Reserve Text: Excerpt from Introduction to Materialist Feminism: A Reader Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham
Introduction:
We see this reader as a timely contribution to feminist struggle for transformative social change, a struggle which is fundamentally a class war over resources, knowledge, and power. Currently the richest 20 percent of humanity garners 83 percent of global income, while the poorest 20 percent of the world's people struggles to survive on just 1 percent of the global income (Sivard 1993; World Bank 1994). During the 19905, as capitalism triumphantly secures its global reach, anticommunist ideologies hammer home socialism's inherent failure and the Left increasingly moves into the professional middle class, many of western feminism's earlier priorities-commitment to social transformation, attention to the political economy of patriarchy, analysis of the perva-sive social structures that link and divide women-have been obscured or actively dismissed. Various forms of feminist cultural politics that take as their starting point gender, race, class, sexuality, or coalitions among them hJVC increasingly displaced a systemic perspective that links the battle against women's oppression to a fight against capitalism. The archive collected in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives is a reminder that despite this trend feminists have continued to find in historical materialism a powerful theoretical and political resource. The tradi-tion of feminist engagement with marxism emphasizes a perspective on social life that refuses to separate the materiality of meaning, identity, the body, state, or nation from the requisite division of labor that undergirds the scramble for profits in capitalism's global system.
As the gap widens between those who own and control the world's wealth and those who do not, women's labor continues to be a primary source of capital accumulation.
[2]
Feeding and caring for children, attending to the sick and the elderly, and providing one of the main sources of cheap labor in waged work have been women's longstand-ing contributions to capital accumulation across the globe. Women perform most of the world's socially necessary' labor, and yet they are far more vulnerable to poverty than men. Many women in the United States working inside and outside the home must provide for themselves and their families on less than two-thirds of the wages earned by men. Ofall poor peo~)le over eighteen living in the United States, 63 percent are women, and women who head households bear the brunt of poverty. This dispro-portionate impoverishment does not affect all women, nor does it affect them to the same degree. Again, using wages as a gauge of these differences, white women earn 70 percent of white men's earnings, while black women earn only 64 percent of what white men earn (U .S. Bureau of Census 1995 ). It is important to remember that pover-ty is not mainly a function of gender or race but a permanent feature of capitalism that affects children and men too. The socially produced differences of race, gender, and nationality are not distinct from class, but they playa crucial role-both directly and indirectly-in dividing the work force, ensuring and justifying the continued availabili-ty of cheap labor, and determining that certain social groups will be profoundly exploited while others will be somewhat cushioned. In this division, it is often children who lose the most; in fact, the vast majority of the world's poor are excluded.
If feminism is to maintain its viability as a political movement aimed at redressing women's oppression and exploitation worldwide, the theory that underlies feminist practice cannot eclipse the material realities that bind race, gender, sexuality, and nationality to labor. And yet, these are the very connections that have been abandoned by western feminists in the past twenty years. As feminism has been absorbed into the mainstream of advanced industrial societies and incorporated into the professions, its dominant voices have grown to disparage ways of making sense of women's lives that connect the oppressive construction of difference and identity to capital's drive to accumulate. Instead, feminists have increasingly promoted knowledges and political strategies that appeal to the visible differences of sex or race. When feminists have questioned visible differences as the basis for political movement or forging coalitions, the alternatives proposed often appeal to abstract, ahistorical, or merely cultural cate-gories like desire, matter, or performativity. In bracketing the relationship of visibility and bodies to capitalism as a class-based system, feminism has implicitly and at times even explicitly embraced capitalism-or, more commonly, ignored it. Often when feminist analysis does address class it is as one of a series of oppressions experienced by individuals. But this seeming "return to class" is in fact a retreat from class analysis. As Ellen Mieskens Wood has indicated, the retreat from class occurs not so much because class disappears from feminist analysis but because it has been transformed into anoth-er form of oppression.' The effect is that class is unhinged from the political economy of capitalism and class power is severed from exploitation, a power structure in which those who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value gen-erated by those who do not. While the concentration and global diffusion of capital has made the class possessing power more difficult to identify, it is precisely because capi-talism has become ever more pervasive, insidious, and brutal that a rigorous and revitalized feminist analysis of its class dynamics is politically necessary now.
