Michèle Barrett

Michèle Barrett (born 1949) is an English sociologist and feminist theorist. She is an emeritus professor of modern literary and cultural theory at Queen Mary University of London, after starting her academic career at City University, London. She was President of the British Sociological Association and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

A socialist feminist, Barrett is best known for her books The Anti-Social Family (1982), written with Mary McIntosh, and Women's Oppression Today (1980), which attempted to reconcile feminist and Marxist analyses, though by the 1990s she had moved away from Marxism towards post-structural feminism and literary theory. She is also a scholar of social history, including the experiences of servicemen in World War I, and of the life and works of Virginia Woolf.

Career

Barrett studied sociology at the University of Durham, gaining a BA, then received a Master of Arts and a DPhil (1976) from the University of Sussex, focussing on Virginia Woolf; she appeared on In Our Time discussing Woolf in 2023. She lectured at City University, London from 1975 for 25 years, moving to Queen Mary University of London in 2000.

In 1979, she was a founding member of the Feminist Review collective. She has served on many other editorial boards and as a book editor.

Barrett was president of the British Sociological Association, 1995-7. In that role, she told The Independent that "the old categories of class, individual and nation-state no longer seem useful. [Sociologists are] having to develop a new vocabulary and set of concepts, and in a time of flux we've been silenced".

Barrett became "well-known as an influential socialist feminist". She began her career using Marxist analysis, but moved away from it towards post-structuralism during the 1980s. Judith Stacey, looking back on a conversation with Barrett in the 1990s, described how Barrett moved away from Marxism and sociology towards literary and cultural studies. Labour historian Bryan Palmer commented on how "Once committed to Marxism and materialist analysis, the Barrett of the late 1980s is a captive of the ideological ensemble of poststructuralist theoretical positions associated with the supposed political and cultural ruptures of post-modernism".

By the mid-1990s, Barrett had featured in three introductions to feminist literary criticism: Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt's Feminist Criticism and Social Change (1985); Maggie Humm's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism (1994); and Mary Eagleton's Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996).

In 2013, the Academy of Social Sciences named her an Academician (now Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, FAcSS).

She was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in April 2016 to enable her study of Woolf.

Publications

Sociology

Women's Oppression Today

Reviewing Barrett's book Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (New Left Books, 1980) shortly after publication, Miriam M. Johnson described how Barrett could not totally combine Marxism and feminism, and reached "a more sociological perspective, in which both economic and ideological factors are given independent weight". Barrett also questioned the close link between feminism and literary criticism, saying "I can find no sustained argument as to why feminists should be so interested in literature or what theoretical or political ends such a study should serve". Barrett argued that the invention of the housewife and the male breadwinner suited the bourgeoisie and capitalist production, but also relied on the pre-existing gender ideology of male supremacy. Her focus on ideology to explain modern family structure was critiqued, including by Colin Creighton as "imprecise and undeveloped". Laura Rice-Sayre, praising the work as "thorough and perceptive", commented on Barrett's point that Marxist analysis is "sex blind" and that women's oppression under capitalism rests on divisions that pre-date capitalism. Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas' 1984 piece, "Rethinking Women's Oppression", critiqued the book for not focussing sufficiently on material conditions rather than ideology. Joan Landes said the book was "a useful introduction to the British feminist left", and commented on a lack of questioning of Marxist theory and an incorrect focus on "right thinking" instead of power structures: "She never entertains the possibility that a feminist approach to reproduction, ideology, or gender, for example, may require a reinterpretation of Marx's account... She disregards the observation that women are advantaged or disadvantaged by forms of organizational structure, that socialism is not just a set of principles to be implemented in the future, but the living practices of an historical movement." June Howard focussed on Barrett's place among Marxist theory: "I would characterize the tendency within Marxist thought which informs Barrett's work as an anti-economistic Marxism which has been strongly influenced by Althusser, Gramsci and the consequences other theorists have derived from their works, although Barrett strongly asserts her differences with the extreme positions in this "post-Althusserian" dialogue". Her use of Louis Althusser's theories helped popularise his work. Charlene Gannage complemented the comprehensive review, saying "Barrett makes a strong argument for stressing the inter-relationship of theory and history". She added that "What is most striking about Barrett’s book is its failure to pose a theoretical framework for understanding women’s collective resistance to their oppression". Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott said the book was influential in turning feminists away from interactionism as an explanation for sexuality, which they regretted three decades later.

