Honors Thesis Colloquium 2009-10

Connie,

You have begun with two crucial sources by focusing on Marx and Friedan.  You might also read Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a classic feminist text that outlines ways of thinking about women’s reproduction and the effects of society in exploiting it.   Once you begin to look at second wave Marxist-feminist writings, you will see that the problems in borrowing marxist analysis for feminist thought around the issue of reproductive rights was very much a topic in the 1970s and 80s.  One of the issues that came to the fore was how much class as an economic category and work as a practice actually illuminated gender and reproduction as a practice.  In other words, you will save yourself a certain amount of time by reading these Marxist-feminist analyses carefully.   That is not to say that you skip over the initial, classic texts—quite the contrary.  I’m glad to see you start with them, and it will be interesting to see if you pick up on something new for our time in comparison to the 70s and 80s perspectives.

Take a look at Zillah Eisenstein’s work over the past few decades.  Also, it woudl be helpful to you to use a collection called Feminist Theory by Kolmar and Bartkowski because their discussion of these issues is quite valuable and it contains a great range of the kinds of writings that have been done by feminists working on these issues.