Materialist feminism is a theoretical current of

radical feminism Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other ...

that was formed around the French magazine '' Questions féministes''. It is characterized by the use of conceptual tools from

Marxism Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...

—notably

historical materialism Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of Class society, class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. Karl Marx stated that Productive forces, techno ...

—to theorize

patriarchy Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of authority are primarily held by men. The term ''patriarchy'' is used both in anthropology to describe a family or clan controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males, and in fem ...

and its abolition. Materialist feminism understands sex and

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

as social constructs that are produced through reproductive exploitation and domestic subordination. Its body of literature includes an analysis of women's work within marriage and in the formal economy, criticism of other streams of feminism, deconstruction of sexuality and advocacy for an autonomous women's movement. Jennifer Wicke defines materialist feminism as "a feminism that insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of

hierarchy, develop... materialist feminism avoids seeing this gender hierarchy as the effect of a singular... patriarchy and instead gauges the web of social and psychic relations that make up a material, historical moment".

History

The term materialist feminism emerged in the late 1970s and is associated with key thinkers such as Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, and Monique Wittig. Rosemary Hennessy traces the history of materialist feminism in the work of British and French feminists who preferred the term materialist feminism to

Marxist feminism Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxism, Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. A ...

. In their view, Marxism had to be altered to be able to explain the sexual division of labor. Marxism was inadequate to the task because of its class bias and focus on production.

Feminism Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...

was also problematic due to its essentialist concept of woman. Material feminism then emerged as a positive substitute to both Marxism and feminism and pointed out the unequal distribution of social resources. ''The Grand Domestic Revolution'' by Dolores Hayden is a reference. Hayden describes material feminism at that time as reconceptualizing the relationship between the private household space and public space by presenting collective options to take the "burden" off women in regard to housework,

cooking Cooking, also known as cookery or professionally as the culinary arts, is the art, science and craft of using heat to make food more palatable, digestible, nutritious, or Food safety, safe. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely, from ...

, and other traditional female domestic jobs.

Margaret Benston Margaret "Maggie" Lowe Benston (1937–1991) was a professor of chemistry, computing science, and women's studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was a respected feminist and labour activist, as well as ...

presents a similar sentiment in her 1969 article, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” stating that the material basis for discrimination against women will be gone when household work is moved from the private to the public sector. However, Benston argues that without actual freedom from housework, it is likely impossible for true equality to exist in job opportunity. A change to communal eating places, she argues, may simply mean that women are moved from a home kitchen to a communal one, not truly freeing them from the burden of domestic labor. As feminism became

postfeminism Postfeminism (alternatively rendered as post-feminism) is an alleged decrease in popular support for feminism from the 1990s onwards. It can be considered a critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, femininity and po ...

, the notion of femininity was "problematized, rather than taken as a given", says Stevi Jackson. The cultural turn of the 1990s aimed to push the boundaries of what the category of "woman" was. Feminists then began to focus on the language of oppression, and materialist feminism lost its prominence.

Relation to Marxist feminism

is focused on investigating and explaining the ways in which women are oppressed through systems of

capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by ...

and

private property Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental Capacity (law), legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which is owned by a state entity, and from Collective ownership ...

. As stated previously, materialist feminism was developed as an improvement upon Marxism, as it was felt that Marxist feminism failed to address division of labor, especially in the household. The current concept has its roots in

socialist Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

and Marxist feminism; Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, who are editors of ''Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives'', describe material feminism as the "conjuncture of several discourses—historical materialism, Marxist and

, as well as

postmodernist Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, Culture, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting ...

and

psychoanalytic PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious processes and their influence on conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on dream interpretation, psychoanalysis is also a talk the ...

theories of meaning and subjectivity".

Theory

Christine Delphy affirms that materialism is the only theory of history that views

oppression Oppression is malicious or unjust treatment of, or exercise of power over, a group of individuals, often in the form of governmental authority. Oppression may be overt or covert, depending on how it is practiced. No universally accepted model ...

as a basic reality of women's lives, which is why women (and other oppressed groups) need materialism to investigate their situation. For her, "to start from oppression defines a materialist approach, oppression is a materialist concept". However, the Marxist distinction between production and reproduction is harshly criticized. For materialist feminists, constructing a theory of patriarchy that reduces women's work to reproduction ends up reaffirming the patriarchal ideology. Delphy theorizes two modes of production in our society: industrial and domestic. The first mode allows for capitalist exploitation, while the second allows for familial and patriarchal exploitation. She argues that the domestic mode of production is the material basis of gender oppression, and that

marriage Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognised union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children (if any), and b ...

is a labor contract that gives men the right to exploit women. Materialist feminists reject that women's oppression has any natural basis. Instead, it is conceived as strictly cultural, and

sex assignment Sex assignment (also known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant's sex, typically made at birth based on an examination of the baby's external genitalia by a healthcare provider such as a midwife, nurse, or physician. In the v ...

would be a means to realize it. They are therefore opposed to any discourse that attempts to explain the situation of women by some internal characteristic of this group, in particular those of an

anatomical Anatomy () is the branch of morphology concerned with the study of the internal structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old scien ...

nature, such as the capacity to give birth or a physical weakness of women relative to men, as well as those of a psychological or psychoanalytic nature, which presuppose a different psyche for men and women. A common target of their criticism is what they call ''néo-féminité'': the celebration of

femininity Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and Gender roles, roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as Social construction of gender, socially constructed, and there is also s ...

proposed by

difference feminism Difference feminism is a term developed during the equality-versus-difference debate in American feminism to describe the view that men and women are different, but that no value judgment can be placed upon them and both sexes have equal moral s ...

Criticism

The relationship between materialism and feminism has been described as "problematic" and regarded as an "unhappy couple". There has also been a concern for the general ambiguity of materialist feminism. It has been called to question whether the differentiation between materialist feminism and Marxist feminism is great enough to be a worthwhile contribution to feminist theory. Christine Delphy's contributions to materialist feminism have also been the subject of criticism, for example by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. They suggest that the definition of materialism feminism has a very loose interpretation of patriarchy and that Delphy's article "Towards a Materialist Feminism" has a focus limited to the oppression of wives and fails to connect this to the global oppression of women in general. However, the main criticism for materialist feminism involves the lack of

intersectionality Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these intersecting and overlapping factor ...

within the theory. By focusing on capitalist relations combined with patriarchy, materialist feminism fails to include women of different classes, sexualities, and

ethnicities An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, rel ...

. Hazel Carby challenged the materialist feminist analyses of the family as universally oppressive to all women. She instead noted the ways that values of the family are different for black women and men, just as the division of labor is also racialized. Rosemary Hennessy comments on how there has recently been pressure to recognize the differences within the definition of "woman" and how this intersects with not only class, but race, sexualities, and genders. Stevi Jackson calls concern towards the recent resurgence of materialist interest, stating that many of the new ideas were reducing the material to capitalist ideas, and that "this might bring us full circle back to the least productive forms of 1970s Marxism". In recent years, materialist feminist thoughts have attempted to focus on transnational issues. Scholars consider a global economic change in relation to the

feminization of poverty Feminization of poverty refers to a trend of increasing economic inequality, inequality in living standards between men and women due to the widening gender pay gap, gender gap in poverty. This phenomenon largely links to how women and children ar ...

. Feminist scholars are also working to create a transnational feminist agenda. For example, Hennessy analyzes grassroots organizations in four

maquiladora A (), or (), is a factory that is largely duty (economics), duty free and tariff free. These factories take raw materials and assemble, manufacture, or process them and export the finished product. These factories and systems are present thro ...

communities along Mexico's northern border. The research claims that the global nature of patriarchy and capitalism sustains a "political economy of sex".

Leading figures

* Christine Delphy * Colette Guillaumin * Rosemary Hennessy * Stevi Jackson * Diana Leonard * Nicole-Claude Mathieu * Monique Plaza * Paola Tabet * Monique Wittig

References