The article is also excerpted in “Women’s Liberation and the Line of March of the Working Class,” the first of a three-part series of Education for Socialists bulletins titled, “Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women’s Liberation.” This title is part of Pathfinder’s “Build the April 25 march on Washington” Supersaver Sale. (See ad linked to home page.) Subheadings are by the Militant. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
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….  
 
Industrial jobs no longer off-limits
The gains for women in industrial production jobs previously off-limits to them—whether in mining, steel, auto, or whatever—have usually meant integration into the industrial unions in a qualitatively new way. Probably the best example is the employment of women in coal mining and the growing role of women in the United Mine Workers union. Women have been fighting their way into jobs such as coal mining. This is precisely because unions such as the UMWA have won contracts that guarantee higher average wages and better benefits than women can find in traditional “female” occupations. Moreover, women are guaranteed wages and conditions equal to male co-workers in the same job categories. Women who have busted into these industries are often among the most conscious unionists. Many have learned through their own experiences why class solidarity and organization are so indispensable. They know that without union protection they would not stand a chance against the bosses’ attempts to divide the work force and turn other workers against them….

But it is precisely by fighting their way into such jobs that women can have an impact on the social conditions that keep the value of their labor power substantially lower than that of men. It is in such industrial union jobs that women are in the best position to develop mutual respect and confidence with male co-workers, gain self-confidence and class consciousness, and affect the attitudes of both men and women about women’s role in society.

A woman who works on an assembly line has a different relationship to the men around her than a woman who works as a secretary. And both are in a qualitatively different economic and social situation vis-à-vis men than a woman who remains outside the labor market altogether….

Other changes important to women’s social position also occurred during the postwar period. For the first time ever, advances in medical science gave women access to birth control methods that were relatively safe and certain, and that were under their own control.

Educational levels rose in general, and women won broader access to job training programs and higher education….  
 
Framework of broad assault
Today the employers are once again making a concerted political effort to roll back, or at least slow down, some of the changes in consciousness about women’s place in society. They are taking aim at concrete gains won through hard struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, such as abortion rights and affirmative action programs.

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….

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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