Socialist Feminism

SOCIALIST FEMINISM. In the mid-1960s, women in the US civil rights and New Left movements began to apply their movements’ radical visions of freedom and equality to their own lives. The women’s liberation movement that resulted, passionate and iconoclastic, conceptualized feminism in ways that went well beyond earlier women’s rights movements. Participants developed diverse views of women’s liberation, among them socialist feminism. By the end of the decade, socialist feminism had consolidated into a distinct trend within the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.

Socialist feminists hoped to meld a materialist analysis of class domination with the best insights of radical feminism—its searing critique of male domination, its insistence that the personal is political, its creative development of nonhierarchical structures, its strategy of organizational autonomy, and its commitment to free sexual expression. Rejecting the liberal feminist goal of individual assimilation into an implicitly white middle-class mainstream, socialist feminists adopted a then-common analytical framework that recognized race, class and gender as major axes of difference. This race/class/gender conceptualization actually went back to a tradition revealed in the writings and speeches of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black women activists. It took sharper forms during the 1930s and 1940s, as Black and white women within the US Communist Party debated the role of women in social change. Decades later, when the movements of the post-Cold War 1960s emerged, the race/class/gender framework remained available, even while most activists were unaware of its roots.

The socialist-feminist movement rejected traditional left analyses that subsumed issues of racism and sexism within the class struggle, or postponed women’s liberation until after the socialist revolution, when all problems would somehow be automatically resolved. The theoretical and strategic questions socialist feminism posed to and for the Left thus converged, to some extent, with those long posed by the Black movement within the United States, and by national liberation movements around the world. As socialist feminists attempted to chart a path linking class and gender, they often found themselves condemned by leftists as “bourgeois individualists” motivated by “identity politics,” or scorned by radical feminists as “male-identified politicos.” Nevertheless, they persisted.

Most American socialist feminists hardly differentiated between Marxist and non-Marxist socialisms, in this way reflecting the weakness of left traditions in the United States. They agreed that the socialist tradition paid important, if insufficient, attention to the so-called woman question. At the same time they noted that it did not provide adequate theoretical or historical accounts of women’s situation, much less practical guidance in the struggle for women’s liberation. And they differed among themselves, often widely, on the interpretation of these inadequacies as well as on just which of the tradition’s elements remain useful and how to develop more adequate analyses and practice.
Socialist feminism took a variety of organizational forms. Socialist feminists formed women’s health collectives that critiqued profit-making health care and developed self-help alternatives.

Consciousness-raising groups, which were a central focus of the women’s liberation movement, provided an exhilarating opportunity for leftist women to think politically on their own. Local socialist-feminist collectives worked with poor and working-class women in factories and communities, seeking to raise consciousness while fighting for maternity benefits and child care or staffing battered women’s shelters. Citywide socialist-feminist women’s unions initiated campaigns for reproductive rights and against sterilization abuse. A national network of study groups pledged to dissolve the tensions between its members’ Marxism and their feminism.

Many socialist feminists also participated in the broader women’s and mass movements of the time; they became active in local feminist groupings, in national organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and in antiwar, antinuclear, environmental, electoral, and other progressive campaigns. In the legal and policy arenas, socialist-feminist lawyers and activists worked to develop strategies that would go beyond the narrow individualism of traditional liberal feminism. Socialist feminists also played a leading role in the early development of women’s studies in colleges and universities.

Some socialist feminists chose to work within left organizations. One group, the New American Movement, described itself from the start as socialist-feminist, and others attempted to deal consistently with issues of women’s liberation. But most left organizations retained a traditional skepticism toward feminism, even in its newly elaborated socialist-feminist variant. Left groups made up of men and women were especially nervous about socialist feminism’s critique of relations in the so-called private sphere, its views on the family, its commitment to the organizational autonomy of the women’s movement, and its endorsement of gay rights and a freer sexuality. Feminists who were members of such organizations often paid the heavy price of isolation from the socialist-feminist community without being compensated by support for their efforts from within the group.

From the start, socialist feminists sought to develop a theoretical foundation that would underpin their myriad practical activities. First in the form of papers, pamphlets, and articles in movement newspapers or magazines, then increasingly as books and scholarly articles, socialist-feminist theoretical work proliferated. One of the main questions socialist-feminist theorists addressed concerned the sources of women’s subordination. Women’s activities in the family household constituted, some suggested, the material basis of female oppression. Early socialist-feminist theorists tried to use traditional Marxist categories to examine this “domestic labor.” What came to be called the domestic labor debate was heavily criticized, however, as narrow and abstruse. Many proposed that women’s experience might better be understood through the concept of patriarchy, imported from radical feminism. By the early 1980s, the predominant view among socialist feminists was that women are trapped within two coordinate systems of oppression, capitalism and patriarchy. In turn, this approach was censured for its simplistic dualism and for its tendency to leave the analysis of capitalism to an unreconstructed traditional Marxist analysis.

