Beyond the established categories: An alternative approach to feminist thought starting from debates about women and the rise of the market economy

Some limitations of the established categories

As noted, the established categories have fostered the development of feminist thought but they have some real disadvantages. For example, consider the use of the distinction between liberal and radical feminists. The terms are often juxtaposed; a liberal feminist is assumed to be more moderate than a radical feminist. But in some contexts, to be a liberal feminist is to be a radical opponent of the status quo. This is true of liberal feminists in a theocracy, for example (see also Eisenstein, 1981: 6).

Moreover, these two categories do not accurately delineate the contours of some important feminist debates. For example, Jaggar suggests that the main liberal feminist claims are supported ‘by the classic liberal belief that there should be a minimum of state intervention in the affairs of the individual’ ([1977] 1979: 259; see also Tong, 2013: 12). On the key issue of pornography, one might therefore expect liberal feminists to be against censorship, but some favour it (Clark, 1980). Meanwhile, the term ‘radical’ fails to reveal much about the position of feminists on pornography. Many radical feminists are strongly in favour of censorship – perhaps the most famous radical feminist, Catharine MacKinnon, is known as a champion of state-generated censorship regulations. But other radical feminists are strongly against such actions. Gayle Rubin, for example, opposes the censorship of non-violent pornography and defends the rights of sexual minorities but calls for a ‘radical theory’ of sexual politics (1984: 148–149). Similarly, while some radical feminists are critics of legalised prostitution (Pateman, 1988; MacKinnon, 1989), Rubin (1984) endorses it. (In Chapter 2 of the 2013 edition of her book, Tong, building on Ann Ferguson’s (1984) essay, does distinguish between radical-cultural feminists and radical-libertarian feminists, but while both writers consider Rubin a sexual libertarian, neither defines the term libertarian).

Although these categories no longer explicitly structure as many debates as they once did, they have an implicit influence on feminist thinking. In spite of their limitations, they remain the assumed and unquestioned background of much feminist thought. ³

For these reasons, it makes sense to consider alternative ways of conceptualising feminist discourse. Before explaining my alternative approach, based on feminist responses to the rise of the market economy, I will justify this focus.

Women and the rise of the market economy

Why is the rise of the market economy of such significance to feminist thought? In a nutshell, market capitalism alters women’s traditional production patterns as well as the impact of kinship rules over these and over women’s status. As noted, Polanyi provides an exemplary historical analysis of the way that capitalism entails the new dominance of the economic over other social spheres. Nicholson builds on this analysis to show that, with capitalism, the economic sphere becomes separated from and dominant over kinship relations, with crucial implications for women’s status.

My starting point is Nicholson’s essay ‘Feminism and Marx’ (1987). A reading of this essay provides a helpful context for understanding rival tendencies in contemporary feminist debates about women’s choices. In this essay, Nicholson analyses the strengths and weaknesses of Marxist theory for understanding gender. She draws on Polanyi’s work to argue that an accurate comprehension of women’s status requires understanding that market capitalism features both the historical emergence of an economic sphere separate from the domestic and political spheres, and the dominance of the economic sphere over the others. Nicholson argues that when the Marxist approach is attentive to the historical changes in relations amongst the family, state and economy, it can be helpful in understanding gender. But the theory does not always maintain this attentiveness; Nicholson suggests that some Marxist categories are implicitly rooted in capitalist relations and are applied uncritically to pre-capitalist cultures. Because of this, she contends that Marxist theory is not as useful for analysing gender as it could be.

Nicholson’s thesis in ‘Feminism and Marx’, then, is that while Marxist theory assumes that the economic sphere is separate from kinship relations and organises them, this is a feature only of capitalist societies. Marxist theory erroneously projects the separation and primacy of the economic sphere that is characteristic of capitalism on to all societies. This, she suggests, explains the weakness of the theory in analysing gender in both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies.

Pre-capitalist societies, in her view, cannot be understood in terms of the separation and domination of the economic sphere over kinship because, within them, gender, childrearing and economic roles are structured chiefly through kinship. In fact, in Gender and History, Nicholson describes kinship as ‘a principle governing a social whole’ (1986: 135). ⁴ Thus, Nicholson suggests that in pre-capitalist societies, kinship rules regarding marriage and sexuality shape both a gendered division of labour and women’s degree of ‘control over the means and results’ of the production of food and objects (1987: 25).

