Dual-Systems Theory

Dual-systems theory grew out of 1970s socialist feminism’s attempts to combine Marxism and feminism. Its premise was that Marxism could explain class exploitation but not women’s oppression, so a feminist theory of patriarchal oppression had to be added to it. As Lise Vogel sums it up, most socialist feminists thereby adopted a view of two parallel, autonomous structures of oppression, patriarchy and capitalism. Theorists paired capitalism and patriarchy, mode of production and mode of reproduction, class system and gender system, to analyse women’s oppression.

The classic text of this view is Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union”, published in Capital & Class in 1979; earlier drafts of 1975 and 1977 were co-written with Amy Bridges. Hartmann compared the “marriage” of the two theories to husband and wife in English common law: “marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism”. She held that Marxist categories such as class, reserve army of labour and wage-labourer are “sex-blind” and cannot explain who fills which place, and defined patriarchy as a set of social relations between men with a material base. Our society, she wrote, is organised both in capitalist and in patriarchal ways, and a “partnership” of patriarchy and capital has evolved; yet that partnership was not inevitable, since men and capitalists often had conflicting interests over the use of women’s labour power. Her political conclusion was that women must have their own organisations and their own power base.

The name “dual systems theory” came from critics, not from Hartmann. In “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory” (Socialist Review 50–51, 1980) Iris Young observed that these theories locate the roots of women’s oppression in two distinct and relatively independent systems. Young argued that dual-systems theory added a theory of gender relations without fundamentally changing the Marxist theory of economic and social relations; she also contributed “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory” to Women and Revolution (1981), Lydia Sargent’s collection of Hartmann’s paper and responses to it. Lise Vogel acknowledged taking the term from Young.

In Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (1983) Vogel identified two legacies coexisting in the socialist tradition, the dual-systems perspective and the social-reproduction perspective. The dual-systems perspective derives women’s oppression from their situation within an autonomous system of sex divisions of labour and male supremacy, and treats class and gender as two autonomous structures. In Vogel’s account it asserts an “inseparable relationship” between sex and class but never specifies the nature of that relationship. Her answer was that no new synthesis of socialism and feminism was needed: Marxist theory itself had to be developed and socialist practice transformed. The content of that unitary theory belongs to social reproduction theory.

The debate over dual-systems theory was less about whether to reduce women’s oppression to class than about where to locate the relation between two oppressions. Hartmann granted that the same sexual division of labour reinforces both patriarchy and capitalism, making the mechanisms of patriarchy hard to isolate in a deeply capitalist and patriarchal society, and insisted that this must nevertheless be done; her critics held that this very separation left the relation between the two systems unexplained.