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Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter
Women’s Oppression Today is now a classic text in the debate about Marxism and feminism and has been reprinted many times since its first publication in 1980. Acknowledging the book as a product of the specific political climate of the time it was written, Michèle Barrett in this revised edition surveys the political and intellectual changes that have subsequently taken place, changes which would make the writing of such a text now impossible.
In a major new essay she discusses the symptomatic absence from the book of any consideration of ethnicity, race and racism, and also reviews the significant developments that have occurred since its first publication. While defending the central arguments of the book in their own terms, she points to fundamental changes in the context in which such a debate might be conducted today. The philosophical challenge of various forms of poststructuralism to the certainties of the book’s materialist premises are discussed, as is the challenge of postmodernism to grand political projects such as socialism and feminism.
In a major new essay she discusses the symptomatic absence from the book of any consideration of ethnicity, race and racism, and also reviews the significant developments that have occurred since its first publication. While defending the central arguments of the book in their own terms, she points to fundamental changes in the context in which such a debate might be conducted today. The philosophical challenge of various forms of poststructuralism to the certainties of the book’s materialist premises are discussed, as is the challenge of postmodernism to grand political projects such as socialism and feminism.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 28, 2020
If you follow, as I sometimes do, various leftist magazines, it won't take long for you to sense the divide between two camps. Let's call them economic leftism and social leftism. You generally find authors either arguing for the prioritization of one over the other – or, perhaps more common at this point, arguing for the compatibility of the two notions.
In short, leftists generally agree on the need for greater equality across the board – economic equality in the form of socialism, or at least a much more regulated capitalist system than currently exists, as well as racial, gender and sexual equality – but can't always agree on whether or how a focus on class (economic equality) fits with a focus on identity (social equality).
This debate is not new, as evidenced by Michèle Barrett's 1980 book, Women's Oppression Today, which is not only 40 years old but also in several ways feels much newer than that.
In this insightful, though densely academic, work, Barrett makes several arguments. Some of them, such as her objection to the use of "patriarchy" then becoming trendy, haven't aged as well. Others, however – such as her analysis of the socially constructed notion of the family and how it is used as a tool of middle-class male dominance – remain quite fresh.
In the end, what makes Barrett's book worth reading is her efforts to straddle two bristling camps – Marxism and feminism – by criticizing both of them!
Marxists who believe women's oppression is essential to the capitalist project and therefore will end with the advent of a socialist system are engaging in ahistorical reductionism, acting as if women were not oppressed in feudal societies. And if there's any cardinal sin for the followers of the founder of historical materialism, it's being ahistorical.
Feminists, on the other hand, miss the ways in which patriarchal domination, whatever its origins, has come to serve the needs of capital – and that liberal reformism, no matter how many victories it wins for women in the social and economic spheres, will ultimately fail if it doesn't address the need for systemic overhaul.
Her insightful critiques of both camps aside, Barrett's work isn't perfect. In addition to being overly dense and academic, it's not clear that Barrett has any suggestions for resolving the weaknesses in the "encounter" between feminism and Marxism that she has identified, nor any solutions for how to break out of the restrictive notions of family she highlights.
Likewise, as she herself acknowledges in both her 1988 introduction and 2014 afterword, Women's Oppression Today – as did a lot of 1970s-era feminist works – focuses almost entirely on the plight of white and straight women; queer women and women of color are barely mentioned, which leaves a gaping hole in her analysis and contributes to the feeling of distance between identitarian leftists and their economic interlocutors that Barrett herself is trying to address.
As an initial exploration of several ways in which feminism and Marxism interact and challenge each other, however, Barrett's work still has much to say four decades after its initial publication. Unfortunately, that's reflective of how little has changed.
After a lost generation of reactionary politics and economics has left America and much of the world more unequal and polarized than they have been in generations, the fractiousness of leftism's two camps is in some ways a reflection of the urgency everyone on the left feels. Revisiting fundamental texts like Barrett's can be a helpful reminder not only that these debates are familiar, but that we do not need to reinvent the wheel in trying to solve them.
In short, leftists generally agree on the need for greater equality across the board – economic equality in the form of socialism, or at least a much more regulated capitalist system than currently exists, as well as racial, gender and sexual equality – but can't always agree on whether or how a focus on class (economic equality) fits with a focus on identity (social equality).
This debate is not new, as evidenced by Michèle Barrett's 1980 book, Women's Oppression Today, which is not only 40 years old but also in several ways feels much newer than that.
In this insightful, though densely academic, work, Barrett makes several arguments. Some of them, such as her objection to the use of "patriarchy" then becoming trendy, haven't aged as well. Others, however – such as her analysis of the socially constructed notion of the family and how it is used as a tool of middle-class male dominance – remain quite fresh.
