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Based on a re-reading of the controversy that arose in 1979 between Christine Delphy and the British authors Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, this article aims to reconsider the nature of the tension between the materialist and post-structural strains of feminism that emerged in France from the 1990s. These two historically successive disputes indeed appear to have at their heart a similar conflict, which is related to differing conceptions of materialism. This investigation of what the “Marxian method” used by Delphy left aside, echoes the theoretical conflicts that characterize the receptions of feminist thinking on both sides of the Atlantic and of the English Channel. Returning to the British intellectual context within which the 1979 controversy developed allows the author to elucidate some of the dynamics at work in the contemporary divide, which, in feminist theories, artificially opposes idealism and materialism. In addition, it also allows an exploration of the connections that unite cultural studies and post-structuralist feminism.