Socialist Feminism

Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. 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. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.

Socialist feminism is a two-pronged theory that broadens Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Socialist feminists reject radical feminism's main claim that patriarchy is the only, or primary, source of oppression of women. Rather, Socialist feminists assert that women are oppressed due to their financial dependence on males. Women are subjects to male domination within capitalism due to an uneven balance in wealth. They see economic dependence as the driving force of women's subjugation to men. Further, Socialist feminists see women's liberation as a necessary part of a larger quest for social, economic, and political justice. 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.

Socialist feminism draws upon many concepts found in Marxism, such as a historical materialist point of view, which means that they relate their ideas to the material and historical conditions of people's lives. Thus, Socialist feminists consider how the sexism and gendered division of labor of each historical era is determined by the economic system of the time. Those conditions are largely expressed through capitalist and patriarchal relations. Socialist feminists reject the Orthodox Marxist notion that class and class struggle are the only defining aspects of history and economic development. Karl Marx asserted that when class oppression was overcome, gender oppression would vanish as well. According to Socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression as a sub-class of class oppression is naive, and much of the work of Socialist feminists has gone towards specifying how gender and class work together to create distinct forms of oppression and privilege for women and men of each class. For example, they observe that women's class status is generally derivative of her husband's class or occupational status, e.g. a secretary that marries her boss assumes his class status.

In 1972,
Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women's Movement
, which is believed to be the first publication to use the term socialist feminism, was published by the Hyde Park Chapter of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (Heather Booth, Day Creamer, Susan Davis, Deb Dobbin, Robin Kaufman, and Tobey Klass). Other socialist feminists, notably two long-lived American organizations Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels'') and August Bebel (''Woman and Socialism'') as a powerful explanation of the link between gender oppression and class exploitation. In the decades following the Cold War, feminist writer and scholar Sarah Evans says that the socialist feminist movement has lost traction in the West due to a common narrative that associates socialism with totalitarianism and dogma.

Post-1970, the socialist feminist movement continued to grow. In "Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth & early Twentieth Centuries," by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, social feminism is defined as "women who saw the root of sexual oppression in the existence of private property and who envisioned a radically transformed society in which man would exploit neither man nor women" The equality described has to do with a transformed society in which both sexes are equal and given the same opportunities despite any physiological differences. Going forward it is described to need a total change in both the economic and social system to create the lasting improvement that the socialist feminism movement is looking for.

Kristen Ghodsee argues in her book ''Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism'' that free markets discriminate against women as big bosses consider women to be less reliable, weaker and more emotional which leads to the gender pay gap as they need financial incentives to employ them.
George Bernard Shaw quotes "Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money". He also claims many women take part in work within the household but this is invisible as far as the market is concerned.

Core issues

Intersectionality

Socialist feminist Claudia Jones worked to incorporate Black women, other working women of color, and their needs into The Communist Party in the 1930s. This is because The Communist Party tended to default to issues of the white, male proletariat. Jones theoretical background rests at the intersection of Marxism, Black Nationalism, and Feminism and she is credited with theorizing ''triple oppression'', the concept that Black and Brown women experience oppression based on race, class, and gender. Jones further argues that white women, much less Black and Brown working women, would never be liberated if the structures of colonialism were not abolished and Black Nationalism were not adopted.

Feminist historian Linda Gordon asserts that socialist feminism is inherently intersectional, at least to a certain degree, because it takes into account both gender and class. Gordon says that because the foundation of socialist feminism rests on multiple axes, socialist feminism has a history of intersectionality that can be traced back to a period decades before Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw first articulated the concept of intersectionality in 1989. According to Gordon, socialist feminism of the 1980s presaged the concept of intersectionality by examining the overlapping structures that produce an individual's experience of oppression. Feminist scholar and women's studies professor Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy says that this broader analysis of societal structures began with socialist feminism and served as a catalyst for feminist scholarship. Kennedy says that many of the first women's studies programs were established by socialist feminist theorists. Despite the claims of being a homogenizing philosophy that erases difference of identity, socialist feminism's inherent approach to difference of identities, through an analysis of economic exploitation of all, is both recognized and enhanced by Crenshaw's intersectionality.

