As part of celebrating Women's History Month, the Militant is reprinting an excerpt from the introduction to Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women by Joseph Hansen, Evelyn Reed, and Mary-Alice Waters. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
The capitalists' offensive against women's rights is not aimed at driving women out of the work force. That is historically precluded. The percentage of wage and salaried workers who are female has been rising, from one plateau to another, ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Instead, the aim is to make women more vulnerable to increased exploitation. The goal is not to push women out of the labor market but to push them down--to jobs with fewer paid holidays, more piece work, less safety, shorter lunch breaks, less union protection, and lower wages.
Women have always made up an important component of the pool of unemployed workers that Marx called the industrial reserve army of labor. This reserve army never disappears under capitalism, even in the best of times. But in a period of capitalist stagnation such as we have lived through over the last decade, the owners of capital need to expand this army of the unemployed in order to intensify competition among workers and thus drive down wages. Hundreds of thousands of women workers were forced into its ranks during the 1980–82 recession, eroding some of the employment gains they had previously won.
Bosses' ideological campaign
The bosses' ideological campaign seeks to reinforce the idea among both sexes that women are "natural" recruits to this reserve army. They are "normally" only marginal workers, temporary workers, part-time workers, home workers. Women are only a "second" wage earner in the family. In periods of rising joblessness, there are always assertions by ruling-class "opinion molders" that unemployment statistics are artificially high, since women should not really be counted as unemployed in the same way as men, who are considered the main breadwinners. This propaganda is aimed at convincing women to accept, with less resistance and resentment, temporary unemployment, or new jobs at lower wages. All this is true despite the increase in female heads of household, a trend that will continue as the evolution of capitalism continues to disintegrate the family.
The capitalists want women to blame themselves, not the social relations of production, for the economic and social problems they confront every day. The goal is to make women feel guilty that their children are being permanently damaged by "abandonment" in child-care facilities (if they exist), or are being turned into lonely latch-key delinquents. Rather than demanding--as a right--both child-care facilities and equal access to high-paying jobs previously barred to them, women are pushed toward being grateful for any job, at any wage.
Rulers' strategy: deepen race divisions
Part of the rulers' strategy is also to deepen race divisions. They seek to break down solidarity and intensify competition between women workers who are fighting their way into nontraditional jobs and Black workers, who constitute a large proportion of the politically more conscious, vanguard layers of the working class. Since women are getting jobs that men "ought" to have, they are alleged to be responsible for the high rate of unemployment of Black males. The employers also attempt to pit white women and Black women against each other along similar lines.
Even the notion that backward, prejudiced men are the source of women's problems is accorded a favored niche in the employers' propaganda arsenal as an alternative to the truth that the capitalist system is responsible for perpetuating the oppression of women.
Glorification of the family
Because the advances in women's status in the 1960s and 1970s were so broad, and the changes in consciousness so sweeping, the counteroffensive against women's rights in the last few years has been all the more concerted. It has taken numerous forms: