(Texas Scorecard) – A Texas Tech University course pushes radical feminism. Materials in the course promote anti-Christian, anti-male attitudes and argue that Marxism is not drastic enough for feminism.
The class, called “Feminist Thought and Theories,” is being offered during the spring 2025 semester and fulfills one of Texas Tech’s requirements for a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Its syllabus reveals that the course promotes various ideological facets of feminism and requires students to read articles suggesting that Marxism does not help the feminist cause because it neglects gender struggles. The first page of the syllabus has an image that proclaims: “If I had a hammer … I’d smash Patriarchy.”
Source: Feminist Thought and Theories Syllabus, Spring 2025
Among the required course readings is an article that examines the relationship between feminism and Marxism.
The article, titled “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” was written by Institute for Women’s Policy Research founder Heidi Hartman and argues that while both ideologies are integral to studying capitalism, feminism has been “subordinated.”
“Recent attempts to integrate Marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the ‘larger’ struggle against capital,” Hartman writes. “To continue our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce.”
The article further asserts that in capitalist societies, “It appears as if each woman is oppressed by her own man alone; her oppression seems a private affair.”
Hartman’s article claims that while Marxism is necessary for understanding capitalist societies, it overlooks the supposed patriarchy that runs such societies and oppresses women.
The class includes many other required readings that focus on racial aspects of feminism. One such article is titled “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing.”
Authored by Andrea Smith, the article asserts that white supremacy operates through three pillars:
- Slavery/capitalism
- Genocide/colonialism
- Orientalism/war
“Unfortunately, in our efforts to organize against white, Christian America, racial justice struggles often articulate an equally heteropatriarchal racial nationalism,” its conclusion states.
In the same paragraph, Smith writes that the “concept” of the family unit should be “challenged.”
“Perhaps, instead, we can reconstitute alternative ways of living together in which ‘families’ are not seen as islands on their own,” Smith continues. “Certainly, indigenous communities were not ordered on the basis of a nuclear family structure—[it] is the result of colonialism, not the antidote to it.”
The course is taught by Texas Tech instructor Dr. Kristen Alder, who has a history of promoting feminist theories and radical gender ideology. In a brochure advertising a Women’s and Gender Studies annual conference last year, Alder reportedly was set to participate in a panel discussion about the intersectionality of queerness and feminist mentorship in education.