Capitalism Has Co-Opted The Women's Movement
"Feminism," wrote the author and second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, "when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society." Writing during a wave of feminist thought that aimed to challenge the economic and social structures that had kept women out of higher education and the workforce, Firestone envisioned radical equality at all levels of existence, and a feminist revolution that was buttressed by socialism.
However, this has been far from the case. Rather than the gender equality inherent in the right to work precipitating other forms of equality such as the abolition of class-based oppression, modern day feminism and feminist movements have more or less been co-opted by capitalist structures, right from the time when Firestone was writing. Interestingly, many of women's gains in the past century have, arguably, been promoted by political and economic changes that were designed to boost capitalism and national interest, rather than to defeat patriarchy. However, capitalism and the profit motive in turn tend to further constrict women's rights and, at times, are even more oppressive than the structures they claimed to overthrow.
The second wave of feminism, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, began at a time of postwar economic growth in many countries in the West, spurred by welfare capitalism and growing investments. This prosperity, along with increasing education for women and innovations like the pill that allowed them to delay marriage and childbearing, meant that they were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers. According to Our World In Data, an initiative by Oxford University, the United States saw female participation in the workforce increase by approximately fifty percent between 1940 and 1960, with comparable increases in other industrialized countries. Although this was still restricted by laws that, for example, prohibited the hiring of married women, it marked the beginning of a shift in the role played by women in capitalism.
This did bring benefits to the individual women, but its greater benefit was to those who held economic and political power. In fact, the key impetus behind the United States promoting the employment of women, was to utilize their skills in winning the Cold War, as emphasised by the establishment, in 1961, of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, with the stated goal of clearing those barriers such as discrimination, which prevented half of America's workforce from using their talents to defeat the Soviet Union.
At the same time, this commission also made sure that anti-discrimination laws did not impinge on the interests of corporations. For example, automobile trade union leader Caroline Davis, a member of the commission, argued that laws against gender discrimination should be binding on all employers in the private sector. Nevertheless, the Commission only ended up endorsing an executive order that merely recommended "equal opportunities for women" in companies with federal contracts. However, this is not to say that these historical changes did not empower individual women.
On the other hand, to assume that capitalism is essentially good for the economic rights of women and other marginalised groups would be a fallacy. Nicole Aschoff, the executive editor of Jacobin, argues that, "While some of these gains can be attributed to development and rationalization — which are correlated with capitalism — many of these gains are the result of dogged political struggle, not capitalism itself." Capitalist structures of wealth distribution continue to favor the minority, regardless of their gender. In fact, the gains made by women in joining the workforce were largely confined to middle and upper-middle-class women in the West, as their working-class counterparts had been performing unskilled or care-based labour for generations, while it would take women in some other regions of the world longer to gain economic rights.
Like many social movements, ranging from the hippies to hackerspace culture, feminism has slowly been eroded by capitalist norms. For example, the fourth wave of feminism came in the form of the recent MeToo movement, which brought to light cases of sexual abuse and assault. However, it did so within the structures of capitalism, exposing misdemeanors within the hierarchical structures of corporations ranging from movie studios to technology companies, without questioning the need for such concentrations of power and wealth. At the same time, previous feminist gains have been turned into profit-spinners by capitalism, including the increasing employment of women.
Globally, as rising costs of living and relatively flat wage trends make it more and more necessary for families to subsist on dual incomes, more and more women have been compelled to join the workforce, thereby lowering labour costs by increasing the supply of labour. Moreover, many of the women joining the workforce around the world are unskilled or lack education, which means that they are often forced to settle for minimum-wage jobs, thereby further increasing profits for their employers. According to ILO estimates from 71 countries, 47% of workers below or at the minimum wage limit are women, compared to 39% of those above.
For these women, the right to work has essentially been a hollow one, as it has not brought with it concurrent rights like the protection from exploitation or discrimination. The industries in which many of them are employed, such as garment making, textiles or agriculture, tend to be low-paying, with long hours and poor working conditions. While this has arguably empowered them to earn money and gain recognition from their community as wage earners, more often than not their right to work has been co-opted by capitalism as a right to exploit them. Many industries, such as the tea industry in Bengal and north-eastern India, in fact depend on a supply of unskilled, ostensibly more docile female workers, and producers find that they can pay these women less and less, thereby maximizing their own profits.
This clearly indicates that for feminism, and indeed any other social movement based on equality, to achieve its goals, it must first work from an intersectional base that includes all women, not just those in the West. While these gains were largely the result of women in developed countries demanding the right to work, their impact has arguably been felt the most in developing economies, where it has been translated into the oppression of workers and another way of maximizing profit.
Rather than creating a society structured around socialism and equality, as Firestone envisioned, the second wave of feminism and women's right to work have instead created greater exploitation in the absence of safeguards and wage regulation. Thus, while capitalist concerns have been an impetus for the greater employment of women, they must, in the long run, be changed or regulated in order to ensure that they do not further lead to a decline in gender equality.
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