Sunday, February 28, 2010

Marxist Feminism?

In a film class the other day we watched a clip from movie called Real Women Have Curves that featured a group of women working in a sweetshop making dresses for some retailer that would sell for many times over what they were being paid. This got me thinking of Marx in terms of feminism, as the class is about Chick Flicks and we often discuss feminism, so I looked into Marxist Feminism. The base ideas of Marxist Feminism is that private property leads to oppression of women and that gender inequity stems from a capitalist system. It argues that women are subordinated, in a manner similar to class oppression, as a way to support the interests of bourgeoisie. I find this combination of philosophies interesting as several female Marxists such as Clara Zetkin argued that Feminism was a bourgeois movement and that women should be liberated by a social revolution. In Zetkin’s “On a Bourgeois Feminist Petition” she states that “the women’s question can only be understood, and demands raised, in connection with the social question as a whole” proposing that proletariat women should ignore feminist petitions that are put out by bourgeois women’s groups. She argues that such a petition would be criticized by the Social-Democratic press if it had been issued by bourgeois democrat, stating “Why should our principled standpoint with respect to the politics of the bourgeois world change because by chance an example of these politics comes from women and demands not a reform on behalf of the so-called social aggregate but rather one on behalf of the female sex?” Zetkin’s argument seems to make claims that Feminism is not in line with Marx’s philosophy and makes me think that those who claim to be Marxist Feminist have, perhaps, misinterpreted Marx’s ideas. I feel a Marxist would argue that after social revolution there would be no classes and that would include gender classes and as such female liberation is inherent in Marx’s philosophy.

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