Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 19th century. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.'The Personal is Political, retrieved January 21st 2021. This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.What is Socialist Feminism?, retrieved on May 28th 2007.
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.Buchanan, Ian. "Socialist Feminism." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 20 October 2011. 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.Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism (US: Nation Books, 2018) George Bernard Shaw quotes "Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money".George Bernad Shaw, An Intelligent Women's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) 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.