ABSTRACT
An important new body of theory is being born out of what Amy Bridges and Heidi Hartmann have called "the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. "2 The name most commonly given to the offspring of this union is "socialist feminism," even though many of those who are most responsible for its emergence are not agreed on what to call it. 3 Tentative, impressionistic, and clearly unfinished, socialist feminism has nevertheless identified and in many cases transcended the limitations of both bourgeois feminism and orthodox Marxism. Socialist feminists have dealt the traditional Marxist account of the origins of partriarchy a blow from which it is unlikely ever to recover. 4 They have exposed the fatal lack in traditional Marxism both of a theory of sexuality and of an adequate account of human psychological development, and have begun to formulate theory in these areas from a historical materialist perspective with challenging results. 5 Further, socialist feminists have subjected several of the central categories of Marxist analysis to searching critical scrutiny, chiefly the categories of "production" and of "relations of production." They have claimed that these categories are conceived too narrowly to allow an adequate understanding either of the oppressive character of the relations between men and women or of what in fact constitutes the proper economic or productive , 'base" of society.6
