MONTHLY REVIEW, 2019, 

Volume 71, Issue 04

(September 2019)

Women, Class, and Identity Politics

Reflections on Feminism and Its Future
by Martha E. Gimenez
(Sep 01, 2019)
Topics:  Feminism  Marxism  Political Economy
 Places:  Global

Source: Emma Holmes, "What Is Intersectional Feminism?," Naked Truths,

January 31, 2019.

MARTHA E. GIMENEZ is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Colorado

Boulder. She is the author of Marx, Women and Capitalist Social
Reproduction (Leiden: Brill, 2018). *

It is always necessary to distinguish between the material

conditions of production [and, I add, reproduction]…and the
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
conflict and fight it out.

—KARL MARX 1

I
In her rightfully celebrated 1969 article, “The Political Economy of Women’s
Liberation,” Margaret Benston articulated several of the enduring themes
and theoretical insights of feminist theories, especially those developed by
socialist and Marxist feminists. For example, she located the material basis
of women’s secondary status in their responsibility for the production of
use values for home consumption and their ensuing economic dependence
upon male breadwinners; the effects of domestic responsibilities on
women’s opportunities; and the material conditions for women’s liberation,
that is, equal access to employment and an end to the privatized nature of
housework and child rearing. 2

As a graduate student in the late 1960s, I struggled to make sense of the

notion that women were oppressed as women and that men or patriarchy
were the source of their oppression—an idea that, at the time, seemed
strange to me.  In contrast, Benston’s perspective that the causes of the
3

secondary status of women were structural, rooted in the capitalist

economy, and resulted in women’s responsibility for child care and the
production of use values for family consumption, made sense to me. It
showed how the functioning of the capitalist economy, given that the
organization of social and biological reproduction remained still in a
“premarket stage,” placed working-class men and women in different
structural positions. This, I inferred, gave some men power over women.
Working-class men had to earn wages to survive economically, whereas
working-class women, whether married or unmarried, could theoretically
either work for wages or work at home, unpaid and dependent on the
wages of the male head of the household.  Abstractly, under capitalism,
4

being an unpaid domestic worker is for working-class women a functional

alternative to earning wages.  In retrospect, having read her article again, I
5

can say that my account of the oppression of women and conceptualization

of what, in the early 1970s, I called the mode of reproduction, owes much to
Benston’s views about the “structural definition of women” and the
household as a place of production and reproduction. 6

II
During the fifty years that passed since the publication of this important
work, feminist thought evolved in a variety of directions, prompted by
challenges from within its ranks as well as changes in the historical
conditions within which feminist struggles and ideas emerged. From the
mid–1960s through the ’70s, inspired by the women’s movement, feminist
theories and programmatic statements offering different explanations of
the oppression of women flourished in the United States and elsewhere,
including theories of patriarchy (radical feminism); the interaction between
patriarchy and capitalism (socialist feminism); and capitalism, viewed as a
system of exploitative relations of production and oppressive relations of
reproduction (Marxist feminism). These early theories were and continue to
be valuable in regard to research and policy implications, and in their
broader ideological effects, raising people’s consciousness about the many
dimensions of the oppression of women and inspiring them to organize and
struggle for change.

Thanks to the success of liberal struggles, women’s opportunities have

expanded; there are today many more women in business, politics, higher
education, and other professions and careers that used to be reserved for
men. Socialist and Marxist feminism shed light on women’s oppression at
home and in the workplace. Awareness around the oppressive dimensions
of sex-segregated labor markets and the double shift, a concept that
captures the persistent conflict between women’s employment and their
primary responsibility for household labor and child rearing, entered
popular culture. Affordable day care has become a legitimate political
objective. Sexual harassment in the workplace has finally been recognized
as a form of gender discrimination. And as the Me Too movement shows,
women are fighting back. However, albeit narrower, the gap between men’s
and women’s earnings and occupational mobility persists. Women’s
enormous contribution to the capitalist economy through unpaid domestic
labor remains unrecognized, while the struggle for reproductive rights
continues unabated, as politicians persist in proposing and often passing
laws overtly intended to restrict women’s access to contraception and
abortion while stealthily aiming to control their sexuality.
7

