Lise Vogel’s Life and Work
An Interview with Kirstin Munro, editor of Vogel’s The Contested Domain
Kirstin Munro
interviewed by
October 13, 2026
LISE VOGEL’S MARXIST FEMINISM has been the starting point for the flourishing of Social Reproduction Theory and is foundational for much of Spectre’s feminist commitments. On the occasion of the publication of The Contested Domain, which includes essays spanning Vogel’s fifty years of work, Spectre editor Aaron Jaffe interviews its editor, Kirstin Munro. The discussion spans Vogel’s personal roots in her family’s commitments to the Old Left, her political dedication to antiracist and feminist struggle, her early work in art history, and her views on the social reproduction of capitalism and Social Reproduction Theory.
As you put in the editor’s introduction, The Contested Domain is a collection of Vogel’s works that amounts to an argument, namely that both Marxism and feminism are necessary commitments. Can you take a moment at the start here and say something about how Vogel united those two commitments?
I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to the editors of Spectre for the chance to talk with you about Lise Vogel’s life and work. We might not even be having this conversation if it weren’t for the efforts of Sue Ferguson, David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya, and others like yourself who have championed Lise and her work. I’m sorry that she isn’t able to participate in this interview herself due to illness, but I will do my best to represent Lise’s perspective and the scholarly legacy she entrusted me with as editor of this book.
To answer your question, I think it helps to consider Lise’s work in its historical context. The Contested Domain ends with what is likely to be Lise’s final original publication, an essay from 2018 about Margaret Benston, a pioneer in Marxist-feminist thought in the late 1960s. Benston can be thought of as one of the starting points for the domestic labor debates, a series of publications ending in the mid-1970s on the relationship between housework, accumulation, and the oppression of women in capitalist society.
One of Lise’s contributions to this debate appears as chapter two in The Contested Domain. While there remain some notable holdouts in the Italian Marxist-feminist tradition, the debate was more or less settled with the conclusion that housework does not produce surplus value directly but rather contributes to accumulation indirectly through the maintenance (day-to-day and intergenerationally) of the commodity labor power.
As the decade wore on, many women’s liberationists began distancing themselves from Marxism, some pursuing a socialist-feminist theoretical synthesis and some abandoning Marxism altogether. We might see Heidi Hartmann’s 1979 essay on “the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” (originally with Amy Bridges, whose coauthorship was later dropped) as a key text in this tradition, a tradition that sees capitalism and patriarchy as dual parallel systems and Marxism as not up to the task. Lise’s work points us in a different direction—her response to that Hartmann essay appears as chapter seven of The Contested Domain.
Vogel finds in Marx the material she needs for a feminist analysis.
In contrast to the then-popular dual systems approach, Lise found her unitary theory of the oppression of women in capitalist society “buried just below the surface of Marx’s analysis of social reproduction in Capital”: that women’s oppression in capitalist society can be understood through an examination of their role “in the context of overall social reproduction.” So, I would say it isn’t exactly that she unites two commitments to Marxism and feminism, but rather that she finds in Marx the material she needs for a feminist analysis.
So, against dual or multi-system views, Vogel’s “unitary view” links women’s oppression to the social reproduction of capitalism. Can you take a moment to spell out how Vogel thought about social reproduction in particular or, as she put it, what is her “social reproduction perspective”?
Lise uses the term “social reproduction” in the conventional Marxist way, referring to the reproduction of the overall conditions of production of a social totality. Lise specifies that her theoretical level of analysis is total social reproduction, which is, she tells us citing Ira Gerstein, “the complex unity of production and circulation,” or the level of analysis of Volume III of Capital. At a joint speaking engagement with Lise in 2019, I asked her if she exclusively uses the term this way throughout her work because of her training as a sociologist. Lise quipped back immediately, “So does Karl Marx.”
To continue the historical conversation, at some point in the mid-to-late 1970s, some feminists began using the phrase “social reproduction” to mean something else—what Lise follows Marx in calling “individual consumption.” By 1984, Jane Humphries and Jill Rubery acknowledge that this redefinition of social reproduction to mean “the daily and intergenerational renewal of human resources … has been controversial,” while also claiming that this redefinition is now “established precedent.”
In 1989, Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner explicitly tell the reader their feminist redefinition should be distinguished from the Marxist one when they redefine social reproduction as “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally.” In other words, for Laslett and Brenner, this transhistorical redefinition of “social reproduction” is deliberately offered as a non-Marxist concept and a feminist challenge to Marxists.
