March 8 is International Women’s Day. It is a global celebration of women fighting for a better life. This is particularly important now when women are under multiple attacks by the MAGA regime in the U.S., attacks that have global implications. Reactionary forces won’t be satisfied with denying women freedom through abortion bans. We can expect attacks on key victories of the women’s movement like birth control and no-fault divorce. As well as frontal attacks on women’s rights, we are watching the destruction of the already miserly government supports for income and healthcare for the elderly, disabled and children as the zealots of DOGE swing their axes through federal programs. The loss of social programs inevitably means that massive additional burdens of unpaid domestic care work will fall on women.
By celebrating women’s role in past struggles, International Women’s Day is a moment to recognize that current attempts to diminish and disempower women are nothing new in the capitalist order. Capitalism is addicted to women’s undervalued labor, which is why it insists they be kept as dependent and vulnerable as possible. Early capitalists turned to women’s labor as industrial mechanization made brawn less important to manufacturing work. Women seemed like ideal targets for labor exploitation to these early industrialists because of their perceived docility and customary low pay. But women were especially vital to capitalism by providing domestic labor. By cooking and cleaning for male workers and birthing and rearing the next generation, women have subsidized capitalism with their free labor for centuries. Without this free work at home, workers could not survive on the low wages the bosses pay.
Early capitalist bosses were badly wrong in their belief that women workers would be docile and compliant. Women have never been far from the frontlines of workers’ struggles – taking on the double way capitalism injures and oppresses them – as wage workers and as those burdened with the unpaid care roles that make wage labor possible. During the Paris Commune of 1871, when workers took over the city, they formed the Union of Women, to reorganize women’s work and insist on their economic and social independence. International Women’s Day (IWD) is itself a socialist celebration, called for at the International Socialist Women’s Conference of 1910 and first marked in 1911. In 1917, a march on IWD by women textile workers in Petrograd sparked the Russian Revolution. Women played militant roles in the sit-down strikes in Flint MI in 1936-7 – a struggle that spurred a strike wave that was a high point of organized labor in the United States. We remember these women’s contributions not just because they added force of numbers in these fights but because they made sure their specific oppression under capitalism was addressed.
The 1970s women’s movement had roots in the Civil Rights Movement. As capitalism has imposed escalating crises on the world, we’ve seen women come to the forefront of struggles globally in recent years. As the MAGA administration tries to roll back more women’s rights, we should remember the 2018 Green Wave movement, which won abortion rights for women in Argentina and has since inspired a wave of similar movements throughout Latin America. And in 2022, women in Iran rebelled against their brutal repression by the Islamic state, which led to massive strikes and other protests across large sectors of the population. While capitalism needs to rely on the hyper-exploitation of women’s paid labor, and even more their unpaid work preparing others to be fit to work, we should recognize that women have not only a special burden, but also a special power! And now is a time to use it.
