Week Thirteen: Materialist Feminism

Marxism has an uneven record in relation to feminism. Feminists have criticized Marxists for producing reductive, oversimplified understandings of gender oppression, and for assuming that gender oppression is simply a side-effect of class oppression. Yet Marx and Engels were attentive to gender issues, and they developed a sophisticated theory of gender. As they argued in The German Ideology, gender, like consciousness itself, is a product of human labor and the gender hierarchy is a product of the unequal division of labor and distribution of resources. The categories "masculine" and "feminine" are produced and reproduced, taking on different characteristics in different historical circumstances according to changing relations of production. From its beginnings, historical materialism has supported a critique of the ideology of gender in social power relations that also recognizes the ways that the academic division of labor facilitates the profit motive and maintains class rule. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, produced a pioneering materialist account of the exploitation of women in the bourgeois family, and twentieth-century Marxist thought offers a long history of critique and opposition to patriarchy.