BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, capitalist expansion and the lash of competition have dictated the incorporation of larger and larger numbers of women into the labor force. This is so because capital always seeks to incorporate into the work force large numbers of workers in oppressed social categories (in this case women), the value of whose labor power under capitalism is less than that of others. This is a key way in which the employers drive down the overall average value of labor power by heightening competition among workers for jobs.

The development of capitalism, however, creates real--and ultimately insoluble--contradictions for the exploiting class. The capitalists’ increasing purchase of women’s capacities as wage laborers inevitably brings in its wake greater economic independence for women. It contributes to further disintegration of the family, and expands the need for the household appliances and prepared foods noted above. These factors, in turn, tend to raise the value of women’s labor power, to raise the wages they can command in the labor market on average, other things being equal.

Through their experiences in the work force and the unions, women in growing numbers also begin to think in broader social terms and to act as political beings. They become increasingly class conscious. They play an expanding role in struggles by the labor movement that can wrest higher wages from the employers and social programs from the capitalist government, thus pushing up the value of labor power for the entire working class.

These were the kinds of economic and social developments that took place in the decades of the post-World War II capitalist expansion, weakening the foundations on which the entire edifice of women’s oppression is built. As these objective preconditions combined with the political changes of the 1950s and 1960s--above all, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements--the "second wave" of feminism exploded onto the scene.

As a result of the women’s liberation struggles since the end of the 1960s, further broad advances have taken place in women’s attitudes toward themselves and their place in society, as well as in the views of men on these matters.

The period of accelerated post-World War II capitalist expansion came to an end in the mid-1970s. As this took place, the shifts in the economic and social conditions of women, and the changing attitudes and expectations accompanying them, increasingly clashed with the economic interests--that is, the profits--of the U.S. ruling class. This conflict lies beneath the political and ideological campaign directed against women’s rights that we are now living through, just as a similar conflict led to the reactionary promotion of the "feminine mystique" in the late 1940s and 1950s.

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.

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.  
 
 
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