Moreover, Nicholson argues that within capitalist society the legacy of kinship-based gender arrangements endures: ‘capitalist society contains aspects of precapitalist societies within it which are highly relevant to gender’ (1987: 26). The economic sphere becomes more autonomous within capitalism but capitalist economies themselves ‘grew out of and continue to be affected by “noneconomic” aspects of human existence’ (Nicholson, 1987: 26). She suggests that a more adequate Marxian theory would reveal the historical process of the ‘domination of the state and later the market over kinship’ and the changes in the situation of women that ensue (Nicholson, 1987: 26). ⁵

Nicholson’s larger argument about the impact of capitalism on women’s status relies on Polanyi’s seminal book, The Great Transformation (1944). Examining Polanyi’s theory will help to explain the terms and grounding of my alternative proposal for feminist classification. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi argued that a market economy based on the motive of gain was a new development in human history. Such an economy promotes the dominance of its key principle, the price principle, over other social principles such as those from the political sphere (or, as Nicholson notes, the familial sphere) (Polanyi, 1944). Polanyi argues that the capitalist market economy pushes, as it were, for the removal of the kind of state regulation that prevailed within feudalism and mercantilism. These systems sometimes featured intense control over labour.

Polanyi’s most interesting arguments stem from early nineteenth century England. ‘Market society’, he contends, ‘was born in England’. In a particularly resonant passage, Polanyi describes the emergence of the Speenhamland Law. He explains that with the rise of industrial production, English authorities developed a series of wage supplements based on the price of bread, which impeded the early development of capitalism. The justices of Berkshire, assembled at Speenhamland, near Newbury, crafted the Speenhamland Law of 1795; this provided for wage subsidies such that each worker could purchase three loaves of bread per week. If a gallon loaf of bread was one shilling, a single male worker must be paid three shillings a week and was guaranteed this much money. The male worker was also paid enough to allow for one gallon loaf for his wife and for each dependent in the family. This meant that the male worker did not have a financial incentive to work hard; the wage was the same regardless of the level of productivity. Many workers took the wage subsidies and barely subsisted. According to Polanyi, productivity plummeted. He speaks of the resultant pauperisation and debasement of the people of the countryside. He reports that by 1834 a consensus developed that a market economy would require market control of the workforce according to the principle of price.

Polanyi, a socialist, does not celebrate this result. He argues that the market economy involved terrible dislocation in the name of progress. He describes how early capitalism in England raised the standard of living but ‘ground men into masses’ ([1944] 2001:35). However, his point is that the capitalist market economy involves pressure to free the use of labour from state restraints. He argues that in pre-capitalist societies, in feudal and tribal settings, the economic order is controlled by the social order. But with capitalism, the economy is separated or liberated from other institutions and, once this happens, the society is forced (at least initially) to allow the market economy to function according to its own laws. Other spheres, such as politics, become subordinate and operate according to the market’s rules. Land and labour become commodities. Polanyi maintained that a well-organised society of the future would feature markets; he argued that markets should not be dispensed with because they help to foster independence of thought and moral freedom. But he envisaged social control of labour, land and prices (Polanyi, 1944).

Polanyi’s reflections merit the attention of contemporary feminists. However, he does not focus much attention on the domestic sphere or on women’s liberation. Nicholson emphasises the separation and dominance of the economic over the domestic sphere that accompanies the rise of the market economy in nineteenth-century England. During this period, she argues, production moves away from the domestic context where it had been organised through kinship:

Indeed, when we think of what is pivotal about industrialization it is that the production of goods ceases being organized by kinship relations and an activity of the household. The creation of goods by members of the household for the purpose of use by the household and organized primarily in accordance with family roles becomes replaced by the creation of goods by members of many different households for the purpose of exchange and organized in accordance with the profit motive. The commoditization of the elements of production means not only, as Polanyi notes, a withdrawal of control on the part of the state over these elements but also a withdrawal on the part of the family. When labour remained at home, its content and organization was primarily a family matter; when it left only its consequences, wages, remained such. (Nicholson, 1987: 23)

