Lise Vogel

Western Marxist theorists 1938–

American Marxist feminist whose Marxism and the Oppression of Women laid the foundations of social reproduction theory

In Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (1983) she criticised dual-systems theory and rooted women's oppression in women's differential location within social reproduction as a whole.

An American sociologist and art historian, born in New York City; her father, Sidney Vogel, was a doctor who volunteered for the Spanish Republic in the Civil War. After Radcliffe College, while a doctoral student in art history at Harvard she worked with SNCC in Mississippi in 1964–1965, and in the late 1960s sided with the socialist-feminist wing of the women's liberation movement and joined Bread & Roses in Boston. She took her art-history PhD in 1968 and taught feminist art history at Brown, then took a second doctorate in sociology and published Marxism and the Oppression of Women in 1983. By situating women's oppression and domestic labour within Marx's account of simple reproduction in Capital, the book laid the foundations of what later came to be called social reproduction theory. She taught sociology at Rider University until 2003.