Marxist, liberal and postmodern feminism

1. Marxist feminism

Cause of inequality

Women’s subordination is rooted in class society and capitalism. Gender inequality is a by-product of the system of private property and will end only when capitalism ends.

Engels: the starting point

Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawing on Lewis Henry Morgan, argued that in early communal societies women had considerable standing. The rise of private property, especially herds and later land, made men want to pass property to their own sons. Monogamous marriage and control of women’s sexuality followed: the “world historical defeat of the female sex”. Liberation would require women’s entry into social production and the abolition of private property.

How capitalism uses women

• Reproduction of labour power: unpaid domestic work feeds, clothes and cares for the present workforce and raises the next one, at no cost to capital. Margaret Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation” (1969), began the domestic labour debate.
• Reserve army of labour: women are drawn into paid work in booms and wars and pushed out in slumps (Veronica Beechey).
• Absorbing frustration: the wife acts as a safety valve who soaks up the worker’s anger at exploitation, so that it is not turned on the employer (Fran Ansley).
• Ideology: the family and the “housewife” role are presented as natural, hiding their economic function.

The Wages for Housework campaign (Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, 1972; Silvia Federici, 1975) demanded that domestic labour be recognised as work.

Socialist feminism

Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (1979), argued that Marxism is “sex-blind”: its categories explain why there are workers but not why women occupy the lower places. She proposed a dual systems theory: capitalism and patriarchy are two interlocking systems.

Criticism

• Patriarchy predates capitalism and survived in State-socialist countries.
• Reduces gender to class; ignores men’s own interest in women’s domestic work.
• Radical feminists reply that patriarchy, not capitalism, is the primary oppression.

2. Liberal feminism

Cause of inequality

Women are held back by prejudice, stereotyping and unequal laws and opportunities, not by any deep structure. Men and women share the same capacity for reason and should have the same rights.

Key thinkers

• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): education.
• J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869): the legal subordination of women is wrong in itself and a hindrance to human improvement.
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963), and the founding of the National Organization for Women (1966).
• Sociologists such as Ann Oakley on gender socialisation: girls and boys are taught different roles from birth.

Programme

• Equal political and civil rights: vote, property, divorce.
• Equal access to education and employment; equal pay; anti-discrimination law.
• Changing socialisation, textbooks and media images.
• Gradual reform through the existing State.

In India the liberal programme is visible in Articles 14, 15(3), 16 and 39(d) of the Constitution, the Equal Remuneration provisions now in the Code on Wages, 2019, maternity benefit now in the Code on Social Security, 2020 (both in force from 21 November 2025), and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013.

Criticism

• Middle-class, white, Western: equal access to the boardroom matters little to women in poverty (bell hooks).
• Leaves structures untouched: legal equality coexists with the double burden of paid and domestic work.
• Accepts male norms: asks women to become like men in the public sphere.

3. Postmodern feminism

Cause of inequality

Inequality is produced through language and discourse, which construct “woman” as the opposite and lesser term of “man”. Postmodern feminists also reject the idea of a single category “woman” with one shared experience, and they distrust grand theories (including Marxist and liberal feminism) that claim to explain all women’s oppression.

Key thinkers

• Simone de Beauvoir (forerunner): woman as the Other.
• Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975): écriture féminine, writing from the female body against phallocentric language; binary oppositions (man/woman, reason/emotion, culture/nature) always rank the masculine first.
• Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), and Julia Kristeva.
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990): gender is performative, created by the repeated performance of acts, not an inner essence. Even “sex” is discursively produced.

Programme

• Deconstruct binaries (drawing on Derrida) and expose how discourses of medicine, law and media fix gender (drawing on Foucault).
• Celebrate difference and multiple identities; politics of subversion and parody.

Criticism

• If there is no category “woman”, there is no subject for feminist politics.
• Abstract and academic; little to say about material inequality, wages, violence.
• Relativism: no ground for saying that one practice is oppressive.

4. Comparison

How this is examined

For “Examine liberal and postmodern feminism” (August 2024, April 2022), write the two schools under the four heads and finish with the comparison table; the word “examine” needs the criticism. “Explain the Marxist feminist theory” (October 2023): Engels, reproduction of labour power, reserve army, the domestic labour debate, Hartmann, criticism. The April 2022 paper paired “Marxist feminism and Black feminism”; use this note with the next one.