Nonetheless, when much production moves out of households and many women are drawn into the public capitalist economy, innumerable tasks involved in running a household remain. In this sense, labour never totally leaves the household. The labour of cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and caring for children is on-going. When women work outside the household, the tasks involved in maintaining the household continue to be performed, often by these wage-earning women in a double-day and/or by wage-earning nannies, housecleaners and domestic workers (who are most often women, and very often in the West, immigrant women and women of colour). ⁷

Contemporary economic restructuring has featured an incorporation of women into paid labour, especially in the growing service sector in the North and in industry in the South (Eisenstein, 2005). Nonetheless, many women in the South work in the informal economy, outside of state regulation; some sell products made in their homes, others sell wares in markets and others work in family businesses without pay (Chen, 2002). Uma Narayan argues that this is a legacy of the colonial policies that favoured male wage labour in formal industries (2005).

Industrialisation influences the situations of women in the informal sector in important ways. For example, as Jesu Rethinam reports, in the smaller fishing communities of Tamil Nadu, India, women are expected to conform to the dictates of the katta panchayats, male-only caste-based institutions devoted to prescribing traditional customs (2013). But in these settings women have the right to sell fish and decide how to use the proceeds. Meanwhile, in larger fishing villages, ‘where capital-intensive technology has expanded the scale of the activity and the financing comes from outside capitalists, women’s economic role has diminished and they have lost their traditional right to the catch’ (Rethinam, 2013: 132). Industrialisation redistributes power in the informal sector, creating new challenges and opportunities for women.

Polanyi and Nicholson examine the changing relations between the economic, the political and the kinship spheres. Such historical approaches to these shifting spheres can help to discourage false generalisations about women’s situations in various societies across the world. These approaches, augmented by an intersectional understanding of how racism, colonialism and heteronormativity and other structures of domination intersect with capitalism, sexism and one another, provide a promising set of concepts for characterising women’s situations. Intersectionality is the theory developed by Black feminist thinkers that highlights that different forms of disadvantage and advantage intersect to shape both lived experience and one another (Crenshaw, 1989). ⁸ But, more than this, these forms of domination interact and modify experience and one another within different domains and spheres. Here I am influenced by Sylvia Walby who argues that intersectional approaches should encompass not only sets of intersecting social relations such as gender, ethnicity and class, but also the domains of economy, state, civil society and the nexus of violence (2007). Walby’s inclusion of domains in the theory of intersectionality is a step forward, but to fully describe women’s situations, the institution of kinship and the domains of the family and domestic sphere and women’s responses to them would also need to be considered. As Uma Narayan points out, different groups of women negotiate the capitalist market, the state and the family ‘to survive—and what they negotiate and what the benefits and burdens of these are differs across class and country’ (personal communication, 2014). In order to think through alternative ways of conceptualising feminist debates, however, I will concentrate in what follows not primarily on describing the impact of the capitalist market economy on women’s situations but on presenting and analysing the normative responses different feminist writers have had to this. Does this development provide opportunities to liberate women? Or, does the commoditisation of land and labour exploit women, undermine women’s power and harm the environment?

An alternative to the established categories: Tendencies in feminist debates on the market economy

As we have seen, Nicholson’s goal is to analyse the usefulness of theoretical tools for providing accurate descriptions of women’s status throughout history and across different cultures. My goal here is to consider how contemplation of the rise of the market economy and its dominance over kinship and political structures generates competing feminist approaches to women’s choices. Therefore, I will now shift my focus, considering not the impact of the rise of market economy on women’s status, but rather how feminists have evaluated the impact of the market economy on women. Some feminists see the rise of the market economy as an opportunity to free women from gender restrictions stemming from kinship traditions, including those transmitted through the family. For these feminists, women’s liberation requires women’s exercise of free choice to enter the market and compete on an equal footing with men. Entering the market for pay provides women with a wage and with it the possibility of greater economic independence which they contend might facilitate the exercise of other types of freedom.

