Marxist feminism (20TH CENTURY)

Development of Marxism to add gender division to class conflict.

The class analysis of Marxism is inadequate rather than incorrect. It needs to be complemented by an understanding of the divisions, particularly in the household, of work and the control over work along lines of gender.

Source:
N O Keohane et al., eds, Feminist Theory (Brighton, 1982)

Theoretical background in Marxism

Marxism follows the development of oppression and class division in the evolution of human society through the development and organization of wealth and production, and concludes the evolution of oppressive societal structure to be relative to the evolution of oppressive family structures, i.e., the normalization of oppressing the female sex marks or coincides to the birth of oppressive society in general.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels writes about the earliest origins of the family structure, social hierarchy, and the concept of wealth, drawing from both ancient and contemporary study. He concludes that women originally had a higher social status and equal consideration in labor, and particularly, only women were sure to share a family name. As the earliest men did not even share the family name, Engels says, they did not know for sure who their children were or benefit from inheritance.^[4]

When agriculture first became abundant and the abundance was considered male wealth, as it was sourced from the male work environment away from the home, a deeper wish for male lineage and inheritance was founded. To achieve that wish, women were not only granted their long-sought monogamy but forced into it as part of domestic servitude, while males pursued a hushed culture of “hetaerism”. Engels describes this situation as coincidental to the beginnings of forced servitude as a dominant feature of society, leading eventually to a European culture of class oppression, where the children of the poor were expected to be servants of the rich.^[4]

Engels rewrites a quote in this book, by himself and Marx from 1846, “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children”, to say, “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.”^[4]

Gender oppression is reproduced culturally and maintained through institutionalized inequality. By privileging men at the expense of women and refusing to acknowledge traditional domestic labor as equally valuable, the working-class man is socialized into an oppressive structure which marginalizes the working-class woman.^[2]

Productive, unproductive, and reproductive labor

Marx categorized labor into two categories: productive and unproductive.

• Productive labor is labor that creates surplus value, e.g. production of raw materials and manufacturing products.
• Unproductive labor does not create surplus value and may in fact be subsidized by it. This can include supervisory duties, bookkeeping, marketing, etc.

Marxist feminist authors in the 1970s, such as Margaret Benston and Peggy Morton, relied heavily on analysis of productive and unproductive labor in an attempt to shift the perception of the time that consumption was the purpose of a family, presenting arguments for a state-paid wage to homemakers, and a cultural perception of the family as a productive entity. In capitalism, the work of maintaining a family has little material value, as it produces no marketable products. In Marxism, the maintenance of a family is productive, as it has a service value, and is used in the same sense as a commodity.^[5]

Wages for Housework

Focusing on exclusion from productive labor as the most important source of female oppression, some Marxist feminists advocated for the inclusion of domestic work within the waged capitalist economy. The idea of compensating reproductive labor was present in the writing of socialists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898) who argued that women’s oppression stemmed from being forced into the private sphere.^[6] Gilman argued that conditions for women would improve when their work was located, recognized, and valued in the public sphere.^[2]

Perhaps the most influential effort to compensate reproductive labor was the International Wages for Housework Campaign, an organization launched in Italy in 1972 by members of the International Feminist Collective. Many of these women, including Selma James,^[7] Mariarosa Dalla Costa,^[8] Brigitte Galtier, and Silvia Federici^[9] published a range of sources to promote their message in academic and public domains. Despite beginning as a small group of women in Italy, the Wages for Housework Campaign was successful in mobilizing on an international level. A Wages for Housework group was founded in Brooklyn, New York with the help of Federici.^[9] As Heidi Hartmann acknowledges (1981), the efforts of these movements, though ultimately unsuccessful, generated important discourse regarding the value of housework and its relation to the economy.^[10]

Domestic Slavery

Many Marxist feminist scholars, in the vein of an analyzing modes of oppression at the site of production, note the effect that housework has on women in a capitalist system. In Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class, the concept of housework is to deconstruct the capitalist construct of gendered labor within the home and to show the ways in which women are exploited through “domestic slavery.”^[11] To address this, Davis concludes that the “socialisation of housework – including meal preparation and child care – presupposes an end to the profit-motive’s reign over the economy.”^[11] In this manner, domestic slavery upholds the structural inequities faced by women in all capitalist economies.

Other Marxist feminist have noted the concept of domestic work for women internationally and the role it plays in buttressing global patriarchy. In Paresh Chattopadhyay’s response^[12] to Custer’s Capital Accumulation and Women’s Labor in Asian Economies, Chattopadhyay notes the ways in which Custer analyzes “women’s labor in the garments industry in West Bengal and Bangladesh as well as in Bangladesh’s agricultural sector, labor management methods of the Japanese industrial bourgeoisie and, finally, the mode of employment of the women laborers in Japanese industry”^[12] in demonstrating the ways in which the domestic sphere exhibits similar gender-based exploitation of difference. In both works, the gendered division of labor, specifically within the domestic sphere, is shown to illustrate the methods the capitalist system exploits women globally.

Responsibility of reproductive labor

Another solution proposed by Marxist feminists is to liberate women from their forced connection to reproductive labor. In her critique of traditional Marxist feminist movements such as the Wages for Housework Campaign, Heidi Hartmann (1981) argues that these efforts “take as their question the relationship of women to the economic system, rather than that of women to men, apparently assuming the latter will be explained in their discussion of the former.”^[10] Hartmann believes that traditional discourse has ignored the importance of women’s oppression as women, and instead focused on women’s oppression as members of the capitalist system. Similarly, Gayle Rubin, who has written on a range of subjects including sadomasochism, prostitution, pornography, and lesbian literature, first rose to prominence through her 1975 essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,^[13] in which she coins the phrase “sex/gender system” and criticizes Marxism for what she claims is its incomplete analysis of sexism under capitalism, without dismissing or dismantling Marxist fundamentals in the process.

More recently, many Marxist feminists have shifted their focus to the ways in which women are now potentially in worse conditions as a result of gaining access to productive labor. Nancy Folbre proposes that feminist movements begin to focus on women’s subordinate status to men both in the reproductive (private) sphere, as well as in the workplace (public sphere).^[14] In an interview in 2013, Silvia Federici urges feminist movements to consider the fact that many women are now forced into productive and reproductive labor, resulting in a double day.^[15] Federici argues that the emancipation of women cannot occur until they are free from the burden of unwaged labor, which she proposes will involve institutional changes such as closing the wage gap and implementing child care programs in the workplace.^[15] Federici’s suggestions are echoed in a similar interview with Selma James (2012) and have even been touched on in recent presidential elections.^[7]

Affective and emotional labor

Scholars and sociologists such as Michael Hardt,^[16] Antonio Negri,^[16] Arlie Russell Hochschild^[17] and Shiloh Whitney^[18] discuss a new form of labor that transcends the traditional spheres of labor and which does not create product, or is byproductive.^[18] Affective labor focuses on the blurred lines between personal life and economic life. Whitney states, “The daily struggle of unemployed persons and the domestic toil of housewives no less than the waged worker are thus part of the production and reproduction of social life, and of the biopolitical growth of capital that valorizes information and subjectivities.”^[18]

The concept of emotional labor, particularly the emotional labor that is present and required in pink collar jobs, was introduced by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983)^[17] in which she considers the affective labor of the profession as flight attendants smile, exchange pleasantries and banter with customers.