A unitary theory

Lise Vogel has put some light on the development of the Marxist thought on the woman question. As Johanna Brenner mentions, feminists – including a great part of socialist feminists – had commonly assumed that "classical Marxist theory had little to say about women's oppression, and the little it had to say was wrong".^[4] This led to the adoption of a dual system theory by most socialist feminists with two parallel autonomous structures of oppression (patriarchy and capitalism), an approach in which Marxism, which could only explain class exploitation but not women's oppression, had to be combined with feminism, a necessary theory to explain the patriarchal oppression of women. One of the most paradigmatic and influential texts holding this approach was Heidi Hartmann’s article The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union. Lise Vogel challenges this view in her book Marxism and the Oppression of Women as well as in other articles, defending a unitary perspective (she also has a text in response to Hartmann’s article in which she argues that there is no need for "some new synthesis between Marxism or socialism, and feminism. Rather, it is Marxist theory itself that must be developed, and socialist practice that must be transformed"^[5]).

Marxist legacies on the woman question

In Marxism and the Oppression of Women, she reviews the most important texts of the Marxist woman question and identifies two legacies that have coexisted: the dual system perspective and the social reproduction perspective. The dual-system approach understands women's oppression as deriving from "their situation within an autonomous system of sex-divisions of labor and male supremacy",^[3] viewing class and gender as two autonomous structures. Women's oppression and class-oppression are viewed as essentially independent and there is the implicit idea that two motors drive the development of history: class-struggle and sex-struggle. This dual character can be seen, for instance, in the commonly cited fragment from Engel's preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:

“According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.”^[6]

This legacy continued with the works of August Bebel, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling and has been inherited by the dual system socialist feminists.

By contrast, Vogel argues that the social reproduction perspective comes from Marx's Capital, and consists on the idea that "women’s oppression has its roots in women’s differential location within social reproduction as a whole".^[3] According to this approach, class struggle would be the central dynamic of social development, and the major characteristic of a class society would still be the appropriation of surplus-labor by the dominant class. Nevertheless, this appropriation would require the constant renewal of the working class, including generational replacement, in which women play a vital role.

Despite situating the roots for this perspective in Marx's Capital, it's important to remark that Marx doesn't talk about the position of women, nor does he mention domestic or reproductive labor, in the Capital’s section Simple reproduction, where the idea of social reproduction is presented. Yet, Marx introduces the eloquent idea that capitalist production needs the constant reproduction of the workers through the transformation of the means of subsistence into the labor power.^[7] Lise Vogel’s contribution is precisely to situate women’s oppression and domestic labor in this scheme, founding what would later be called the Social Reproduction Theory. However, she argues that some Marxists (she mentions Lenin and Clara Zetkin) had already conceived the woman question from the point of view of the reproduction of labor power. Therefore, this approach can also be considered a legacy from Marxism. The development of the social reproduction perspective (or the Social Reproduction Theory), can be considered Vogel’s major contribution to Marxist-feminist theory.

On the domestic labor debate

Regarding the domestic labor debate, Vogel conceptualizes domestic labor as the necessary labor that reproduces labor power. She points out that, as reproductive labor, it doesn’t produce surplus-value but only use-value. Therefore, it doesn’t fit into the Marxist category of productive labor. She argues that it should be situated in the Marxist category of necessary labor instead. In her own words: "Domestic labour is the portion of necessary labour that is performed outside the sphere of capitalist production. For the reproduction of labour-power to take place, both the domestic and the social components of necessary labour are required".^[3]

On the debates between the equality and difference approach

With respect to the debates between the equality and difference approach and the United States gender policies, Vogel analyses the positions of each perspective and the policies supported on each side. On the one hand, the equality approach holds that men and women should be treated equally and, therefore, argues that maternity leave should be regulated as any other medical leave, claiming for a job-protected leave available for all temporally disabled workers. On the other hand, the difference approach affirms that special rights are required for women, including a specific protection in their maternity leave, in order to achieve real equality.^[8] Vogel argues in favor of transcending this debate, proposing a gender neutrality perspective based on the concept of diversity that combines respect for differences with commitment to equality using gender-neutral legal rules.^[9] The idea is that in a diverse society, in which different individuals or groups have special needs and responsibilities, equality is compatible with special accommodations,^[10] but this should not be reduced to gender difference.

Books

• Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Brill/Haymarket, 2013 (expanded from the 1983 edition). Translated into Chinese (2009), Turkish (2015), German (in press)
• Woman Questions: Essays for a Materialist Feminism. Routledge and Pluto Press, 1995
• Mothers on the Job: Maternity Policy in the U.S. Workplace. Rutgers University Press, 1993
• Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Rutgers University Press, 1983; pb., 1987; Pluto Press, 1984
• The Column of Antoninus Pius. Loeb Classical Monographs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973

List of selected articles

• "Beyond Intersectionality" Science & Society, April 2018
• "Preface" Social Reproduction Theory, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya, Pluto Press, 2017
• "Introduction" (with Martha Gimenez) Special Issue on "Marxist-Feminist Thought Today," Science & Society, January 2005
• "Introduction" (and editor) review symposium on Red Feminism, by Kate Weigand, in Science & Society, Winter 2002-2003
• "Hausarbeitsdebatte" [Domestic Labor Debate], in vol.5 of Historisch-Kritisches Woerterbuch des Marxismus, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Berlin: INKRIT, 2002
• "Domestic Labor Revisited" Science & Society, Summer 2000 Anthologized in Feminist Interpretations of Marx, ed. Christine Di Stefano, Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming
• "From the Woman Question to Women's Liberation" in Materialist Feminism, ed. R.Hennessy and C.Ingraham, Routledge, 1997
• "Engels’s Origin: Legacy, Burden, and Vision" in Engels Today, ed. C. Arthur, Macmillan, 1996
• "Considering Difference: The Case of the U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993" Social Politics, Spring 1995
• "Telling Tales: Historians of Our Own Lives" Journal of Women's History, Spring 1991
• "Debating Difference: Feminism, Pregnancy, and the Workplace" Feminist Studies, Spring 1990
• "Socialist Feminism" Encyclopedia of the American Left, Garland, 1990; rev.ed., Oxford, 1998
• "Questions on the Woman Question" Monthly Review, June 1979 Translated: Monthly Review, edizione italiana, July–August 1979; Revista Mensual, November 1979; Pensamiento Critico, March–April 1980; Meniaia Epitheorese, July 1980
• "«Humorous Incidents and Sound Common Sense»: More on the New England Mill Women" Labor History, Spring 1978
• "«Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak»: New England Mill Women in the Early Nineteenth Century" in Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. M. Cantor and B. Laurie, Greenwood, 1977; pb. 1985
• "«Their Own Work»: Two Documents from the Nineteenth-Century Labor Movement" Signs, Spring 1976
• "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness" Feminist Studies, 1974. Anthologized in Feminist Art Criticism, ed. A. Raven, et al., UMI Research Press, 1988; Harper Collins, 1991
• "Modernism and History" New Literary History, Fall 1971(with L.S. Robinson)
• "Circus Race Scenes in the Early Roman Empire" Art Bulletin, June 1969
• "Flexibility versus Formalism" Art Journal, Spring 1968