III
The question of the oppression of women, the critique of which constituted
feminism as an academic and political pursuit, has been feminism’s
enduring source of strength and appeal, yielding numerous critical theories
and perspectives.  This has produced continual conceptual shifts defining an
8

evolving feminism, such as the shift from women to gender and from
inequality to difference. It has also involved shifts from theorizing the
general conditions of women’s experience—oppressed at home and in the
workplace, while juggling the conflicting demands of both—to theorizing the
implications of the claim that, while gender may be the main source of
oppression for white, heterosexual, middle-class women, women with
different characteristics and experiences are affected by other forms of
oppression as well. 9

The most consequential of those critiques was put forth by black feminists
and other women of color, resulting in the race, gender, and class  analytical
framework, which eventually crystallized into intersectionality. Equally
significant is the perspective of social reproduction, which, though grounded
in Marxist feminism, expanded its subject beyond the original focus on
women’s oppression.
My purpose in this essay is to offer some considerations about the
relationship between these perspectives and Marxist feminism. Do these
perspectives strengthen Marxist feminism’s theoretical distinctiveness and
political relevance? Or do they, instead, place it onto a different theoretical
terrain? I believe the latter is the case, given that intersectionality blurs into
social stratification, and social reproduction can refer to a variety of macro-
level phenomena (reproduction of the labor force, class structure,
oppressive relations, relations of production, and so on) beyond biological
reproduction and the reproduction of labor power. I will argue that a
possible way for Marxist feminism to remain a distinctive theoretical and
politically relevant perspective might be to return to class, in the Marxist
sense, theoretically reexamining the relationship between class and
oppression, particularly the oppression of working-class women, within
capitalist social formations. This would entail a structural analysis of
oppression, in Benston’s sense—that is, one that seeks in the development
and functioning of capitalism the historically specific material basis of all
forms of oppression.

IV
The women’s liberation movement was part of the panoply of social
movements active in the 1960s and ’70s, when people organized on the
basis of gender (women’s liberation), age (Grey Panthers), sexuality (gay
liberation), ethnicity (Mexican Americans, Chicanos, Asian Americans), and
race (black feminists, Black Panthers). The forms of consciousness,
intellectual production, and politics of those identity-based social
movements were grounded in the material experiences of the activists and
scholars participating in those movements. They were influenced by the
political, ideological, and social context of the United States, a social
formation where, particularly in the media, census and social science data
about social phenomena was usually presented and discussed excluding
class, thus fostering a tendency to conflate and perceive the effects of class
with the effects of gender, race, ethnicity, and other oppressed
statuses.  Unfortunately, class is absent today from the vocabulary of most
10

people and the dominant political discourse, labor has no political

organization and representation, and idealist readings of Karl Marx
predominate in many sectors of the left. 11

Women of color, keenly aware of the differences between their experiences

of oppression and those of white feminists, offered critiques that
foreshadowed the development of the aforementioned analytical
frameworks, writing about the simultaneity of “racial, sexual, heterosexual,
and class oppression” in the context of “interlocking systems of oppression,”
which later became known as intersectionality.  This and other critical
12

observations did more than identify the oppressive and interrelated forces
affecting the lives of women of color; they called attention to the
relationship between social stratification and oppression as evinced in its
effects on everyone’s lives and identities. 13

Given that intersectionality is viewed as an important feminist theory, the

oppression of women should be at its center. However, its broad scope
—”interlocking systems of oppression” resulting in “complex identities”—
introduces some ambiguity in its subject because it applies, with variable
effects, to everyone: man and woman, white and nonwhite, citizen and
noncitizen, immigrant and native, and so on. In Marx, Women and Capitalist
Social Reproduction, I argue that, if narrowly understood, intersectionality’s
subject is the oppression of women with complex identities, although,
besides “marginalized women,” it also applies to “occasionally marginalized
men.”  The term marginalized implies poverty and near poverty, and being
14

at the bottom of the chain of systems of oppression—thus excluding

women occupying middle and privileged locations in those systems. Could
intersectionality, then, claim to be a feminist theory while excluding a large
proportion of the female population? At the same time, however, if
intersectionality applies to everyone—for everyone is situated in the social
stratification system and the relations of oppression, and a substantial
proportion of the male population is located at the bottom—it makes sense
to view it as an approach to the study of stratification and its oppressive
effects, rather than as a feminist theory.15