In the end, what makes Barrett's book worth reading is her efforts to straddle two bristling camps – Marxism and feminism – by criticizing both of them!
Marxists who believe women's oppression is essential to the capitalist project and therefore will end with the advent of a socialist system are engaging in ahistorical reductionism, acting as if women were not oppressed in feudal societies. And if there's any cardinal sin for the followers of the founder of historical materialism, it's being ahistorical.
Feminists, on the other hand, miss the ways in which patriarchal domination, whatever its origins, has come to serve the needs of capital – and that liberal reformism, no matter how many victories it wins for women in the social and economic spheres, will ultimately fail if it doesn't address the need for systemic overhaul.
Her insightful critiques of both camps aside, Barrett's work isn't perfect. In addition to being overly dense and academic, it's not clear that Barrett has any suggestions for resolving the weaknesses in the "encounter" between feminism and Marxism that she has identified, nor any solutions for how to break out of the restrictive notions of family she highlights.
Likewise, as she herself acknowledges in both her 1988 introduction and 2014 afterword, Women's Oppression Today – as did a lot of 1970s-era feminist works – focuses almost entirely on the plight of white and straight women; queer women and women of color are barely mentioned, which leaves a gaping hole in her analysis and contributes to the feeling of distance between identitarian leftists and their economic interlocutors that Barrett herself is trying to address.
As an initial exploration of several ways in which feminism and Marxism interact and challenge each other, however, Barrett's work still has much to say four decades after its initial publication. Unfortunately, that's reflective of how little has changed.
After a lost generation of reactionary politics and economics has left America and much of the world more unequal and polarized than they have been in generations, the fractiousness of leftism's two camps is in some ways a reflection of the urgency everyone on the left feels. Revisiting fundamental texts like Barrett's can be a helpful reminder not only that these debates are familiar, but that we do not need to reinvent the wheel in trying to solve them.
May 14, 2015
This book covers such a wide range of debates within both feminism and Marxism that it should be considered an encyclopedia. At the same time, the focus is on Eurocentric debates, and there's almost no mention of the global context or even of non-white women in the UK. She does correct this somewhat in the foreword that she wrote much later.
November 18, 2019
I don't think I'm intelligent enough for this book. Parts of it made sense, and I felt like I was getting somewhere, but parts of it had so much terminology and unnecessarily long words that I was just glossing over it trying to get through.
September 26, 2007
Although I'm sure it serves the author well in Academia, I found the writing style too dry and intellectual for my prole-brain. I am marking it 'read' without having finished it, in honesty, without having made it one quarter of the way through.
March 3, 2020
An intellectual fraud going on the traditional Continental Philosophy path: set a conclusion than massage the facts to fit the conclusion. After all, the academic commission bestowing various tenures is the client and not the reader.
April 16, 2019
An excellent book
November 27, 2015
That women are oppressed inside capitalism is not something that this book wastes time with. It is a given, and if you are more interested in learning about the ways in which women are oppressed, you'd be better consulting a different work. This is a book that, instead, deals with the intersectionality between class oppression and women's oppression and tries to reconcile Marxist theory on the former with radical feminism (as understood in the '70s) on the later. As such, this book requires familiarity with the works of Marx and Engels and later thinkers like Althusser, Lacan, and even Freud. Coming to it without understanding what concepts like ideology, discourse, functionalism, social reproduction, etc. can make it pretty difficult to grasp (and it was to me).
Some of the central ideas of the book are the relationship between the Marxist concept of base and superstructure and how it relates to the oppression of women: according to Marxism, women's oppression today must be the result of the relations of production in capitalism and must also be beneficial to the capitalist class. This falls short, according to Barrett and some authors she brings up, as both pre-capitalist societies already had some of the oppressive forms present in capitalism and socialist states in their way to communism have done little to overcome the oppression of women. Also, women in the capitalist class can also be the victims of oppression. She argues that there must be something that transcends the economic relations of capitalism that allows this oppression to still be present.
On this regard, Barrett devotes considerable effort analyzing the role of the family in producing and reproducing oppression towards women. She argues that both Marx and Engels fall short in their understanding of the family (while recognizing that Engels' "The private property, the family, and the state" has important merits) and that this might explain in part how Marxist theory even makes the mistake to mystify the family instead of analyzing its contradictions (something that I think it is better understood now than it was in the 70's. -- I recall at least Harvey's historical account of how the bourgeois family form was passed on to the working class as part of an ideological battle for the convenience of the former, but I am not sure in which book that was.) She studies the ideological concept of the family, how the state (through its education, legal, and social apparatuses) makes sure to reproduce it further, and how the ideological family and the real family (both in bourgeois and working classes) differ from each other and how much of the oppression (and not only of women) is a consequence in these deviations.
