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Woman's Estate
After scrutinizing the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Mitchell goes on to describe the organization of women's liberation in Western Europe and in America and to locate the areas of women's oppression. Part II presents her own theories, which focus on four key work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialization of children, and includes a detailed study of the modern family and a reevaluation of Freud's work in this field.
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First published January 1, 1971
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March 13, 2025This book is copyrighted 1971 and my paperback version was printed 1973. I'm pretty sure I purchased it new as part of my reading on feminism that I never got to 50 years ago. This book was in my queue, but I moved it up since the author was referenced in my previous book, The Female Eunuch. I like it when my books overlap. This one was a very readable but more academic tome than the previous book. Another one written by an English author with that perspective primarily. I failed to mention in my review of the The Female Eunuch that Germaine Greer is Australian and educated in England. This one also was very informative and took a Freudian/Marxian viewpoint of how and why women are/were second class citizens, and the progress of history via Marxian economics is the only way to change our status. Much progress has been made in 50 years, but women never achieved equality during that time and of course now we are backsliding. Reading this has convinced me, at least for the time being until I read differently, that we currently are in the late stages of capitalism. Time will tell where we go from here! I will be recycling this book.
February 11, 2022
mis gibi kitap valla, feminizm 101
August 23, 2017
kadın kurtuluşu hareketinin ne olduğunu nerde başladığını, sosyalist feministlerle radikal feministler arasındaki farkı, örgütlenme ilkelerini, temel kavramları, Beauvoir nasıl başlamış nasıl dönüşmüş, Kate Millet ne anlatmış, Firestone kimmiş, şimdi ne yapılabilir görmek için çok iyi bir kaynak derim,
December 24, 2017
i agree to a large extent with the basic ideas of Mitchell's philosophy, especially regarding the role of women in reproduction and work, but as per usual with white feminists, this take extends to only modern Western industrial societies and hence lacks representation of an intersectional approach to women's liberation.
December 26, 2022
Interesting how in the preface one can mention that talks of feminism are overly focused on the western movements and then casually continue to go "but I won't be discussing anything else either" and not see a problem with it? Incredibly dated and very feminism 101 even when it was current. It's interesting as it captures the moment but other than that, I'd say there's better stuff out there and this one is entirely unnecessary.
April 5, 2019
As a feminist view of the state of women in the early seventies and how they got there together with an analysis of the situation where to go, it is totally adequate. As a subjective piece of literature, to get an insight into feminist thinking and theory. As an objective work, it is less good but sometimes Juliet Mitchell manages to give a reasonable summary of past events and some current standings. But, and this is the big but, the view itself is nothing more than feminist Marxist as any - and as it happens to be, it all is just totally horribly wrong to the core. The book still gets two stars mainly for it is an accessible read and do give insight into feminist thinking, but deserves no more for its wrong view of history, economy, work, class, and capitalism. It is one of those books I easily could have criticized in detail a multitude of pages while reading it, but in the end - why bother going into detail here. One thing to mention though is that it did make me wiser in the way of coming closer to understand why feminism sees itself as the enemy of capitalism and friend of marxism, but there is still mystery in why and why they never seem to understand even the basics of it.
January 16, 2018
Mitchell centrally assesses two schools of feminism: 'radical feminists', for whom the fundamental form of oppression is men's domination of women, and Marxist-feminists, who demand that the specific form of sexism be related to how all workers are subordinated in capitalism. Her view is that it is premature (in 1971) to assimilate the feminist push-back against misogyny to a broader theory. The details of her own account of oppression examine the sidelining of women from production (other than in 'newer' service-sector, consumption-oriented jobs, in magazine publishing and other kinds of editing, and in the fashion and homeware industries); the restriction of women to mothering and reproduction; and the sanctification of sex through marital exclusivity. Mitchell has an especially good line on motherhood: 'there are few more precarious ventures on which to base a life'.
June 2, 2020
Extremely of its time — bears the marks of late-sixties Marxism (that awkward shotgun marriage of Althusserianism and Maoism) and is notably concise. In the back half, she finally arrives in her wheelhouse, and that retains some contemporary interest, but as for the rest of it, the significance is mainly historical.
August 19, 2025
AN EARLY ‘CLASSIC’ OF THE MODERN WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
Juliet Mitchell (b. 1940) is professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge; she is also a director in the Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London.
