Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg,
1910
Socialist and Marxist feminisms
Socialist feminism connects the oppression of women to Marxist ideas about exploitation, oppression
and labor.
Socialist feminists see women as being held down as a result of their unequal standing in both the workplace and the domestic sphere.
Prostitution,
domestic work,
childcare and
marriage
are all seen as ways in which women are exploited by a patriarchal system which devalues women and
the substantial work that they do.
Socialist feminists focus their energies on broad change that affects society as a whole, and not just on an individual basis. They see the need to work alongside not just men, but all other groups, as they see the oppression of women as a part of a larger pattern that affects everyone involved in the capitalist system.
Marx felt that when class oppression was overcome, gender oppression would vanish as well.
According to socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression as a sub-class of class oppression is naive and much of the work of socialist feminists has gone towards separating gender phenomena from class phenomena.
Some contributors to socialist feminism have criticized these traditional Marxist ideas for being largely silent on gender oppression except to subsume it underneath broader class oppression.
Other socialist feminists, notably two long-lived American organizations Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels and August Bebel as a powerful explanation of the link between gender oppression and class exploitation.
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century both Clara Zetkin and Eleanor Marx were against the demonization of men and supported a proletarian revolution that would overcome as many male-female inequalities as possible.
See also: Gender roles in Eastern Europe after Communism