These women, Macron said, after he’d seen them on the roundabouts of French streets, no longer have the capacity to live or take care of their children they have no hope. A few weeks before we met, Delphy had published a response on her blog to President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke of the anger “of the single mother, widow or divorced ,” forming part of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement.

It was a Sunday afternoon in January, and that weekend, like most weekends for several months, France had been embroiled in violent protests and political turmoil. Nearby hung a poster of Simone de Beauvoir. We sat at Delphy’s kitchen table, where she smoked cigarettes and drank tea, facing a library containing books by Judith Butler and Catharine MacKinnon. ĭelphy, who is now in her late 70s, welcomed me to her loft-like apartment in Paris’s 1st arrondissement, where she has lived and produced most of her work over the last three decades. In so far as materialism concerns oppression, and inversely if we accept that to start from oppression defines among other things a materialist approach,” Delphy wrote in a 1980 issue of Feminist Review.

To this extent, it can be used by feminism. “Marxism is, by all the evidence, materialist. DECADES AGO, Simone de Beauvoir described Christine Delphy as “France’s most exciting feminist writer.” Delphy, a French sociologist and theorist, cofounded the “Mouvement de Libération des Femmes” (the women’s liberation movement) in the 1970s and later joined forces with de Beauvoir to publish Nouvelles Questions Feministes (New Feminist Issues ), a review that explores the social construct of gender and materialist feminism, a concept Delphy pioneered based on Marxism.ĭelphy is a prolific writer whose work centers on the domestic economy and the oppression of women, rooted not in capitalism but the patriarchy.

Christine delphy close to home