Novack explains that the subordinate status of women is a permanent feature of bourgeois society because it is an integral component of capitalist exploitation. As a result, the struggle for the emancipation of women from their status as a second sex cannot be separated from the line of march of the working class toward the revolutionary conquest of power. Copyright © 1969 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

In the second place, capitalists require not only cheap but constantly renewed supplies of labor power, which must primarily come from the younger generation. Women have the prime responsibility for raising children. Their unpaid or poorly recompensed labors in the family household serve to lower the costs of reproducing and renewing the labor force.

These costs would be much higher if the capitalist regime had to take over the multiple services provided gratis or at minimal expenditure by the family setup and the domestic drudgery of married women. The socialization of such services would have to be paid for by taxation, which would in part fall upon the capitalists. This shift would increase the cost of the most vital factor of production, the work force which creates value, and reduce whatever advantage accrues to the national capitalist class in that respect.

Third, where women work in large numbers in industry, trade, offices, schools and the professions, discrimination against them is directly profitable to the employers. Degradation and domesticity keep them in the category of lower-paid labor. The capitalists always benefit from maintaining national, racial and sexual differentials in income and status among the work force. The working class as a whole would be a far more homogeneous and formidable antagonist if all discriminations and divisions within it were eliminated.

Fourth, women are a detachment of the reserve army of labor required by the capitalists during periods of labor shortage. This supply can be impounded or tapped according to the fluctuating rate of the accumulation of capital. During wartime, women can be mustered out of the household and drawn into the productive processes, as was done during the first and second world wars. Then, with the end of hostilities, they can be sent back to the family hearth, there to be kept in storage until capital needs to recall them again. The family home is a depot where surplus labor is deposited and kept in mothballs at least expense to the profiteers.  
 
Prime targets
Fifth, females of all ages are the prime target of the advertising hucksters who must induce them, by fair means or foul, to purchase all kinds of commodities, useful and useless, from gadgets to cosmetics. In this con game even the appliances which are supposed to relieve and lighten household toil become devices for fastening the family to the credit companies.

Social as well as economic reasons lead the possessing classes to shore up the cult of the family. The ordinary urban family with the male at its head acts as a stabilizing and conservatizing agency in an otherwise unsettled world. It is a corral where the domestic servant works for the master in the kitchen, nursery and dining room.

Though the family nest may often provide the sole sanctuary from the buffetings and harassments of a cruel outside environment, it fosters immersion in purely private concerns, narrowness of outlook and exclusiveness among its members. Here attempts are made to tame, discipline and conservatize adolescents. All sorts of backwardness, from religion to racism, are nurtured within its walls.

These ever-present factors are more potent than long-standing prejudice in preventing the capitalist regime from giving women the freedom they desire. The rulers can under duress bestow upon women the same formal juridical, political and constitutional rights that men possess: the right to own and dispose of property, the right to vote and hold office, and the right to divorce, although these rights may be curtailed in practice. They can even be pressed to legalize birth control and abortion.  
 
Bourgeois reforms
But just as the bourgeois revolution transformed the Southern chattel slaves into impoverished landless freedmen and then returned them to new forms of bondage, so bourgeois reforms have allowed women to escape from being a complete chattel of the male master and become a “free individual” in the bourgeois sense. What they have not done is to release women from the grip of the men and give them equality in the decisive spheres of social life.

The exploitative structure of their system sets limits on the scope of the freedoms the monopolists can grant to any segment of the oppressed. Just as the American capitalists have failed to give equality to the blacks a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, so they have not truly emancipated women. They cannot make good on their promises of “liberty for all” because they lack the material incentives and class impulsions to do so.  
 
Socialist revolution
It will take a thoroughgoing reorganization of the entire social setup from the economic foundations up to and including family relations before women can eradicate the causes of their inferior status and the evils flowing from it. In order to accomplish that, a socialist revolution, which will transfer state power and the ownership of the means of production from the monopolists to the majority of the people, must be carried through.

These are the lessons to be learned from the disappointing results of the democratic epoch in improving the position of the female sex and from examining the actual role of women, and especially working-class women, in the functioning of American capitalism today.  
 
 
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