The Socialist Feminist Project
Edited By Nancy Holmstrom
Monthly Review Press, 2002
$35 Cdn
(20% off available through www.monthlyreview.org)

The Socialist Feminist Project sat on my coffee table for several days before I could bring myself to read it. Let’s face it, with six sections and 35 individual contributors, this is a textbook. It’s 426 pages, with no pictures, and serves up its fair share of jargon and academic gobbledegook. But if you tackle it in doses, starting with the articles that seem the most relevant, then I think you’ll not only find it interesting, but insightful and thought-provoking too. In her introduction, Nancy Holmstrom defines a socialist feminist as anyone who tries to understand women’s subordination in a “coherent and systematic way,” integrating class, gender, race, sexual orientation and other aspects of identity “with the aim of using this analysis to help liberate women.” Yet, she admits, this all-encompassing definition hides what is actually a very tumultuous history.

The Evolution of Socialist Feminism

Socialist feminism and its emergence as a theoretical and political discipline in the 1960s and 1970s has had its share of ups and downs. Like any theory, it’s been shaped by criticism and debate. In just nine pages, Holmstrom attempts to summarize and contextualize this history, explaining that it is unfair to characterize socialist feminists as simply reducing women’s oppression to class oppression. She argues that socialist feminism grew as a response to the inadequacies of marxist theory in analyzing women’s experience, only to be sidelined by the rise of postmodernism, which has dominated academic debate since and contributed to a strong “identity politics” in many activists for the last two decades.

Clearly these were tough times for Holmstrom. You can almost hear her smugness as she looks to the current political context, which sees postmodernists’ grip slowly loosening amidst an onslaught of harsh neo-liberal policies, global structural adjustment programs, and mass poverty and environmental degradation: “The brutal economic realities of globalization make it impossible to ignore class, and feminists are now asking on a global level the kinds of big questions they asked on a societal level in the 1970s … The academic focus on cultural issues to the exclusion of politics is beginning to seem one-sided, even self-indulgent, to more and more people … This is an opportune time to reconsider how Marxism can help us comprehend the global reality of women’s oppression and how Marxism itself needs to be revised or supplemented.”

The old socialist feminism didn’t reduce everything to class, but it did often prioritize class, argues Holmstrom. The “new” socialist feminism incorporates an integrated analysis, recognizing oppressions are inter-related. It attempts to examine how this subordinates women within particular cultural, political and economic contexts. Her proof of this transformation? The essays in this book, for the most part, showcase recent socialist feminist work and, taken together, illustrate that it is still vibrant, evolving and more relevant than ever. “The brutal economic realities of globalization impact everyone across the globe – but women are affected disproportionately…Socialist feminism is the approach with the greatest capacity to illuminate the exploitation and oppression of most of the women of the world.” Whether or not this sweeping statement is true is difficult to say, but for academics immersed in this field, The Socialist Feminist Project certainly offers a considerable body of research and theory to analyze, critique and build on.

Organizing Outside the Ivory Towers

For those of us outside the ivory towers, don’t despair. There’s plenty in these pages to get us thinking too. The Socialist Feminist Project is divided into six sections: sex, sexuality and reproduction; family; wage labour and struggles; nature, society and knowledge; economics, social welfare and public policy; and politics and social change. In my selective reading, I found many articles relevant to community workers and activists – women and men. For those, like me, struggling to raise anti-poverty issues in Ontario, articles by Leslie Salzinger, Mimi Abramovitz, Temma Kaplan, Mary Hawkesworth and Chandra Talpade Mohanty offer sobering analyses of maquila shop floor management tactics, increasing state attacks on poor women as social services are privatized, the reality of “democracy” for women globally, and the dramatic growth in piece work and home work as corporations scramble to take advantage of patriarchal family relations to outsource work and minimize labour costs. Jo Bindman and Kamala Kempadoo also offer considerable insights into the globalized sex industry, which enslaves - but also attracts - more and more women struggling to make ends meet amidst increasing poverty, violence and displacement.

Other articles focus on the need to shake up old ways of organizing. For example, in “Stories of Survival: Class, Race and Domestic Violence,” Janice Haaken suggests that while once essential in uniting women in the struggle against violence, terms like “battered women” and “domestic violence” hide other realities. For example, they conceal the fact that poor and working class women are more likely to be assaulted by their partners than more affluent women. Similarly, women of colour are more likely to absolve their abusers. This is not surprising given the burden of poverty and racism that they experience. There is also a direct link between women’s access to and control over economic resources and their ability to resist male violence. Haaken argues that more focus needs to be given to these differences, if adequate supports and services are to be developed. Another author, Purvi Shah, suggests the movement also needs to more effectively challenge police violence as well as global and economic violence.

Articles like Rosalind P. Petchesky’s “Human Rights, Reproductive Health, and Economic Justice: Why they are Indivisible,” and Elizabeth Martinez’s “Listen Up, Anglo Sisters” also argue for a broader approach to organizing around health and reproductive health issues. As Petchesky points out, reproductive and sexual rights for most women are unattainable given the economic destitution of developing countries. Restrained by structural adjustment policies and state and corporate corruption, as well as patriarchal approaches to policy-making, developing countries cannot offer adequate medical facilities and supports.

Several articles also offer important ideas regarding the complexities of how racism and patriarchy intertwine in women’s lives. In “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Deniz Kandiyoti explores why many women in patriarchal relationships may be resistant to changing relationships. For example, women in North Africa, the Muslim Middle East, and South and East Asia garner respect and maximize their security by bearing sons, who eventually marry, ensuring a younger woman to care for the family and household. Without alternate sources of support, attempts to break down these patriarchal arrangements cause considerable stress.

The articles that moved me most were autobiographical pieces by Cherrie Moraga and Dorothy Allison, who bravely bare their lives to us. Moraga fills a single page with words of contempt for her Chicano brother, who, growing up, she waited on hand and foot. “Male in a man’s world. Lightskinned in a white world. Why change?” she says of her brother. “Unlike him, I could never have become the white man, only the white man’s woman.” Similarly, Allison shares her shame growing up poor in South Carolina and the years of “denial” later as she reformed her identity as a radical lesbian activist which, while sustaining a part of her, also angered her as she witnessed the strong class bias evident in her lesbian activist circles.

Transforming our Activism

These differences – based on the colour of our skin, poverty, sexual orientation, age, religious persecution, citizenship or lack of it, varying ability, and where we live – continue to hinder global solidarity among women. Do we hang onto the old ways of organizing, strategies that produced the feminist and civil rights movements and resulted in tremendous gains for the middle class but largely left behind the poor? Or, as Johanna Brenner argues, are there structural and political limitations in those strategies? Is “a new antiracism offensive only possible if it is tied to an anticapitalist politics – allied to a broad coalition for economic and social justice?”