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Marxism and Feminism
Marxism and Feminism is a critical examination of feminist thought since the eighteenth century, from a Marxist perspective. It is a response to the growing dissatisfaction with feminist writing which declares simply that men oppress women, sometimes describes how, but falls short of examining why. In this book some of the early proponents of women's rights are examined. The Marxist analysis of Engels is clarified. More recent contributors, writing from the tradition of radical feminism or attempting Marxist explanations, fall under scrutiny. Guettel takes a critical look at the issues and the theory arising from women's movement today.
62 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 10, 2025
I came to this book expecting an illuminating bridge between two traditions I’d wrestled with separately in my own reading life—Marxism and feminism—and left feeling like I’d been trapped in a never-ending couples’ counselling session where neither side truly wanted reconciliation.
Winter afternoons in the early 2000s, I’d read Marxist texts with the kind of reverence one reserves for an old, battle-scarred prophet, only to realise, years later, that half of humanity’s oppression was treated as a side quest.
The logic was always the same: once the revolution comes, patriarchy will vanish like steam off a kettle. Having lived through enough revolutions of the merely personal, I knew that steam condenses — it doesn’t disappear.
On the feminist side, the book resurrected the ghosts of the 1970s academic scene I’d read about during grad school — brilliant minds endlessly subdividing into camps, sub-camps, and warring factions. Patriarchy was the big bad, sure, but whether capitalism was its co-conspirator or its puppet varied depending on which table you sat at.
I couldn’t help but think of the feminist reading groups I’d joined, where we’d start discussing Simone de Beauvoir and end with three splinter meetings in three separate cafés. The movement’s intellectual richness is also its chaos, and this book captured that — perhaps too faithfully.
Guettel’s attempt at unifying these two was like watching an earnest matchmaker introduce two people who’ve already decided the other is beneath them. There are moments where you can see the promise — Marxism’s structural analysis complementing feminism’s lived-experience critiques — but then the old habits kick in.
Marxism keeps interrupting to explain why its theory already accounts for everything; feminism rolls its eyes and mutters about being patronised. The prose has the stilted politeness of an awkward wedding toast, where everyone claps but no one is fooled.
Reading it, I was reminded of over-fermented kombucha — the kind you buy thinking it’s going to make you healthier, only to find it tastes like vinegar and regret. Both Marxism and feminism, as handled here, began as nourishing, radical frameworks. Both have moments of piercing clarity. But both also have an astonishing blind spot for their own complicity in perpetuating what they claim to dismantle.
It’s not that the book fails entirely — it made me revisit my own intellectual flirtations with each side, and that’s worth something.
But it left me thinking that maybe the “middle ground” isn’t a bridge at all but a no-man’s-land where ideas go to reenact old battles, endlessly, under the guise of dialogue.
Winter afternoons in the early 2000s, I’d read Marxist texts with the kind of reverence one reserves for an old, battle-scarred prophet, only to realise, years later, that half of humanity’s oppression was treated as a side quest.
The logic was always the same: once the revolution comes, patriarchy will vanish like steam off a kettle. Having lived through enough revolutions of the merely personal, I knew that steam condenses — it doesn’t disappear.
On the feminist side, the book resurrected the ghosts of the 1970s academic scene I’d read about during grad school — brilliant minds endlessly subdividing into camps, sub-camps, and warring factions. Patriarchy was the big bad, sure, but whether capitalism was its co-conspirator or its puppet varied depending on which table you sat at.
I couldn’t help but think of the feminist reading groups I’d joined, where we’d start discussing Simone de Beauvoir and end with three splinter meetings in three separate cafés. The movement’s intellectual richness is also its chaos, and this book captured that — perhaps too faithfully.
Guettel’s attempt at unifying these two was like watching an earnest matchmaker introduce two people who’ve already decided the other is beneath them. There are moments where you can see the promise — Marxism’s structural analysis complementing feminism’s lived-experience critiques — but then the old habits kick in.