The 1988 edition had a new subtitle, "The Marxist/Feminist Encounter", Barrett by then being uncomfortable with the idea of Marxist feminism. In it, Barrett coined the term "New Australian Feminism" for the work of Moira Gatens and Elizabeth Grosz, which had a mixed reception in the country. Influenced by African-American writers, the second edition also revised the focus on family as the cause of women’s oppression to include the role of the state. Reviewing the 2014 Verso Books edition, Rita Mookerjee discussed how the book is "of its time" in the way it focuses on "Anglo-Western women" and how it "places an emphasis on biological determinants that, in the following decade, are proven by Judith Butler to be flimsy", and yet "aptly historicizes economics and feminism in a way that allows readers to locate ideological shifts and trends". Judith Stacey recounted how Barrett's shift to post-structuralism in the 1990s made her quip that the only word in the book's title she was still comfortable with was "today".

The Anti-Social Family

The Anti-Social Family (Verso Books, 1982), co-authored with Mary McIntosh, "argued at length that rather than trying to promote or remake or reform the family we should consider alternatives to this form of private life". The book contradicted a then-prevalent idealisation of the nuclear family, instead proposing – taking inspiration from Marx and Engels – that collective structures in society should make the family unnecessary. They say the family is anti-social because family inheritance enforces inequality, family support undermines wider social responsibility, family is patriarchal, coercive, and condemns women to the "tyranny of motherhood", and family undermines female sexuality. They noted the exclusion of lesbian women from being mothers and the stigmatisation of not having children. The book controversially for the time argued against marriage and instead promoted communal living, childlessness, and homosexual relationships.

Christine Williams said it was "a highly polemical book, insightful at times, and exceedingly didactic at others". W. T. Murphy commented on their positioning: "Barrett and McIntosh are sociologists and well known in the women's movement; their book is best described as aimed at a general Left-wing readership they write as socialists for socialists"; he concluded "their 'buzz-words' leave me, at any rate, little the wiser". Ann Ferguson discussed the book's use of deconstruction and argued that "it remains unclear whether the deconstruction of the family implies a specific moral/political alternative. To claim that we need to reconstruct the whole of society, rather than to advocate some specific alternative to the current capitalist-patriarchal family/household, dodges the political issue raised by the ideology of familialism". She also found the writing "boring and the obscure" and that "the arguments against Lasch, Donzelot and others, though insightful, are ultimately too sketchy to be convincing". Miriam E. David was disappointed: "It seems to me that the book, as a whole, fails in its ultimate political aim of convincing the informed reader of the correct, socialist-feminist challenge to the family form under capitalism. Nonetheless, the book is exciting, challenging and provides a number of useful critiques of aspects of family ideology." She identified the analysis of children in families as particularly weak. Philip Neiser said their "critique of the modern family is in many respects incisive". He contrasted their idea of the family being anti-social, in opposition to a vague idea of social harmony, with his proposal that family is anti-political, in opposition to community political activity. Fran Bennett commented on the heavy emphasis on textual criticism and said that "Critical Social Policy readers may wish that there was rather more contemporary political and strategic debate in the book".

The book triggered a debate about race, specifically how non-white experiences and scholarship were neglected. Hazel Carby, Floya Anthias, and Nira Yuval-Davis countered that the book was written from the viewpoint of white feminism. They believed that the family can be a focus of resistance to racism and imperialism, and that families are targetted by colonial powers. Barrett and McIntosh addressed these concerns in a 1985 essay in Feminist Review (reprinted in 2005), "the first serious white British feminist response to critiques by women of color", which "rekindled the debate on racism and the women's movement". Welcoming the debate, Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Margaret Coulson felt "it fails to open up the kind of area of discussion which is needed. This is because they lose sight of the central issue in the challenge which has been made – which is racism. By bringing another issue, namely ethnocentrism, into the foreground, they end up with their own previous conceptual categories intact." Heidi Safia Mirza's "gut reaction" was that "The paper's sole purpose seemed to be a self-indulgent exercise, exorcizing the guilt socialist-feminists feel about the myopia of their past analyses". Hamida Kazi said the essay was "very encouraging" and commented on how Barrett and McIntosh "accept that black feminist work is ghettoized". Sue Lees said that "they do not really take an argued theoretical position. Because of this they cannot really resolve the issue of what the significance of 'race' is for feminist theory.... They come to the main theoretical issue and then rather avoid confronting it." Caroline Ramazanoglu was scathing: "This level of tightly defended 'autocritique' seems too complacent to be appropriate in a feminist journal as a means of opening up the dialogue that they seek between the exponents of white feminism and the anger and frustration which have been widely expressed by black women."

