Abstract
The “Marriage” Of Marxism and Feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism.1 Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the “larger” struggle against capital. To continue our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce.
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Notes
I. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1965, pp. 442–445.
Kenneth M. Davidson, Ruth B. Ginsburg, and Herma H. Kay, Sex Based Discrimination (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 1974), p. 117.
Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, edited, with an introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: International Publishers, 1972).
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958).
Eli Zaretsky, “Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life,” Socialist Revolution, Part I in no. 13–14 (January–April 1973), pp. 66–125.
Also Zaretsky, “Socialist Politics and the Family,” Socialist Revolution (now Socialist Review), no. 19 (January–March 1974), pp. 83–98.
Bruce Brown’s Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).
Henri Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) may be grouped with Zaretsky.
In this Zaretsky is following Margaret Benston (“The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Monthly Review, Vol. 21, no. 4 [September 1961], pp. 13–27), who made the cornerstone of her analysis that women have a different relation to capitalism than men. She argued that women at home produce use values, and that men in the labor market produce exchange values. She labeled women’s work precapitalist (and found in women’s common work the basis for their political unity). Zaretsky builds on this essential difference in men’s and women’s work, but labels them both capitalist.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1973; second edition), pamphlet, 78 pps.
See Dalla Costa, “A General Strike,” in All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework, and the Wages Due, ed. Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1975).
The literature of the debate includes Lise Vogel, “The Earthly Family,” Radical America, Vol. 7, no. 4–5 (July–October 1973), pp. 9–50.
Ira Gerstein, “Domestic Work and Capitalism,” Radical America, Vol. 7, no. 4–5 (July–October 1973, pp. 101–128.
John Harrison, “Political Economy of Housework,” Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists, Vol. 3, no. 1 (1973).
Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 83 (January–February 1974), pp. 3–24.
Margaret Coulson, Branka Magas, and Hilary Wainwright, “‘The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism,’ A Critique,” New Left Review, no. 89 (January–February 1975), pp. 59–71.
Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labour,” New Left Review, no. 89 (January–February 1975), pp. 47–58.
Ian Gough and John Harrison, “Unproductive Labour and Housework Again,” Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists, Vol. 4, no. 1 (1975).
Jean Gardiner, Susan Himmelweit and Maureen Mackintosh, “Women’s Domestic Labour,” Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists, Vol. 4, no. 2 (1975).
Wally Seccombe, “Domestic Labour: Reply to Critics,” New Left Review, no. 94 (November–December 1975), pp. 85–96.
Terry Fee, “Domestic Labor: An Analysis of Housework and its Relation to the Production Process,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 1–8.
Susan Himmelweit and Simon Mohun, “Domestic Labour and Capital,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1977), pp. 15–31.
Laura Oren documents this for the working class in “Welfare of Women in Laboring Families: England, 1860–1950,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, no. 3–4 (Winter-Spring 1973), pp. 107–25.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Juliet Mitchell, Womens Estate (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 92.
Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 40 (November–December 1966), pp. 11–37, also reprinted by the New England Free Press.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
Shulamith Firestone, TheDialectic of Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1971).
“Politics of Ego: A Manifesto for New York Radical Feminists,” can be found in Rebirth of Feminism, ed. Judith Hole and Ellen Levine (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), pp. 440–443.
Additional writings of radical feminists, of whom the New York Radical Feminists are probably the most influential, can be found in Radical Feminism, ed. Ann Koedt (New York, Quadrangle Press, 1972).
See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977).
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Jane Flax, “The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and Within Feminism,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 4, no. 2 (June 1978), pp. 141–189.
Kate Millett, SexualPolitics (New York: Avon Books, 1971), p. 25.
One example of this type of radical feminist history is Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1975).
For the bourgeois social science view of patriarchy, see, for example, Weber’s distinction between traditional and legal authority, Max Weber: The Theories of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 328–357.
These views are also discussed in Elizabeth Fee, “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, nos. 3–4 (Winter-Spring 1973), pp. 23–29.
Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), especially Chapter 3, “Community.”
See Viana Muller, “The Formation of the State and the Oppression of Women: Some Theoretical Considerations and a Case Study in England and Wales,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 1977), pp. 7–21.
The diversity is shown in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Rapp Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Woman, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974).
Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach, by Liba Leibowitz (North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press, 1978).
For an excellent discussion of one such transition to socialism, see Batya Weinbaum, “Women in Transition to Socialism: Perspectives on the Chinese Case,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 34–58.
Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Kelly, 1969) describes women’s preindustrial economic roles and the changes that occurred as capitalism progressed.
Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 25–26.
Cited in Neil Smelser, Social Change and the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 301.
These examples are from Heidi I. Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 1, no. 3, pt. 2 (Spring 1976), pp. 162–163.
For a more complete discussion of protective labor legislation and women, see Ann C. Hill, “Prospective Labor Legislation for Women: Its Origin and Effect,” mimeographed (New Haven, CT: Yale Law School, 1970) parts of which have been published in Barbara A. Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Eleanor H. Norton, and Susan C. Ross, Sex Discrimination and the Law: Causes and Remedies (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1975), an excellent law text. Also see Hartmann, “Job Segregation by Sex,” pp. 164–166.
Carolyn Shaw Bell, in “Working Women’s Contribution to Family Income,” Eastern Economic Journal, Vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1974), pp. 185–201, presents current data and argues that it is now incorrect to assume that the man is the primary earner of the family.
Oscar Handlin, Bostons Immigrants (New York: Atheneum, 1968) discusses mid-nineteenth century Boston, where Irish women were employed in textiles; women constituted more than half of all wage laborers and often supported unemployed husbands.
See Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), esp. Chap. 1.
As Pat Mainardi said in “The Politics of Housework,” “[t]he measure of your oppression is his resistance” (in Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan [New York: Vintage Books, 1970], p. 451).
See her “Redefining the Question of Revolution,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 1977), pp. 54, 78.
Additional studies of the interaction of capitalism and patriarchy can be found in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
See Batya Weinbaum and Amy Bridges, “The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption,” Monthly Review, Vol. 28, no. 3 (July–August 1976), pp. 88–103, for a discussion of women’s consumption work.
For the view of the Frankfurt School, see Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” in Critical Theory (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972).
Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, “The Family,” in Aspects of Sociology (Boston: Beacon, 1972).
For more on racial orders, see Stanley Greenberg, “Business Enterprise in a Racial Order,” Politics and Society, Vol. 6, no. 2 (1976), pp. 213–240.
Michael Burroway, The Color of Class in the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, Zambia Papers No. 7, 1972).
See Michael Reich, David Gordon, and Richard Edwards, “A Theory of Labor Market Segmentation,” American Economic Review, Vol. 63, no. 2 (May 1973), pp. 359–365.
See David M. Gordon, “Capitalist Efficiency and Socialist Efficiency,” Monthly Review, Vol. 28, no. 3 (July–August 1976), pp. 19–39, for a discussion of qualitative efficiency (social control needs) and quantitative efficiency (accumulation needs).
See Gerd Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers, the View from Milwaukee, 1866–1921 (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967).
Stewart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1976).
For the proportion of people in nuclear families, see Peter Uhlenberg, “Cohort Variations in Family Life Cycle Experiences of U.S. Females,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 36, no. 5 (May 1974), pp. 284–92.
For remarriage rates, see Paul C. Glick and Arthur J. Norton, “Perspectives on the Recent Upturn in Divorce and Remarriage,” Demography, Vol. 10 (1974), pp. 301–14.
For divorce and income levels, see Arthur J. Norton and Paul C. Glick, “Marital Instability: Past, Present, and Future,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 32, no. 1 (1976), pp. 5–20.
Also see Mary Jo Bane, Here to Stay: American Families in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
Heather L. Ross and Isabel B. Sawhill, Time of Transition: The Growth of Families Headed by Women (Washington, D.C.; The Urban Institute, 1975).
See Kathryn E. Walker and Margaret E. Woods, Time Use: A Measure of Household Production of Family Goods and Services (Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1976).
Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 6, no. 3 (Spring 1981).
Richard Sennett’s and Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Random House, 1973) examines similar kinds of psychological phenomena within hierarchical relationships between men at work.
See John R. Seeley, et al., Crestwood Heights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), pp. 382–94.
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Hartmann, H. (2010). The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union. In: Sitton, J.F. (eds) Marx Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117457_14
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