She wrote in the Preface of this 1971 book, “By 1970 there was some form of Women’s Liberation Movement active in all but three of the liberal democratic countries in the advance capitalist world… Most of the different groups are professedly, if variously, revolutionary. Why are they rarely seen to be such?... All previous revolutionary movements have had, at their centre, at the crucial times, to be clandestine… Women’s Liberation … is the most public revolutionary movement ever to have existed… This raises many questions… about the nature of the movement itself. We have to ask why it arose… in the late sixties. What it is like as a political movement. What problems does it have to confront in analyzing the position of women. And… where do we go from here?” (Pg. 11-13)
She continues, “A description of the characteristics of the movement involves… the campaigns it wages and the concepts it is evolving in the process of building itself as a political movement: consciousness-raising, male chauvinism, sexism, feminism, liberationism and its no-leadership structures… Also, of the analysis so far tentatively developed, which … runs something like---women are an oppressed people, we can learn about this oppression by using the ‘politics of experience,’ we can combat oppression by attacking the institutions of power (men and/or male-dominated society) to produce either ‘equality’ or the ‘liberated self.’” (Pg. 13-14)
She observes, “Women’s Liberation had revolutionary food from two sources: women’s economic poverty within the richest country in the world (like the Blacks) and their mental and emotional debasement in some of the richest conditions that country provides (like students and youth). A growing consciousness of the latter permitted the realization of the former. For poverty alone cannot protest for itself. It is never extreme deprivation that produces the revolutionary.” (Pg. 21)
She goes on, “Seen from this perspective, the ‘middle-class’ composition of Women’s Liberation is not an unhappy fact, a source of anxiety… but an intrinsic part of feminist awareness. The most economically and socially underprivileged woman is bound much tighter to her condition by a consensus which passes it off as ‘natural’… and hence inescapable: a college-educated girl spending her time studying ‘home economics’ for an academic degree is at least in a position to ask ‘why’?” (Pg. 22)
She notes, “there is no chance of the working class rising up and simply asserting their cultural values over and against those of the middle class. The ideological dimensions of the revolution are likely to come initially from within the ideologically dominant class… The structure of advanced capitalism---both at home and in its imperialist actions in pre-capitalist countries---suggests that the role of OPPRESSED groups, that is those groups which experience their oppression as much culturally as economically, is increasingly important. Women are an oppressed half of the population.” (Pg. 34-35)
She argues, “The economic changes that thrust into revolutionary prominence the new ‘educated,’ youthful middle class, that provoked radical attacks on the ideological institutions, caused the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Once it had arisen… it saw that its tasks were greater than its origins: that women’s oppression manifests itself in economic and cultural deprivation, that oppressed women are found in all exploited minorities, in all social classes, in all radical movements. That on the issue of the position of women, friends are foes. It is with these realizations that the theory and practice of the movement has to contend.” (Pg. 38-39)
She clarifies, “Briefly, liberationists see the oppression of women as one (though a major one) of the many oppressions experienced by different people in pre-socialist societies; radical feminists contend it is the major and primary one in all societies.” (Pg. 51)
She outlines, “Women’s Liberation both counteracts the oppressed behavior of women in our society (women cannot be submissive, fragile, dependent, etc.) and provides a political base for the analysis of this oppression. Such a separatist movement in no way excludes the awareness of other oppressed groups under capitalism, nor does it pretend that the society does not harm men, too. The movement is largely anti-capitalist and as such assumes the distortion of everybody’s life and potential today.” (Pg. 58)
She notes, “Women’s Liberation is crucially concerned with that area of politics which is experienced as personal. Women come into the movement from the unspecified frustration of their own private lives, find that what they thought was an individual dilemma is a social predicament and hence a political problem. The process of transforming the hidden, individual fears of women into a shared awareness of the meaning of them as social problems, the release of anger, anxiety, the struggle of proclaiming the painful and transforming it into the political---this process is ‘consciousness-raising.’” (Pg. 61)
She explains, “‘Male chauvinism’ is being too much of a man. Either the male chauvinist has internalized the domination of men within our society and, in his individual actions and attitudes epitomizes this ‘supremacy’ or, as radical feminists believe, this attitude pre-exists any specific social formation.” (Pg. 63) She adds, “‘Patriarchy’ then is the sexual politics whereby men establish their power and maintain control. All societies and all social groups within these are ‘sexist’—not in the sense that one could maintain ‘all societies are racist,’ but in the far more fundamental sense that their entire organization, at every level, is predicated on the domination of one sex by the other. Specific variations are less significant than the general truth.” (Pg. 65)
She asserts, “Feminism unites women at the level of their total oppression---it is all-inclusive… Its politics match this: it is a total attack. The theory backs this: the first division of labor was the first formation of oppressor and oppressed---the first division of labor was between man and woman. The first domination must be given priority---it must be the first to go.” (Pg. 87)
She acknowledges, “Feminist consciousness has been inadequately represented in the formation of socialist ideology, as the oppression of women has, so far, been inadequately combatted in socialist revolutions.” (Pg. 96)
She says, “far from women’s PHYSICAL weakness removing her from productive work, her SOCIAL weakness has in these cases evidently made her the major slave of it.” (Pg. 104)
She contends, “The belief that the family provides an impregnable enclave of intimacy and security in an atomized and chaotic cosmos assumes the absurd---that the family can be isolated from the community, and that its internal relationships will not reproduce in their own terms the external relationships which dominate the society. The family as a refuge from society in fact becomes a reflection of it.” (Pg. 146-147)
She points out, “the most elementary demand is … the right to EQUAL WORK itself. At present, women perform unskilled, uncreative service jobs… In the working class, occupational mobility is thus sometimes easier for girls than for boys---they can enter the white-collar sector at a lower level. But only two in a hundred women are in administrative or managerial jobs. Women are poorly unionized and receive far less money for the manual work they perform.” (Pg. 149)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying the development of feminist theory.