The subject of social reproduction theory is also ambiguous. Like

intersectionality, social reproduction is also viewed as a feminist theory, but,
in its current versions, its scope reaches beyond the oppression of women
and the reproduction of labor power to encompass the reproduction of the
natural and social conditions for the reproduction of capitalism.

V
Early Marxist feminists theorized the outcome of women’s domestic labor
and production of use values—the reproduction of labor power—and
debated the nature of the relationship between domestic labor, the level of
men’s wages, and the production of surplus value.  This is why, if compared
16

to current thinking about social reproduction, early Marxist feminist

theories could be categorized as social reproduction theories stricto sensu.
Social reproduction’s scope today entails far more than biological
reproduction, the reproduction of labor power, and the network of social
institutions beyond the household that contribute to the reproduction of
labor power (such as the educational and health care systems). It includes,
for example, the reproduction of the population, social classes, relations of
production, labor force, and different layers and relations of oppression
(gender, age, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, and so on) of the social
stratification system among which the population of all social formations is
distributed.  Given that the reproduction of labor power and social
17

stratification systems reflect and presuppose changing economic, political,

legal, and ideological macro-level conditions, social reproduction is also
about the reproduction of social formations as a whole.
Social reproduction feminists stress the integration of the production of
things and the production of life, thus arguing that surplus production and
capital accumulation necessitate the reproduction of labor power and that,
consequently, “social reproduction is at the heart of the class struggle.”  In
18

principle, I agree. However, following Marx’s distinction between

transhistorical and historical elements of social organization, I argue that
social reproduction is best theorized in its historical context: “If production
be capitalistic in form, so, too will be reproduction.”  This is why I call my
19

perspective on reproduction capitalist social reproduction, arguing that “in

the social formations where capitalism is the dominant mode of production,
the structures, processes and contradictions of the mode of
production determine the social organization (i.e., establishes historical
limits for its variability) and the material basis of the mode of reproduction
feasible for the social classes and strata within classes.” 20
The relationship between production and reproduction under capitalism is
inherently contradictory, for the reproduction of the working classes is
subject to the power, interests, and reproduction of the capitalist
class.  Capitalist contradictions constantly change access to the conditions
21

of reproduction for different sectors of the working class through a variety

of mechanisms intended to increase profits and reduce labor costs. This is
why I prefer to say that the working classes’ economic and social survival is
at the heart of the class struggle. Indeed, a key contribution of social
reproduction theory is pointing out that class struggles are workers’
struggles for access to the material and social conditions necessary for
economic and social survival and advancement, and that the working class
encompasses a population larger than the currently employed sector of the
labor force.  As Immanuel Wallerstein observed, because “the constructed
22

‘peoples’—the races, the nations, the ethnic groups—correlate so heavily,

albeit imperfectly, with ‘objective class’…a very high proportion of class-
based political activity in the modern world has taken the form of people-
based [women, minority groups, immigrants, etc.] political activity.”23

VI
The overlap between early Marxist feminist theory and a narrow
formulation of social reproduction theory is clear, but it becomes less so as
the scope of social reproduction theory broadens. From the standpoint of
much current thinking about social reproduction, however, early Marxist
feminist theories were flawed because they unfolded within a limited
framework that privileged the categories of class and gender, investigating
them “in isolation from race, sexuality, colonialism, and other constitutive
relations” while overlooking the “multi-faceted complexity of real world
relations and political struggles…[where] racial oppression intersects with
gendered forms of domination and class exploitation.” 24

