The history of people is a history of struggle. Today, we’re celebrating International Women’s Day, just one particular segment of this struggle. IWD grew out of the struggles of working class women: struggles for shorter hours, better pay and decent working conditions. On March 8, 1857, women garment and textile workers in New York City demonstrated to demand an end to the 12 hour work day and sweatshop working conditions. And on March 8, 1908, another demonstration was held on New York’s Lower East side. Thousands, including young garment workers who had just won a hard fought strike, women active in the suffrage movement, and immigrant working women gathered to demand better living and working conditions, an end to child labor and the right to vote. In 1910, at the Second International Conference of Women Socialists, Clara Zetkin proposed that March 8 be celebrated as International Women’s Day.
Today, IWD is celebrated world-wide. Though March 8 is the recognized day of celebration, the struggle of women for full equality goes on every day of the year. Our recognition of this struggle should not be limited to just this one day.
In the U.S. few people have known of this day. Certainly we never learned about it in our history books and it’s not a recognized holiday. But in the past few years its history has been revived by both women and men who have begun to learn the roots of their oppression and who have sought out their history.
Today the oppression of women continues. We have won some gains – the right to vote, the 8 hour work day – but women are still denied full equality and capitalism is quickly trying to reverse our gains. Women have fought for the right to control their own bodies, a right which includes deciding whether and when to have children. But, with the attacks on abortion and abortion funding by The Supreme Court and Congress poor women are losing the right to abortion. Many national minority women are totally denied the right to have children. Through forced sterilizations capitalists have sought to further degrade and destroy the families of Black, Puerto Rican and other national minorities. We can expect that with the attacks on abortion rights the propaganda for sterilizing poor women will intensify.
Women’s wages still continue to be much lower than men’s wages. Girls are still shunted into "female" jobs. The Equal Rights Amendment, an act which will provide for the legal equality of men and women has yet to be passed. In fact some states have rescinded or are considering rescinding ratification of the ERA. Overall, a massive right wing drive has been mounted against the ERA and abortion rights. The rights of homosexuals, both male and female, which have been won in the last decade, are under attack by these same right wingers who would force them back into the closets.
To sum this up, we can see that the history of women in the past, their oppression and their struggles – is the history of women today. The struggle continues and will intensify.
Now we want to get into talking about the system we live under, the system of capitalism. We will show how this system oppresses and exploits women and why it must be destroyed. We’re not trying to go into every nut and bolt of how capitalism works – what we would like to do is try to explain basically and briefly what the system is.
Capitalism is first and foremost an economic system in which a small number of people own and control the vast majority of the nations resources – both natural resources and tools, factories, office buildings and other man made products. Because of their ownership and control of these resources, most people in this society have to work for these people, selling their labor for as high a price as possible. These owners of the wealth we call the ruling class or capitalists; those who work, the working class. Because of their ownership and control of the economic system, they control the whole country. They form alliances with the politicians and judges to control the political and legal systems. Some of these politicians are drawn directly from the ranks of this class of owners. Nelson Rockefeller is the prime example. He controls a great deal of wealth and was governor of the state of New York for twelve years. Often, too, a politician will sell himself to the capitalists and become a faithful servant of that class. R.M. Nixon is a prime example.
The capitalists always have enough money to bribe with soft jobs and material goods some few people to represent them and spread their ideas. There are many so-called union leaders who represent the system and defend it, as a way of defending their own privileged lifestyle. They have a stake in the system the way it is. Thus, a union bureaucrat’s sell-outs become not some sort of puzzle but understandable – it’s in their interests, as well as the big capitalists to stomp down rank and file militence.
The capitalism we live under in this country today is a particular stage or form of capitalism, called imperialism. Imperialism is the highest, most developed stage of capitalism.
