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Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work

A good place to situate the start of theoretical debates about women, class and work is in the intersection with Marxism and feminism. Such debates were shaped not only by academic inquiries but as questions about the relation between women’s oppression and liberation and the class politics of the left, trade union and feminist movements in the late 19 th and 20 th centuries, particularly in the U.S., Britain and Europe. It will also be necessary to consider various philosophical approaches to the concept of work, the way that women’s work and household activities are subsumed or not under this category, how the specific features of this work may or may not connect to different “ways of knowing” and different approaches to ethics, and the debate between essentialist and social constructionist approaches to differences between the sexes as a base for the sexual division of labor in most known human societies.

The relation of women as a social group to the analysis of economic class has spurred political debates within both Marxist and feminist circles as to whether women’s movements challenging male domination can assume a common set of women’s interests across race, ethnicity, and class. If there are no such interests, on what can a viable women’s movement be based, and how can it evade promoting primarily the interests of white middle class and wealthy women? To the extent to which women do organize themselves as a political group cutting across traditional class lines, under what conditions are they a conservative influence as opposed to a progressive force for social change? If poor and working class women’s issues are different than middle and upper class women’s issues, how can middle class women’s movements be trusted to address them? In addition to these questions, there is a set of issues related to cross-cultural comparative studies of women, work and relative power in different societies, as well as analyses of how women’s work is connected to processes of globalization.

Considerable research in the past 30 years has been devoted to women and work in the context of shifting divisions of labor globally (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004). Some of this feminist work proceeds from the development perspectives promoted by the UN and other policy making institutions (Chen et al . 2005), while other research takes a more critical view (Beneria 2003; Pyle and Ward 2007). Many studies address changes in the gender division of labor within specific national economies (Freeman 1999; George 2005; Rofel; Sangster 1995) while others consider the impact of transnational migration on women’s class position (Pratt 2004; Romero 1992; Stephen 2007; Keogh 2015) and women’s opportunities for cross-class solidarity and grassroots-based organizing (Mohanty 2003). More recent feminist research has addressed the restructuring of work and its impact on women and gender culture as an effect of neo-liberal economic adjustments (Adkins 2002; Enloe 2004; Federici 2008 [Other Internet Resources]; McRobbie 2002; Skeggs 2003).

1. Marxism, Work, and Human Nature

2. marxist-feminist analyses, 3. first wave feminist analyses of women and work, 4. second wave feminist analyses of housework, 5. the public/private split and its implications, 6. psychological theories of women and work, 7. ethical theories of women’s caring work, 8. modernist vs. postmodernist feminist theory, 9. race, class, and intersectional feminist analyses, 10. anarchist perspectives on work and its other, 11. punitive perspectives on work and non-work, 12. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

Marxism as a philosophy of human nature stresses the centrality of work in the creation of human nature itself and human self-understanding. Both the changing historical relations between human work and nature, and the relations of humans to each other in the production and distribution of goods to meet material needs construct human nature differently in different historical periods: nomadic humans are different than agrarian or industrial humans. Marxism as a philosophy of history and social change highlights the social relations of work in different economic modes of production in its analysis of social inequalities and exploitation, including relations of domination such as racism and sexism. (Marx 1844, 1950, 1906–9; Marx and Engels 1848, 1850; Engels 1942). Within capitalism, the system they most analyzed, the logic of profit drives the bourgeois class into developing the productive forces of land, labor and capital by expanding markets, turning land into a commodity and forcing the working classes from feudal and independent agrarian production into wage labor. Marx and Engels argue that turning all labor into a commodity to be bought and sold not only alienates workers by taking the power of production away from them, it also collectivizes workers into factories and mass assembly lines. This provides the opportunity for workers to unite against the capitalists and to demand the collectivization of property, i.e., socialism, or communism.

According to Engels’s famous analysis of women’s situation in the history of different economic modes production in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1942), women are originally equal to, if not more powerful than, men in communal forms of production with matrilineal family organizations. Women lose power when private property comes into existence as a mode of production. Men’s control of private property, and the ability thereby to generate a surplus, changes the family form to a patriarchal one where women, and often slaves, [ 1 ] become the property of the father and husband.

The rise of capitalism, in separating the family household from commodity production, further solidifies this control of men over women in the family when the latter become economic dependents of the former in the male breadwinner-female housewife nuclear family form. Importantly, capitalism also creates the possibility of women’s liberation from family-based patriarchy by creating possibilities for women to work in wage labor and become economically independent of husbands and fathers. Engels stresses, however, that because of the problem of unpaid housework, a private task allocated to women in the sexual division of labor of capitalism, full women’s liberation can only be achieved with the development of socialism and the socialization of housework and childrearing in social services provided by the state. For this reason, most contemporary Marxists have argued that women’s liberation requires feminists to join the working class struggle against capitalism (Cliff 1984).

Many Marxist-feminists thinkers, prominent among them sociologists and anthropologists, have done cross-cultural and historical studies of earlier forms of kinship and economy and the role of the sexual or gender division of labor in supporting or undermining women’s social power (cf. Reed 1973, Leacock 1972, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). They have also attempted to assess the world economic development of capitalism as a contradictory force for the liberation of women (Federici 2004; Mies 1986; Saffioti 1978) and to argue that universal women’s liberation requires attention to the worse off: poor women workers in poor post-colonial countries (Sen & Grown 1987). Other feminist anthropologists have argued that other variables in addition to women’s role in production are key to understanding women’s social status and power (Sanday 1981; Leghorn and Parker 1981). Yet other feminist economic historians have done historical studies of the ways that race, class and ethnicity have situated women differently in relation to production, for example in the history of the United States (Davis 1983; Amott and Matthaei 1991). Finally some Marxist-feminists have argued that women’s work in biological and social reproduction is a necessary element of all modes of production and one often ignored by Marxist economists (Benston 1969; Hennessy 2003; Vogel 1995).

Those feminist analyses which have highlighted the role of women’s work in the social construction of gender and the perpetuation of male dominance have been termed liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist feminism by such influential categorizers as Jaggar and Rothenberg [Struhl] (1978), Tong (2000), Barrett (1980), Jaggar (1983) and Walby (1990) [ 2 ] . However, the pigeonhole categories of liberal, radical, Marxist, or socialist categories apply poorly to both to first wave women’s movement feminist predecessors and contemporary deconstructionist, post-structuralist and post-colonialist perspectives.

A number of first wave feminists write about work and class as key issues for women’s liberation, such as socialist-feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, heavily influenced by Darwinism and 19 th century utopian modernism (Gilman 1898, 1910, 1979), anarchist Emma Goldman (1969), and existentialist, radical feminist and Marxist of sorts Simone de Beauvoir (1952). This is because the debates that arose around the place of the women’s movement in class politics were different in the early and mid-twentieth century than they were in the 1960s when many feminist theorists were trying to define themselves independently of the left anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements of the time.

The debate about the economic and social function of housework and its relation to women’s oppression is an old one that has been a feature of both the first and second wave women’s movements in the US, Britain and Europe. In both eras, the underlying issue is how to handle the public/private split of capitalist societies in which women’s reproductive functions have either limited their work to the home or created a “second shift” problem of unpaid housework and childcare as well as waged work. In the first wave, located as it was in the Victorian period where the dominant ideology for middle and upper class women was purity, piety and domesticity (also called the “cult of true womanhood”), the debate centered on whether to keep housework in the private sphere yet make it more scientific and efficient (Beecher 1841; Richards 1915 ), or whether to “socialize” it by bringing it into the public sphere, as socialist Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated (1898).

In the US, the “public housekeeping” aspect of the Progressive movement of the 1890s through early 1900s advocated that women bring the positive values associated with motherhood into the public sphere — by obtaining the vote, cleaning out corruption in politics, creating settlement houses to educate and support immigrants, and forming the women’s peace movement, etc. (cf. Jane Addams 1914). Disagreements about whether to downplay or valorize the distinctive function and skills in motherhood as work for which women are naturally superior, or to see motherhood as restricting women’s chances for economic independence and equality with men in the public sphere, were also evident in debates between Ellen Keys (1909, 1914) and Gilman. Keys represented the difference side, that women are superior humans because of mothering; while Gilman and Goldman took the equality side of the debate, that is, that, women are restricted, and made socially unequal to men, by unpaid housework and mothering [ 3 ] .

In the second wave movement, theorists can be grouped by their theory of how housework oppresses women. Typically, liberal feminists critique housework because it is unpaid. This makes women dependent on men and devalued, since their work is outside the meaningful sphere of public economic production (Friedan 1963). Marxist feminist theorists see this as part of the problem, but some go further to maintain that housework is part of a household feudal mode of production of goods for use that persists under capitalism and gives men feudal powers over women’s work (Benston 1969, Fox 1980). Other Marxist feminists argue that women’s housework is part of the social reproduction of capitalism (Federici 1975, 2004; Malos 1975; Vogel 1995). That the necessary work of reproducing the working class is unpaid allows more profits to capitalists. It is the sexual division of labor in productive and reproductive work that makes woman unequal to men and allows capitalists to exploit women’s unpaid labor. Some even make this analysis the basis for a demand for wages for housework (Dalla Costa 1974; Federici 1975). More recently, Federici has done an analysis of the transition to capitalism in Europe. She argues that it was the emerging capitalist class need to control working class reproduction, to eliminate working class women’s control over biological reproduction, and to assure their unpaid reproductive work in the home by restricting abortions, that fueled the campaign against witches during this period (Federici 2004).

One of the philosophical problems raised by the housework debate is how to draw the line between work and play or leisure activity when the activity is not paid: is a mother playing with her baby working or engaged in play? If the former, then her hours in such activity may be compared with those of her husband or partner to see if there is an exploitation relation present, for example, if his total hours of productive and reproductive work for the family are less than hers (cf. Delphy 1984). But to the extent that childrearing counts as leisure activity, as play, as activity held to be intrinsically valuable (Ferguson 2004), no exploitation is involved. Perhaps childrearing and other caring activity is both work and play, but only that portion which is necessary for the psychological growth of the child and the worker(s) counts as work. If so, who determines when that line is crossed? Since non-market activity does not have a clear criterion to distinguish work from non-work, nor necessary from non-necessary social labor, an arbitrary element seems to creep in that makes standards of fairness difficult to apply to gendered household bargains between men and women dividing up waged and non-waged work. (Barrett 1980).

One solution to this problem is simply to take all household activity that could also be done by waged labor (nannies, domestic servants, gardeners, chauffeurs, etc.) as work and to figure its comparable worth by the waged labor necessary to replace it (Folbre 1982, 1983). Another is to reject altogether the attempts to base women’s oppression on social relations of work, on the grounds that such theories are overly generalizing and ignore the discrete meanings that kinship activities have for women in different contexts (Nicholson 1991; Fraser and Nicholson 1991; Marchand 1995). Or, one can argue that although the line between work and leisure changes historically, those doing the activity should have the decisive say as to whether their activity counts as work, i.e., labor necessary to promote human welfare. The existence of second wave women’s movements critiques of the “second shift” of unpaid household activity indicates that a growing number of women see most of it as work, not play (cf. Hochschild 1989). Finally, one can argue that since the human care involved in taking care of children and elders creates a public good, it should clearly be characterized as work, and those who are caretakers, primarily women, should be fairly compensated for it by society or the state (Ferguson and Folbre 2000: Folbre 2000, Ferguson 2004).

