Marxist Feminist Research Articles

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

A close colleague eulogized Grace Holmes Carlson (1906–1992) by declaring that “there was nothing run-of-the-mill about” this “fierce woman” (p. 225). In this welcome addition to the recent burst of work on the religious Left, Donna T. Haverty-Stacke meticulously explores how Carlson's Minnesota working-class origins and Catholic schooling first propelled her to a dynamic twelve-year career in the Twin Cities Trotskyist movement and then shaped her abrupt apostasy and return to the church, where she refashioned herself as a Christian Marxist feminist. Grounded in letters, interviews and, unsurprisingly, Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance material, the book illuminates the development of working-class and leftist feminisms between that movement's first and second waves and highlights the importance of personal relationships in sustaining radical commitment and activism. After attending a Catholic college, Carlson earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1933, where she was also exposed to depression-era left-wing...

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Contributors

FEMINISM REFLECTION THROUGH FAMILY COMMUNICATION IN THE MAIN CHARACTER OF LITTLE WOMEN MOVIE

This paper is meant to understand how Jo march, who is the female lead character, is portrayed and how the film reflects feminist values through the character of Jo march. The analysis in this text uses a feminist approach because the purpose of this writing is to find the feminism of the main character and how communication in the family affects all the decisions taken by the main character in this film. This analysis is based on the sources of Little Women movie by Greta Gerwig. The method of analysis used is a qualitative descriptive method. To find the feminism values of the Jo March character, there are three problem formulated in this paper. The first problem is knowing the type of feminism shown by the main character, Jo March. Second, how is the point of view of women shown in the Little Women movie. And last how does communication with family affect the feminism side of the main character.. Analysis showed that: (1) in the film little women, the main character featured two types of feminism, which is liberal feminism and Marxist feminism. (2) The point of view toward women, which women at that time were limited by the thought that they should marry in order to have a good life. (3) Finally, Family has a very important role to build a person's mindset.

Female Economic Exploitation: A Marxist Feminist Analysis of Woolf’s ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’

This study aims to demystify the underneath realities of the social structure in the context of Marxist feminism. Although the world has gone modern, and one observes the modernization in almost every field of life yet when we observe through our experiential actualities around the existing world, we realize that women have always been a victim of capital under the control of men. Ehrenreich (1976) relates that we find Marxist feminism as a kind of theory that emerges as a reunion of Marxism and Feminism. These two theories Marxism and Feminism particularly focus on all the possible forms and types of structured and well-planned inequalities which lead one to the episodic happening of ordeals of disadvantaged and disempowered individuals. In this research, the writer has tried to unravel woman’s exploitation through class stratification; social and emotional oppression using Marxist feminism as a literary vista. This research takes Woolf’s short story ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’ in the context of Engel’s book (1902). The study of the selected short story concludes that Marxist feminism states that capitalism is the only reason for the woman’s oppression and subjugation and second-class status in society which can only be possible by bringing change in social structure.

Palpating history: Magical healing and revolutionary care in Rural Serbia and Macedonia

Marxist feminist Silvia Federici has identified the figure of the witch as exemplifying a non-capitalist worldview. While Federici’s analysis has significantly nuanced understandings of primitive accumulation, its significance for traditions of magical healing remains to be studied. While Federici focuses on the violent campaign against witchcraft in Western Europe, she does not deal with those people who still practice ways of healing glossed as ‘witchcraft’ or ‘magic’ in the present, which have been largely subsumed by the academic discipline of folklore. As the Ottoman Empire was exempt from the early-modern witch craze, the ongoing practices of magical healing found in Serbia and Macedonia provide a particularly rich site for such an investigation. Grounded in ethnographic research on incantation-based healing practices in the Balkan region, this article reveals the contemporary significance of vernacular healing practices in cultivating a relational view of the body. While folklorists have anticipated the death of these practices since the 19th century, the continuation of these practices in the Balkan region tells us that these premonitions of cultural death did not come to fruition. By revealing the false distinction between the social body, the physical body and the mind, healers recognize the body as not only a sack of organs, but as a historical subject embedded in a specific set of material relations. Health is constituted not only by the absence of disease, but by intersubjective relations with the natural world and an ongoing obligation to act ethically toward the dead, toward one’s neighbors and toward future generations. Refusing to accept a vision of time and history that regards incantations as archaic, the dead as foreign and the village as the site of the past, the healing practices discussed in this article provide a fertile agenda for revolutionary planning.