When capitalism first started out, it was generally confined to each country it was developing in, where homegrown capitalists competed with each other. But it is in the nature of capitalism that it must keep growing. You have to keep making more money and more profit. When there was not much room left in the home countries to grow, capitalism had to expand throughout the world, going to the underdeveloped nations of the third world to find cheap natural resources, easily exploited labor and markets for the extra goods they produced at home but couldn’t sell. This is imperialism. Of course, to gain such power in the third world requires brutal suppression of the native peoples and rigid enforcement of your rule.
That’s what’s happening is South Africa where the U.S. upholds the brutal rule of apartheid. That’s what’s happening in various countries in South America where the U.S. upholds violent fascist governments. That’s what was happening in countries such as Viet Nam until the people threw off U.S. intervention. That is what happens everywhere in the world where the big capitalists have investments which need protecting. That is what imperialism is.
Of course, there’s not just one imperialist power, so these imperialist countries compete with each other, sometimes through war, for control of the juicy plums. For example, in southern Africa the two biggest imperialists, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, are each trying to gain a foothold and set up situations where they can control and exploit the people and resources of the area. The people who live there have to fight them both.
Imperialism exploits and oppresses people not only in foreign countries, but in the homeland as well. In the United States we are exploited and oppressed by imperialism. It is in that context that we view the exploitation and oppression of women.
Women in this society suffer special oppression. Through belonging to that group called female they are denied equal status.
Special oppression effects all women in the U.S. to some degree, although the oppression borne by women of the propertied class is hardly anything compared to that of the vast majority of women in the U.S. Almost everyone is oppressed in a capitalist society – for example, if you’re black, chicano, asian or native american, you are not accorded the full benefits of the system and you are oppressed. If you are a worker you are oppressed because you have to have a job to survive where you must put up with harassment on the job, with unsafe working conditions and forced overtime. Women are oppressed in the way that most of us are and they are oppressed because they happen to be women rather than men.
Women’s special oppression is based on their being denied equality: both legal equality and real equality, by which we mean an equal opportunity to grow up with a sense of self-worth and an equal chance to pursue a particular goal that men in this society have.
Women weren’t always oppressed, although that has been their plight in most of human history. When you go back to primitive society, where people lived communally and survived by hunting, fishing and gathering whatever edibles grew wild, there was no need for one sex to be in control. Society was at a survival level and the work of all was necessary and important. In these communal societies there existed a sexual division of labor. Because of women’s involvement in pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, women took primary responsibility for production around the home. This included the growing of some foods, cooking and providing clothing. Men were physically freer to move around so they had responsibility for hunting and widespread gathering. Thus men were primarily involved in the domestication of animals and the development of herds and or orchards. Because of their involvement in this work, men were responsible for any surplus produced and this surplus was the first form of wealth and private property. Thus production began to occur outside the home and the position of men became more important and with this the first oppression of women began. As history progressed the form that society took changed and with it the oppression of women changed. In each epoch, however, one thing remains constant: WOMEN ARE ALWAYS DENIED THE RIGHTS THAT MEN IN THAT SOCIETY HAVE.
