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Marxism and Feminism
Global events, from economic crisis to social unrest and militarization, disproportionately affect women. Yet around the world it is also women who are leading the struggle against oppression and exploitation. In light of renewed interest in Marxist theory among many women activists and academics, Marxism and Feminism presents a contemporary and accessible Marxist–feminist analysis on a host of issues. It reassesses previous debates and seeks to answer pressing questions of how we should understand the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, and how we can envision a feminist project which emancipates both women and society.
With contributions from both renowned scholars and new voices, Marxism and Feminism is set to become the foundational text for modern Marxist-feminist thought.
With contributions from both renowned scholars and new voices, Marxism and Feminism is set to become the foundational text for modern Marxist-feminist thought.
400 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2015
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420 people want to read
About the author
Shahrzad Mojab
32 books19 followersShahrzad Mojab is the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and Professor at the Department of Adult Education and Counselling Psychology, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/UT). Shahrzad's areas of research and teaching are minority women's access to education; educational policy studies; comparative and international education; anti-racism education; critical and feminist pedagogy; feminism and nationalism; gender, state, diaspora and transnationality; women, war, militarization and violence; women, war and learning; and feminism, colonialism and imperialism; and cultural relativism as an ideological tool. Her publications include, among others, articles and book chapters on ‘Islamic Feminism’, feminism and nationalism, adult education and the construction of civil society in the Middle East, women’s NGOs and transnationalism, and diaspora, feminism and neo-liberalism. She is the editor of Women of A Non States Nation: The Kurds, co-editor of Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism, and Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges. She is currently conducting SSHRC-funded research on war, diaspora, and learning; women political prisoners in the Middle East; and war and transnational women’s organizations (Women, War, Diaspora, and Learning: Research Resources: www.utoronto.ca/wwdl.)
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2025
Great criticism of liberal intersectional approaches.
July 21, 2023
A great, accessible and comprehensive collection of essays on Marxism and feminism spanning a variety of topics including class, race, labour power, reproduction, nation(alism), imperialism and financialisation among others
Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in Marxism and feminism
I particularly enjoyed:
Chapter 5 on democracy that identifies the limits of freedom for women within bourgeois democracy in the debate over control of reproduction that necessitates the struggles of feminism. The struggles over paid/unpaid labour, wages for housework, sex work, social entitlements for reproductive work, and redistribution and economic justice have an inner relation to one another such that the sexuality of women, their role in the reproduction of labour power, and the contribution of reproductive labour to the accumulation of capital are indivisible social relations and thus points for the violent subversion and state control of women's bodies and consciousness.
Chapter 7 on ideology - The criticism of the understanding of patriarchy from which national and international women's noon-governmental organisations (NGOs) and advocacy-based social movements are predominantly organised. That is an understanding and politics framed within a schema that begins and ends with antithetical discursivities recommending "educational" empowerment for women, especially through the education of "rights". This schema is derived from the postmodern, liberal linguistic or discursive approach to social relations, which confine patriarchal ideolog to the realm of consciousness alone, and endanger the very project of feminism. By articulating discursively, the feminist project becomes a pedagogic one of trying to change consciousness without changing the material world. Thus the agenda of the "development" agency for women is concerned with the "issues" rather than the social organisation that gives rise to them. Feminism is then incorporated in patriarchal corporate agencies and managerial bureaucracies of the state, which creates a class of women experts who hold power over other women.
Chapter 9 on intersectionality - References Bridget Anderson's brilliant work examining women's experiences as domesic workers, their relationship with their female employers and with the state of which they are non-citizens, the nature of reproductive work and its connection to production in capitalism, the work of organising etc. Anderson's singular contribution (one made possible with a materialist approach) is her contention that paid domestic work, particularly when it includes care, involves not the sale of labour power, but the sale of the self, of personhood. Caught in the liminal space between the traditional and the modern, the private and the public, migrant domestic workers are personally dependent on their female employers, a condition reinforced by state laws. The history of slavery in the US South is summoned here to emphasise its connection to the current practice of hiring domestic workers from the periphery. By taking over the reproductive work traditionally assigned to the wife, it is obvious that domestic workers are enabling their employers to participate in lucrative work in the public sphere.
Chapter 12 on patriarchy/ies - Summarises the work of Mies and Wallerstein that linked domestic work in the imperial core to subsistence farming in the periphery as parallel resources or reserve armies for the primary accumulation of capital, as well as linking housewifisation in Europe to the process of colonisation and expropriation of resourcse, suggesting an interpenetration of colonial practices, the gendering and racialisation of divisions of labour. This work drew attention to the connection of periphery subsistence and other unpauid labour with consumption and development in the imperial core, foregrounding the contemporary international division of labour.
Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in Marxism and feminism
I particularly enjoyed:
Chapter 5 on democracy that identifies the limits of freedom for women within bourgeois democracy in the debate over control of reproduction that necessitates the struggles of feminism. The struggles over paid/unpaid labour, wages for housework, sex work, social entitlements for reproductive work, and redistribution and economic justice have an inner relation to one another such that the sexuality of women, their role in the reproduction of labour power, and the contribution of reproductive labour to the accumulation of capital are indivisible social relations and thus points for the violent subversion and state control of women's bodies and consciousness.
Chapter 7 on ideology - The criticism of the understanding of patriarchy from which national and international women's noon-governmental organisations (NGOs) and advocacy-based social movements are predominantly organised. That is an understanding and politics framed within a schema that begins and ends with antithetical discursivities recommending "educational" empowerment for women, especially through the education of "rights". This schema is derived from the postmodern, liberal linguistic or discursive approach to social relations, which confine patriarchal ideolog to the realm of consciousness alone, and endanger the very project of feminism. By articulating discursively, the feminist project becomes a pedagogic one of trying to change consciousness without changing the material world. Thus the agenda of the "development" agency for women is concerned with the "issues" rather than the social organisation that gives rise to them. Feminism is then incorporated in patriarchal corporate agencies and managerial bureaucracies of the state, which creates a class of women experts who hold power over other women.
Chapter 9 on intersectionality - References Bridget Anderson's brilliant work examining women's experiences as domesic workers, their relationship with their female employers and with the state of which they are non-citizens, the nature of reproductive work and its connection to production in capitalism, the work of organising etc. Anderson's singular contribution (one made possible with a materialist approach) is her contention that paid domestic work, particularly when it includes care, involves not the sale of labour power, but the sale of the self, of personhood. Caught in the liminal space between the traditional and the modern, the private and the public, migrant domestic workers are personally dependent on their female employers, a condition reinforced by state laws. The history of slavery in the US South is summoned here to emphasise its connection to the current practice of hiring domestic workers from the periphery. By taking over the reproductive work traditionally assigned to the wife, it is obvious that domestic workers are enabling their employers to participate in lucrative work in the public sphere.
Chapter 12 on patriarchy/ies - Summarises the work of Mies and Wallerstein that linked domestic work in the imperial core to subsistence farming in the periphery as parallel resources or reserve armies for the primary accumulation of capital, as well as linking housewifisation in Europe to the process of colonisation and expropriation of resourcse, suggesting an interpenetration of colonial practices, the gendering and racialisation of divisions of labour. This work drew attention to the connection of periphery subsistence and other unpauid labour with consumption and development in the imperial core, foregrounding the contemporary international division of labour.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews