ABSTRACT
The Marxist conception of history is rooted in changing material circumstances. Those material circumstances are referred to as the economic base, or mode of production; upon the economic base rests the social superstructure, which includes such political and cultural institutions as the state and the family. Efforts to refurbish Marxist categories to meet feminist challenges have taken many forms and produced an enormous literature. Most versions offer, as a key element, some reclassification of women’s domestic labor with respect to its material status. There is less consensus on whether men as a group, including working-class men, contribute to and benefit from the oppression of women, and on the relationship between gender oppression and class oppression. An increasing incidence of socialist feminist demands for a more thorough reformulation of Marxist categories in the 1980s is not just the consequence of difficulties already encountered in their use; in some respects it is the logical outcome of the original feminist agenda.
