Socialist feminism
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.[1] 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 1800s.[2] 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.'[3] 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.[4]
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.[5] 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.[6]
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.[7] Karl Marx asserted that when class oppression was overcome, gender oppression would vanish as well. According to Socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression as a sub-class of class oppression is naive, and much of the work of Socialist feminists 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).[8] 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.[9]
Post-1970, the socialist feminist movement continued to grow. In "Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth & early Twentieth Centuries,"[10] 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[1]" 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.[11]
George Bernard Shaw quotes "Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money".[12] He also claims many women take part in work within the household but this is invisible as far as the market is concerned.
Sub-theories of socialist feminism[edit]
Anarcha-feminism[edit]
Anarcha-feminism, also called anarchist feminism and anarcho-feminism, combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary coercive hierarchy that should be replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle, and the anarchist struggle against the state. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".[24] Bakunin opposed patriarchy and the way the law "subjects [women] to the absolute domination of the man". He argued that "[e]qual rights must belong to men and women" so that women can "become independent and be free to forge their own way of life". Bakunin foresaw the end of "the authoritarian juridical family" and "the full sexual freedom of women."[25]
Anarcha-feminism began with late 19th and early 20th century authors and theorists such as anarchist feminists Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy Parsons.[26] In the Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-feminist group, Mujeres Libres (Free Women) linked to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, organized to defend both anarchist and feminist ideas,[27] while the prominent Spanish anarchist and feminist leader Federica Montseny held that the "emancipation of women would lead to a quicker realization of the social revolution" and that "the revolution against sexism would have to come from intellectual and militant 'future-women.' According to this Nietzschean concept of Federica Montseny's, women could realize through art and literature the need to revise their own roles."[28]
In Argentina, Virginia Bolten is responsible for the publication of a newspaper called La Voz de la Mujer (The Woman's Voice), which was published nine times in Rosario between 8 January 1896 and 1 January 1897, and was revived, briefly, in 1901. A similar paper with the same name was reportedly published later in Montevideo, which suggests that Bolten may also have founded and edited it after her deportation.[29] "La Voz de la Mujer described itself as "dedicated to the advancement of Communist Anarchism". Its central theme was that of the multiple nature of women's oppression. An editorial asserted, "We believe that in present-day society nothing and nobody has a more wretched situation than unfortunate women." Women, they said, were doubly oppressed—by bourgeois society and by men. Its feminism can be seen from its attack on marriage and upon male power over women. Its contributors, like anarchist feminists elsewhere, developed a concept of oppression that focused on gender oppression. Marriage was a bourgeois institution which restricted women's freedom, including their sexual freedom. Marriages entered into without love, fidelity maintained through fear rather than desire, oppression of women by men they hated—all were seen as symptomatic of the coercion implied by the marriage contract. It was this alienation of the individual's will that the anarchist feminists deplored and sought to remedy, initially through free love and then, and more thoroughly, through social revolution."[30]
Mujeres Libres was an anarchist women's organization in Spain that aimed to empower working class women. It was founded in 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón and had approximately 30,000 members. The organization was based on the idea of a "double struggle" for women's liberation and social revolution and argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel. In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists. Flying day-care centres were set up in efforts to involve more women in union activities.[31] Lucía Sánchez Saornil, was a Spanish poet, militant anarchist and feminist. She is best known as one of the founders of Mujeres Libres and served in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). By 1919, she had been published in a variety of journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial and La Gaceta Literaria. Working under a male pen name, she was able to explore lesbian themes[32] at a time when homosexuality was criminalized and subject to censorship and punishment. Writing in anarchist publications such as Earth and Freedom, the White Magazine and Workers' Solidarity, Lucía outlined her perspective as a feminist.
In the past decades, two films have been produced about anarcha-feminism. Libertarias is a historical drama made in 1996 about the Spanish anarcha-feminist organization Mujeres Libres. In 2010, the Argentinian film Ni dios, ni patrón, ni marido was released which is centered on the story of anarcha-feminist Virginia Bolten and her publishing of La Voz de la Mujer.[33][34]
Later theoretical works[edit]
Zillah R. Eisenstein[edit]
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism was a collection of essays assembled and anthologized by Zillah R. Eisenstein in 1978.
Sociologist and academic Rhonda F. Levine cites Eisenstein's work as a "superb discussion of the socialist-feminist position" in her anthology Enriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline.[53] Levine goes on to describe the book as "one of the earliest statements of how a Marxist class analysis can combine with a feminist analysis of patriarchy to produce a theory of how gender and class intersect as systems of inequality".[53]
Eisenstein defines the term 'capitalist patriarchy' as "descriptive of the 'mutually reinforcing dialectical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual structuring."[54]
She believes: "The recognition of women as a sexual class lays the subversive quality of feminism for liberalism because liberalism is premised upon women's exclusion from public life on this very class basis. The demand for real equality of women with men, if taken to its logical conclusion, would dislodge the patriarchal structure necessary to a liberal society."[55]
Donna Haraway and "A Cyborg Manifesto"[edit]
In 1985, Donna Haraway published the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in Socialist Review. Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to feminist narratives of the twentieth century. For Haraway, the Manifesto came at a critical juncture at which feminists, in order to have any real-world significance, had to acknowledge their situatedness within what she terms the "informatics of domination".[56] Feminists must, she proclaims, unite behind "an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit".[56] Women were no longer on the outside along a hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such.[57]
According to Haraway's manifesto, "there is nothing about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices" (p. 155). A cyborg does not require a stable, essentialist identity, argues Haraway, and feminists should consider creating coalitions based on "affinity" instead of identity. To ground her argument, Haraway analyzes the phrase "women of colour", suggesting it as one possible example of affinity politics. Using a term coined by theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes that "oppositional consciousness" is comparable with a cyborg politics, because rather than identity it stresses how affinity comes as a result of "otherness, difference, and specificity" (p. 156).
