Socialist feminism

[1] However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s.

Socialist feminists attempted to integrate the fight for women's liberation with the struggle against other oppressive systems based on race, class, sexual orientation, or economic status.

One place that this is shown is in his third Parisian manuscript of 1844, where he states that "marriage is a form of exclusive private property", and condones treating women "as the prey and servant of social lust".

[8] Despite some claims, he has never been found to argue that the creation of a classless society would lead to gender oppression vanishing; instead evidence exists which suggest that he viewed female struggles as something independent.

According to Bhavani and Coulson, race, class, and gender are inextricably linked, and the exclusion of any one of these factors from one's worldview would result in an incomplete understanding of the systems of privilege and oppression they say constitute our society.

Girls and women, according to Tristan, thus cannot obtain gainful employment outside of the domestic sphere due to their neglect in their education and forced preoccupation with cleaning, cooking, and tending to children.

Households that cannot hire additional aid for domestic duties limit the hours women are able to work outside their homes—having to do both outside and inside labor results in the uncompensated "second shift", expanding the gap.

The idea of a contract for husbands to pay their wives is an exaggerated circumstance yet for decades it was the expectation that the woman would be considered a housewife and the man would be the breadwinner and make decisions for the family.

"[27] Anarcha-feminism began with late 19th and early 20th century authors and theorists such as anarchist feminists Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Lucy Parsons.

[28] In the Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-feminist group, Mujeres Libres (Free Women) linked to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, organized to defend both anarchist and feminist ideas,[29] while the prominent Spanish anarchist and feminist leader Federica Montseny held that the "emancipation of women would lead to a quicker realization of the social revolution" and that "the revolution against sexism would have to come from intellectual and militant 'future-women.'

[35][36] Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the social institutions of private property and capitalism to explain and criticize gender inequality and oppression.

According to Marxist feminists, private property gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political and domestic struggle between the sexes, and is the root of women's oppression in the current social context.

He argues that a woman's subordination is not a result of her biological disposition but of social relations, and that men's efforts to achieve their demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties have gradually solidified and become institutionalized in the nuclear family.

Ultimately, Engels traces these phenomena to the recent development of exclusive control of private property by the patriarchs of the rising slaveowner class in the ancient mode of production, and the attendant desire to ensure that their inheritance is passed only to their own offspring: chastity and fidelity are rewarded, says Engels, because they guarantee exclusive access to the sexual and reproductive faculty of women possessed by men from the property-owning class.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Clara Zetkin and Eleanor Marx were against the demonization of men and supported a proletariat revolution that would overcome as many male–female inequalities as possible.

As their movement already had the most radical demands in women's equality, most Marxist leaders, including Clara Zetkin[38][39] and Alexandra Kollontai,[40][41] counterposed Marxism against bourgeois feminism, rather than trying to combine them.

Orthodox Marxists view the later attempt to combine Marxism and feminism as a liberal creation of academics and reformist leftists who want to make alliances with bourgeois feminists.

Certainly not the woman worker.Kollontai was a prominent leader in the Bolshevik party in Russia, defending her stance on how capitalism had shaped a rather displeasing and oppressing position for females that are part of its system.

[50] In keeping with her unusual position during her time, she also kept diaries of her plans and ideas on moving towards a more "modern" society where socialism would help uproot that of capitalism and the oppression that different groups of gender and class had been facing.

[51] Kollontai's most pertinent presence in feminist socialism was her stance on reproductive rights and her view on women being allowed the same luxuries that men have in finding love not only to be stable and supported, and to also be able to make their own money and be secure on their own two feet.

[53] A series of articles written against Inman's ideas appeared in the party's literary monthly, The New Masses, and the polemic was extended with the publication of a pamphlet by A. Landy, Marxism and the Woman Question.

Although most of Haraway's earlier work was focused on emphasizing the masculine bias in scientific culture, she has also contributed greatly to feminist narratives of the twentieth century.

Using a term coined by theorist Chela Sandoval, Haraway writes that "oppositional consciousness" is comparable with a cyborg politics, because rather than identity it stresses how affinity comes as a result of "otherness, difference, and specificity" (p. 156).

This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind" Defined as a post-gender world, this cyborg represents the idea that there can by a dystopian future in which gender, religion and race are not dismissed but are not factors in how members of this society treat each other.

She situates the institutionalization of rape and prostitution, as well as the heretic and witch-hunt trials, burnings, and torture at the center of a methodical subjugation of women and appropriation of their labor.

This is tied into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common—from water, to seeds, to our genetic code—becomes privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

[M]aterialist 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".

[67] In the 1970s, the impacts of post-World War II technological development led many women to organise against issues from the toxic pollution of neighbourhoods to nuclear weapons testing on indigenous lands.

staged a "hex" of Wall Street at a branch of Chase Manhattan Bank, wearing rags and fright makeup; Robin Morgan stated that the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined sharply the next day.

[81] Members were active at the Ford plants at Halewood and Dagenham[citation needed] and devoted a great deal of time to self-analysis and considering their relationship with the larger Trotskyist groups.