OPPapers.com

A Critique Of Marxist Feminism

It is a common error to associate all feminists with that movement’s radical left wing. The radical feminists are but one part of the feminist movement. Because they are extreme and very vocal, the media have overemphasized their importance to the point where the broader term “feminism” is associated with them alone. Many women, especially conservatives, avoid identifying themselves as feminists for fear of being lumped together with the radicals. The feminist movement is, in fact, composed of different groups with different beliefs. What all feminists share is the belief that women have the right to be more than just homemakers, which is hardly a radical notion. It is unfair to portray all members of any political movement as adherents of the same radical ideology.
It is possible to identify the three main currents within feminist thought as liberal, radical, and Marxist. Each responds to women’s oppression in a different way. Liberal feminism is concerned with attaining economic and political equality in a male-dominated society. Radical feminism is focused on men and patriarchy as the main causes of the oppression of women. And Marxist feminism is a theoretical position that uses Marxist theory to understand the capitalist sources of the oppression of women.
In the early period of the contemporary feminist movement, feminists searched for a grand theory to explain the sexual inequality, hierarchy, and domination that defined entirely the experience and organization of gender and sexuality. Some theorists saw women as trapped by “their own reproductive anatomy, the objectification of their bodies, the mothering relation or the marriage relation.” Others theorized that gender oppression was inherent to capitalism and the “relations of work and exploitation” (Chodorow 1). This essay will focus mainly on the latter of the two viewpoints. I agree with most of the ideas in this theory, the Marxist approach to feminism.
Throughout history the...