Liberal, Marxist and radical feminists have all characterized women as doubly alienated in capitalism because of the public/private split that relegates their work as mothers and houseworkers to the home, and psychologically denies them full personhood, citizenship and human rights (Foreman 1974, Okin 1989, Pateman 1988, Goldman 1969). Noting that women workers on average only have about 70% of the average salary of men in the contemporary U.S., feminists have claimed this is because women’s work, tied stereotypically to housework and hence thought unskilled is undervalued, whether it is cleaning or rote service work, or nurturing work thought to be connected to natural maternal motivations and aptitudes. Hence some feminists have organized in campaigns for “comparable worth” to raise women’s wages to the same as men’s wages involving comparable skills (Brenner 2000; cf. also articles in Hansen and Philipson eds. 1990).

Many radical feminists maintain that women’s work is part of a separate patriarchal mode of reproduction that underlies all economic systems of production and in which men exploit women’s reproductive labor (Delphy 1984; O’Brien 1981; Leghorn and Parker 1981; Rich 1980; Mies 1986). Smith (1974), O’Brien (1981), Hartsock (1983 a,b), Haraway (1985) and Harding (1986) pioneered in combining this radical feminist assumption with a perspectival Marxist theory of knowledge to argue that one’s relation to the work of production and reproduction gave each gender and each social class a different way of knowing the social totality. Women’s work, they argued, ties them to nature and human needs in a different way than men’s work does, which creates the possibility of a less alienated and more comprehensive understanding of the workings of the social totality. Patricia Hill Collins argues further that the racial division of labor, institutional racism and different family structures put African American women in yet a different epistemic relation to society than white and other women (2000). Writing in a post-modernist re-articulation of this feminist standpoint theory, Donna Haraway argues that the breakdown of the nature/culture distinction because of scientific technology and its alteration of the human body makes us into “cyborgs”. Hence our perspectives are so intersectional that they cannot be unified simply by a common relation to work. What is required for a feminist politics is not a situated identity politics, whether of gender and/or race and/or class, but an affinity politics based on alliances and coalitions that combine epistemic perspectives (Haraway 1985).

Like these radical feminists, some socialist-feminists have tried to develop a “dual systems” theory (cf. Young 1981). This involves theorizing a separate system of work relations that organizes and directs human sexuality, nurturance, affection and biological reproduction. Rather than seeing this as an unchanging universal base for patriarchy, however, they have argued that this system, thought of as the “sex/gender system” (Rubin 1975; Hartmann 1978, 1981a,b), or as “sex/affective production” (Ferguson 1989, 1991; Ferguson and Folbre 1981) has different historical modes, just as Marx argued that economies do. Rubin argues that sex/gender systems have been based in different kinship arrangements, most of which have supported the exchange of women by men in marriage, and hence have supported male domination and compulsory heterosexuality. She is hopeful that since capitalism shifted the organization of the economy from kinship to commodity production, the power of fathers and husbands over daughters and wives, and the ability to enforce heterosexuality, will continue to decline, and women’s increasing ability to be economically independent will lead to women’s liberation and equality with men.

With a different historical twist, Hartmann argues that a historical bargain was cemented between capitalist and working class male patriarchs to shore up patriarchal privileges that were being weakened by the entrance of women into wage labor in the 19 th century by the creation of the “family wage” to allow men sufficient wages to support a non-wage-earning wife and children at home (1981a). While Ferguson and Folbre (1981) agree that there is no inevitable fit between capitalism and patriarchy, they argue that there are conflicts, and that the family wage bargain has broken down at present. Indeed, both Ferguson and Smart (1984) argue that welfare state capitalism and the persistent sexual division of wage labor in which work coded as women’s is paid less than men’s with less job security are ways that a “public patriarchy” has replaced different systems of family patriarchy that were operating in early and pre-capitalist societies. Walby (1990) has a similar analysis, but to her the connection between forms of capitalism and forms of patriarchy is more functional and less accidental than it appears to Ferguson and Smart.

Walby argues that there are two different basic forms of patriarchy which emerge in response to the tensions between capitalist economies and patriarchal household economies: private and public patriarchy. Private patriarchy as a form is marked by excluding women from economic and political power while public patriarchy works by segregating women. There is a semi-automatic re-adjustment of the dual systems when the older private father patriarchy based on the patriarchal family is broken down due to the pressures of early industrial capitalism. The family wage and women’s second class citizenship that marked that initial re-adjustment are then functionally replaced by a public form of patriarchy, the patriarchal welfare state, where women enter the wage labor force permanently but in segregated less well paid jobs. But Ferguson (1989,1991), Smart (1984) and Folbre (1994) suggest that although the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands over wife and children as economic assets has been diminished in advanced capitalism, there is always a dialectical and contradictory tension between patriarchy and capitalism in which both advances and retreats for women’s equality as citizens and in work relations are constantly occurring in the new form of public patriarchy. Thus, the new “marriage” of patriarchal capitalism operates to relegate women to unpaid or lesser paid caring labor, whether in the household or in wage labor, thus keeping women by and large unequal to men. This is especially notable in the rise of poor single-mother-headed families. However, as it forces more and more women into wage labor, women are given opportunities for some independence from men and the possibility to challenge male dominance and sex segregation in all spheres of social life. Examples are the rise of the first and second wave women’s movements and consequent gains in civil rights for women.

The work of feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (1989) has been a notable intervention into the public-private split by bringing into view the institutions and power regimes that regulate the everyday world, their gender subtext, and basis in a gendered division of labor. Legal feminist critics expand on the biopolitics of the patriarchal welfare state, which psychiatrizes as it threatens mothers with the loss of child custody. This represents a new eugenics twist on the enduring mistrust of working-class mothers and casting those who are imprisoned as undeserving parent (Guggenheim 2007; Law 2012). African American mothers bear the brunt of punitive and racist family and criminal law (Roberts 2022; Thompson 2010; Solinger et al . 2010).

The socialist-feminist idea that there are two interlocking systems that structure gender and the economy, and thus are jointly responsible for male domination, has been developed in a psychological direction by the psychoanalytic school of feminist theorists. Particularly relevant to the question of women and work are the theories of Mitchell (1972, 1974), Kuhn and Wolpe (1978), Chodorow (1978, 1979, 1982) and Ruddick (1989). Mothering, or, taking care of babies and small children, as a type of work done overwhelmingly by women, socializes women and men to have different identities, personalities and skills. In her first work (1972), Mitchell argues that women’s different relations to productive work, reproduction, socialization of children and sexuality in patriarchy give her lesser economic and psychological power in relation to men. In a Freudian vein, Mitchell later argues (1974) that women learn that they are not full symbolic subjects because compulsory heterosexuality and the incest taboo bar them from meeting either the desire of their mother or any other woman. Chodorow, also reading Freud from a feminist perspective, suggests that women’s predominance in mothering work is the basis for the learned gender distinction between women and men. The sexual division of infant care gives boys, who must learn their masculine identity by separating from their mother and the feminine, a motive for deprecating, as well as dominating, women. Ruddick from a more Aristotelian perspective suggests that it is the skills and virtues required in the practice of mothering work which not only socially construct feminine gender differently from men’s, but could ground an alternative vision for peace and resolving human conflicts, if a peace movement were led by women.

Ferguson argues that the “sex/affective” work of mothering and wifely nurturing is exploitative of women: women give more nurturance and satisfaction (including sexual satisfaction) to men and children than they receive, and do much more of the work of providing these important human goods (cf. also Bartky 1990). The gendered division of labor has both economic and psychological consequences, since women’s caring labor creates women less capable of or motivated to separate from others, and hence less likely to protest such gender exploitation (Ferguson 1989, 1991). Folbre argues by contrast that it is only because women’s bargaining power is less than men’s because of the power relations involved in the gender division of labor and property that women acquiesce to such inequalities (Folbre 1982). Ferguson argues that gendered exploitation in a system of meeting human needs suggests that women can be seen as a “sex class” (or gender class) which cuts across economic class lines (1979, 1989, 1991). This line of thought is also developed by Christine Delphy (1984), Monique Wittig (1980) and Luce Irigaray (1975).

On the other side of the debate, Brenner (2000) argues that women are not uniformly exploited by men across economic class lines: indeed, for working class women their unpaid work as housewives serves the working class as a whole, because the whole class benefits when its daily and future reproduction needs are met by women’s nurturing and childcare work. They argue further that middle and upper class women’s economic privileges will inevitably lead them to betray working class women in any cross-class alliance that is not explicitly anti-capitalist. Hochschild (2000) and hooks (2000) point out that career women tend to pay working class women to do the second shift work in the home so they can avoid that extra work, and they have an interest in keeping such wages, e.g., for house cleaning and nannies, as low as possible to keep the surplus for themselves. Kollias (1981) argues further that working class women are in a stronger political position to work effectively for women’s liberation than middle class women, while McKenny (1981) argues that professional women have to overcome myths of professionalism that keep them feeling superior to working class women and hence unable to learn from or work with them for social change.

Several authors have explored the ethical implications of the sexual division of labor in which it is primarily women who do caring labor. Nancy Fraser (1997) and Susan Moller Okin (1989) formulate ethical arguments to maintain that a just model of society would have to re-structure work relations so that the unpaid and underpaid caring labor now done primarily by women would be given a status equivalent to (other) wage labor by various means. In her council socialist vision, Ferguson (1989, 1991) argues that an ideal society would require both women and men to do the hitherto private unpaid work of caring or “sex/affective labor.” For example, such work would be shared by men, either in the family and/or provided by the state where appropriate (as for elders and children’s childcare), and compensated fairly by family allowances (for those, women or men, doing the major share of housework), and by higher pay for caring wage work (such as daycare workers, nurses, and teachers).

Carol Gilligan (1982) claims that women and girls tend to use a different form of ethical reasoning — she terms this the “ethics of care” — than men and boys who use an ethics of justice. Some have argued that this different ethical approach is due to women’s caring sensibilities that have been developed by the sexual division of labor (Ruddick 1989). Interestingly, the debate between feminist theorists of justice, e.g., Fraser and Okin, and ethics of care feminists such as Gilligan and Ruddick, is less about substance than a meta-ethical dispute as to whether ethics should concern principles or judgments in particular cases. All of these theorists seem to have ideal visions of society which dovetail: all would support the elimination of the sexual division of labor so that both men and women could become equally sensitized to particular others through caring work.

Asha Bhandary (2020) proposes an integrative approach, enlargening the Rawlsian distributive justice theory with liberal dependency care. Taking into account Eva Feder Kittay’s (2019, 1998) emphasis on human dependency, Bhandary argues that Rawls’s framework must be expanded to include caring considerations as part of the basic structure of society. To address feminist critiques, she adds that boys must be taught the value of care work and voluntary participation in it. Bhandary develops an arrow of care map to account for distributive inequalities (race, class, etc.) within countries and cross-culturally. In Meaningful Work , Andrea Veltman (2016) also provides a liberal normative account of care, endorsing Paul Gomberg’s (2007) concept of contributive justice, where each community and family member pulls together voluntarily using a system of job rotation, rather than relying on state provisions of goods.

By contrast, the authors of the Care Manifesto (Chatzidakis et al ., 2020) build on political theorists who call for a centering of care and a decentering of economics (Tronto 2013; 1993) and a universal care giver model (Fraser, 2013) in democratic societies. Caring work is not only important at the level of interpersonal care but also at the macroscopic level of “theorising caring infrastructures and the nature of an overarching politics of care” grounded in “feminist, queer, anti-racist and eco-socialist perspective” (Chatzidakis et al ., p. 22). Such perspective also critiques the exploitative nature of transnational care chains where Global North upper class women exploit the labor of women and girls from the Global South (Anderson, 2000). Reproductive labor has also become transactional and exploitative in another sense: surrogacy arrangements in the global biomarkets, where Indian women carry babies and are contractually required to give up the newborn on terms dictated by Global North couples, which may include selective abortion during pregnancy (Saravanah, 2018). By centering care in the commons, these theorists call attention to a politics of interdependence.