Another aspect of the book is the criticism of the concept of patriarchy and of the (dated) idea of radical feminism that women's oppression exists for the benefit of men, and how this idea neglects the historicism of this oppression. There are lengthy accounts on ways in which the term patriarchy can even be detrimental to the cause of feminism, and the need for an approach of feminism to Marxist methods (historical materialism, perhaps importantly) on the study of this oppression. She presents several attempts to reconcile Marxist theory with radical feminism but, in her view, most of them have been insufficient one way or another and further work in the area is of utmost necessity.
There's a lot in this book, and I feel that my review fails short to mention all of the insight present in it. It is also hard to come out of it with any clear conclusions -- if anything, I get the feeling that the role of the family, as ideologically defended and reproduced by the state through its different agencies, is nothing but crucial to understand what shapes the currently oppressive society towards women. Taking into account that the state, in its current form, serves to protect capitalist interests above all, it is hard to think of any real emancipation of women within capitalism. However, it is clear that just overcoming capitalism will not suffice to completely eradicate women's oppression -- the ideological formations that would survive capitalism, like the family, need also to be completely transformed, and that's yet another difficult challenge.
From the preface and the afterword (both written recently), it is clear that the book has aged considerably and that a lot of ground has been covered in the last 35 years. However it's still worth a read, and its bibliography and references make it worth it as a starting point in the study of marxist-feminism.
Some of the central ideas of the book are the relationship between the Marxist concept of base and superstructure and how it relates to the oppression of women: according to Marxism, women's oppression today must be the result of the relations of production in capitalism and must also be beneficial to the capitalist class. This falls short, according to Barrett and some authors she brings up, as both pre-capitalist societies already had some of the oppressive forms present in capitalism and socialist states in their way to communism have done little to overcome the oppression of women. Also, women in the capitalist class can also be the victims of oppression. She argues that there must be something that transcends the economic relations of capitalism that allows this oppression to still be present.
On this regard, Barrett devotes considerable effort analyzing the role of the family in producing and reproducing oppression towards women. She argues that both Marx and Engels fall short in their understanding of the family (while recognizing that Engels' "The private property, the family, and the state" has important merits) and that this might explain in part how Marxist theory even makes the mistake to mystify the family instead of analyzing its contradictions (something that I think it is better understood now than it was in the 70's. -- I recall at least Harvey's historical account of how the bourgeois family form was passed on to the working class as part of an ideological battle for the convenience of the former, but I am not sure in which book that was.) She studies the ideological concept of the family, how the state (through its education, legal, and social apparatuses) makes sure to reproduce it further, and how the ideological family and the real family (both in bourgeois and working classes) differ from each other and how much of the oppression (and not only of women) is a consequence in these deviations.
Another aspect of the book is the criticism of the concept of patriarchy and of the (dated) idea of radical feminism that women's oppression exists for the benefit of men, and how this idea neglects the historicism of this oppression. There are lengthy accounts on ways in which the term patriarchy can even be detrimental to the cause of feminism, and the need for an approach of feminism to Marxist methods (historical materialism, perhaps importantly) on the study of this oppression. She presents several attempts to reconcile Marxist theory with radical feminism but, in her view, most of them have been insufficient one way or another and further work in the area is of utmost necessity.
There's a lot in this book, and I feel that my review fails short to mention all of the insight present in it. It is also hard to come out of it with any clear conclusions -- if anything, I get the feeling that the role of the family, as ideologically defended and reproduced by the state through its different agencies, is nothing but crucial to understand what shapes the currently oppressive society towards women. Taking into account that the state, in its current form, serves to protect capitalist interests above all, it is hard to think of any real emancipation of women within capitalism. However, it is clear that just overcoming capitalism will not suffice to completely eradicate women's oppression -- the ideological formations that would survive capitalism, like the family, need also to be completely transformed, and that's yet another difficult challenge.
From the preface and the afterword (both written recently), it is clear that the book has aged considerably and that a lot of ground has been covered in the last 35 years. However it's still worth a read, and its bibliography and references make it worth it as a starting point in the study of marxist-feminism.
March 19, 2016
This book does an excellent job laying the groundwork for understanding how feminism and Marxism should coexist and the many intersections between class oppression and gender oppression historically. Barrett does excellent work here on the nature of ideology and how that becomes material and even tackles the uses of psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism. Women's Oppression Today's big failure is it stubbornly Global North context. The book, written in 1980, completely lacks an analysis of race, sexuality, ability, or geographical context. The forward to the 2014 does work to address this, but I would liked to see an additional chapter written at the very least.
March 19, 2013
very good. even those this book is a bit old very little of it feels at all dated. very useful information in recapitulating the crux of marxist feminism. i highly recommend reading this book as well as Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. together they will get you fully grounded in the best of marxist feminism.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews