Lably
Skip to content

Socialist feminism

Ideology that seeks liberation from economic and cultural sources of women's oppression

  • 33 min read
  • 6 chapters
Writing on a building wall in Barcelona, Spain: "Independence, Socialism, Feminism"
AlexKollontai · CC0

Related on Lably

Through Feminism, Capitalism and Economy

Socialist feminism is a two-pronged theory that broadens Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Socialist feminists reject radical feminism's main claim that patriarchy is the only, or primary, source of oppression of women. Rather, Socialist feminists assert that women are oppressed due to their financial dependence on males. Women are subjects to male domination within capitalism due to an uneven balance in wealth. They see economic dependence as the driving force of women's subjugation to men. Further, Socialist feminists see women's liberation as a necessary part of a larger quest for social, economic, and political justice. Socialist feminists attempted to integrate the fight for women's liberation with the struggle against other oppressive systems based on race, class, sexual orientation, or economic status.

Socialist feminism draws upon many concepts found in Marxism, such as a historical materialist point of view, which means that they relate their ideas to the material and historical conditions of people's lives. Thus, Socialist feminists consider how the sexism and gendered division of labor of each historical era is determined by the economic system of the time. Those conditions are largely expressed through capitalist and patriarchal relations. Socialist feminists reject the Orthodox Marxist notion that class and class struggle are the only defining aspects of history and economic development. Although Marx may have prioritised class oppression as the subject of his study and did not talk about female emancipation often, he did treat it as an issue in its own right. One place that this is shown is in his third Parisian manuscript of 1844, where he states that "marriage is a form of exclusive private property", and condones treating women "as the prey and servant of social lust". Despite some claims, he has never been found to argue that the creation of a classless society would lead to gender oppression vanishing; instead evidence exists which suggest that he viewed female struggles as something independent. However, due to his writing on women being scarce, the tradition and works of Marxist Feminism is one constructed through the works of the many feminist Marxists that came after; either through reinterpreting his original writings or providing their own theories to the foundation he provided. Much of this work has gone towards specifying how gender and class work together to create distinct forms of oppression and privilege for women and men of each class. For example, they observe that women's class status is generally derivative of her husband's class or occupational status, e.g. a secretary that marries her boss assumes his class status.

In 1972, "Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women's Movement", which is believed to be the first publication to use the term socialist feminism, was published by the Hyde Park Chapter of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (Heather Booth, Day Creamer, Susan Davis, Deb Dobbin, Robin Kaufman, and Tobey Klass). Other socialist feminists, notably two long-lived American organizations Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) and August Bebel (Woman and Socialism) as a powerful explanation of the link between gender oppression and class exploitation. In the decades following the Cold War, feminist writer and scholar Sarah Evans says that the socialist feminist movement has lost traction in the West due to a common narrative that associates socialism with totalitarianism and dogma.

Post-1970, the socialist feminist movement continued to grow. In "Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth & early Twentieth Centuries," by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, social feminism is defined as "women who saw the root of sexual oppression in the existence of private property and who envisioned a radically transformed society in which man would exploit neither man nor women" The equality described has to do with a transformed society in which both sexes are equal and given the same opportunities despite any physiological differences. Going forward it is described to need a total change in both the economic and social system to create the lasting improvement that the socialist feminism movement is looking for.

Kristen Ghodsee argues in her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism that free markets discriminate against women as big bosses consider women to be less reliable, weaker and more emotional which leads to the gender pay gap as they need financial incentives to employ them. George Bernard Shaw quotes "Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money". He also claims many women take part in work within the household but this is invisible as far as the market is concerned.

Core issues

Intersectionality

Socialist feminist Claudia Jones worked to incorporate Black women, other working women of color, and their needs into The Communist Party in the 1930s. This is because The Communist Party tended to default to issues of the white, male proletariat. Jones theoretical background rests at the intersection of Marxism, Black Nationalism, and Feminism and she is credited with theorizing triple oppression, the concept that Black and Brown women experience oppression based on race, class, and gender. Jones further argues that white women, much less Black and Brown working women, would never be liberated if the structures of colonialism were not abolished and Black Nationalism were not adopted.

Feminist historian Linda Gordon asserts that socialist feminism is inherently intersectional, at least to a certain degree, because it takes into account both gender and class. Gordon says that because the foundation of socialist feminism rests on multiple axes, socialist feminism has a history of intersectionality that can be traced back to a period decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw first articulated the concept of intersectionality in 1989. According to Gordon, socialist feminism of the 1980s presaged the concept of intersectionality by examining the overlapping structures that produce an individual's experience of oppression. Feminist scholar and women's studies professor Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy says that this broader analysis of societal structures began with socialist feminism and served as a catalyst for feminist scholarship. Kennedy says that many of the first women's studies programs were established by socialist feminist theorists. Despite the claims of being a homogenizing philosophy that erases difference of identity, socialist feminism's inherent approach to difference of identities, through an analysis of economic exploitation of all, is both recognized and enhanced by Crenshaw's intersectionality.

