Full bibliography

Feminist theory is often articulated as a series of categories of thought: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, etc. These categories have aided the recent development of feminist thought, but their prevalence sometimes limits discussion to predicable perimeters. My argument begins from the observation that feminists often have very different responses to the rise of the market economy as a separate institution largely free of control by political and kinship-based authorities. In particular, there is a difference of opinion about the liberating possibilities of participating in a largely self-regulating market economy. I think an investigation of this disagreement could provide a new way of conceptualizing the main lines of feminist argument. For example, feminists who emphasize that the market economy provides an opportunity for women to free themselves from gender restrictions expressed in family and kinship traditions might be called libertarian-type feminists. Other feminists, those who (from varying perspectives) are skeptical that participation in the free market results in freedom for women, might be termed free-market skeptics. Of course, one wants to avoid creating new rigid labels, but thinking about this conceptualization can help to destabilize old categories and to recast often divisive debates (for example, over issues such as prostitution, pornography and housework).The argument is inspired by thinking through descriptions of the historically changing relations between market, family and politics found in two works: Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation and Linda Nicholson's "Feminism and Marx: integrating Kinship with the Economic." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript