Below are remarks given by Mary-Alice Waters on Feb. 18 during the 2025 Havana International Book Fair to present Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women by Joseph Hansen, Evelyn Reed, and Waters (see news article here). Waters is a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press. She is the book’s editor and author of its preface and opening chapter. Copyright © 2024 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Thank you Martín [Koppel]. And a thank you to everyone here with us today.
I would like to add one thing to what Martín has said in introducing Esther [Pérez], who will be speaking as part of the program this morning. Not only did she give us this excellent Spanish translation of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women. After finishing that work, she also posed two thoughtful questions many readers might have, and those questions serve as a framework for the opening chapter of this new edition.
More about that in a moment!
I also want to reiterate what an honor it is for us to have with us both General Teté Puebla and Commander Víctor Dreke, representing the women and men the course of whose lives were changed forever as they fought to bring down the Batista dictatorship and open the road to the first socialist revolution in the Americas.
Thinking about our presentation today, I was reminded of a remark that Teté made to us some 20 years ago when we were working together to prepare her book, Marianas in Combat, which tells the story of the women’s combat platoon initiated by Fidel in the Sierras during the revolutionary war.
“Before the revolutionary victory,” Teté noted, “women were objects — mere bed decorations. After the revolution this changed. Women began to organize massively, working to change the conditions of their lives and to free themselves.”
We’ve come a long way since then. But none of us can forget that for the majority of women around the world, Teté’s words still capture the reality of their existence.
About capitalism, not cosmetics
The preface to this new edition of Los cosméticos, las modas y la explotación de la mujer opens with the words:
“Title notwithstanding, Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women is not a book about cosmetics.
“It is about capitalism.”
“How capital’s ‘merchants of beauty’ reap profits by exploiting economic, social, and sexual insecurities of women and adolescents.”
—Mary-Alice Waters
It is about the social relations that are created and perpetuated at this stage of history by the property-owning classes that appropriate the raw materials provided by nature. (With total disregard for the human consequences, whatever they may be.) To transform those materials into products they can sell — commodities — capitalist owners buy our labor power at the lowest price 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 the book, they sell those products of our own labor back to us, reaping the greatest profit possible, claiming they deserve that wealth because they are more intelligent and work harder. And anyway, we’ll all “look better” by spreading or ingesting these commodities onto and into our bodies.
With humor and materialist clarity, Joseph Hansen in 1954 demystified these workings of capitalism in an article entitled “The Fetish of Cosmetics,” which is the cornerstone of this book. Hansen 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.
Everything — and everybody — has a price. That is the universal guide to action of capital. And meant literally. Mr. Trump, the current president of the strongest — even if weakening — imperialist power in the world, is not an aberration. He only says openly — and acts on — what his entire class believes to be its due.
To them we’re all objects in a portfolio of real estate holdings on which they can turn a profit.
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women is also about the place of women in this capitalist economic order. To quote one of co-author Evelyn Reed’s contributions to this delightful collection, capitalism in its highest and final stage (the imperialist stage we’re living through today) has largely advanced “from selling women as commodities, to selling commodities to women.” And to men, I would add.
What distinguishes cosmetics and clothing from other commodities like a refrigerator or a cellphone, Joseph Hansen explains, is that sexual relations attach to them. And that is used by the “merchants of beauty” to increase their profits, to exploit the economic, social and sexual insecurities of women and adolescents above all. Who doesn’t want a more satisfying sex life if all you have to do is buy the right “things”?
The cosmetics trade — 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 by capitalist commerce across every continent of the world.
Product of class-divided society
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. It’s an economic, a social relationship that is the product of class society. Women were reduced to the “second sex,” subordinate to men, a mere five or ten thousand years ago. That’s a blink of the eye in the 6 million years since our first known human ancestors emerged from the primate world.
As Reed points out, this subjugation of women as the “second sex” is inextricable from the rise of class divisions based on private ownership, as opposed to communal ownership, of land and the products of human beings’ social labor. In that historical process women, like cattle and other domesticated animals, became valuable private property.
How and why did that social transformation 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?
These are some of the questions explored and answered in this book, along with an unequivocal affirmation by its authors: That the road to ending the oppression and exploitation of women is inseparable from the revolutionary struggles by the working class and its exploited allies the world over to take state power out of the hands of today’s dominant capitalist rulers.
It’s what Teté explained so clearly and simply in the words cited a few minutes ago. It’s what you did here in Cuba more than 65 years ago.
Four decades and counting
For nearly four decades Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women has been one of the most popular titles published by Pathfinder Press. Its cumulative sales top 18,000, including more than 3,000 in Farsi (the majority language in Iran).
It was first published in book format by Pathfinder Press in 1986. The introductory chapter, “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. How in those years, young men and women like me discovered it as part of beginning our political lives, drawn to the working-class battle to bring down the Jim Crow edifice of racial segregation in the U.S., and won to the example of the deepening socialist revolution in Cuba. The historical materialist, dialectical, and working-class course we encounter in these pages helped us understand things we had never before been able to explain.
It helped us chart a course for a lifetime.
A Farsi edition of the book appeared in Iran in 2002, published by Golâzin, a Tehran-based publishing house organized by women, and has been reprinted three times since then. A new edition is now being prepared there.
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 delivered by Isabel Moya, a leader of the Federation of Cuban Women, at the 2011 Havana International Book Fair. Her sparkling words deserved a space in this collection and have been included in each new edition ever since.
And, in a matter of days, Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women will also be available for the first time in French.
