Wherever there have been socialists, there have been socialist feminists. In the early 1800s, pre-Marxian socialists in Britain and France strove to incorporate the politics of women's emancipation into their vision of a communal, just society. But to recover the modern roots of socialist feminism, we need only look back 40 years to what's now called Second Wave Feminism. At that time, young radicals were grappling with the questions posed, on the one hand, by the political terrain of post-World War Two America (Jim Crow laws, the Vietnam War and sexist policies and attitudes) and, on the other, by some practices and structures of the Left itself.
People like Kate Millet (Women and Revolution), Sheila Rowbotham (Women, Resistance and Revolution) and Juliet Mitchell (Women's Estate) pointed out the limits of liberal feminism, which understood emancipation as women gaining greater access to, and fuller representation within, the state and business. They argued that sexism was not just about men's greater opportunities in these areas, and it wouldn't end simply by legislative fiat. Rather, they saw relations between the sexes as socially determined - that is, embedded in and shaped by the dynamics and institutions of capitalist society.
While real differences divided these and other socialist feminists, a common anti-capitalist thread wove its way through their writings and activism. Similarly, they insisted that there's nothing natural about the family; rather it's a socially constructed institution that plays a key role in maintaining the capitalist economy. They suggested that the economic significance of the single-household family was more self-evident in the pre-industrial period, when the production of goods and food largely occurred in or near households (as most people worked as craftsmen or farmers). With industrialization came factories and offices, and work was separated from home and family life; as a result, the household - and women's lives as domestic caretakers - faded from sight. What's more, responsibility for childcare and household work prevented women from participating as full and equal members of both the workforce and civil society, thereby ensuring their lack of political voice and super-exploitation in low-paying jobs with little security.
The Domestic Labour Debate
One early strand of socialist-feminism is known as "the domestic labour debate" - a series of articles and discussions about the ways in which women's unpaid housework and childcare contribute to the maintenance and promotion of capitalism's ability to wrench a profit from its paid labour force. Contributors (such as Margaret Benston, Peggy Morton and Maria Della Costa) attempted to apply the categories of Marxist political economy to the "female" activities of wiping snotty noses, ironing shirts and frying eggs. The debate centred around whether or not domestic labour constituted its own "mode of production" based on the production of "use values" (goods for consumption rather than sale) or whether shopping, feeding, and clothing this and the next generation of workers constituted "value-producing" activities (that is, by producing the workforce, women were, in effect, directly producing a profit for the capitalist class). The debate was never definitively resolved but its participants did make a strong case for the essential links between household and wage labour.
The domestic labour debate, however, never clearly answered why it was women in particular who shouldered the burden of housework and childcare. The failure to account for the specifics of women's experience promoted a growing skepticism about the usefulness of marxism to feminism - a skepticism best voiced by Heidi Hartmann in a 1979 article, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism." Hartmann argued that society can be understood in terms of two distinct, though related, sets of relations. One, the economic relationship of capital and labour, is, as theorized by Marx, fueled by the exploitative process of surplus extraction, and it will only end with a working-class uprising. The other, the interpersonal relationship of men and women, is subject to the logic of patriarchal oppression, which can only be defeated by women fighting together "as a class." Hartmann's "dual systems theory" set, for a long time to come, the terms of socialist-feminist discussions, debates and activism.
Michele Barrett's 1980 book, "Women's Oppression Today", reaffirmed that dualist framework from a somewhat different angle. Barrett emphasized the ideological potency of patriarchy, arguing that patriarchy, as a powerful set of pre-capitalist ideas, withstood the tendencies within capitalism to treat all people (black or white, man or woman) equally, as potential wage-labourers ripe for exploitation. While weaknesses in Barrett's argument have been exposed (initially by Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas), her understanding of oppression in ideological terms captured the imagination of a number of socialist feminists as a healthy corrective to the narrowly economic domestic labour debate positions. Barrett's socialist feminism drew on and fed into post-structuralist theories which construe the realm of ideas as operating independently from social reality - that is, as having a life of their own, only coincidentally linked to the material constraints and opportunities in people's everyday lives. From here, it was a short step to the even more radically idealist vision of society, postmodernism, which sees social reality as constructed by "discourse" (language and other cultural representations).
The Challenge From Women Of Colour
As the dualist framework came to dominate socialist feminism, women of colour mounted an important challenge. One early group was the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists organized in the mid-1970s. They and others, like Patricia Hill Collins and Himani Bannerji, argued that in suggesting class and patriarchy are the two fundamental engines driving social change, socialist feminists neglect important non-class divisions (racism, heterosexism, ablism, etc.) amongst women. For many feminists (bell hooks being one of the better known), post-marxist theories of ideology and discourse seemed to offer a convincing means of understanding these complexities. Soon the notions of class and class struggle were pushed into the background.
While dual systems theory floundered in the 1980s, a number of academics and activists continued to elaborate on an alternative socialist feminist theory. People like Johanna Brenner, Nancy Holmstrom, Meg Luxton, Pat Armstrong and Wally Seccombe suggested that, rather than two semi-autonomous, intersecting systems, oppression and exploitation are integrally linked in a single - though multi-faceted - system of social reproduction that is neither purely economic nor purely cultural or ideological. Historical limits and possibilities, they suggested, are shaped by the material conditions in which people reproduce themselves and the species as a whole. Social life then, is explained by looking not just at the economy, but also at the biological and cultural limits at play in any given historical moment. This perspective opens the door for an analysis of the way in which race, gender, sexuality, etc. intersect with class. It also allows us to see how ideology and identity can play important roles in shaping our individual and collective responses to oppression and exploitation.
As the influence of postmodernism has declined in recent years, a commitment to "intersectionality" has been taken up by left feminists more generally, although much of their work slips into a sort of left-liberal multi-culturalism that ignores issues of economic exploitation, class and marxism. Socialist feminists working from the social reproductionist framework are well positioned to intervene in these debates, and show once again the relevance of a non-reductionist marxism to feminism.
Frances Piper is an Editorial Associate with New socialist.