MARXIST FEMINIST VIEW

Question 1

What do they argue?

Answer 1

• Marxist feminism suggests that gender inequality arises primarily from the nature of capitalist society, not from an independent system of partiarchy. IT is working class women who suffer the worst consequences of this.
• Capitalism intensifies the partiarchal inequalities in pursuit of its own interests in the following ways:
  1. In the family women are used as free labour in the form unpaid domestic labour and childcare.

2. Women and children act as a brake on revolutionary ideas = men cannot afford to strike to improve their working conditions because their families would starve while the strike lasted.
3. When men come home from work stressed out and angry, their wives and children calm them down, give them a reason for continuing to work and send them back the next morning, ready for another day’s labour
4. Women are used as a cheap labour force, and as a reserve army of labour, which can be called away from the home when circumstances demand.
   - Equality of women with men will only come about through revolutionary change which challenges both capitalism and society.

Question 2

Criticisms of marxist feminism?

Answer 2

• It doesn’t explain the fact that patriarchy has existed in all known societies.
• It is men, not just capitalism, who benefit from women’s subordination
• By emphasising the class differences between women, it deflects attention away those problems shared by all women

Question 3

WEAKNESSES?

Answer 3

• Radical feminists are critical of the emphasis on capitalist explotiation - they argue that patriarchy is a more significant form of explotitation that predates capitalism
• Liberal feminists have questioned the usefulness and practicality of marxist feminism as it relies on a revolution to bring about change and that does not seem to be happening in the UK
• furthermore, liberal feminists would argue that the experience of women has not been particularly happy in those countries that have tried to implement communism

Question 4

STRENGTHS?

Answer 4

1. It highlghts the ways in which economic inequality and exploitation are important features of gender inequality i.e capitalism and patriarchy are interdependent
2. Modern day research into the gender pay gap supports the notion that capitalism may be connected to womens subordination
3. It provides a convincing explanation for the anxieties around the body experienced by many women by linking this to the profitable industries that rely on the worries and concerns that individual women feel about their appearance, health etc.