Linking women's identities and bodies desires, and needs to class matters to feminism because capitalism is fundamentally a class system. Without the class division
[3]
between those who own and those who labor, capitalism cannot exist. Women's cheap labor {guaranteed through racist and patriarchal gender systems) is fundamental to the accumulation of surplus value-the basis for capitalist profit-making and expansion. A feminism that aims to improve the lives of all women and at the same time recognizes their differential relation to one another cannot ignore the material reality of capital-ism's class system in women's lives. Class objectively links all women, binding the professional to her housekeeper, the boutique shopper to the sweatshop seamstress, the battered wife in Beverly Hills to the murdered sex worker in Bangkok or the Bronx. But class also pits women against each other, dividing those allied with the private and cor-porate control of wealth and resources from the dispossessed.
Historically, marxist feminism has been the most theoretically developed feminist critique of the reality of class in women's lives. Because marxist feminists see the con-tinuous historical connections between women's oppression and capitalism, theirs is a politics of social transformation that ultimately looks to the elimination of class. Many of the essays in this book reiterate the contention that a feminist politics aimed at com-batting women's exploitation and oppression and elimina.ting the forces that divide women from one another must oppose capitalism. Against the current fashion in west-ern feminism, the tradition of socialist and marxist feminism does not shy away from the elimination of capitalism as a long-range goal, but holds the importance of this vision as a necessary component of the fight for social justice. Granted, feminist move-ment in advanced industrial sectors has achieved immensely important reforms within capitalism, reforms that indeed have improved many women's lives. And most socialist feminists have endorsed these improvements. But if feminism is to be a social move-ment that aspires to meet the needs of all women, it must also confront its own class investments in refusing to connect its analysis to a global social system whose very premise is that some women benefit at the expense of others.
While the critical knowledges of anticapitalist, materialist feminism have been mar-ginalized and even suppressed in the past two decades in the West, they have not disappeared. One of the objectives of this Reader is to make the fertile, varied archive of this work more visible and readily available to those who struggle in the ongoing collec-tive effort to produce knowledge for transformative social change.
What is Marxist Feminism?
The historical links between marxism and feminism were forged in the contradictory situation of first-world women under monopoly capitalism and played out in the insights and oversights of nineteenth-century socialists. Inspired by the historical mate-rialism of Marx and Engels, first-wave socialist feminists-among them Clara Zetkin, Isaac Bebel, and Alexandra Kollontai-promoted the struggle for women's emancipa-tion. Activists like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Rose Pastor Stokes, and others took these ideas to the front lines of labor organizing. Over the course of the next century, feminists found in the theory of historical materialism concepts that could be used to explain the social structures through which women are exploited and oppressed. At the same time, feminists have not approached marxism uncritically. Indeed, the history of feminist interest in marxism has been punctuated by a great deal of critical exchange as feminists challenged marxism's limits and in the process
[4]
expanded its explanatory power as a theoretical framework that might more adequately address the differential historical situation of women. This critical debate has been fun-damental to what marxist feminists call political praxis-that is, the practical-theoretical struggle involved in movements for social change.
The names for the knowledges that have emerged out of the intersection of marxism and feminism in the past thirty years vary-sometimes designated as marxist feminism, socialist feminism, or materialist feminism. These signatures represent differences in emphasis and even in concepts, but all signal feminist critical engagement with histori-calmaterialism. While socialist and marxist feminist thinking was never the dominant voice of feminism in the industrialized world, during the early years of feminism's sec-ond wave and throughout the 1970s this work had a profound effect on feminist theory and practice. In the past decade or so, however, as feminism has become more absorbed into the middle-class professions, these knowledges have been increasingly discredited. As a result, many young first-world scholars and activists, whose introduc-tion to feminism has taken place in the wake of the conservative backlash of the 1980s and '90s, are unaware of the history of socialist and marxist feminism and the knowl-edges it produced. It is important to remember, though, that while feminists in overdeveloped countries during this time may have ignored or consciously rejected marxism as outmoded, irrelevant, or worse, an obstacle to the emancipation of women, "two-thirds world women" activists have continued to take seriously historical materialism as a theory for social revolution \ Chinchilla 1991; Dunayevskaya 1985 ).2
What has been the appeal of historical materialism for feminists? Simply put, histor-ical materialism is emancipatory critical knowledge. Historical materialism offers a systemic way of making sense of social life under capitalism that simultaneously serves as an agent for changing it. It is not only interested in explaining the world but also in transforming it. In other words, as this gloss on Marx's Thesis XI on Feuerbach sug-gests, historical materialism argues that explaining the world ( theory) and changing it (practice) are integrally connected.'
As emancipatory knowledge, historical materialism takes as its starting point real liv-ing individuals and what they need in order to produce their means of subsistence, that is, in order to survive. It recognizes that the continual production of life through the satisfaction of human needs is a collective undertaking involving an ensemble or system of connected productive activities. One of the key concepts of historical materialism is this recognition that the production of life is a systemic process, one that takes place through a system of related activities. Historically, these activities have taken the form of divisions of labor or relations of production, organizations of state and of consciousness or culture. Emancipatory change that aims to eliminate exploitation and oppression within a social system cannot take place by eradicating inequities only in one sphere of social life. For change to be truly emancipatory, it must include civil rights and cultural reforms and extend to the social structures that allow wealth for the few to be accumulated at the expense of the many.
Under capitalism, the production of the means to satisfy human needs has taken the form of relations of production in which resources that are collectively produced are not collectively controlled or shared. Those few who own or control the forces for pro-ducing (technology) what is needed to satisfy human needs do so because of the surplus value (profit in the form of capital) that they accrue through the unpaid labor-power of many. Knowledge-making is an integral material aspect of this arrangement
[5]
because knowledges-what is considered true or the ways things are-can legitimize how labor and power are divided. For this reason, culture-the domain of knowledge production-is both a stake and a site of class struggle. Historically, the oppression of women and people of color through patriarchal and racist ideologies has been neces-sary to and embedded in this fundamental structure of capitalist production. While the ways of making sense that prevail in capitalist societies may serve to legitimate and reproduce divisions of labor benefiting the owning class, however, they do not always succeed in doing so and are themselves often contradictory. Moreover, oppositional knowledges that contest the ruling ideas also circulate and vie for the status of truth.In keeping with the premises of historical materialism, marxist feminists argue that the starting point of any theory has consequences; as a way of making sense of the world, any theory helps to shape social reality. In arguing their standpoint and evaluat-ing the usefulness of other theories, marxist feminists ask, What are the consequences of this way of thinking for transforming the inequities in women's lives? How is this way of explaining the world going to improve life for all women? Underlying these questions is marxist feminism's visionary horizon-tbe social transformation necessary to meet women's collective needs. In the past decade or so, however, concepts like social transformation have been disparaged by many feminists in favor of more local or contingent explanations of social life. Along with the disappearance of a vision of trans-formative change, class as the fundamental social structure of capitalism has also faded from most feminist analysis. Against this trend, materialist-marxist and socialist-feminism argues that social transformation is not a romantic fantasy. On the contrary, we contend that the history of social movements has shown that in times of deep cyni-cism it is especially important to maintain a vision of possibility on the horizon of the struggle for social change. This vision was one hallmark of the early years of feminism's second wave and is echoed throughout this book-in essays by Margaret Benston, Christine Delphy, Mary Alice Waters, Lindsey German, Barbara Smith, Nellie Wong, and others.
