An Introduction to Feminism

In the last chapter, I outlined the three most widely recognised approaches within feminist philosophy: liberal, Marxist and radical feminism. I warned against the reification of these categories, and stated my intention to focus on those places where real disagreements between feminists emerge most clearly and concretely. Among those places, there is no place like the home. Radical, liberal and Marxist feminisms are associated with quite different attitudes to what has traditionally been called the ‘private sphere’, clashing over issues such as the unpaid labour of women in the home, the rearing of children, and the institutions of marriage and the family. Radical feminists have accused Marxist feminists not so much of getting these issues wrong, but of treating them as unimportant – tending to privilege the role and perspective of the (male) waged industrial worker above all else. Some Marxist feminists have sought to remedy this by emphasising the role of unpaid ‘reproductive’ labour (mostly performed by women in the home) in sustaining capitalism and producing wealth. We briefly encountered, in the last chapter, the preferred solution of socialist feminist and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the collectivisation of household labour.

Meanwhile, those usually considered ‘radical feminists’ have produced a wide array of controversial suggestions, some of which will be mentioned in the course of this chapter. Liberal feminists, for their part, while stopping short of calling for the abolition of the family (a demand notoriously characteristic of some radical feminists), have been keen to advocate its reform – breaking with the traditional liberal view of the ‘private sphere’ as a realm of ‘individual choice’ into which politics should not intrude.