The Representation of Women in Bertolt Brecht’s Play

This study aims to describe the portrayal of women in Bertolt Brecht's dramas. In his plays, Brecht's women descriptions are different from the typical characteristics of his time. By looking at the way he portrayed the female characters, Bertolt Brecht's purpose can be identified. The data sources of this study are three Bertolt Brecht’s dramas, namely Die Dreigroschenoper, Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder, and Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan. Marxist feminist literary theory is used to analyze the data. The results show that the women in Brecht's drama are described as strong and independent women. Polly Peachum and Mrs. Peachum in Die Dreigroschenoper are independent women who work to help her husband in managing the business. Mutter Courage in Mutter Courage und Ihre Kind shows an independent woman who draws some money on the battlefield. Shen Te in Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan is a beautiful woman who was chosen by God as a good person and tries hard to open a business. From the portrayal of these women, it is comprehended that the women figures created by Brecht have different characters. They are eager to act and fight against the injustice against women and the classism factor. Despite their social class and gender being weak, they can rise and show their existence to prevent themselves from oppression. Brecht’s Marxist ideology preceded the portrayal of the female characters in his dramas.

Book Review: Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

Book Review: Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

FEMINISME MARXIS DALAM NOVEL TEMPURUNG KARYA OKA RUSMINI

This study aims to describe Marxist feminism in Tempurung novels by Oka Rusmini. Marxist feminism is a problem related to social classes in the family and society. Marxist feminism is important to study, because in family life and in people's lives there are so many problems related to social classes especially those that occur in women. This research is a qualitative research with descriptive method. the data from this study are in the form of sentences that contain quotations containing Marxist feminism. The data source of this research is the Tempurung novel by Oka Rusmini. The technique used in collecting data is documentation techniques, because it collects data from written information in the form of Tempurung novels by Oka Rusmini. The results of this study of Marxist feminism show that in family life and in society there are still differences in social classes, especially in women. In this case women experience various kinds of problems, such as: women's position based on socio-economic and women's position based on social class in society. The position of women based on socio-economic conditions includes economic exploitation of employment and economic exploitation of marriage. Whereas the position of women based on social class in society includes class differences in family and class differences in society.

Materialism, autonomy, intersectionality: revisiting Virginia Woolf through the Wages for Housework perspective

Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay Three Guineas contends that the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their political opinions. Woolf proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose they should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy, and through which women are doubly exploited as unwaged or under-waged workers. And third, women must remain outside male-dominated movements and must organise an autonomous group even if they share the same cause with male workers; intersectional association will be possible only when each exploited group empowers itself and regains its own voice. This article examines how this highly materialist aspect of Woolf's feminism was revisited by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. By so doing, it argues that despite its facade of literary modernism and alleged elitism, Woolf's text contributes to real-life movements and continues to inspire people of different class backgrounds in different times. Discovering the connection between Woolf and Marxist feminism alters our way of seeing the history of feminist theory: the history is never a linear progress from one wave to another but a complex and interwoven narrative, in which once-forgotten ideas can travel across time and space, resurging as new ideas in different contexts.