I strongly disagree with this assessment. Marxist feminists were explicitly

theorizing the relationship between capitalist class relations and the
structural basis of the oppression of women. Their work illuminated the
effects of capitalism on women’s economic and social placement and the
significance of domestic labor, and did not preclude that other oppressive
relations could be taken into account in the context of empirical research in
the “real world,” that is, in capitalist social formations, in which colonial-
imperial and racial oppressions were inscribed.
In defense of Marxist feminist theory, where critics see weakness, I see
strength. Early Marxist feminists examined the relationship between the
functioning of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist
organization of biological and social reproduction, identifying in its effects
the material conditions that define the status of women in capitalist social
formations, meaning in societies where the capitalist mode of production
prevails.  The perception that Marxist feminism “privileged” gender to the
25

exclusion of other forms of oppression does not take into account the
importance of differentiating between levels of analysis. At the level of
analysis of capitalist social formations (such as the United States, France,
Uruguay, and so on), women’s experiences of oppression differ greatly—
this is the level of analysis where Marxist social scientists research the
effects of class relations, social stratification, and oppressive social
relations, or what advocates of intersectionality identify as “axes of
oppression” and “complex identities.” The capitalist mode of production, in
contrast, is the level of analysis where early Marxist feminists developed
their theories of the capitalist structural material conditions underlying the
subordinate status of women, regardless of differences in their individual
identities and locations in the class structure and social stratification
system.
While Marxist feminism has also been criticized for “privileging” class, I
argue that it did not “privilege” it enough. Marxist feminist theories capture
the essence of the material conditions affecting most working-class women,
though this is not always explicitly stated, hence the perception that they
overgeneralize. Benston’s statement that “except for the very rich, who can
hire someone to do it, there is for most women an irreducible minimum of
necessary labor involved in caring for home, husband, and children,” points
out, at the level of analysis of the articulation between capitalism and
reproduction, the fate of most propertyless women under
capitalism.  Within capitalist social formations, however, women are divided
26

not only by class location (owners and non-owners of the means of

production) but also by their location in the social stratification system.
Indirect references to class, such as differentiating between the very rich
and most everyone else, or the top 1 percent and the 99 percent, obfuscate
the nature of class differences and the existence of socioeconomic
differences within classes, unwittingly contributing to the reigning confusion
about class in the United States.
VII
There is a strong connection between the intensification of economic
inequality, globally and within capitalist social formations, and changes in
social science and feminist thought that seek to acknowledge the limitations
of theorizing about one or simultaneous oppressions in relative isolation
from class. Theoretically, it is difficult to conceptualize the relationship
between class and oppression in a context where avoidance of “class
reductionism” often results in confusing class with income or with
socioeconomic status, reducing it to an ideology or “classism,” or conflating
class and oppressions, such as positing that class is “gendered” or “raced.”
More importantly, it is seldom recognized that class and oppressions belong
to two different levels of analysis: class is one of the enduring structures of
the capitalist mode of production whose causal effects are felt in all
capitalist social formations, whereas oppressive identities and relations of
oppression are more historically variable, ideologically and politically
constructed to suit changing economic and political needs. 27

Politically, the problem is how to foster class unity and class consciousness
in a working class fragmented and weakened by the effects of economic
and technological change, and by identity politics and cultural wars. A
possible solution might lie, firstly, in “privileging” class, exploring the
theoretical and political implications of the fact that all the population
aggregates identifiable on the basis of status—that is, categories of
oppression such as gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship
status, age, and sexuality—are divided by class.  Secondly, it must be kept in
28

