Materialist Feminism A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives

Materialist Feminism: A Reader In Class, Difference, And Women's Lives speaks out against the retreat to identity politics.

During the 1980s, capitalism triumphantly secured its global reach, anti-communist ideologies hammered home socialism's inherent failure, the New Left increasingly moved into the professional middle class--and many of feminism's earlier priorities were marginalized. "Identity politics", often formulated in terms of social reconstructionism or multiculturalism, has increasingly suppressed materialist feminism's systematic perspective, replacing it with discourse analysis or cultural politics. Materialist Feminism: A Reader argues against the retreat to multiculturalism for keeping invisible the material links among the explosion of meaning-making practices in highly industrialized social sectors, the exploitation of women's labor, and the appropriation of women's bodies that continues to undergird the scramble for profits and state power in multinational capitalism.

Introduction: Materialist (Marxist) Feminism: Reclaiming Anti-Capitalist Feminism -- Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham ARCHIVE I: WOMEN UNDER CAPITALISM: THEORIZING PATRIARCHY, LABOR, MEANING
1. Margaret Benston -- The Political Economy of Women's Liberation (1969)
2. Mary Alice Waters -- The Politics of Women's Liberation Today (1970)
3. Selma James -- Introduction for The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972)
4. Mariarosa Dalla Costaand and Selma James -- Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972)
5. Charlotte Bunch -- Not for Lesbians Only (1975)
6. Christine Delphy-- For a Materialist Feminism (1975)
7. Barbara Ehrenreich-- What is Socialist Feminism? (1976)
8. Martha Gimenez-- The Oppression of Women: A Structuralist Marxist View (1978)
9. Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe-- Feminism and Materialism (1978)
10. Michele Barrett-- Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender (1980)
11. Iris Marion Young-- Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory (1980)
12. Gloria Joseph-- The Incompatible Menage a Trois: Marxism, Feminism and Racism (1981)
13. Hazel V. Carby-- White Woman Listen!: Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood (1982)
14. Frigga Haug-- The Hoechst Chemical Company and Boredom with the Economy (1982)
15. Lise Vogel-- From the Woman Question to Women's Liberation (1983)
16. Lindsey German-- Theories of the Family (1989)
ARCHIVE II: THINKING DIFFERENCE GLOBALLY: RACE, CLASS, SEXUALITY
17. Swasti Mitter-- Women Working World-Wide (1986)
18. Marie Mies-- Colonization and Housewifization (1987)
19. Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan
-- The Construction of Woman in...Popular Texts of Empire (1989)
20. Nellie Wong-- Socialist Feminism: Our Bridge to Freedom (1991)
21. Norma Chinchilla-- Marxism, Feminism, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America (1991)
22. Leslie Feinberg-- Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992)
23. Rose Brewer-- Theorizing Race, Class, and Gender (1993)
24. Barbara Smith-- Where's the Revolution (1993)
25. Lillian S. Robinson-- Touring Thailand's Sex Industry (1994)
26. Nicola Field-- Identity and the Lifestyle Market (1995)
ARCHIVE III: ONGOING WORK
27. Chrys Ingraham-- The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender (1994)
28. Victoria Tillotson-- A Materialist Feminist Reading of the Figure of Jeanne Duval
29. Cynthia Comaccio-- Motherhood in Crisis: Women, Medicine, and State in Canada
30. Kathryn Russell-- A Value-Theoretic Approach to Childbirth and Reproductive Engineering (1994)
31. Gwyn Kirk-- Standing on Solid Ground: Toward a Materialist Ecological Feminism
32. Meera Nanda-- History is What Hurts: Historicizing Postcolonial Ecofeminism Critique of the Green Revolution
33. Carol Stabile-- Feminism and the Ends of Postmodernism

Rosemary Hennessy is Assistant Professor of english at SUNY, Albany. Chrys Ingraham teaches in the Department of Sociology at Russell Sage College.