Materialist Feminism

Materialist feminism variously highlights the central-ity of capitalism in understanding women's oppression and continues to foreground transformative social change rather than, for example, seeking reforms and concessions within the capitalist system. The term materialist feminism emerged in the late 1970s and is associated with some key feminist thinkers, such as Christine Delphy, Rosemary Hennessy, and Stevi Jackson. During the early years of second-wave feminism, Socialist and Marxist feminists sought to insert and apply the “women question” to traditional Marxist theory, rethinking class relations and consciousness with regard to gender. Traditional Marxism was incapable of explaining the gender division of labor, having focused on class alone. In exploring the role of women in social reproduction, as a source of cheap labor in “public” and “private” realms, materialist feminists suggested that women could be recognized as a separate, exploited group or “class.” The class “war” over resources, power, and knowledge was also a gendered one, and here some materialist feminists, such as Linda Phelps and Iris Marion Young, explained the intersection between class and gender in terms of “dual systems” of oppression and exploitation as created and sustained by capitalism and patriarchy. Patriarchy was understood as the system of exploitation that produced gender inequality interacting with the mode of production (capitalism) to create women's oppression. The terms mode of production and mode of reproduction have been used to speak of these dual, interacting systems, while Alison Jagger developed the term relations of procreation.

The names for such understandings, theories, and activities have changed over time, once labeled as Socialist or Marxist feminism and now more commonly labeled as materialist feminism. The linguistic shift also perhaps signifies a shift toward or entrenchment within academia, as feminism becomes “mainstreamed,” somewhat devoid of grassroots activism and concerns, which is seen to lie at the heart of materialist feminisms' focus on social change. Yet it is the concept of “historical materialism” that is seen to provide for an understanding of the interconnectedness of activities and productions that sustain capitalism. Here, society can be understood (in theory) as well as changed (in action) via historical materialism, as a form of emancipatory, revolutionary knowledge.

Materialist feminism has been contested from various angles. The shifts and debates within and about materialist feminism to some extent represent generational gaps, affiliations, and even accusations. Notably, in foregrounding the primacy of capitalist relations—combined and explained in relation to patriarchy—materialist feminist approaches were criticized as falsely universalizing women's oppression; that is, attributing gender inequality to one primary cause rather than paying heed to the ways in which differently positioned women are advantaged and dis-advantaged by classed, gendered, sexual, and racial inequalities as other important and intersectional social divisions. Such criticism inspired a move toward including and rethinking “difference.” Second-wave feminism brought three main branches of thought: liberal feminism, which sought economic, political, and social reforms within the existing system; radical feminism, which focused on sexuality and men's ability to control this as a main basis of women's oppression; and socialist feminism, which theorized the interaction between capitalism and patriarchy. These were contested and fractured by an assertion of difference between and within these branches; and accusations were issued about the prioritization of white middle-class women's voices. Hazel Carby challenged materialist feminist analyses of the family as universally oppressive to all women, noting instead the ways that arrangements and meanings of the family are differentiated for black women and men, just as the division of labor is also radicalized. The category woman, seemingly necessary to articulate a feminist voice and politics, was challenged and deconstructed in the attention to the ways women differently occupied and challenged it. The once easily articulated “universal class” of “woman” became replaced in the attention to difference, channeled through identity politics. Identity politics often highlighted the boundaries of “sisterhood” and competing “hierarchies of oppression” between the most-exploited versus the most-privileged women and has been blamed as producing an unbridgeable stalemate, as opposed to fostering feminist coalitions.

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