This is an excerpt from a document by the Organization for Revolutionary Unity (ORU) in the early 1980s.

How Capitalism Forms the Material Basis for Women’s Oppression

Capitalism did not create the secondary position of women, but was able to exploit and develop it for profit as it came out of feudalism (as it exploited other differences in the emerging working class). In the process, capital strengthened and ‘added new wrinkles to the ideology of female inferiority. The owning class’s intense all-pervasive subjugation of working class and national minority women facilitated the expansion and consolidation of capitalism in two closely connected ways:

1) Historically, women provided an underclass or secondary class of workers who would work for less and could be moved in and out of the labor force with flexibility, in other words a “reserve army of labor.”

2) At home, in a private capacity, women contributed untold hours of unwaged domestic labor maintaining and reproducing the working class.

Women as a Reserve Army of Labor

If women did not exist, early capitalists would have had to invent them. For their purposes nothing could have been more profitable than half of the working class already constrained politically, economically and ideologically in a subservient role within the class. Early, manufacturing, particularly in textiles, was able to employ women and children first within their own homes and then in large plants at subsistence wages even lower than men were making in other industries. This use of women continues to this day in the electronics plants, in office “factories”, canneries, and so on. When no longer needed, women, especially national minority women, were and are summarily dropped from the work force. Many other groups have functioned similarly as a reserve army of labor – new immigrants, Blacks and other national minorities. Within these groups women are consistently paid less and ‘have more difficulty in getting fulltime, permanent work. The ideology of female inferiority and the reality of her position in the home are crucial contributing factors which have facilitated the movement of women in and out of the work force.

In some respects women’s position in the work force has changed in the last twenty years. Women are still forced into lower paid, seasonal and part-time work, the majority are still able to find jobs in mainly new or expanding industries which are unorganized and in many cases unprotected by labor laws. But whereas once women could be shunted off to home again “where they really belong” when no longer needed, now women expect to work and society expects them to work. If they are laid off they are “unemployed” not “housewives” and can be counted on to look for another job. In short, women are becoming a permanent part of the work force, although still in a disadvantaged position.

It is very unlikely that a significant portion of working women could now be turned out of their jobs as the result of a propaganda campaign such as occurred after World War II.

Since the last century it has been a common view that sexist attitudes have forced women into jobs which are extensions of their role at home (nursing, waiting tables, teaching, secretarial). Certainly the parallel has aided the process of funneling women into these jobs by defining them as “women’s” work. But the reason women are doing these Jobs is much more fundamental to capitalism than stereotypes, potent though they are. These are the areas where capitalism is currently expanding and where the demand for labor is greatest, particularly the demand for unskilled, cheap labor. Hospitals, fast food chains, hotels, banks, insurance companies have made untold profits from not having to pay union wages and benefits or provide job security.

But capitalism will hire women with the same enthusiasm for all kinds of jobs which are not extensions of traditional female work. The most obvious current example is electronic assembly, but other industrial jobs in canning, frozen food plants, textiles and so on also actually have little relation to the canning, freezing and sewing women do at home as individual housewives. During wartime, capitalists hire women to replace men without any concern for their feminine natures, and in its first century manufacturing relied heavily on women and children workers. National minority women in particular have throughout U.S. history done arduous, grueling work without it upsetting capitalist sensibilities.

Women and Domestic Labor

The bulk of unwaged domestic labor is done by women, including women who work outside the home in waged jobs. In the working class and lower strata of the middle classes the work is done primarily by the adult women and older daughters of the household. This occurs not only in the traditional nuclear family with husband as breadwinner, but in families where both parents work full time for wages, in single-mother homes, and in extended family homes where there may also be grandmothers, aunts, and other women to help with the household chores. In millions of households in the U.S. it is understood that shopping, cooking, sewing, cleaning, nursing, childcare, and in general making the household run smoothly are women’s responsibilities, whatever their other obligations. A loyal, comforting, patient, even submissive attitude toward their families as they labor is another major part of their responsibility.

