became a private service: the wife became head servant, excluded from all participation in social production” (Engels 1942, p. 65). Women's subordination was neither biologically natural nor God‐given; instead, the class relations of capitalism enforced the gender hierarchies that anchored women's oppression. Marxist feminists viewed this patriarchal family as integral to capitalism, and thus a site of oppression that must be destroyed. Familial gendered labor relations, instead, should be socialized. Only when women as workers joined proletarian struggles against capitalism could they combat women's oppression in patriarchal values and social orders. Marxist feminists expanded these insights in the 1880s through the 1920s to ask how divisions of reproductive labor and productive work reproduced capitalism as a whole. In particular, Rosa Luxemburg argued that imperialism relied upon reproduction to more intensively exploit workers, new markets, and natural resources (Luxemburg 1951).
In the early 1900s, socialist feminists demanded a better understanding of how reproduction became women's work and demanded the end to monogamous marriage and objectification in the family (Bebel 1910). They criticized the strict separation between the private family/home and the public workplace (Krupskaya 1899). In campaigns to organize women during the 1880s, the praxis of socialist feminism developed explanations for why women's work was paid less than men's work. It challenged the fiercely policed domain of factory work as necessarily men's work; and sought entry for women workers into the collective bargaining units of workers' associations and unions (Zetkin 1976). Socialist feminists sought to synthesize feminist analyses of gender inequality, social reproduction, and economic reproduction. They developed a broader view of women's economic, social reproductive role and gender oppression as interactive contributions toward women's oppression.
Engels and Zetkin examined the family as the site of women's oppression, used for the further extraction of women's (and to a lesser degree men's) unpaid reproductive labor by capitalism. They also targeted marriage as a religious and state institution that enforced women's subordination to men and to capital. Neither, however, substantively theorized how control over women's bodily integrity and sexual desires was also a constitutive facet of capitalism. Alexandra Kollantai, who joined the Bolshevik Party in Russia (later the USSR) from 1899 to her death 1952, raised precisely these questions. In her 1908 introduction to The Social Basis of the Women's Question, Kollantai agreed that “woman” is a class‐divided group within capitalism; therefore, the vote alone was not enough to ensure all women's liberation. Women's franchise did nothing to advance the power of workers for themselves; instead, it heightened the class power of some women over others. Instead, working‐class women must join the proletarian revolution in solidarity with working‐class men to overthrow capitalism (Kollantai 1908 [1984]).
Over the course of Kollantai's life, particularly in the USSR after the 1917 revolution, she argued that women's liberation had multiple facets that could not be won solely as workers. Private property, she agreed, is the underlying cause of women's oppression. However, without the active transformation of morality, sexuality, and the family constitutive of state socialism, women would never gain full emancipation. Kollantai formed the Women's Bureau in 1919 and led it for over two years between 1920 and 1922. She developed programs of state support for children and mothers, such as paid maternity leave and childcare institutions. She changed divorce laws, civil marriage laws, and laws for illegitimate children's rights. During the 1920s she fought to liberate oppressive mores of sexuality and the family in her position (Kollantai 1920). Sex, desire and pleasure, she argued, should also propel revolutionary horizons. These alternate emotional and ethical orders took shape primarily in her novels, such as Love of Worker Bees (1923 [1978]) and Red Love (1927). In these works, the revolution, the will of the people, and the desire to live fulfilling lives shared a libidinal ethos with bodily autonomy and women's right to experience sexual pleasure as they wished. She described collectivist family forms that could create new egalitarian social relationships, amply supported by state socialism. Kollantai, too, faced resistance to her ideas, but emancipatory and revolutionary sex, love, care, and desire remain bedrock principles in Marxist feminism.
The Value of Social Reproduction
The Marxist feminism that emerged from these struggles integrated an attention to feudal social forms of gender relations in order to better understand imperialist strategies for capitalist accumulation. Late capitalism spawned a twofold method: the systematic disarticulation of production from one region or location, so that factories roam the earth in relentless search of unorganized workers, coupled with the global integration of capital in time, money, and space. Workers have lost power as capital has gained. Imperialism in late capitalism mobilized rural women from subsistence agricultural economies as workers, through land eviction and policies of peasant immiseration. As a result of mass migration from small landholdings, away from livelihoods based on subsistence farming, those previously marginal regions formed the basis for new markets as they became more fully integrated into global capitalism. In the words of Patricia Fernández‐Kelly, the question about the gender relations of the political economy asked, “how women were becoming the new face of the international proletariat” (Fernández‐Kelly 2007, p. 509).
The second question about social reproduction as a site for both capitalism's renewal and its downfall focuses on the ongoing centrality of primitive accumulation – variously called tribute, debt payment, theft, resource extraction, and oppression, depending on the context – to the accumulation of surplus value (or profit) in capitalism (Federici 2012). Social reproduction looks to the lives of workers beyond the workplace: of leisure, vices, love, and ethics. These pursuits outside of the sphere of production are still threaded with ideologies of capitalism and their commodification, including emotions, pleasure, and family. Analysts of social reproduction seek to better understand these linkages between workers and their lives. Theories of gender and political economy necessarily overlap with those about social reproduction in vital ways, not least because imperialism is predicated upon the primitive accumulation of unpaid work and the earth's resources (Simpson 2009).
In the early twentieth century, socialist feminists argued for the social wage to bridge the divide between paid productive work and unpaid reproductive labor. The social wage sought to give material value to reproductive labor. Kollantai's early work to provide greater state support for reproductive work, spread from the USSR in the early twentieth century to nations across Europe, Iran, Cuba, and other state socialist governments (Bier 2011; Moghadam 2003). Paid time off for childcare, maternity leave, subsidized food for childbearing women, and other pro‐maternalist policies emerged from Marxist feminist analyses, particularly in socialist state formations of the USSR and Eastern Europe (Ghodsee 2015). Efforts to collectivize reproductive labor, also championed by Kollantai, through state‐run childcare and collective living arrangements sought to encourage women's political participation and lessen their workloads spread to China in the 1950s and Tanzania in the 1960s.
In the 1930s and 1940s, another strategy to link production to reproduction developed in the United States. In the late 1930s, Mary Inman, an American communist challenged the Marxist feminist focus on women as workers. She argued that the reproductive labor of middle‐class women should be recognized as productive work (Inman 1940). While her analysis did not change the Communist Party's position on the woman question, she continued to write about the importance of women's reproductive labor to waged work through the 1960s (Weigand 2001). Socialist feminists from the Caribbean, Italy, Germany, France, and the UK revived Inman's recognition of reproductive labor as productive work (Benston 1971; Mies et al. 1988). Like Inman, they directly challenged the separation between production and reproduction in traditional Marxist feminism. “Labor power is a commodity produced in the home,” wrote Selma James. “Women are not marginal in the home, in the factory, in the hospital, in the office. We are fundamental to the reproduction of capital and fundamental to its destruction” (Dalla Costa and James 1972, p. 19). Beginning in Italy, demands for payment in the Wages for Housework movement sought the downfall of capitalism through bankrupting its reliance on women's unpaid reproductive labor. The movement also sought to collectivize women who were atomized by the work's invisibility hidden within the domestic sphere. Women, as the primary subjects of this unpaid labor, could realize
