BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
As part of our coverage for Women's History Month we are
reprinting below an except from "The capitalist ideological
offensive against women today," Mary-Alice Waters's 1985
introduction to the Pathfinder title Cosmetics, Fashions, and
the Exploitation of Women. Copyright Pathfinder Press,
reprinted with permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
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.
Bosses seek to drive down wages
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 at lower
wages, more piece work, less safety, shorter lunch breaks,
less union protection, fewer paid holidays.
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 temporarily forced into its ranks during the 1980-82 recession, eroding some of the employment gains they had previously won.
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 acquiesce, with less resistance and resentment, to temporary unemployment, or to 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.
Want women to blame themselves
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.
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 employment propaganda arsenal as an alternative to the truth that the capitalist system is responsible for perpetuating the oppression of women.