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In 1970, an article titled “L'ennemi principal” (the main enemy) appeared in a special issue of the French journal Partisans devoted to the theme of “Women's liberation.” Signed Christine Delphy, the article took issue with the Marxist conceptualization of women's oppression as the result of capitalism. Like radical feminists across the Atlantic (Millett 1978 [1970]; Firestone 1979 [1970]), and drawing, like them, inspiration from Beauvoir (1949), Delphy framed the social relationship between women and men as one of class struggle, and sexuality and the family as key sites of that struggle (Delphy 1998a, b). Where Delphy's analysis was different, or perhaps went a little further, than some US radical feminist analyses, was in its use of Marxian materialism as a method to “analyze the relationships between the nature of domestic goods and services and the mode of production of those goods and services” (1998a, p. 34, my translation). That relationship of domestic and sexual production/reproduction would subsequently be termed sexage by Colette Guillaumin 2012 [1978]. Guillaumin's term evoked two others: esclavage (slavery) and servage (serfdom) – both of which Delphy had also referred to as a point of comparison with the appropriation of women's domestic labor, as qualitatively different from the appropriation of the labor of waged workers. At the same time, Delphy differentiated – as did Guillaumin – the domestic mode of production from serfdom. Serfs produce labor in exchange for their keep, whereas women, even when they work for a wage outside the home and so technically “keep” themselves, nonetheless continue to supply domestic labor for free, thus taking on a double workload, one remunerated and one not. Moreover, for French materialist feminists, the appropriation of women within the family and sexuality goes beyond the simple appropriation of women's domestic labor, as it extends to those “goods and services” produced by women, including sexual and reproductive services. As such, women's labor within marriage and the family constitutes a specific mode of production (Delphy 1998a; Guillaumin 1992).

In a later essay “Pour un féminisme matérialiste” (for a materialist feminism) first published in the journal L'Arc in 1975, Christine Delphy argued that Marxian materialism, based on analysis of class struggle, was traversed by a profound contradiction in that it excluded women as a category of sociopolitical analysis. Marx, and Marxist theorists, either completely ignored women's existence or relegated anything to do with women to the realm of the objectively unknowable: the private, the subjective, the emotional, the sexual – and most especially the “natural” – in which “women” were objects rather than subjects of history and class struggle. Yet the revolt of women showed that the situation of women was not natural or inevitable in some biological sense, but socially constructed and thus resistible.

For Delphy, feminist theory necessarily takes as its starting point that resistance by women. For “the class of the proletariat is not the result of Marxist theory of capital; on the contrary, it is Marxist theory of capital that is founded on the necessary premise of the oppression of the proletariat” (1998a, p. 281, my translation). Similarly, women's resistance is not the result of feminist theory but its initiator. In other words, the epistemological starting point for any analysis of oppression is the situation, and struggles, of the oppressed. In this, Delphy is perhaps closer to Lukács 2000 [1923] than to Marx, and to all the standpoint epistemologies than have developed since Lukács, from Césaire (1950) to Sandoval (2000).

A system of knowledge production that takes as its starting point the oppression of women thus “constitutes an epistemological revolution” (Delphy 1998a, p. 277). It challenges not only the pretentions to neutrality of masculinist knowledge, but also the often elitist production of “theory” and the technocratic and often arbitrary division of knowledge into discrete “disciplines,” each with its own jealously‐guarded spheres of theory and content. Delphy characterized this separation and intellectual border‐policing as an essentially anti‐materialist strategy of compartmentalization and obfuscation, in that it masks the totality and coherency of systems of oppression and, moreover, removes theorization from its grounding in the lived experience of social relations. She directed the main thrust of this criticism toward psychology and psychoanalysis, by which many French Marxist theorists were attracted and via which they sought to explain the relationship between men and women and reconcile the “subjectivity/affect/sexuality” trio with Marxist materialism. This “Freudo‐Marxism” was popularized in France through the writings of such theorists as Jacques Lacan (1966) and Louis Althusser 1976 [1970]. According to Delphy, the attempt at reconciliation was a failure, due to the “exorbitant pretention” of psychoanalysis to be more than a theory of interpretation of subjectivity, but subjectivity itself, thus positioning psychoanalytic theorists as the only ones qualified to discuss it (Delphy 1998a, p. 279). Accepting this pretention meant accepting the entry of the enemy, “idealism” (understood in a Marxian sense – see below), into historical materialism.

For Delphy, feminist theory, in that it seeks to explain and combat oppression, must also, to be coherent, be a theory of history, given that the relationship of male domination of women has been constituted socially, thus, by definition, historically (Delphy 1998a, pp. 271–4):

A feminist interpretation of history is thus “materialist” in a broad sense, that is, its premises lead it to consider intellectual production as the product of social relationships, and to consider the latter as relationships of domination.

(Delphy 1998a, p. 274, my translation)

French materialist feminism is thus a radical departure from Marxist analysis even as it remains grounded in historical materialism, as well as a refusal of the then fashionable recourse to psychoanalysis as a way of dealing with what Marxist scholars understood as “subjectivity” (women remained relegated to this latter domain). Within the French feminist movement, the divergence between materialist feminists (also known as revolutionary feminists, and later, due to transatlantic influence, radical feminists) and Marxist feminists (féministes lutte de classes, who by and large were not tempted by Freudo‐Marxism either) was as strong as that between radical feminists and socialist feminists in the UK and the US.

French materialist feminists similarly rejected biological essentialism, just as Beauvoir, from whom they drew such inspiration, had famously done in 1949: “on ne naît pas femme, on le devient” (one is not born, but rather becomes, Woman) (Beauvoir 1949, Vol. I, p. 285). That is, “becoming woman” is a process of socialization that is at once material and ideological: there is no “feminine nature” or “essence” that is not the product of social relations. I note in passing that this celebrated sentence of Beauvoir's is one of her most mistranslated and misinterpreted (see Winter 1999). The import of the original sentence is that “one is not born this thing called Woman, one becomes this thing through socialization,” and that meaning is made very clear in the chapter in which it appears (“Childhood”), the first of the final section of Volume I, titled “Education/Training” (Formation). Radical lesbian theorist Monique Wittig – whose work, like that of other radical lesbians such as Colette Guillaumin, is grounded in French materialist feminism – was later to extrapolate that analysis to argue that because lesbians refuse to “become woman” within the system of heterosexuality, they can be said in fact not to be “women” in that Beauvoirian sense, “not economically, nor politically, nor ideologically. For in fact what makes a woman is a particular social relation to a man” (Wittig 2001 [1980], p. 63: my translation).

Delphy and other materialist feminists, and later, radical lesbians, thus took strong exception to the tendency in France known as “Psychanalyse et politique” (or Psyképo), which drew heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis and produced a strongly biologizing framing of women within social relations. Delphy also famously criticized Annie LeClerc's book Parole de femme (1974) for its celebrating of women's biology and femininity (Delphy 1998c [1976]; see also Jackson 1996, 42 ff). This sort of celebration of women's “difference” through countervalorizing of constructions of femininity that are usually deployed to keep women down was comparable to the “compensatory sur‐evaluation” of racialized groups, using similar strategies, as famously discussed by Colette Guillaumin (1972).