You can see this usage continue in feminist sociology and anthropology through the 1990s and up to the present, by both Marxists and non-Marxists. For two Marxist examples, we can see the term used in this way in Sue Ferguson’s 1999 essay on social reproduction feminisms in Critical Sociology and New Politics, or when Marxist geographer Cindi Katz defines social reproduction as the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” in Antipode in 2001.
While I personally disagree, there are valid arguments for using the term social reproduction to mean the reproduction of the commodity labor power alone, and even for the further move to redefine social reproduction as “life making.” But it is important to be clear that Lise does not use “social reproduction” in this way. Unfortunately, the more popular redefinitions of “social reproduction” mean that many people assume Lise’s “social reproduction perspective” is about the work of “life-making,” because they misunderstand what she means when she uses the term social reproduction, even as she is careful to define it.
To return to your question, then, Lise’s “social reproduction perspective” is concerned with overall social reproduction—meaning the reproduction of the overall conditions of capitalist production—one element of which is the maintenance and replacement of the commodity labor power, not as individual workers but as “the totality of laborers.” Lise moves from a highly abstract discussion of overall social reproduction divorced from any particular social form to a model of the reproduction of labor power as one element of the social reproduction of “class society” in general, and then to a discussion of the reproduction of labor power as one element of capitalist social reproduction.
Part of what makes her work distinct among Marxist feminists is a refusal to begin her analysis with the categories of women, domestic labor, or the family–household. In fact, she even says that building a theory of the oppression of women on the category of “women” is a mistake.
From the perspective of the overall social reproduction in capitalist society, “the reproduction of labor-power becomes a question of the reproduction of the working class as a whole.” But the working class for Lise is not limited to current waged workers—she includes the “active labor-force, the industrial reserve-army, and that portion of the relative surplus-population not incorporated in the industrial reserve-army.” And she points out that the maintenance and replacement of the working class as a whole can be carried out in any number of ways, not just in the family–household, but also in barracks or work camps, or via migration or enslavement.
Lise’s view is that any analysis of how this maintenance and replacement is carried out in practice is an empirical question and not a theoretical one, and that this is historically contingent rather than determined from within the model. However, within contemporary capitalism there is a group that often has a disproportionate responsibility for the reproduction of the working class as a whole, people in the category of women.
One of the defining features of Lise’s approach is a sharp distinction between theoretical and empirical questions. The strength of that distinction is that it prevents her from deriving empirical outcomes directly from abstract categories in a deterministic way. But it means that Lise’s social reproduction perspective can’t explain, for example, why women are disproportionately responsible for domestic labor in contemporary capitalist society, or predict under what conditions this arrangement might change.
The subtitle of the book Marxism and the Oppression of Women hints at something unfinished; it is an effort “Toward a Unitary Theory” rather than just “A Unitary Theory.” In the earlier version (her 1980 dissertation), Lise calls this theorization “provisional.” I think this reflects a tension between what an abstract model can provide and what might be required to provide a practical orientation for social movements, as Lise herself describes her objective.
Vogel has been an inspiration for so many Marxist feminists, and it’s wonderful to see the accumulating force of her ideas collected in a way that marks the decades of her own work. Rather recently, as Paula Varela notes in her Foreword, Vogel has been nearly universally acknowledged as the intellectual starting point for the flourishing rearticulations and deepening of Social Reproduction Theory. The Contested Domain itself is a contribution to Pluto Press’s series on Social Reproduction Theory (Tithi Bhattacharya, an editor at Spectre, is also coeditor with Susan Ferguson of the series). So, I’m wondering what Vogel would find most valuable and compelling in these recent developments of Social Reproduction Theory, but also, if you wish, which kinds of commitments she’d likely be less enthused by.
It is difficult to speak for Lise, of course, but I know she was encouraged by the growth of interest in Marx following the 2007—08 crisis. And of course, it must have been validating that the more general Marx revival was accompanied by a return to Marx within feminist thought after several decades of marginalization within the women’s movement and academic gender and women’s studies departments. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like for her to have enjoyed a small readership for her entire career, only to see her ideas become influential later on, especially following the success of the 2013 new edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women and subsequent translations.
I think Lise would appreciate the corrective provided by Social Reproduction Theory to more orthodox interpretations of Marx that view the working class as composed exclusively of productive waged workers. Unlike some other Marxist feminists of her generation, Lise is unequivocally supportive of trans people, so I suspect she would endorse efforts within Social Reproduction Theory to develop trans-inclusive Marxist theories. And I think she would also welcome attempts to integrate race and other forms of difference into analyses of social reproduction, since this is already present as a line of inquiry in her own work.
