Women’s rights are under attack – don’t women’s rights always seem to be under attack? Abortion Rights have been rolled back more than 50 years in the US, while in Britain the Supreme Court essentially told us that what’s between our legs when we’re born is what will define us for life. So how can we change this? Or are women destined always to be second class citizens, the victims of our biology, always the underdog?
Feminism has been seen as the way to fight women’s oppression but there are many different kinds of feminism – from the liberal feminism that wants to see more women CEOs and judges to the intersectional feminism that tries to tackle institutional sexism, racism etc. But what is different about Marxist feminism is not only its built-in intersectionality; Marxist feminism explains where our oppression comes from and, with that, indicates a way of ending it.
For the majority of time that human beings have been on this planet, we lived in cooperative egalitarian societies where women’s contribution to keeping everyone alive was seen as equal, often greater, than men’s.1For more about egalitarian pre-class societies, see Eleanor Burke Leacock (1981), Myths of Male Dominance: Collected articles on women cross-culturally, Monthly Review Press, New York. All that changed when developments in agriculture led to surpluses and, eventually, to the emergence of the male-dominated family, private property and ultimately the state. Engels described these changes as “the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children …”
Industrial Revolution
As ways of producing things changed, more changes came about in the way that families functioned. By the time Marx and Engels were writing, the Industrial Revolution was wreaking huge changes on the families of working people. The demands of production and the greed of the capitalist class meant that the entire family – mother, father and children as young as four years old – had to work in the factories.
Because there were no trade unions and no health and safety laws, accidents were common and workers, especially children, were often killed. In 1844 when Engels wrote his Conditions of the Working Class in England, average male life expectancy was 29 in Manchester, just 28 in Liverpool; this was an average: the wealthy tended to live well into their 80s, even 90s.
The rapid changes to production were mirrored by rapid changes to social reproduction. By social reproduction, Marxists mean the reproduction of life; that is the way human beings are reproduced literally – through childbirth and child rearing practices. But it is also about how we reproduce our lives and our labour on a daily basis – where we live, how we live, how we produce food, stay healthy, educate our children and crucially, how we care for those who need care: children, disabled and older people.
During the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people worked 12-14 hour days and slept in crowded tenements where several families often had to share one room. Sanitation was unheard of and many children didn’t get to grow up because the overcrowded living quarters bred disease. The context for the reproduction of life was so bleak that Marx and Engels thought the family would disappear altogether.
But over the following decades, the working class fought to save their family life. They campaigned for an eight-hour day and laws to protect child labourers; they held rent strikes to get improved living conditions and demanded the right to be part of trade unions. The death rate from disease was so high that even the capitalist class demanded public health improvements. The sewerage system that is now starting to fail was mainly built in the second half of the 19th century in order to reduce disease.
Family wage?
For the first half of the 20th century, there were some groups of workers who earned a ‘family wage’. A family wage would mean that the male breadwinner earned enough for his wife to be able to stay at home and care for the children. This was an ideal that few families could afford, however, as the family wage was not a reality for many. Most women had to work on top of housework and childcare – taking in washing, or ironing, sewing or cleaning for others.
Since the 1970s, there has been another massive change to women’s lives, very similar in many ways to what happened during the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism needed more workers if it was to continue its relentless drive to accumulate.The rate of female employment rose rapidly across the global North. The Celtic Tiger was built on women’s labour.
But the capitalist class believed its own fairy tales about women in the home “not working”; it failed to realise that women didn’t just run the home, get in the groceries, cook, clean and look after their children; they also looked after elderly parents and often a disabled family member also. In the 1960s/1970s England, there was free childcare for working families and Home Helps to look after older and disabled people in their homes. Those public services are gone in England, and we never had them to lose on any part of this island.
Alienation
Capitalism really messes human beings up. On the one hand, having a decent job is generally good for our physical and mental wellbeing. But a decent job is hard to find these days. It’s long been the case that most people hate their jobs. However, because of the way work is organised now, it has become more pernicious, more poisonous than just not liking our jobs. Marx wrote about how people have no choice but to sell their labour to survive under capitalism, however lousy and bad for us our job is – and how this alienates us not only from the product of our labour but from our “species being”, our humanity, our human nature.
Despite what we might think looking at the dog-eat-dog world we inhabit today, it is human nature to cooperate with each other to get the best outcome for everyone. Humans cooperated for tens of thousands of years before private property existed, and class started to divide us. In class society, you are either a slave or a free person, a lord or a serf, a boss or a worker.
