Radical feminism

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that advocates for a radical response to patriarchy and male supremacy, primarily relying on understanding material and social struggles that define a woman's political-economic conditions. The ideology and movement originates in the 1960s with what the 'original' radical feminists would call the Women's Liberation Movement, a movement of broad feminists which questioned the legal validity of patriarchy and even the social and economic background behind gendered oppression.

The radical feminist movement, while encompassing a range of perspectives, included tendencies that adopted dialectical materialism and revolutionary politics with the aim of developing feminism into a more systematic and historically grounded theoretical framework. Among the tendencies of radical feminism, a unifying characteristic was a shared opposition to liberal feminism, particularly its emphasis on reforming existing patriarchal structures rather than dismantling them. While no formal splits or declarations of theoretical divergence exist — aside from broader cultural and political disputes, such as those surrounding trans inclusion — materialist feminism have consistently distinguished themselves from more idealist strands of radical feminism, such as those associated with thinkers like Mary Daly through rigorous dialectical theory.

Cultural feminism remains distinctly separate from the materialist tradition of radical feminism as it splits heavily from the Marxist framework overall, as they view the battle against patriarchy as a spiritual battle.

The History of Radical Feminism

Radical feminism emerged prominently in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a necessary challenge to the limits of liberal feminism, which sought legal equality within capitalist frameworks without addressing the underlying structures of women’s oppression. Radical feminists argued that patriarchy was a material system embedded within social and economic relations, requiring revolutionary transformation.

Materialist and Marxist-feminism distinguishes itself by grounding women’s oppression as inseparable from class relations and class struggle, unlike cultural radical feminism, which often emphasized spiritual or cultural separatism. This materialist approach foregrounds the role of unpaid domestic labor, reproductive labor, and the sexual division of labor in sustaining capitalist exploitation.

However, the rise of feminist critiques within the left was met with significant resistance, particularly from many Western Marxist and socialist organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist demands were frequently dismissed as “petty-bourgeois” distractions from the “real” class struggle. For example, sections of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) often downplayed or outright rejected feminist organizing, arguing that gender oppression was secondary to class contradictions and that feminism threatened proletarian unity.

Similarly, many Trotskyist groups, such as factions of the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party in the UK and US, resisted autonomous feminist organizing, viewing identity-based politics as divisive.

This backlash was not limited to rhetorical opposition. In practice, women activists faced marginalization within party structures and were often discouraged from raising feminist issues as independent concerns.

The New Communist Movement in the United States, which sought to rebuild Marxist-Leninist parties in the 1970s, exhibited ambivalence toward feminism, with many cadres perceiving it as a bourgeois ideology incompatible with proletarian revolution.

Academic Marxist feminists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici critiqued these tendencies, emphasizing that ignoring gender oppression undermines revolutionary struggle itself.

A citation from Mariarosa Costa's The Power of Women

The failure to integrate feminist analysis into Marxist praxis delayed the development of a comprehensive approach to class and gender oppression.

Despite this resistance, materialist feminism continued to grow, deeply influencing revolutionary movements internationally and shaping Marxist-Leninist-Maoist understandings of the “woman question” as inseparable from the fight against capitalism and imperialism.