There is a libertarian strand to feminist arguments for women’s wage labour participation. It is true that for some the term libertarian will suggest an anti-statist laissez faire apologist for capitalism. ⁹ But the libertarianism I have in mind is expressed in a definition offered by Roger Scruton. He defines it as: ‘the form of liberalism which believes in freeing people not merely from the constraints of traditional political institutions, but also from the inner constraints imposed by their mistaken attribution of power to ineffectual things’. Among those things, he includes the ‘institutions of religion, and the family, and customs of social, especially sexual conformity’ (Scruton, 1996: 315).

Those feminists who see women’s participation in the market economy as a means to free women from family and sexual restrictions might, then, be thought of as libertarians. Alternatively, they might be called market opportunists. But it should be noted that feminists who see themselves as market opportunists are not always capitalist market enthusiasts. The assumption is that one can take advantage of an opportunity while having reservations about the system that creates it.

Consider a controversial, theoretical version of this view. The contested discourse of Camille Paglia is of interest here. ¹⁰ Her approach provides an extreme but revealing example of one type of libertarian feminism. Her repeated argument is that it is a good thing that American women have been freed from traditional restrictions on sexual choice (imposed by the family and society before the 1960s) and that, once freed in this way, women should take responsibility for all the consequences of their decisions. This is clearly a libertarian approach.

Paglia, a registered Democrat, argued in Salon that capitalism, though flawed, has advantages for women:

Capitalism, which spawned modern individualism as well as the emancipated woman who can support herself, is essentially Darwinian. It expands any society’s sum total of wealth and radically raises the standard of living, but it leaves the poor and weak without a safety net. Capitalism needs the ethical counter-voice of leftism to keep it honest. But leftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism—without which Western women would have no professional jobs to go to but would be stuck doing laundry by hand and stooping over pots on the hearth fire all day long (2007).

Women in many societies have also been restricted from participation in wage labour whether by legal rules or by practices such as the family wage. Women are often not paid for their long hours of work. Participation in wage work can help establish women’s right to work in the formal economy.

The view that women can liberate themselves through participation in the market economy is not limited to the industrialised West. Naila Kabeer has observed that although the work of Third World women in factories is exploitative and underpaid, women often choose this work because it is superior to the alternatives available to them (2004). Kabeer maintains that her interviews with female garment workers in Bangladesh reveal that even highly exploitative market capitalism can entail notable advantages:

Women valued the satisfaction of a ‘proper’ job in contrast to the casualized forms of employment that had previously been their only options. Their ability to earn on a regular basis gave them a sense of self-reliance, of standing on their own feet. They also valued their access to new social networks on the factory floor, which replaced their previous isolation within the home; the greater voice they exercised in household decision-making because of the value of their economic contribution; their enhanced sense of self-worth; and, in some cases, greater personal freedom and autonomy. (2004: 18)

In the same essay, Kabeer controversially argues that attempts to procure global labour standards can result in job losses that worsen the position of women export workers in developing counties. She adds, however, that wage labour can provide women with an opportunity to engage in collective bargaining for the reforms they may seek (Kabeer, 2004: 21–24). The latter argument is crucial, given the unsafe conditions often confronting workers (exemplified, notably, by the collapse of a building on 24 April 2013 in Dhaka containing several garment factories which killed 1129 people). Beyond unfair treatment and risks to women’s health, it is important to remember that the costs of participation in the market economy can include the cost of their lives.

It is true that the changes wrought by the rise of the market economy provide women with opportunities to escape from lingering kinship-based traditions that foster gender inequality and women’s economic dependence. In her more recent work, Kabeer raises penetrating questions about how paid work can empower women and she also rightly emphasises the link between women’s paid employment and their ability to ‘claim their rights as women, as workers and as citizens’ (2008: 18).

Many feminists, however, would characterise themselves as sceptical that the advantages of women’s participation in the capitalist market outweigh its disadvantages, or as critics of capitalism’s dominance over other spheres. They by no means form a single category; instead, their critiques take several different forms. Here the argument necessarily advances in broad strokes but I will outline various tendencies.

