Socialist-Feminist American Women's History

Abstract

Socialist-Feminist American Women's History' Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Socialist-feminist history has, during the past two decades, arguably moved "from margin to center," from the pages of Feminist Studies to those of the Journal of American History. Today, it dominates American women's history, if only by setting the terms of many of the main debates, and is increasingly making its influence felt in American history in general.1 Yet its very success has tended to obscure the boundaries between socialist-feminist and mainstream women's history. The problems of identification and definition have become murky. Who, precisely, defines herself as a socialistfeminist historian?2 What, in these times of the triumph of poststructuralist literary theory and the related but incomparably more important collapse of the world socialist movement, does socialist feminism mean? Navigating uneasily between the establishment mainstream and a rising tide of postmodernism , which themselves are showing signs of merging, socialistfeminist history is losing its distinct identity.3 Contemporary American socialist feminism, which originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, embodied the attempt to resolve the tensions between second wave feminism and marxism. It stands, according to Alison Jaggar, as "the most adequate of the feminist theories formulated to date,"4 but also, in many respects, "the most questionable" of feminist paradigms, primarily because of the difficulty in distinguishing it from radical feminism on the one hand and marxism on the other.5 For Jaggar, socialist feminism differs from radical feminism in resisting the temptations of idealism and biologism and from marxism by fundamentally revising the entirety of traditional marxist analysis "from domestic labor to imperialism."6 Socialist feminism shares with marxism a basic conception of "human nature as created historically through the dialectical interrelation between human biology, human society and the physical environment," as "mediated by human labor or praxis."7 But more than marxism, it emphasizes the psychological as well as the physical differences between women and men and remains primarily committed to overcoming "all forms of alienation but especially those that are specific to women."8 This commitment has led socialist-feminists to argue that (men's) control of the productive resources of society has always included "a struggle to control the reproductive capacity of women" and has resulted not merely in struggles among classes but in struggles among women and men. In this perspective, "the conceptual tool of the sexual division of labor" figures as central to socialist-feminist political and economic theory, which ©1990 Journal of Women's H istory, Vol. l No. 3 (Winter)__________________ * For help and encouragement, warmest thanks to Lou Ferleger, Linda Gordon, Ginger Gould, Lisa Greenwald, Joan Hoff-Wilson, Sharon McCoy, Fabienne McPhail, John Merriman, and Christie Farnham. 182 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY WINTER views women's subordination as a structural feature of society rather than simply one aspect of the broader social relations of production, notably contemporary capitalism.9 Socialist feminism, thus, "enlarges the domain of political economy" challenges, especially the distinction between public and private.10 Trying to synthesize "the insights of radical feminism with those of traditional marxism," socialist-feminists have postulated two systems of production—the capitalist and the "patriarchal domestic"—and two systems of domination—class and gender. Notwithstanding persisting theoretical problems, socialist-feminists combine allegiances to feminism with allegiances to historical materialism as central to any understanding of women's oppression.11 The problems deriving from the tension inherent in a "dual systems theory" that attempts to give equal weight to sex-gender and class relations as sources of women's oppression and which, according to Iris Young, plague socialist-feminist theory in general have, not surprisingly, also bedeviled socialist-feminist history, which has, during the last two decades, developed in tandem with it.I2 Beginning with a concern to provide historical explanations for the situation of women in the 1960s, socialist-feminist history initially focused on the status and consciousness of white middleclass women, implicitly taken to represent the experience of the American woman in general, with some independent attention to working-class women. The political developments of the 1980s, including the vicissitudes of feminism, have, however, gradually prompted socialist-feminist historians to more complex considerations of the...