https://themilitant.com/2020/02/29/second-class-status-of-women-arose-with-class-society/
‘Second-class status of women arose with class society’
article
Vol. 84/No. 9
March 9, 2020
MILITANT/RON POULSEN Women garment workers in Dhaka fighting for union
rights, better wages and conditions, October 2014. Bangladeshi “fashion”
industry
workforce of 4 million is 80% female. Women in these factories have
joined union struggles, advancing their confidence and status. figure
Women garment workers in Dhaka fighting for union rights, better wages
and conditions, October 2014. Bangladeshi “fashion” industry workforce
of 4 million
is 80% female. Women in these factories have joined union struggles,
advancing their confidence and status.
MILITANT/RON POULSEN Women garment workers in Dhaka fighting for union
rights, better wages and conditions, October 2014. Bangladeshi “fashion”
industry
workforce of 4 million is 80% female. Women in these factories have
joined union struggles, advancing their confidence and status. figure end
The Spanish-language edition of
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 liberation began
as a 1954 debate in the pages of the Militant over the relation of the
big-business marketing of cosmetics and fashions to women’s oppression.
The excerpt
is from the preface by Mary-Alice Waters, originally written for the
Cuban edition of Los cosméticos, las modas y la explotación de la mujer
by Ciencias
Sociales. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
Two questions asked by thoughtful readers since the initial publication
of Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women are useful to
consider.
First, are questions addressed in a debate over cosmetics and fashions
more than fifty years ago still relevant? Aren’t they long bypassed?
Second, isn’t Reed’s article on “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?”
outdated? Hasn’t knowledge of the earliest human societies moved far
beyond what
was known in the mid-1950s?
The response to the first question is underscored by Hansen’s rhetorical
question in “The Fetish of Cosmetics.” In the whole history of
capitalism, he
asks, “has the bourgeoisie ever gone about cultivating the fetish of
commodities more cold-bloodedly than American big business?”
The resources devoted by capitalist enterprises to advertising and the
creation of markets, far from being a thing of the past, have expanded
astronomically
in the last half century as the working class has been pushed into
“needing” everything from must-have cell phones, to the latest model
automobiles, $500
torn blue jeans, an exploding array of “cosmetic” surgeries, designer
handbags, and
cosmetics-designed-to-make-you-look-like-you’re-not-using-cosmetics.
All these and more are pushed on hapless “consumers” without truce. The
pressure to be “fashionable” — that is, to be “employable,” and
attractive to a
potential spouse — has penetrated even more deeply into the working
class. Television and the internet greatly intensify the all-pervasive
intrusions.
The manufactured compulsion to “shop,” playing on the emotional
insecurities of women and adolescents above all, has only deepened and
spread. The “marketing”
Hansen pokes such fun at in the 1950s seems amateur by comparison to the
sales techniques employed today. “Shop until you drop” has gone from
being a humorous
exaggeration to a description of an actual social condition pushing
increasing numbers of working-class families into more and more debt at
usurious rates.
The impact of the twenty-first century capitalist advertising “industry”
is, if anything, even more insidious as it spreads into areas of the
globe previously
buffered to some extent from the imperialist world market. In large
areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, marked by imperialist-enforced
agricultural
and industrial underdevelopment, as well as in countries previously part
of the now-defunct economic and trading bloc once dominated by the
Soviet Union,
the siren song of the commodity fetish is an imperialist weapon like
none other.
In the eloquent words of the
Communist Manifesto,
“the cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which
[the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls. … It compels all
nations, on
pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it
compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst,
i.e., to become
bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
As the not-so-outdated polemic of the 1950s makes clear, in periods of
working-class retreat such as we have lived through the last quarter
century — a
period of retreat far longer and more devastating than the relatively
brief post-World War II interlude — the “heavy artillery” of capitalism
takes its
greatest toll, including among the most politically conscious layers.
The answer to the second question is equally important.
The articles by Evelyn Reed — “The Woman Question and the Marxist
Method” and “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?” — are two of the
earliest she wrote
on these subjects. They were, in effect, “first drafts” of work that she
continued to edit, expand, write about, and lecture on for another
quarter century.
This second edition of Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of
Women, in fact, incorporates Reed’s editing on “The Woman Question and
the Marxist
Method” when she prepared portions of it in 1969 for inclusion in
Problems of Women’s Liberation.
That title, along with
Sexism and Science,
Is Biology Woman’s Destiny?
and Reed’s widely acclaimed book
Woman’s Evolution
have been published in editions around the world in more than a dozen
languages.
The focus of the sharp polemic in Cosmetics, Fashions, and the
Exploitation of Women is what Reed often referred to as the
“Hundred-Year War in Anthropology.”
Here, as elsewhere, Reed defends the historical materialism of
nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Morgan, whose work Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels
drew on extensively in their writings on the subject, and Morgan’s
twentieth-century continuator Robert Briffault.
As Reed points out, one of the major battle lines in this century-plus
war over historical materialism has been the question, does something
akin to the
modern bourgeois “patriarchal system of marriage and family relations
[go] all the way back to the animal kingdom”? Or did what is often
referred to as
“patriarchy,” and the second-class status of women, arise in relatively
recent times, on the scale of evolution, as a cornerstone of
class-divided societies?
As private rather than communal property came to dominate all social
relations, including those between men and women, didn’t a small handful
of men emerge
for the first time as a ruling class, subjugating other men — and, in
the process, women as well? …
If class society and the accompanying subordinate status of women is
only a stage of human history, one that arose at a certain historical
juncture for
specific reasons, then it can be eliminated at another historical
juncture for other specific reasons.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
