Marxist Feminism: Class Struggle, Capitalism, and Gender

Gender inequality is not simply the product of cultural attitudes or individual bias. According to Marxist feminism, it is built into the very structure of the economic system we live under. By combining Marx’s critique of capitalism with an analysis of gender, Marxist feminism argues that the exploitation of women is inseparable from the exploitation of labor itself. Understanding this connection is key to grasping why women continue to face lower wages, greater domestic burdens, and economic dependence-not just in any one country, but globally.

The foundations of Marxist feminism 🔗

Marxist feminism applies the tools of Marxist analysis-class struggle, modes of production, and exploitation-directly to the question of gender. At its core, it argues that women’s oppression is not a product of biology or culture alone, but of economic structures. Specifically, it is capitalism that creates and sustains the conditions under which women are subordinated.

In traditional Marxist thought, history is driven by class conflict: the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production) exploit the proletariat (those who must sell their labor to survive). Marxist feminists extend this framework to show that capitalism and patriarchy are inseparable systems that mutually reinforce one another. Capitalism relies on women’s unpaid domestic labor to function, and this exploitation simultaneously strengthens patriarchal structures embedded in society.

Crucially, Marxist feminism distinguishes itself from liberal feminism, which focuses on equal rights within the existing system, and from radical feminism, which centers male dominance as the root problem. Marxist feminism insists that gender inequality is fundamentally linked to class struggle and private property. True liberation, in this view, cannot be achieved through reforms alone-it requires dismantling the capitalist economic system itself.

This also means that Marxist feminism specifically highlights how working-class women experience a dual oppression: they are exploited as workers in the public sphere through underpaid wage labor, and as women in the private sphere through unpaid domestic work. Both forms of exploitation serve capitalism’s interests by keeping labor cheap and reproducible.

Key theorists and their contributions 🔗

Several major thinkers have shaped Marxist feminist theory, but two stand out for their foundational influence on how we understand women’s economic exploitation: Friedrich Engels and Mariarosa Dalla Costa.

Friedrich Engels and the origin of women’s oppression 🔗

Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator and co-author of The Communist Manifesto, produced what remains the most influential materialist theory of women’s oppression in modern history in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Drawing on the anthropological research of Lewis Henry Morgan, Engels argued that women’s subjugation was not a timeless or natural condition but a historical development tied to the rise of private property and class society.

Engels observed that in earlier communal societies, women had considerably more authority and economic power. The shift came when men began accumulating herds of livestock and other productive resources as private property. The development of class society meant that the household-reproduction of labor-was no longer a collective concern but became privatized, dominated by the male head of household. To ensure that property passed to legitimate male heirs, monogamous marriage was enforced, confining women to the domestic sphere and placing them under male control.

Engels famously described this historical turning point as “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.” His central argument was that women’s oppression is social, not biological, and arose alongside class exploitation-both rooted in the same development of private property. As he wrote, the first class antagonism in history coincides with the subjugation of women in monogamous marriage. This materialist explanation remains foundational to Marxist feminist theory, even as later scholars have critiqued its limitations, particularly its insufficient attention to working-class women’s specific conditions and the role of ideology in sustaining gender oppression.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and reproductive labor 🔗

While Engels explained the historical origins of women’s oppression, Mariarosa Dalla Costa brought the analysis into the contemporary capitalist economy by focusing specifically on domestic labor. An Italian Marxist feminist and activist, Dalla Costa co-authored the landmark 1972 text The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community with Selma James. This text launched the “domestic labor debate” by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism-labor that had been rendered invisible by its exclusion from the wage relation.

Dalla Costa’s argument was straightforward but radical: reproductive labor is essential to capitalism, and because it is unpaid, its crucial role is made invisible. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, and emotional labor all maintain the worker who goes to the factory or office each day. They also produce the next generation of workers. Employers profit from all of this without paying a cent to the person doing it. This, Dalla Costa argued, was not simply a social arrangement but an economic one-central to capitalist accumulation.

Together with Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James, Dalla Costa co-founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign in 1972, which demanded that states pay women for their domestic labor. The demand was not simply about money. It was a political strategy to make the exploitation of women’s unpaid work visible and to challenge the assumption that housework is a natural expression of femininity rather than economically valuable labor.

Where Engels focused on the patriarchal family structure as the site of women’s oppression, Dalla Costa shifted attention to the global economic function of women’s reproductive work. Both the household and the global capitalist economy, she argued, depended on this labor continuing unpaid. Any feminist struggle for liberation had to address this exploitation directly.

Analyzing women’s labor under capitalism 🔗

Capitalism exploits women’s labor through two interconnected channels: their participation in the paid workforce and their performance of unpaid domestic work. Marxist feminism argues that both are systematically undervalued, and both serve to sustain capital accumulation.

Women in the paid workforce 🔗

In the paid labor market, women have historically been concentrated in lower-wage sectors-care work, retail, hospitality, food service-while facing barriers to higher-paying occupations. Women are hyper-exploited through the division of labor, a devaluation of wages, and oppressive working conditions. This is not incidental to capitalism; it is structural. A cheaper labor force boosts profit margins, and women have served as that cheaper labor force throughout capitalist history.

Marxist feminists also point to the concept of women as a “reserve army of labor”-a pool that can be activated when the economy demands more workers and released (back into the domestic sphere) when it does not. This flexibility benefits capital by keeping wages suppressed for all workers, as the threat of replacement with cheaper female labor limits workers’ bargaining power.