Useful anthologies of the first stage of second wave socialist feminist writings which include discussions of women, class and work from psychological as well as sociological and economic perspectives are Eisenstein (1979), Hansen and Philipson (1990), Hennessy and Ingraham (1997), and Holmstrom (2002). Jaggar (1983) wrote perhaps the first philosophy text explaining the categories of liberal, radical, Marxist and socialist-feminist thought and defending a socialist-feminist theory of male domination based on the notion of women’s alienated labor. Others such as Jaggar and Rothenberg (1978), Tuana and Tong (1995) and Herrmann and Stewart (1993) include classic socialist feminist analyses in their collections, inviting comparisons of the authors to others grouped under the categories of liberal, radical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, postmodern, postcolonial and multicultural feminisms.

Various post-modern critiques of these earlier feminist schools of thought such as post-colonialism as well as deconstruction and post-structuralism challenge the over-generalizations and economic reductionism of many of those constructing feminist theories that fall under the early categories of liberal, radical, Marxist or socialist feminism (cf. Grewal and Kaplan 1992; Kaplan et al . 1999; Nicholson 1991; Fraser and Nicholson 1991; hooks 1984, 2000; Anzaldúa and Moraga 1981; Sandoval 2000). Others argue that part of the problem is the master narratives of liberalism or Marxism, the first of which sees all domination relations due to traditional hierarchies and undermined by capitalism, thus ignoring the independent effectivity of racism (Joseph 1981); and the second of which ties all domination relations to the structure of contemporary capitalism and ignores the non-capitalist economics contexts in which many women work, even within so-called capitalist economies, such as housework and voluntary community work (Gibson-Graham 1996).

In spite of the “pomo” critiques, there are some powerful thinkers within this tendency who have not completely rejected a more general starting point of analysis based on women, class and work. For example, Spivak (1988), Mohanty (1997), Carby (1997), and Hennessy (1993, 2000) are creating and re-articulating forms of Marxist and socialist-feminism less susceptible to charges of over-generalization and reductionism, and more compatible with close contextual analysis of the power relations of gender and class as they relate to work. They can be grouped loosely with a tendency called materialist feminism that incorporates some of the methods of deconstruction and post-structuralism (Hennessy 1993; Landry and MacLean 1993).

Many in the contemporary feminist theory debate are interested in developing concrete “intersectional” or “integrative feminist” analyses of particular issues which try to give equal weight to gender, race, class and sexuality in a global context without defining themselves by the categories, such as liberal, radical or materialist, of the earlier feminist debate categories (cf. work by Davis 1983; Brewer 1995; Crenshaw 1997; Stanlie and James 1997; Anzaldúa 1999; hooks 1984, 2000). Nonetheless strong emphasis on issues of race and ethnicity can be found in their work on women, class and work. For example, Brewer shows that white and African-American working class women are divided by race in the workforce, and that even changes in the occupational structure historically tend to maintain this racial division of labor. Hooks argues that women of color and some radical feminists were more sensitive to class and race issues than those, primarily white, feminists whom she labels “reformist feminists” (hooks 2000).

Presupposed in the general theoretical debates concerning the relations between gender, social and economic class, and work are usually definitions of each of these categories that some thinkers would argue are problematic. For example, Tokarczyk and Fay have an excellent anthology on working class women in the academy (1993) in which various contributors discuss the ambiguous positions in which they find themselves by coming from poor family backgrounds and becoming academics. One problem is whether they are still members of the working class in so doing, and if not, whether they are betraying their families of origin by a rise to middle class status. Another is, whether they have the same status in the academy, as workers, thinkers and women, as those men or women whose families of origin were middle class or above. Rita Mae Brown wrote an early article on this, arguing that education and academic status did not automatically change a working class woman’s identity, which is based not just on one’s relation to production, but one’s behavior, basic assumptions about life, and experiences in childhood (Brown 1974). Joanna Kadi (1999) describes herself as cultural worker who tackles elitism in the white academy, including in women’s studies courses. Tokarczyk and Fay acknowledge that the definition of “class” is vague in the U.S. Rather than provide a standard philosophical definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the working class, they provide a cluster of characteristics and examples of jobs, such as physically demanding, repetitive and dangerous jobs, jobs that lack autonomy and are generally paid badly. Examples of working class jobs they give are cleaning women, waitresses, lumberjacks, janitors and police officers. They then define their term “working class women academics” to include women whose parents had jobs such as these and are in the first generation in their family to attend college (Tokarczyk and Fay, 5). They challenge those that would argue that family origin can be overcome by the present position one has in the social division of labor: simply performing a professional job and earning a salary does not eradicate the class identity formed in one’s “family class” (cf. Ferguson 1979).

More recent work in socio-legal studies also has begun to question the limits of intersectional analysis (Grabham et al . 2009). It acknowledges the importance of intersectionality, a term coined by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to shed light on epistemic injustice done to Black women in anti-discrimination law. Yet, despite its merit for overcoming the dual system’s theoretical impasse, Joanna Conaghan also critiques the essentializing tendencies of intersectional analysis which succeeds mainly dealing with race and gender oppression at an individual level, but it has little to offer to remedy structural injustice. Furthermore, because such method is identity-focused it will not get at the dimension of class which has been traditionally thought in relational not locational terms (2008, 29–30).

To theorize the problematic relation of women to social class, Ferguson (1979, 1989, 1991) argues that there are at least three different variables — an individual’s work, family of origin, and present household economic unit — which relate an individual to a specific socio-economic class. For example, a woman may work on two levels: as a day care worker (working class), but also as a member of a household where she does the housework and mothering/child care, while her husband is a wealthy contractor (petit bourgeois, small capitalist class). If in addition her family of origin is professional middle class (because, say, her parents were college educated academics), the woman may be seen and see herself as either working class or middle class, depending on whether she and others emphasize her present relations of wage work (her individual economic class, which in this case is working class), her household income (middle class) or her family of origin (middle class).

Sylvia Walby deals with this ambiguity of economic class as applying to women as unpaid houseworkers by claiming against Delphy (1984) that the relevant economic sex classes are those who are housewives vs. those who are husbands benefiting from such work, not those of all women and men, whether or not they do or receive housework services (Walby 1990). Ferguson, however, sides with Delphy in putting all women into “sex class”, since all women, since trained into the gender roles of patriarchal wife and motherhood, are potentially those whose unpaid housework can be so exploited. But seeing herself as a member of a fourth class category, “sex class,” and hence, in a patriarchal capitalist system, seeing herself exploited as a woman worker in her wage work and unpaid second shift housework, [ 4 ] is thus not a given but an achieved social identity. Such an identity is usually formed through political organizing and coalitions with other women at her place of employment, in her home and her community. In this sense the concept of sex class is exactly analogous to the concept of a feminist epistemological standpoint: not a given identity or perspective, but one that is achievable under the right conditions.

Realizing the importance of this disjuncture between economic class and sex class for women, Maxine Molyneux (1984) argues in a often cited article that there are no “women’s interests” in the abstract that can unify women in political struggle. Instead, she theorizes that women have both “practical gender interests” and “strategic gender interests.” Practical gender interests are those that women develop because of the sexual division of labor, which makes them responsible for the nurturant work of sustaining the physical and psychological well-being of children, partners and relatives through caring labor. Such practical gender interests, because they tie a woman’s conception of her own interests as a woman to those of her family, support women’s popular movements for food, water, child and health care, even defense against state violence, which ally them with the economic class interests of their family. Strategic gender interests, on the contrary, may ally women across otherwise divided economic class interests, since they are those, like rights against physical male violence and reproductive rights, which women have as a sex class to eliminate male domination.

Molyneux used her distinctions between practical and strategic gender interests to distinguish between the popular women’s movement in Nicaragua based on demands for economic justice for workers and farmers against the owning classes, demands such as education, health and maternity care, clean water, food and housing, and the feminist movement which emphasized the fight for legal abortion, fathers’ obligation to pay child support to single mothers, and rights against rape and domestic violence. She and others have used this distinction between practical and strategic gender interests to characterize the tension between popular women’s movements and feminist movements in Latin America (Molyneux 2001; Alvarez 1998; Foweraker 1998).

A similar distinction between different types of women’s interests was developed further as a critique of interest group paradigms of politics by Anna Jónasdóttir (1988, 1994). Jónasdóttir argues that women have a common formal interest in votes for women, women’s political caucuses, gender parity demands, and other mechanisms which allow women a way to develop a collective political voice, even though their content interests, that is, their specific needs and priorities, may vary by race and economic class, among others. Her distinctions, and those of Molyneux, have been changed slightly — practical vs. strategic gender needs, rather than interests — to compare and contrast different paradigms of economic development by World Bank feminist theorist Carolyn Moser (1993). Most recently the Jónasdóttir distinctions have been used by Mohanty (1997) to defend and maintain, in spite of postmodernists’ emphasis on intersectional differences, that commonalities in women’s gendered work can create a cross-class base for demanding a collective political voice for women: a transnational feminism which creates a demand for women’s political representation, developing the platform of women’s human rights as women and as workers. Nonetheless, the tension between women’s economic class-based interests or needs and their visionary/strategic gender interests or needs is still always present, and must therefore always be negotiated concretely by popular movements for social justice involving women’s issues.

Another approach to the problematic nature of socio-economic class as it relates to women are empirical studies which show how class distinctions are still important for women in their daily lives as a way to compare and contrast themselves with other women and men, even if they do not use the concepts of “working class,” “professional class” or “capitalist class”. Many have pointed out that the concept of class itself is mystified in the U.S. context, but that nonetheless class distinctions still operate because of different structural economic constraints, which act on some differently from others. The Ehrenreichs (1979), in a classic article, argue that this mystification is due to the emergence of a professional-managerial class that has some interests in common with the capitalist class and some with the working class. Whatever its causes, there are empirical studies which show that class distinctions still operate between women, albeit in an indirect way. Barbara Ehrenreich (2001), by adopting the material life conditions of a poor woman, did an empirical study of the lives of women working for minimum wages and found their issues to be quite different from and ignored by middle and upper-class women. Diane Reay (2004) does an empirical study of women from manual labor family backgrounds and their relation to the schooling of their children, and discovers that they use a discourse that acknowledges class differences of educational access and career possibilities, even though it does not specifically define these by class per se. Similarly, Julie Bettie (2000) does an impressive discourse analysis of the way that Latina high school students create their own class distinctions through concepts such as “chicas,” “cholas” and “trash” to refer to themselves and their peers. These categories pick out girls as having middle class, working class or poor aspirations by performance indicators such as dress, speech, territorial hang-outs and school achievement, while never mentioning “class” by name. Women’s experiences of growing up working class are presented in the anthology edited by Tea (2003).

Drawing on a socialist feminist framework, Margaret McLaren (2019) offers an ethnographic study of cross-border feminist solidarity. She focuses on SEWA, the largest women’s union in the world with over 700,000 members and its own cooperative bank. This Indian organization of self-employed women has ties with a sister organization in South Africa and builds global grassroots trading networks in addition to fostering cross-cultural dialogues and peace-building. Utilizing traditional gendered expectations, married women leave the home to work in women-only groups where the artisans organize beyond the workplace for public health, sewage treatment and other social justice issues such as violence prevention. Such cooperatives which also forge ties with Global North consumers showcase the possibilities for transnational feminist organizing in the face of neoliberalist finance and resource extraction.

