Vol. 71/No. 40      October 29, 2007

In the introduction Waters puts this subject in its historical framework, explaining the political consequences of the changes in women’s social conditions in the United States since World War II, especially their increasing incorporation into the industrial workforce and trade unions. Copyright ©1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
At the end of World War II, the U.S. rulers came out on top of the imperialist heap, with their main capitalist rivals devastated. The postwar workers’ upsurge in Western Europe was crushed. The 1945-46 strike wave in the United States ended in a stalemate. These factors established the preconditions for a quarter century of capitalist economic expansion during which broad layers of U.S. working people were able to wrest significant concessions from the bosses.

At the same time, however, the world system of imperialist domination had been weakened. While the imperial masters were fighting each other, the masses of colonial slaves rebelled. Revolutionary struggles for independence exploded throughout Asia and Africa. Despite enormous losses and devastation, the Soviet Union emerged victorious over German imperialism. The workers and peasants of Eastern Europe and China put an end to landlord-capitalist rule in vast new areas of the globe.

The response of the imperialist powers to these mortal blows was to launch and then expand the cold war against the Soviet Union and its new allies. The imperialists attempted to militarily crush the national liberation forces in Korea and Vietnam. Some individuals at top levels of the U.S. government gave serious consideration to using nuclear weapons against the people of those two countries and thus to repeating the horrors inflicted on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years earlier.

In the United States, the domestic side of the cold war was an anticommunist witch-hunt. It was aimed at destroying the unity and combativity of the industrial unions born in the great labor upsurge of the 1930s. It sought to turn back the postwar surge in the fight for Black civil rights. It was intended to sow fear, division, and demoralization among all those fighting for social progress.

The witch-hunt was at its peak as the 1950s began to unfold. The depoliticization of working-class fighters in the unions deepened. There was less and less motion in the labor movement around social questions and no extensive political life independent of the employers’ parties.

As a result of these conditions, the membership of the Socialist Workers Party—as well as that of the Communist Party and other organizations on the left—declined sharply and rapidly. Socialists became more and more isolated politically.

During World War II women had been incorporated into the labor force in larger numbers than ever before. Even more importantly, they were hired to perform many jobs from which women had previously been excluded. This broadened the social and political horizons of tens of millions of women who had formerly been trapped in the stultifying confines of the home or employed only in jobs traditionally hiring female labor.

This also brought irreversible changes in the way that both women and men thought about women’s place in society. When the war was over, there were millions of women and men who wanted to maintain these newly conquered social and economic relations.

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 became 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.
 
 
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