Though individual women may be happy with their lives, that doesn’t change the fact that they are oppressed. For years, right here in the land of the free, women were not allowed to vote. In fact, they only gained this right in the last 60 years and only after hard fought struggle. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 employers could refuse to hire a women simply because she was a women. Now, the employers have to clean up their act somewhat, but they still get away with a lot, because again, the courts interpret the laws and the judges in those courts are either members of or loyal servants to the capitalist class. Yet, women’s oppression under capitalism is much more than these few examples. It begins in the cradle and continues to the grave and involves a whole set of myths that have grown up about women. Women are taught to be docile, taught that their sole purpose in life is to get themselves a man and stand by him. Women are actually taught to be physically and mentally inferior to men and to be emotionally weaker. And, by and large, when women are channeled into the job market they are channeled in a direction which would tend to lead them into jobs which do not provide for long term career development and if the jobs are production jobs, into jobs which are low paying and non-union. All of this fits real well with attitudes that men in this society are taught to have about women and by the same token, attitudes that women are taught to have about themselves. One thing is for sure, DIFFERENCES in capabilities in most are NOT inborn, they are conditioned – people are brought up and trained to view one another in a particular way, consistent with the needs of society. What we are saying is that the way women are viewed in a capitalist society is consistent with the needs of capitalist society. One example of this is women and industrial work. Most of us have to work to live and if we’re going to work, we want a shot at a job with decent pay, and a union contract which covers health care and retirement. These jobs are hard, dirty and often dangerous. But where there is a union they pay better than some of the cleaner jobs such as secretarial and clerical work, that have been historically seen as suitable for women. Now, however, women are seeking to break down employment barriers and have proven that the skills necessary to operate a machine, or to drive a truck or operate a forklift are not somehow skills which are biologically determined, carried only by the male chromosome. Rather, these skills are learned, gained through practice and experience and these skills have little of anything to do with sex. It is true that most men are larger than women and capable of certain heavier tasks. Certainly, though, we have the technology now that no one should have to do jobs that tax their physical strength.
So when we talk about the special oppression of women, we are not only talking about their actual legal and economic inequality in this society, we are also talking about all the myths and prejudices that have grown up about women. These myths serve to keep women down.
We’ve discussed the training that women get to fit certain stereotypes and roles in our country. The question is why? We think that it is in the interest of the ruling class to keep women in this role of homemaker, reproducer, consumer and unemployed.
Karl Marx made the point about a hundred years ago that the only means for survival that a worker has under capitalism is his or her capacity to work. The worker must sell this ability to an employer. The price of the ability to do work, which we call labor power, takes the form of wages, and wages are always as low as the capitalists can get away with, as the lower wage, the greater the share for the bosses. What it comes down to is that the employer pays the amount necessary to keep the worker alive. Thus what the employer buys is not only the worker’s ability to perform labor but also the ability of the worker’s wife to maintain the household, and bear and raise children, who in turn grow up and sell their labor power to the capitalists. Thus, the capitalist is getting a real deal here, because he gets 4O hours plus from his workers and something like 90 plus hour week of unpaid labor from the worker’s wife. Three work weeks for the price of one! Thus there is a material basis for keeping women in their place in the U.S. And if there is a concrete basis for it, then a set of ideas will grow out of the basis for women’s oppression. So we get to the baggage that was mentioned earlier: the mythology of the innate inferiority of women.
Under capitalism, therefore, women have been relegated to the role of keeping the husband fed and clothed and sexually satisfied, and of having children – children who will be future workers. in addition women form a reserve army of labor. If you keep up the unemployment rate in this country, it won’t be news to you that at least 5% of the workforce is unemployed at all times. However, when something in the nature of an emergency happens, the capitalists use the unemployed, who form what we call a reserve army of labor, to fill the jobs that can’t be filled by the regular workforce. During WW II, when most able-bodied men were in the armed forces, the capitalists called on women to take over jobs in production which were not available to them during times of peace. During WW II, women weren’t too weak to work as steel workers, or to work in auto, so why is it that during peace time, the tables turn so drastically? As well as oppressing women in their roles as housewife and mother, capitalism oppresses women to maintain a cheap source of labor.
Though the mythology says that women’s role is in the home, the reality is that many women work today and many women have always worked. These women carry two jobs – their 40 plus hours in the factory or office and then their evenings and weekends spent maintaining the home, the children and the husband. Through the mythology maintained about women, capitalism has justified paying women lower wages and keeping women out of the skilled trades. They do this by saying that women are only working for pin money; that women will quit the job as soon as they get married or as soon as they have children. The reality is that most women work because they have to – because they are the sole support of themselves or of themselves and their children or because two wages in the family are necessary to survive.
