lar forms of sex oppression we experience today
are, to a significant degree, recent develop-
ments. A huge historical discontinuity lies
between us and true patriarchy. If we are to
understand our experience as women today, we
must move beyond the biological invariants of
human experience to a consideration of capital-
ism as a system.

There are other ways | could have gotten to
the same point. | could have said simply that as
feminists we are most interested in the most
oppressed women—poor and working-class
women, third-world women—and for that rea-
son we are led to a need to comprehend and
confront captialism. | could have said that we
need to address ourselves to the class system
simply because women are members of classes.
But | am trying to bring out something else
about our perspective: that there is no way to
understand sexism as it acts on our lives—never
mind class oppression for a minute! —without
putting it in the historical context of capitalism.

Now let’s go on to our outlook as Marxists.
Again, | think most socialist feminists would
agree with my capsule summary as far as it
goes. And the trouble again is that there are a
lot of people (I'll call them “mechanical Marx-
ists”) who do not go any further. To these
people, the only “real” and important things
that go on in capitalist society are those that
relate to the productive process or the conven-
tional political sphere. From such a point of
view, every other part of experience and social
existence —education, sexuality, recreation, the
family, art, music, housework (you name it)—is
peripheral to the central dynamics of social
change; it is part of the “superstructure” or
“culture.”

Socialist feminists are in a very different
camp. We (along with many Marxists who are
not feminists) see capitalism as a social and
cultural totality. We understand that, in its
search for markets, capitalism is driven to
penetrate every nook and cranny of social exis-
tence. Especially in the monopoly capitalism
phase, the realm of consumption is every bit as
important, just from an economic point of view,
as the realm of production. So we cannot under-
stand class struggle as something confined to
issues of wages and hours, or confined only to
workplace issues. Class struggle occurs in every
arena where the interests of the classes conflict,
and that includes education, health, the arts,
etc. We aim to transform not only the owner-
ship of the means of production, but the totality
of social existence.

So, as Marxists, we come to feminism from a
completely different place than the “mechani-
cal Marxists.” Because we see monopoly capi-
talism as a political/economic/cultural totality,
we have room within our Marxist framework for
feminist issues which have nothing ostensibly to
do with production or “politics,” issues that
have to do with “private” life.

Furthermore, in our brand of Marxism, there
is no “woman question,” no big mystery about
women —because we never compartmentalized
women off to the “superstructure” in the first
place. Marxists of a mechanical bent continual-
ly ponder the issue of the unwaged woman (the
housewife): is she really a member of the work-
ing class? That is, does she really produce sur-
plus value? We say, of course housewives are
members of the working class—not because we
have some elaborate proof that they really do
produce surplus value—but because we under-
stand a class as being composed of people, and
as having a social existence quite apart from
the capitalist-dominated realm of production.
When we think of class in this way, then we see
thatin fact the women who seemed most periph-
eral, the housewives, are at the very heart of
their class—raising children, holding together
families, maintaining the culture and social
networks of the community.

So we are coming out of a kind of feminism
and a kind of Marxism whose interests quite
naturally flow together. | think we are in a posi-
tion now to see why it is that socialist feminism
has been such a great mystery. It is a paradox
only as long as what you mean by socialism is
really “mechanical Marxism” and what you
mean by feminism is an ahistorical kind of radi-
cal feminism. These things don't add up; they
have nothing in common.

But if you put together another kind of social-
ism and another kind of feminism, as | have
tried to define them, you do get some common
ground. And that is one of the most important
things about socialist feminism today: that it is
a space—free from the constrictions of a trun-
cated kind of feminism and a truncated version
of Marxism—a space in which we can develop
the kind of politics that address the political/
economic/cultural totality of monopoly capi-
talist society. We could go only so far with the
available feminisms, the conventional Marxism,
and then we had to break out to something that
is not so restrictive and so incomplete in its
view of the world. We had to take a new name,
“socialist feminism,” in order to assert our de-
termination to comprehend the whole of our
experience and to forge a politics that reflects
the totality of that comprehension.

At that | may have fulfilled my mission of
demystifying socialist feminism, but | don’t
want to leave this theory as a “space” or a
common ground. Things are beginning to grow
in that ground. We are closer to a synthesis in
our understanding of sex and class, capitalism
and male domination, than we were a few years
ago. Here | will indicate very sketchily one such
line of thought:

1. The Marxist/feminist understanding that
class and sex domination rest “ultimately” on
force is correct, and this remains the most
devastating critique of sexist/capitalist society.
But there is a lot to that “ultimately.” In a