This book, written by a Marxist feminist who has been actively involved in the socialist and women’s movements since the 1970’s, is a collection of articles written from the mid-1980’s to 2000. It thus spans a period during which socialist-feminist associations gradually lost organizational strength, and Marxism lost the widespread intellectual influence it had had during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Feminist thinking also branched out in different directions from the triad of liberal-radical-socialist feminism. In fact this was a time of extraordinary social, economic and political change in Europe and North America, but feminist movements and feminist ideas had made a permanent impact. Johanna Brenner’s book outlines for us how feminist politics and feminist theorizing engaged with a resurgence of right-wing politics and changes in state policy on welfare and other issues concerning women, while arguing that socialist feminism still remains relevant.
In the first chapter, “Towards a Historical Sociology of Gender”(1984), Brenner talks of Marxist-feminism’s theoretical impasse: how to combine the Marxist understanding of capitalist relations of production in the workplace with feminist analyses of patriarchal domination over women in the household? She rejects the dualist approach of those who see capitalism