We have deliberately reviewed some of the premises of marxist feminism because they have been persistently misread, distorted, or buried under the weight of a flourish-ing postmodern cultural politics. In addition to social transformation, many other concepts that were basic to marxist feminist theof)" in the early 1970s-among them social structure, production, patriarchy, and class-have been dismissed by post-marx-ist feminists in favor of analyses that treat social life in terms of contingencies, local force relations, or discourses.' Post-marxist feminism rejects historical materialism's systemic view of social life, the premise that human survival is based on the existence of real living individuals who must produce the means to survive and do so under histori-cally variant conditions. Instead, they focus almost exclusively on ideological, state, or cultural practices, anchor meaning in the body and its pleasures, or understand social change primarily in terms of the struggle over representation. While many post-marx-ist feminists insist that their analyses are materialist and may even present themselves as materialist feminists, post-marxist feminism is in fact cultural materialism. Cultural materialism rejects a systemic, anticapitalist analysis linking the history of culture and meaning"making to capital's class system. It is important to note that many post-marx-ist feminists are the very same socialist feminists whose work was once so instrumental in drafting concepts that link the production of knowledge and the formation of identi-ties to capitalism as a global system. Among them are Michele Barrett, Drucilla Cornell,
[6]
Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Gayle Rubin, and Iris Young. Although we do include the early work of some marxist feminists who later rejected marxist feminism in this volume, we have not represented post-marxist feminism because this work is widely published internationally and readily available. However, any full understanding of feminist debates over how to understand the materiality of women's lives should attend to post-marxist feminism because it has become the dominant discourse of western academic feminism. For this reason we address its pivotal role in the historical sketch of materialist feminism that follows.
At the crest of the second wave, feminist theorists working in critical engagement with marxism and the formation of the New Left in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States developed sustained and rigorous theories of women's place in patri-archy and capitalism. Socialist feminists argued for a theoretical and political analysis that would explain the systemic intersection of capitalism and patriarchy. The lines of division between radical and socialist feminism were often blurred during this early phase of feminism's second wave. But it is clear that the theoretical frameworks femi-nists devised were deeply affected by the marxist theory circulating in the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States, in first-world student and labor movements, in liberation struggles in Vietnam, China, and Cuba, and in the emergent New Left. Rejecting the "old Left" attachment to the Soviet Union and socialist parties, the New Left was an effort to acknowledge that capitalism succeeds in part because of the ways ideology permeates every aspect of daily life. And yet within New Left efforts to politicize the personal, women and women's interests were often ignored. Many of the founders of radical feminism were socialists frustrated by the refusal of men on the Left to address patriarchal systems of power. As Alice Echols's history of this period in U.S. feminism makes clear, much theoretical work in the early years of the second wave was done by feminists who wanted to elaborate and rework the New Left's analysis of global capitalism in order to explain the relationship between sex-gender structures and class.
During the early years of the second wave, socialist feminists, fortified by the bur-geoning feminist movement,. exerted new pressures on marxist theory and practice to reformulate the "woman question" by rethinking key categories of marxist logic, including production, reproduction, class, consciousness, and labor. They asserted that the classical marxist insights into history were gender blind and ignored women's con-tributions to social production, while feminist analysis-although strong regarding the systemic character of relations between the sexes-was often ahistorical and insuffi-ciently materialist. A marriage between marxism and feminism was called for. Debate turned on the terms of the arrangement.s The radical force of socialist feminism over the ensuing two decades derives from its refusal simply to graft the interests of women onto classical marxism. Instead, socialist feminists worked over certain marxist con-cepts in order to explain women's role in social reproduction and the integral function of patriarchal structures in the smooth operation of capital accumulation and in the formation of the state and consciousness. Socialist feminists typically argued that a fun-damental connection exists between women's struggle and the class struggle, and yet they also acknowledged that because capitalism is a social totality, this struggle is not confined to wage labor but is also fought out in culture.
By 1975 the systemic analysis characteristic of early radical and socialist feminism was already being displaced or recast as cultural feminism. Cultural feminism begins with the assumption that men and women are basically different. It aims to reverse
[7]
patriarchal systems of value that privilege male over female, focuses on the cultural fea-tures of patriarchal oppression, and primarily aims for reforms in this area. Unlike radical and socialist feminism, cultural feminism adamantly rejects the Left's critique of capitalism, emphasizes patriarchy as the root of women's oppression, celebrates women's rituals and spaces, and veers toward separatism. Even though it does not argue for women's equality with men, cultural feminism shares an ideological affilia-tion with liberal feminism and with liberalism generally in that it focuses exclusively on superstructural change. Maria Mies outlines the historical background and political implications of this point:
The belief in education, cultural action, or even cultural revolution as agents of social change is a typical belief of the urban middle class. With regard to the woman's ques-tion it is based on the assumption that women's oppression has nothing to do with the basic material production relations. ...This assumption is found more among Western, particularly American, feminists who usually do not talk of capitalism. For many Western feminists women's oppression is rooted in the culture of patriarchal civilization. For them, therefore, feminism is largely a cultural movement, a new ide-ology, or a new consciousness. (Mies 1986: 22)
In contrast to cultural feminists, materialist, socialist, and marxist feminists do not see culture as the whole of social life but rather as only one arena of social production and therefore as only one area for feminist struggle.
Although socialist and marxist feminism was germane to the political and theoreti-cal development of second-wave feminism, it wasn't until the late 1970s that the term "materialist feminism" came into circulation. The development of materialist feminism in the West is linked historically to the shift to cultural politics in western marxism post-1968, and some of the unevenness in its history, in particular the growing atten-tion to ideology, must be read in that context. Annette Kuhn, Anne Marie Wolpe, Michele Barrett, Mary MacIntosh in Britain, and Christine Delphy in France were among the initial promoters of materialist feminism. They favored this term over "marxist feminism" in order to emphasize the point that although marxism had not adequately addressed women's exploitation and oppression, a historical materialist analysis might be developed that would account for the sexual division of labor and the gendered formation of subjectivities. More than socialist feminism, materialist femi-nism was the conjuncture of several discourses-historical materialism, marxist and radical feminism, as well as postmodern and psychoanalytic theories of meaning and subjectivity. In drawing on post modern critiques of the humanist subject and neo-marxist theories of ideology, materialist feminism constituted a significant shift from the feminist debates of the early '70s, both radical and socialist alike.
By the mid-80s, the general terms of debate among first-world socialist and marxist feminists had drifted so far into theorizing women's oppression in terms of culture, consciousness, and ideology that concerns over how to explain the connection between patriarchy and capitalism, or the links between women's domestic labor and ideology had been all but abandoned. In an anthology like Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt's Feminist Criticism and Social Change ( 1985), for instance, it is clear that materialist feminism was beginning to mean "more attention to ideas, language and culture than in much traditional Marxist criticism" (xix) and that, even more than its
[8]
socialist and Marxist feminist relatives, materialist feminism in the United States was becoming primarily an academic discourse.
While the particulars of the history of marxist feminism in advanced capitalist countries vary, the drift toward cultural feminism and away from marxist feminism has been a general transnational trend.' Like other members of the New Left, many U.S. feminists rallying under the banner of materialism during the '80s were critical of the role of the university in the corporate state, even as they became the bearers of the uni-versity's class privilege (Ehrenreich 1990). Like other second-wave feminists, mostly white and middle-class, many U.S. women (and men) came into feminism through a fraught relationship to the academy. As student or young faculty activists, they chal-lenged the university's authority, tying the interests of technological experts and academic resear(hcrs to patriarchal power and to the military industrial complex dri-ving U.S. economic and imperialist ventures globally. Yet they also stood to benefit materially from the professional credentials the university offered. The dilemma for many feminists and marxists both turned on how to make a living in this institution without betraying their radical politics. For those who found their way out of this con-tradictory situation by becoming oppositional intellectuals on the margins of the university, the economic recession of the 1970s exacted heavy penalties. By the '80s, however, many socialist and marxist feminists working in or near universities and col-leges not only had been almost thoroughly integrated into the professional middle class, but also had abandoned historical materialism's class analysis. It is worth noting here that the relationship of the contest over knowledge in this phase of the postmod-ern academy's history to changes in the welfare state and in the relations of production globally remains an unwritten chapter in late feminism's class history.
