Women's Studies 3050

Marxist/Socialist Feminism

Does equality mean legal equality and freedom of competition as the liberalists maintain? Or does equality require economic equality and freedom from competition as the Marxist feminists claim? Marxist feminists differ from liberalists in their methods of achieving equal rights for women by advocating community rights over individual rights. Following the Communist Manifesto, the Marxist feminists believe that women are oppressed by the capitalist system because capitalism concentrates power in the hands of a few capital-owning men. Women are valued only in reproduction; women's work is to produce the children who will eventually supply the labor to the owners. Women must also provide the care for children and for the men who support them. Women's sexuality and their roles as wives and mothers are commoditized while their sphere of influence remains the home and hearth. In order to change such a tightly woven pattern of social norms, family, and the economy, the women's movement must seek to transform all areas of society, economic, sexual, personal, and political. Transformation comes through abandoning capitalism and nuclear families for socialism and community. (from: E. Storkey What's right with feminism, 1985)

Feminist standpoint theory derives from the Marxist position that the socially oppressed class can access knowledge unavailable to the socially privileged, particularly knowledge of social relations. As feminist standpoint theory has developed, it has focused more on the political nature of the standpoint (for example a "feminist" standpoint rather than a "women’s" standpoint.), and it has attempted to attend to the diversity of women by incorporating the standpoints of other marginalized groups. Extremely influential in feminist approaches to social science (particularly sociology), standpoint theory remains as controversial as it is insightful. Feminist standpoint theorists propose that traditional epistemology ignores the fact that knowledge claims are produced in a social context.

Epistemology is defined as "the theory or science that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge."

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