The attempt to generate an integrated Marxist-feminist theoretical framework for the analysis of capitalist patriarchy produced a great deal of frustration among socialist feminists. U.S. efforts to develop socialist-feminist theory were hampered by isolation from the renaissance of Marxist thought that had been flourishing in Europe since the early 1960s, and by a general impatience with theory; in addition, the repressive rightward political shifts of the post-Vietnam era quickly undercut the previous decade’s radical optimism. In the more realistic mood of the late 1970s, socialist feminists recognized that the ambiguities of women’s experience required a more subtle analytical approach. Many rejected the conceptual frameworks that had led to what they now saw as an “unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism.” They turned instead to historically rooted empirical studies, to more eclectic approaches to theory, or to new philosophical orientations that challenged conventional assumptions about the objectivity and certainty of knowledge. Those socialist feminists who retained the goal of developing a Marxist-feminist theoretical synthesis undertook the task with a more sophisticated awareness of its multitiered complexity.

Socialist-feminist organizations were generally small and short-lived, never able to consolidate the resources and stability of mainstream feminist groups such as NOW. In the 1970s, economic recession, political repression, and internal divisions took a heavy toll on the radical social movements that had emerged in the previous decade. Some socialist feminists concluded that their movement had died, but many argued that although weakened it survived in altered form. All agreed that the gap between socialist-feminist practical and theoretical activities was widening. Socialist-feminist activists continued to participate in women’s organizations, progressive campaigns, and the Left. Socialist-feminist intellectuals, increasingly settled in academia, pursued research and teaching agendas that were sometimes more determined by disciplinary boundaries and the demands of tenure than by practical questions of social change. Most important, new generations of feminists were coming of age who had never known the organic personal connections between activism and theorizing that had been an everyday experience in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, feminist academics often deployed a socialist-feminist framework as they addressed a broad range of concerns: the material basis for and history of women’s subordination; the specificity of sexism as opposed to racism or class subordination; the diversity among women, flowing especially from differences of class, race, and ethnicity, but also from distinctions of age, ability, and sexuality; the relationship between Marxism and feminism; the role of families in societal reproduction; the place of women workers in the economy; the interplay of sexuality, consciousness, and ideology; the construction, reproduction, and representation of gendered subjectivity. Socialist-feminist scholars were also active in developing radical critiques of the traditional academic disciplines.

Research on the politics of women’s liberation was especially significant. Socialist feminists analyzed the concept of equality, both examining its origins in liberal political theory and affirming its radical potential. They investigated women’s activism in earlier social movements, thereby placing contemporary feminist politics in historical context. Socialist-feminist studies of women in Third World countries emphasized the dangers of projecting Western concepts of the politics of women’s liberation onto societies with sharply distinct histories and realities. The question of women’s liberation in socialist societies was a matter of great interest and debate among socialist feminists, for socialist societies provide an opportunity to examine the relationship between feminism and socialism as it develops in actual historical processes. Socialist feminists offered a diversity of views on both the obstacles to and the prospects for women’s liberation in socialist societies.

Despite its commitment to an analysis that included all women, socialist feminism was a mostly white and middle-class movement. Black and other women of color generally remained at a distance from organized feminism, even in its socialist-feminist variant, as did most working-class and poor women. Nonetheless, starting in the early 1960s a practical version of feminism took hold at the grass-roots level among women in poor, working-class, Black, and Third World communities throughout the United States. Although generally refusing to call themselves feminists, unprecedented numbers of these women were active on behalf of themselves, their families, and their communities. They joined unions, fought for day care and better schooling, sued employers for sex discrimination and sexual harassment, and formed the backbone of a burgeoning welfare rights movement. Strong, motivated, and persevering, such women embodied in their activism an implicitly socialist-feminist analysis of women’s subordination as enmeshed in systems of race, class, and gender subordination.

The grass-roots activism of the 1960s was complemented by the emergence in the 1970s of networks of progressive feminists of color committed to developing theoretical as well as practical work around such concerns. For example, the Combahee River Collective, a small group of Black lesbian feminists, penned an influential manifesto that offered, without using the term, an intersectional analysis consistent with socialist feminism. In the 1980s and after, Black and Latina feminist scholars more and more found employment in the academy. As they became skilled activists within their departments, universities and professional associations, as well as important public intellectuals, many brought with them a socialist-feminist perspective.

Through their activities over more than five decades, socialist-feminist organizations and individuals have had a profound and enduring effect. Within the Left, questions of gender subordination were generally taken more seriously than in the past. Fewer left organizations dismissed feminism as mere bourgeois individualism, although their assimilation of socialist-feminist analysis may be limited. Some left periodicals assumed socialist-feminist perspectives in their editorial policies and regularly publish important socialist-feminist analyses. Within the mainstream women’s movement, issues of race and class were often addressed as a matter of course. NOW, for example, sometimes transcended its liberal individualist origins by conducting campaigns that oppose economic inequalities among women. Socialist-feminist perspectives and concerns spread well beyond their origins in the women’s liberation movement. Socialist feminism not only contributed importantly to efforts on behalf of all women, but in many ways set the terms of a new feminist discourse.

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