Marxism keeps interrupting to explain why its theory already accounts for everything; feminism rolls its eyes and mutters about being patronised. The prose has the stilted politeness of an awkward wedding toast, where everyone claps but no one is fooled.
Reading it, I was reminded of over-fermented kombucha — the kind you buy thinking it’s going to make you healthier, only to find it tastes like vinegar and regret. Both Marxism and feminism, as handled here, began as nourishing, radical frameworks. Both have moments of piercing clarity. But both also have an astonishing blind spot for their own complicity in perpetuating what they claim to dismantle.
It’s not that the book fails entirely — it made me revisit my own intellectual flirtations with each side, and that’s worth something.
But it left me thinking that maybe the “middle ground” isn’t a bridge at all but a no-man’s-land where ideas go to reenact old battles, endlessly, under the guise of dialogue.
August 16, 2025
A DISCUSSION OF ISSUES FOR FEMINISM FROM THE MARXIST VIEWPOINT
Author Charnie Guettel begins this 1974 book, “A remarkable number of articles and books on the oppression of women have appeared in recent years by authors spanning the entire political spectrum… Many of us are dissatisfied with a strict bourgeois feminism which simply declares that men oppress women, sometimes describes how, but does not really tell us why. Women in the left are looking to Marxism to discover the basic causes of our oppression, and to give us a scientific understanding of our society that will enable us to develop a strategy to organize for liberation. Most radical feminism, no matter how scathing its attack on existing institutions, is very much in the tradition of bourgeois liberalism.” (Pg. 1)
She continues, “Marxism… starts from the premise that we are not what we are because of what we think, but that we think in certain ways because of the kind of work we do, or don’t have to do, or are kept from doing. Women are oppressed by men because of the forms their lives have had to take in class society, in which both men and women have been oppressed by the ruling class… Capitalism tries to use reproduction, sexuality, masculine-feminine socialization of children in such a way as to make us more exploitable, not to satisfy human needs. Herein lies the special oppression of women as women, as well as of women as workers.” (Pg. 2-3)
She notes, “Mary Wollstonecraft based her arguments for equality on the … premise [of]… the inalienable natural rights of individuals. All men and women by virtue of their common humanity and creation by God are entitled to the opportunity for full development. From the French Revolution until about 1890 this was the dominant argument used for women’s rights. The Anti’s would reply that what was ‘natural’ for the woman was the domestic sphere. The answers to this varied. Many of our feminist sisters replied that women were capable of both home and work, many hedged, but few argued that women were not AT LEAST responsible for the home, whatever potential they may develop in addition to this.” (Pg. 4-5)
She argues, “for most of human history [before ‘civilization’] nothing like the exploitation of the last five thousand years existed. And it is not innate ‘weakness’ that has put women at a disadvantage, but her reproductive role in the context of systems of exploitation.” (Pg. 6)
She states, “For Engels, the man’s going to war and hunting, and the woman’s staying at home and gathering and preparing the food was ‘natural.’ A better way of describing this might be that one of society’s first important cultural adaptations was assigning to the woman tasks compatible with childbearing and childrearing, and to the man… all others… Some feminists have interpreted Engels to mean that once women RULED and were defeated by the male sex. They were defeated all right, but before that no one ruled in the way they do in class societies with states. As long as the division of labor was reciprocal there was no exploitation and hence no domination in the sense of ‘propertied’ advantage.” (Pg. 10-11)
She asserts, “Womankind, like mankind, does not set itself problems it cannot solve, and until women were securely and irrevocably in social production there was no base for their movement... The woman movement ‘as such’ in capitalist countries never had a working class base until this time around: it is historically false to characterize the turn-of-the-century movement as working class, regardless of militancy. Socialist thought tends to approximate, in the long run, the possibilities of the working classes it deals with.” (Pg. 20)
She says, “The interplay between liberal feminism and Marxism continues. Feminst analysis forces socialist liberationists to deal, for example, with sexuality as a social issue. Indeed, making sexuality a public issue, a ‘political’ issue, and subject ‘fit for Marxists’ and other revolutionaries, is one of the historical tasks of feminism. But because of their bourgeois view of sexuality, feminists have been unable to advance it as a human health right and to push for the social institutions that would make healthy sex a reality, such as sex education in the schools and sex therapy clinics.” (Pg. 43)
