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oppression operates through the institution of the ‘bourgeois family’. The patriarchal character of such a family is ensured by the practice of patrilineality, through which descent is traced through the male line, together with the inheritance of property. Most socialist feminists agree that the confinement of women to a domestic sphere of housework and motherhood serves the economic interests of capitalism. Some have argued that women constitute a ‘reserve army of labour’, which can be recruited into the workforce when there is a need to increase production, but easily shed and returned to domestic life during a depression, without imposing a burden on employers or the state. At the same time, women’s domestic labour is vital to the health and efficiency of the economy. In bearing and rearing children, women are producing the next generation of capitalism’s workers. Similarly, in their role as housewives, women relieve men of the burden of housework and child-rearing, allowing them to concentrate their time and energy on paid and productive employment. The traditional family provides the worker with a powerful incentive to find and keep a job because he has a wife and children to support. The family also provides male workers with a necessary cushion against the alienation and frustrations of life as ‘wage slaves’. Male ‘breadwinners’ enjoy high status within the family and are relieved of the burden of ‘trivial’ domestic labour. Although socialist feminists agree that the ‘women’s question’ cannot be separated from social and economic life, they are profoundly divided about the nature of that link. Gender divisions clearly cut across class cleavages, creating tension within socialist feminist analysis about the relative importance of gender and social class, and raising particularly difficult questions for Marxist feminists. Orthodox Marxists insist on the primacy of class politics over sexual politics. This suggests that class exploitation is a deeper and more significant process than sexual oppression. It also suggests that women’s emancipation will be a by-product of a social revolution in which capitalism is overthrown and replaced by socialism. However, many modern socialist feminists find it difficult to accept the primacy of class politics over sexual politics, in part because of the disappointing progress made by women in state-socialist societies such as the Soviet Union. Many of them, indeed, subscribe to a form of neo-Marxism, which accepts the interplay of economic, social, political and cultural forces in society. They therefore refuse to analyse the position of women in simple economic terms and have, instead, given attention to the cultural and ideological roots of patriarchy. This can be seen, for example, in Juliet Mitchell’s (1971) assertion that women must achieve emancipation in four key areas: work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialization of children. Radical feminism The central feature of radical feminism is the belief that sexual oppression is the most fundamental feature of society and that other forms of injustice – class exploitation, racial hatred and so on – are merely secondary. Gender is thought to be the deepest social cleavage and the most politically significant; more important, for example, than social class, race or nation. Radical feminists have therefore insisted that society be understood as ‘patriarchal’ to highlight the central role of gender oppression. Such thinking was evident in the pioneering work of Simone de Beauvoir, and was developed by early radical feminists such as Eva Figes, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett. Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) drew attention not to the more familiar legal or social disadvantages suffered by women, but to the fact that patriarchal values and beliefs
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