For the employing class, however, increasing economic independence and social equality for women is incompatible with intensified superexploitation of female labor power. Hence, the deliberate promotion during postwar years of the "feminine mystique," as it later came to be known. This extensive political and ideological campaign was aimed at rolling back the changes in attitudes about women's proper role. It was promoted in order to reinforce the idea that women--whether or not they are part of the labor force--should first and foremost be wives, mothers, and housekeepers. Thus women should accept employment at lower wages and under worse conditions. Women should spend less time on union activity or political concerns and should take less interest in them.

Women were not the only target of the rulers' ideological campaign. This reactionary assault, waged through the mass media, schools, and churches, was directed toward reversing the attitudes of both sexes concerning women's social role. But its impact on women was different. To a large extent women, like other oppressed layers of capitalist society, internalize the pressures on them. They place limitations on themselves, often unconsciously. They accept the socially prescribed roles, and, in fact, often promote the conditions that perpetuate their own oppression.

Through the "cosmetics" debate that took place among members of the Socialist Workers Party, we get a glimpse of the diverse, if not so subtle, ways in which the postwar period of reaction affected even women and men who were socialists and conscious champions of women's liberation. We see how the pressures affected the way people thought about themselves.  
 
Changes in women's social conditions
Since the early 1950s, of course, there have been extensive changes in the economic and social conditions facing women in the United States. The domestic and international political situation has been vastly altered, as well.

Most importantly, the accelerated expansion of capitalism in the postwar years brought with it an even greater incorporation of women into the labor market than during World War II. In 1950, 33.9 percent of women sixteen years of age and over were in the labor force. By 1960 that figure had risen to 37.7 percent. In 1970 it was 43.3 percent. And by 1983, more than half of all working-age women--52.9 percent--were in the labor force. During that thirty-three-year period, the percentage increase of women who were in the labor market was slightly more than the percentage increase during the seventy years between 1890 and 1960!

Women today account for 43 percent of the labor force, as compared with 29 percent in 1950. This marks a qualitative advance in the economic independence of women and consequently a change in their social status.

It is also important, however, to take a look at the changes in where women are employed. Two of the most carefully promoted myths are the notions that working women have generally "escaped" from industrial jobs, and that this represents a rising economic and social status for women. The reality is far more complex. The most important advances for women--although directly involving only a small percentage of women--have been precisely those that have integrated them more deeply into the most strongly organized, predominantly male, sectors of the industrial working class....

The goal of the bosses and their government is not to drive women out of the labor force, but to undermine their class consciousness and political self-confidence. The goal is to make women more willing to acquiesce in attacks on wages, working conditions, social services, affirmative action programs, and equality on the job. In this way, the employers are attempting to hold back the increase in the value of women's labor power (and thereby that of the class as a whole), and to enforce greater discipline and "productivity" by imposing speedup and more dangerous working conditions.

These attacks on women's rights are part of a broader offensive that the U.S. capitalist class has been waging for more than a decade. The target is all working people, and all those whose race, sex, language, or national origin is used by the ruling class to single them out for superexploitation and special oppression. The employers are determined to fundamentally shift the relationship of forces between capital and labor that was established following the post-World War II strike wave.

This intensifying capitalist offensive began with the 1974-75 world recession and picked up steam with the 1980-82 recession. It is directed against the wages, job conditions, democratic rights, and organizations of the working class. It is aimed at heading off progress toward political independence by the working class--toward any notion that labor should develop and fight for its own positions on social and political questions, independent of and opposed to those of the bosses and bosses' parties.

This offensive has been registered in a rightward shift of the entire bipartisan structure of capitalist politics in the United States. It has been accompanied by a sustained ideological offensive aimed at dividing the working class more deeply between employed and unemployed, and along the lines of race, sex, age, "skill levels," language, and national origin. A special goal has been to reverse gains won by Blacks and women, who over the previous period fought their way through some of the barriers that keep them confined to second-class status in capitalist society in general, and within the labor force in particular.