Juliet Mitchell (b. 1940) is professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge; she is also a director in the Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London.
She wrote in the Preface of this 1971 book, “By 1970 there was some form of Women’s Liberation Movement active in all but three of the liberal democratic countries in the advance capitalist world… Most of the different groups are professedly, if variously, revolutionary. Why are they rarely seen to be such?... All previous revolutionary movements have had, at their centre, at the crucial times, to be clandestine… Women’s Liberation … is the most public revolutionary movement ever to have existed… This raises many questions… about the nature of the movement itself. We have to ask why it arose… in the late sixties. What it is like as a political movement. What problems does it have to confront in analyzing the position of women. And… where do we go from here?” (Pg. 11-13)
She continues, “A description of the characteristics of the movement involves… the campaigns it wages and the concepts it is evolving in the process of building itself as a political movement: consciousness-raising, male chauvinism, sexism, feminism, liberationism and its no-leadership structures… Also, of the analysis so far tentatively developed, which … runs something like---women are an oppressed people, we can learn about this oppression by using the ‘politics of experience,’ we can combat oppression by attacking the institutions of power (men and/or male-dominated society) to produce either ‘equality’ or the ‘liberated self.’” (Pg. 13-14)
She observes, “Women’s Liberation had revolutionary food from two sources: women’s economic poverty within the richest country in the world (like the Blacks) and their mental and emotional debasement in some of the richest conditions that country provides (like students and youth). A growing consciousness of the latter permitted the realization of the former. For poverty alone cannot protest for itself. It is never extreme deprivation that produces the revolutionary.” (Pg. 21)
She goes on, “Seen from this perspective, the ‘middle-class’ composition of Women’s Liberation is not an unhappy fact, a source of anxiety… but an intrinsic part of feminist awareness. The most economically and socially underprivileged woman is bound much tighter to her condition by a consensus which passes it off as ‘natural’… and hence inescapable: a college-educated girl spending her time studying ‘home economics’ for an academic degree is at least in a position to ask ‘why’?” (Pg. 22)
She notes, “there is no chance of the working class rising up and simply asserting their cultural values over and against those of the middle class. The ideological dimensions of the revolution are likely to come initially from within the ideologically dominant class… The structure of advanced capitalism---both at home and in its imperialist actions in pre-capitalist countries---suggests that the role of OPPRESSED groups, that is those groups which experience their oppression as much culturally as economically, is increasingly important. Women are an oppressed half of the population.” (Pg. 34-35)
She argues, “The economic changes that thrust into revolutionary prominence the new ‘educated,’ youthful middle class, that provoked radical attacks on the ideological institutions, caused the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Once it had arisen… it saw that its tasks were greater than its origins: that women’s oppression manifests itself in economic and cultural deprivation, that oppressed women are found in all exploited minorities, in all social classes, in all radical movements. That on the issue of the position of women, friends are foes. It is with these realizations that the theory and practice of the movement has to contend.” (Pg. 38-39)
She clarifies, “Briefly, liberationists see the oppression of women as one (though a major one) of the many oppressions experienced by different people in pre-socialist societies; radical feminists contend it is the major and primary one in all societies.” (Pg. 51)
She outlines, “Women’s Liberation both counteracts the oppressed behavior of women in our society (women cannot be submissive, fragile, dependent, etc.) and provides a political base for the analysis of this oppression. Such a separatist movement in no way excludes the awareness of other oppressed groups under capitalism, nor does it pretend that the society does not harm men, too. The movement is largely anti-capitalist and as such assumes the distortion of everybody’s life and potential today.” (Pg. 58)
She notes, “Women’s Liberation is crucially concerned with that area of politics which is experienced as personal. Women come into the movement from the unspecified frustration of their own private lives, find that what they thought was an individual dilemma is a social predicament and hence a political problem. The process of transforming the hidden, individual fears of women into a shared awareness of the meaning of them as social problems, the release of anger, anxiety, the struggle of proclaiming the painful and transforming it into the political---this process is ‘consciousness-raising.’” (Pg. 61)