I should mention that Lise sees her own work as specifically Marxist-feminist, but she is happy for her contributions to be seen as an inspiration or starting point for Social Reproduction Theory. There is an interesting parallel in the short-lived effort in the early1980s to rename the Marxist-feminist theorizing of the past as Dual Systems Theory. Three of Lise’s essays that appear in The Contested Domain even show up in a Dual Systems Theory bibliography from 1981 in the journal New Political Science.
This is a bit funny considering her scholarly point is in favor of theoretical unification as opposed to the synthesis of dual systems approaches. I think the placement of Lise’s work in a “dual systems theory” bibliography is illustrative of the problems that can arise from anachronistic or retroactive categorizations, such as when all Marxist-feminist theorizing of the past, or sometimes only Italian Marxist feminism, is now referred to by some people as Social Reproduction Theory.
The precise use of categories and concepts is central to Lise’s intellectual approach throughout her career. One of Marx’s main criticisms of the political economists is that they are sloppy, so you could argue that conceptual precision is just good Marxism. To the extent that newer developments are not as precise or conceptually rigorous as the approach advocated for by Lise, I think she would be less enthused. One such example might be the redefinition of the concept “social reproduction” from meaning the reproduction of a social totality to meaning the reproduction of labor power alone that I just mentioned.
Thank you. That kind of precision is incredibly important to preserve the basic commitments of the Marxist tradition! But, as this volume reminds us, Vogel wasn’t just a theorist of Marxist feminism or Social Reproduction Theory. Can you take a moment to tell us a bit about her earlier work as theorist and left critic of art and art history? What stands out to you as particularly important from this period of Vogel’s life and work?
Lise’s earliest publication, from 1968 in Art Journal, came out the same year she defended her PhD in art history at Harvard. I wasn’t able to include this essay in The Contested Domain because I limited the book only to her work on Marxism, feminism, or both. That being said, I find this article significant in terms of Lise’s overall development as a thinker. It’s a methodological intervention against the “formalist bias” in art criticism, and a critique of the notion that “concepts (and their respective referents) such as ‘form,’ ‘content,’ ‘subject matter,’ ‘visual,’ ‘optical,’ ‘tactile,’ ‘intellectual,’ and so on, can be correlated into a structure of effectively independent and mutually exclusive categories.”
She compares art history to the field of psychology, where concepts like “sensation, perception, knowledge, emotion, and so on, proved to be hopeful abstractions rather than useful categories.” I find this fascinating because she makes a similar point about the careful selection of analytical categories in her 1973 essay in Radical America (chapter two in The Contested Domain), except this time in reference to the categories of feminist political economy.
There is a second concept in this early Art Journal article that winds up in Lise’s later work, polyphony. She uses this idea initially to discuss changing ways of experiencing art and later to talk about the “productive polyphony” of the women’s liberation movement and diverse voices in feminist scholarship (chapter eleven in The Contested Domain). She notes with some surprise the two appearances of polyphony in her work in the introduction to her 1995 essay collection Woman Questions (now chapter one in The Contested Domain).
Lise’s original area of expertise in art history was Ancient Roman artifacts; she was a student of the archeologist and scholar of ancient art George M. A. Hanfmann. She has two publications on this topic that I couldn’t include in the book, an article surveying instances of chariot races in circus scenes and a monograph based on her dissertation about the Column of Antoninus Pius.
Her argument in that monograph is that the column will be misinterpreted if not taken as a whole and understood within its full historical context. And while from what I can tell it is conventional ancient Roman art historiography for the time, Lise opens the book with two Marxist epigraphs that emphasize the importance of interconnectedness to understanding the world:
The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.
—Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”
Any thing that is torn out of its contextual relations ceases to exist.
—Dietzgen, The Positive Outcome of Philosophy
This theme of interconnectedness is of course very important to her unique and influential perspective on social reproduction I just mentioned, based on an interpretation of “social reproduction” as the reproduction of a society as a whole.
Obviously the two can’t be entirely unconnected, but I’m wondering, do you see a kind of aesthetic quality to Vogel’s subsequent work, a consistent throughline or approach that marks Vogel’s work in a distinctive way?
