The Contributions of Socialist Feminisms
Marxist and feminist theorists have traditionally disagreed on the origin of the oppression
of women, the reason for its perpetuation, and the means to achieve its demise. While orthodox
Marxist analyses of women’s oppression have focused on the category of ‘productive’ labor,
defined as wage labor performed in the marketplace, socialist feminists have introduced the
importance of examining the category of ‘reproductive’ labor, defined as unpaid labor performed
in the family, subsistence, and informal economies, as the locus for understanding both the root
cause of women’s oppression and the path toward women’s emancipation. Moreover, many
Marxist analyses of women’s oppression take as a given a “natural” sexual division of labor and
do not account for or explain the pre-existent power relation which allows “men” to relegate
“women” to the lesser valued sphere of reproduction, often reducing all forms of material
oppression to the economic. There is an extensive socialist-feminist literature of theorists and
practitioners who have tried to bridge the gap between class-based and gender-based oppressions
by attempting to theorize the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy. I would like to
briefly examine this literature to explain: (1) why a socialist-feminist understanding of the
spheres of production and reproduction must be re-examined and resurrected as we assess the
successes and failures of revolutionary movements for social change in the late twentieth-
century; and (2) what contributions a socialist-feminist approach can make to a contemporary
project of comparative intersectional feminisms.
Numerous scholars have pointed out the inadequacies of an orthodox Marxist framework
to fully explain the oppression of women.
Many point out how Marx mentions both production
and reproduction, and then proceeds to ignore reproduction and focus only on production.
many Marxist-Feminists have subsequently attempted to take Marx’s concepts of ‘production,’
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Convention