My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings All The Boys To The Yard
Friedrich Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1845) addressed issues that many “Marxists” had not (they were more interested in workers’ oppression, not women’s oppression). It showed how changes in the material conditions of people affect the organization of their family relations. Engels argued that monogamous marriage is a social institution that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with private property. He wrote that if women are to be truly emancipated from men, they must be economically independent.
Contemporary Marxists Feminists, as I have seen it, don’t usually deal directly with reproductive or sexual concerns, i.e. contraception, sterilization, abortion, pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, rape, and woman battering, like, say a radical feminist might. They seem to be more focused on things like the concerns of working women. They help us to understand how the institution of family is related to capitalism; how women’s domestic work is trivialized and not considered “real work”; and basically how women are given the most unfulfilling, boring, and/or low-paying jobs. These are all offered as partial explanations for gender oppression.
That reminds me of a joke: why did the woman cross the road? Who cares – the real question is, “What is she doing out of the kitchen?”
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