In the last two decades two important changes must be noted: 1) the effect of the women’s movement on the division of labor within households; and 2) the flow of large numbers of women into the paid labor force which has removed some aspects of domestic labor to outside the home (mainly childcare during working hours).

But these changes, despite all the media publicity, must be viewed cautiously. The current depression has slowed the influx of women into the paid labor force. In particular, many minority women have been laid off or are unable to find jobs. The depression may also be keeping young adults home with their parents longer. While the women’s movement has probably influenced the division of labor in many homes to some degree, it is still rare for men to share fully responsibility for housework and childcare.

Domestic work is not only disproportionately the responsibility of women, it remains the most inefficient, unsocialized type of labor existing under modern capitalism. For instance, each night millions of dinners are cooked and served in separate household units. For the working class one way to avoid this drudgery is fast-food restaurants but their high cost and low quality of food must be constantly measured against their efficiency in feeding large numbers of people quickly. Other kinds of housework are equally inefficient and isolated, including the purchase of “labor-saving” devices which could be used much more efficiently by larger groups of people.

What then does domestic labor accomplish? What is its function under capitalism? And how is it related to wage labor for the capitalists?

This labor which most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives has generated controversy among feminists and other Progressives who have analyzed its role in capitalism. Although Karl Marx and Frederick Engels commented on household work in a number of different contexts over a hundred years ago, neither of them developed anything approaching a complete analysis of it.

Domestic labor accomplishes two vital tasks for the capitalist system: 1) it reproduces and prepares for adulthood a new generation of workers; and 2) it restores daily the worker or workers of a household to a condition where he or she can return to work and labor again for the capitalist. Women, in their labor, provide food, rest, recreation and a place to live for the only period of time the worker is not directly supervised by the capitalist. From the capitalists’ point of view these hours are merely the necessary time during which the laborer’s ability to labor is restored. From the workers’ point of view this part of the day is the reason for which he or she works. Workers everywhere struggle to extend and improve the quality of this period as much as possible.

The controversy arises over where women’s domestic labor is located in the capitalist mode of production. In the 1960’s and 70’s women demanded that attention finally be paid to the special oppression of women, an oppression far larger, far more complex than the mere exclusion of women from the industrial workplace, an oppression located in the home as well as the office or factory. Whereas volumes have been written since Marx on the capitalist exploitation of workers in waged production, the hard work of women at home went largely unnoted until the 1960’s. Domestic work was apparently unworthy of serious analysis and was not often granted the status of being real work.

When more and more women began to work for wages, they continued to labor at home, struggling to survive under the equivalent of two jobs. This coincided with the development of a strong, independent women’s movement. It became clear to the more class-conscious, revolutionary-minded women that an analysis of women’s labor at home that related it to the capitalist mode of production in general was essential to an all-around understanding of women’s oppression, and to the development of effective strategies for fighting it. But that analysis was not easy to develop. For Marxists and Marxist-feminists it required a comprehensive understanding of the capitalist mode of production as described by Marx and a full recognition of the social value and extent of domestic labor and the special oppression for women it represents.

Two fundamentally opposed views emerged, one characterizing domestic labor as domestic servitude for the husband, the other characterizing it as productive labor for the capitalist class, its specific product being the commodity labor-power. In Appendix B we discuss these two views and our preliminary view of the matter. In the long run, progressive and revolutionary organizations will need a correct and comprehensive analysis of this question – if only because it profoundly affects how we speak to and how we attempt to organize and win over women outside the workplace, women who by necessity are as intimately concerned with welfare rights, educational reforms, reproductive and health care issues and childcare as they are issues of wages, overtime and lay-offs. It is vital to understand that few working class women escape the burden of housework and childcare – these are responsibilities that belong almost entirely to women, and no woman will be liberated until it becomes a responsibility shared by all of society.