About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about four key Feminist theorists’ writing on the family, focusing in particular on: (i) Shulamith Firestone, who argues that the family is inherently patriarchal and that patriarchy is a universal, inevitable consequence of women’s childbearing role; (ii) Kate Millett, whose work focuses more on the cultural basis of male domination; (iii) Christine Delphy, who applies Marxist ideas around relations of production to conceptualise gender inequality; (iv) Ann Oakley, who has been very influential in drawing attention to women’s unpaid domestic labour as an important aspect of the wider patriarchal social structure.

About the lecturer

Professor Michèle Barrett is Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University of London. She has a wide and multi-disciplinary range of expertise, including literary modernism and the work of Virginia Woolf, Marxist and Feminist social theory, family studies, and the history of the First World War. Her publications include Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (3rd ed. 2015), The Anti-Social Family (2nd ed. 2015, as co-author), and Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War (2007).