What's material about materialist feminism?
A Marxist Feminist Critique

Martha E. Gimenez

In the heady days of the Women's Liberation Movement, it was possible to identify four main currents within feminist thought: Liberal (concerned with attaining economic and political equality within the context of capitalism); Radical (focused on men and patriarchy as the main causes of the oppression of women); Socialist (critical of capitalism and Marxism, so much so that avoidance of Marxism's alleged reductionisms resulted in dual systems theories postulating various forms of interaction between capitalism and patriarchy); and Marxist Feminism (a theoretical position held by relatively few feminists in the USA - myself included - which sought to develop the potential of Marxist theory to understand the capitalist sources of the oppression of women).

These are, of course, oversimplified descriptions of a rich and complex body of literature; however, they reflected important theoretical, political and social cleavages among women that continue to this day. Divisions in feminist thought multiplied as the effects of poststructuralist and postmodern theorizing emerged alongside grassroots challenges to a feminism perceived as the expression of the needs and concerns of middle- and upper-middle-class white `First World' women. In the process, the subject of feminism became increasingly difficult to define. The postmodern critique of `woman' as an essentialist category, together with critiques grounded in sexual preference, racial, ethnic and national origin differences, resulted in a seemingly never-ending proliferation of `subject positions', `identities' and `voices'. Cultural and identity politics replaced the early focus on capitalism and (among Marxist Feminists primarily) class divisions among women. Today class has been reduced to another `ism' - that is, to another form of oppression which, together with gender and race, integrates a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorizing and research; though, to my knowledge, theorizing about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection).

I was, therefore, very interested to read, a few years ago, a call for papers for a volume on Materialist Feminism (MatFem). The description of MatFem put forward by the editors, Chrys Ingraham and Rosemary Hennessy, was to me indistinguishable from Marxist Feminism (MarxFem). This seemed such a promising development in feminist theory that I proceeded to invite the editors to join me in creating an electronic discussion list on Materialist Feminism, MatFem (http: //csf.colorado.edu/matfem). Initially, I thought that MatFem was simply another way of referring to MarxFem, but I was mistaken; the two are distinct forms of feminist theorizing. There are, however, such similarities between them in some feminists' work that some degree of confusion between the two is to be expected.

In this article, I will identify the differences between these two important currents within feminist theory, and the reasons for the return of feminist appeals to materialism at a time when the theoretical shift towards idealism and contingency seems hegemonic in the academy. Given the conflicting views that coexist under the materialist cover, I will argue for a clear break between Materialist and Marxist Feminisms, and for a return to the latter necessitated by the devastating effects of capitalism on women and the consequent political importance of a theoretically adequate analysis of the causes of their plight.

What is Materialist Feminism?

To define MatFem is not an easy task. Theorists who self-identify as Materialist or as Marxist Feminists differ in their understanding of what these labels mean and, consequently, the kind of knowledges they produce. Depending on their theoretical allegiances and self-understanding, feminists may differ in their classification of other feminists' works, so that clear lines of theoretical demarcation between and within these two umbrella terms are somewhat difficult to establish. Take, for example, Lise Vogel's work.1 I always considered Vogel a Marxist Feminist because, unlike Socialist Feminists (whose avoidance of Marx's alleged reductionisms led them to postulate ahistorical theories of patriarchy),2 she took Marxism seriously and her analysis of reproduction as a basis for the oppression of women is firmly grounded within the Marxist tradition. However, the subtitle of her recent book (a collection of previously published essays), is `Essays for a Materialist Feminism'. Self-identifying as a Socialist Feminist, she states that Socialist Feminists `sought to replace the socialist tradition's theorizing about the woman question with a "materialist" understanding of women's oppression'.3 This is certainly news to me: Socialist Feminism's rejection of Marx's and Marxism's `reductionism' led to the deliberate effort to ground `patriarchy' outside the mode of production and consequently - from the standpoint of Marxist theory - outside history. Materialism, Vogel tells us, was used to highlight the key role of production - including domestic production - in determining the conditions leading to the oppression of women. Materialism was also used as `a flag', to situate Socialist Feminism within feminist thought and within the Left; Materialist Feminism, Vogel argues, cannot therefore be reduced to a trend in cultural studies, as some literary critics would prefer.4 But wasn't Engels's analysis materialist?5 And didn't Marxist Feminists (Margaret Benston6 and Peggy Morton7 come to mind) explore the ways production - public and domestic - oppressed and exploited women?

These brief comments about Vogel's understanding of MatFem highlight some of its problematic aspects as a term intended to identify a specific trend within feminist theory. It can blur, as it does in this instance, the qualitative differences that existed and continue to exist between Socialist Feminism, the dominant strand of feminist thought in the USA during the late 1960s and 1970s, and the marginalized Marxist Feminism. I am not imputing such motivations to Lise Vogel; I am simply pointing out the effects of such an interpretation of US Socialist Feminism, which, despite the use of Marxist terms and references to capitalism, developed theoretically as a sort of feminist abstract negation of Marxism.

Other feminists, for different reasons, would also disagree with Vogel's interpretation. For Toril Moi and Janice Radway, for example, the relationship between Socialist Feminism and MatFem is `far from clear'.8 As editors of a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly dedicated to this topic, they do not offer a theory or a clear definition of the term. Presumably, the issue's content will give the reader the elements necessary to define the term for herself, because all the authors `share a commitment to concrete historical and cultural analysis, and to feminism understood as an "emancipatory narrative".'9 One of these authors, Jennifer Wicke, defines MatFem as follows:

a feminism that insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of gender 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; ... materialist feminism argues that material conditions of all sorts play a vital role in the social production of gender and assays the different ways in which women collaborate and participate in these productions ... there are areas of material interest in the fact that women can bear children.... Materialist feminism ... is less likely than social constructionism to be embarrassed by the occasional material importance of sex differences.10

Insistence on the importance of material conditions; material historical moments as a complex of social relations which include and influence gender hierarchy; the materiality of the body and its sexual, reproductive and other biological functions: these remain, however, abstract pronouncements which unavoidably lead to an empiricist focus on the immediately given. There is no theory of history, of social relations or of the production of gender hierarchies that could give guidance about the meaning of whatever is observed in a given `material historical moment'.

Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, authors of Materialist Feminisms,11 tell us that theirs is a book `about feminism and Marxism', examining the debates between feminism and Marxism in the USA and Britain and exploring the implications of those debates for literary and cultural theory. The terrain of those early debates, which were aimed at a possible integration or synthesis between Marxism and feminism, shifted due to the emergence of identity politics, concern with postcolonialism, sexuality, race, nationalism, and so on, and the impact of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The new terrain has to do with the `construction of a materialist analysis of culture informed by and responsive to the concerns of women, as well as people of colour and other marginalized groups'.12 For Landry and Maclean, MatFem is a