‘The fashion world became a capitalist gold mine’

Vol. 85/No. 10 - March 15, 2021
Above, portrait of high society bourgeois soiree. Inset, members of United Steelworkers of America Local 8888 picket in February 1979 in successful battle for union recognition against Newport News, Virginia, shipyard bosses. “The woman question cannot be divorced from the class question,” Evelyn Reed writes in Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women.

  Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women by Joseph Hansen, Evelyn Reed and Mary-Alice Waters is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. This Marxist classic on women’s emancipation began as a 1954 debate in the Militant…