ABSTRACT
The marriage of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the larger struggle against capital. Marxist feminists who have looked at housework have also subsumed the feminist struggle into the struggle against capital. The great thrust of radical feminist writing has been directed to the documentation of the slogan “the personal is political.” Women’s discontent, radical feminists argued, is not the neurotic lament of the maladjusted, but a response to a social structure in which women are systematically dominated, exploited, and oppressed. Capitalist development creates the places for a hierarchy of workers, but traditional marxist categories cannot tell us who will fill which places.
