Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter

By Michele Barrett and Kathi Weeks

Women’s Oppression Today is a classic text in the debate about Marxism and feminism, exploring how gender, sexuality and the “family-household system” operate in relation to contemporary capitalism. In this updated edition, Michèle Barrett surveys the social and intellectual changes that have taken place since the book's original publication, and looks back at the political climate in which the book was written. In a major new essay, she defends the central arguments of the book, at the same time addressing the way such an engagement would play out differently today, over thirty years later.

A foreword by Kathi Weeks examines the importance of approaching all feminist theories as events whose repercussions stretch beyond the circumstances of their creation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781682234

Michele Barrett

Mich�le Barrett is Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author, among other works, of Women's Oppression Today, The Anti-Social Family, and Politics of Diversity (co-authored with Roberta Hamilton).

Reviews for Women's Oppression Today

[csaavedra_894108 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

That women are oppressed inside capitalism is not something that this book wastes time with. It is a given, and if you are more interested in learning about the ways in which women are oppressed, you'd be better consulting a different work. This is a book that, instead, deals with the intersectionality between class oppression and women's oppression and tries to reconcile Marxist theory on the former with radical feminism (as understood in the '70s) on the later. As such, this book requires familiarity with the works of Marx and Engels and later thinkers like Althusser, Lacan, and even Freud. Coming to it without understanding what concepts like ideology, discourse, functionalism, social reproduction, etc. can make it pretty difficult to grasp (and it was to me).

Some of the central ideas of the book are the relationship between the Marxist concept of base and superstructure and how it relates to the oppression of women: according to Marxism, women's oppression today must be the result of the relations of production in capitalism and must also be beneficial to the capitalist class. This falls short, according to Barrett and some authors she brings up, as both pre-capitalist societies already had some of the oppressive forms present in capitalism and socialist states in their way to communism have done little to overcome the oppression of women. Also, women in the capitalist class can also be the victims of oppression. She argues that there must be something that transcends the economic relations of capitalism that allows this oppression to still be present.

On this regard, Barrett devotes considerable effort analyzing the role of the family in producing and reproducing oppression towards women. She argues that both Marx and Engels fall short in their understanding of the family (while recognizing that Engels' "The private property, the family, and the state" has important merits) and that this might explain in part how Marxist theory even makes the mistake to mystify the family instead of analyzing its contradictions (something that I think it is better understood now than it was in the 70's. -- I recall at least Harvey's historical account of how the bourgeois family form was passed on to the working class as part of an ideological battle for the convenience of the former, but I am not sure in which book that was.) She studies the ideological concept of the family, how the state (through its education, legal, and social apparatuses) makes sure to reproduce it further, and how the ideological family and the real family (both in bourgeois and working classes) differ from each other and how much of the oppression (and not only of women) is a consequence in these deviations.

Another aspect of the book is the criticism of the concept of patriarchy and of the (dated) idea of radical feminism that women's oppression exists for the benefit of men, and how this idea neglects the historicism of this oppression. There are lengthy accounts on ways in which the term patriarchy can even be detrimental to the cause of feminism, and the need for an approach of feminism to Marxist methods (historical materialism, perhaps importantly) on the study of this oppression. She presents several attempts to reconcile Marxist theory with radical feminism but, in her view, most of them have been insufficient one way or another and further work in the area is of utmost necessity.

There's a lot in this book, and I feel that my review fails short to mention all of the insight present in it. It is also hard to come out of it with any clear conclusions -- if anything, I get the feeling that the role of the family, as ideologically defended and reproduced by the state through its different agencies, is nothing but crucial to understand what shapes the currently oppressive society towards women. Taking into account that the state, in its current form, serves to protect capitalist interests above all, it is hard to think of any real emancipation of women within capitalism. However, it is clear that just overcoming capitalism will not suffice to completely eradicate women's oppression -- the ideological formations that would survive capitalism, like the family, need also to be completely transformed, and that's yet another difficult challenge.

From the preface and the afterword (both written recently), it is clear that the book has aged considerably and that a lot of ground has been covered in the last 35 years. However it's still worth a read, and its bibliography and references make it worth it as a starting point in the study of marxist-feminism.