Socialist Feminism: Sex and Gender in Theory and Practice

Decades before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, socialist feminists across Europe were asking questions: How ought the unpaid labor of women be accounted for in a future socialist or communist society? Is women’s liberation from patriarchal control a necessary precursor to socialist revolution—or an outcome of it? Should socialists, men and women alike, support abortion, birth control, and family planning? Before and after the pivotal year of 1848, women were often at the center of theoretical debates about unionization, gender equality, and collectivization—as well as key participants in early practical socialist experimentation. They carved out a vital space within class-based political organizing for the elaboration of women’s rights, put questions of social reproduction front and center, and were by no means of a single stripe when it came to both theory and its practical implementation. What has been the lasting impact of socialist feminism on the discourse of historical materialism? What role did socialist feminists’ understanding of both gender and race play in the formulation of early socialism’s political demands?

In this course, we will explore 19th and early 20th century socialist feminism in both Europe and the United States—from so-called utopian socialist writings to the work of abolitionists, proto-Bolsheviks, suffragists, and self-designated Marxists. Our key interlocutors will include, alongside Marx and Engels, Flora Tristan, Hubertine Auclert, Anna Wheeler, Maria Stewart, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Louise Michel, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Clara Zetkin, August Bebel, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Angelina Grimké.