Toward Socialist Feminism*

Barbara Ehrenreich

At some level, perhaps not too well articu-
lated, socialist feminism has been around for a
long time. You are a woman in a capitalist
society. You get pissed off: about the job, about
the bills, about your husband (or ex), about the
kids” school, the housework, being pretty, not
being pretty, being looked at, not being looked
at (and either way, not listened to), etc. If you
think about all these things and how they fit
together and what has to be changed, and then
you look around for some words to hold all
these thoughts together in abbreviated form,
you’d almost have to come up with something
like “socialist feminism.”

A lot of us came to socialist feminism in just
that way: we were reaching for a word/term/
phrase that would begin to express all of our
concerns, all of our principles, in a way that
neither “socialist” nor “feminist” seemed to. |
have to admit that most socialist feminists |
know are not too happy with the term “socialist
feminist” either. On the one hand it is too long
(I have no hopes for a hyphenated mass move-
ment); on the other hand it is much too short
for what is, after all, really socialist internation-
alist anti-racist anti-heterosexist feminism.

The trouble with taking a new label of any
kind is that it creates an instant aura of sec-
tarianism. “Socialist feminism” becomes a chal-
lenge, a mystery, an issue in and of itself. We
have speakers, conferences, articles on “social-
ist feminism” —though we know perfectly well
that either “socialism” or “feminism” is too huge
and too inclusive to be a subject for any sensible
speech, conference, or article. People, includ-
ing avowed socialist feminists, ask themselves
anxiously, “What is socialist feminism?” There
is a kind of expectation that it is (or is about to
be at any moment, maybe in the next speech,
conference, or article) a brilliant synthesis of
world historical proportions—an evolutionary
leap beyond Marx, Freud and Wollstonecraft.
Or that it will turn out to be nothing, a fad
seized on by a few disgruntled feminists and
female socialists, a temporary distraction.

I want to try to cut through some of the
mystery which has grown up around socialist
feminism. Here | am going to focus on our
“theory” —the way we look at and analyze the
world. | am not going to deal with our total
outlook as socialist feminists because | want to
stick as closely as possible to the interface of
the two main traditions we grow out of —social-
ism and feminism.

A logical way to start is to look at socialism
and feminism separately. How does a socialist
—more precisely a Marxist—look at the world?
How does a feminist look at the world? To begin
with, Marxism and feminism have something
important in common: they are critical ways of
looking at the world. Both rip away popular
mythology and “common-sense wisdom” and
force us to look at experience in a new way.
Both seek to understand the world—not in
terms of static balances and symmetries (as in
conventional social science), but in terms of
antagonisms. So they lead to conclusions which
are jarring and disturbing at the same time that
they are liberating. There is no way to have a
Marxist or a feminist outlook and remain a
spectator. To understand the reality laid bare by
these analyses is to move into action to change it.

Here | am going to restrict myself to what | see
as the core insights of Marxism and feminism,
and state these as briefly and starkly as possible:
Marxism (in 20 words or less) addresses itself to
the class dynamics of capitalist society. Every
social scientist knows that capitalist societies are
characterized by more or less severe, systemic
inequality. Marxism understands this inequality
to arise from processes which are intrinsic to
capitalism as an economic system. A minority of
people (the capitalist class) own all the facto-
ries/ energy sources/resources on which every-
one else depends in order to live. The great
majority (the working class) must, out of sheer
necessity, work, under conditions set by the
capitalists, for the wages the capitalists pay.
Since the capitalists make their profits by pay-
ing less in wages than the value of what the
workers actually produce, the relationship be-
tween these two classes is necessarily one of
irreconcilable antagonism: the capitalist class
owes its very existence to the continued exploit-
ation of the working class. What maintains this
system of class rule is, in the last analysis, force.
The capitalist class controls (directly or in-
directly) the means of organized violence rep-
resented by the state—policemen, jails, etc.
Only by waging a revolutionary struggle aimed
at the seizure of state power can the working
class free itself, and, ultimately, all people.

Feminism addresses itself to another familiar
inequality. All human societies are marked by
some degree of inequality between the sexes. If
we survey human societies at a glance, sweep-
ing through history and across continents, we
see that they have commonly been character-