Certainly, we have the resources and technology available so that there need be no distinction between men’s and women’s job. And women’s role in the home can be greatly reduced. Childcare could be made available for all. Housework can be shared. However, this would bring an increase in the demand for jobs by women – jobs that are well-paying and capitalism couldn’t absorb this demand. Capitalism can’t even employ all those demanding jobs now!
So far in our discussion of the special oppression of women, we’ve pointed out the forms this oppression takes and the reason for the oppression. What we haven’t spoken to is the role men play in oppressing women. Men are not the source of women’s oppression, the capitalist system is. However, men do play a role. Men fall prey to the capitalist mythology that has grown up about women. And in many ways they become pawns in the capitalists game by acting out those myths. This is something that we must overcome as we strive to develop a revolutionary movement in the United States. They key to this is to understand how this system oppresses most of us, and to unite against our oppressors. This is easier said than done. We are encouraged and taught by the schools, tv, and the written media that men must behave in a certain way or they aren’t real men and that women must fulfill a certain image or they aren’t real women. In the context of a society where most of us cannot come close to fulfilling those images, a certain amount of frustration and confusion about who we are is bound to occur, which is in large part the cause of violence between men and women. Wife beating is a long manifestation of women’s oppression. A husband who is having difficulty living up to the image of a man^ who is having problems supporting his family, may take it out on his wife. It reflects the idea that a man’s wife is part of his property to be used and abused as he sees fit. This may seem somewhat harsh, since most husbands love their wives, but the relationship between husband and wife is not based on ^quality. Thus the society creates a situation in which it uses the man as a tool to reinforce his wife’s oppression. Ultimately, to end wife beating we must create a society based upon equality and mutual respect. However, we cannot condone wife beating while we are trying to bring about change. We must support a women’s right to defend herself against all physical attacks, and do what we can to stop such attacks. We condemn wife beating. Yet, we can’t fall into the dead-end solution which has us only looking at stopping these attacks without changing the system which creates and engenders the atmosphere which gives rise to these attacks.
This analysis applies to rape too. We’ve got to do whatever is necessary to support women in their attempts to stop rape, but we must also understand that it can’t be stopped as long as we live in a capitalist system.
Women who are working are not only oppressed, they are also exploited. All workers are exploited in capitalist society. The term exploitation means simply that workers are not paid the full value for the products that they produce. In the end, your paycheck for a week’s work reflects the value that you’ve created in less than that full week. The capitalist keeps the rest, which is his profit. Capitalists are all the time seeking to minimize their costs in order to maintain and increase their rate of profit. When their rate of profit is jeopardized, they use any tactic they can get away with to keep the profit up or to increase it. Thus the oppression of workers is tied to their exploitation. For example, safety regulations are often not even worth the paper on which they are printed. It costs money to upgrade safety standards, and money is the only god the capitalist recognizes. Unsafe working conditions, harassment, speed-ups, this is the oppression working people face on the job, an oppression which comes directly out of the exploiter-exploited relationship that exists between the individual capitalist and each of his workers on the one hand, and between the whole capitalist class and the working class on the other hand.
In general, women suffer greater exploitation and oppression on the job than men do. Women are paid less for the same kind of work and as we said before, women are shunted into the lower paying jobs.
As the movie (Union Maids) showed and as many of you have experienced many times, unions do little to organize the unorganized and to fight for the rights of workers that have been organized. Significantly, women have been almost totally ignored by the unions. Though such unions as the CIO were once fighting unions, the leadership of the unions has been taken over by people who have become bureaucrats. These misleaders have found that they can lead a rich and powerful life by serving the capitalist class and by misleading the working class. Union leadership’s non-dealings with women have their roots in two conditions: first, because of the mythology around women and jobs, the union leadership do not see organizing women as important. And secondly, as we said before, many union officials often don’t do their Jobs. They have a concrete interest in not serving the working class. Thus, unions aren’t organizing women and to the extent that women have organized, there are often sweetheart contracts, a lack of aggressive enforcement of the contract and a lack of total support during strikes.
