Evolution of Feminist Theory: From Radical and Marxist Feminism to Global Perspectives

Feminist theory did not begin with a single idea about why women occupy a lower social position. It grew out of arguments between anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and Marxist economists who each traced the roots of gender inequality to a different source. Some looked at biology and desire, others at kinship rules, and still others at property and capital. Tracing this evolution from radical feminism’s early debates with Freud to Marxist feminism’s later reckoning with race and colonization shows how feminist thought became less about a single universal explanation and more about layered, context-specific ones.

Radical feminism and the question of universal male domination 🔗

Early radical feminists argued that male domination was not accidental or culturally specific. They believed it was universal, present in some form across nearly every known society, and they looked to biology and heterosexuality as its foundation. This led many radical feminist theorists to engage closely with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, since Freud offered one of the most influential accounts of how gender difference gets built into the human psyche.

Freud’s theory rested on ideas like penis envy and castration anxiety, which framed female development as a reaction to lacking the male organ. Radical feminists pushed back hard on this framing. They argued that defining women primarily through absence or lack made femininity look like an incomplete or deficient version of masculinity, rather than a distinct identity in its own right. This critique became a launching point for feminist engagement with psychoanalysis more broadly, since Freud’s model implied that female subordination was rooted in anatomy rather than social arrangement.

Malinowski and the challenge from matrilineal societies 🔗

One of the most direct anthropological challenges to Freud came from Bronisław Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. Freud had assumed that his Oedipus complex, where a boy resents his father as a rival for his mother’s affection, was a universal feature of human psychology. Malinowski’s research complicated that claim. In Trobriand society, descent and authority passed through the mother’s line, so a boy’s disciplinarian was his mother’s brother rather than his father, while his own father remained an affectionate, non-authoritarian figure.

This meant the tension Freud considered inevitable, hostility toward the father, simply did not show up in the way he predicted. Instead, boys directed their resentment toward their maternal uncle, and their incestuous desire was theorised to shift toward the sister rather than the mother. Malinowski used this to argue that family structure, not universal biology, shaped the child’s psychological conflicts. Freudian psychoanalysts like Ernest Jones disagreed, arguing the Oedipal pattern was simply displaced rather than erased. That debate has never fully settled, but it firmly established that kinship structure could reshape, or at least redirect, psychological development that Freud had treated as fixed.

Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and gender as a system of exchange 🔗

If Malinowski challenged Freud with ethnographic data, Jacques Lacan reworked Freud through language and symbolism. Lacan replaced Freud’s literal penis with the phallus, a symbolic marker rather than an anatomical one.

The phallus as a symbol, not an organ 🔗

For Lacan, the phallus represented masculine social privilege, authority, and status within the social order, not the male body part itself. This distinction mattered enormously for feminist theorists, because it reframed male dominance as something constructed through language and social meaning rather than something inevitably tied to biology. Lacan described the phallus as a privileged signifier within the unconscious, a stand-in for power that no individual man or woman could ever fully embody. Some feminist scholars found this reframing useful because it opened space to question and even destabilise male privilege as a cultural construct rather than a biological fact. Others argued it still centred masculinity as the reference point for the entire theory, which limited how far it could go as a tool for liberation.

Lévi-Strauss and women as objects of exchange 🔗

Around the same period, the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss offered a different but related theory. He argued that kinship systems were built on the exchange of women between groups of men, with the incest taboo functioning as the mechanism that forced this exchange to happen outside one’s immediate family. In his framework, women were treated as what he famously called the ultimate gift, exchanged to build alliances between men rather than participating as partners in those alliances themselves.

The anthropologist Gayle Rubin took this theory and pushed it toward an explicit feminist critique. She argued that the “exchange of women” placed women’s oppression within social systems rather than biology, which was a genuinely useful shift. But Rubin also pointed out a problem: not every society organises marriage this rigidly. Simpler, more egalitarian societies with less formal kinship structuring did not always follow Lévi-Strauss’s exchange model in the strict way he proposed. This variation across cultures suggested that treating the exchange of women as a universal, unchanging law of human society overstated the case, and that kinship arrangements were far more historically and culturally specific than Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist model allowed for.

