To this extent, it can be used by feminism. “Marxism is, by all the evidence, materialist. I aim not only to give Delphy's work the benefit of a sympathetic reading but also to demonstrate how such a reading participates in contesting two of the narratives that Clare Hemmings has identified as reducing the “feminist seventies” to “seventies feminism.” Delphy's constructivist materialist conceptualization of gender belies efforts to contrast the (essentialist) seventies with the (constructivist) nineties-efforts that mark the latter as theoretically and politically superior.DECADES AGO, Simone de Beauvoir described Christine Delphy as “France’s most exciting feminist writer.” Delphy, a French sociologist and theorist, cofounded the “Mouvement de Libération des Femmes” (the women’s liberation movement) in the 1970s and later joined forces with de Beauvoir to publish Nouvelles Questions Feministes (New Feminist Issues ), a review that explores the social construct of gender and materialist feminism, a concept Delphy pioneered based on Marxism.ĭelphy is a prolific writer whose work centers on the domestic economy and the oppression of women, rooted not in capitalism but the patriarchy. This essay undertakes a close reading of Delphy's writings on gender together with her earlier work on women as social class to elaborate what I term her constructivist materialism: a materialist analysis of gender hierarchy premised on the conviction that sex difference is not the foundation of gender but is, rather, its effect. This essay revisits the work of Christine Delphy, a leading activist in the women's liberation movement in France and a leading materialist feminist theorist whom many US feminist scholars have written off as a “seventies feminist”: she not only published one of her most-read pieces in the 1970s but is also judged to typify that period by virtue of her (in)famous conceptualization of women as a class.
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