The struggle for women’s emancipation is in essence a class struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. In the U.S. today, the overwhelming majority of women are part of the working class and oppressed nationalities. The masses of women face a common enemy–the imperialist bourgeoisie–along with all other oppressed and exploited people.
The fight for the full emancipation of women must be a component part of the working class program for socialism and the proletarian dictatorship. Without the participation of the masses of women, socialist revolution cannot be successful.
The oppression of women arose historically with the emergence of classes and private property. Throughout the history of class society, women have been largely excluded from social production and chained to domestic slavery.
Capitalism has greatly intensified the oppression and enslavement of women. At the same time, it has brought millions of women into the workforce. Their entrance into socialized production has set the stage for women’s greater participation in the class struggle.
While the ruling class likes to boast that the U.S. is the most “free” and “democratic” of all countries, the position of women in U.S. society reveals the brutal and exploitative character of the capitalist system. Rather than freeing women from the drudgery of unpaid household work and providing the opportunity for their full and equal participation in social production, capitalism exploits the masses of women. For working women, it forces double duty, work at home and on the job. Those without a job are exploited as a cheap reserve army of labor.
As a vast labor reserve, women are drawn in and out of production according to the needs of the imperialists. Women, along with minority workers and youth, are traditionally the “last hired, first-fired” and suffer the highest unemployment rates. Millions of women are chained to the welfare system which keeps them at subsistence levels and attacks their families through harassment and surveillance.
Women are barred from many fields of work and suffer wage discrimination in virtually every area of production where they are employed. The masses of minority women are triply oppressed, exploited as workers and forced to suffer both national and sex discrimination.
It is the imperialist ruling class that profits from this oppression and exploitation, using the position of women to lower wages, worsen the working conditions and attack the living standards of all workers and their families.
To prop up its system, the bourgeoisie promotes the reactionary ideology of male chauvinism aimed at dividing men and women workers and keeping women backward and isolated from the class struggle. Our Party wages a consistent struggle for women’s equality in all spheres, including the working class family. The Party defends the family from the bourgeoisie’s vicious attacks and stands for building the working class family as a fighting, proletarian unit.
The masses of women have risen up militantly and heroically against imperialism and its policies of discrimination, national oppression, and imperialist war. The mass movement of women for emancipation is a powerful ally of the working class. It has historically played an important role in the movements for socialism and national liberation, the struggle against imperialist aggression such as in Indochina, and the day-today struggle of the working class for better living and working conditions. The struggle of women garment workers in New York against inhuman sweatshop conditions and child labor was the origin of International Women’s Day, the international working class holiday.
To divert and misdirect this movement, the bourgeoisie has promoted feminist leadership. Feminism is a petty-bourgeois ideology that serves the interests of imperialism. It directs the women’s movement towards trying to get a “bigger piece of the pie” for a tiny minority of women. The feminists, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), glorify legislative reform as the only road to women’s emancipation. Feminism also attacks men as the enemy of women and advocates decadent “counter-cultural” lifestyles.
Within the labor movement, the capitalists use their agents, the trade union bureaucrats, to promote male chauvinism and feminism, to channel women’s struggles into reformism, and to weaken the class struggle by trying to divide men and women workers.
The revisionist CPUSA serves imperialism by attempting to divert the women’s movement into a reserve of support for the aggression and war schemes of the Soviet social-imperialists and by promoting reformism and electoral struggle as the road to women’s liberation.
The mass movement for women’s liberation can only achieve its goals by linking its struggles with the working class struggle for socialism. Women’s emancipation is not a favor granted to them by any bourgeois “saviors,” but women must become fighters for their own liberation.
The proletariat must lead the movement for women’s emancipation, driving the reformists and revisionists out of its ranks. It must take up every instance of oppression and discrimination against women and use it to rally the masses of women, forge unity between men and women workers and expose the bankruptcy of the capitalist system.
Within the Party, special attention must be paid to the recruitment and Marxist-Leninist training of women. Special efforts, including provisions for childcare and sharing of household work, must be made to ensure women’s full participation. Special mass organizations must be developed to mobilize women in the struggle.
Under socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, women will achieve political, economic and social equality for the first time in the history of class society. The barriers to women’s full participation in political life and production will be broken down. Household work will become socialized, and women will be released from domestic slavery. The working class family will be strengthened as an important unitforthe development of proletarian fighters, freed from the domestic bondage and economic exploitation of capitalism.
The CP(M-L) further demands: an end to forced sterilizations; the right to safe birth control and abortions; paid maternity leaves with no loss of seniority; child care for all working and oppressed families; extend protective legislation to all workers; full equality for women; equal pay for equal work, pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and end forced work programs.