She explains, “‘Male chauvinism’ is being too much of a man. Either the male chauvinist has internalized the domination of men within our society and, in his individual actions and attitudes epitomizes this ‘supremacy’ or, as radical feminists believe, this attitude pre-exists any specific social formation.” (Pg. 63) She adds, “‘Patriarchy’ then is the sexual politics whereby men establish their power and maintain control. All societies and all social groups within these are ‘sexist’—not in the sense that one could maintain ‘all societies are racist,’ but in the far more fundamental sense that their entire organization, at every level, is predicated on the domination of one sex by the other. Specific variations are less significant than the general truth.” (Pg. 65)
She asserts, “Feminism unites women at the level of their total oppression---it is all-inclusive… Its politics match this: it is a total attack. The theory backs this: the first division of labor was the first formation of oppressor and oppressed---the first division of labor was between man and woman. The first domination must be given priority---it must be the first to go.” (Pg. 87)
She acknowledges, “Feminist consciousness has been inadequately represented in the formation of socialist ideology, as the oppression of women has, so far, been inadequately combatted in socialist revolutions.” (Pg. 96)
She says, “far from women’s PHYSICAL weakness removing her from productive work, her SOCIAL weakness has in these cases evidently made her the major slave of it.” (Pg. 104)
She contends, “The belief that the family provides an impregnable enclave of intimacy and security in an atomized and chaotic cosmos assumes the absurd---that the family can be isolated from the community, and that its internal relationships will not reproduce in their own terms the external relationships which dominate the society. The family as a refuge from society in fact becomes a reflection of it.” (Pg. 146-147)
She points out, “the most elementary demand is … the right to EQUAL WORK itself. At present, women perform unskilled, uncreative service jobs… In the working class, occupational mobility is thus sometimes easier for girls than for boys---they can enter the white-collar sector at a lower level. But only two in a hundred women are in administrative or managerial jobs. Women are poorly unionized and receive far less money for the manual work they perform.” (Pg. 149)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying the development of feminist theory.
October 10, 2026
Juliet Mitchell's Woman's Estate is persuasive where it resists explaining women's oppression through economic production alone. Work, reproduction, sexuality, and child socialization intersect without collapsing into a single cause. The framework makes gendered subordination appear less like an inherited prejudice that progress will naturally remove and more like a set of institutions requiring deliberate transformation. I find the book historically significant even where later feminist thought has complicated its assumptions about family structure, psychoanalysis, and universality. Its theoretical ambition sometimes produces categories that seem more stable than lived experience. Yet the insistence on multiple sites of domination remains important. A politics of emancipation that changes employment but leaves intimate authority unquestioned would be incomplete. Mitchell's intervention is valuable because it makes that incompleteness conceptually difficult to ignore. Mitchell's discussion becomes especially relevant where political programs treat family life as a natural residue untouched by reform. Decisions about reproduction and care are central to the organization of labor and citizenship. Recognizing that fact also complicates any separation between private choices and political structures, a distinction that often conceals who bears the costs of social reproduction.
February 14, 2025
Sadly found this not very good. Whilst the baseline politics is correct, the analysis above this was disjointed and unconvincing. Mitchell appears to contradict herself multiple times throughout the book, and will make sweeping assertions will little or no evidence.
At points the politics seems slightly odd - for instance, her defence of the predominantly middle-class nature of the women's liberation movement because "middle-class culture is the dominant culture, and therefore a middle-class movement is a movement that can change that dominant culture". The same goes for her strange diatribe against the slogan "abolish the family", instead arguing for women to use less "maximalist" slogan that focus on achievable reforms. Such an analysis I think highlights the use by some of "prefigurative politics" as a revolutionary coat for reformist politics, and dodges having to present a clear strategy for how women's current role - and related oppression - can be turned on its head to create a revolutionary break with capitalist society. On this question, I found Woman's Consciousness, Man's World by Sheila Rowbotham was a far more useful read.