Jean Bethke Elshtain’s views on feminism and the family are of particular interest here because she explicitly opposes what she calls the ‘free-market’ approach to feminism. In her essay ‘Feminism, Family and Community’, she critiques versions of feminism inspired by a ‘free-market model’ that ‘proclaims all constraints of individual expression to be coercive’ (Elshtain, 1982: 445). According to Elshtain, feminists should defend a non-oppressive version of the traditional family which could serve as a source of resistance to corporate power and to right-wing defenses of family values. ¹¹

Elshtain associates her point of view with the feminist ethics of care. Drawing on Carol Gilligan’s argument that women tend to prioritise care for others in ethical decision-making, Elshtain asserts that feminists should defend ‘women’s traditional social sphere’ ([1982] 1993). According to Elshtain, if Gilligan is right that women ‘have a distinctive moral “voice,” emphasising concern and responsibility for others, feminists should be among the first to preserve the sphere that makes this morality possible and to determine how to best extend its imperatives to serve a less-than-humane public world’ (1982: 447; See:Elshtain, 1998; Held, 2002).

More recent work on feminist care ethics has critiqued the essentialism of earlier studies, as well as the exclusion of care ethics from traditional understandings of citizenship (Mahon and Robinson, 2011). A key theme remains the need to re-value the work of caring for the bodies and minds of others, still largely performed by women in the domestic sphere, but there is a new emphasis on protesting the transnational commoditisation of care work, with its unequal gendered, racialised distribution of the giving and receiving of care. Joan Tronto, for example, argues for the merits of a democratic feminist care ethics approach to the transnational capitalist commoditisation of care work because it is focused on ‘actual relationships and the attendant responsibilities that they bring’ (2011: 177).

Marxist feminists are different sorts of market critics. Obvious opponents of market capitalism, they have consistently argued that the economic functions of the family should be performed collectively. In ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’, Engels contended that when wives have legal equality with husbands ‘it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished’ ([1884] 1984: 131). Marxist feminists who remain committed to such a vision advocate the industrialisation of household tasks. In her classic Marxist feminist essay, ‘The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation’, Margaret Benston envisions the industrialisation of housework. The family, she suggests, is a ‘pre-industrial’ production unit. She advocates socialist but not capitalist industrialisation. ‘Industrialization is, in itself’, she maintains, ‘a great force for human good; exploitation and dehumanization go with capitalism and not necessarily with industrialization’ (Benston, [1969] 1984: 243).

Distinguished both from those who emphasise the benefits of women’s familial power and from those who are capitalist market opportunists, these critics of capitalism see industrialisation as an opportunity for women to escape obligations imposed by kinship-based roles. It is in this spirit, I think, that Simone de Beauvoir could claim in The Second Sex that: ‘All forms of socialism, wresting woman away from the family, favour her liberation’ ([1949] 1989: 112).

While thinkers such as Engels, Benston and Beauvoir, in their different ways, advocate state-controlled industrialisation as a means of obtaining women’s freedom, environmentalist feminists are sceptical about the benefits of industrialisation itself. This growing body of work critiques the ways that the discourses and practices of industrial capitalism subordinate both women and nature (Mellor, 2003). Environmentalist feminists have argued that because of the gendered and hierarchical division of labour, the adverse environmental impacts of capitalist industrialisation have disproportionately affected women and the poor. Bina Agarwal, for example, carefully grounds her critique of state and corporate environmental practices in India in a material analysis and defends a vision of democratic, egalitarian communities that empower women and preserve natural resources and local knowledge about them (1992). She provides a critique of the dominance of the norms associated with industrial capitalism and defends an alternative arrangement which provides for community control of economic development.

Feminist environmentalists thus would ask questions about the impact on the environment of the factory work that market opportunists defend. Feminist environmentalist approaches lend themselves to a critique of some feminist market opportunist approaches for using an overly individualistic basis for judgment of ethical and political issues.