mind that the working classes are fragmented not only in terms of gender,
race, ethnicity, and so on, but also in terms of education, occupation,
income, place of residence, religion, political affiliation, and so forth,
meaning, in terms of social and economic stratification.
At the level of analysis of the mode of production, most people, whatever their
gender, race, ethnicity, and other individual characteristics may be, are
working class, whether they are aware of this fact or not. They do not own
the means of production, they depend on the sale of their labor power to
survive, and their economic survival is always tenuous and subject to
changes in the national and global capitalist economy, which, in turn,
reflects the profit-seeking decisions of the capitalist classes.
At the level of analysis of social formations, common class location and
objective commonality of interest are obscured and dampened by the
effects of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic status, and other divisions.
Because of class and socioeconomic status divisions, membership in
oppressed groups does not entail commonality of political and economic
interests. Though the proportion of women and members of racial and
ethnic minorities in the capitalist class and the upper layers of the social,
economic, and political system is very small, class contradictions and
conflicts of interest do not disappear under the mantle of common
identities. For example, successful struggles for civil rights for all members
of an oppressed group do not erase class contradictions and socioeconomic
inequality within the group. At best, they foster the upward mobility of
some individuals while leaving capitalism and all forms of economic and
social inequality unchanged.
It is necessary, consequently, to transcend the reification of the concepts
of class and working class as things separate from the relations of
oppression in general and from women’s struggles and other identity-based
struggles in particular. Marxist feminist theory has illuminated the material
conditions for the oppression of working-class women and needs to say so
forcefully, overcoming the ideological control underlying the usual qualms
about economic determinism and class reductionism that contributed to
the retreat from class and rise of identity politics. In this context, to
“privilege” class means to make explicit that oppression is always
experienced within the political and social spaces of class and social
stratification, which, in turn, can ameliorate or intensify its effects. The
outcomes of class relations and class conflicts fall differentially upon women
depending on their class location, socioeconomic status, and placement in
the structures of oppression, regardless of their self-identification with one
or several oppressed identities.
The ever-present material reality of class, however, is seldom acknowledged
by the average person. But whether acknowledged or not (that is,
independent of the degree of class consciousness), the effect of class
location is real, even though its “hidden injuries” may be experienced and
understood through the lens of identity. For example, if considered from an
exclusively feminist standpoint, current Republican efforts to undermine
women’s legal and necessary access to contraception and abortion have
been called the Republican “war on women.” Such an interpretation
overlooks important class and socioeconomic status differences in the
impact of restrictive policies about biological reproduction. Regardless of
race, ethnicity, and other differences, capitalist women and women in the
upper layers of the social stratification system are not affected by such
policies, because they can afford to pay for contraception and abortion if
their health insurance does not cover them or if they are banned or
unavailable in their place of residence.  Because most women live with
29

children, husbands, partners, or other family members, their reproductive

decisions affect not only their own well-being but that of others as well. In
the context of insufficient wages, uncertain employment, inadequate
housing, lack of health insurance, and other ills affecting working-class
people, reactionary family policies can be best understood as a war on the
working class.30

VIII
As wealth and income inequality intensify, the material reality of and effects
on people’s lives become increasingly difficult to ignore. The time has come
to acknowledge the limits of identity-based theorizing and politics. The
economic, social, and political successes of many individual women have
not altered the fate of the majority. Perhaps this is one of the sources of the
renewed interest in Marxism and feminism we see today, particularly in
Europe, where three international conferences have recently taken place. 31

In order to become more than an academic exercise, Marxist feminism

needs to return to its historical-materialist roots and to class, as the key
material basis of the problems facing working-class women, whether
employed or not. In the current economic and political environment, it is
important to articulate a feminism that acknowledges that the majority of
women are located in the working class and that the oppression and
problems working women (whatever their identity or identities may be) face
within social formations are significantly affected by their class position.
Working women are not only responsible for the reproduction of labor
power, the economic survival of their families, and the working class:
they are part of the working class. In fact, they are more than half of the
world’s working classes, given that “their common location in the relations
of production and reproduction is a universal, yet historical, material base,
for their potential mobilization and political organization not as women and
not as workers but as working women.” 32

Therefore, it is time, when writing and speaking about issues that matter to
women, to specify their class location, socioeconomic status, and any other
relevant characteristics, such as whether they are working-class Latina
women, capitalist white women, working-class Central-American immigrant
women, middle-class women (in terms of socioeconomic status), African-
American women, and so on. This is not intended to describe complex
identities, but to call attention to the ubiquitous nature of class as the
social, economic, and political space where everyone’s lives unavoidably
unfold, regardless of people’s awareness of their class position.

