Christine Delphy

Christine Delphy (born 1941) is a French feminist sociologist, writer and theorist. Known for pioneering materialist feminism, she co-founded the French women's liberation movement (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, or MLF) in 1970 and the journal Nouvelles questions féministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1981.

Biography Christine Delphy was born in 1941 to parents who owned a local pharmacy. In the documentary film on her life and ideas, "Je ne suis pas féministe, mais..." ("I am not a feminist, but...") Delphy describes an early feminist consciousness in observing her parents: though running the pharmacy was labor-intensive for both of them, when they came home at lunch, Delphy noticed her father putting his feet up to rest and read the newspaper while her mother was obliged to cook a midday meal and then do the dishes before they both returned to work.

Nevertheless, Delphy did not always identify as a feminist, owing to stigma around the term. In a television interview in 1985, she described a period of her life when she routinely prefaced comments with, "Je ne suis pas féministe, mais..." (the phrase from which the film draws its title).

Education Delphy studied sociology at the University of Chicago, the University of Paris and the University of California, Berkeley. Returning to France, Delphy was interested in pursuing a dissertation project on women, but she describes in Je ne suis pas féministe, mais... meeting resistance to the topic in her then-advisor Pierre Bourdieu, who told Delphy that there was no one to advise such a project because no one researches women (though French sociologists like Andrée Michel had already published significant research).

Delphy agreed to pursue rural sociology instead, but the question of women, and particularly the economic role women played, emerged in this project as well. While pursuing fieldwork, "I realized there was a whole set of goods that absolutely did not pass through the marketplace," with much of women's economic contributions functioning as unpaid labor, in contrast to the wage labor that was central to theories of capitalist oppression (that is, the capitalist class extracts the value between the wages they pay workers and the actual value of what the workers produce).

"To a degree, the outline of [Delphy's magnum opus] The Main Enemy was already there. The bringing to light not just the economic exploitation of women, but a specific form of economic exploitation." Delphy is openly lesbian and was a member of the Gouines rouges ("Red Dykes").

In 1971, she added her name to the Manifesto of the 343, publicly declaring she'd had an abortion when it was illegal in France.

In more recent years, the implementation of the 2004 French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools—a law which includes banning French Muslim school-girls from wearing their headscarfs on school grounds—brought the issues and discrimination facing French Muslim women to Delphy's attention. In response to this, Delphy confronted and addressed the reaction of many French feminists who support the law, criticizing this stance as hypocritical and racist.

Ideas

Materialist Feminism

Delphy was a pioneer of materialist feminism, applying a materialist approach to gender relations. Delphy analyzes inequalities between men and women as rooted in a material economic basis, specifically the domestic relations of production. This revision of Marxism questioned the idea that there are only capitalist classes. For Delphy, gender is also a position in the mode of production (domestic labor). In this view, the main enemy of women as a class is not capital but patriarchy. She also developed an analysis of gender arguing that gender precedes sex. Her theory constitutes a landmark in the process of denaturalizing sex, which is a marker of gender.

Along with Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Monique Wittig, and others, Delphy launched the materialist feminism school. Materialist feminism is particularly present in the journal Nouvelles questions feministes, still directed by Delphy.

Against Essentialism and the so-called "French Feminism"

Delphy challenges the biological essentialist view of gender, even when it comes from the women's movement. She also critiqued what she called "the invention of 'French Feminism'": she argues that most French feminists are against essentialism and very few support what was called "French Feminism" in the United States. For Delphy, the American invention of "French Feminism" had a political purpose: the acceptance of essentialism among Anglo-American feminists (it was expected they would think, If French women think this way, we have to respect and accept this).

All these ideas are elaborated in many articles from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Questions féministes and Nouvelles questions féministes and were published in the following books: L'Ennemi principal, tome 1 : L'Économie politique du patriarcat (1997) and L'Ennemi principal, tome 2 : Penser le genre (2001).