The feminist critique of market dominance finds another form of expression in the democratic tendency. Many feminists have articulated the need for democratic control over economic decision-making and have advocated the libratory potential of women’s participation in democratic organising and politics. To cite just one example, Lourdes Benería calls for ‘subordinating markets to the objectives of truly democratic communities. The goal is to place economic activity at the service of people-centred development and not the other way around; or to strive for productivity and efficiency not for their own sake but as a way to increase collective well-being’ (2003: 128). Such a formulation entails challenging the dominance of the economic sphere over the political sphere (see also Eisenstein, 2005: 512).

What conclusions can be drawn about the relationships among these tendencies? First, while some critics of market dominance seek to reclaim women’s family and/or kinship-based activities and dispositions, other such critics seek to free women from these. The latter thinkers are critical of both the dominance of the market and of the authority of kinship or family-based rules over women. In contrast, the critics of market dominance who seek to revalue kinship and family-based activities and values not only have a different conception of the means for achieving feminist goals, they have a different view of the character of sexism. ¹² For feminists such as Elshtain, contempt for women’s traditional activities and values is itself a form of sexism (Young, 1990).

A second sort of division of opinion is apparent if one considers the tendencies in another way. Among those who seek to free women from kinship-derived rules, feminist market opportunists see participation in the market economy as a promising means for achieving this, while feminist critics of market dominance emphasise the drawbacks of this course of action.

Also, consider for a moment three of these tendencies: care feminism, environmentalist feminism and democratic feminism. These strands each correspond to what Nancy Fraser has identified as indispensible background conditions of capitalism: social reproduction, nature and political community (2014). (Fraser defines social reproduction as ‘the forms of provisioning, caregiving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds’ [2014: 61]). For Fraser, capitalism depends upon these conditions, but it simultaneously undermines and devalues them, particularly in its neo-liberal form. Extending Fraser’s argument to the one elaborated here, care feminists challenge capitalism’s undermining of social reproduction, environmentalist feminists challenge capitalism’s undermining of nature and democratic feminists challenge capitalism’s undermining of political community. Feminists of these three tendencies are likely to see women’s participation in the market economy as a double-edged sword because, although it confers independence on individual women, it entails market dominance over the conditions which make capitalism, as well as life itself and the human world, possible. Feminists of these three tendencies protest against market dominance for different reasons but they all protest against it. These three tendencies are linked back both to Polanyi’s critique of the dominance of the market over political community and nature and to Nicholson’s emphasis on the dominance of the market over kinship and the domestic sphere where so much social reproduction takes place.

It might be argued that the alternative approach to feminist tendencies I propose involves reworking certain earlier socialist feminist premises. I would readily concede that the historical approach to the developments I emphasise owes a debt to socialist feminism. My argument shows that a certain strand of socialist feminist argument can stimulate thought about key feminist tendencies which are critical of market dominance, raising questions about their distinctiveness and their common ground.

Market, kinship, history and the sexuality debates

In developing this alternative perspective, I do not imply that all feminist questions can only be understood through the frame of the rise of the market economy. But even when the focus is squarely on questions of sexuality, for example, considering a variant of this new conceptualisation is useful. As noted, attempts to understand feminist debates about pornography and prostitution in terms of the liberal or radical dispositions of various feminists encounter the problem that there are feminist radicals on both sides of each issue. Concentrating instead on feminist reactions to the ways that the rise of the market economy has re-positioned women could better focus the debate on the context of the challenges women face.

For example, in her influential article ‘Thinking Sex’, Gayle Rubin describes how industrialisation and urbanisation in the modern West not only changed family and gender relationships but also led to a new sexual system, which both identified deviants and permitted new sexual communities to arise (1984). Rubin relies on Michel Foucault’s argument in the History of Sexuality (Vol. 1) that, due to economic and political changes that began particularly in the eighteenth century in the West, a new system of sexuality was superimposed on a pre-existing system of alliance and kinship. For Foucault, all societies feature a system of alliance to maintain relationships; it is ‘a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions’. But in the modern West, governments, professionals and institutions such as the police and the media imposed this new sexual system of control over bodies onto the earlier system of alliance; the sexual system, he writes, ‘without completely supplanting the latter, helped to reduce its importance’ (Foucault, 1978: 106, cited in Rubin, 1984: 169–170).