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON REVERSAL OF GENDER ROLES IN A COLONIAL AND A POST COLONIAL AFRICAN NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE STUDY ANGELA KIMARU

This study sought to critically analyze reversal of gender roles in Gods Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane and Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The study revolved around the following objectives: To examine the roles assigned to women in liberating their men from bondage of colonialism and neocolonialism in the two selected texts, to examine how the authors of the two selected texts embrace African woman’s spirit of welcoming change, to assess the challenges faced by women in liberating their men from the bondage of colonialism and neocolonialism in the two selected texts. The two selected novels portray reversal of gender roles where by the authors strongly believe in women’s natural abilities and qualities, they define roles of female characters in a male dominated society. In the two selected texts, men are exploited by colonial and neocolonial masters hence they are not in a position to fully provide for their families. Women therefore take up the men’s roles in the process they struggle to earn a living and safeguard the interests of their families and in the process they suffer indirect exploitation. This study therefore explored the possibilities of the healing powers of female bonding; it aimed at recommending and educating the society on the need to include women, because the society can develop better if women are given the rightful place in a male dominated society. This study was guided by feminism theory and Marxist feminism. The methodology was anchored by descriptive design. It was conducted using qualitative research approach and content analysis as a method of qualitative analysis that enabled analyse the selected collected data.

Neoliberal Capitalism, Older Adult Care and Feminist Theory

Classic feminist social theory highlights the exploitation of women’s labor in capitalist societies traditionally through an examination of how housework and childcare is perceived and organized, excluding an explicit analysis of older adult care work. In light of the surge in the demand for older adult caregiving over the last several decades, this paper uses older adult care work as a new lens to understand how gender, and its intersections with other critical identities such as race, ethnicity, and nativity, are a basis for continued exploitation and marginalization in modern capitalist systems. Building on Marxist feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s work on social value and domination, I argue that women’s care labor, both paid and unpaid, is an instrument of capital accumulation that differentially exploits women based on key intersectional identities. An examination of the system of older adult care work in the United States allows us to see the multilayered and complex system of exploitation that creates and institutionalizes existing social hierarchies as capitalism seeks to expand. The paper ends with a discussion of two potential family care paths America could conceivably pursue in the coming years; one toward increased commodification of care work in line with neoliberal capitalism, and the other toward more comprehensive social welfare policies that alleviate women’s reproductive labor burden and begin to break down gendered and racialized hierarchies.

Class Inequalities: A Marxist Study of Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Story of Noble Rot

This study aims to analyze the aspect of Class inequalities in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel The Story of Noble Rot from Marxist perspectives. This study also highlights how the factors of Class inequalities become the cause of class conflict and give rise to the issue of false class consciousness. False class consciousness refers to the frame of mind that wards off a person from perceiving the maltreatment of their situation. According to Marxist theory, the society is divided into two different classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Labor is a commodity in a capitalist society, and it is taken as something bought and sold in the economic market. The bourgeoisie exploit the proletariat by using their labor power and such manipulation of the masses gives rise to class conflict. The proletariats are deceived into thinking that everything is fine and the alarming situations in which they live and work are inevitable. This self-deception is known as false class consciousness, which leads to a sense of alienation. The masses suffer from false class consciousness and fail to realize their common interest against their exploiters. Such Inequalities also bring to light the perspective of Marxist feminism, which highlights the exploitation of women by the bourgeoisie in a capitalist society.

You are What You Own: A Transitivity Analysis of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

The present study attempts to analyze the processes of transitivity in the text In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009) by Daniyal Mueenuddin. The two short stories namely In Other Room, Other Wonders and About a Burning Girl have been selected from the collection of eight stories. In developing countries, a growing disparity can be observed in socio-economic classes. This elucubration tends to interpret literature by using a framework of linguistics to describe the various facets of character’s life. A total of 109 clauses have been extracted from the texts to demarcate Marxist themes such as class difference, corruption, commodification and Marxist feminism. The transitivity analysis of fictional expedition shows that the material process is 37.6%, mental process is 26.6%, verbal process is 12.8%, behavior process is 11%, relational process is 8.25% and existential process is 4.58%. The study can lend a helping hand to the ones intending to describe literature by applying theories of linguistics and play their part in contributing to the repertoire of applied linguistics.

