Women’s oppression

The oppression of women in the 21st century takes many forms and reaches into every part of social life. Generations of women have fought for and won major gains in women’s rights, but women’s oppression continues.

Women’s labor is devalued and exploited

Sixty years after the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women working full time year-round are still paid roughly 80 cents for every dollar paid to men. The gap has barely moved in the past decade, and in recent years it has widened.

Racism and national oppression compound it. Measured against the earnings of white, non-Hispanic men, Black women are paid about two-thirds as much, and Latine and Native women under 60 cents on the dollar.

The wage gap is only one part of women’s economic oppression. Women are concentrated in many lower-paid occupations and face barriers to advancement into higher-paying positions. At the same time, women continue to perform a disproportionate share of unpaid household labor, child care and care for family members.

This unpaid labor is necessary for society. Children must be raised, meals prepared, homes maintained and people cared for. But capitalism treats much of this work as a private responsibility of individual families rather than a social responsibility.

Lower wages and greater responsibility for unpaid care can leave women economically dependent on husbands, partners or inadequate government assistance. Single mothers and older women are especially vulnerable to poverty.

Women who do this work have been among the most militant sections of the U.S. working class.. On Jan. 12, 2026, 15,000 nurses at Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian walked out in the largest nurses strike in New York City history, demanding enforceable safe staffing ratios, protection from workplace violence and contract language barring ICE agents from their hospitals. The three hospital systems spent roughly $100 million on travel nurses to keep running through the strike, while NewYork-Presbyterian chief executive Steve Corwin was paid $26.3 million in 2024. Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian held out 39 days. The strike was fought over staffing, safety and conditions as much as over pay — over the terms on which the work of caring for other people gets done.

Capitalism benefits from this inequality. Employers gain from a workforce in which large sections can be paid less, while society receives enormous amounts of necessary labor without paying for it at all.

Political equality is not enough

For much of U.S. history, women were denied basic political rights, including the right to vote. The women’s suffrage movement won a major victory with the 19th Amendment in 1920, although racist laws and practices continued to deny many Black women and other oppressed women the vote.

Women remain underrepresented in political office. But increasing the number of women elected or appointed to office does not by itself end women’s oppression.

A woman who becomes a corporate executive, judge, governor or president can administer the same capitalist system that exploits working-class women. Representation can break down barriers and reflect important gains, but liberation requires changing the social relations that produce inequality.

The struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment shows that even formal legal equality has been bitterly contested. First introduced in 1923, the ERA was passed by Congress in 1972. By 2020, 38 states had ratified it, but its status remains disputed because of the deadline imposed on ratification.

Formal equality before the law matters. But legal equality alone cannot overcome inequalities rooted in wages, property, unpaid labor and class.

Reproductive rights are under attack

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional protection of abortion rights. Many states then banned or sharply restricted abortion.

Protests broke out at the Supreme Court within hours of the June 24, 2022, ruling and spread to cities across the country that weekend. The fight continued long after.

Control over reproduction is a central question of women’s liberation.

Even where abortion, contraception and other reproductive health care remain legal, cost, distance, lack of insurance, child care needs and restrictions imposed by employers and governments can place them beyond the reach of working-class and poor women.

Reproductive justice means more than the legal right to abortion. It includes the ability to decide whether to have children and the ability to raise children with adequate food, housing, health care, education and safety.

A formal right means little if a person lacks the material means to exercise it.

The culture reflects and reinforces women’s oppression

Women’s oppression also appears throughout capitalist culture.

Advertising, entertainment, pornography and other forms of mass culture frequently present women’s bodies as commodities and measure women by standards of sexual attractiveness imposed for profit. Sexist ideas portray women as submissive, less capable or naturally suited to serving and caring for others.

These ideas did not create women’s oppression by themselves. They reflect and reinforce social relations already rooted in the family, workplace and class society.

Women are pressured to conform to narrow standards of appearance, sexuality and behavior, while violence and harassment against women are often minimized or normalized.

Capitalism can even turn resistance to these pressures into another market, selling empowerment as a product while leaving the material foundations of women’s inequality untouched.

It was not always this way

Women’s oppression is not a law of nature.

Human societies have organized family life, property, work and relations between women and men in many different ways. Many societies without class divisions had far more egalitarian relations between women and men than later class societies. Some were matrilineal, tracing descent through women, and women in many communal societies exercised substantial economic, political and social authority.

There is no evidence that the systematic subordination of women found in class societies is an eternal feature of human existence.

As private property, inherited wealth and class divisions developed, control over property and inheritance became increasingly important. The family changed with them. Women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity became more tightly controlled, particularly where inheritance depended on establishing recognized lines of descent.

The forms differed greatly from one society to another, but class society gave women’s oppression a durable material foundation.

Under the legal doctrine of coverture, a married woman in Britain and the United States lost many independent legal and property rights to her husband.

Under capitalism, the family was transformed again. Women entered wage labor on an enormous scale, but responsibility for much of the work of maintaining the household and raising the next generation of workers remained privatized within the family.

Capitalism therefore inherited older forms of women’s oppression while reshaping them for its own needs.

Class society polices gender

Women’s oppression is connected to a wider system that regulates gender and sexuality.

Class societies have imposed different rules governing family life, gender roles, sexuality and reproduction. European colonialism carried its own patriarchal family structures and gender norms around the world, often attacking social arrangements that did not conform to them.

Many Indigenous societies recognized social and gender roles that did not fit the rigid female-male categories imposed by European colonizers. Colonial governments, missionaries and boarding schools attempted to suppress these traditions along with Indigenous languages, religions and political institutions.

Capitalist society inherited and transformed these systems of gender control. It continues to enforce expectations about how women and men should behave and to oppress transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people whose lives challenge those expectations.

The histories of women’s oppression and LGBTQ+ oppression are not identical, but both show that the social rules surrounding gender and sexuality are historically created, not fixed by nature.

Socialism removes the foundation of women’s oppression

When the working class abolishes capitalist private ownership of the major means of production, it removes a fundamental material basis for exploitation and makes it possible to organize child care, health care, elder care, housing and other necessities as social responsibilities rather than burdens placed mainly on individual families and women.

Cuba has gone furthest. On Sept. 25, 2022, Cubans voted a new Families Code into law. It recognizes the value of domestic labor and requires that it be shared, extends labor rights and pay to people caring full time for children, the elderly or people with disabilities, and confirms the right to free abortion and paid family leave. It raises the income of working women with three or more children under 18 by 50%. It codifies penalties for violence in the family and legalizes same-sex marriage and adoption.

Cubans wrote it themselves. From Feb. 1 to April 30, 2022, some 6.5 million people — three-quarters of the electorate — discussed the draft in more than 79,000 meetings and made more than 336,000 interventions. Nearly half the text was rewritten before it reached the National Assembly. The referendum passed with 66.87% in favor on a 74% turnout.

Socialism does not automatically erase sexism or other forms of oppression inherited from thousands of years of class society. Those ideas, habits and social relations must be consciously fought.

Women’s liberation will not be granted by courts or legislatures. It is being fought for now, in the hospitals and the schools and the streets, and it will be won by the same class that is fighting there.

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