More recent criticisms of materialist based approaches to class have drawn on elements associated with the cultural turn. Discursive approaches have been used to try to go beyond the limitations of Marxism and attend to how class is thought of and talked about. Materialism and discursivity are not inevitably opposed, indeed the ideological aspects of […]

A less strictly economic analysis of the relation between gender and class is evident in French forms of materialist feminism, which were developing alongside — but largely independently from — the Anglo-American ver­sions. Hennessy and Ingraham’s (1997) collection, for example, includes only Delphy’s work. In fact there were five French women who were key figures […]

Most materialist feminists follow at least the key argument made in Margaret Benston’s (1969) early article, that capitalist accumulation relies not just on paid labour but on women’s unpaid labour in the household. I focus on her work as one of the most influential, earliest, and clearest con­tributions to the domestic labour debate. However, there […]

Marxist feminists were among the first to try systematically to determine the nature of women’s class position (see for example, Benston, 1969). The way in which women combined Marxism and feminism varied. Apart from Marxist feminism, sometimes it was called socialist feminism or materialist feminism. Although these were largely different labels for the same kind […]

Class has always been of major interest to sociologists, but understand­ings and classifications of class have been based on men’s life experi­ences. If we want to understand some of the key differences between the life of women lawyers and of women cleaners class is a useful concept because it can help us to think about […]

Imagine two women, the same age, from the same city. They both work in the same office building. One has a comfortable office, starts work at different times each day depending on what needs doing, and lives by herself in a nice house in a quiet area of town. The other starts work at five […]

The politics of gender based around a shared identity as women (or men) has seemingly been subsumed by the advance of issues-based politics with a distinctly global character. Post-colonial struggle, environmental politics, peace, and indeed the anti-globalization movement itself have attracted not only members of the political left previously involved in feminism and other ‘new’ […]

Masculinity politics was only in some cases sympathetic to feminism, as men took up feminist challenges of masculine privilege in different ways. Small numbers of men supported and were involved in second — wave feminism. This made sense within discourses about the need for women and men to work together to achieve more equitable gender […]

The emphasis on embodied identity/experience as the ‘proper’ basis for feminist knowledge and action was at times a radicalizing position, but sometimes produced an individualized approach to power and oppression caught up with how feminists oppressed each other within political action (Grant, 1987). In general, there was some doubt as to where the personal and […]

The notion of sisterly unity is in fact a feminist myth. Some accounts of second-wave feminism (for example, Mitchell and Oakley, 1997) have represented it as a united sisterhood torn apart by fragmentation because some women could not see their common cause with others. There was a great deal of excitement and fellow feeling, which […]