5 Materialist Feminisms

      Bronwyn Winter

Introduction

      Materialist feminism emerged as a concept early in the so‐called “second‐wave” period in the West. It examined gender as a materially and historically constructed relationship of domination and women as a social group constituted through that relationship. Although it came from a Marxian basis of historical materialism, materialist feminism departed from Marxism in significant ways. At the same time, materialist feminists chose the term “materialist” in preference to “Marxist” because of the failure of Marxist analysis to account for and address the sexual division of labor, and indeed the division of society as a whole into two gendered groups that Simone de Beauvoir (1949), and Christine Delphy after her, had likened to “castes.” (Delphy, other French materialist feminists, as well as Anglo‐world radical feminists, subsequently used the term “class.”)

      Feminists in many contexts outside the Western world also both drew inspiration from Marxism and critiqued it during roughly the same period, but in quite different contexts: notably those of decolonization and postcoloniality and/or emergence from dictatorships (this last also being the case in the West, for example, in Portugal, Spain, and Greece). However, it was in the Anglophone and Francophone West that the term “materialist feminism” was coined and the theories it denoted were developed. This chapter, then, will focus on those specific Western developments – not because feminist activism and theories outside the West (and indeed outside the Anglo world) are not important, but because their political and theoretical foundations are grounded in specific geohistorical contexts and as such present original theoretical elements and nomenclature not found within Western materialist feminisms. These non‐Western feminist theorizations thus merit their own detailed treatments, with attention to the vast diversity of historical, geopolitical, and cultural specificities of context that impacted on how the theories developed.

The first feminist analysis that openly termed itself “materialist” was that of sociologist Christine Delphy in France. Later in the 1970s, the term was popularized across the Channel by, among others, British feminist sociologists Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe, and social and cultural theorist Michèle Barrett (the last of whom famously took issue with Delphy's understanding of “materialist feminism,” as discussed in this chapter). It then crossed the Atlantic to be further investigated by literary and cultural studies scholar Rosemary Hennessy and sociologist Chrys Ingraham. Hennessy and Ingraham reinvigorated the term in the 1990s as a critical response both to the “postmodern avant‐garde” (Hennessy 1993, p. xii) and to intersectional considerations (Crenshaw 1989, 1991, although Hennessy and Ingraham do not use Crenshaw's term). They identified a new direction of materialist feminism that problematized the category “woman,” exploring “how ‘woman’ as a discursive category is historically constructed and traversed by more than one differential axis” (Hennessy 1993, p. xii).

      In a 1997 anthology, titled Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives, Hennessy and Ingraham grouped a number of different, even disparate, feminist texts under the umbrella “materialist feminism,” their commonality being their attachment to historical materialism as a method of analysis, or at least their explicit opposition to capitalism (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997a). The texts had first been published in France, the UK or North America, between 1969 and 1995. In compiling the anthology, Hennessy and Ingraham gave themselves the brief of responding to the challenges posed by women of color and lesbians (in particular) in raising issues of difference among women. At the same time, they wished to address the postmodern fragmentation of feminism, in particular the