8 Feminism and MarxisN he Problem of Marxism and Feminism raising groups, which were common in the United States in the of their class. Aside from the few who have taken jobs or professions 97os, the impact of male dominance was concretely uncovered and nalyzed rhrough the collective speaking of women's experience from the bourgeoisie do not take part in social procuction. They are nothing Inets uf the surpass pmi t riir men exert fru pe ctive ot that cx Because marxists icmcI (utilIT proletariat. They are parasites tt the Ixtrisites of the su ial body of powerlessness, first and last, as concrete and externally imposed they believe that it must be concretely and externally undone co be Luxernburg's sympathies lay with " proletarian women, "who derive hanged. Through consciousness raising taken more broadly, women's their right to vote from being"productive for society like the men. G werlessness was found to be both externally imposed and deeply er blind spot to gender occupied the same place in her perspective internalized. For example, femininity is women's identity to women as hat Mill's blind spot to class did in his. Mill defended women's rell as women's desirability to men-indeed, it becomes identity to uffrage on gender grounds with a logic that excluded working-class omen because it is imposed through men's standards for desirability women:Luxemburg defended wome women s suffrage on class grounds women.From this practical analytic, a distinctly feminist conce although the vote would have benefited women without regard to of consciousness and its place in social order and change has emerged It does not substitute one set of professed ideas for another and declare Women as women, women unmodified by class distinctions and hange, in the mode of liberal idealism. Nevertheless, what marxism part from nature, were simply unthinkable to Mill, as to mos conceives as change in consciousness is not, within marxism, a form of beals, and to Luxemburg, as to most marxists. Feminist theory asks social change in itself. For feminism, it can be, but this is because marxism: what is class for women? Luxemburg, again like Mill with womens oppression is not just in the head, so feminist consciousness in her own frame of reference, subliminally recognized that wo is not just in the head either. But to the materially deprived, the pain men derive their class position from their personal alliances with men isolation, and thingification of women who have been pampered and This may help explain why women do not unite against male domin- pacified into nonpersonhood is difficult to swallow as a form of ance, but it does not explain that dominance which cuts across class oppression. As a result, changing it is difficult to see as a form of lines even as it takes some forms peculiar to classes. What distinguis aberation in any but the most reduced sense. This model is particularly es the bourgeois woman from her domestic servant is that the latter difficult to swallow for women who will never carry a briefcase and is paid (if barely), while the former is kept (if contingently).Is whom no man has ever put on a pedestal this a difference in social productivity or only in its measures,mea- Marxism, similarly, has not been just misunderstood. Marxist sures that themselves may be products of womens undervalued statu theory has traditionally attempted to comprehend all meaningful The tasks the women perform and their availability for sexual social variance in class terms. In this respect, sex parallels race and access and reproductive use are strikingly similar. Luxemburg saw the nation as an undigested but persistently salient challenge to the bourgeois woman of her time as a"parasite of a parasite"but faile exclusivity or even the primacy of class as social explanation. Marxists to consider her possible commonality with the proletarian woman who typically extend class to cover women, a division and submersion that inadequate to womens d common experience. For example, in 1912 Rosa Luxemburg addressee is the slave of a slave. In the case of bourgeois women, to lim a limit this analysis to their relations to capitalism through men is to a group of women on the issue of suffrage see only its vicarious aspect. To fail to do this in the case of proletarian en is to miss its vicarious aspect. In both cases, to define wo- Most of these omen who act like lionesses in the str men's status solely in class terms is entirely to miss their status as wo- against"male would trot like docile lambs in the men defined through relations with men, which is a defining relational action if they had the suffrage. Indeed status they share even though the men through whom they acquire hey would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part differ