Feminist Ideology In Marxism

After this second wave of feminism, women began to be emancipated from the home, this concerned economists, what would keep the capitalist wheels turning so smoothly if not for the insecure, isolated and bored housewife, consuming cleaning products so as to be the envisioned ‘perfect women’ (Wolfe 1996:65). Before the second wave of feminism women’s magazines focused mainly on household products, however during the liberation of women from the home advertisers lost their primary consumer, it would Wolfe quotes Friedan take “a clever economist to figure out what would keep the economy going if the housewife market fell off” (Wolfe, 1996:65). A new ideology must be promulgated to ensure the same level of consumerism, economists did develop

In Marxist feminism these two concepts are used in conjunction with Marx’s theories to determine how women are oppressed in capitalist societies whilst taking into account the “gender divisions which precede [capitalism]” (Barret 1985:9). However the concept that we shall focus on however is ideology, whilst this concept in Marxist feminism thought focuses on women’s oppression in relation to their position to the modes of production and the “familial ideology” (Barret 1985:30). I shall use a Neo-Marxist feminist perspective which is autonomous of economic determination, one that has gone beyond the realms of Marxism, which instead uses ideology as a more intersubjective view of gender identity. This new perspective on ideology largely derives from Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ and Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony, it is possible under this perspective to question the construction of femininity through