So far, it has been assumed that work is an intrinsic good.

What if waged or unwaged work itself were to be considered problematic or oppressive? Autonomous Marxists contest that liberal or socialist feminist perspectives have unnecessarily mystified work and have operated with a moralism. Autonomists are associated with the Operaismo, post-Operaismo and Autonomia movements, the Midnight Notes Collective, Zerowork, Lotta Feminista, and the Wages for Housework movement (Weeks 2011, 241). Whether one ought to be paid for housework or reproductive labor or seek equal employment opportunities, feminists have not sufficiently opposed the sanctification of work. Championing the refusal of work means to abandon a narrow focus on the critique of the extraction of surplus value or of the process of deskilling. Furthermore, it is imperative to interrogate how work dominates our lives (Weeks 2011, 13). Kathi Weeks charges that a productivist bias is common to feminist and Marxist analysis. The credo of autonomists then is liberation from work, in contradistinction to Marxist humanists such as Erich Fromm’s advocacy for liberation of work.

The Wages for Housework campaign demanded purposefully the impossible. These feminists did not only ask for compensation for unpaid domestic labor, but also postulated the end of such work (Federici 1975). Post-work also means post-domestic care, something that gets lost in some of the ethic of care analysis, which inadvertently fosters a romantic attachment to endowing meaning to such work. Furthermore, post-work also appeals to carving out space for “queer time” and queer resistant agency (Halberstam 2005, Lehr 1999), an appeal to unscripted life. A wholesale critique of housework is not easily understood; even Arlie Hochschild’s (1997) own analysis of her ethnographic studies of diverse family practices comes to the conclusion that authentic housework should be sanctified and set apart from mere alienating factory production (Weeks 2011, 157–59).

A post-work ethic entails a playful commitment to leisure and unstructured activities such as day-dreaming. Joseph Trullinger (2016) extends Kathi Weeks’ analysis by drawing on Marcuse’s concept of great refusal and playful labor defying commodity fetishism and productivism. By ignoring the liberatory power of play, Weeks insufficiently engages the meaning of work and the asceticism of the work ethic (Trullinger 2016, 469). Still, the danger of play morphing into (unpaid) labor is real, as evinced by social media corporate giant FaceBook exploiting play-labor for capitalist gains (Fuchs 2016) and a corporate feminism may ask us to “lean in” (Sandberg 2013) rather than “lean out.”

While it is reasonable to champion daydreams and play as intrinsic goods, idle time itself is often not felt as a good or luxury, but instead a psychic imposition. This is why one speaks of “doing time,” when one is sentenced to a prison term or worse, to death row (Moses 2007). Imprisonment is anathema to Indigenous, socio-centric peoples in the Global South, and imprisonment is closely connected to the disciplinary apparatus of western colonization of the Americas and Africa (Nagel 2007). The birth of the western modern prison focused on self-discipline, known as the “separate system” of Philadelphia, PA, leading to enforced isolation and separate celling. Day-dreaming in a solitary cell becomes positively dangerous and suicides and mental illness increase exponentially (Casella et al . 2016). Idle time is thus countered by another prison regime, the Auburn, NY, factory system, also known as the “silent system,” where prisoners worked in a factory, but they were forbidden to talk with each other. Under the notorious Southern U.S. convict lease system, representing the shift “from the prison of slavery to the slavery of prisons” (Davis 1998), Black female and male prisoners were toiling in chain gangs, a visceral legacy of chattel slavery. Slavery or indentured servitude is codified in the U.S. Constitution, turning the nation-state into a penal democracy (James, 2007).

Another haunting reminder of chattel slavery is the neoliberal welfare state’s intrusion in the family, charging parents with poor work ethic and neglect of their children. In the US, poor children of color, especially Black, Latine, and American Indians living on reservations, are at higher risk of being taken away from their kin and carers and turned over to the family regulation system (Goldberg 2015). The world over, parents who are socially displaced such as Romanian immigrants in Norway, are under greater scrutiny by state actors, e.g., child protective services. In the U.S., social workers’ own white middle class (protestant) work ideology is enforced paradoxically on working-class mothers: these stigmatized women are summoned to comply with social programming, a penal version of the cult of domesticity and are thus effectively forced out of a paid job, made dependent on the good will of the social worker and family court judge, who may grant access to child-supervised visits. Parents charged with child abuse and/or neglect are thus unable to pursue education or a job, often creating an intergenerational cycle of the violence of poverty (Nagel 2018). In ideological terms, this is coded as welfare dependency and racialized as a controlling image, thus stereotyping young Black mothers (Fraser and Gordon 1994; Hill Collins 2000). In response, the National Welfare Rights Organization was created to destigmatize welfare by postulating it as a human right (Toney 2000) and by also demanding a basic income, as alternative to punitive welfare (Weeks 2011, 138). The proposal for universal basic income has gained traction in recent years (Chatzidakis et al. 2020). Migrant workers, worker-mothers who serve as domestic workers are also at risk (of deportation and/or imprisonment) for facing frivolous neglect charges or simply for lacking proper visa status. Gendered moral economies operate across national, racial and geographic borders in enforcing a domestic and domesticating patriarchal ideology and determining who is a good victim and deserves to be rescued (Keogh 2015; Nagel 2013; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010; Grewal and Kaplan 1992; Kaplan et al . 1999).

Stigmatized work such as erotic labor or sex work has divided feminists into two camps: those who support sex workers’ rights to organize and seek labor law protection and carceral feminists who advocate “rescuing” women trafficked into sex work (Bernstein 2007; Nagel 2015). Some sex worker rights approaches focus on eschewing the moralizing rallying cry of choice versus coercion and seek to destigmatize such labor and offer a postcolonial critique of prohibitionist ideology (Kempadoo and Doezema 1995). Others also focus on the lived experiences and agencies of such workers and contextualize their lives within structural constraints of the feminization of poverty (Dewey 2010; Zheng 2009). Paradoxically, by focusing narrowly on income-generating activities, Dewey (2010) contents that such advocates actually reinscribe stigmatization. And some sex workers’ rights organizations such as COYOTE (“Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics”) also inadvertently endorse a traditional work-ethic ideology by appealing to a moralizing discourse of respectability (Weeks 2011, pp. 67–68).

Theoretical and empirical debates about the relation of women to class and work, and the implications of these relations for theories of male domination and women’s oppression as well as for other systems of social domination, continue to be important sources of theories and investigations of gender identities, roles and powers in the field of women and gender studies, as well as in history, sociology, anthropology and economics. They also have important implications for epistemology, metaphysics and political theory in the discipline of philosophy, and consequently other disciplines in humanities and the social sciences.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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anarchism | Beauvoir, Simone de | -->Engels, Friedrich --> | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex and gender | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex markets | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | Marx, Karl

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Feminist Views on the Role of Education

Last updated 26 Nov 2019

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Feminist sociologists have large areas of agreement with functionalists and Marxists in so far as they see the education system as transmitting a particular set of norms and values into the pupils. However, instead of seeing these as either a neutral value consensus or the values of the ruling class and capitalism, feminists see the education system as transmitting patriarchal values.

For example, Heaton and Lawson (1996) argued that the hidden curriculum taught patriarchal values in schools. They noted traditional family structures in textbooks (along with many other gender stereotypes, subjects aimed towards specific genders, gender divisions in PE and sport and the gender division of labour in schools (predominantly female teachers and male managers).

Liberal feminists would point out these remaining issues of patriarchy in education while also acknowledging significant strides towards equality in the education system. In the 1940s and 50s, under the tripartite system, boys had a lower pass rate for the 11+ than girls (essentially institutionally failing girls in order to ensure more boys can succeed) and some subjects being specifically for one gender or the other used to be institutional rather than based on apparent preference. Today, once subjects become optional, there are quite clear gender preferences for one subject or another, but all subjects are open to all pupils. Perhaps the biggest change, since the 1980s, is that girls now outperform boys in education so if the system is a patriarchal one, designed to favour boys, it is singularly failing. However, Michelle Stanworth (1983), for instance, noted that there will still higher expectations of boys and teachers would be more likely to recommend boys apply for higher education than girls at the same academic level.

Radical feminists argue that the education system is still fundamentally patriarchal and continues to marginalise and oppress women. It does this through some of the processes already noted (reinforcing patriarchal ideology through the formal and hidden curriculum and normalising the marginalisation and oppression of women so that by the time girls leave school they see it as normal and natural rather than as patriarchal oppression). Radical feminist research has also looked at sexual harassment in education and how it is not treated as seriously as other forms of bullying (e.g. Kat Banyard, 2011).

Black and difference feminists point out how not all girls have the same experience in education and that minority-ethnic girls are often victims of specific stereotyping and assumptions. For example, teachers might assume that Muslim girls have different aspirations in relation to career and family from their peers. There have been studies of the specific school experiences of black girls, which we will consider in more detail in future sections.

Where feminists acknowledge that there has been a great deal of improvement for girls in education, they would point to feminism itself as being one of the main reasons for this. Sue Sharpe (1996) found that London schoolgirls in the 1970s had completely different priorities and aspirations from similar girls in 1996. She found that while in the 1970s girls’ priorities were marriage and family, in the 1990s this had switched dramatically to career. While there are a number of potential reasons for this, legislative changes such as the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1976 Sex Discrimination Act are likely to have played their part, hence supporting a liberal feminist perspective).

What all feminists agree on is that the education system does work as an agent of secondary socialisation which teaches girls and boys what are seen as universal norms and values and gender scripts that are actually those of contemporary patriarchy and that girls and boys learning these values prevents social change and challenges to patriarchy.

Evaluating feminist views on the role of education

Two features of contemporary education, at least in the UK, which critics of feminist views on education often point out are: 1) education is an increasingly female-dominated sector (most teachers are women, an increasing number of managers are women because they are drawn from the available teachers) and 2) the education system is increasingly resulting in female success and male underperformance. If this is a system designed to ensure men are in the top positions in society and women are marginalised into a domestic role, then it would appear to be failing. The education system is sending more and more girls into higher education (Michelle Stanworth’s research on this is now out of date).

However, while there is clearly some truth in these criticisms, it is still clear that there is a glass ceiling and a gender pay gap so the education system might be creating lots of highly-qualified girls, they are still losing out to their male peers when it comes to top jobs and higher incomes. They are also still more likely to take time off for child-rearing, work part time and to carry out the majority of housework tasks. Feminists point out that the education system largely normalises this (alongside other agents of socialisation such as the family and the media) and so even highly-qualified women often accept this as inevitable or normal. At the same time men are socialised to also consider this normal.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Socialist/Marxist Feminism

Introduction, early marxist feminism.