Unpaid domestic labor and the “double burden” 🔗

In the private sphere, women perform the reproductive labor that keeps the capitalist workforce functioning. This includes cooking, cleaning, childcare, elder care, and emotional labor. None of it appears in GDP calculations. None of it earns a wage. Yet, as Dalla Costa argued, this work maintains and reproduces the workers who create products and generate profit-employers benefit from it without paying the people who perform it.

When women entered the paid workforce in large numbers throughout the 20th century, this domestic labor did not disappear. It simply became a second shift. Women went from the office or factory to the kitchen and nursery-a phenomenon sociologist Arlie Hochschild documented in her foundational study The Second Shift. Marxist feminists identify the family itself as a tool of capitalism, serving three key economic functions: reproducing and socializing the next generation of workers, absorbing the frustrations of alienated male workers (thereby reducing social unrest), and maintaining a reserve army of labor that can be mobilized or demobilized according to economic demand.

Modern implications of Marxist feminism 🔗

Marxist feminist theory, developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, has not lost its relevance. Contemporary economic data consistently reflects the patterns it identified: persistent wage gaps, the undervaluation of care work, and the concentration of women in precarious, low-paid employment.

The gender pay gap as structural exploitation 🔗

The gender pay gap is one of the most visible expressions of the economic inequality Marxist feminists describe. In 2024, women in the United States earned an average of 85% of what men earned, according to Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings. Globally, the situation is even more stark-women worldwide earn approximately 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, and at the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum projects it will take 134 years to achieve global gender parity.

The gap is compounded by race and class. In 2023, for every dollar earned by a white man, a Latina woman working full-time year-round earned just 57.8 cents, while a Black woman earned 66.5 cents. This intersection of race and gender in wage exploitation is precisely what Marxist feminists like Angela Davis and Alexandra Kollontai anticipated: that capitalism’s exploitation of women is always shaped by additional hierarchies of class, race, and national origin.

Marxist feminism also offers an important lens on why the pay gap persists even as women’s educational attainment has surpassed men’s. Women are paid less than men at every education level-among college-degree holders, women are paid 24.2% less than men. This cannot be explained by qualifications alone. It reflects the systematic devaluation of women’s work that Marxist feminists trace back to capitalism’s dependence on cheap, gendered labor.

Unpaid domestic labor today 🔗

The burden of unpaid domestic work has not been equalized by women’s entry into the formal economy. Research consistently shows that women continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of household labor. Women do significantly more unpaid care and household work than men across all groups, by race and ethnicity, family structure, and employment status. This imbalance directly limits how women can use remaining time, affecting career advancement, leisure, and economic autonomy.

The COVID-19 pandemic made these dynamics even more visible. As schools closed and care responsibilities expanded, women-especially mothers-were disproportionately pushed out of the labor force. Women’s unpaid reproductive labor, such as childcare and domestic work, is devalued and marginalized under capitalism, relegating women to a secondary position in the labor market. The pandemic did not create this vulnerability; it exposed the structural dependence of the capitalist economy on women’s uncompensated care work.

Neoliberalism and the limits of “corporate feminism” 🔗

Contemporary Marxist feminists have also turned a critical eye toward what is sometimes called “corporate feminism” or “lean-in feminism”-the idea that gender equality can be achieved through individual advancement within capitalist structures. The problem, from a Marxist feminist perspective, is that this approach benefits primarily affluent, often white women while leaving working-class women’s structural exploitation untouched.

Neoliberal ideology often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, celebrating the appointment of women to corporate boards while ignoring the fact that the cleaners and care workers keeping those corporations running are overwhelmingly female, poorly paid, and without job security. Marxist feminists argue that the feminization of precarious labor-flexible, part-time, low-wage work-is not a coincidence but a feature of how capitalism organizes gendered exploitation in the 21st century.

Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, early Marxist feminist thinkers, made a related argument in the early 20th century: it is extremely difficult for upper-class women to truly understand the struggles of the working class, and feminist movements that ignore this class divide will inevitably privilege already powerful women while leaving the most exploited behind.

Critiques and ongoing debates 🔗

Marxist feminism is not without its critics. Some argue that it reduces gender oppression entirely to economic factors and underestimates the independent force of patriarchal ideology, sexual violence, and cultural norms. Others-particularly socialist feminists-challenged the classical Marxist feminist view that overthrowing capitalism was the necessary first step to women’s liberation, arguing instead for an integrated theory that treats patriarchy and capitalism as a unified system rather than two separate structures.

There are also important critiques from postcolonial and intersectional perspectives. Early Marxist feminist theory developed primarily in Western contexts and often failed to account for how colonialism, race, and global economic inequality shape women’s experiences differently across the world. Contemporary Marxist feminists have worked to address these gaps, producing analyses that bring together class, gender, race, and imperial power as interconnected axes of exploitation.

Despite these debates, Marxist feminism remains a vital analytical framework. While some Marxist themes may not be as relevant today, Marxist feminists can still be used to explore how the political economy is gendered in late-stage capitalism and how the social reproduction of people and communities continues to sustain and renew capitalist accumulation-largely on the backs of women.

What do you think? If capitalism structurally depends on women’s unpaid labor to function, can gender equality ever be fully achieved without fundamental economic transformation? And how do you see the “double burden” of paid and unpaid work shaping the lives of women you know?

References

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