Other work

In 1979 Barrett co-edited the book Ideology and Cultural Production with Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolff, which collected papers from a 1978 British Sociological Association conference on culture at the University of Sussex. Robert Neal Wilson concluded that "this collection does not hang together".

Barrett's Feminist Review article the same year with McIntosh, "Christine Delphy: Towards a Materialist Feminism?", was taken by Delphy as an attack not only on her ideas but herself, and to misrepresent her ideas. They questioned whether Delphy saw those in need of care as exploiters of women, to which Delphy rebutted that she viewed the men who would otherwise do the work of women as the exploiters.

Her 1980 lecture "Feminism and the Definition of Cultural Politics", proposed a decoupling of "women's art" and "feminist art" and questioned value judgements and the meaning of art.

Barrett's 1986 essay "Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender", first published in the book Feminist Criticism and Social Change, "suggests new methods for studying relations between literature, gender ideology, and social change". She posits that "ideology is embedded historically in material practices but it does not follow either that ideology is theoretically indistinguishable from material practices or that it bears any direct relationship to them". Her book chapter the following year, "Marxist Feminism and the Work of Karl Marx" in Anne Phillips' Feminism and Equality, criticised Karl Marx for his "feet of clay" on women's issues, deriding his analysis as "scattered, scanty and unsatisfactory", lacking in comparison to his collaborator Friedrich Engels.

In 1989, she contributed the piece "Some Different Meanings of the Concept of 'Difference': Feminist Theory and the Concept of Ideology" to Alice Parker and Elizabeth Meese's book The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory (John Benjamins), discussing how feminism has moved from an analysis of sex and gender difference to analysis of differences among women. She identified three differences, which have varying and contradictory theoretical implications: a psychoanalytical analysis of sex differentiation; a postional or relational difference deriving from Saussurian linguist theory; and the variety of lived experiences.

She co-edited a Verso book series, Questions for Feminism, with Annette Kuhn, Ann Rosalind Jones, and Anne Phillips. With Roberta Hamilton, she edited the book The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism (1986), which aimed to highlight the perceived benefits of Canadian feminist scholarship over its US and UK counterparts. Lillian Robinson said, "As its subtitle indicates, The Politics of Diversity assumes a Marxist analysis of social forces and institutions.... The collection's Canadian provenance is responsible for the sophisticated level on which it engages the connections and contradictions between Marxism and feminism." R A Sydie said "this is a book that all Canadian feminists should have in their library". In 1993, with Anne Phillips she edited the book Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates. Pamela Moore and Devoney Looser said it was "a fine collection of essays" of feminist theory, while Ramazanoglu said Barrett's piece "gives a succinct account of what it is about poststructuralism and postmodernism that is challenging to feminism". "What a treat" was Linda McDowell's take on the collection, discussing Barrett's "careful reflective piece on the cultural, 'deconstructive' turn in feminist theorizing".

Her 1992 book Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Cambridge Polity Press) examined whether the Marxist concept of ideology was still useful or whether post-structuralism's concepts of power and subjectivity should replace it. Barrett had moved from the "scientific" position of Althusser to the discourse approach of Foucault. According to Miriam Adelman, Barrett commented on how "critical theory... gradually frees itself from restrictive Marxist language and concepts and in doing so, undergoes a paradigm change". Barrett describes how "plural constructed heritages" contribute to scholarly fields and cautions against "disciplinary policing". Martin Gardiner said it was "an engaging and at times impassioned read". Renate Bridenthal was critical of what she saw as a muddled review of Marxist views of ideology and namedropping, concluding that "Failing an original thesis, the purpose and readership of this book are unclear", while Kate Soper said "Barrett is much more confident about the need to go beyond Marx than about what to put in his place". Gregor McLennan focussed on Barrett's work as an exemplary study of post-Marxism and its critique of reductionism and universalism, commenting that "her hesitations, to me, signal a commendable awareness" while calling Barrett's analysis superficial.

In the same year, Barrett contributed a book review of psychoanalysis and feminism to the journal Signs with Judith Kegan Gardiner, Barrett providing a sociological and Gardiner a literary perspective. It was the first such two-field review commissioned by the journal.