How are the feminist sexuality debates recast through a focus on the historical analyses of the relations amongst these systems? First, this frame provokes questions about the impact of the industrialisation of pornography on women who work inside and outside the sex trade. Consider the effects of this industry in the context of the modern control of women’s bodies through the deployment of sexual discourse (Rowbotham, 1973). Secondly, the rise of the market economy re-positions sex workers. For example, prostitution, whatever else its consequences, provides a path that frees or distances women from the authority of kinship and traditional families. As Shannon Bell, in a provocative reading of Irigaray, writes, ‘the prostitute negotiates sexuality only as a commercial exchange inside the male exchange economy; but she does negotiate it’ (1994: 91). But how is the sex worker affected by the dominance of the motive of gain and by new sexual controls of the body? Feminists will have conflicting views. My suggestion is that grounding the debates in these historical contexts is more promising than beginning from a focus on whether the theoretical disposition of writers is radical or liberal or Marxist (see also Jaggar, 1983: 128).

Still another version of my approach might be generated by considering the relation between market economy, kinship and feminist debates about technology, particularly reproductive technologies (see Minow and Shanley, 1996).

Conclusion

Of course, objections could be raised that feminist thinking is restricted not only by the traditional categories but by the practice of categorisation itself, and that my proposal of alternative tendencies reinforces this practice (See also Jaggar, 1983: 123).

However, classification is not, in itself, always problematic. In the right conditions, classifying kinds of feminist thought can illuminate the choices facing feminist thinkers. By enabling comparisons amongst positions, it can focus our minds on the soundness of premises, the accuracy of diagnoses, the desirability of goals and the plausibility of forms of resistance. The critical use of classification can also help one to situate one’s own opinions in relation to those of others.

It is true that the compartmentalisation of categories and pigeonholing of writers can be a problem. This is why I have presented the feminist responses to the market economy not as discrete or uniform categories, but instead as loose tendencies. Proposing an alternative approach could also help to foster scepticism in the use of categories by disrupting routine application of the usual types.

This is not to deny that the established categories can be useful for particular purposes. For example, they can be helpful in situating feminist theory in relation to traditional political theory. That said, my approach has an advantage over the older one which stems from how it is derived.

Many of the traditional categories of feminist thought have been grafted onto older political theories. Liberal feminism is a feminist development of liberalism; Marxist feminism, a feminist development of Marxism, to take some obvious examples. These categories are theories responding to previous theories. The same is true of existentialist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism and poststructuralist feminism. Moreover, the original formulations of liberal, Marxist, existentialist, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories are often not feminist, and, indeed, some of them begin from sexist assumptions. Feminists who base their thinking on these theories can face some obvious challenges as a result. Moreover, the established categories did not emerge as direct feminist responses to the terms of reality that women around the world face, terms such as gender, kinship, the family, the market and the state. In contrast, the approach taken in this article arises from a direct focus on women’s experience. Derived in this way, this approach is less likely than the established mode of classification to get mired in meta-theoretical questions of limited relevance to women’s actual dilemmas.

But beyond this, because it is derived directly from feminist responses to women’s experiences, the new approach is better suited than the older one to combination with intersectional theories of women’s subjection which emphasise how forms of domination combine to shape lived experience (Crenshaw, 1989: 139–140, 146, 150–152). The feminist commentaries on women and the market economy discussed above venture varied interpretations of how sexism and capitalism interact to shape women’s experience of changing social spheres and domains, as well as of their experiences of social reproduction, nature and political community. Obviously, more work is required to show how these analyses register (or do not register) the ways that other structures of domination, such as imperialism, racism and homophobia, combine with capitalism and sexism to alter women’s experiences in conjunction with these spheres and domains. Intersectional work can reveal how these structures interact to confer multiple social advantages on some women and multiple disadvantages on others. It can also, crucially, show the diverse ways women respond to these situations. In turn, this vital work could contribute to the development of new theories and tendencies.

My objective in this article has not been to sweep away the established categories, but rather to challenge their dominance. They are not the only way of classifying feminist thought. By outlining another way, I have offered an alternative perspective on feminist debates. My hope is to foster a critical approach to the established categories and to encourage the development of new thinking that begins directly from women’s varied situations in the world.