Feminism for the 99% or Solidarity in the House of Difference? Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Theory

Intersectionality is often understood to exist primarily as a corrective to other emancipatory theories rather than as a theory in its own right. Social reproduction theory (SRT), a strain of Marxist feminism exemplified in this article by contributors to the volume Social Reproduction Theory – Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression published in 2017, is characterized by a self-understanding that involves incorporating intersectional insights as a reaction to Black feminist interventions. In this narrative, intersectionality itself becomes obsolete, serving first and foremost as a step on SRT’s dialectical journey to becoming a better theory. Allegedly undertheorized intersectional frameworks constitute an ever-present foil for SRT’s self-image as an emancipatory theory of the capitalist social whole. This narrative is problematized on multiple levels in this article. SRT and its depiction of intersectionality are summarized in the first part of the paper. The second part demonstrates, on the one hand, that a historicization of intersectionality as ‘intervening’ into Marxist feminist theories, adding an intersectional perspective to feminist analysis of capitalism, ignores the formative role of analyses of Black women’s position as working subjects within overarching capitalist structures in intersectional thought. On the other hand, SRT's narrative occludes practical and theoretical implications of a framework that explicitly theorizes resistance from the margins. Building on this critique of SRT’s understanding of intersectionality, the third part develops an intersectional notion of solidarity, thus showing that the ostensibly seamless integration of intersectional insights into SRT obfuscates a potentially fruitful tension between the two frameworks pertaining to their respective understandings of solidarity and social transformation.

Back to Basics with Labor-Power

Ted Striphas recently called for a return to the “problem of culture” within cultural studies. This is a political as much as a methodological provocation: “culture” became an object of analysis among mid-twentieth century scholars in dialogue with Marxist accounts of ongoing political crises. Taking a cue from this past, this essay rethinks culture in relation to the ongoing crisis in social reproduction via Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). Within some Marxist feminist currents, “social reproduction” refers to the reproduction of labor-power, Marx’s term for the capacity to work sold on the market in exchange for wages. Marxist feminists have theorized such matters at length via their analyses of the practices undergirding the reproduction of labor-power. SRT is not unfamiliar to cultural studies scholars, but those engaged with it tend to explore the representation of socially reproductive practices within culture rather than the ways culture itself contributes to labor-power’s reproduction. This is unsurprising. Historically, the field has discussed labor-power in terms of its circulation rather than its reproduction, detailing culture’s role in reproducing social systems. Drawing upon Michael Denning’s “labor theory of culture,” recent work in SRT, and Marx, I argue that culture functions in a socially reproductive capacity within the logic of capitalism. In doing so, it casts cultural struggle as a form of social reproduction struggle at the intersection of labor-power’s reproduction and that of the society that requires it. This essay constructs a systematic account of culture’s socially reproductive before using it to consider its historical expression in the current moment.

Labour in Wonder Woman: A Marxist Feminist Reading

An Amazonian Goddess who was raised a warrior set in World War I, screams the impact of Marxism. Wonder Women (2017), produced by DC, has a nominal heroine who seems like an icon of Feminism but is instead the opposite in close observation. Though the character seems vigorously empowered, she is reduced to a commodity in the clutches of capitalism. Wonder Woman’s labour was tried to fit into the domestic sphere. This paper would explore the film from the focal lenses of Marxist Feminism. The investigative questions revolve around ‘cheap labour,’ ‘reserve labour,’ and ‘reproduction.’ Also, the marginalized status of other proletariats is examined. How the character becomes a target of capitalism by pushing her into the domestic sphere and objectification is the paper’s primary concern. The paper would use a qualitative approach to achieve the desired result. The analysis will be a subjective judgment based on the film text. The characters’ cognitive behavior and the surrounding are a central element that will be explored through the narrative analysis. The research methodology will employ conceptualization and qualitative design and methodology.