Despite the alleged presence of intersectionality in socialist feminism, many feminists, particularly women of color, critique the movement for perceived deficiencies in regards to racial equity. In Kennedy's account of socialist feminism's impact on women's studies, she says that a lack of Black voices in feminist academia contributed to whitewashing of women's studies programs and courses. Kum-Kum Bhavani, a professor at University of California Santa Barbara, and Margaret Coulson, a socialist feminist scholar, assert that racism in the socialist feminist movement stems from the failure of many white feminists to recognize the institutional nature of racism. 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. Kathryn Harriss, a feminist scholar from the United Kingdom, describes what she sees as the shortcomings of the socialist feminist movement of the 1980s in the United Kingdom. Harriss describes marginalized women's grievances with the Women's Liberation Movement. She says many lesbian women criticized the movement for its domination by heterosexual feminists who perpetuated heterosexism in the movement. Similarly, Black women asserted that they were deprived a voice due to the overwhelming majority of white women in the WLM advocating widely held views regarding violence against women, the family, and reproductive rights that failed to account for the distinct struggles faced by women of color.

Motherhood and the private sphere

Theorists Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, in ''The Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery'', published in 1825, describe how women's work contributes to capitalism's continuance. They assert that cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and all other activities that are deemed domestic work do constitute as actual work. Wheeler and Thompson assert that people, or labor, are needed for capitalism to function and that without women producing children as well as fulfilling these domestic activities, capitalism would fail.

Flora Tristian, French socialist activist, in her piece "Why I mention Women" published in 1843, argued that women and girls do not receive education because they are tasked with domestic duties. 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.

Socialist feminists highlight how motherhood and the gendered division of labor grows "naturally" from women's role as mothers, is the source of women's exclusion from the public sphere, and creates women's economic dependence on men. They assert that there is nothing natural about the gendered division of labor and show that the expectation that women perform all or most reproductive labor, i.e. labor associated with birthing and raising children but also the cleaning, cooking, and other tasks necessary to support human life, deny women the capacity to participate fully in economic activity outside the home. In order to free themselves from the conditions of work as a mother and housekeeper, socialist feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman saw the professionalization of housework as key. This would be done by hiring professional nannies and housekeepers to take the load of domestic work away from the woman in the house. Perkins Gilman also recommended the redesign of homes in ways that would maximize their potential for creativity and leisure for women as well as men, i.e. emphasizing the need for rooms like studios and studies and eliminating kitchens and dining rooms. These changes would necessitate the communalization of meal preparation and consumption outside the home and free women from their burden of providing meals on a house-by-house scale.

Toxic Masculinity

Socialist feminists claim that toxic masculinity is not only damaging to men but also women and non-binary people. Toxic masculinity is the idea that men should behave in a specific way, most commonly these behaviors are strong and with hold emotion (Salam, Maya). For example, in Latinx culture toxic masculinity is referred to as "Machismo" (FEM Magazine). Machismo keeps men in their designated masculine roles while women are given the submissive role. Machismo enforces the idea that men are the superior gender and women are second class citizens. The pressure on men to adhere to gender roles and in particular a gender binary feeds to the crisis of male suicide, rape culture and the normalization of violence. Socialist feminist politics aims to say this normalized behavior is just another part of gender construction the patriarchy has just created to harm women.

Toxic masculinity can be observed in every day life such as "locker-room talk" (FEM Magazine). Locker-room talk is an excuse for men to spew comments about women that are most commonly sexual. Because these men are in a certain environment, this behavior is normalized. However, locker-room talk is extremely harmful especially because it enforces the gender hierarchy that socialist feminism aims to diminish. Another example in which exemplifies toxic masculinity is the phrase "boys will be boys". This term is usually used to justify an action of a male that is rude or inappropriate which in turn harms women because it makes exceptions for men to behavior however they please. These examples enforce the behaviors that are sexist and give a false idea to men that they are allowed to treat women however they want.

