Women’s oppression

The oppression of women in the 21st century is perhaps more multifaceted and developed than it has been historically. Gains in women’s rights have been the product of the long struggle of women and anti-sexist allies, but these gains have not ended the oppression of women.

On average, women working full time earn about 81 cents for every dollar men earn — a gap of nearly 20 percent. Women of color earn less still. This economic discrimination is only one part of the systematic oppression of women.

For centuries the labor of women has been devalued and exploited through lesser or no wages; unsafe and unregulated working conditions; the nonpayment for extensive and valuable domestic work; and being forced to give all wages to one’s father or male spouse. The “glass ceiling” — the limits placed on the upward mobility of women in the workforce — traps women in low-wage industries.

Since women are paid less than men but take up the bulk of the domestic work in the home, women are oftentimes trapped in economic dependence on men or forced to rely on a sexist system for economic help. This assistance is badly underfunded and does little to aid women in economic need.

Women make up the bulk of the poor and are hit hardest by economic crises — the “feminization of poverty.”

Women’s oppression is evident in the political arena as well. Capitalist politics have historically disenfranchised women by allowing only men to vote and hold public office. The women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries won the vote for women, but women’s roles in politics are still often limited to the appearance-making spouse of a candidate. Even women who have entered the political arena have had to adhere to the rules and expectations of a male-dominated system.

Women are still vastly outnumbered on the Supreme Court and in Congress. The Equal Rights Amendment — a simple guarantee that rights shall not be denied on account of sex — was first introduced in 1923 and passed by Congress in 1972. By 2020 the required 38 states had ratified it. Yet it has still been kept out of the Constitution, blocked at certification on a disputed deadline.

The oppression of women is rooted in the rise of private property and class society, and in the unequal place it forced on women within the family. For centuries the law treated women as the property of fathers and husbands, and remnants of that status persist today, placing boundaries on women’s bodies and their sexuality.

Reproductive rights won by generations of women and their allies are now being torn away. In 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion, and state after state moved to ban or sharply restrict it. Even where abortion and birth control remain legal, they are often out of the economic reach of working and poor women.

It is hard to see how, in this system, women could ever win true reproductive justice — not just the right to choose whether to bear children, but the right to bring a child into a society that will make sure it is well-fed, clothed, sheltered and educated.

When women’s oppression is discussed, it is easy to overlook its social and cultural side. That includes the sexual degradation and overall sexualization of women in popular culture; the association of women with products that can be bought and sold; the normalization of abusive behavior toward women; and the branding of women as intellectually and physically inferior and submissive to men. These aspects of women’s oppression are reinforced through popular television programs and commercials; music and music videos; pornography; magazines; and every other form of advertising.

Women are stereotyped in the media as sexual objects that men can obtain through monetary or material exchange. These images — by far the most prevalent images of women in popular entertainment and advertising — encourage men to mimic these sexist views in their dealings with women. Women, in turn, are pressured to fit the stereotypes and discouraged from taking active, independent roles in defining their sexuality, their body image and their social lives.

One may ask, faced with the oppression of women past and present, “Was it always like this?” The answer is no. Women have been oppressed and exploited for centuries, but it was not always so. For most of human history women were not oppressed. In the old communal societies women were equal to men; in some, societies were matriarchal. This does not mean men were oppressed by women — it means women held a social and cultural standing in family and community that was not built on anyone’s exploitation.

While the division of labor between women and men differed, no system of superior and inferior was built on it. Not until the rise of private property, and with it class society, did the oppression of women emerge. Since then women have been oppressed in every form of class society — slavery, feudalism and capitalism.

Women’s oppression is part of a wider system of gender oppression. The same class society that subordinated women also hardened the division of everyone into two fixed genders, each with narrow roles and harsh punishment for stepping outside them. The oppression of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people flows from that same root — a social order that polices gender to hold the family, and the class relations built on it, in place. (That oppression is taken up in its own entry, LGBTQ+ oppression.) Many communal societies recognized more than two genders and honored people we would now call transgender or Two-Spirit. Like the oppression of women, the rigid gender system is no law of nature. It came in with class society, and it can go out with it.

Marxists hold that the absence of women’s oppression — and of any rigid policing of gender — in pre-class societies shows that these are not rooted in nature, nor in some eternal male dominance, but in the system of private property and class. The abolition of private property lays the basis for the full liberation of women, and of all people oppressed on the basis of gender.

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