Today, as economic inequality grows, the economic prospects of working-

class men, particularly those poorly educated, have been declining, as they
have been for decades. Productivity grows as wages stagnate. Working-class
family formation is increasingly difficult and unstable, especially as capital
turns to women’s labor to reduce labor costs. As women continue to
increase their participation in the labor force, their responsibility for the
work of social reproduction has also intensified.  These macro-level changes
33

in the demand for labor and women’s labor force participation exacerbate
the divisions within the working class, particularly the antagonisms between
working men and women, fostered by the identity politics favored by the
capitalist class.
As long as women’s oppression and other oppressions occupy the center of
feminist theory and politics, while class remains at the margins, feminism
will unwittingly contribute to keeping class outside the collective
consciousness and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. To
become a unifying, rather than a divisive, political and ideological force,
twenty-first-century Marxist feminism needs to become an overtly working-
class women’s feminism, in solidarity with the working class as a whole,
supporting the struggles of all workers, women and men, and gender-
variant people of all races, national origins, citizenship statuses, and so on,
thus spearheading the process toward working-class organization and the
badly needed return to class in U.S. politics.
Footnotes
1. * I thank Paul Cammack and Lise Vogel for their useful comments and
suggestions.
Notes
1. ↩ Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859; repr., New York: International, 1970), 21.
2. ↩ Margaret Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Monthly
Review 21, no. 4 (September 1969): 13–27. In my book, Marx, Women and
Capitalist Social Reproduction (Leiden: Brill, 2018), I explore these issues of
women, class, and identity in depth.
3. ↩ In 1957, the year I entered law school at the University of Córdoba in
Argentina, to pursue becoming a lawyer was not an unusual choice. I grew up
encouraged to believe there were no limits to what I could accomplish, in an
environment where I took for granted the presence of women in professions that
 in the United States at the time were still considered the prerogative of males
(such as medicine, dentistry, biochemistry, and law).
4. ↩ Of course, in capitalist social formations, many working-class women did
both, particularly women belonging to racial or ethnic minorities or to some
immigrant populations. The historically specific characteristics of social
formations produce empirical variations in the survival strategies working-class
men and women of different racial, ethnic, and national origins develop within
capitalist constraints.
5. ↩ The proportion of full-time domestic workers or “stay-at-home mothers”
fluctuates with social and economic changes. In the United States, it decreased
from 49 percent in 1967 to 23 percent in 1999, rising to 29 percent in 2012. See
Jacob Galley, “Stay-at-Home Mothers Through the Years,” Monthly Labor
Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2014.
6. ↩ Martha E. Gimenez, “Population Structure and Processes in the Capitalist
Mode of Production” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles,
1973).
7. ↩ For recent efforts to restrict abortion, see Marisa Lati and Deanna Paul,
“Everything You Need to Know About the Abortion Ban News,” Washington
Post, May 17, 2019. See also Martha E. Gimenez, “Reactionary Family Policies
in the 21st Century: The Republican War on the Working Class in the United
States,” Cultural Logic 23 (2019).
8. ↩ For a comprehensive list and discussion see, for example, Judith
Lorber, Gender Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
9. ↩ A lot of feminist theorizing, particularly in the United States, arose from a
misplaced critique of early Marxist feminism. It was not understood that the
focus of Marxist feminism, like Benston’s, was the structural place of women
under capitalism. Instead, as a basis for critique, theorists pointed to the empirical
differences (racial, ethnic, national origin, and so on) among women in different
societies. While these facts are true, feminist theorizing failed to grapple with the
difference between historically specific factors affecting the status of women
within capitalist social formations, and the capitalist structures and constraints
affecting women that are common to all social formations.
10. ↩ For example, politicians and the media emphasize the disproportionate poverty
of women, children, and racial and ethnic minorities, as if male and white poverty
were insignificant, the poor were classless, and poverty were unrelated to the
normal functioning of capitalism and class relations. In 2017, seventeen million
white people were 43.8 percent of the poor population. See the current U.S.
Poverty Statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau, available at
http://federalsafetynet.com.
11. ↩ I grew up in a middle-class family in Argentina, at a time (the 1950s and ’60s)