While materialist feminism emerged out of western marxism, it also drew on and helped to formulate postmodernism's critique of empiricism and of the individual as an autonomous and coherent self. We understand postmodernism as a historical crisis accompanying the shifts in relations of production under late capitalism. It is symptomatic that this crisis has been most attended to in the West in terms of cultural changes, including challenges to empiricism and the Cartesian self played out primarily in avant-garde fiction and poetry, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and history. Understood in historical and materialist terms, however, postmodernism is not just a matter of disruptions occurring at the level of culture. Rather, these cultural changes are bound up with, and to some degree even caused by, crises in capital's divi-sions of labor and neoimperialist arrangements. Postmodernism, in other words, is an effect both of shifts in production from the first to the two-thirds world and of techno-logical developments, especially microprocessing, that have made possible the rapid movement of capital and new forms of work; at the same time postmodernism is an effect of the dismantling of empire and its neoimperialist reconfiguration in the second half of the twentieth century. As the cultural logic of these late capitalist conditions, postmodernism is also deeply embedded in patriarchal structures upon which capital's multinational reach depends. For example, the recruitment of middle-class women into the newly formed service professions of overdeveloped sectors-into education and middle management-has depended upon the accompanying recruitment of two-thirds world women into the production lines in the maquilladora, the Pacific rim, and the sweat-shops of the United States. The colonization of the unconscious promoted through advertising and high-tech telecommunications produces desire and sexuality,
[9]
family and femininity in modalities that commodify women's bodies and labor as the property of men, even as some women are allowed more freedom to exert their "inde-pendence" in the competitive marketplace.
Marxist feminism sees in much postmodern theory a refusal to acknowledge the his-torical dimensions of postmodemism and a limited and partial notion of the social-in Marx's words, an effort to fight phrases only with phrases. Deconstruction's critique of western metaphysics, for instance, which has served as a matrix for much postmodern feminist cultural theory, sees the social as primarily textual and sees meaning as the effect of the radical instability of language." Many cultural materialists who have cri-tiqued or distanced themselves from deconstruction's textual analysis, however, also make use of theoretical frameworks that tend to reduce social life to representation, albeit a much more socially grounded understanding of language as discourse.' In con-trast, historical materialist (marxist) feminists aim to make visible the reasons why representations of identity are changing, why they do not take the same forms they did a century or even fifty years ago, and how these changes in identity are connected to historical shifts in the production of life under late capitalism.
Marxist feminism is a critically engaged feminist standpoint, forged in part through the struggle over knowledge with other feminist perspectives. One stake in the struggle over materialism in feminist theory now is professional feminism's class alliance. If a shared commitment within feminism to the improvement of women's lives exists, there is no shared agreement that feminism necessarily involves combatting capital-ism's class system. Increasingly, work that claims the signature "materialist feminism" shares much in common with cultural feminism, in that it does not set out to explain or change the material realities that link women's oppression to class. Many "materialist feminists" do not even consider themselves socialists. As the quote from Maria Mies we cited earlier suggests, however, marxist feminists do connect women's oppression to capitalism as a class system and refuse to limit feminist practice to changing forms of consciousness or discourse. We see this book as an effort to reinsert into materialist feminism-especially materialist feminism in those overdeveloped sectors where this collection will be most widely read-those ( untimely) marxist feminist knowledges that the drift to cultural politics in postmodern feminism has suppressed. It is our hope that in so doing this project will contribute to the emergence of feminism's third wave and its revival as a critical force for transformative social change.