Despite the alleged presence of intersectionality in socialist feminism, many feminists, particularly women of color, critique the movement for perceived deficiencies in regards to racial equity. In Kennedy's account of socialist feminism's impact on women's studies, she says that a lack of Black voices in feminist academia contributed to whitewashing of women's studies programs and courses. Kum-Kum Bhavani, a professor at University of California Santa Barbara, and Margaret Coulson, a socialist feminist scholar, assert that racism in the socialist feminist movement stems from the failure of many white feminists to recognize the institutional nature of racism. According to Bhavani and Coulson, race, class, and gender are inextricably linked, and the exclusion of any one of these factors from one's worldview would result in an incomplete understanding of the systems of privilege and oppression they say constitute our society. Kathryn Harriss, a feminist scholar from the United Kingdom, describes what she sees as the shortcomings of the socialist feminist movement of the 1980s in the United Kingdom. Harriss describes marginalized women's grievances with the Women's Liberation Movement. She says many lesbian women criticized the movement for its domination by heterosexual feminists who perpetuated heterosexism in the movement. Similarly, Black women asserted that they were deprived a voice due to the overwhelming majority of white women in the WLM advocating widely held views regarding violence against women, the family, and reproductive rights that failed to account for the distinct struggles faced by women of color.

Motherhood and the private sphere

Theorists Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, in The Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery, published in 1825, describe how women's work contributes to capitalism's continuance. They assert that cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and all other activities that are deemed domestic work do constitute as actual work. Wheeler and Thompson assert that people, or labor, are needed for capitalism to function and that without women producing children as well as fulfilling these domestic activities, capitalism would fail.

Flora Tristian, French socialist activist, in her piece "Why I mention Women" published in 1843, argued that women and girls do not receive education because they are tasked with domestic duties. Girls and women, according to Tristan, thus cannot obtain gainful employment outside of the domestic sphere due to their neglect in their education and forced preoccupation with cleaning, cooking, and tending to children.

Socialist feminists highlight how motherhood and the gendered division of labor grows "naturally" from women's role as mothers, is the source of women's exclusion from the public sphere, and creates women's economic dependence on men. They assert that there is nothing natural about the gendered division of labor and show that the expectation that women perform all or most reproductive labor, i.e. labor associated with birthing and raising children but also the cleaning, cooking, and other tasks necessary to support human life, deny women the capacity to participate fully in economic activity outside the home. In order to free themselves from the conditions of work as a mother and housekeeper, socialist feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman saw the professionalization of housework as key. This would be done by hiring professional nannies and housekeepers to take the load of domestic work away from the woman in the house. Perkins Gilman also recommended the redesign of homes in ways that would maximize their potential for creativity and leisure for women as well as men, i.e. emphasizing the need for rooms like studios and studies and eliminating kitchens and dining rooms. These changes would necessitate the communalization of meal preparation and consumption outside the home and free women from their burden of providing meals on a house-by-house scale.

Toxic masculinity

Toxic Masculinity is a specific but not uncommon form of masculinity that depends on traditional patriarchal gender roles that inherently place men over women. What makes it a particularly harmful ideology is due to its promotion of misogyny, patriarchy, physical & sexual aggression towards women and emotional isolation. This directly threatens the physical safety of women and girls, as well as the health of men and boys. This is because toxic masculinity is performative by nature; if you fail to meet the standards of the ideology then you are perceived as a weaker/less valuable man. This leads to men under utilizing physical and mental treatments while at the same time increasing the risk of injury to these areas. Socialist feminists like all other feminist groups agree that toxic masculinity is a harmful set of practices that should be abolished alongside the patriarchy.

Social media also plays a role in toxic masculinity's affect on men, those who subscribe to toxic masculinity are more likely to report negative experiences on social media. This is because these certain types of men are believed to actively search for opportunities to assert themselves in online spaces, this combined with the fact social media usage is often linked with depression serves to only damage the men and the victims of these men significantly.

Toxic masculinity is not specific to any specific country or culture, different places around the world have their own words to describe toxic masculine behaviors. The word and concept Machismo is an example of this, it is primarily used in Spanish speaking countries and describes behavior that not only promotes misogyny, enforces traditional gender roles while glorifying masculinity and disregarding femininity.

Gender pay gap

Socialist feminist theories have been used to highlight the economic disparities amongst women on a global scale. Contemporary socialist feminists have shifted their concerns from uncompensated house labor to the insufficient pay women receive for work done outside the home. Although some women have secured high-paying male-dominated jobs, most find work in service, clerical, agriculture, and light industrial work. Feminist philosopher Rosemarie Tong presents three common reasons for the gender wage gap: "the concentration of women in low-paying, female-dominated jobs; the high percentage of women who work part-time rather than full-time; and outright wage discrimination against women."

The gender pay gap has been produced and sustained through patriarchal and capitalist conditions. The feminization and devaluation of service-based jobs have subjected women to low wages. The lack of access women have to alternative employment which may harbor higher pay, has increased the wage gap. Households that cannot hire additional aid for domestic duties limit the hours women are able to work outside their homes—having to do both outside and inside labor results in the uncompensated "second shift", expanding the gap. Women's work is considered "secondary wages" under patriarchy. Even women who can work full-time and do the same jobs as men are not paid equally. Tong claims that "women are paid less simply because they are women, a very disturbing thought to say the least."

The gender pay gap is an issue that is especially prevalent in the United States. In Feminist Policy and Human Nature, Allison Jagger describes the biological differences between women and men that would affect job performance namely "Most evidently, women's reproductive functions may mean that women have needs for pregnancy leave, maternity services and arrangements for easy access to their nursing babies." This fact insists that it is not only important but it is necessary for the workplace to incorporate this fairly into contracts. Forcing women to take unpaid maternity leave goes into the issue of the gender wage gap since women have reproductive needs that go far beyond men but are not compensated for that.

In 2017, there was an international women's strike protesting the unfair treatment of women in today's society. The strike included over 50 countries and occurred on international women's day. The strikes in each country were focused on an injustice in that specific country. In the United States women protested by not working or spending money to show how much influence women have.

Sign in to keep reading

5 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Social studies