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Socialist/Marxist Feminism by Wendy Lynne Lee LAST REVIEWED: 15 January 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 15 January 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0088

The long arc of Marxist scholarship certainly reaches many domains—economics, sociology, political ecology. However, few scholarly projects have likely benefited more, or offered more, to sustaining the relevance of Marx and Marxism than the feminist analysis, interpretation, and application of the Marxist critique of capitalism. From the earliest translations of Marxist thought into revolutionary action, socialist feminists have sought to introduce sex and gender as salient categories of capitalist oppression, arguing that being a woman bound to patriarchal institutions such as marriage is comparable to a working-class laborer bound to the wage. Friedrich Engels also plays a key role in the socialist feminist appropriation of Marxist ideas. By showing the extent to which marriage is about the maintenance and expansion of property, Engels opens the door to a wide range of analysis concerning the material conditions of women’s lives and labors. Marxist ideas become the focus of renewed interest over the course of the American civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. It is thus unsurprising that a wealth of new feminist and antiracist theories begin to develop during this period, as well as analyses of structural inequality, including oppression with respect to the LGBTQ community. It is perhaps the most recent work among socialist feminists, in league with other activists and theorists, however, that is both truest to Marx’s original intent and that demonstrates the relevance of his ideas to the future fortunes of human societies, namely, the application of Marxist critique to environmental deterioration—especially anthropogenic climate change. Hence, the following is organized historically but also topically. It begins with the work of early socialist feminists, looking to include women within Marxist categories of class analysis but quickly moves to arguments that sex and gender—and then race/ethnicity and sexual identity—constitute their own salient categories of oppression. This explosion of theory and activism deserves to be treated topically so that the variety and breadth of socialist feminist ideas as well as the divisions and debates among its representatives becomes clear. The critique of capitalism has, of course, always been an essentially global enterprise. It is thus not surprising that the extension of socialist feminist analyses to the Global North and Global South would produce a wealth of insight and activism. For many of the same reasons, the same is true of the rise of socialist ecofeminism. The last section comes full circle. Devoted to arguments whose focus is the justification and fomenting of revolution, The Communist Manifesto finds its place next to contemporary socialist ecofeminist calls for workers from all regions of the planet to unite to overthrow once and for all the capitalist economic system responsible for jeopardizing the planet’s capacity to support life.

Although not explicitly defined as feminist, among the key early influences on Marxist/socialist feminism is Engels 1972 (originally published in 1884). Engels 1972 argues that as early human communities became more agrarian—as the institution of private property became more and more bound to inheritance—women’s capacity for both domestic and sexual reproductive labor became a crucial commodity. The origin of the institution of marriage is not, argues Engels, love or fidelity but rather the disposition of inheritable wealth through male bloodlines. Hence, private property is intimately bound to the rise of patriarchy and to what later feminist theorists will refer to as the structural inequality of both sexual and (given the economic dependence it generates) gendered forms of class. Engels sets the scope and tenor of early Marxist/socialist feminist work either with respect to developing his insights further, or as critique. Some key works that revolve around the broad scope of these themes beyond Engels 1972 include Montefiore 2017 (originally published in 1905), Kollontai 1977 , Weil 1986 , Nye 1994 , Shulman 1996 —a collected set of essays from Marxist/anarchist theorist Emma Goldman— Lee 2001 , Weiss and Kensinger 2007 , Scott 2008 , and Bender 2012 .

Bender, Frederic. The Communist Manifesto: They Only Call it Class War When We Fight Back . New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.

This edited volume offers a range of commentary and critique on the famous revolutionary pamphlet, Marx’s Communist Manifesto . Not all are explicitly feminist in orientation, but Wendy Lynne Lee’s radical feminist critique of Marx’s references to “the community of women,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s postmodernist reading, and Lucian Laurat’s sociological interpretation all shed light on important feminist questions concerning the intersection of class, gender, and historical moment.

Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State . New York: Penguin Classics, 1972.

Originally published in 1884. Engels makes out a key early argument for Marxist/socialist feminism, namely that the institution of marriage is essentially a socially sanctioned form of prostitution that exists to insure male bloodlines for the purposes of inheritance. Also asserts that women’s capacity for both unpaid domestic labor and the sexual reproduction of labor and progeny is fundamental to the rise of capitalism.

Kollontai, Alexandra. Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Writings . Toronto: Alix Holt, 1977.

A truly trailblazing early Marxist feminist, Kollantai’s work encompasses commentary on the early-20th-century Russian women’s movement, the rights of workers, sexual morality, and marriage. As an agent of the emergent Soviet state, Kollontai occupied one of the few positions of power for women: minister of social welfare.

Lee, Wendy Lynne. On Marx . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001.

This introduction to Marx (intended for undergraduates) includes brief discussion of a number of central Marxist themes, historical materialism, the critique of capitalism, the alienation of workers, and the prospects for a Communist revolution. But it also includes a chapter devoted to the critique of oppression, focused on the oppression of women and a Marxist feminist analysis of Marx’s own complex and conflicted view of women.

Montefiore, Dora B. Socialism and Women . Northhampton, MA: The Anarcho-Communist Institute Digital Publication, 2017.

Originally published in 1905. Situated in a fundamentally socialist outlook, this wide-ranging set of essays and op-ed offers a rich set of topics that give the reader a clear sense of the conflicts women faced given the essentially patriarchal distribution of access to capital, wages, and opportunity in the early 20th century. Less theory than practical advice, Montefiore is a window into the real-time implications of Engels’s arguments concerning marriage, wealth, and inheritance.

Nye, Andrea. Philosophia: The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt . New York: Routledge, 1994.

Nye argues that although much of feminist theorizing remains a response to male figures, an appreciation of the thinking and experience of female theorists who share a history and a theoretical orientation can open up new vistas. Such is the case, argues Nye, with Luxemburg, Weil, and Arendt who broadly Marxist orientation to questions of morality and justice offer new insight to the philosophical tradition.

Scott, Helen, ed. The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution . Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2008.

Rosa Luxemburg was a critical Marxist thinker in the early 20th century. Her observations about class in Reform or Revolution , and her insight concerning the use of labor strikes as a tool to address the oppression of workers in Mass Strike still resonate with socialist activists, and especially socialist feminists. Both works are collected in Scott’s volume along with an excellent introduction.

Shulman, Alix Kates. Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader . New York: Humanities Books, 1996.

This volume includes a wide range of key essays from a central early figure of Marxist/socialist feminism, Emma Goldman. The volume includes selections from Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life (1931), and other sources. A prolific writer and social critic, Goldman develops and critiques Engels’s arguments concerning marriage as prostitution, the institution of private property, and women in the labor force.

Weil, Simone. Simone Weil: An Anthology . New York: Penguin, 1986.

While we might rightly regard Weil as somewhat on the margins of socialist as well as feminist theory, her work as a moral and political thinker and activist, particularly in the context of social upheaval and Marxist ideas, makes her an important inclusion in this set of early feminist and socialist thinkers. Weil has been especially influential with respect to contemporary feminist work in the critique of war and the masculinist vocabulary of war.

Weiss, Penny, and Loretta Kensinger, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

In this excellent anthology devoted to Goldman’s work, we see a wide array of contemporary feminist thinkers offer analyses of Goldman’s feminist perspective, her Marxist commitments, and her relevance for contemporary issues confronting women, especially working-class women.

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Marxist Perspective on Education

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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On This Page:

Key Takeaways

• Marx and Engels themselves wrote little about education. Nonetheless, there is a long history of Marxists who have argued that education can both enforce and undermine capitalism.
• Sociologists Bowes and Gintis argue that education serves three main purposes: the reproduction of class inequality, its legitimization, and the creation of a compliant capitalist workforce.
• Althusser and his successor, Bordieu, believed that education served to benefit the ruling class both by spreading capitalist ideology and transmitting cultural capital, giving more legitimacy to those in the know.
• Critics have pointed out that those “exploited” by the education system are aware of their status, and do not blindly accept the values of educational institutions.

Marxist Views on Education

Although Marx and Engels wrote little on education, Marxism has educational implications that have been dissected by many. In essence, Marxists believe that education can both reproduce capitalism and have the potential to undermine it.

However, in the current system, education works mainly to maintain capitalism and reproduce social inequality (Cole, 2019).

According to Marx and Engels, the transformation of society will come about through class struggle and actions — such as the actions that the working-class proletariat can take to disempower the ruling bourgeoisie.

Marx and Engels emphasize the role of the spread of “enlightened” opinion throughout society as a way of creating class change.

Nonetheless, Marx and Engels both believed that fostering a full knowledge of what conditions under and what it would mean to overthrow capitalism was necessary to enact basic structural change.

Marx believed that the bourgeoisie failed to offer a real education; instead, education is used to spread bourgeois morals (Marx, 1847). Marx and Engles also, however, believed that workers are educated by doing labor and that education in schools should even be combined with labor.

The theorists felt that this combination of education with labor would increase awareness of the exploitative nature of capitalism.

Marxists were interested in two related issues regarding education under capitalism: firstly, how and to what extent education reproduces capitalism, and, secondly, the ways in which education in capitalist societies could undermine capitalism.

Bowes and Gintes (1976)

Bowes and Gintes (1976) were the two sociologists most associated with the Traditional Marxist perspective in education.

In the view of Marxist, educational systems in capitalist systems perform three functions of the elite, or bourgeoisie class: reproducing class inequality, legitimizing class inequality, and working in the interests of capitalist employers.

The Reproduction of Class Inequality

The process of reproducing class inequality works like this: Middle-class parents use their cultural and material capital to ensure that their children get into the best schools and then go on to achieve highly in those schools.

This can happen through giving children one-on-one instruction with tutors, paying for private school tuition, or, in extreme cases, making donations directly to elite schools that they want their children to attend.

All of this capital meandering means wealthier students tend to get the best education and then go on to get jobs in the middle class.

Meanwhile, working-class children, who are more likely to get a poor education, are funneled into working-class jobs.

The Legitimization of Class Inequality

Marxists argue that, while in reality money determines the quality of one”s education, schools spread a “myth of meritocracy” to convince students that they all have an equal chance of success and that one”s grade simply depends on their effort and ability.

Thus, if a student fails, it is their fault.

This has the net effect of controlling the working classes. Believing that they had a fair chance, the proletariat became less likely to rebel and attempt to change society through a Marxist revolutionary movement (Thompson, 2016).

Bowes and Gintis explain this concept through the idea that students in the capitalist education system are alienated by their labor. Students have a lack of control over their education and their course content.

School motivates, instead, by creating a system of grades and other external rewards. This creates often destructive competition among students who compete to achieve the best grades in what is seen, at least superficially, as a meritocratic system.

Reproduction and legitimization of social inequality – Althusser

Althusser saw himself as building on the conditions that Marx theorized necessary for capitalist production through emphasizing the role of ideology in the social relationships that permeate people’s lives.

He believed that all institutions, schools included, drilled the values of capitalism into pupils, perpetuating the economic system. In this way, he considered education to be part of the “ideological state apparatus.”

Althusser says this influence perpetrates education in multiple ways. This ideological state apparatus, according to Althusser, worked by injecting students with ideas that keep people unaware of their exploitation and make them easy to control.

Secondly, he believed that this injection of ideas produces complaints and an unquestioning workforce, passively accepting their roles (Ferguson, 2018).

Althusser’s successor, Pierre Bordieu (1971) also believed that the education system and other cultural institutions and practices indirectly benefited the bourgeoisie — the capital class — through passing down “cultural capital.”

Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that someone can use to demonstrate their competence and social status, allowing them to wield influence.

Working in The Interests of Capitalist Employers

Finally, Bowes and Gintis (1976) suggested that there is a correspondence between the values taught by schools and the ways in which the workplace operates.

They suggest that these values are taught through a so-called hidden curriculum , which consists of the things that students learn through the experience of attending school rather than the main curriculum thoughts at the school.

