The Proletarian of the Proletariat
A Modern Look at Working Class Women's Position in Society
"The most oppressed man can oppress one being, his wife. The woman is the proletarian of the proletariat." Flora Tristan
Nearly two hundred years ago Flora Tristan observed what male theorists refused to - that women are the proletarian of the proletariat; that men in working class communities exploit women’s labor in ways similar to how the bourgeoisie exploit working class labor. And just like women’s position in the working class, Leftist movements haven’t changed much either - they're still operating on a male-as-default bias: ignoring the lesser, more restrictive roles assigned to proletarian women and the specific forms of oppression they experience that place them at the bottom of society to the benefit of everyone above them, including proletarian men.
Women’s role in society, and in the working class, is distinct in that the exploitation of their labor starts in the home and is then exported into the workforce. Simultaneously, proletarian men are kept docile in their low position in society by the power they are able to exert over the women who live amongst them, which often prevents them from building meaningful class solidarity with the women in their social class against the bourgeoisie. After all, many proletarian men yearn for the power that bourgeiousie men hold - as most everyone yearns for power rather than exploitation and subjugation - and they get a taste of it through their elevated position over working class women.
“Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.” - Eleanor Marx
At the time, Marx was speaking on proletarian women’s unique position within the working class by comparing their role in the home to the role of the worker in society. Now we know that both of her astute observations apply to women in both their role in the home and in society.
Men are able to idle in the home because women are the workers in the home: statistics show that women do the majority of the unpaid labor in the home even if they perform paid labor outside of the home1, and their labor enables men to spend more time in leisure activities regardless of if there is a child in the home2. Similarily like the bourgeoisie, men are able to dictate who labors in the home through their control of capital. In a longitudinal study exploring the connection between household financial control and who performs housework3, researchers found that “control of household financial decisions reduces men's but not women's housework time” and that “women's individual earnings reduce their housework time only when they can access these earnings” while “men's relative earnings reduce their housework time when they or their partners manage the couple's earnings, but not when partners manage their earnings independently.” Men benefit from controlling not only the household capital, but the personal capital of their girlfriend or wife as well; women do not benefit from controlling anything other than their own capital.
It’s not just about the control of capital either - husbands are more likely to own the home4 and do less housework than live-in boyfriends5, while married mothers do more unpaid labor than single mothers6 - simply put, married men do less housework because they create more work for their wives7. On a more deeply insidious level these statistics expose a correlation between men’s ownership of property and control of capital with the ability to dictate the labor of their wives within the home for their own benefit - a form of power and control that women are not able to seize or derive benefit from. It’s an eerie microcosmic reflection of the power the bourgeoisioe hold that enables them to dictate the labor of the working class for their benefit through the control of property and capital.
While both working class women and men are kept under the tyranny of the bourgeoisie, women experience a unique burden preventing their ability to access paid labor because of their role as unpaid laborer within the home.
Zoning - the “explicit division of what could be built where that legally separated where you live from where you might work”8 - is a relatively modern idea that’s seen it’s biggest growth in the past few decades. As Caroline Criado Perez points out in Invisible Women, "zoning laws are based on, and prioritize the needs of, a bread-winning heterosexual married man who goes off to work in the morning, and comes home to relax.”9 Zoning relies on the idea that the home is a place of leisure separate from the place one labors, but it can only be a place of leisure because someone labored to make it that way; zoning implicitly relies on the idea that women should labor in the home to make it leisurely for their working husbands (to keep them docile with their position in the workforce) instead of, or in addition to, participating in the workforce themselves.
While the “stay at home mother” ideal is an ahistorical trope that ignores the historical exploitation of working class women’s paid labor, it’s also ahistorical in that it ignores how working class women sought to financially provide for their families under capitalism - historically and to this day. Gatekept from full-time scheduled work by the ceaseless demands of unpaid domestic labor, women turn to running businesses from their home, which gives them the flexibility to attend to housework and childcare while still participating in the paid workforce. Modern day zoning laws - the most restrictive thus far - prevent most businesses outright from operating out of the home, or from making substantial profit if allowed to operate out of the home, preventing women from one of the most foolproof ways they can fit paid labor into their lives under the current tyranny of unpaid labor dictated by their husbands. It’s no coincidence that the biggest proponents of zoning laws are property owners, who’s property value relies on the comfortable ideals of suburban middle class life built for men - the separation of home and work.
