Article Subjects and Geography: Feminism

Christian Revolutionaries, Churched and Unchurched

Christian Revolutionaries, Churched and Unchurched

by Paul Buhle

October 1, 2026

Paul Buhle reviews Emily Pierson: A Yankee Radical, a new biography of the eponymous Christian radical and communist organizer. As a "strong willed" woman born at the nineteenth century and living well into the twentieth, Pierson is a figure whose work spanned the fight for women's suffrage, public health, the labor movement, and the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban Revolutions, traveling to the latter countries toward the end of her life. As a writer, teacher, churchgoer, and worker, Pierson, Buhle writes, was a presence to be reckoned with throughout her lifetime.
Engels for Our Times: Gender, Social Reproduction, and Revolution

Engels for Our Times: Gender, Social Reproduction, and Revolution

by Marnie Holborow

March 1, 2024

"It is surprising," Marnie Holborow writes, "how often in Marxist accounts of women's oppression Frederick Engels is overlooked." In responding to this gap in analysis, Holborow examines his influential work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, finding his observations on gender roles and social reproduction under capitalism—and their expressions based on class—are not only astute for Engels's time, but very much for ours as well.

Hegemonic Femininity in Popular Culture: Heteronormative Appropriation of Lesbian Sexualities in Contemporary India through Neeraj Ghaywan’s ‘Geeli Pucchi’

Hegemonic Femininity in Popular Culture: Heteronormative Appropriation of Lesbian Sexualities in Contemporary India through Neeraj Ghaywan’s ‘Geeli Pucchi’

by Aratrika Bose, Tanupriya and Anuja Singh

January 1, 2024

Using the lens of Neeraj Ghaywan's film Geeli Pucchi, Aratrika Bose, Tanupriya, and Anuja Singh explore the ways in which lesbian characters negotiate the trappings of hegemonic femininity embedded in Indian culture, from marriage and home life to the workplace, and the role of the body and "beauty" in the navigation of feminine identities.

What Comes after a Cycle of Protests? The Case of the 2020 Women’s Protests in Poland

What Comes after a Cycle of Protests? The Case of the 2020 Women’s Protests in Poland

by Magdalena Muszel and Grzegorz Piotrowski

November 1, 2022

Two years after the peak of the 2020 street protests for reproductive rights in Poland, Magdalena Muszel and Grzegorz Piotrowski explore the movement's effects on Polish society. Despite the dissipating energy of the participants and continued intransigence of most major parties, this cycle of protests shifted the values and political preferences of specific gender and age groups, as well as affecting the common perception of protest movements in Poland.

‘Bury Class Society Before It Buries Us All’: Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Vision for a Marxist Feminist Anthropology

‘Bury Class Society Before It Buries Us All’: Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Vision for a Marxist Feminist Anthropology

by Ahmed Kanna

February 1, 2022

Eleanor Burke Leacock taught that transhistorical, universal male dominance is a myth, not a fact. Writing during the grimmest period of Cold War reaction, Leacock put forward a critique of the mainstream U.S. ideology, which took for granted the idea that there were only two genders, in binary opposition to each other, and that these were the direct product of so-called male and female nature.

Sex and Socialism

Sex and Socialism

by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson

February 1, 2020

While later generations of Marxian scientific socialists saw sex as secondary, derivative of the real relationships of production, many of the earliest socialist theorists and movements took sexual matters very seriously. Thus, in many ways, the advent of Marxian socialism represented something of a step backward in the development of a radical sexual politics. However, in the twentieth century, old divisions on the sex question within the left soon reappeared.

Liberating Women from “Political Economy”: Margaret Benston’s Marxism and a Social-Reproduction Approach to Gender Oppression

Liberating Women from “Political Economy”: Margaret Benston’s Marxism and a Social-Reproduction Approach to Gender Oppression

by Tithi Bhattacharya

January 1, 2020

There is an unresolved tension at the heart of Marxist explanations for women's oppression under capitalism. Although there is general agreement that the bourgeois family, as the dominant kinship unit, has something to do with generating and reproducing that oppression, the exact role of the family varies among Marxists. In this respect, Margaret Benston's proposal to situate domestic labor within capitalist production was truly pioneering. Rather than record and describe domestic work, Benston theorized this labor and laid the basis for later feminists to apprehend the production of commodities and the reproduction of labor power within a unitary framework.

Notes from the Editors, September 2019

Notes from the Editors, September 2019

by The Editors

September 1, 2019

This special issue of Monthly Review honors the fiftieth anniversary this month of Margaret Benston's landmark "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation." The essay sparked a revolution in Marxian thought, the full implications of which are only now being perceived in contemporary social reproduction theory. We have reprinted Benson’s pieces together with contributions by Silvia Federici, Martha E. Gimenez, Selma James (interviewed by Ron Augustin), Leith Mullings, Marge Piercy, and Lise Vogel, all of whom have played leading roles since the 1970s in the development of feminist historical materialism.

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