I could be biased by my own training, but the throughline that I see is a mathematical one, which has of course a type of aesthetic quality. Lise’s father was a physician, and her family emphasized the importance of math and science.
Lise graduated from the Bronx High School of Science two years early, and originally majored in math at Radcliffe, where she matriculated when she was sixteen years old. During a two-year break from university, she worked for an astronomer in France, before returning to the US and changing her major to art history.
I think we can see throughout Lise’s work two things that mathematics requires: first, precision in the application of concepts and categories, and second a particular type of structural reasoning. During one of our conversations while I was working on the book, Lise said to me, “I was always looking for the answer to questions. In mathematics, there are multiple routes to an answer, and some are elegant.”
In mathematics, what people mean by “elegant solution” is an approach that shows a deep understanding of the underlying structure of a problem rather than a solution arrived at through trial and error (or what we call “brute force”). Many examples of this type of mathematical elegance take the form of unified frameworks, or general theories: showing that multiple results or models that appear to be distinct are actually examples of the same general model or underlying system.
Lise’s unitary theory was arrived at through systematic study of Marx’s overall approach.
As I write in my editor’s preface to The Contested Domain, I think Lise’s unitary theory of the oppression of women in capitalist society is an elegant solution, since it was arrived at not by redefining concepts or ad hoc reasoning but through her systematic study of Marx’s overall approach. And rather than producing a hybrid critique of multiple systems (that is, capitalism and patriarchy), Lise developed a theoretically unified account of women’s oppression.
But this elegant intellectual aesthetic appears throughout her work as far back as her writing on ancient Roman artifacts. Lise consistently looked for answers to her questions by interrogating the underlying structure connecting what appear to be separate phenomena.
I’ve been focusing a lot on the theoretical side, but Vogel’s life was deeply informed by her practical engagements and her commitments to various struggles. Can you take a moment and describe what these were and how you see them guiding or moving Vogel’s work?
There is a touching letter from Lise’s father, Sidney Vogel, to a five-year-old Lise, sent when he was stationed with the US Army in Italy in 1943. The letter gives a very intimate sense of the political commitments Lise’s parents instilled in her even as a young child.
Her father tells Lise that children all over the world love candy and swimming but describing children who go barefoot and live without running water or indoor toilets, that “all over the world, most people do not have all the wonderful conveniences that you do.” Sidney Vogel is so tender in this letter asking Lise to think beyond herself, even as a five-year-old.
Lise’s commitment to liberation grew out of her family’s involvement in the communist movement and her experiences as a child of the Old Left. Lise’s father, Sidney Vogel, volunteered in the medical services of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and joined the US Army during the Second World War to participate for a second time in the fight against fascism. She dedicated Marxism and the Oppression of Women to her mother, Ethel Vogel, and her aunt, Anna Vogel Colloms.
These two women testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1950 for their alleged involvement in an unsuccessful Soviet plot to bust Trotsky’s assassin out of prison in 1943. Lise’s account of her experiences growing up as a “red diaper baby” appears in chapter one of The Contested Domain, but this material was originally published in 1995, before Lise was fully aware of her family’s involvement with the US Communist Party.
She only learned about her mother’s and aunt’s possible involvement in the plot in 1999, and about their HUAC testimony in 2010. This lifetime of secrecy gives some sense of the fear her parents must have lived with during the Second Red Scare.
A concern for radical justice is something Lise says she was taught by her family, and she has repeatedly cited her participation in the civil rights movement as influential on her political and intellectual development, in particular her time in Mississippi as a Freedom Summer volunteer in 1964 and 1965. I found a haunting archival document as I was preparing my editor’s preface for The Contested Domain: her notes from the Freedom Summer orientation in Oxford, Ohio.
On June 22, 1964, Lise records Bob Moses’s warning to the volunteers about the potential for violence and advice about remaining safe. This was the day after three volunteers had been murdered by Klansmen in Mississippi but before the group in Ohio were aware the volunteers were missing.
Despite the very real risks, Lise returned to Mississippi for Freedom Summer the following year. She was also active in the antiwar movement and was arrested twice for her participation in civil disobedience and protest activities.
Like many women veterans of Freedom Summer and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lise later participated in the women’s liberation movement, and her scholarly trajectory was directly altered as a result. Lise left her job as an Assistant Professor in art history at Brown University prior to receiving tenure so she could move back to Boston, which was a major hub for the New Left at the time.
While in Boston, Lise supported herself teaching courses in feminist art history as an adjunct and participated in a variety of study groups and related activist circles. Several of the essays collected in The Contested Domain emerged from this period.