Some parallels between the values taught at school and those used to exploit workers in the workplace include:

The passive subservience of pupils to teachers, which corresponds to the passive subservience of workers to managers;

An acceptance of hierarchy – the authority of teachers and administrators over students — corresponding to the authority of managers over employees;

Motivation by external rewards (such as grades over learning), which corresponds to workers being motivated by wages rather than the job of a job.

Correspondence Principle

The Key concept in Bowes and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) is that the reproduction of the social relations of production is facilitated and illustrated by the similarities between how social relations in education and in production work.

In order to reproduce the social relations of production, the education system must try to teach people to be properly subordinate and render them sufficiently confused that they are unable to gather together and take control of their material existence — such as through seizing the means of production.

Specifically, Bowes and Gintis (1976) argued, the education system helps develop everything from a student”s personal demeanor to their modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social-class identifications which are crucial to being seen as competent and hirable to future employers.

In particular, the social relations of education — the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work — replicate a hierarchical division of labor. This means that there is a clear hierarchy of power from administrators to teachers to students.

The Myth of Meritocracy

One such aspect of the capitalist education system, according to Bowes and Gintis, is the “myth of meritocracy “.

While Marxists argue that class background and money determine how good of an education people get, the myth of meritocracy posits that everyone has an equal chance at success. Grades depend on effort and ability, and people’s failures are wholly their fault.

This casts a perception of a fair education system when, in reality, the system — and who succeeds or fails in it — is deeply rooted in class (Thompson, 2016).

Criticisms of the Marxist Perspective on Education

The Marxist perspectives on education have been criticized for several reasons.

The traditional Marxist perspective on education has been evaluated both positively and negative. On the affirmative side, there is a wealth of evidence that schools reproduce class inequality.

In particular, evidence suggests that those from the middle and upper classes do much better in education because the working classes are more likely to suffer from material and cultural deprivation. Meanwhile, the middle classes have high material and cultural capital, along with laws that directly benefit them.

Another point in favor of the Marxist view of education is the existence of private schools. In these schools, the very wealthiest families can buy a better education for their families. This gives their children a substantially greater chance of attending an elite university.

There is also strong evidence for the reproduction of class inequality in elite jobs, such as medicine, law, and journalism. A disproportionately high number of people in these professions were educated in private institutions and come from families who are, in turn, highly educated (Thompson, 2016).

On the other hand, sociologists such as Henry Giroux (1983) have criticized the traditional Marxist view on education as being too deterministic. He argued that working classes are not entirely molded by the capitalist system and do not accept everything they are taught blindly. Paul Willis’ study of the working-class “lads” is one example of lower-class youths actively rejecting the values taught by education.

There is also less evidence that pupils believe school is fair than evidence that pupils believe school is unfair. The “Lads” that Paul Willis studied (2017) were well aware that the educational system was biased toward the middle classes, and many people in poorly-funded schools know that they are receiving a lesser quality of education than those in private schools.

• The Functionalist Perspective of Education

Bourdieu, P., & Bordieu, P. (1971). Formes et degrés de la conscience du chômage dans l”Algérie coloniale. Manpower and Unemployment Research in Africa , 36-44.

Bowes, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Captalist America.

Cole, M. (2019). Theresa May, the hostile environment and public pedagogies of hate and threat: The case for a future without borders . Routledge.

Ferguson, S. (2018). Social reproduction: what’s the big idea? Giroux, H. (1983). Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education: A critical analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 53 (3), 257-293.

Giroux, H. (1983). Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education: A critical analysis.  Harvard Educational Review ,  53 (3), 257-293.

Marx, K., Engels, F. (1847). Manifesto of the communist party .

Thompson, M. (2016). Assess the Marxist View of the Role of Education in Society .

Willis, P. (2017). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs . Routledge.

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Article contents

Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

• Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

• feminist theories
• qualitative research
• educational research
• positionality
• methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

Liberal, Marxist and Radical Feminist Perspectives on Society: An Introduction

covering views on causes of inequalities, solutions, key thinkers and evaluations.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on June 30, 2023 by Karl Thompson

Liberal, Radical and Marxist and Feminism are the three main types of feminism, with different explanations for sex and gender inequalities and related strategies for social change.

This distinction between the three main types of feminism is common in A-level sociology and first year degree social studies, and it is also usual to add a fourth type which is postmodern (also known as difference) feminism.

Most contemporary feminists would balk at the idea of generalising Feminist theory into three (or four) basic types because part of Feminism is to resist the tendency towards categorising things, but for the purposes of A-level sociology, these three/ four are types what you need to know!

Liberal, Radical and Marxist Feminism: Simplified

• Liberal Feminism – aims to achieve gender equality between men and women through social policy reforms, within the system.
• Marxist Feminism – argues capitalism structures patriarchy, bringing down capitalism is the main goal.
• Radical Feminism – patriarchy exists in all institutions. All women share common interests against all men, brining down patriarchy is the goal.

There follows below more detailed accounts of each of these three feminist theories with links as appropriate.

You might also like this summary post on FOUR types of feminism (including difference/ postmodern feminism) which bullet points the information below.

Liberal Feminism

Liberal Feminism is the original form of Feminist theorising and activism, dating back to the time of Mary Wollonstonecraft. 

The central aim of liberal feminism is to improve and defend women’s rights through identifying inequalities between men and women and reforming these inequalities. 

Liberal Feminists believe that the main causes of gender inequality are ignorance and socialisation. They do not believe that social institutions are inherently patriarchal and believe in a “March of Progress” view of gender relations. They believe that men and women are gradually becoming more equal over time and that this trend will continue.

As evidence liberal feminists point to legal reforms they have campaigned for which have successfully promoted equality such as winning the vote for women and the sex discrimination act (1970).

Liberal Feminists are especially keen to emphasise the beneficial effects which women going into paid work has had on gender equality over the last 50 years especially: the pay gap is nearly 0 for women and men aged between 18-34 and dual earner households are now the main type of household in the UK and this is correlated with increased gender equality in other sectors of social life such as education and the family.

Within education, boys used to outperform girls, but now girls outperform boys in nearly every subject and at every level of education and within the family, evidence shows men are doing a greater share of domestic labour (housework, childcare), decision making is becoming more equal and that male and female children are socialised in a much more similar manner with similar aspirations.

Liberal feminists are the most likely to prefer positivist, statistical methods and have a tendency to measure progress towards gender equality using quantitative indicators such as the pay gap between men and women, educational achievement gaps and the proportions of men and women in parliament. 

Liberal Feminists believe research can be value free and freed from malestream bias with sufficient care. 

Solutions to remaining gender inequalities

Liberal Feminists do not seek revolutionary changes: they want changes to take place within the existing structure. 

Greater equality for women is to be achieved through reform of the mainstream liberal democratic capitalist order and reform is mostly sort through official, legal means, especially through campaigning for equality legislation. 

Examples of the reformist political campaigns that liberal feminists have focused on include:

• Winning voting rights for women. 
• Equal pay legislation 
• Increasing financial independence for women. 
• Cultural changes which promote mutual respect. 

Thus from a liberal feminist perspective, all the major barriers to gender equality have been broken down over the last century and since women now have equal opportunities to enter the workforce and politics, we have effectively achieved legal gender equality in the UK and there is very little else that needs to be done.

Only relatively minor changes need to be made to advance gender equality further, it’s a matter of tweaking social policy rather than radical and drastic systemic level changes.

We find Liberal Feminism embedded in mainstream political institutions such as the Equal Pay Commission and a major current focus of contemporary liberal feminism is the ‘glass ceiling’ as legislation hasn’t yet effectively narrowed the promotion prospects or differences in pay and bonuses between men and women at the higher end of professional life.

Evaluations of Liberal Feminism

On a positive note, Liberal Feminist ideas have probably had the most impact on women’s lives. It is hard to deny that gender equality has improved in many countries through reform rather than the more radical changes Marxist and Radical feminists argue we need.

One easy criticism of the liberal feminist view is that it is ethnocentric – it only really reflects the experiences of white, middle class women.

Liberal feminism tends to treat gender differences as sex differences. Liberal feminists campaign for equal rights between biologically female women and biologically male men, it has little or no interest in campaigning for greater gender equality in the broader sense of equality for people across sexualities or sexual identities. It focuses on biological sex, not issues of gay or trans equalities.  

Liberal Feminism uncritically accepts male-centred constructions of the existing social order including definitions of what it means to be a human being. It accepts deeply held malestream concepts and divisions such as male/ female and sex/ gender divides, something which postmodernist feminists in particular object to.

Marxist Feminism

Marxist Feminism connects Marxist notions of the relations of production to social relations of biological reproduction, focusing on the way childbirth and child care have economic ramifications. 

Marxist Feminists see the exploitative social relations of production as the main focus. Capitalism subordinates and exploits both the working classes and all women, both upper and lower class females. 

The most exploited group is working class women who are exploited by the whole of the ruling class and working class men and a working class housewife’s work is exploited by both her husband and the broader forces of the capitalist economy. 

In the mid twentieth century women were relatively marginalised from the public sphere (work and politics) and relatively confined to the private world of domestic work. Under capitalism the type of labour associated with the domestic sphere such as cooking, cleaning and tidying was not recognised as work at all, leading to the widespread view that women were merely consumers, dependent on the income from the ‘real work’ of their husbands. 

A main focus for marxist feminists in the 1970s was ‘housework’ which was seen as the intersection of class and gender based modes of exploitation. 

Housework was not regarded as real work, and thus unpaid, because of the structure of the capitalist system. It was primarily women who did this work for free, never pausing to think that they might even be paid for it. While male breadwinners benefited directly from the free labour of their female partners, the main beneficiary was the capitalist economy: women provided for the domestic needs of men so they could keep serving the needs of the system through doing paid work. 

Essentially capitalism required that all women be put into the housewife role and be exploited, but this was disguised by an ideology that saw housework as naturally women’s work. 

For further information see the marxist feminist perspective on the family .

The increasing amount of women going into work is not interpreted as liberation from ‘domestic tyranny’ by Marxist feminists, but rather capitalism seeking out cheaper forms of labour to exploit. 

Women are often found in low-paid, low-skilled, part-time, insecure work and the existence of a class of all women who are disadvantaged is a structural necessity for capitalism, so the relative disadvantages women face at work compared to men can’t be solved by legislation as liberal feminists claim. 

Marxist Feminism: Key thinker

Fran Ansley (1972) argued women absorb the anger that would otherwise be directed at capitalism. Ansley argued women’s male partners are inevitably frustrated by the exploitation they experienced at work and women were the victims of this, including domestic violence. She famously coined the phrase ‘women as the takers of shit’ to describe their domestic roles.

(The Roots of Marxist Feminism)

Marxist (or more broadly socialist) feminism can trace its roots back to the late nineteenth century and has had a complex relationship to communist and socialist movements over the last century and a half. 

Engel’s (1978/ 1884) pioneering work is the starting point for further attempts to formulate a materialist feminism that sought to apply Marxist concepts to understand the nature of sex and gender based exploitation. 

Engels initially argued that throughout history women have been both economically and politically subordinated by men. Successive modes of production have been structured to control women in terms of their work and their reproductive capacities. Women have been exploited differently to men because of their capacity to give birth. 

Marxist Feminism – solutions to gender Inequality

For Marxist Feminists, the solutions to gender inequality are economic – We need to tackle Capitalism to tackle Patriarchy. Softer solutions include paying women for childcare and housework – thus putting an economic value on what is still largely women’s work, stronger solutions include the abolition of Capitalism and the ushering in of Communism.

They are more sensitive to differences between women who belong to the ruling class and proletarian families. Marxist Feminists believe that there is considerable scope for co-operation between working class women and men and that both can work together.

