Feminist Theories on Class and Gender: From Radical to Materialist Feminism

Feminist theory has never been a single, unified school of thought. Different feminists have asked different questions about why women face inequality and how it should be challenged. Some looked at men’s power over women in homes and bedrooms. Others looked at factories, wages, and capitalism. Out of these debates emerged three influential strands that continue to shape gender studies today: radical feminism, materialist and Marxist feminism, and dual-system theory. Each offers a distinct lens on how class and gender intersect, and each has reshaped how we understand oppression itself.

Why class and gender are studied together 🔗

The connection between class and gender is not obvious at first glance. Class usually refers to economic position, while gender refers to social roles attached to being a woman or a man. But feminist thinkers in the late 1960s and 1970s noticed that the two often work in tandem. Women’s unpaid housework subsidises the economy. Working-class women face exploitation both as workers and as wives. Upper-class women may have wealth but still face male control over decisions, mobility, and sexuality. To understand this layered reality, feminists began borrowing tools from Marxism, sociology, and political philosophy, while also creating new concepts of their own.

Radical feminism: patriarchy as the root system 🔗

Radical feminism took shape in the late 1960s as part of the second wave of the women’s movement. Its central argument was bold: the oppression of women is not a side effect of capitalism, racism, or any other system. It is its own foundational system, called patriarchy. For radical feminists, dismantling patriarchy was the primary political task.

Kate Millett and the politics of sex 🔗

The thinker most associated with this position is Kate Millett, whose 1970 book Sexual Politics became a manifesto of second-wave feminism. Millett argued that the relationship between men and women is itself political, structured by power, not nature. She presented patriarchy as a result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities, and treated it as the most pervasive ideology in culture.

Millett’s contribution was to widen the definition of politics. Earlier feminists focused on suffrage, employment, and legal equality, all matters of the public sphere. Millett insisted that domestic violence, marital rape, and sexual coercion were not private misfortunes but political problems maintained by a patriarchal system. The slogan “the personal is political” found its most rigorous defence in her work.

She also examined how institutions like the nuclear family, monogamous marriage, religion, and literature reinforce male supremacy. For Millett, the family was not merely a private space but an arm of the patriarchal state, training individuals to accept hierarchical gender roles from childhood. She argued that social institutions such as monogamous marriage and the nuclear family buttressed male supremacy, and called for nothing less than a reorganisation of society to undo it.

Challenging male dominance across spheres 🔗

Radical feminists did not limit their critique to the home. They examined how male dominance operates in politics (through who holds office), in economic life (through unequal pay and the gendered division of labour), in culture (through media that objectifies women), and in sexuality (through pornography, prostitution, and sexual violence). In every sphere, the radical feminist argued, the same logic appeared: men as a group benefit from women’s subordination.

This generalising claim is also where critics push back. Radical feminism has been challenged for treating “women” and “men” as uniform categories, often overlooking how caste, class, race, religion, and sexuality cut across gender. Indian feminist scholarship in particular has pressed this point, noting that a Dalit woman’s experience of patriarchy is shaped by caste hierarchies that upper-caste women do not share. Still, radical feminism remains influential because it named something earlier movements had downplayed: the political nature of intimate life.

Materialist and Marxist feminism: oppression rooted in production 🔗

While radical feminists looked at male power directly, another set of thinkers looked at economic structures. Marxist and materialist feminists argued that women’s oppression cannot be separated from the way societies organise production, property, and labour. For them, patriarchy is not a free-floating system but is anchored in concrete material relations, especially the work women do in households.

Christine Delphy and the domestic mode of production 🔗

French sociologist Christine Delphy is one of the founders of materialist feminism. She co-founded the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) in 1970 and the journal Nouvelles questions féministes with Simone de Beauvoir in 1981. Delphy’s central insight was to apply Marxist tools, but in a way orthodox Marxists had refused to do: she turned them on the family itself.

Delphy proposed that two modes of production operate side by side in modern societies. One is the industrial mode, which allows capitalist exploitation through wage labour. The other is the domestic mode of production, in which men, as husbands, appropriate the unpaid labour of women, as wives. She argued that the domestic mode of production is the material basis of gender oppression, and that marriage is a labour contract that gives men the right to exploit women.

From this followed a striking conclusion. If gender is shaped by a person’s position in the relations of production, then gender itself is a class relation. For Karl Marx, class was a position in the mode of production. For Delphy, gender is also a position in the mode of production through domestic labour, and the main enemy of women as a class is not capital but patriarchy. This reframing is radical: it means a homemaker is not outside the economy but at the heart of an exploitative system.

The argument resonates strongly with contemporary debates about unpaid care work. Time-use surveys consistently show that women perform a disproportionate share of cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elder care, work that is essential to the economy but invisible in GDP. Delphy’s framework gives a name to this invisibility and connects it to a structural relationship rather than personal choice.

Shulamith Firestone and ‘sex as class’ 🔗

The American thinker Shulamith Firestone took the analysis in a different direction in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex. Firestone’s opening line became famous: “Sex class is so deep as to be invisible.” She borrowed Marx and Engels’s framework of historical materialism but argued they had missed something fundamental. Beneath economic class lay an even older division: the biological division between those who can become pregnant and those who cannot.

