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Materialist feminism emerged as a concept early in the so‐called “second‐wave” period in the West. It examined gender as a materially and historically constructed relationship of domination and women as a social group constituted through that relationship. Although it came from a Marxian basis of historical materialism, materialist feminism departed from Marxism in significant ways. At the same time, materialist feminists chose the term “materialist” in preference to “Marxist” because of the failure of Marxist analysis to account for and address the sexual division of labor, and indeed the division of society as a whole into two gendered groups that Simone de Beauvoir (1949), and Christine Delphy after her, had likened to “castes.” (Delphy, other French materialist feminists, as well as Anglo‐world radical feminists, subsequently used the term “class.”)

Feminists in many contexts outside the Western world also both drew inspiration from Marxism and critiqued it during roughly the same period, but in quite different contexts: notably those of decolonization and postcoloniality and/or emergence from dictatorships (this last also being the case in the West, for example, in Portugal, Spain, and Greece). However, it was in the Anglophone and Francophone West that the term “materialist feminism” was coined and the theories it denoted were developed. This chapter, then, will focus on those specific Western developments – not because feminist activism and theories outside the West (and indeed outside the Anglo world) are not important, but because their political and theoretical foundations are grounded in specific geohistorical contexts and as such present original theoretical elements and nomenclature not found within Western materialist feminisms. These non‐Western feminist theorizations thus merit their own detailed treatments, with attention to the vast diversity of historical, geopolitical, and cultural specificities of context that impacted on how the theories developed.

The first feminist analysis that openly termed itself “materialist” was that of sociologist Christine Delphy in France. Later in the 1970s, the term was popularized across the Channel by, among others, British feminist sociologists Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe, and social and cultural theorist Michèle Barrett (the last of whom famously took issue with Delphy's understanding of “materialist feminism,” as discussed in this chapter). It then crossed the Atlantic to be further investigated by literary and cultural studies scholar Rosemary Hennessy and sociologist Chrys Ingraham. Hennessy and Ingraham reinvigorated the term in the 1990s as a critical response both to the “postmodern avant‐garde” (Hennessy 1993, p. xii) and to intersectional considerations (Crenshaw 1989, 1991, although Hennessy and Ingraham do not use Crenshaw's term). They identified a new direction of materialist feminism that problematized the category “woman,” exploring “how ‘woman’ as a discursive category is historically constructed and traversed by more than one differential axis” (Hennessy 1993, p. xii).

In a 1997 anthology, titled Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives, Hennessy and Ingraham grouped a number of different, even disparate, feminist texts under the umbrella “materialist feminism,” their commonality being their attachment to historical materialism as a method of analysis, or at least their explicit opposition to capitalism (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997a). The texts had first been published in France, the UK or North America, between 1969 and 1995. In compiling the anthology, Hennessy and Ingraham gave themselves the brief of responding to the challenges posed by women of color and lesbians (in particular) in raising issues of difference among women. At the same time, they wished to address the postmodern fragmentation of feminism, in particular the privileging of discourse and individual identity politics at the expense, it seemed, of analysis of the material conditions in which women lived, in a context of global consolidation of capitalist power.

This anthology, and Hennessy's (1993) work Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, notwithstanding their attention to debates within feminism at that time, nonetheless create an impression of an organic transnational development of a “materialist feminism” that, despite its geohistorical spread and its venturing into new areas, supposedly came from a relatively homogenous analytical and political core.

In this chapter, we will see that the story of “materialist feminism” is far less straightforward. It presents significant historical and geographical variations, and not all those dubbed “materialist feminists” by Hennessy and Ingraham may themselves identify as such, or not in the same way. French materialist feminists, for example, were much closer in their analysis and politics to radical feminists of the Anglo world than they were to most Anglo‐world self‐identified materialist feminists.

This chapter, then, will explore the historical and sometimes parallel, sometimes distinct, and sometimes conflictual development of these three distinct understandings of materialist feminism: first, that developed by Christine Delphy and subsequently others in France in the 1970s (“French materialist feminism”); second, that developed in the UK by Kuhn and others (“British materialist feminism”); and third, the later use of the term by Hennessy and Ingraham to reconcile Marxian materialist analysis with intersectional considerations and to respond to the challenge of postmodernism (“US materialist feminism”).

Although all these groups of materialist feminists positioned themselves quite explicitly in relation to Marxism, and adapted Marx's historical materialism to explain male domination as grounded in material relations, they differed both from Marxist feminism and from each other in their analysis. Common to all strands, however, was the premise that gender is not natural or presocial but socially constructed through history as a material power relation. Materialist feminisms differ from postmodernism or Butlerian social‐constructionism (Butler 1990) – which also interrogate gender as open to change – in that they foreground the material (social, economic), structural, and ideological rather than (only) discursive or cultural underpinnings of these social relations. Indeed, their focus is more firmly on the social and economic relations than on individual positionalities, although US materialist feminism arguably attaches more attention to the latter, as do US social sciences, and US feminism, more generally (see also my discussion of Carol Stabile's work below).

Before proceeding, I should make clear my use of the terms “Marxian” and “Marxist.” I use the former term to refer to theories and interpretations of societies and politics that are grounded in or strongly influenced by either Marx's historical materialism or his theory of capital and the relations of production. The latter term refers either to intellectuals who self‐identify as such, or, more explicitly, to Marx‐inspired political movements, whether aligned with Communism (which in the 1970s and 1980s was far more mainstream in France than in the Anglo world) or with extreme‐left groups (such as Trotskyists or Maoists). As for the terms “Marxist feminist” and “socialist feminist,” these terms have often been used interchangeably, although the distinction is ostensibly that Marxist feminists have prioritized class and capitalist relations, while socialist feminists incorporated some radical feminist analyses of patriarchy, developing a “dual systems” theory whereby capitalism and patriarchy represented two systems of oppression that co‐existed and interacted. Further distinctions exist outside the Anglo world, for example in Continental Western Europe, where Marxist party politics have been more influential, and so the distinction between “Marxist feminist” (or in France, féministes lutte de classes: class‐struggle feminists) and “socialist feminist” more closely resembles the distinction between Anglo‐world “socialist feminists” and “(liberal) social democrats.” (For more on the Anglo‐world history of “Marxist” versus “socialist” feminism see Ehrenreich 1997 [1976]; Hartmann 1979.)

One more important comment to make before proceeding is to dispel the occasional confusion, particularly in the US, between materialist feminism and “material feminism,” as developed by Karen Barad in the late 2000s. Barad's material feminism revolves around concepts such as “agential realism” and “onto‐epistemology” and draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and quantum physics (Barad 2007). It has no genealogical link with materialist feminism, but rather with poststructuralism, and will not be a focus of this chapter.