Evaluations 

Marxist feminism is too narrowly focused on issues of the economy and work and downplays issues which are not economic in nature. 

Marxist feminism is reductionist in that it subordinates gender exploitation to economic exploitation within capitalism. One obvious criticism of this idea is that women’s oppression within the family existed before capitalism and in communist societies.

Postmodernist feminists argue that there are more complex issues feminism needs to deal with surrounding gender and culture which Marxist feminists dismiss as just ideologies of capitalism.

Radical Feminism

Radical Feminism began to be influential in the late 1970s and argued that the focus of feminism should be on patriarchy, defined as a social order wholly and primarily structured around the interests of males. 

For radical feminists patriarchy runs through multiple social institutions simultaneously: from politics through work, education and the family.

Patriarchy was seen to have its root in both physical and symbolic violence against women. Domestic violence was seen not as an accident arising from the dispositions of particular men, but a structural feature of the current family set up, and pornography was seen as a symbolic expression of a society centred around control of and hatred of women.

In essence many marxist concepts were reworked by radical feminists: social structural explanations, ideology and highlighting the hidden nature of oppression.

Against Liberal Feminists they argue that paid work has not been ‘liberating’. Instead women have acquired the ‘dual burden’ of paid work and unpaid housework and the family remains patriarchal – men benefit from women’s paid earnings and their domestic labour. Some Radical Feminists go further arguing that women suffer from the ‘triple shift’ where they have to do paid work, domestic work and ‘emotion work’ – being expected to take on the emotional burden of caring for children.

Rape, violence and pornography are also methods through which men have secured and maintained their power over women. (Andrea Dworkin, 1981). For evidence of this, Radical Feminists point to the ‘dark side of family life’ –  According to the British Crime Survey domestic violence accounts for a sixth of all violent crime and nearly 1 in 4 women will experience DV at some point in their lifetime and women are much more likely to experience this than men..

Rosemarie Tong (1998) distinguishes between two groups of radical feminist:

• Radical-libertarian feminists believe that it is both possible and desirable for gender differences to be eradicated, or at least greatly reduced, and aim for a state of androgyny in which men and women are not significantly different.
• Radical-cultural feminists believe in the superiority of the feminine. According to Tong radical cultural feminists celebrate characteristics associated with femininity such as emotion, and are hostile to those characteristics associated with masculinity such as hierarchy.

Key Thinker: Kate millet

Kate Millet’s sexual politics (1) is one of the most famous works of this period in which she analysed the existence of patriarchy in eight different ways:

• ideological
• sociological (social, such as in the family)
• Economic and educational
• Force (violence)
• Myth and religion
• psychological

Radical Feminism: Solutions to gender inequality

Radical Feminists argued there was a universal sisterhood of all women because women had common interests against all men and engaged in consciousness raising so that individual women could see how patriarchy really worked. 

Radical Feminists see the traditional nuclear family as particularly patriarchal, and advocate its abolition and the establishment of alternative family structures and sexual relations.

The various alternatives suggested by Radical Feminists include separatism – women only communes, and matrifocal (female centred) households. Some also practise political Lesbianism and political celibacy as they view heterosexual relationships as “sleeping with the enemy.”

Radical feminists have often been actively involved in setting up and running refuges for women who are the victims of male violence.

Evaluations of Radical Feminism

It Ignores the progress that women have made in many areas e.g. work, controlling fertility, divorce.

The power of men is overstated primarily because of a failure to recognise differences in power between men, for example class based differences. 

They failed to recognise the role of money in some forms of exploitation: pornography for example.

Postmodern Feminists criticise the idea that there is a universal sisterhood of all women with shared interests.

Signposting and Related Posts

I usually teach this as part of my introductory block in the very first two weeks of A-level sociology.

Students should read this introduction to Feminism post first of all.

Inglis, D (2015) An Invitation to Social Theory

Kate Millet (1969) Sexual Politics

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One thought on “Liberal, Marxist and Radical Feminist Perspectives on Society: An Introduction”

If I remember correctly, Engels makes it clear in his book, “The State, Private Property and the Family”, that the oppression of women started with the emergence of a class society, that is over 6,000 years before Capitalism. In short, where a minority of the population enjoy privilege and wealth over and above the majority then the mechanism of divide and rule is useful to develop.

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V. I. Lenin

The tasks of the working women’s movement in the soviet republic, speech delivered at the fourth moscow city conference of non-party working women, september 23, 1919.

Delivered: 23 September, 1919 First Published: Pravda No. 213, September 25, 1919 ; Published according to the text of the pamphlet, V. I. Lenin, Speech at the Working Women’s Congress, Moscow, 1919, verified with the Pravda text Source: Lenin’s Collected Works , 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 40-46 Translated: George Hanna Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Comrades, it gives me pleasure to greet a conference of working women. I will allow myself to pass over those subjects and questions that, of course, at the moment are the cause of the greatest concern to every working woman and to every politically-conscious individual from among the working people; these are the most urgent questions—that of bread and that of the war situation. I know from the newspaper reports of your meetings that these questions have been dealt with exhaustively by Comrade Trotsky as far as war questions are concerned and by Comrades Yakovleva and Svidersky as far as the bread question is concerned; please, therefore, allow me to pass over those questions.

I should like to say a few words about the general tasks facing the working women’s movement in the Soviet Republic, those that are, in general, connected with the transition to socialism, and those that are of particular urgency at the present time. Comrades, the question of the position of women was raised by Soviet power from the very beginning. It seems to me that any workers’ state in the course of transition to socialism is laced with a double task. The first part of that task is relatively simple and easy. It concerns those old laws that kept women in a position of inequality as compared to men.

Participants in all emancipation movements in Western Europe have long since, not for decades but for centuries, put forward the demand that obsolete laws be annulled and women and men be made equal by law, but none of the democratic European states, none of the most advanced republics have succeeded in putting it into effect, because wherever there is capitalism, wherever there is private property in land and factories, wherever the power of capital is preserved, the men retain their privileges. It was possible to put it into effect in Russia only because the power of the workers has been established here since October 25, 1917. From its very inception Soviet power set out to be the power of the working people, hostile to all forms of exploitation. It set itself the task of doing away with the possibility of the exploitation of the working people by the landowners and capitalists, of doing away with the rule of capital. Soviet power has been trying to make it possible for the working people to organise their lives without private property in land, without privately-owned factories, without that private property that everywhere, throughout the world, even where there is complete political liberty, even in the most democratic republics, keeps the working people in a state of what is actually poverty and wage-slavery, and women in a state of double slavery.

Soviet power, the power of the working people, in the first months of its existence effected a very definite revolution in legislation that concerns women. Nothing whatever is left in the Soviet Republic of those laws that put women in a subordinate position. I am speaking specifically of those laws that took advantage of the weaker position of women and put them in a position of inequality and often, even, in a humiliating position, i.e., the laws on divorce and on children born out of wedlock and on the right of a woman to summon the father of a child for maintenance.

It is particularly in this sphere that bourgeois legislation, even, it must be said, in the most advanced countries, takes advantage of the weaker position of women to humiliate them and give them a status of inequality. It is particularly in this sphere that Soviet power has left nothing whatever of the old, unjust laws that were intolerable for working people. We may now say proudly and without any exaggeration that apart from Soviet Russia there is not a country in the world where women enjoy full equality and where women are not placed in the humiliating position felt particularly in day-to-day family life. This was one of our first and most important tasks.

If you have occasion to come into contact with parties that are hostile to the Bolsheviks, if there should come into your hands newspapers published in Russian in the regions occupied by Koichak or Denikin, or if you happen to talk to people who share the views of those newspapers, you may often hear from them the accusation that Soviet power has violated democracy.

We, the representatives of Soviet power, Bolshevik Communists and supporters of Soviet power are often accused of violating democracy and proof of this is given by citing the fact that Soviet power dispersed the Constituent Assembly. We usually answer this accusation as follows; that democracy and that Constituent Assembly which came into being when private property still existed on earth, when there was no equality between people, when the one who possessed his own capital was the boss and the others worked for him and were his wage-slaves-that was a democracy on which we place no value. Such democracy concealed slavery even in the most advanced countries. We socialists are supporters of democracy only insofar as it eases the position of the working and oppressed people. Throughout the world socialism has set itself the task of combating every kind of exploitation of man by man. That democracy has real value for us winch serves the exploited, the underprivileged. If those who do not work are disfranchised that would be real equality between people. Those who do not work should not eat.

In reply to these accusations we say that the question must be presented in this way—how is democracy implemented in various countries? We see that equality is proclaimed in all democratic republics but in the civil laws and in laws on the rights of women—those that concern their position in the family and divorce—we see inequality and the humiliation of women at every step, and we say that this is a violation of democracy specifically in respect of the oppressed. Soviet power has implemented democracy to a greater degree than any of the other, most advanced countries because it has not left in its laws any trace of the inequality of women. Again I say that no other state and no other legislation has ever done for women a half of what Soviet power did in the first months of its existence.

Laws alone, of course, are not enough, and we are by no means content with mere decrees. In the sphere of legislation, however, we have done everything required of us to put women in a position of equality and we have every right to be proud of it. The position of women in Soviet Russia is now ideal as compared with their position in the most advanced states. We tell ourselves, however, that this is, of course, only the beginning.

Owing to her work in the house, the woman is still in a difficult position. To effect her complete emancipation and make her the equal of the man it is necessary for the national economy to be socialised and for women to participate in common productive labour. Then women will occupy the same position as men.

Here we are not, of course, speaking of making women the equal of men as far as productivity of labour, the quantity of labour, the length of the working day, labour conditions, etc., are concerned; we mean that the woman should not, unlike the man, be oppressed because of her position in the family. You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.

In pursuance of the socialist ideal we want to struggle for the full implementation of socialism, and here an extensive field of labour opens up before women. We are now making serious preparations to clear the ground for the building of socialism, but the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women and when we undertake the new work together with women who have been ’emancipated from that petty, stultifying, unproductive work. This is a job that will take us many, many years.

This work cannot show any rapid results and will not produce a scintillating effect.

We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework. And the work of organising all these institutions will fall mainly to women. It has to be admitted that in Russia today there are very few institutions that would help woman out of her state of household slavery. There is an insignificant number of them, and the conditions now obtaining in the Soviet Republic—the war and food situation about which comrades have already given you the details—hinder us in this work. Still, it must be said that these institutions that liberate women from their position as household slaves are springing up wherever it is in any way possible.

We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves. The working women must themselves see to it that such institutions are developed, and this activity will bring about a complete change in their position as compared with what it was under the old, capitalist society.

In order to be active in politics under the old, capitalist regime special training was required, so that women played an insignificant part in politics, even in the most advanced and free capitalist countries. Our task is to make politics available to every working woman. Ever since private property in laud and factories has been abolished and the power of the landowners and capitalists overthrown, the tasks of politics have become simple, clear and comprehensible to the working people as a whole, including working women. In capitalist society the woman’s position is marked by such inequality that the extent of her participation in politics is only an insignificant fraction of that of the man. The power of the working people is necessary for a change to be wrought in this situation, for then the main tasks of politics will consist of matters directly affecting the fate of the working people themselves.

Here, too, the participation of working women is essential —not only of party members and politically-conscious women, but also of the non-party women and those who are least politically conscious. Here Soviet power opens up a wide field of activity to working women.