Red Rag Magazine, Feminist Economics and the Domestic Labour Pains of Liberation

This article examines the domestic labour debate of the 1970s as it was mediated in the Marxist feminist magazine, Red Rag (1972–80). Red Rag’s visual representations of housework wittily demystified the bonds of ‘love’ that bound women to the everyday routines of domestic labour while its theoretical discussions offered alternative feminist perspectives to the New Home Economics, a neo-classical economic approach to the household as well as to Marxist economics that occluded women’s labour in its emphasis on production. Within the pages of the magazine, an emerging feminist economics developed that challenged the gendered production boundaries reinforcing the division of labour, graphically depicted intra-household conflict and exposed the ideological assumptions that rendered caring labour invisible. It was not only in terms of theory, however, that Red Rag contributed to these debates but also in terms of its collective practice. The process of making the magazine became the subject of editorials reflecting on how feminists worked together. Red Rag’s analysis of its own production processes illuminated the internal tensions within the collective but also pointed to some of the ‘contradictions’ within the WLM, contradictions that were bound up with the cultural capital attached to economic theory and the authority this conferred on the Red Rag collective.

Gender Issues in Freeman’s The Revolt of Mother

This paper analyses the gender role in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's (1890) one of the most popular short stories, The Revolt of Mother through a Marxist feminist perspective. The story depicts the gender disparity created by the patriarchal American society of the nineteenth century and the revolt of a female character, Sarah as the indication of the women's movement of 1848. The analysis of the story reveals how females are dominated and oppressed by the males in the family and also in society concerning decision-making affairs. Furthermore, it shows that if male domination and suppression continue without understanding females’ desires and fulfilling the promises made for them, they can be turned into rebellions and the traditional gender dichotomy can be broken down in a while as the protagonist appears in the story. This article also relates gender discrimination and proposes possible ways to maintain the equality and harmony between males and females concerning Nepali society.

Mothering and the Racialised Production of School and Property Value in New York City

AbstractThis article explores middle‐class mothers’ labours associated with relocating for a “good school” in NYC as they navigated the material and ideological structures of scarcity related to its highly unequal school system. Based on ethnographic research with a diverse group of women in a middle‐class area, I document the multiple ongoing labours associated with this “choice”, and trace how the neoliberal education complex (that includes testing and real estate industries, and school rating websites) compels women to perform them. Through the lenses of Marxist feminism and racial capitalism, I demonstrate how these labours produce school and property value that reinscribe race onto space. While middle‐class women are disciplined and their labours coerced, their labours are routed to dispossess working‐class communities of colour, and reproduce the racial hierarchy of human‐ness on which capital depends. This article underscores the role of gender and race‐making in middle‐class reproduction, and their linkage to elite accumulation and working‐class dispossession.

Prim ‘A’ Geniture: Gender Bias and Daughter Successors of Entrepreneurial Family Businesses

Entrepreneurs establishing businesses from research and innovation eventually must consider the succession of their firms. Often the enterprise is passed to a family member to continue the vision and legacy of the entrepreneurial founder. While typically the norm of primogeniture dictates that the eldest son is the recipient, today, with changing societal attitudes toward women’s leadership, daughters often find themselves as the firm leader. While some daughters report advantages, others experience significant gender bias in the successor-leader role. Using a critical realist methodology, this exploratory study used interviews from three daughters who were either the successor-leader or were in the process of becoming the successor-leader of a business founded by their father to identify mechanisms within the family, the family business and societal social structures that caused them to experience gender bias. Marxist feminist notions of patriarchy and its roots within the family structure were applied as an a priori theory to identify potential mechanisms that cause gender bias. While this ‘triple patriarchy’ was expected to explain the cause of gender bias, the data suggest that when daughter successors receive validation by their father, any mechanisms that may have caused gender bias are counteracted by others that enable a daughter to be accepted as the successor-leader.