When I asked Lise why she decided to pursue a second PhD in sociology at Brandeis (from 1976 to 1980), she told me it was motivated by her lack of self-confidence. I think many of us can relate to feeling like that, to having “imposter syndrome,” but I found this answer surprising since Lise had produced so much intellectual work on the subject outside the academy and had gained considerable expertise by the time she started her second PhD.
Her dissertation for that PhD, Beyond Domestic Labor: Women’s Oppression and the Reproduction of Labor Power, was published three years later as Marxism and the Oppression of Women. In the acknowledgements (a version of which became the preface to the book), Lise writes that, “the revival of Marxist theory … offers the best chance to provide theoretical guidance in the coming battles for the liberation of women.”
So, to return to your question about how these political commitments guided Lise’s writing, I think her research on Marxism and feminism was recursively related to her movement work. It arose out of her experiences in movements for liberation, but she also intended the writing to be for those movements.
The political stakes couldn’t be higher given the revanchist, conservative, or merely liberal versions of feminism on offer these days. It’s far too much to ask you to synthesize everything, but maybe just two or three key ideas—which themes within Vogel’s Marxist feminism that we haven’t really touched on much would you like to highlight for our readers?
One thing that hasn’t received enough attention is Lise’s empirical work. Her 1993 book, Mothers on the Job, is a study of US pregnancy policy (some of the more theoretical portions appear as chapters twelve and thirteen in The Contested Domain).
You might assume that empirical research was something that Lise turned to later in her career, however, she also published a nineteen-page pamphlet of employment statistics about women workers in 1971, Women Workers: Some Basic Statistics, with material originally prepared for a conference for working women in Boston in 1970. Women Workers is yet another place where Lise presents a critique of inadequate concepts, this time the statistical categories in US government data that she says are “not only deceptive, but frequently … both misleading and offensive,” particularly with respect to race and ethnicity.
I was struck by the remarkable continuity between Women Workers and present-day social reproduction feminisms evidenced by the pamphlet’s cover image, a photo of two unionized hospital workers representing SEIU Local 250 on the picket line. I believe that one of the women in the photo is Shirley Ware, who originally became involved with the union when she was working at a nursing home because she needed a health plan for her child with a heart condition.
According to the National Union for Healthcare Workers, Ware became Local 250’s first Black organizer in 1971. It’s almost uncanny how Ware’s story reflects ideas in, for example, Feminism for the 99%.
The Woman Workers pamphlet was published five years before Lise started her PhD in sociology at Brandeis, but I find it interesting that the majority of her committee was empirically oriented qualitative researchers. She overlapped with Ralph Miliband at Brandeis; though he wasn’t on her committee, he read and commented on the dissertation.
Maybe a bit surprising, Lise’s supervisor was Egon Bittner, who was an old-school fieldwork style of sociologist known for his ethnographic studies of police. Incidentally, I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but Nancy Chodorow was also his student.
Lise insists that attention to gender, race, and class are all necessary for contemporary social theory.
I’ve wondered if Lise’s insistence on this empirical–theoretical divide comes out of this training in sociology by empiricists. It’s something I asked her about, but she said she wasn’t sure.
Something else that I think doesn’t get enough attention is how much of Lise’s work concerns race, diversity, and inequality. We can see this as early as her analysis in the Women Workers pamphlet from 1971. Still-widespread narratives emerged in the 1990s about a flattened “second wave” feminism that erase the importance of socialist feminism and Marxist feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Part of that narrative is that the feminists of this period, who, according to this account, are exclusively liberal feminists, took a colorblind approach. Lise insists that attention to gender, race, and class are all necessary for contemporary social theory, and that they have been central for socialist and Marxist feminists since the start.
Later in her career, she began critically studying popular approaches to diversity and equality, which you can see in Mothers on the Job, but also in her critical engagement with “intersectionality” (chapter fourteen of The Contested Domain). Lise acknowledges that many attempts by white women to include racial considerations in their gender analysis have been clumsy and fall short, but her work shows that the taken-for-granted belief that the women’s liberation movement was totally unconcerned with race is simply untrue.
The last thing I’d like to say, and this is one of the things that I admire the most about Lise, is that she truly forged her own intellectual path. Lise never followed academic trends. She just pursued whatever topics interested her with an exceptionally high degree of rigor. And, even if it meant that her career suffered as a result, she never abandoned her commitment to Marx. ×