We must also understand the role assigned by capitalism to women of racial and national minorities. In this speech we aren’t going into the material basis of national oppression. We do want to point out how national minority women are doubly and triply oppressed in this society. Union Maids points to the fact that Black workers are paid less than white workers, and are therefore oppressed as Blacks, on the basis of nationality. Black women workers, as well as Chicanas and Asian women workers are thus triply oppressed, that is oppressed as women, as a part of a national minority, and as workers.
Racism, everyone knows what that is. We use it to define a series of ideas that one group is inferior to another only because of their skin color or other superficial characteristics or their national origin. When a group has been systemically oppressed by another group, as have blacks, chicanos, native americans and other minority groups in the U.S., we say that they are victims of national chauvinism, an attitude that says my country or nationality can do what it has to do to assert its superiority, no matter what it does to you and your nationality. The most blatant example of national chauvinism is the Nazis of WW II. But it can happen and has happened here. What the white dominated U.S. ruling class has done to the native american people is almost beyond comprehension. But right in there too is the way this capitalist society has dealt with blacks, chicanos and asians. Terror, starvation, repression, hopelessness, that has been what the capitalists have tried to lay on racial and national minorities in this country. And for the women of these groups, the fist has struck harder. Rapes, forced sterilizations, destruction of the family, these are the situations which minority women have to deal with on a daily basis. These outrages are faced by all women who are members of an oppressed grouping. And it is critical for those of us who want to turn things around to understand both the double oppression of racial and national minority women in the U.S., and the triple oppression of working women from these groups.
We now want to talk about reforms. We do not believe that the solution to the oppression of women is to be found in reforms. We do see that reforms are important and to be fought for as they give us more space to conduct the struggle against capitalism and in the context of the fight for reforms, we can point out to all the limits of reforms and how much further we need to go to produce genuine women’s liberation. When the system grants a reform that will tend to impair its ability to do what it wants under any conditions, then it will seek to make someone else pay for the reform. For example, we support affirmative action hiring – the hiring of women into areas where before they have been denied employment. Yet we also do not believe that it serves the purposes of the working class to in turn cause white male workers or any other male worker to lose work because the system has messed over women so long. Thus, we stand for affirmative action on the one hand and FULL employment with an adequate wage for all on the other. We support the ERA. Although we don’t view this or any other constitutional amendment as the way in which equality will be achieved the fact is that it will give women the opportunity to enter into jobs at all levels of the work force and it will give us an opportunity to point out that full equality cannot be achieved under capitalism. Two other reforms that we believe are of great importance are abortion and childcare. We talked about abortion earlier. Without free universal child-care, the fight for a job may be just another hollow mockery on the part of capitalism. But with childcare centers, thousands of women will have the opportunity to do what they may have given up hope of ever doing – resuming an education, beginning an education, learning a skill, getting a job. The point is that childcare will aide women in their attempts to become stronger, more able to live as equals. But again, we cannot simply let the reform become an end in itself. With childcare in particular, once freed from the home, women will still have to operate in the same exploitative society as before only with less of a burden than before. We must be clear on this when we support and work in these struggles. Women who get work after the ERA will still be workers, subject to a job controlled by a corporation whose sole aim is profits. We believe that we can accomplish the task of winning the reform and still pointing out the end goal. We believe that the great majority of women both in the movement and outside of it, are honestly seeking real answers. Overtime, if we as progressives and communists have done our work well, been involved in the reform efforts from day one, women will look at our ideas and accept many of them. Then we’ll be able to go about developing a women’s movement that consciously challenges the system and gives aid to and receives support from the movements of working people and minorities.
There is another reason that the reform struggles of today have so much importance and that is the opposition to the reforms which is rising today. Earlier in this presentation we pointed out how the right to abortion is under attack, the passage of the ERA is in serious jeopardy and the rights won by homosexuals would be eroded.
These reactionary forces want to roll back the reform gains of the last ten to fifteen years, and return us to a time when women sweetly stayed home and tended to the kids while Daddy went out and brought home the bacon. These attacks are meant to keep us divided and unable to set our sights on the real enemy – capitalism.
We support the gains. We don’t want them rolled back, we want them expanded. This right wing movement is a threat to us al1 – women, minorities, working people, progressive people, all who don’t want a more repressive, more authoritarian situation here. We must fight back against these forces and unite in defense of the rights which are under attack.
We’ve spoken at length about the society. We’ve defined it as an imperialist society that attempts to repress or corrupt all that offer opposition. Within the context of such a society, we’ve tried to describe the special oppression faced by all women and the deeper forms which are visited upon working class women and minority women. We have also spoken to the fact that we must unite the large majority of women in struggle if we are to make any short term or long term gains against the ways that this society deals with women. We would like to take some time now to explain how we as communists see solving the problems confronted by women under capitalism.
The working class, those people who produce the wealth of this nation and of all nations, is the only class that knows how to create something out of nothing. It’s not magic. Even though the president of a large corporation may know how his industrial empire is operated, see how well he does if he has to run the machines and make the parts. If workers can gain control of society, that is, gain the political power, they could operate the country whereas the present rulers could not do the same without the millions of workers. Since the working class is the revolutionary class (that is, they are the ones capable of destroying the old and running the new society) we believe that the working class is the class that plays the leading role in the movement for social change, and eventually, socialism. But there are others not within the class who are part of the move for change. Thus, we would want to unite the working class movement with the movement of women and the movements of oppressed minorities in the U.S. Since many of the women and oppressed minorities are also workers, there is a basis for uniting within the class the groups which can be brought together to fight for future equality and justice. And if we can accomplish this, by overcoming sexism and racism within the class, we have a real good shot at bringing into our movement all women who have an interest in bringing about change and all oppressed minorities whose interests will be served by long term social change. In the process of this struggle, we, as communists, hope to convince people that the real cure for what ails us is not more thorough going reforms of this system, but rather, a whole new system, socialism, based on the fact that the working class will be the class in power.
We believe that only under such a system can the inequality that marks the capitalist system be eradicated. Yet, even though the exploitation and oppression that exist for women under capitalism can only be done away with after capitalism is overthrown, there is no guarantee that it will disappear in and of itself. Socialism is the starting point. Since a socialist system has no need for exploitative relationships and has no need to oppress anyone (except the former rulers) there is no basis for either. However, the ideas that grow out of living under capitalism for so many years do not go away overnight. We will have to begin a long term educational program that will purge the poison of national chauvinism, racism and sexism from the American people and which will teach us all how to unite in such a way that differences will be respected but at the same time will not stand in the way of all of us working together.
It is a long hard road that will lead us to socialism, and with it peace, justice and equality. We haven’t begun to address the question of how we think we’re going to get there. We believe that what’s needed to begin with is a political party of the working class, a party that is dedicated to putting the working class in charge, and ousting the capitalists. We need a political party that can provide leadership in good times and bad – to the struggles of workers, women and oppressed minorities. This party will be made up of workers, women and oppressed minorities. We need a party that can enter a struggle for a reform and help build that struggle – without losing sight of the fact that reforms will never cure the system. We need a party that will ultimately lead the working class and its allies in the overthrow of the system of capitalism. This party is a communist party.
Through overall unity among all progressive peoples, with the working class and its party in the forefront, we will eventually move toward a society which is based on the equality of all working and oppressed people, a society that will do away with economic inequality, which will work to eliminate the false ideas of male and female superiority/inferiority. We will have finally entered the era in history when misery and inequality are fast going down the tubes and we will all be able not only to call one another brother and sister but to be that to one another.
We wish everyone a happy International Women’s Day, and hope that in years future we can again be together, more of us and more deeply united in our struggle.