Gender, Marxist Theories of

Abstract

Marxist theories of gender are fundamentally concerned with analyzing the relation between class exploitation and gender inequality. Women's oppression is regarded as the product of the economic, political, and social structures of capitalism. For Karl Marx, power in capitalist societies derives from the division of labor in production, giving rise to the fundamental class division between the owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and the non owners (the proletariat) who sell their labor power. A key term in explaining this relation is exploitation, meaning the appropriation by non producers (the bourgeoisie under capitalism) of a portion of the product of the direct producers (the proletariat under capitalism). Marxist anthropology has applied the concept of exploitation to social relations in non capitalist societies and, following Friedrich Engels, Marxist-feminist anthropologists have linked the oppression of women to production relations in which men exploit the labor of women.