Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 19:28:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Ann Ferguson <aferguso-AT-benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu>
Subject: Re: Marxist Feminism


11/7/94

On Fri, 4 Nov 1994, wesley david cecil wrote:

> I would be very interested in a discussion of Marxism and Feminism(it is 
> a major component of my dissertation research).  In my reserachup to now, 
> however, I have noticed a general tendency for both terms to remain so 
> ill defined as to often render the connection between the two as rather 
> suspect.  So what do we mean when we say "Marxism and Feminism?"  
> 	For my part, I am interested in question of how materiality is 
> figured in the two discourses since both often rely heavily on issues of 
> materiality to ground various arguments.  
> 
	One good and influential starting point on this is Heidi Hartmann's
essay "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism".  Hartmann argues that
there are two interrelated but semi-autonomous systems, capitalism and
patriarchy.  The first is described by Marxism from a historical 
materialist perspective, that is, by assuming that power and domination 
in society is importantly traced to the social relations of the 
production and distribution of material goods, and that such social 
relations (SRs) vary historically depending on different modes of 
production.  Simlarly she argues that patriarchy has different historical 
modes of production and control of the goods of human sexuality, viz. 
pleasure and children.  I argue in a similar vein in my two books, "Blood 
at the Root" (1989, Pandora) and "Sexual Democracy" (1991, Westview), only
I call the patriarchal modes, modes of "sex/affective production", and argue
that the sexual division of labor both in capitalist social relations of 
production and in patriarchal sex/affective production in wage labor and 
in unpaid household work means that men as a sex/class exploit and 
control women's labor (although this has to be modified by the 
inequalities of race and social class, so more precisely, men of one 
social class and race exploit women of the same class and race, and men 
of the dominant class and race in addition exploit women of all 
subordinate races and classes.)  Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis wrote a paper 
on this as economists arguing that labor power is heterogeneous not 
homogeneous because of racial and patriarchal domination and the 
consequent race and sex segmentation of the work force, and Nancy Folbre 
wrote a paper arguing that women's labor power in the home can be said to 
be exploited by men in the home because of the unreciprocal exchange of 
family labor.

	Actually these theories are usually thought of as 
socialist-feminist theories rather than marxist-feminist since they assume
at least a dual system of social domination theory and sometimes a 
tri-system theory (adding racial domination, on the racial formations 
model of Michael Omi and Howard Winant in "Racial Formations in the 
US").  Marxist feminists are people like Rosemary Hennessy, Margaret 
Benston , Lise Vogel and Juliet Mitchell.  All of these folks in one way 
or another still accept the base/superstructure model of social 
domination and think women's oppression is either due to superstructural 
features of male domination in the family or in ideological discourses, 
or (Benston) the persistence of precapitalist, feudal production in the 
family, or (Vogel) women's role in biological reproduction which 
disadvantages her in entering wage labor.

	There's a whole lot more that can be said.  What more are you 
interested in?
	
	Ann Ferguson
	aferguso-AT-uci.edu


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