Marxist Feminism: The case for gender as a class issue

For those of you who want to delve into the nitty gritty of Marxist Feminism, I highly recommend “Materialist Feminism” by Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham. It is a compilation of articles from the late sixties to late nineties that traces the discourse of feminism and how it became intertwined with marxism. For those of you who want a more brief overview, I will now summarize the main argument of Christine Delphy in her article “For a Materialist Feminism.” Delphy’s piece outlines the crux of why two previously unrelated social theories became intertwined and makes a strong case for why they should be.

Delphy starts her argument with feminism. According to Delphy, feminism presupposes the oppression of women and its socially constructed origin. In other words, if the inequality of men and women was a natural (rather than social) phenomenon, then women could not hope to change their situation through a social revolution. Because feminism demands both a restructuring of society and social revolution, the unstated assumption is women’s situation can be changed. Delphy argues that socially constructed inequality is the heart of oppression.

A feminist interpretation of history is therefore “materialist” in the broad sense; that is, its premises lead it to consider intellectual production as the result of social relationships, and the latter as relationships of domination. – Material Feminism, pg. 60

Delphy continues to explain how the interdisciplinary view of academia helps to place some areas of human experience outside of traditional study, and thus limit our recognition of oppression. Her point here isn’t as crucial to explaining the marxist-feminist connection, so I won’t linger on it. There is one key point, however. Delphy uses the academia example to introduce the idea that a narrow definition of domain can lead those who control pedagogy to overlook women’s lives. She then argues this is exactly what happened with marxism.

Marxism (or materialism, as Delphy refers to it), is the theory that the world is controlled through economic forces, and the upper classes control and oppress the lower classes through the perpetuation of their worldview. This is a somewhat indelicate explanation, but it serves well enough to explain Delphy’s argument. Delphy observes that marxism centers its argument around the oppression of the worker, and therefore neglects sexuality and affect, which were the primary domains of female oppression.

Women as a group were excluded from the classes involved. Their oppression was not thought of as a class exploitation. – Material Feminism, pg. 62

This, Delphy asserts, was an oversight on the part of Karl Marx. Feminism corrected this oversight when it presented the situation of women as an oppressive and unnatural state. In this way, feminists could make a strong case for their conflict with those in power as a class struggle.

Feminism, by imprinting the word oppression on the domain of sexuality, has annexed it to materialism. – Material Feminism, pg. 63

Thus material (or marxist) feminism was born. Women made a substantial claim that they were a legitimate part of the proletariat class, and their insights as a marginalized group could be combined with the marxism.