She suggests, “formulating the problem simply as a question of what is more ‘important,’ sex or class, is 'mechanical' [in the technical Marxist sense]. To say that a social process develops dialectically is to recognize that struggle to overcome secondary contradictions in the process sometimes takes precedence over struggle to overcome primary ones.” (Pg. 50)
She concludes, “The efforts to find a ‘new Marxism,’ purified in the cauldron of woman’s consciousness, is as natural to the women’s movement as other ‘separate attempts’---separate women’s political parties, separate women’s trade unions, and some kind of never-quite-becoming autonomous women’s movement. It could well be that these represent stages in injecting women’s issues into the left generally, but stages constantly re-emerging far into the struggle for socialism. In part, the theory we demand for such struggle is and will be a product of science which can only be developed fully in a socialist society…. There can be no ISOLATED super-theory of women’s liberation. The next thing on the agenda is a more developed Marxist psychology to analyze sexuality, socialization, and the myriad of aspects of development involved in our liberation. And since this kind requires scientific and medical advances of a kind not yet available to us, the questions have scarcely surfaced, let alone the answers.” (Pg. 62)
'Scientific' Marxism was much more a ‘live’ issue back in 1974, when this book was written, than it is today. It seems rather ‘dated,’ these days.
Author Charnie Guettel begins this 1974 book, “A remarkable number of articles and books on the oppression of women have appeared in recent years by authors spanning the entire political spectrum… Many of us are dissatisfied with a strict bourgeois feminism which simply declares that men oppress women, sometimes describes how, but does not really tell us why. Women in the left are looking to Marxism to discover the basic causes of our oppression, and to give us a scientific understanding of our society that will enable us to develop a strategy to organize for liberation. Most radical feminism, no matter how scathing its attack on existing institutions, is very much in the tradition of bourgeois liberalism.” (Pg. 1)
She continues, “Marxism… starts from the premise that we are not what we are because of what we think, but that we think in certain ways because of the kind of work we do, or don’t have to do, or are kept from doing. Women are oppressed by men because of the forms their lives have had to take in class society, in which both men and women have been oppressed by the ruling class… Capitalism tries to use reproduction, sexuality, masculine-feminine socialization of children in such a way as to make us more exploitable, not to satisfy human needs. Herein lies the special oppression of women as women, as well as of women as workers.” (Pg. 2-3)
She notes, “Mary Wollstonecraft based her arguments for equality on the … premise [of]… the inalienable natural rights of individuals. All men and women by virtue of their common humanity and creation by God are entitled to the opportunity for full development. From the French Revolution until about 1890 this was the dominant argument used for women’s rights. The Anti’s would reply that what was ‘natural’ for the woman was the domestic sphere. The answers to this varied. Many of our feminist sisters replied that women were capable of both home and work, many hedged, but few argued that women were not AT LEAST responsible for the home, whatever potential they may develop in addition to this.” (Pg. 4-5)
She argues, “for most of human history [before ‘civilization’] nothing like the exploitation of the last five thousand years existed. And it is not innate ‘weakness’ that has put women at a disadvantage, but her reproductive role in the context of systems of exploitation.” (Pg. 6)
She states, “For Engels, the man’s going to war and hunting, and the woman’s staying at home and gathering and preparing the food was ‘natural.’ A better way of describing this might be that one of society’s first important cultural adaptations was assigning to the woman tasks compatible with childbearing and childrearing, and to the man… all others… Some feminists have interpreted Engels to mean that once women RULED and were defeated by the male sex. They were defeated all right, but before that no one ruled in the way they do in class societies with states. As long as the division of labor was reciprocal there was no exploitation and hence no domination in the sense of ‘propertied’ advantage.” (Pg. 10-11)
