Socialist and Marxist feminism (some see them as two distinct approaches, but here we will look at both) unites ideas of capitalist oppression from Marxism and the concept of patriarchy from feminism.

French sociologist Christine Delphy believes that marriage is still a structurally unequal relationship, because the opportunities for women in the public sphere are fewer (especially in the sphere of work), while the gender division of work is still maintained within the domestic sphere. In her opinion, there are two main ways of production in modern society. The industrial type of production is based on capitalist ownership and exploitation, and the patriarchal mode of production is defined by patriarchal exploitation. In this sense, she views marriage as an institution based on the male appropriation of female labor. Both modes of production are autonomous and separate. The patriarchal mode of production leads to the fact that women belong to a single class, so the status of every woman is independent of the status and wealth of her husband. The patriarchal way of production implies that the man, as the head of the house, appropriates the free work of the woman and other subordinates of the household. Women do the vast majority of all household chores, take care of children and the elderly, and also perform emotional, reproductive, and sexual roles. In addition to control over work, men have complete control over property, money distribution, and consumption. Women, even when working, perform all domestic roles, while still having no control over the property. All women are united by common oppression by men.

British feminist theorist and historian Sheila Rowbotham used Marxist feminism as a theoretical basis for her socio-historical research. Rowbotham was influenced by Marxist social historians Edward Thompson and Dorothy Thompson. Rowbotham believes that capitalism produces double oppression and exploitation of women. Women are capitalistically exploited in the workplace, and in addition, they are exploited in the household. She is critical of classical Marxism because it neglects the oppression and exploitation of women. In the book Women's Consciousness, Men's World (1973b), Rowbotham states that women's domestic work is part of the production chain because it allows men to focus only on market-oriented work. Women, in addition to being controlled by men and being oppressed and exploited in the capitalist system, also have a problem with the internalization of domination, because they see themselves as inferior beings.

Rowbotham in her essay Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (1980) calls for the creation of small social movements and groups (workers, women, gays, ethnic and racial minorities, youth) that can best respond to the challenges of capitalism and enable the creation of socialism. it would, in turn, eliminate inequalities other than economic ones. In several books, Rowbotham has researched the history of women in radical and revolutionary movements in the United States, Cuba, Algeria, Great Britain, China, Russia, and France. In addition to researching domestic work, she studied the position of women in formal work and process of employment and job seeking. Rowbotham has made equally significant contributions to her historical, theoretical, and activist work.

American political scientist Zila Eisenstein believes that it is unnecessary to study capitalism and patriarchy separately because these two orders together form a single system, which she called "capitalist patriarchy". To end such an oppressive system, two simultaneous revolutions are necessary - socialist and feminist. She studied the relations between socialists and feminists within trade unions. She examined the rise of neoliberalism and imperial and militaristic globalization and how such globalization affects the decline of liberal democracy in the world, as well as the creation of new gender and class formations around the planet. She also studied the position of workers in Cuba, India, China, and Indonesia. She also deals with the social aspects of medical problems: the increase in breast cancer and AIDS, as well as the position of health workers. The subject of her study is also how patriarchy shapes the racial structure and new forms of nationalism. Her goal is to build a coalition of women around the world, regardless of their differences.

American political scientist Nancy Hartsock's theory is inspired by Marxist theory and a postmodern attitude toward epistemology. Hartsock studies the relations of domination and investigates how they are formed, how they shape individuals, in what ways resistance to domination is given, and how relations of domination change. She believes that the relations of power and domination are always connected with epistemology, so she wants to build an alternative approach to epistemology and ontology, which would connect the knowledge and everyday life experience of discriminated groups. This is how standpoint epistemology developed. She believes that social relations, and our position within them, structure the ways we understand the world and shape the concepts and categories we use. Although she was close to Marxism, she believed that epistemology and science that starts from a feminist viewpoint have greater potential to describe and understand the core of social relations. In her study of the global market, she starts from the view that women are involved in that market differently. Women, in addition to selling their labor, also reproduce that labor through biological reproduction and social reproduction. On the other hand, women are more often victims of the global chain of forced labor and human trafficking.

British feminist Juliet Mitchell in her article "Women: The Longest Revolution" (1966) accuses socialism of failing to lead to the emancipation of women, while theoretically reproaching socialist ideology for studying the position of women only through the role of women in economic production. She believed that Marxist feminists should problematize the psycho-sexual foundations of gender relations, and that would require a complete revision of the Marxist theory. In his book Women's Estate (1971), Mitchell argues that the women's liberation movement, which emerged in the United States, was inspired by the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In the same book, she states that the high participation of women in the labor force is not enough to achieve equality, because women must enter employment with a built-in independent economic interest. She also advocates the introduction of various forms of communal family life, which would correspond to the specific wishes and circumstances of the people in those communities.

In Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), Mitchell combines Althusser's view that ideology is relatively independent of economic relations with Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis. The view of the relative independence of ideology enables Mitchell to create a theory of the subordination of women, which is independent of the analysis of the role of women in capitalist production. She believes that the role of women in the economy was key for women's position while the whole society was based on kinship, however, in capitalism kinship ceased to be the basis of social and economic reproduction. The subordination of women in modern society is more maintained through ideology, and the ideology itself is reproduced on a subconscious level through the re-enactment of Oedipal drama between generations. That is why the struggle against patriarchy must take the form of a cultural revolution. Mitchell, unlike most feminists, was a supporter of psychoanalysis. She was a supporter of Freud's teaching and believed that he did not defend the symbolic order, but only described it.

