“Be sure to send me the equivalent of my cloth in silver so that I can buy barley.” A woman in Assur to her husband in a distant trading colony, about 1900 BCE. “You are perpetually pressing oil, grinding barley,… Continue Reading
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were champions of women’s liberation, both in theory and in practice, in public and in private.1 Important work has already been published exploring both Marx’s and Engels’s writings about women and the family, and developing… Continue Reading
A review of Heather A Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Brill, 2012/Haymarket, 2013), £85.29/£19.99 Heather Brown has written an important study of Marx’s writings on women’s oppression.1 She situates her book in the current… Continue Reading
A review of Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Haymarket, 2014), £19.99 Growing anger and activism around the issue of women’s oppression have seen the return of many arguments from the 1970s and 1980s… Continue Reading
I want to respond to a claim Sheila McGregor has made in two recent articles concerning the history of sexuality.1 Since the 19th century Marxists have argued that the development of human society began with a long period of “primitive… Continue Reading
We live in contradictory times: they reflect how much in society in relation to women has changed, but also how much appears to have stayed the same. Women make up almost half the workforce and just over half of trade… Continue Reading
According to Sir Stuart Rose, the outgoing executive chairman of Marks and Spencer, women (or “girls” as he puts it) “have never had it so good”: Apart from the fact that you’ve got more equality than you can ever deal… Continue Reading