She asserts, “Womankind, like mankind, does not set itself problems it cannot solve, and until women were securely and irrevocably in social production there was no base for their movement... The woman movement ‘as such’ in capitalist countries never had a working class base until this time around: it is historically false to characterize the turn-of-the-century movement as working class, regardless of militancy. Socialist thought tends to approximate, in the long run, the possibilities of the working classes it deals with.” (Pg. 20)
She says, “The interplay between liberal feminism and Marxism continues. Feminst analysis forces socialist liberationists to deal, for example, with sexuality as a social issue. Indeed, making sexuality a public issue, a ‘political’ issue, and subject ‘fit for Marxists’ and other revolutionaries, is one of the historical tasks of feminism. But because of their bourgeois view of sexuality, feminists have been unable to advance it as a human health right and to push for the social institutions that would make healthy sex a reality, such as sex education in the schools and sex therapy clinics.” (Pg. 43)
She suggests, “formulating the problem simply as a question of what is more ‘important,’ sex or class, is 'mechanical' [in the technical Marxist sense]. To say that a social process develops dialectically is to recognize that struggle to overcome secondary contradictions in the process sometimes takes precedence over struggle to overcome primary ones.” (Pg. 50)
She concludes, “The efforts to find a ‘new Marxism,’ purified in the cauldron of woman’s consciousness, is as natural to the women’s movement as other ‘separate attempts’---separate women’s political parties, separate women’s trade unions, and some kind of never-quite-becoming autonomous women’s movement. It could well be that these represent stages in injecting women’s issues into the left generally, but stages constantly re-emerging far into the struggle for socialism. In part, the theory we demand for such struggle is and will be a product of science which can only be developed fully in a socialist society…. There can be no ISOLATED super-theory of women’s liberation. The next thing on the agenda is a more developed Marxist psychology to analyze sexuality, socialization, and the myriad of aspects of development involved in our liberation. And since this kind requires scientific and medical advances of a kind not yet available to us, the questions have scarcely surfaced, let alone the answers.” (Pg. 62)
'Scientific' Marxism was much more a ‘live’ issue back in 1974, when this book was written, than it is today. It seems rather ‘dated,’ these days.
August 2, 2024
Guettel offers a compelling argument in support of the view that the primary cause of inequality between men and women is the non-socialization and non-industrialization of childcare and housework, making it difficult for women to enter the workforce in the same way that men can. Critically, this persisting inequality between sexes arose originally from and continues to be embedded in the asymmetry of participation in (economically) productive forces between men and women; in other words, an imbalance in how men and women of any class, but particularly the working class, live with respect to the means of production; namely, the oppression of women is a result of capitalism.
Guettel argues (rightly, I might add), that the true emancipation of women is part and parcel to the further development of socialism, in the sense that each depends on the other; socialism is a prerequisite for women to be able to enter the workforce to the same extent and with the same opportunities as men.
Finally, the book is an effective critical examination of past traditions of bourgeois and idealistic feminism, which often only identify that men oppress women, but fail to adequately account for the mechanisms by and for which this oppression occurs.
Guettel argues (rightly, I might add), that the true emancipation of women is part and parcel to the further development of socialism, in the sense that each depends on the other; socialism is a prerequisite for women to be able to enter the workforce to the same extent and with the same opportunities as men.
Finally, the book is an effective critical examination of past traditions of bourgeois and idealistic feminism, which often only identify that men oppress women, but fail to adequately account for the mechanisms by and for which this oppression occurs.
July 24, 2019
The structures our of society must be studied to understand how to begin undoing the oppressions of any and all oppressed people. We can’t undo the wrongs until we undo the most universal injustice—that of class—and this book helps to illuminate this imperative.
April 30, 2015
First published in 1974. I read for an essay, but found it a short, easy read. It convinced me that feminism can't use Marxism as a way of explaining the repression of women - probably the opposite of what the author intended, but it still had some good points.
July 4, 2013
« May of us are dissatisfied with a strict bourgeois feminism which simply declared that men oppress women, something describe how, but does not really tell us why. »
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews