The capitalist class has become dependent on this method of “privatized reproduction” within the working-class family because it lessens its own financial responsibility for the reproduction of labor power, which is instead largely supplied by unpaid domestic labor performed primarily by women. In capitalist societies, women in property-holding families reproduce heirs women in working-class families reproduce generations of labor power for the system. They understood that women’s role as biological “reproducers” results in their subordinate status inside the nuclear family, and consequently throughout society. Marx and Engels located the root of women’s oppression in their role within the nuclear family in class societies. Moreover, the history of those who carried on the Marxist tradition on women’s oppression during the mid-twentieth century has frequently been rendered invisible-yet these activists and theorists provided an indispensible thread that continued between the victory of women’s suffrage in the 1920s (often referred to as US feminism’s “first wave” and the rise of the 1960s movements for women’s liberation (known as its “second wave”). While their theory requires updating, 2 their enormous contributions have too often been dismissed or ignored. Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai, and Leon Trotsky-developed a theoretical framework tying the fight for women’s liberation to the struggle for socialism. The classical Marxists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, V. “ If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.” 1

Markx engles compared to suffragists