Woman Question

WOMAN QUESTION. Since its inception, the American Left has defined itself principally in relation to the working class, the designated agent of revolutionary change. The role of women within the movement has been, consequently, problematical. Women historically have worked for wages in fewer numbers than men, and their jobs, mainly in low-paying manufacturing and service sectors, have not matched the image of proletarian work as established by the male leadership. Only in 1920 did women gain the right to vote, and therefore women had no direct role in electoral campaigns until relatively recently in the history of the Left. The reality of women’s oppression or subordination has nevertheless repeatedly challenged Left theorists and strategists to wrestle with matters defined by gender as well as class. This discussion has been known as the “woman question.”

Although this discussion generally dates to abolitionists’ confrontation with women’s controversial role in the antislavery movement, the Left became intimately involved during the decades after the Civil War. At this time an independent and mass woman’s movement took shape and presented socialist and reformist organizations alike with a demand for recognition. German American socialists responded most forcefully to die Frauenfrage and experimented with the first organizations designed to address women’s special concerns. The most important theoretical work on the woman question appeared in Germany in 1879, August Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus. Translated by Daniel De Leon as Woman under Socialism and published in the United States in 1904, Bebel’s text supplied the American Left with its standard “answer” through the 1930s.

Bebel opened his text by acknowledging that “woman and workingmen have, since [days of] old, had this in common—oppression.” He then constructed a grand historical framework to trace women’s distinct role in social production from ancient times to the consolidation of capitalism in the nineteenth century and to relate each historical stage to the intensification of their oppression. While he regretted the pull of women into the waged labor force under modern industry for its impact on family life, he nevertheless looked optimistically upon this development. The trend in social life, Bebel wrote, “is not to banish woman back to the house and hearth as our ‘domestic life’ fanatics prescribe … but is to lead woman out of the narrow sphere of strictly domestic life to a full participation in the public life of the people.” As the material conditions of industrial capitalism forced women into wage labor, they, like male workers, could ready themselves for class war and the socialist reconstruction of society. Bebel not only juxtaposed the sufferings of the working class and women across history, but also explained how women would attain freedom only insofar as they struggled to overthrow capitalism.

Bebel’s parallel construction of the oppression of women and workers did not settle the matter. Because women bear a special relation to what Marx and Engels had termed the “reproduction of labor power,” that is, the bearing and raising of children as well as the maintenance of the household, their roles as wage-earners never correspond to those of men. When women work for wages they earn less than men, and as an expanding sector of the labor market, women concentrate into a small number of low-paying occupations. Equally important, waged work does not significantly alter women’s responsibilities for the family and household. For these reasons, the persistent Left emphasis on social production as the site of revolutionary consciousness and proletarian agency displaces women and their concerns and ensures their questionable status within the movement and its theoretical formulations.

Eisenstein, Zillah, ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978.

Kuhn, Annette, and Annemarie Wolpe. Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984.