BY EVELYN REED
The woman question cannot be divorced from the class question. Any confusion on this score can only lead to erroneous conclusions and setbacks. It will divert the class struggle into a sex struggle of all women against all men.

Historically, the sex struggle was part of the bourgeois feminist movement of the last century. It was a reform movement, conducted within the framework of the capitalist system, and not seeking to overthrow it. But it was a progressive struggle in that women revolted against almost total male domination on the economic, social, and domestic fronts. Through the feminist movement, a number of important reforms were won for women. But the bourgeois feminist movement has run its course, achieved its limited aims, and the problems of today can only be resolved in the struggle of class against class.

The woman question can only be resolved through the lineup of working men and women against the ruling men and women. This means that the interests of the workers as a class are identical; and not the interests of all women as a sex.

Ruling-class women have exactly the same interest in upholding and perpetuating capitalist society as their men have. The bourgeois feminists fought, among other things, for the right of women as well as men to hold property in their own name. They won this right. Today, plutocratic women hold fabulous wealth in their own names. They are completely in alliance with the plutocratic men to perpetuate the capitalist system. They are not in alliance with the working women, whose needs can only be served through the abolition of capitalism. Thus, the emancipation of working women will not be achieved in alliance with women of the enemy class, but just the opposite; in a struggle against them as part and parcel of the whole class struggle.

The attempt to identify the interests of all classes of women as a sex takes one of its most insidious forms in the field of female beauty. The bourgeois myth has arisen that since all women want to be beautiful, they all have the same interest in cosmetics and fashions which are currently identified with beauty. To buttress this myth, it is claimed that fashion beauty has prevailed throughout all ages of history and for all classes of women. As evidence, they point to the fact that even in primitive society, women painted and decorated their bodies. To explode this myth, let us briefly examine the history of cosmetics and fashions.

In primitive society, where there were no classes, no economic and social competition, and no sexual competition, the bodies of both women and men were painted and "decorated," and it was not for the sake of beauty. It was a necessity that arose out of certain primeval and primitive conditions of labor, which I shall explain in detail in future articles.¹

It was necessary at that time for each individual who belonged to the kinship group to be "marked" as such. These "marks" were not merely ornaments, rings, bracelets, short skirts, etc., but actual gashes, incisions, tattoo marks, etc. as well as different kinds of painting. These marks indicated not only the sex of each individual but the changing age and labor status of each individual as he matured from a child to an elder.

These marks identified the kindred members of the same group or labor collective. Since primitive society was socialist, these marks also expressed social equality. The bourgeois anthropologists will not reveal all of this to you, but neither can they reveal anything about the underlying economic and social forces that govern either primitive or modern society.

Then came class society. The marks that signified, among other things, social equality under primitive socialism, became transformed into their opposite. They became fashions and decorations that signified social inequality: the division of society into rich and poor, into rulers and subjugated. Cosmetics and fashions became the marks of social distinction between the classes and the apex of this social distinction is found in the French Court before the French Revolution.

Among these kings, princes, and landed gentry, both men and women were dressed in the height of fashion, with their painted faces, powdered hair, lace ruffles, gold ornaments, and the like. Both sexes were "beautiful" according to the standards of the day. But, more decisively, both sexes in the ruling class were demarcated by these cosmetics and fashions from the peasants who sweated for them on the land and who were, by the same standards, not beautiful. Fashion at that period was the mark of class distinction of both sexes of the ruling class against both sexes of the working class.

Then, for certain historical reasons we will not go into here, men left the field of fashion primarily to the women. The big bourgeois, who emerged after the French Revolution, established his class standing through the fashions of his wife, and in other ways, in place of himself wearing gold pants and lace ruffles. Among the women, however, fashions were still the mark of class distinction and not sex identity in the days of "Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's lady."²

But as capitalism developed, there arose an enormous expansion of the productive machine and with it the need for a mass market. Since women represent half the population, profiteers in "beauty" eyed this mass and lusted to exploit it for their own purposes. And so the fashion field was expanded out of the narrow confines of the rich and made socially obligatory upon the whole female population.

Now, for the first time, class distinctions were covered over and concealed behind sex identity, to serve the needs of this sector of big business. And the bourgeois hucksters began grinding out the propaganda: All women want to be beautiful. Therefore all women have the same interest in cosmetics and fashions. Beauty became identical with fashion and all women were sold on their common "needs and wants" for these fashions.

Today, billions are coined out of every department in the fashion field; cosmetics, clothes, hairdos, slenderizing salons, beauty salons, jewelry, fake and real, and so on. Beauty, it was discovered, was a very flexible formula. All you had to do to become rich was to discover a new aid to beauty and convince the whole population of women that they "needed and wanted" this aid.
 

1.See Woman's Evolution, especially pp. 99–103, 282–95.

2.This quotation is paraphrased from Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Ladies." Its last two lines are "For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady / Are sisters under their skins."  
 
 
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