Firestone argued that historical materialism should be expanded to include the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another. Pregnancy, childbirth, and the long dependency of human infants, she claimed, placed women in a position of vulnerability that men exploited to establish dominance. From this primary division flowed the family, private property, and eventually capitalism itself.

Firestone’s solution was equally provocative. She believed that if biological reproduction was the root of oppression, then technology that freed women from pregnancy and childcare, including artificial reproduction and collective childrearing, could free them from “sex class” altogether. Her vision was utopian and has been criticised for its biological determinism, but it pushed feminist theory to take reproduction seriously as a political question.

Where Marxist feminism differs 🔗

Classical Marxist feminism, drawing more directly on Marx and Engels, often locates women’s oppression in the emergence of private property and the bourgeois family. In this view, women became economically dependent when their domestic labour stopped producing exchangeable goods and was confined to the private sphere. Liberating women required abolishing capitalism, which would dissolve the conditions that produced their dependence.

Materialist feminists like Delphy were unsatisfied with this. They argued that simply ending capitalism would not automatically end men’s appropriation of women’s labour at home. Patriarchy needed its own analysis and its own struggle. This disagreement set the stage for the next major development.

Dual-system theory: the unhappy marriage 🔗

By the late 1970s, many feminists felt that neither radical feminism nor Marxist feminism alone could explain the full picture. Radical feminism risked ignoring economics; Marxist feminism risked ignoring sexuality, the body, and the household. Dual-system theory emerged as an attempt to bring the two together.

Heidi Hartmann and the partnership of patriarchy and capitalism 🔗

The most influential statement of dual-system theory came from American economist Heidi Hartmann in her 1979 essay “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism.” Hartmann argued that while both Marxist method and feminist analysis are necessary to understand capitalist societies and the position of women within them, feminism has consistently been subordinated, and that what must be analysed is the combination of patriarchy and capitalism.

Marxism, Hartmann said, could explain how capitalism produced jobs, wages, and class hierarchies, but its categories were “sex-blind.” They could describe the structure of production but not why women, rather than men, ended up doing certain kinds of work. Patriarchy, treated as a distinct system of relations between men, was needed to fill that gap.

A symbiotic relationship 🔗

The strength of dual-system theory lay in showing how capitalism and patriarchy reinforce each other rather than simply coexist. Capitalism benefits from patriarchy because unpaid domestic labour reproduces the workforce at no cost to employers. Patriarchy benefits from capitalism because the wage system, the gendered division of labour, and the “family wage” model historically gave men economic power over women within the household.

This symbiotic relationship explains many puzzles. Why do women earn less even when they have equal qualifications? Why is care work undervalued? Why does the burden of domestic work fall on women even in dual-earner households? Dual-system theory answers that two systems are at work simultaneously, each propping the other up. It also acknowledges that the analytical separation of class and oppression, or capitalism and patriarchy, was widely taken up, even though some critics found it idealist or theoretically unstable.

Critiques and later developments 🔗

Dual-system theory has its critics. Some, like Iris Marion Young, argued that treating capitalism and patriarchy as separate systems risks losing sight of how thoroughly they have fused in modern societies. They pushed for a “unitary” theory in which gender oppression is understood as built into capitalism itself. Others noted that dual-system frameworks still tend to treat “patriarchy” as universal, glossing over how caste, race, and colonial histories produce very different gender regimes.

Even with these critiques, dual-system theory remains a useful entry point. It captures something most observers can recognise: women’s lives are shaped both by the household and by the labour market, and neither can be understood without the other.

Why these debates still matter 🔗

The questions raised by radical, materialist, and dual-system feminists are far from settled. Debates about maternity leave, the recognition of housework in national accounts, sexual harassment laws, reproductive rights, and the gender pay gap all draw on the conceptual tools developed in this period. When activists argue that unpaid domestic work should be counted as labour, they are speaking the language of materialist feminism. When campaigns insist that workplace harassment is political, not personal, they are echoing Millett. When economists analyse how women’s labour subsidises both employers and male family members, they are working in the dual-systems tradition.

Together, these schools also remind us that there is no single feminist answer to the question of class and gender. There are competing analyses, each with strengths and gaps, and a thoughtful reader benefits from understanding all three rather than picking one.

What do you think? Does it make more sense to treat patriarchy and capitalism as two separate systems that prop each other up, or as one tightly fused structure? And in your own observations of family and work life, whose framework explains what you see best: Millett’s, Delphy’s, Firestone’s, or Hartmann’s?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Politics
2. https://sociology.institute/introduction-to-sociology/radical-feminism-critique-patriarchy-gender-roles/
3. https://newrepublic.com/article/144740/courageous-radicalism-kate-millett
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Delphy
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialist_feminism
6. https://reference.org/facts/Christine_Delphy/5dAsPwvp
7. https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981687900800102
9. https://www.counterfire.org/article/marxism-and-the-oppression-of-women-towards-a-unitary-theory/