Theories of Women’s Oppression Between Marxism and Feminism: Finding a New Approach for Understanding Gender

In the 70s, Marxist-feminist currents defined gender through the division of labor that relegated women to the home and made their work unwaged. However, the assignment of domestic tasks to women remains a more complex process than it has been made out to be. By opening the scopes from the Marxist feminist debates around gender, this study aims to define the gender category through concepts developed in the critique of political economy and its study of the capitalist social relation. Through this insight, I argue that during the first two centuries of capitalism the necessities for the establishment of the family institution and the figure of the free individual laborer were resolved through a specific division of labor that created a relation of domination within the family household, which was reified as the category of gender. By understanding how the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production give way to the division of labor, this study attempts to revitalize the Marxist debate on gender and relate it to the cycle of capitalist production.