Women’s social and economic position makes them a powerful social force in any period of change. In struggle, they have been among the most dedicated, the most militant, the most willing to sacrifice. No revolution has, or ever could, take place without the contribution of women.

To wield the power of women for the cause of revolution today, we cannot simply apply the formulas of the past. The growing polarization of wealth and poverty is throwing millions into poverty regardless of gender, color or nationality. Under such conditions, unity along class lines is the only means of organizing our forces for the struggles ahead.

Understanding women's status and condition today is crucial to understanding why this is so. The following article seeks to continue the discussion on how we, as revolutionaries, must play our role in finally liberating women from their ancient oppression, and transforming society into what it can now be – where all will share in the fruits of society, where inequality and oppression will have no part.

Women's changing position in society

Women's oppression arose with private property and has changed according to the historical and economic conditions that dictated their place in production. Prior to the rise of private property, women's labor played a central role in social production and reproduction. There was a division of labor between men and women, but not an inequality because there was no possibility of the accumulation of property. The domestication of animals and the development of agriculture led to the accumulation of property that was passed from one generation to the next. Women were pushed out of social production, and confined to private production within the family, thus, becoming dependent upon men. These epochal changes, centuries in the making, accompanied the reorganization of society to safeguard private property relations.

In the past 50 years, we have seen great changes in the position of women. Technological developments in the home have freed women to enter the work force, the expansion of the post-war economy made jobs available, and, more recently, downsizing and declining wages brought about by the introduction of electronics have made those jobs necessary to maintain the family. Increasingly, these same technological developments are erasing the physical differences between men's and women's work. Women now constitute almost 50 per cent of the U.S. workforce. They are better educated, and have access to occupations that were once the exclusive domain of men.

Like other historically oppressed groups in America, women have been increasingly integrated into the different classes in American society. Women are increasingly represented within the most elite circles of the corporate and political world. Seven of the world’s 50 richest people are women. Women corporate CEOs make decisions involving billions of dollars and the lives and livelihood of thousands of people. A black woman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is responsible for developing and overseeing U.S. foreign policy, is one of the most powerful people in the world. This November, the U.S. may elect its first woman President. These elite women, like the men of their class, defend private property and advance the interests of the capitalist class.

The majority of American women, however, are struggling even harder than ever to juggle a life of work and family, discrimination in the workplace, and the general financial and emotional stresses of life lived in a world where the "race to the bottom" is ever-present. “We are an accident away from homelessness,” a Florida woman told interviewers for the AFL-CIO’s 2006 Ask a Working Woman Survey. “I own a home, I make decent pay, but, if I am out of work for more than 3 months, my son and I are on the street.” Another, responding to the same survey wrote, “Everything that benefits working women is under siege – jobs, education, health coverage, retirement, child care. Everything that helps billionaires is being strengthened. Corporations and government have become interchangeable.”

From among these growing numbers of discontented women is emerging a section of women who do have common economic interests. These are the women of the emerging new class of dispossessed. They make up over 60 per cent of minimum wage workers, 70 percent of part-time workers, 55 percent of temporary workers, and 47 percent of multiple job holders. Immigrant women are almost wholly concentrated in the lowest paying jobs, such as domestic work and the service sector. Over one-third of all the families maintained by women live below the poverty level. Almost half of single, black mothers live below the poverty line.

As women’s situation deteriorates, the wholesale destruction of the social safety net makes their abandonment by society all too real. Welfare is so restricted as to be useless. Public housing is being torn down and rebuilt to house the better off. Public health clinics and hospitals have been shuttered, never to open again. It is not surprising then, that women and children of all colors constitute the fastest-rising number of the homeless and destitute.

It is upon women’s backs that the crumbling capitalist order is reorganizing itself in a desperate attempt to maximize profits and defend private property relations at all costs. Which way society will go is no longer an abstract question. As society disintegrates, and women’s situation deteriorates, a backlash is developing that clamors for further restriction of women’s rights, trivializes the growing violence against them, and turns a blind eye to their downward spiral into destitution.

The women of the new class share common economic interests, not only with each other, but, increasingly, with men in their similar economic position.

Electronics – labor-replacing technology – has devastated a growing section of male workers. Unskilled, entry level, skilled manufacturing and, increasingly, white-collar workers are finding themselves marginalized, unable to find or to keep work. A growing section of men is finding that their prospects are little different from women's as men join the women as contingent workers – part-timers, temps, and working multiple jobs.

Electronic technology has the potential to provide everyone in society with the fruits of a stable, cultured, and decent life. Under capitalism, this same technology has rendered the value of human labor "worthless," throwing increasing millions of men and women into the ranks of the new class. Reforming the current economic system will not meet the needs of this class. That can only be accomplished by reorganizing society around the possibilities of the new technology.

Old means of control undermined

Under capitalism, male supremacy justifies women's economic dependence on men not simply for its own sake, but as a crucial part of the interlocking web of ideas that facilitates the functioning of the capitalist system.

Men have benefited from women's economic dependence, but ultimately these advantages have only been bestowed to further the exploitation and control of men by the capitalist class. For example, their position as primary breadwinner and person responsible for the family has tied them more tightly to the capitalist system (a situation electronics is changing). Male supremacy has justified women as a cheap work force and in so doing has, at different times in history, pitted men against women both politically and economically.

The ideological power of male supremacy does not simply rely upon the ability of the ruling class to enforce women's economic and social subordination, but also upon their ability to provide men with the means to secure social and, particularly, economic superiority over women. This process has taken different forms according to class position and periods of history and, in our country, according to color.

Today, we see that it is not only "the job" and its role in stabilizing the ideology of male supremacy that is being destroyed, but the whole web of relationships that make up society. The family, the raising of children, the specific roles of men and women – these no longer serve the same purpose in a world where labor is no longer needed. This process is affecting millions of men and women, disrupting their sense of themselves, their relation to others and to society as a whole. This is not to say that the ideology of male supremacy no longer exists or that it will somehow magically disappear. It does mean that the material basis for all existing ideologies is being destroyed, opening up the possibilities for class unity in a way we have not known before in history.

The emerging new class faces real and practical problems of survival – housing, health care, water, and food. In the fight for these demands the class will be forced to confront the backward ideologies, battle to discard all that stand in their way, and take up new ideologies that further their goal of a better society. Washing away the muck of ages will be no simple or easy thing, but it will be essential if the class is to forge itself into a force capable of meeting the demands of history.

Take up the vision of a new world

We are in the midst of profound change. All aspects of society are struggling to resolve the oppression they have experienced for historical as well as economic reasons. The inequality of women and racial oppression still exist today. But it is also clear that the historical construction of race and gender is inherently connected to class relations cultivated by the existing system. Neither society as a whole nor these historical struggles can take any steps forward apart from the resolution of the problems of the new class. Only a solution that addresses the "least of us" will resolve the problems for all of us. To take up the cause of the new class is to take up the cause of the majority of the world’s women – including those in this country – in a real and practical way.

It is time to rip the root of the women's struggle out of the capitalist soil, for both women and men to come together and unite around a program that goes beyond women's legal and political emancipation. The struggle of women today is for all that the material changes in society have made possible. This struggle cannot be resolved short of the reorganization of society into a system in which the fruits of human civilization are made available to all.

Only then can we create a world in which there will be, as Frederick Engels once wrote: "A generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves from fear of economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their own corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual — and that will be the end of it."

March.2008.Vol18.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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