At points the politics seems slightly odd - for instance, her defence of the predominantly middle-class nature of the women's liberation movement because "middle-class culture is the dominant culture, and therefore a middle-class movement is a movement that can change that dominant culture". The same goes for her strange diatribe against the slogan "abolish the family", instead arguing for women to use less "maximalist" slogan that focus on achievable reforms. Such an analysis I think highlights the use by some of "prefigurative politics" as a revolutionary coat for reformist politics, and dodges having to present a clear strategy for how women's current role - and related oppression - can be turned on its head to create a revolutionary break with capitalist society. On this question, I found Woman's Consciousness, Man's World by Sheila Rowbotham was a far more useful read.
May 30, 2023
Piccolo saggio diviso in due parti principali. La prima parla del Women's Liberation Movement di cui Juliet Mitchell faceva parte, sia in Inghilterra sia in altri paesi occidentali, mettendolo a confronto con altri movimenti di rivolta post '68. Riporta anche sia la varietà di tendenze politiche sia il dibattito tra correnti femministe (all'epoca radicali e socialiste) aggiungendo proprie critiche e riflessioni. La seconda parte parla più strettamente delle varie oppressioni delle donne, a partire da quella lavorativa fino alla famiglia. Mitchell parte dalla sua esperienza parlando principalmente della situazione in UK di donne di diverse classi sociali. Il suo femminismo si basa molto sia sulla realtà materiale, si capisce che ha ben chiare le situazioni di cui parla, sia su una visione psicologica data la sua esperienza in materia. L'ultimo capitolo è infatti dedicato alla psicanalisi come scienza di cui auspica una riappropriazione femminista. Per essere scritto tra il 1966 e il 1971 contiene delle riflessioni che sono valide tutt'oggi.
February 10, 2026
Feminist teoriyi Marksizm ve psikanalizle buluşturarak, kadının ezilmişliğini sadece ekonomik değil, ideolojik ve psikolojik boyutlarıyla da analiz eden kurucu bir metin. Mitchell, kadının kurtuluşunun, üretimden, yeniden üretime, cinsellikten çocuk yetiştirmeye kadar dört ayrı yapının dönüşümüyle mümkün olacağını savunarak, indirgemeci yaklaşımlara karşı çıkıyor. "Kadın sorunu"nu sınıf mücadelesinin bir yan başlığı olmaktan çıkarıp, kendi özgün dinamikleriyle devrimci teorinin merkezine yerleştiriyor. Ataerkil kapitalizmin çok katmanlı yapısını çözmek için güçlü bir teorik alet çantası.
February 6, 2026
I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to - it was full of smart and interesting insights about social movements, the feminist movement in particular and various aspects of women's condition. Theoretically it was all over the place, but it went places that were a lot more interesting than the standard Marxist-feminist take I was expecting, and frankly, all of this is very impressive given it was published in 1971, when second-wave feminism was barely off the ground.
Given to me by Kathy.
Given to me by Kathy.
April 19, 2022
Pretty good but sometimes outdated.
Insightful views on Freud that I’m not knowledgeable enough to comment on
Insightful views on Freud that I’m not knowledgeable enough to comment on
January 16, 2024
Çeviri biraz sıkıntılı ve tabii ki güncel duruma çok uzak bir kitap. Feminizm tarihi ve temelleri açısından ise harika.
July 18, 2024
Like many feminist texts, offers a recapitulation of the history of feminist theory in relation to the feminist movement, but pales in comparison to Mitchell's more explicitly theoretical work.
July 7, 2025
Very white centric.
September 15, 2025
sigh.... nem aqui consigo escapar do freud...não queria ter lido tanto sobre ele.
mas honeslty at the end of the day...kinda disappointed
mas honeslty at the end of the day...kinda disappointed
June 3, 2021
Truly one of the best feminist texts I have ever read. Mitchell's passion, her analysis intertwining Psychoanalysis and Marxism is really interesting, and at points had me loudly agreeing with the points put forward or at times being amazed at points which, it is almost amazing are not talked about so much today in discourse.
In short this book is truly one of the best texts I've read, and I cannot wait to read more of Mitchell's work in the future.
In short this book is truly one of the best texts I've read, and I cannot wait to read more of Mitchell's work in the future.
August 17, 2024
great book, dense at times, often in a dialogue with other feminist writers. interesting critiques of contemporary socialist and radical feminist movements, many of which still relevant today. sometimes outdated examples, valuable as a historical source in that sense. personally i dont get her respect for freud
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