day-to-day sense, most people acquiesce to sex
and class domination without being held in line
by the threat of violence, and often without
even the threat of material deprivation.

2. It is very important, then, to figure out
what, if not the direct application of force,
keeps things going. In the case of class, a great
deal has been written already about why the
American working class lacks militant class
consciousness. Certainly ethnic divisions, es-
_pecially the Black/white division, are a key to
the answer. But, | would argue, in addition to
being divided, the working class has been
socially atomized: working-class neighborhoods
have been destroyed and allowed to decay; life
has become increasingly privatized and inward-
looking; skills once possessed by the working
class have been expropriated by the capitalist
class; capitalist-controlled “mass culture” has
edged out almost all indigenous working-class
culture and institutions. Instead of collectivity
and self-reliance as a class, there is mutual
isolation and collective dependency on the
capitalist class.

3. The subjugation of women, in ways char-
acteristic of late capitalist society, has been a
key to this process of class atomization. To put
it another way: the forces which have atom-
ized working-class life and promoted cultural/
material dependency on the capitalist class are
the same forces which have served to perpetu-
ate the subjugation of women. It is women who
are most isolated in what has become an in-
creasingly privatized family existence (even
when they work outside the home too). It is, in
many instances, women’s skills (productive
skills, healing, midwifery) which have been dis-
credited or banned to make way for commodi-
ties. It is, above all, women who are required to
be utterly passive/uncritical/dependent (i.e.,
“feminine”) in the face of the pervasive capital-
ist penetration of private life. Historically, late
capitalist penetration of working-class life has
singled out women as prime targets of pacifica-
tion (or “feminization”) because women are the
culture-bearers of their class.

4. It follows that there is a fundamental inter-
connectedness between women’s struggle and
what is traditionally conceived as class struggle.
Not all women’s struggles have an inherently
anti-capitalist thrust (particularly not those
which seek only to advance the power and
wealth of special groups of women), but all
those which build collectivity and collective
confidence among women are vitally important
to the building of class consciousness. Con-
versely, not all class struggles have an inherent-
ly anti-sexist thrust (especially not those which
cling to pre-industrial patriarchal values) but all
those which seek to build the social and cultural
autonomy of the working class are necessarily
linked to the struggle for women’s liberation.

This is one direction which socialist feminist
analysis is taking. No one is expecting a synthe-

sis to emerge which will collapse socialist and
feminist struggles into the same thing. The cap-
sule summaries | gave earlier retain their “ulti-
mate” truth: there are crucial aspects of capital-
ist domination (such as racial oppression) which
a purely feminist perspective simply cannot ac-
count for or deal with—without bizarre distor-
tions, that is. There are crucial aspects of sex
oppression (such as male violence within the
family) into which socialist thought has little
insight—again, without a lot of stretching and
distortion. Hence the need to continue to be
socialists and feminists. But there is enough of a
synthesis, both in what we think and what we
do, for us to begin to develop a self-confident
identity as socialist feminists.

*Versions of this article have been presented at the Social-
ist Feminist Conference, Yellow Springs, Ohio, July 1975; at
Women’s Week, Brown University, April, 1976; and in WIN
(June 3, 1976) as “What is Socialist Feminism?”

Barbara Ehrenreich is the co-author, with Deirdre English,
of Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women
Healers, and Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics
of Sickness (Feminist Press, New York). She is a member of
HealthRight (a New York women’s health collective),
Action for Women in Chile, and New American Movement.