Materialist and Socialist Feminism

Materialist and socialist feminism analyze gender oppression through its connection to economic structures, labor, and the reproduction of the workforce, drawing on and revising the Marxist tradition.

Definition

Feminist traditions that explain gender inequality in terms of material and economic relations, especially the organization of productive and reproductive labor under capitalism, and that draw critically on Marxist categories.

Scope

This topic covers Marxist feminism, which roots women's subordination in the property relations of class society and the unpaid character of domestic and reproductive labor, and socialist feminism, which argues that capitalism and patriarchy are distinct but interlocking systems that must be theorized together. It treats the debate over domestic labor, social reproduction theory, and the question of how class and gender are related, describing these positions rather than endorsing one.

Core questions

• How does the unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of women sustain a capitalist economy?
• Are capitalism and patriarchy one system or two interlocking systems?
• Can the abolition of class society end gender oppression, or does patriarchy require its own analysis?

Key theories

Social reproduction and domestic labor

The argument that the unpaid work of bearing and raising children and maintaining the household reproduces labor power, transferring value to capital, so that gender oppression is bound up with the economic structure rather than separate from it.

Dual-systems theory

The socialist-feminist thesis, associated with Hartmann, that patriarchy and capitalism are analytically distinct systems of power that have historically reinforced each other, so neither a purely Marxist nor a purely radical analysis is sufficient.

History

Engels's nineteenth-century account tied women's subordination to the rise of private property and the monogamous family. Twentieth-century Marxist and socialist feminists, especially in the 1970s domestic-labor and wages-for-housework debates, reworked these ideas, while Hartmann's 'unhappy marriage' essay framed the enduring dual-systems question and Federici's later work historicized the link between gendered violence and early capitalism.

Debates

One system or two

Whether patriarchy can be subsumed under the analysis of capitalism, or whether it is an autonomous system of male power that capitalism merely intersects with.

Key figures

• Friedrich Engels
• Heidi Hartmann
• Silvia Federici
• Juliet Mitchell

Seminal works

• engels1884
• hartmann1979
• federici2004

Frequently asked questions

What is social reproduction?

It is the work, much of it unpaid and performed by women, of producing and sustaining people and their capacity to labor, such as childcare, cooking, and care work, which materialist feminists argue underpins the wider economy.