Below is the preface by Mary-Alice Waters to the new 2024 edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women by Waters, Evelyn Reed and Joseph Hansen, available in December. Waters is a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party and president of Pathfinder Press.
The next issue of the Militant will print two other chapters from the book: “Norms of Beauty and Fashion Are Inseparable from the Class Struggle,” by Waters, and “As Though It Were Written Today,” by Isabel Moya. Moya was a leader of the Federation of Cuban Women and director of its publishing house Editorial de la Mujer. Copyright © 2024 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Title notwithstanding, Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women is not a book about cosmetics.
It is about capitalism.
It is about the social relations that are created and perpetuated at this stage of history by the property-owning class that appropriates the raw materials provided by nature. (With cold disregard for the human consequences, whatever they may be.) To obtain the labor they need to transform those materials into products they can sell — commodities — they buy our labor power by the hour: two, ten, twenty hours a day, whatever they can get away with. (Again, with callous indifference to our health, safety, or the needs of our families.)
Then, like the “merchants of beauty” you will read about in this book, they sell those products of our labor back to us, reaping what they consider to be their justly deserved profits.
With clarity and humor, in his 1954 article “The Fetish of Cosmetics” Joseph Hansen laid bare these workings of capitalism. He helps us understand how the economic system that continues to dominate the world today turns not only cosmetics but all our economic and social relations into commodities to be bought and sold.
‘Capitalism turns not just cosmetics but all human social relations into commodities to be bought and sold . . .’
Everything — and everybody — has a price. Ever heard that cynical phrase? It’s the international banner of capital. And meant literally.
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women is also about the place of women in this economic order. To quote one of Evelyn Reed’s contributions to this delightful collection, capitalism in its highest and final stage (the imperialist stage, which we’re living through today) has largely advanced “from selling women as commodities, to selling commodities to women.” And to men.
To achieve this, they promote sexy, come-hither images of women intended to convince other women how — by buying “the right things,” and buying more of them — they can vanquish their competitors and fetch a “higher price” in the dog-eat-dog marketplace for happiness, security, money, and a mate.
As a memorable billboard on the streets of San Francisco once urged, “Be someone. Buy something.”
To the dismay of the capitalist class worldwide, the rate of profit these days may not be as spectacular as during the African slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the times of the primitive accumulation of capital). The cosmetics trade, however, which in the name of “beauty” promotes everything from skin whiteners to grossly disfiguring “body sculpting” and genital mutilation, is today one of the most lucrative “industries” spread far and wide across every continent of the capitalist world.
Understanding how and why women and adolescents are most vulnerable to the hucksters of these grossly imagined and grossly expensive commodities is the second gift this book brings to its readers.
The oppression of women, the half of humanity that delivers new human life to the world, is not a product of our biology. Its roots are not to be found in the animal kingdom. Women were reduced to the “second sex,” subordinate to men, a mere ten thousand years ago, give or take a few thousand. That’s hardly a blink of the eye in the six million years since our first known human ancestors emerged from the primate world. As Reed points out, this subjugation of women was inextricable from the rise of class divisions based on private as opposed to communal ownership of land and the products of social labor.
The universal second-class status of women in class-divided society is a social relationship, an economic relationship. How and why did that condition come about? And how can it be ended?
What does any of this have to do with the material and emotional insecurities of women and adolescents today? How do capitalists play on these conditions to generate profits as they sell their snake oil — and try to persuade women they need and want to have their bodies surgically mutilated.
These are some of the questions explored in this book. And Reed and Hansen answer with an unequivocal affirmation: That the road to ending the oppression and exploitation of women is inseparable from the revolutionary battle by the working class and its exploited allies the world over to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class.
* * *
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women was first published in book format by Pathfinder Press in 1986. The introductory article, “Norms of beauty and fashion are inseparable from the class struggle,” tells the story of how the correspondence and articles collected here came to be written in the 1950s and preserved as a mimeographed discussion bulletin of the Socialist Workers Party.
‘Ending women’s oppression is part of the working-class battle to take state power out of capitalists’ hands . . .’
A Farsi edition of the book appeared in Iran in 2002, published by Golâzin, a Tehran-based publishing house led by women, and has been reprinted three times since then. The first Spanish edition came out in 2010, published in Cuba under the imprint of Ciencias Sociales. Pathfinder’s first Spanish-language edition followed in 2014, incorporating the lively comments about the book delivered by Isabel Moya, a leader of the Federation of Cuban Women, at the 2011 Havana International Book Fair.
For nearly four decades the book has been one of the most popular titles published by Pathfinder Press, with cumulative sales topping 18,000, including some 4,000 in Farsi.
This second edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women, soon to be published in French as well, is long overdue. The article “Norms of beauty and fashion are inseparable from the class struggle,” earlier versions of which have appeared in Spanish, will now be available in English and French for the first time. As will the thoughtful words of Isabel Moya.
The quickening pace and sharpness of the class struggle on a global scale make publication of this new edition all the more important, as daily news reports the world over bring to the fore the brutal reality of women’s oppression in all its hundreds of manifestations.
Rape and sexual enslavement as weapons of war and domination.
Denial of access to education and to divorce.
The stoning of women for adultery.
The promotion of “child brides.”
Deprivation of a woman’s ability to sell her own labor, earn a living on her own, drive a car, open a bank account, travel, or even leave her home unaccompanied by a man.
Government dictates that a woman must cover her hair, or face, or entire body, and that even her voice should never be heard in public.
Denial that the children a woman gives birth to belong to her, rather than whatever man she “belongs” to.
Denial of access to either fertility treatments, or to safe and legal contraception and abortion services.
And the many more “civilized” (read capitalist), manifestations of a woman’s inferior economic and social status, such as the “pay gap” between men and women that exists worldwide. It’s a universal inequality that will never be eradicated under capitalism. Because it’s not a matter of discrimination that can be eliminated by education or legislation. It’s an integral part of the very foundation of the global system of class relations — exploitative relations that produce and reproduce a division in the working class that is a source for the propertied classes of astronomical extra profits, year in and year out.
In a world of deepening capitalist crisis, “is the use of cosmetics worth the attention of a Marxist?” Hansen asks. You will find an unambiguous “Yes!” in these pages.
Read on, enjoy, and arm yourself for the only battle that can open the door to women’s equality — the battle to settle which class will rule.
October 2024