Feminists starting from the socialist position of wanting to redistribute social rewards struggle to understand how class and gender might interrelate. Socialist and materialist feminists draw their political theory from Marxist materialism, which argues that ‘the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life’ (Engels cited in Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978: 7). They then worked to adapt this theory to (better) explain gender inequalities (see Chapter 7). Marxist feminists usually saw gender inequalities as caused by capitalism, while materialist feminists saw women as a class. In the former case they tried to use Marxist theories to understand women’s domestic labour as essential to capitalism. Women have historically done the work of reproducing workers, both by giving birth to them and by feeding, clothing, and caring for them so that they can go out to work. The unpaid labour that this reproduction of paid labour involves has gone largely unrecognized. Because of this domestic role women have also formed a reserve army of cheap labour, used by capitalists whenever there is a shortage of men and then discarded at times of higher unemployment — often because of pressure from male-dominated trade unions. However, this argument fails to take account of the fact that women usually do different paid jobs to men, rather than simply standing in for them (Beechey, 1978). Marxist theory also does not explain why it is women that do domestic labour and, if that is unclear, it is also unclear why women should be the reserve army (see Jackson, 1998b: 16).
Those who understood women as a class focused on the way in which social relations were not simply capitalist, but also patriarchal. The French materialist feminist Christine Delphy (1984), for example, argued that the relation between husbands and wives could be seen as exploitative. Men, rather than recognizing women’s work in the household by handing over a standard part of their income in return for their wives’ domestic labour, only ‘give’ women enough for their basic needs (perhaps in the form of room and board or ‘housekeeping’). Others such as Heidi Hartmann (1981) and Sylvia Walby (1986) developed a dual-systems theory that attempted to see capitalism and patriarchy as systems that connected through the labour market. Feminists tended to move towards a position in the 1980s where patriarchy was seen as existing not just within capitalism but within a range of historical conditions (Jackson, 1998b: 17—18).Yet the focus on materialism was felt by other feminists to be inadequate in explaining women’s social position, leading to the emergence of radical feminism.