British sociologist Mary Mackintosh throughout her life tried to connect, both in theory and through social activism, feminism, and its critique of society, with socialist ideas and queer theory and movement. In the book The Anti-Social Family (1982), co-authored with Michèle Barrett, the authors criticize the ideological norms of the standard nuclear family and argue that this standard family form excludes and marginalizes other forms of family and different lifestyles. authors criticize the ideology that idealizes the family. The family, as promoted by this ideology, is "antisocial" because it supports the capitalist exploitation of women's labor, but also because it destroys life outside the family. This ideology stigmatizes people living outside the family (singles, people living in institutions). The authors believe that the social idea of ​​the family represents the family as the only place where love and care prevail, thus denying the existence of these relationships in other spheres, masking the true nature of family life, and enabling domestic violence and abuse. Macintosh advocated the introduction of changes in social policy, which would contribute to reducing the economic dependence of women on men.

British sociologist and feminist Michèle Barrett (1949-) in the book The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (1991) uses Marxist and Foucault's concepts to examine the complex matrices of women's subordination. Barrett examined contemporary feminist theory in her book Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (1992). She notes that modern feminists are increasingly rejecting major theoretical systems such as liberalism and Marxism, and instead adopting a poststructuralist and postmodernist approach. She calls this process of rejecting macro-theoretical systems "destabilization of theory". In her later work, she identifies female subordination in the family-household system as something that serves to organize the relations of production of a social formation as a whole. Thus, the family-domestic system of subordination provides a uniquely effective mechanism for ensuring the maintenance of the continuity of the entire social system. Barrett believes that the concept of patriarchy has analytical limitations. Gender inequality is not simply a product of women's experience, but it springs from ideology, that is, the way women and the family are represented in the media and culture.

American anthropologist Gail Rubin, in „The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), concludes that the patterns of kinship and exchange that Claude Levi-Strauss wrote about shaped women as goods that could be exchanged and owned by men (fathers, brothers, and husbands). These patterns of kinship create political structures and power relations, as well as a system of social relations that regulates the rights and obligations of men, women, and children. These kinship systems shape the economic and political oppression of women, but also how women and men shape their social and sexual selves. Rubin believes that capitalism also contributes to the economic exploitation of women, because capitalism depends on the reproduction of labor, and it is based on the unpaid labor of women in the household.

In the article „Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984), the author explores how society shapes sexuality and sexual identity. She concludes that medical and legal institutions create and maintain sexual differences and norms of deviant sexual behavior, to achieve political goals. She calls this approach to sex "sexual essentialism." Sexual essentialism presupposes the biological determinism of sexual behavior and serves to create a hegemonic model of acceptable sexual practices. Rubin also criticizes feminist theory and practice, which has also often marginalizes some sexual practices (sadomasochism, pornography, sex work, transsexuality). With her theory, but also with her activism, Rubin actively promotes sexual freedoms, the right to choose, and sexual diversity, as a way of combating totalizing aspirations towards homogeneity.

Authors: Barrett, Michèle; Delphy, Christine; Eisenstein, Zillah; Hartsock, Nancy; McIntosh, Mary; Mitchell, Juliet; Rowbotham, Sheila; Rubin, Gayle; Thomas, S. Dorothy; Benston, Margaret; Brenner, Johanna; Fraser, Nancy; Gimenez, Martha; Hartmann, Heidi; Hansen, Karen; Hennessy, Rosemary; MacKinnon, Katherine; Ramas, Maria; Vogel, Lise.

Books:

Delphy. The Main Enemy, A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression (1977);

     -     Close to Home (1984);

     -     Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies (1992);

     -     Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror (2015);

Eisenstein. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1978);

     -     The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (1986);

     -     Hatreds, Racialised and Sexualised Conflicts in the 21st Century (1996);

     -     Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism and the Lure of Cyberfantasy (1996);

     -     Against Empire: Feminism, Racism and the West (2004);

     -     Sexual Decoys, Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (2007);

     -     Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution (2019);

Hartsock. Building Feminist Theory (1981);

     -     Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (1983);

     -     Women and Poverty (1990);

     -     The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (1998);

     -     Postmodernism and the Political Change (1999);

McIntosh. The Anti-Social Family (1982);

     -     Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (1992);

Mitchell. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women (1974);

     -     The Rights and Wrongs of Women (1979);

     -     Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (1982);

     -     Women, the Longest Revolution (1984);

     -     Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (2000);

Rowbotham. Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972); 

     -     Hidden from History (1973a);

     -     Woman's Consciousness, Men's World (1973b);

     -     Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (1980);

     -     Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organization Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First (1993);

     -     Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (1993);

     -     Homeworkers Worldwide (1993);

     -     A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (1997);

     -     Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (1997);

     -     Women Resist Globalization (2001);

Rubin. „The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Rayna Reiter ( ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975);

     -     „The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M.”, in Barbara Davis (ed.) Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (1981);

     -     „Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”, in Carole S. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984).