Dworkin said, "Woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness." By preventing women from becoming financially independent, the bourgeoisie are ensuring that women remain dependent on the men within their social class. This serves the interest of working class men by giving them the power to dominate at least one class of people for their own material benefit, and it serves the interest of the bourgeoisie by keeping working class men complacent within their own exploitation by awarding them a small bit of power, and by keeping the paid labor of women cheap and dependable as they have less options and feel the financial burden more acutely. At they’re core, zoning laws are a covert method the bourgeoisie utilize to prevent women from accessing adequate paid labor, therefore keeping them under the tyranny of their husband - which ultimately benefits the bourgeoisie.
Even in the workforce women’s participation is conditional, with men’s participation often coming at the expense of women’s. This reality has been exposed by the pandemic, which saw women bearing the brunt of job losses10 and women-owned businesses being hit harder than male-owned businesses.11 As Moira Donegan points out in her piece about the Great Resignation, “The fact of the matter is that when we speak of the Great Resignation, we are really referring to a great resignation of women. … It might be more accurate, then, to say that as far as working mothers are concerned, the Great Resignation doesn’t reflect women leaving the workforce. It reflects them being forced out.”12
That doesn’t mean the workforce was an equitable or fair place for women before the pandemic. When one thinks of the working class they usually imagine a man, both because of the male-as-default bias most of us subconsciously operate from, but also because men are the ones centered in discussions about the exploitation of the working class; in reality, women are more likely to be low wage earners.13 When it comes to men’s jobs, the risks are well-known, studied, and accounted for. Many male-dominated jobs, like coal mining and construction, are heavily regulated to ensure safety, yet the same is not true for female-dominated jobs - jobs who’s employment numbers far surpass that of men employed in male-dominated industries. As Caroline Criado Perez states in her book Invisible Women, “While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women.”14 Criado Perez goes on to show that women who work in nail salons are exposed to chemicals daily that have been linked to cancer, yet understudied and therefore require almost no regulation; that “women working as carers and cleaners can lift more in a shift than a construction worker or a miner”15, and that nurses are “subjected to more acts of violence than police officers or prison guards.”16 And at the end of the day these women will return home to more labor while men idle.
Women’s distinctive exploitation by the bourgeoisie goes beyond being a modern issue. As Rosalind Miles explains about women’s role in the industrial revolution in her book Who Cooked the Last Supper?, “As a waged laborer, by contrast, a woman was on a fixed weekly sum, fixed moreover at a rate often lower than that of children, let alone that of men, for reasons that were crystal clear to the boss-persons: “The low price of female labor makes it the most profitable as well as the most agreeable occupation for a female to superintend her own domestic establishment, and her low wages do not tempt her to abandon the care of her own children [i.e., because she cannot be tempted to what she cannot afford, a nurse or mother-substitute] … Mr. E., a manufactorer, employs females exclusively … [with] a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessities of life.”17” Miles then reveals that women were “exploited as child slaves - little girls began down in the mines, opening doors for the coal wagons to pass, as young as five, “invariably set to work at an earlier age than boys … from a notion very generally entertained among the parents, that girls are more acute and capable to making themselves useful at an earlier age than boys.”18”
Yet the distinct historical exploitation of women’s labor is barely recognized or addressed - rather many men believe the lie that men planned and built society while women sat comfortably in the home until feminists, very recently, fought to join the workforce. Not only does this chauvinistic lie obscure the historical exploitation of women’s paid and unpaid labor, by the bourgeoisie and by the men of their own social class, it also exposes another blind spot the Left has in regards to women’s labor - the disregard of women’s reproductive labor.