The quickening pace and sharpness of the class struggle on a global scale make publication of this new edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women all the more important. Daily news reports the world over shine a spotlight on the brutal reality of women’s oppression in all of its hundreds of manifestations — from rape and sexual enslavement as weapons of war and domination, to the more “civilized” (read capitalist) symptoms of a woman’s inferior economic and social status, such as the “pay gap” between men and women that exists worldwide.
Whatever the form or degree, the inequality between men and women will never be eradicated under capitalism, however. Because it’s not a matter of discrimination that can be eliminated by capitalist education or legislation. It’s an integral part of the very foundation of the global system of class relations — capitalist relations of exploitation — that produce and reproduce a division in the working class that is a source of astronomical extra profits, year in and year out, for the propertied classes.
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.
Fetishism of cosmetics
Before finishing I want to return to the two questions mentioned at the beginning.
The first question is: Are the issues addressed in a debate about cosmetics and fashion many decades ago still relevant? Haven’t “we” moved beyond that?
Second: Hasn’t knowledge of the earliest human societies moved far beyond what was known in the early 1950s? Isn’t Evelyn Reed’s article on “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?” outdated for that reason?
The response to the first question is underscored by Hansen’s rhetorical question in “The Fetish of Cosmetics.” In the whole history of capitalism, he asks, “has the bourgeoisie ever gone about cultivating the fetish of commodities more cold-bloodedly than American big business?”
More than three centuries after the birth of industrial capitalism, we can say that the resources devoted by capitalist enterprises to advertising and the creation of markets — that is, creating “needs” that don’t naturally exist — have expanded astronomically, and continue to expand.
“Things” you must have to be happy are pushed on hapless “consumers” without pause — including younger and younger children!
The pressure to be “fashionable” — that is, to be attractive to a potential mate, as well as “employable” — has penetrated ever more deeply into the working class. Under bourgeois domination, the internet and the misnamed “social media” have become new and more powerful tools by which capitalist ideology, morals, and commodities intrude into our lives every minute of the day.
The impact of the 21st century capitalist advertising “industry” is, if anything, even more insidious as it spreads to areas of the globe previously buffered to some extent from the imperialist world market. In large areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the siren song of the commodity fetish is an imperialist weapon like none other.
What’s more, the “cosmetic surgery industry” penetrates more and more deeply into these countries. In the eloquent words of the Communist Manifesto, “the cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls…. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
As the not-so-outdated polemic of the 1950s makes clear, in periods of working-class retreat such as we’ve lived through for the last decades — there have been no new victorious socialist revolutions for more than six decades — the “heavy artillery” of capitalism takes its toll, including among the most politically conscious layers of the toilers.
Class struggle and class politics
The answer to the second question — are Evelyn Reed’s articles obsolete? — is also important.
“Marxism and the Woman Question” and “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?” focus on the sharp polemic that Reed often referred to as the “Hundred-Year War in Anthropology.” Here, as in other writings, she defends the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and the work of the most observant and materialist of the founders of the modern field of anthropology on which they drew.
As Reed points out, in this century-plus war over historical materialism one of the major battle lines has been the family and its transformations over time.
On one side are those who assert that something akin to the modern bourgeois “patriarchal system of marriage and family relations goes all the way back to the animal kingdom.” It is eternal — and therefore so is the second-class status of women.
On the other side are those, like Reed, who defend historical materialism and document how what is often referred to as “patriarchy,” and the subjugation of women, arose in recent millennia as a cornerstone of class-divided societies.
“Concealed behind the debate,” Reed explains, is “a question of class struggle and class ideology.”
If class society and the accompanying subordinate status of women is only a stage of human history, one that arose at a certain historical juncture for specific reasons, then it can be eliminated at another historical juncture for other specific reasons.
If there has been an extended evolution of social relations through violent, conflict-driven stages of the prehistory and history of human society — determined by increasing levels of labor productivity and changing property relations — then capitalism and capitalist rule are no more permanent than the property and social relations that preceded them.
Those studying and writing today about the development of social labor and the earliest stages of social organization are able to draw on a larger and richer body of research than the earliest anthropologists, or even those of Reed’s generation. Of that there is no doubt. And light will continue to be shed on the complexities and contradictions — the uneven and combined varieties — of human social evolution.
But as Reed points out, recognition of diversity “is no substitute for probing into social history and explaining the evolution of human society as it advanced” — and continues to advance — “through the ages.”
Which class rules
News accounts everyday bring home to us ever more sharply that we are today living through the opening of what will be years of worldwide economic, financial, and social convulsions, class battles, and wars. The imperialist epoch’s opening guns of World War III have already been heard. But the unimaginable is not yet the inevitable.
That depends on which class rules. The international working class is today far larger and potentially more powerful than in the years that preceded the two interimperialist slaughters of the 20th century. And the large increase in the percentage of women in the workforce worldwide is one of the reasons for this.
What’s missing is growing working-class consciousness, confidence and revolutionary leadership. Communist leadership that can — and will — develop only in the course of class battles.
The kind of leadership provided by V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party he forged in the czarist empire. Leadership of the kind exemplified by Fidel Castro and the cadres of the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army in Cuba, who led the way to Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Leadership of the exploited producers of all skin colors and nationalities the world over, like that demonstrated by Malcolm X, a leadership with moral courage and integrity. And, I will add, of the Socialist Workers Party leadership who shared that course.
Those kinds of leadership, too, can only be forged — and will continue to be forged — in the heat of class battles.
* * *
With this new edition, Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women has begun a new stage of its life — and not a moment too soon.
This is a book to read and enjoy. Even more important, it is a book that helps to arm us for the only battle that can open the door to women’s equality — and a future for humanity — the battle to settle on a world scale which class will rule.