Heidi Hartmann
Heidi Hartmann, an economist, is the President of the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), a scientific research organization that she founded in 1987 to meet the need for women-centered, policy-oriented research. Hartmann lectures on women, economics, and public policy, has often testified before Congress, and is often cited as an authority in various media outlets. She has published a number of articles in journals and books. She is a co-author of several IWPR reports, including Women’s and Men’s Employment and Unemployment in the Great Recession; Still A Man’s Labor Market: The Long-Term Earnings Gap; Unnecessary Losses: Costs to Americans of the Lack of Family and Medical Leave; Equal Pay for Working Families, and Strengthening Social Security for Women.
Hartmann's The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism was published in 1981 and is one of the most well known critiques of Marxism from a feminist perspective. In it Hartmann argues that "The “marriage” of Marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife, depicted in English common law; Marxism always supersedes feminism. Hartmann argues that traditional Marxist modes of analysis do not leave room for feminism or taking seriously gender oppression (or race).
"The present status of women in the labor market and the current arrangement of sex-segregated jobs is the result of a long process of interaction between patriarchy and capitalism. I have emphasized the actions of male workers throughout this process because I believe that emphasis to be correct. Men will have to be forced to give up their favored positions in the division of labor-in the labor market and at home-both if women's subordination is to end and if men are to begin to escape class oppression and exploitation.99 Capitalists have indeed used women as unskilled, underpaid labor to undercut male workers, yet this is only a case of the chickens coming home to roost-a case of men's co-optation by and support for patriarchal society, with its hierarchy among men, being turned back on themselves with a vengeance. Capitalism grew on top of patriarchy; patriarchal capitalism is stratified society par excellence. If non-ruling-class men are to be free they will have to recognize their co-optation by patriarchal capitalism and relinquish their patriarchal benefits. If women are to be free, they must fight against both patriarchal power and capitalist organization of society.
In her 1976 article, "Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex," she writes:
The subconscious influences behavior patterns, which form the micro underpinnings (or complements) of social institutions and are in turn reinforced by those social institutions. I believe we need to investigate these micro phenomena as well as the macro ones I have discussed in this paper. For example, it appears to be a very deeply ingrained behavioral rule that men cannot be subordinate to women of a similar social class. Manifestations of this rule have been noted in restaurants, where waitresses experience difficulty in giving orders to bartenders, unless the bartender can reorganize the situation to allow himself autonomy; among executives, where women executives are seen to be most successful if they have little contact with others at their level and manage small staffs; and among industrial workers, where female factory inspectors cannot successfully correct the work of male production workers. There is also a deeply ingrained fear of being identified with the other sex. As a general rule, men and women must never do anything which is not masculine or feminine (respectively). Male executives, for example, often exchange handshakes with male secretaries, a show of respect which probably works to help preserve their masculinity. At the next deeper level, we must study the subconscious-both how these behavioral rules are internalized and how they grow out of personality structure. At this level, the formation of personality, there have been several attempts to study the production of gender, the socially imposed differentiation of humans based on biological sex differences.
A materialist interpretation of reality, of course, suggests that gender production grows out of the extant division of labor between the sexes, and, in a dialectical process, reinforces that very division of labor itself. In my view, because of these deep ramifications of the sexual division of labor we will not eradicate sex-ordered task division until we eradicate the socially imposed gender differences between us and, therefore, the very sexual division of labor itself. In attacking both patriarchy and capitalism we will have to find ways to change both society-wide institutions and our most deeply ingrained habits. It will be a long, hard struggle."