Tithi Bhattacharya

Feminism United States India 1971–

Indian-born American historian who edited Social Reproduction Theory and co-wrote Feminism for the 99%

In 2017, with Angela Davis, Nancy Fraser and others, she called for an International Women's Strike on 8 March under the banner of a feminism for the 99% rather than "lean-in" feminism and became one of its national organisers; that year she also edited Social Reproduction Theory.

An Indian-born historian and Marxist feminist working in the United States. She took her PhD at the University of London in 2000 and is professor of South Asian history at Purdue University. Her first book, The Sentinels of Culture (2005), studies the British-educated middle class of nineteenth-century Kolkata. In 2015 she applied for US citizenship, citing the stress of visa applications and the election of Narendra Modi. In 2017 she edited Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression and was one of the national organisers of the International Women's Strike of 8 March. In 2019 she co-wrote Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto with Cinzia Arruzza and Nancy Fraser. She writes on the politics of Islamophobia and advocates Palestinian rights and BDS.

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

How did social reproduction theory become a feminism for the 99%?

Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, which Bhattacharya edited for Pluto Press in 2017, gathers the line of thought running from the domestic labour debate of the 1970s and Lise Vogel. Social reproduction means all the activity that makes workers again, day by day and from one generation to the next. Feeding, raising children, caring for the sick and teaching, whether as unpaid work at home or as waged work in hospitals and schools: without it there is no one to work. As the book's description puts it, while many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.

The subtitle sums up the point. "Remapping class" means not seeing the working class only as wage earners at the workplace but redrawing the map of class to include the people and places that feed, raise and care for those workers. "Recentering oppression" means not treating oppressions such as sexism and racism as add-ons to the class question but explaining them from the centre of how capitalism reproduces labour power. The English Wikipedia describes the book as having advanced social reproduction theory, a Marxist feminist theory that analyses the role of women's labour under capitalism, and describes Bhattacharya as a researcher "operating on the cutting edge of recent work on social reproduction theory".

The same year the theory went into the streets. On 6 February 2017 Bhattacharya, with Angela Davis, Nancy Fraser, Cinzia Arruzza and others, published a call in The Guardian. "Lean-in" feminism, which puts forward the advancement of a successful few, would not defeat the Trump administration, they wrote, but a mobilisation of the 99% would; joining feminist groups from around thirty countries, they proposed an international strike on 8 March against male violence and in defence of reproductive rights. The women's strike in Poland against the abortion ban and the women's movement in Argentina were their models. Bhattacharya was one of the national organisers of the strike.

This current was set down in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, which she wrote with Arruzza and Fraser in 2019. The manifesto ties feminism to other struggles, including anti-racism and anti-capitalism, and according to Purdue it has been translated into more than thirty languages. A Korean edition appeared in 2020.