when—in my milieu—being female was a fact of private, but not social or
political, significance, as, for example, class or nationality. This influenced my
work. I gained an intuitive awareness of the historicity of the personal and
sociopolitical identities and categories of analysis dominant in all social
formations.
12. ↩ Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Monthly
Review 70, no. 8 (January 2019), 29.
13. ↩ The concept refers to the ranking and distribution of a society’s population
into aggregates of different social and economic standing based on characteristics
such as, for example, gender, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, income,
education, occupation, and place of residence.
14. ↩ Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction, 101–2; see also
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “The Structural and Political Dimensions of
Intersectional Oppression,” in Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers
Reader, ed. Patrick R. Grzanka (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2014), 18.
15. ↩ See, for example, Nira Yuval-Davis, “Beyond the Recognition and Re-
Distribution Dichotomy,” in Framing Intersectionality, ed. Helma Lutz, Maria
Teresa Herrera-Vivar, and Linda Supik (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 156, 159.
16. ↩ See, for example, Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women:
Toward a Unitary Theory (1983; repr., Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 177.
17. ↩ See, for example, Meg Luxton, “Reclaiming Marxist Feminism,” Studies in
Political Economy 95 (2015): 166.
18. ↩ Meg Luxton, “The Production of Life Itself: Gender, Social Reproduction and
IPE,” in Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, ed. Juanita
Elias and Adrienne Roberts (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2017), 39.
19. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1974), 566.
20. ↩ Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction, 353–57; see also
chap. 13.
21. ↩ Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction, 299.
22. ↩ See, for example, Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social
Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” Viewpoint, October 31,
2015.
23. ↩ Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Construction of Peoplehood,” in Race, Nation,
Class, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 84.
24. ↩ Susan Ferguson, Genevieve LeBaron, Angela Dimitrakaki, and Sara R. Farris,
“Introduction,” Historical Materialism 24, no. 2 (2016): 28, 30.
25. ↩ See, for example, Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s
Liberation”; Martha E. Gimenez, “The Oppression of Women,” in Structural
Sociology, ed. Ino Rossi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982);
Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women.
26. ↩ Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” 24.
27. ↩ Non-European immigrants are automatically racialized or ethnicized in the
United States and incorporated into the already existing oppressed minority
groups. See, for example, Martha E. Gimenez, “Minorities and the World-
System,” in Racism, Sexism and the World-System, ed. Joan Smith et al. (New
York: Greenwood, 1988), 39–56. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, “The
Construction of Peoplehood,” Sociological Forum 2 (1987): 373–88; Barbara
Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left
Review 181 (1989): 95–118.
28. ↩ In terms of Weberian sociology, the categories of oppression are status
categories that entail “a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of
honor…connected with any quality shared by a plurality.” See Max Weber, From
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. C. W. Mills and H. Gerth (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), 181.
29. ↩ Capitalist women are women who own capital in their own right, whether
inherited and/or earned, or are married to a capitalist and enjoy the privileges of
wealth. It is important to note that there are six states in the United States with
only one abortion clinic. Planned Parenthood might be forced to cease providing
abortions in Missouri and if this happens it will become the first state without a
single abortion clinic. See, “A Dark Milestone for Women’s Rights,” New York
Times, May 28, 2019.
30. ↩ Gimenez, “Reactionary Family Policies in the 21st Century.”
31. ↩ The Strength of Critique: Trajectories of Marxist-Feminism, First International
Marxist-Feminist Conference, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin, March 20–22,
2015; Building Bridges—Shifting and Strengthening Visions—Exploring
Alternatives, Second International Marxist-Feminist Conference, Academy of
Fine Arts, Vienna, October 7–9, 2016; and Transforming Ourselves,
Transforming the World, Third International Marxist-Feminist Conference, Lund
University, Lund, Sweden, October 5–7, 2018.
32. ↩ Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction, 342.
33. ↩ See Andrew J. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost (New York: Russell Sage, 2014).