We have had a difficult time in the struggle against the forces hostile to Soviet Russia that have attacked her. It was difficult for us to fight on the battlefield against the forces who went to war against the power of the working people and in the field of food supplies against the profiteers, because of the too small number of people, working people, who came whole-heartedly to our aid with their own labour. Here, too, there is nothing Soviet power can appreciate as much as the help given by masses of non-party working women. They may know that in the old, bourgeois society, perhaps, a comprehensive training was necessary for participation in politics and that this was not available to women. The political activity of the Soviet Republic is mainly the struggle against the landowners and capitalists, the struggle for the elimination of exploitation; political activity, therefore, is made available to the working woman in the Soviet Republic and it will consist in the working woman using her organisational ability to help the working man.

What we need is not only organisational work on a scale involving millions; we need organisational work on the smallest scale and this makes it possible for women to work as well. Women can work under war conditions when it is a question of helping the army or carrying on agitation in the army. Women should take an active part in all this so that the Red Army sees that it is being looked after, that solicitude is being displayed. Women can also work in the sphere of food distribution, on the improvement of public catering and everywhere opening dining-rooms like those that are so numerous in Petrograd.

It is in these fields that the activities of working women acquire the greatest organisational significance. The participation of working women is also essential in the organisation and running of big experimental farms and should not take place only in isolated cases. This i5 something that cannot be carried out without the participation of a large number of working women. Working women will be very useful in this field in supervising the distribution of food and in making food products more easily obtainable. This work can well be done by non-party working women and its accomplishment will do more than anything else to strengthen socialist society.

We have abolished private property in land and almost completely abolished the private ownership of factories; Soviet power is now trying to ensure that all working people, non-party as well as Party members, women as well as men, should take part in this economic development. The work that Soviet power has begun can only make progress when, instead of a few hundreds, millions and millions of women throughout Russia take part in it. We are sure that the cause of socialist development will then become sound. Then the working people will show that they can live and run their country without the aid of the landowners and capitalists. Then socialist construction will be so soundly based in Russia that no external enemies in other countries and none inside Russia will be any danger to the Soviet Republic.

Collected Works Volume 30 Collected Works Table of Contents Lenin Works Archive

Russian Activists Just Won an Important Battle Over LGBTQ Rights. But the War Is Far From Over

T here aren’t many people like Yulia Tsvetkova in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The Russian city is 5,000 miles and seven time zones east of the capital, Moscow, and for half the year, it is under snow or ice. It’s known more for shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing than LGBTQ rights and feminist activism — but that hasn’t stopped Tsvetkova forging a reputation in both. “There are practically no activists here, most of them try to leave,” she says, over a phone call. “But there’s still a lot I can do.”

In the past three years, the 27-year-old has headed a youth theatre, where she created plays that explored gender stereotypes, run online groups on feminism and sex education, and published drawings that she says promote LGBTQ and women’s rights on social media. Her activism has made her a target for the authorities. In July, about a week after the Kremlin pushed through constitutional amendments that include defining marriage as a union between a man and woman, Tsvetkova was fined for a second time under the country’s notorious “gay propaganda” law and forced to pay 75,000 Rubles ($1000) over her colorful illustrations of same-sex couples and their young children.

Tsvetkova is now facing charges of “spreading pornography” for a Vagina Monologues page she published on social media last November, which features illustrations of vaginas, aimed at breaking the stigma around women’s bodies. “I laughed, my lawyer laughed, my friends laughed. Anyone can see that this isn’t pornography,” she says. Yet she spent four months under house arrest and prosecutors are relentlessly trying to build a case against her. If she is found guilty, as 99% of those prosecuted in Russia’s criminal courts are, she could be sent to jail for up to six years. Tsvetkova has become a symbol of the resistance against Russia’s enforcement of “traditional values” and despite the Kremlin’s attempt to stigmatize her activism, she has received unprecedented support from celebrities, artists and journalists across Russia and beyond.

The defiance of Tsvetkova and many other LGBTQ activists in Russia may finally be paying off. Two weeks after the constitution was changed, the government proposed a bill to ban same-sex marriage and end the legal recognition of transgender people. Many activists had expected the landmark bill, co-authored by conservative lawmaker Elena Mizulina, to pass in the fall. But on Nov. 16 parliament revoked the bill for revision and it could now be scrapped altogether.

Svetlana Zakharova, a spokesperson at the Russian LGBT Network in St. Peterburg says she can’t say for sure why the law was repealed, but emphasizes that the LGBTQ community and its allies in Russia managed to unite to resist the legislation “more than ever before”. “Our activities, together, helped to dismiss the bill,” she says. Mizulina lost support because of the “tremendous level of public outrage about the bill’s homophobia and transphobia,” Jonny Dzhibladze, a coordinator at Vykhod (“Coming Out”), a St.Petersburg based LGBT rights group, says. “It looks like we can breathe freely for some time,” he says.

But a battle won does not mean the war is over. The climate for LGBTQ people in Russia is still extremely hostile. According to a 2019 report by the Russian LGBT Network, 12% of LGBT people surveyed reported being subject to physical attacks, and 56%, psychological abuse. LGBTQ activists have been arrested, attacked and killed . “If you live your life quietly and you do not make demands from the government, you do not express yourself publicly as an LGBT person, the government is not going to go after you,” says Tanya Lokshina, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division. The repeal of the bill is unlikely to change that situation. “It’s not as if everything was fine before the bill, and if it passed, everything would be bad,” says Tsvetkova. But it does seem like “we’re in a moment of transition between accepting what’s around us and challenging it,” she says.

Russia’s culture of intolerance

Over the past 20 years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has closely aligned himself with the socially conservative Orthodox Church and has enacted legislation in purported defense of “traditional values” that activists say has promoted a culture of hostility toward the LGBTQ community. Russia is already one of the least LGBTQ friendly places in Europe, ranking higher than only Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey in the 2019 Rainbow Index , by Brussels-based advocacy group Ilga-Europe. In 2012, Moscow city authorities banned pride events for 100 years.

A year later Putin passed the so-called “gay propaganda” law, which bans information deemed to promote homosexuality to minors. The punishments were not severe, but it made it more dangerous for LGBTQ activists to claim their rights and stifled access to support services for LGBTQ youth. Alexander Kondakov, a researcher at the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg says “It cannot be denied that the discriminatory law and the hateful rhetoric around LGBT rights at the time influenced an increase in violence towards LGBT people”.

Then came this year’s bill. Activists say the legislation represented an escalation, taking aim at the rights of transgender people in particular. It was a “tremendous blow” for the trans community in Russia, says Lokshina. Activists say that ending legal recognition – banning transgender people from changing the sex on their birth certificate – as the bill proposed, would further marginalize an already vulnerable group and open the way for more discrimination.

Alexei Lis, a 36 year-old activist and transgender man from St. Petersburg says that “If the police stop me and ask for my I.D. and see a woman’s photo, I could be harassed and beaten.” Gaining legal recognition is “an important step for transgender people in intergrating in society”, in terms being able to apply for jobs and access medical services without fear of discrimination, says Reinera Veles, an 23 year-old activist and transgender woman from Moscow.

For many LGBTQ people and their allies, the bill was a step too far. Russian LGBTQ activists fought back through campaigns including a social media movement ( #ProtectRussianTransLives ) and a petition that has been signed by almost 23,000 people. Dozens of doctors specializing in gender transition also condemned the move. In an appeal to lawmakers, medical professionals wrote that the bill will “destroy” the process of full gender transition by ending the legal recognition of transgender people. They said that the practice, which has been in place for decades in Russia, is “extremely important” for the “socialization” of transgender people. Banning it would “aggravate” gender dysphoria, they said.

High profile figures also joined the protest, including playwright Valery Pecheikin, opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, and lawmaker and TV presenter Oksana Pushkina. Defying her colleagues in Putin’s United Russia party, Pushkina called it “an absolutely insane law” in an interview with TV Dozhd (“Rain”) , one of the country’s few remaining independent outlets. Referring to Article 19 of Russia’s Constitution, which guarantees equal rights and freedoms to all citizens, she emphasized that “sexual orientation cannot be the basis for restricting civil rights.” Afterwards, several LGBTQ activists wrote open letters to Pushkina explaining how the bills would affect them.

The Russian government has entrapped itself, says Lokshina. “The more the government cracks down, the more vigorous LGBT activism in Russia becomes,” she explains. “One of the greatest developments” that she says she’s seen in her 20 years of human rights work in Russia is the “the mainstreaming” of the LGBTQ rights movement. “Seven or eight years ago LGBT activists were seen as separate from the human rights community. The mainstreaming happened because of the crackdown,” she says.

Justice for Yulia

The widespread criticism over Tsvetkova’s persecution is a case in point. Several high profile figures have publicly defended her over the “pornography” investigation, including TV host and former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, actress Renata Litvinova, and veteran broadcaster Vladimir Pozner. They urged the authorities to protect the activist, who says she has received death threats from an anonymous homophobic network called Saw that publishes the names and contacts of LGBTQ people, and calls for violence against them. LGBTQ activist Elena Grigoryeva was murdered in July 2019 after her details appeared on Saw’s website.

Opposition grew. In June, over 500 Russians across the country staged single person pickets in solidarity with Tsvetkova. Police responded aggressively, detaining 40 demonstrators in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The same month, over 50 media outlets organized a “Media Strike for Yulia”, demanding that the “pornography” investigation be dropped. Writers, journalists, actors, influencers, and bloggers published articles, including in Vogue , under the hashtag #forYulia and #FreeJuliaTsvetkova, and some 248,000 people signed an online petition calling on authorities to drop the case against her.

Until recently, very few public figures in Russia were voicing their support for LGBTQ issues, says Zakharova, at the Russian LGBT network. “It shows that society is changing. It’s not as homophobic as our officials and religious leaders think,” she says. While the Russian public is still deeply divided on LGBTQ rights, support for the community appears to be growing. A 2019 poll by the Levada Center, an independent polling agency in Moscow, found that 47% of Russians support equal rights for the LGBTQ community, the highest level in 14 years (43% were not in support). The trend is especially pronounced in 16-18-year-olds , 81% of whom reported a “friendly or calm attitude” toward LGBTQ people and 33% reported having LGBTQ acquaintances, compared to 42% and 8% respectively among the general public . “There’s a lot of hope in young people,” says Zakharova.

While there is little evidence that Putin’s ruling party is becoming less hostile to LGBTQ people, there seems to have been a shift in attitudes among Russia’s democratic opposition figures. In 2009, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure Alexei Navalny suggested that gay people could “frolic” in a cordoned stadium rather than in public in a Pride Parade. Yet during his bid for Moscow mayor in 2013 and an aborted run for the presidency in 2017, he proposed to allow regional referenda on same-sex marriages. More recently, in June, he accused the government of going “completely crazy” after pro-Kremlin media group Patriot released a homophobic political advert . Sobchak, the TV host, in 2011 doubted the need for same-sex marriages. “I just don’t understand why this phenomenon should be called marriage,” she said. But as a presidential candidate in 2018, she included same-sex civil unions and the lifting of the “gay propaganda” law in her political program .

The repeal of the bill was an important win for Russia’s LGBTQ community, but it’s just one victory. “It’s not the end point,” Tsvetkova says. “Homophobia is a daily reality in Russia”. Battling that requires the daily work of LGBTQ groups across the country, the willingness of the the public to speak out about inequality and efforts of human rights lawyers as they defend LGBTQ rights activists, like Tsvetkova, who currently awaits the start of her trial. But many activists feel that the change that they have long been fighting for is finally in the air.

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