ABSTRACT
It was not until the influence of both radical feminist and Marxist feminist studies that we began to focus on the implications of the relations between the mode of production and patriarchy in the emerging class divisions for African women. In the 1970s theoretical foundations of radical feminism were forged in Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics, published in 1971, and Shulamith Firestone’s book Dialectics of Sex, published in 1972. Firestone and Millett argued that women’s oppression is a direct result of gender exploitation and not class exploitation, making women’s oppression the most fundamental form of oppression. In contrast the 1980s Marxist feminist writings of Heidi Hartmann, Michele Barrett and Karen Sacks have analyzed women’s oppression in terms of “gender relations as and where they may be distinct from, or connected with the processes of production and reproduction understood by historical materialism” (Barrett 1988:9). Prior to these studies, class was conceptualized as genderfree, with the relationship of women to the system left unaddressed.
