She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston.

During her time in graduate school, she became involved in the anti-war and civil rights movements and she worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi between 1964 and 1965.

In the late 60's, she participated in the emerging women's liberation movement, taking the side of its socialist feminist wing, and joined the organization Bread & Roses in Boston.

As an art historian, Lise Vogel conducted research on Roman Imperial relief sculpture in her first Ph.D., which was published in the monograph The Column of Antoninus Pius[2] and many articles.

[citation needed] After the publication of Marxism and the Oppression of Women, she kept working on the development of Marxist-feminist theory, focusing on family, maternity, workplace and gender policies among other topics.

The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.”[6] This legacy continued with the works of August Bebel, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling and has been inherited by the dual system socialist feminists.

Yet, Marx introduces the eloquent idea that capitalist production needs the constant reproduction of the workers through the transformation of the means of subsistence into the labor power.

[7] Lise Vogel’s contribution is precisely to situate women’s oppression and domestic labor in this scheme, founding what would later be called the Social Reproduction Theory.

On the other hand, the difference approach affirms that special rights are required for women, including a specific protection in their maternity leave, in order to achieve real equality.

[8] Vogel argues in favor of transcending this debate, proposing a gender neutrality perspective based on the concept of diversity that combines respect for differences with commitment to equality using gender-neutral legal rules.

According to Ferguson and McNally, the only significant scholar response to the first edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women, which is Lise Vogel's most important book, was written by the socialist feminist Johanna Brenner.

[11] Moreover, she claims that due to their economistic reading of Marx's Capital and also as a result of their tendency to abstraction, marxist-feminists don't pay enough attention to race and ethnicity.

They ignore "the specificity of differential exploitation that actually exists in an economic organization" and, she continues, "not even functionally [do] they apply the categories of "race" and ethnicity and attend to practices of racism to augment their understanding of capital".

[13] According to Ferguson and McNally, if Vogel's work didn't initially get the attention it deserved is because it "appeared at a moment of acute disarray for the socialist-feminist movement […] [with] neoliberalism in the political sphere and postmodern theory in the intellectual realm".