Parallel to this domestic offensive has been an escalation of U.S. aggression abroad, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. As part of the preparations for war, there has been an enormous increase in U.S. military spending. We have seen a constant barrage of anticommunist propaganda, directed above all against Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Salvadoran freedom fighters, but also against Angola, Vietnam, the South African and Palestinian peoples. This has been accompanied by a domestic spy hunt and antiunion "industrial security" campaign. Through the concerted political drive on all these fronts, Wall Street and Washington are trying to bludgeon and con the U.S. working class into believing that their foreign policy is in our interests.

One result of this sustained economic and political offensive, with all its reactionary ideological offshoots, has been a deepening class polarization in the United States. Not everyone is suffering from the policies that the employers are putting into effect. To the contrary, tens of millions of individuals in middle-class and professional layers are benefiting from these policies. Some layers of the working class have also improved their situation--even if the insecurities and pressures that are common to their class also bear down on them. To varying degrees, all these social layers are being pulled to the right politically.

On the other hand, the big majority of workers and working farmers are taking stiffer and stiffer blows. The bosses' offensive has run into resistance, however. There has been opposition to two-tier wage scales, bank foreclosures on struggling farmers, and U.S. military intervention in Central America. Working people have mobilized in defense of Black rights. Struggles have been fought around women's rights, and immigrants' rights.

All of these are labor issues--issues on which the labor movement must have its own policies and defend its own class interests and those of its allies. All are questions on which there is reflection, concern, and a growing willingness to take action on the part of workers. Broad and growing sectors of working people--on the farms and in the factories--are becoming aware that there are interconnections among these many battlefronts.

So far, defeats and setbacks for working people continue to outnumber victories, and the bosses and their politicians retain the initiative. But that has not put a stop to resistance. To the contrary, the willingness and desire of working people to fight back continues to assert itself.

The class polarization and the experiences that are generating it give an impulse to the politicization and radicalization of the most combative workers. But these same developments also embolden rightist proponents of national-chauvinist, racist, anti-Semitic, antiwoman, and antiunion prejudices, as well as other reactionary ideas.

This is the political context in which we need to place the current attacks on women's rights by the employers and their government.  
 
Bosses reinforce antiwoman prejudices
When the bosses go on a stepped-up offensive to shift the relationship of forces in their favor, they play every card in the deck--war and the threat of military aggression abroad; more naked use of the cops and courts at home (whether against Blacks, immigrant workers, farmers, or strikers); massive cuts in social services; tax hikes; union busting and concession contracts. At the same time, they wage a political campaign to justify their course as being in the interests of "all of us." They talk about "equality of sacrifice," the "national interest," "labor-management cooperation," and "common cultural values."

Within this framework, the rulers single out special targets as part of their broad frontal assault. One of these is always the progressive changes taking place in women's social status. The employers are aiming at the advances of working-class women especially, but the barrage is necessarily directed against all women. The second sex must be taught to know its place.

The attack on women's rights is fundamental to the success of the capitalist offensive. Discrimination against women is one of the most important ways in which the rulers work to deepen divisions within the working class. Its acceptance helps the bosses keep the labor movement shackled to a narrow trade union perspective, instead of thinking in broader social terms and acting politically to advance the interests of the oppressed and exploited. The perpetuation of women's subordinate status is one more obstacle along the road to independent working-class political action.

The employers aim to undermine working-class women's consciousness of themselves as workers, as part of the working class, and instead to heighten their consciousness of themselves as women--not in the feminist sense, but in all the retrograde ways that are drummed into women from childhood. The employing class seeks to reinforce the prejudices about women's proper place and domestic role. It seeks to convince women that they want to be dependent on a man, with the second-class status that entails.

Such prejudices, and the ways women internalize them, go back millennia. But the rise and development of capitalism progressively undermines them, as it forces women out of the home and off the farm and pushes them as individuals into the labor market--with all the brutality inherent in the capitalist mode of production.

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.  
 
 
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