Socialist Feminism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The term socialist feminism has sometimes been used in a descriptive sense to refer to any feminist work from the 19th century onward that is informed by the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and that emphasizes issues of class, economics, and labor as central components of both women's oppression and the key to their liberation. As such, it is often used interchangeably with Marxist feminism, materialist feminism, and feminist materialism, although, when defined more narrowly, it is set in opposition to these approaches. All of these perspectives are rooted in the assumption that women's oppression is caused not by their individual situations but by the social, political, and economic structures in which they live. To take into account women's lives, they expand upon typical Marxist analyses of the realm of production to that of reproduction, examining how women are oppressed in their roles as mothers, wives, and caretakers and how their sexuality is commodified.

In the early 1970s, some British and North American feminists, including Juliet Mitchell and Barbara Ehrenreich, began using the term socialist feminism as a radical critique of Marxist feminism's gender-neutral concept of class and as a Marxist critique of radical feminism's essentializing and ahistorical concept of gender. However, from the beginning the focus of socialist feminism expanded beyond a dual-systems approach to include multiple perspectives, including psychoanalytic, antiheterosexist, antiracist, global, and transnational feminisms.

Socialist feminism has continually been challenged by questions regarding the relationship of the terms in its dual system. Which is more important, gender or class, patriarchy or capitalism? And, which came first, gender or class, patriarchy or capitalism? Do the additional perspectives constitute new “systems,” or is there a hierarchy in place with gender and class as the most important and the others as supplemental? Can all of the terms ever be valued equally? Some theorists attempted to resolve these problems by finding unity among the concepts. Iris Marion Young suggested that the concept of division of labor incorporated an analysis of both gender and class while also replacing the gender-neutral concept of class with one that took into account women's oppression with respect to production. Alison Jaggar suggested that the concept of alienation linked women's oppression across their multiple roles in society.

The feminist methodology of standpoint theory, developed by Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Nancy Hartsock, is considered to be located within socialist feminism. Standpoint theory argues that women's unique position in society provides them [Page 878]with a grounding for truth claims as well as with a method for analyzing reality.

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