. Victorian reformers campaigned for changes in factory work and housing, which led to the creation of a “family wage” for men, an amount that was intended to sustain a family and allow women to stay at home to care for their children and clean their homes. This wage rarely did suffice and many working-class women continued to take in sewing and other piecework. Though the adaptation of the middle-class nuclear family to the working class had the impact of trapping working-class women, it also relieved them from exhausting hours of factory work. Children were sent to school, not only to educate them for future jobs, but also to instill in them the discipline of work. Middle-class sexual mores were propagated widely among the working class to drive down the rate of prostitution and the deadly diseases and out-of-wedlock births that were its consequences.

      In The Construction of Homosexuality, David Greenberg makes a compelling case for why the rising capitalist order sharpened gender roles and strengthened the ideology of the family.²⁹ The agricultural societies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial North America required strict obedience in a world of rigorous labor where there was little social mobility. The priorities of the nineteenth-century market, however, drove shifts in what the new society treasured most of all in the male character—competitiveness and a desire for personal achievement. In this environment, emotional expressiveness, a nurturing attitude, and dependence on others translated into weakness and vulnerability. By 1860, men no longer embraced, cried, or kissed other men in public for fear of appearing effeminate.³⁰ As men left the home for employment in factories and offices, women’s role in raising the children and running the household shaped the medical profession’s new gender ideal of women as nurturers and dependent on men for material and social sustenance.

      Capitalist society continues to grapple with the contradictions between the privatization of child-rearing and household maintenance and the countervailing forces that tear the family apart. The nuclear family today provides the ruling class with an inexpensive means for the feeding and preservation of the current workforce and the raising and disciplining of the next generation of workers.

      The family also serves a sociological function. By training young people to accept traditional sex roles—men are the smart or strong breadwinners, while women are the nurturing companions and child-raisers—families are ideal incubators for rigid sex norms. Homosexual and transgender behaviors present a challenge to this ideological norm. After all, if women can look and act “like men” and men can look and act “like women” and/or if men and women can live in same-sex relationships and each embody attributes conventionally attributed exclusively to men or women, gender and familial norms are thrown into question. The behavior of sexual minorities and gender-benders weakens and even defies these sex and gender roles, thus undermining the attitudes most desirable to the smooth functioning of capitalist society.

      Half of all American children live in a single-parent family at some point, and half of all marriages end in divorce. As women in industrialized societies have become thoroughly integrated—though unequally paid—in the workforce, women’s ability to dissolve marriages and live independent of men has strengthened. This has created tensions between the ideology of the family and the reality of people’s lives. Even the contentious abortion battle is an expression of this contradiction: as women have become central to the labor force, abortion is both economically necessary and socially desirable to many. But despite capital’s needs for women workers to have fewer children and to control whether and when to get pregnant, the right wing continues to oppose legal abortion and to bolster ideology that strengthens the nuclear family and the ideal of women as mothers.

      The American ruling class today is split on the question of whether to legalize same-sex marriage, because while marriage serves to further legitimize traditional family values, gay marriage would normalize homosexuality and break down gender divisions in the working class. Thus, the Christian right sees no contradiction in heralding family values while depicting the right to same-sex marriage as a harbinger of an end to all that is sacred. George W. Bush’s $1.5 billion marriage initiative to goad poor (heterosexual) women into getting and staying married was also fueled by the ruling class’s desire to offload any responsibility to care for their workers’ children, who have five times the chance of living in poverty and twice the risk of two-parented kids of dropping out of school.³¹

      The battle for equal marriage rights—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire are the only U.S. states where same-sex marriage has been legalized³²—is about more than the 1,049 federal rights and benefits that accrue to those who are married. Ruling-class bigots who oppose equal marriage rights understand that this civil rights battle could well open the door to the end of all legal discrimination against gays and lesbians, in the way that the 1947 California Supreme Court decision striking down the ban on interracial marriage in that state opened the way for further struggles. Gay marriage also challenges the traditional notion of what a family is supposed to look like. Its legalization creates an obvious confrontation with the very idea that there is anything natural about the heterosexual nuclear family.

      The construction of homosexuality

      Modern capitalism created the “social space” for a gay identity to emerge.³³ Industrial and financial centers concentrated people in huge numbers, thereby creating the potential for anonymity that had never before existed in human societies. Having created the possibility for individuals to live apart from their families and to experiment with alternative sexual practices away from the narrowness of rural life, capitalist society then sought to define and repress this new sexual “deviance.” As D’Emilio explains,

      As wage labor spread and production became socialized, then, it became possible to release sexuality from the “imperative” to procreate…. In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex.³⁴

      Industrial capitalism’s hostility to homosexuality is unique in comparison to previous societies’ laws punishing alternative sex practices. Whereas old laws condemned homosexual acts that threatened procreation, new proscriptions were enacted against a small class of people whose behavior set them apart from the majority. As British socialist Noel Halifax puts it, “Under capitalism sexuality was now not a ‘private affair regulated by…traditions and prejudices of the community’ but become ‘a public matter for the state.’”³⁵

      Gay and lesbian stigmatization became systematized as the “homosexual type” in the form of a small minority of men and women whose