Under capitalism, you are forced to compete with other workers: for jobs, for homes, for the best outcomes for you and your family. And if things aren’t great in your life, well it’s always this group or that group that is to blame. When I was growing up in Cork, it was Northerners my father used to blame for “coming down here, taking our jobs”. These days, it’s immigrants we are told to blame. Similarly, in the 1980s, we were told that gay men were a threat to our children; these days, it’s trans people we are told are a threat.
But for Marx, the alienation caused by capitalism does not only alienate us from others but from ourselves, our own humanity. This is an important insight for Marxist feminism. It is hard to believe that a person could rape a child or regularly beat up the person they say they love. But Marx’s theory of alienation explains how it is that some people can do things which go against our “species being”, or what we would call humanity or human nature.
Biology is not destiny
Marxist feminism is also important when it comes to thinking about trans and non-binary people. While some of those who call themselves Marxists talk about the “material reality of sex” meaning that biology is essentially destiny, Marx took a very different approach. In a footnote in Capital, he critiqued utilitarians arguing they must deal with “human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch”. In other words, we are all shaped as much by the society we live in as we are by our biology. And, just as we in the Global North have ‘conquered’ our environment – keeping ourselves warm in winter and cool in summer, so we have overcome our biology to an astonishing extent.
Our grandmothers had 10-12 children; these days anything more than two children is considered a large family. It used to be that deciding to end an unwanted pregnancy involved opting for an expensive operation that needed a general anaesthetic, now abortion can be self-managed using pills. Organ transplants, laser eye treatment, hip replacements – these are all examples of healthcare available to most people in the Global North, examples of the extent to which our ‘historical epoch’ has ensured that biology need not define us. Marx also argued that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations” i.e. biology is only part of our construction, the kind of society we live in is hugely influential.
In an excellent article on why biology is not our destiny, Sheila McGregor writes that we are all shaped not just by our bodies but by “the kind of society, class, family and wider environment an individual is born into, this includes: the impact of social values, expectations about behaviour and what is permissible, and political ideas. All these factors influence the way the individual develops and articulates their own sense of self, in relation to others and their own bodies, as they experience the world”.
This explains why so many young people today are able to come out as trans while still quite young: they have been born into a world where gender norms have been challenged by generations of feminists and socialists, where technology has developed to allow puberty to be delayed, gender-affirming healthcare has become a lot less difficult (though still nowhere near accessible enough) and where social media means young people today can see that trans and non-binary people exist and always have.
Ending the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people
What is so inspiring about the Marxist approach to women’s oppression is that it shows us how we can have real women’s liberation – a society where women are not second-class citizens, walking wombs or objects of misogynistic violence and where our reproductive potential is not used to diminish us but recognised as the huge contribution it is to society.
When we look at the position of women, of LGBTQ+ people, the nature of the family and how social reproduction is organised, we see it has changed through history as the way production is organised changed. Most pre-class societies were egalitarian, with women having as much power as men – often more power over decision-making than men. It is perfectly reasonable, then, to think that changing the mode of production to one which leads to the abolition of classes could lead to a return to egalitarianism.
How do we get there? Clearly, we, the 99% who depend on our labour to pay the bills, need to turn the world upside down and start to use the huge wealth that capitalism has produced to meet the needs of people, not of the 1% who currently own all that wealth. In such a world, we could socialise the tasks currently left to the nuclear family. Free 24-hour nurseries and a society where all children are the concern of everyone, not just their parents, would free up women but would also rescue many children for whom the privatised family is as oppressive as it is to women.
An end to the nuclear family would strike a blow to the gender binary, which depends on the family to enforce it and start allowing everyone to be able to define themselves. The oppression of gays and lesbians, trans and non-binary people, is related to the oppression of women within the nuclear family. So, replacing the family with a more collective approach to social reproduction would be the start of the end of all the related forms of oppression and would allow everyone the freedom to be the best version of themselves.
Further Reading
For more about egalitarian pre-class societies, see Eleanor Burke Leacock (1981), Myths of Male Dominance: Collected articles on women cross-culturally, Monthly Review Press, New York.
On Engels, historical materialism and women’s oppression see Marnie Holborow (2024), Homes in Crisis Capitalism: Gender, work and revolution, Bloomsbury Academic, London.
Marx’s theory of alienation and how it relates to gender-based violence and the family is discussed in Ferguson, I., Lavalette, M and Mooney, G. (2002), Chap 5 “People have become objects: The Roots of Alienation”, Rethinking Welfare: A Critical Perspective, Sage, London.
Sheila McGregor, Biology is not our destiny, explores the Marxist approach to trans and non-binary people.