Her 1999 book Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and Things is a collection of her essays from two decades of moving from Marxist sociology to post-Marxism. The introduction and two of ten essays are new material. Barrett said in one essay, "Postmodernism is not something that you can be for or against... For it is a cultural climate as well as an intellectual position, a political reality as well as an academic fashion.” She pushed back against a perceived "aggressive anti-humanism" in post-structuralist theory in favour of allowing for the richness of human experience and beliefs. Charlie Gere said that "Barrett picks her way carefully but firmly through the minefield of modern theory, in which backing away from one potentially explosive location often risks backing onto another" and commented on how "Barrett's authentic voice permeates the volume". Jackie Orr favourably discussed the boundary-work, such as a fictional meeting of Woolf and Foucault, and concluded that "perhaps the theme of this collection really is Barrett's own impressive capacity for theoretical and political self-reflection and transformation." Woolf scholar Jeanette McVicker found the comparison of Woolf's and Foucault's understanding of truth unhelpful, as the "one-to-one correspondence" obscured wider similarities.

In a chapter in the 2000 book Understanding Contemporary Society (Sage, eds Browing, Halcli, and Webster), Barrett equated post-feminism with girl power, a restoration of feminity as opposed to "militant feminism"; she lampooned third-wave feminism as a form of girl power for grown-ups and used Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager as an example of post-feminism.

With her son Duncan Barrett she published Star Trek: The Human Frontier (Routledge) in 2000. Gary Westfahl said that most will find it "an entertaining and enlightening journey" that is "unusually readable", but critiqued a lack of analysis of the sci-fi roots of the franchise and their neglect of the original series. Ann Kaloski-Naylor said it is "a persuasive and at times engrossing analysis of, in particular, three main themes: Star Trek as sea voyage; Star Trek as an interrogation of humanness; and Star Trek as a postmodern destabilizing of identity."

Woolf

In 1979 she wrote an introduction to a collection of Virginia Woolf's non-fiction, Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing: Her Essays, Assessments and Arguments. A.O. Frank commended her approach: "Barrett is eager to demonstrate that at a certain depth in Woolf's work there lies a sustained and coherent stratum of theoretical concern, of social as well as literary criticism.... Barrett's Introduction is also exemplary in the way in which it handles the connection between the fictional and non-fictional works."

In her 1993 introduction to a Penguin edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and it's "sequel", Three Guineas, Barrett compared the gender neutrality of the former with the focus on gender difference in the latter. Jane Marcus said Barrett "maintains a sceptical tone about Woolf's politics", criticising Woolf for not engaging with political movements and raising examples of snobbery and racism in her private writing.

In "Reason and Truth in A Room of One's Own: A Master in Lunacy", her contribution to the 2001 book Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (editors Jessica Berman and Jane Goldman), Barrett discusses Woolf's critique of the masculine authorial self, "logical and pedagogic", for which Woolf uses the image of I as a shadow or dark bar.

Her 2013 paper "Virginia Woolf's Research for Empire and Commerce in Africa (Leonard Woolf, 1920)" in Woolf Studies Annual said that Virginia's "knowledge and commitment to radical geopolitics and anti-imperialism" was greater than her husband Leonard's.

Barrett continued her work on Woolf in 2021 with a chapter in Historicizing Modernists: Approaches to ‘Archivalism’ (edited by Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen, and Erik Tonningon) about WoolfNotes, a website digitising Woolf's archive. She began the project in 2016 and it released 7000 digitised pages of Woolf's research and reading notes online in 2024.

Social history

With Peter Stallybrass, Barrett wrote a 2013 paper in Historical Writing Journal on the history of private use of printing and handwriting, noting that in the twentieth century the two were often combined such as in diaries and calendars and that the postcard created new forms of interpersonal communication.

She has also researched military life, including the role of African soldiers with the British army in World War I and how they were deliberately not commemorated by name by the Imperial War Graves Commission; she received the 2021 Queen Mary University of London Influence Award for this work. She published "Subalterns at War: First World War Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission" in Interventions in 2007 and "Death and the Afterlife: Britain's Colonies and Dominions" in Das' book Race, Empire and the First World War. Her 2008 book Casualty Figures (Verso) recounts the life of five WWI servicemen and their experiences of shell shock, The Telegraph warning that "This is not a book for the squeamish or the faint-hearted. The stories of these five men are real, unimaginable and highly personal." She discusses the lasting effects of trench warfare and how this has had insufficient attention.

Personal life

Her son is historian Duncan Barrett. She parented him with Mary McIntosh, her partner when they published The Anti-Social Family.

She has been friends with Peter Beilharz, Catherine Hall and Stuart Hall, and Judith R. Walkowitz.

External links

• . English and Drama. Queen Mary University of London. Archived from on 15 August 2025.
• Mircov, Velizar (22 September 2022). . Sociopedia.
• Barrett, Michèle. . Massolit.