Toxic masculinity has become a more popular issue to discuss among feminists due to the increase of popular male influencers that promote the behaviors and mindsets of toxic masculinity. Males will go on social media platforms such as Tiktok, and share their harmful ideas about how women should be behaving. This has become a major issue among feminists today, and trends on Tiktok have been curated to combat toxic masculinity. For example the #97% trend was created for women to share their stores about sexual harassment. 97% of women will experience some form of sexual harassment in their lifetime, and therefore this trend shows that women suffer immensely at the hands of men.

Gender pay gap

Socialist feminist theories have been used to highlight the economic disparities amongst women on a global scale. Contemporary socialist feminists have shifted their concerns from uncompensated house labor to the insufficient pay women receive for work done outside the home. Although some women have secured high-paying male-dominated jobs, most find work in service, clerical, agriculture, and light industrial work. Feminist philosopher Rosemarie Tong presents three common reasons for the gender wage gap: "the concentration of women in low-paying, female-dominated jobs; the high percentage of women who work part-time rather than full-time; and outright wage discrimination against women."

The gender pay gap has been produced and sustained through patriarchal and capitalist conditions. The feminization and devaluation of service-based jobs have subjected women to low wages. The lack of access women have to alternative employment which may harbor higher pay, has increased the wage gap. 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. Women's work is considered "secondary wages" under patriarchy. Even women who can work full-time and do the same jobs as men are not paid equally. Tong claims that "women are paid less simply because they are ''women,'' a very disturbing thought to say the least."

The gender pay gap is an issue that is especially prevalent in the United States. In ''Feminist Policy and Human Nature'', Allison Jagger describes the biological differences between women and men that would affect job performance namely "Most evidently, women's reproductive functions may mean that women have needs for pregnancy leave, maternity services and arrangements for easy access to their nursing babies." This fact insists that it is not only important but it is necessary for the workplace to incorporate this fairly into contracts. Forcing women to take unpaid maternity leave goes into the issue of the gender wage gap since women have reproductive needs that go far beyond men but are not compensated for that.

In looking at the amount of unpaid labor that women have worked over centuries is a major issue regarding unpaid labor in the house and in childcare. Women in capitalism are not compensated for their role in the household including housework, cooking, cleaning, childcare and the cost of carrying and delivering a child. "Contracts for husbands to pay their wives for domestic services have been found invalid by the courts. If housewives do not like the conditions of their work they are hardly free to move to another household; instead, they are tied by an elaborate legal contract which can only be broken on special grounds. Marriage is, in fact, a relation that is remarkably similar to the feudal relation of vassalage; it provides a means for exchanging support and protection from the husband in return for services and devotion from the wife." 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. This idea of women's unpaid labor is more than simply the housework and childcare services; it's the fact that the labor housewives did was considered compulsory instead of labor. This is the type of thinking and mentality that the socialist feminism and women who want more of these

In 2017, there was an international women's strike protesting the unfair treatment of women in today's society. The strike included over 50 countries and occurred on international women's day. The strikes in each country were focused on an injustice in that specific country. In the United States women protested by not working or spending money to show how much influence women have.

Sub-theories of socialist feminism

Anarcha-feminism

Anarcha-feminism, also called anarchist feminism and anarcho-feminism, combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary coercive hierarchy that should be replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle, and the anarchist struggle against the state. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist". Bakunin opposed patriarchy and the way the law "subjects omento the absolute domination of the man". He argued that " ual rights must belong to men and women" so that women can "become independent and be free to forge their own way of life". Bakunin foresaw the end of "the authoritarian juridical