Pluto Publishing, 1977

Although Marx and Engels developed a historical account of the oppression of women, they failed to analyse the strategic link between women's liberation and proletarian revolution. It was Freud, the pessimistic liberal, who provided the stress on sexuality missing from both radical and revolutionary thought.

There have been many attempts to fuse the marxist and freudian approaches but as Ann Foreman shows, in her careful exploration of Mitchell, Reich and Marcuse's writings, they have failed. The existentialist approach has been more productive but it too has provided no basis for women's liberation.

Ann Foreman argues that the decisive intellectual step needed now is to establish the centrality of women's oppression to the organisation of the work process to capitalism and the exclusion of workers from control over the means of productionn. Such a step would provide the basis for re-stating the terms under which women's liberation is possible and for exploring strategies required for its realisation.