the same is consequent to the time wherein men livewithout other security than what their own strength and their own invention shallfurnish them withal.

For such is the nature of men that, howsoever theymay acknowledge many others to be more witty or more eloquent or morelearned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves, forthey see their own wit at hand and other men’s at a distance.

Thisreplacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of

on the contrary,human beings exhibit an inborn tendency to carelessness, irregularity and unreliability in their work, andthat a laborious training is needed before they learn to follow the example of their celestial models

n the photographic camera he hascreated an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retainsthe equally fleeting auditory ones

but it is very difficult to forman opinion whether and in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their culturalconditions played in the matter

Men are proud of those achievements, and have aright to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, thissubjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfilment of a longing that goes back thousands ofyears, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and hasnot made them feel happier.

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for ourmisery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions

Christine Delphy (1984), for example, describes marriage as a class rela- 45tion in which wo.men's labor benefits men without comparable remuneration. She makes it clear that the exploitation consists not in the sort of workthat women do in the home, for this might include various kinds of tasks, butin the fact that they perfor m tasks for someone on whom they are dependent. Thus, for example, in most systems of agr icultural production in theworld, men take to market the goods women have produced, and more oftenthan not men receive the status and often the entire income from this labor

Liberalism has traditionally asserted the right of all rational autonomousagents to equal citizenship. Early bourgeois liberalism explicitly excludedfrom citizenship all those whose reason was questionable or not fully developed, and all those not independent (Pateman, 1988, chap. 3; cf. Bowles andGintis, 1986, chap. 2). Thus poor people, women, the mad and the feebleminded, and children were explicitly excluded from citizenship, and many ofthese were housed in institutions modeled on the modern prison: poorhouses,insane asylums, schools.

In twentieth-century capitalist economies the workplaces that womenhave been entering in increasing numbers serve as another important site ofgender exploitation. David Alexander (1987) argues that typically femininejobs involve gender-based tasks requiring sexual labor, nurturing, caring forothers' bodies, or smoothing over workplace tensions. In these-ways women'senergies are expended in jobs that enhance the status of, please, or comfortothers, usually men; and these gender-based labors of waitresses, clerical workers, nurses, and other caretakers often go unnoticed and undercompensated

Gro�ps, I have said, exist only in relation to other groups. A group 'maybe identified by outsiders without those so identified having any specific consc10usness of themselves as a group. Sometimes a group comes to exist onlybecause one group excludes and labels a category of persons, and those label�d come to understand themselves as group members only slowly, on thebaSIS of their shared oppressio

Groups, on the other hand, constitute individuals. A person's particularsense of history, affinity, and separateness, even the person's mode of reasoning, evaluating, and expressing feeling, are constituted partly by her or hisgroup affinities.This does not mean that persons have no individual sty les, orare unable to transcend or reject a group identity

An aggregate is any classification of persons according to some attribute.Persons can be aggregated according to any number of attributes-eye color,the make of car they dr ive, the street they live on

A social group is a collective of persons differentiated from at least oneother group by cultural forms, practices, or way of li:fe. Members of a grouphave a specific affinity with one another because of their similar experienceor way of life, which prompts them to associate with one another more thanwith those not identified with the group, or in a different way. Groups are anexpression of social relations; a group exists only in relation to at least oneother group. Group identification arises, that is, in the encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in theirFiv� Faces of Oppression ■ 41way of life and forms of association, even if they regard themselves as belonging to the same society

ppression in this sense is structural,rather than the result of a few people's choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following thoserules.

In its new usage, oppression designatesthe disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannicalpower coerces them, but because of the ever yday practices of a wellintentioned liberal society. In this new left usage, the tyranny of a ruling groupover another, as in South Africa, must certainly be called oppressive.