Donna Haraway is the author of A Cyborg Manifesto and it describes a dystopian future in which cyborgs represent the ideal way society would treat people in fixing the way society separates people by gender, race and religion. In her extensive manifesto written in 1991, Haraway explains about a political myth as a "cyborg"[58] who represents the ideal way someone would be treated in society. Haraway's manifesto describes the cyborg as "A cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind" Defined as a post-gender world, this cyborg represents the idea that there can by a dystopian future in which gender, religion and race are not dismissed but are not factors in how members of this society treat each other. This manifesto is consistently mentioning the idea of feminism and how feminists aren't looking for more or less than men but to make the playing field equal. This also goes to the socialist feminism point that without a massive change in society the feminist won't be able to get lasting change.
Autonomist feminism[edit]
Leopoldina Fortunati is the author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (L'arcano della riproduzione: Casalinghe, prostitute, operai e capitale), a feminist critique of Marx. Fortunati is the author of several books, including The Arcane of Reproduction (Autonomedia, 1995) and I mostri nell'immaginario (Angeli, 1995), and is the editor of Gli Italiani al telefono (Angeli, 1995) and Telecomunicando in Europa (1998), and with J. Katz and R. Riccini Mediating the Human Body. Technology, Communication and Fashion (2003). Her influences include Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri, and Karl Marx.
Silvia Federici is an Italian scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition.[59] Federici's best known work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati. In it, she argues against Karl Marx's claim that primitive accumulation is a necessary precursor for capitalism. Instead, she posits that primitive accumulation is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself—that capitalism, in order to perpetuate itself, requires a constant infusion of expropriated capital.
Federici connects this expropriation to women's unpaid labour, both connected to reproduction and otherwise, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor. Related to this, she outlines the historical struggle for the commons and the struggle for communalism. Instead of seeing capitalism as a liberatory defeat of feudalism, Federici interprets the ascent of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract.
She situates the institutionalization of rape and prostitution, as well as the heretic and witch-hunt trials, burnings, and torture at the center of a methodical subjugation of women and appropriation of their labor. This is tied into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common—from water, to seeds, to our genetic code—becomes privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.
Material feminism[edit]
Material feminism highlights capitalism and patriarchy as central in understanding women's oppression. The theory centers on social change rather than seeking transformation within the capitalist system.[60] Jennifer Wicke, defines materialist feminism as "a feminism that insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop [...]. [M]aterialist feminism avoids seeing this gender hierarchy as the effect of a singular [...] patriarchy and instead gauges the web of social and psychic relations that make up a material, historical moment".[61] She states that "materialist feminism argues that material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in the social production of gender and assays the different ways in which women collaborate and participate in these productions".[61] Material feminism also considers how women and men of various races and ethnicities are kept in their lower economic status due to an imbalance of power that privileges those who already have privilege, thereby protecting the status quo.
The term material feminism was first used in 1975 by Christine Delphy.[62] The current concept has its roots in socialist and Marxist feminism; Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, editors of Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives, describe material feminism as the "conjuncture of several discourses—historical materialism, Marxist and radical feminism, as well as postmodernist and psychoanalytic theories of meaning and subjectivity".[62] The term materialist feminism emerged in the late 1970s and is associated with key thinkers, such as Rosemary Hennessy, Stevi Jackson and Christine Delphy.[60] Rosemary Hennessy traces the history of Materialist Feminism in the work of British and French feminists who preferred the term materialist feminism to Marxist feminism.[63] In their view, Marxism had to be altered to be able to explain the sexual division of labor. Marxism was inadequate to the task because of its class bias and focus on production. Feminism was also problematic due to its essentialist and idealist concept of woman. Material feminism then emerged as a positive substitute to both Marxism and feminism.[63] Material feminism partly originated from the work of French feminists, particularly Christine Delphy. She argued that materialism is the only theory of history that views oppression as a basic reality of women's lives. Delphy states that this is why women and all oppressed groups need materialism to investigate their situation. For Delphy, "to start from oppression defines a materialist approach, oppression is a materialist concept".[64] She states that the domestic mode of production was the site of patriarchal exploitation and the material basis of the oppression of women. Delphy further argued that marriage is a labor contract that gives men the right to exploit women.[64] The Grand Domestic Revolution by Dolores Hayden is a reference. Hayden describes Material feminism at that time as reconceptualizing the relationship between the private household space and public space by presenting collective options to take the "burden" off women in regard to housework, cooking, and other traditional female domestic jobs.[65]
Ecological feminism or Ecofeminism[edit]
In the 1970s, the impacts of post-World War II technological development led many women to organise against issues from the toxic pollution of neighbourhoods to nuclear weapons testing on indigenous lands. This grassroots activism emerging across every continent was both intersectional and cross-cultural in its struggle to protect the conditions for reproduction of Life on Earth. Known as ecofeminism, the political relevance of this movement continues to expand. Classic statements in its literature include Carolyn Merchant, US, The Death of Nature;[66] Maria Mies, Germany, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale;[67] Vandana Shiva, India, Staying Alive: Women Ecology and Development;[68] Ariel Salleh, Australia, Ecofeminism as Politics: nature, Marx, and the postmodern.[69] Ecofeminism involves a profound critique of Eurocentric epistemology, science, economics, and culture. It is increasingly prominent as a feminist response to the contemporary breakdown of the planetary ecosystem.