Marxist feminism and the making of capitalist patriarchy 🔗

While radical feminists focused on biology, psychology, and symbolic systems, Marxist feminists took a different route. Following Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, they argued that women’s subordination was tied directly to the emergence of private property and class society, not to some timeless feature of human nature.

Property, equality, and the myth of timeless patriarchy 🔗

The anthropologist Eleanor Leacock built on this Marxist foundation through her fieldwork among the Montagnais-Naskapi people of Canada. She found that in societies without concentrated private property, gender relations tended to be far more egalitarian, with men and women sharing authority and labour rather than one dominating the other. This suggested that patriarchal hierarchy was not a fixed feature of human societies, but something that intensified alongside private ownership, inheritance, and accumulated wealth.

Colonization as a vehicle for imposing patriarchy 🔗

Leacock’s work with fellow anthropologist Mona Etienne extended this argument into the history of colonization. Their research showed that European colonial administrators and Christian missionaries actively reorganised gender relations in the societies they came into contact with. Etienne and Leacock documented case studies of resistance to these patriarchal impositions across colonised societies in Africa and the Americas, where women had previously held land rights, public authority, or economic autonomy that colonial rule steadily eroded.

What makes this history significant is the ideological packaging around it. European powers frequently justified imposing male-headed family structures and formal marriage norms as part of a broader civilizing mission, treating indigenous gender arrangements as backward rather than simply different. Patriarchy, in this reading, was not something colonised societies had always possessed. It was, in many documented cases, something introduced or intensified through conquest and conversion.

Domestic labor and women as the reserve army of labour 🔗

Marxist feminism also turned its attention to something classical Marxism had largely ignored: unpaid domestic work. The economist Margaret Benston argued that women’s role as unpaid reproducers of labor power, cooking, cleaning, childcare, and emotional maintenance of the household, was economically essential to capitalism even though it generated no wage and no visible profit.

Benston described women as forming a reserve army of labour. Her analysis pointed to how women could be pulled into wage work when labor was scarce and pushed back into the home when it was not, absorbing the fluctuations of the capitalist economy without permanent job security or wage recognition. This pattern is visible in India’s own informal sector, where a large share of women’s labor, from home-based piecework to informal domestic service, keeps costs low for the formal economy while remaining statistically undercounted and legally under-protected. This shadow economy quietly subsidises capitalism precisely because it stays invisible in official productivity measures.

Race, class, and the limits of a single-lens feminism 🔗

By the period following the Second World War, it became increasingly clear that gender alone could not explain how differently people experienced capitalism and patriarchy. Race and class shaped women’s lives in ways that a purely gender-based analysis missed entirely.

Black feminist thought and community-centred identity 🔗

Scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and Elsa Barkley Brown examined how African American women’s experiences diverged sharply from the priorities of white, middle-class feminist movements. Collins developed what became known as an intersectional approach, rejecting the idea that oppression could be ranked into a single hierarchy with race above gender or class above both. Her analysis showed that oppression operates simultaneously across political, economic, and ideological spheres, meaning race, gender, and class could not be studied as separate, stackable categories.

This mattered concretely. Where many white middle-class feminists sought liberation from men and from domestic confinement, African American women, as Collins and Brown’s work showed, were often more focused on securing an intact family life, protection from sexual exploitation, and community solidarity as sources of dignity and self-definition. Family and community were not sites of confinement to escape from; they were spaces of identity and resistance in the face of racial oppression. This divergence exposed how a feminism built around one group’s specific historical experience could not simply be generalised to all women, no matter how universal it claimed to be.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Do you find the psychoanalytic explanations from Freud and Lacan still useful for understanding gender today, or do the anthropological and Marxist critiques make a stronger case? And looking at India’s own informal economy, do you see Benston’s idea of women as a “reserve army of labour” still playing out in visible ways around you?

References

1. https://www.simplypsychology.org/oedipal-complex.html
2. https://nosubject.com/The_Signification_of_the_Phallus
3. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/150945/24-201-spring-2016/contents/readings/MIT24_201S16_Gayle_Notes.pdf
4. https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/legacies-and-genealogies-in-feminist-anthropology/eleanor-burke-leacock-and-historical-transformations-of-gender-beyond-timeless-patriarchy/
5. https://monthlyreview.org/articles/on-margaret-benston/
6. https://www.asanet.org/patricia-hill-collins/