Cosmetics, fashions and the exploitation of women

Cosmetics, Fashions and the Exploitation of Women is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. Joseph Hansen, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, sparked a lively debate when under the pen name Jack Bustelo he wrote an exposé in the Militant in 1954 on the profit-driven cosmetics industry and their efforts to propagandize women that they desperately needed cosmetics to get beautiful. This book is drawn from the record of that debate, which became known in the history of the SWP as the “Bustelo controversy.” It includes an introduction by current SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters along with other articles discussing the pressures that bear down on women and men in capitalist society, especially during periods of political reaction and retreat. Excerpted is SWP leader Evelyn Reed’s article, “The Woman Question and the Marxist Method,” defending Bustelo. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED

As we have frequently pointed out, the past fourteen years of war boom and prosperity have produced a conservatizing effect upon the working class which we describe as a “bourgeoisification.” One of the forms this takes is the readiness of the workers to accept bourgeois opinions and propaganda as scientific truth and adapt themselves to it.

Like the whole working class, the party is under constant pressure and bombardment from this massive bourgeois propaganda machine. As the conscious vanguard, however, we must not permit ourselves to become influenced by it to the slightest degree. On the contrary, we must counter this mood in the working class through unremitting ideological struggle.

Certain discussions now taking place in the party reveal that a certain amount of adaptation to bourgeois propaganda has arisen which, although probably unwitting, is a signal that should alert us to the danger. These discussions revolve around a very important and highly complex subject, the woman question. Since many aspects of this question are still obscure, and all aspects are sensitive, it is all the more imperative that we begin such a discussion on the basis of utmost clarity and objectivity. …

The contradictory position of the comrades arises out of the notion that questions concerning women in the realm of sex, beauty, and so on transcend class lines. The discussion, therefore, is taking place in an abstract void, apart from history and the class struggle. This notion arises out of the bourgeois myth that the needs of all women in the realm of sexual beauty are identical for all classes of women because of their common identity as women.

This is completely false. The class distinctions between women transcend their sex identity as women. This is above all true in modern capitalist society, the epoch of the sharpest polarization of class forces.

The woman question cannot be divorced from the class question. Any confusion on this score can only lead to erroneous conclusions and setbacks. It will divert the class struggle into a sex struggle of all women against all men.

Historically, the sex struggle was part of the bourgeois feminist movement of the last century. It was a reform movement, conducted within the framework of the capitalist system, and not seeking to overthrow it. But it was a progressive struggle in that women revolted against almost total male domination on the economic, social, and domestic fronts. Through the feminist movement, a number of important reforms were won for women. But the bourgeois feminist movement has run its course. …

[A]s capitalism developed, there arose an enormous expansion of the productive machine and with it the need for a mass market. Since women represent half the population, profiteers in “beauty” eyed this mass and lusted to exploit it for their own purposes. And so the fashion field was expanded out of the narrow confines of the rich and made socially obligatory upon the whole female population.

Now, for the first time, class distinctions were covered over and concealed behind sex identity, to serve the needs of this sector of big business. And the bourgeois hucksters began grinding out the propaganda: All women want to be beautiful. Therefore all women have the same interest in cosmetics and fashions. Beauty became identical with fashion and all women were sold on their common “needs and wants” for these fashions.

Today, billions are coined out of every department in the fashion field; cosmetics, clothes, hairdos, slenderizing salons, beauty salons, jewelry, fake and real, and so on. Beauty, it was discovered, was a very flexible formula. All you had to do to become rich was to discover a new aid to beauty and convince the whole population of women that they “needed and wanted” this aid. …

Thus, when the comrades defend the right of women to use cosmetics, fashions, etc., without clearly distinguishing between such a right and the capitalist social compulsion to use them, they have fallen into the trap of bourgeois propaganda. Even worse, as the vanguard of women, they are leading the mass of women into this fashion rat race and into upholding and perpetuating these profiteers, exploiters, and scoundrels.

It is contended that so long as capitalism prevails, we must abide by these cosmetic and fashion decrees. Otherwise, we will be left behind in the economic and social rear. This is true. We must give at least a token recognition of the harsh reality.

But this does not mean that we must accept these edicts and compulsions complacently, or without protest. The workers in the plants are often obliged to accept speedups, pay cuts, and attacks on their unions. But they always and invariably accept them under protest, under continuing struggle against them, and in a constant movement to oppose their needs and will against their exploiters.

The class struggle is a movement of opposition, not adaptation, and this holds true not only of the workers in the plants, but of the women as well, both workers and housewives. It is because the issues are more obscured in the realm of the women as a sex that some of our own comrades have fallen into the trap of adaptation. In this respect we must change our course. Let us begin to demonstrate, through history, that the modern fashion standard of beauty is not a permanent fixture, and that the working woman can and should have something to say about it.

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