Often, the only time the Left will address the sexual and reproductive exploitation of women is when discussing “sex work.” When the argument crops up, the side that garners the most support is often the one arguing that “sex work” can be freely chosen, is no different than any other form of labor, and that it’s a preferrable choice - the implication being that it’s easier than manual labor. This popular argument relies on multiple bad faith assertions that obscure women’s specific exploitation and harm, not only in the sex trade, but also within non-sex trade labor. The most important fact that is obfuscated by this argument is the sexed power dynamics at play within the sex trade: nearly all “workers” are women while almost all “customers” are men, which leads to the often denigrated social question: for the minority of women who are in the position to “choose” this work, how “freely chosen” is it? In a society where girls are pressured from birth to assume the role of sex object with male validation as their reward, where even the most progressive factions applaud and celebrate women assuming that role, how “freely chosen” is that role for women? And more importantly, why is the more privileged minority who “chose” this for themselves being used to obfuscate the power dynamics and harm that this industry causes for less privileged women?
The idea that “sex work” is no different from any other type of labor conceals the harm women experience within the industry; it purposefully skirts around the fact that prostitution is the single most deadliest job in America19, and it’s even more dangerous in other countries. It’s also important to note that manual labor in this argument is often male-coded, which turns a blind eye to women’s specific exploitation and harm within manual labor - an issue that has already addressed above. This assertion simultaneously ignores the physical harm women can experience during heterosexual sex, whether in the course of a relationship or during casual sex, or more importantly, sex with a john who views the woman as an object that he’s paid for to satiate his desires and is entitled to treat as he wishes with no care for her comfort or pleasure. From STIs and gynecological pain and trauma, both of which can have long-term, painful health consequences and require invasive painful procedures to diagnose and/or treat (and remember, women are routinely underprescribed pain management for most procedures due to medical misogyny), to unplanned pregnancies and the host of issues that brings.
It’s worth noting that while white collar women are turning their whisper networks about the psychological harm that arises from the gray area between enthusiatic consent and sort-of-consented-to-sex into public conversations, many are simultaneously arguing that their job is equally as exploitative or harder than “sex work.” How is their paper pushing, comfortable, well-paid job “as exploitative” or “harder” when they’ve already (appropriately) admitted that consented-to casual sex can sometimes be pyschologically painful?
Perhaps the most important aspect certain factions of the Left work to hide about this topic is that it’s a massive industry worth $180 billion globally20 where the people most likely to amass large profits from the exploitation of women’s bodies are men and the bourgeoisie. This goes for both online “sex work”, where the websites, the production companies, and sometimes even individual women’s accounts are owned and operated by men, and “full service sex work” (ie, prostitution) where most women have pimps - and pimps are often men - with the bourgeoisie enthusiastically participating as both pimp and customer.
Porn, a topic that’s tightly linked to the “sex work” discussion yet not addressed as often, is similar: from the fallacious arguments that rely on the naturalization of women’s oppressive sexual roles to combat the idea that the industry is inherently exploitative, to the outright insistence to ignore the unique harm it brings not only to women in the industry, but to women as a class as well. Porn as an industry is a bit more nebulous due to it being almost entirely online, so “revenue estimates for the porn industry vary widely. Some believe the industry does not even make $6 billion a year, while others say it makes $10 billion, $15 billion, or even $97 billion.”21 And similar to the sex trade, and all other forms of women’s sexual and reproductive exploitaiton, it’s often the borgeoisie tapping into a booming global industry to try their luck at turning a profit at the expense of lower class women. And as this discussion becomes more mainstream, many women on the Left are asking themselves how they can build authentic solidarity with men who are more than happy to participate in a billion dollar industry predicated on the exploitation and denigration of women.
Surrogacy, an industry that’s worldwide revenue is “projected to reach $201.40 million by 2025”22 is more explicit in it’s exploitation of women by the bourgeoisie: the media has spent months excitedly reporting how popular of an option it has become for bourgeoisie women who claim they don’t want to ruin their bodies with the labor of pregnancy and birth. In a time when a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body specifically in regards to abortion is a prominent topic, it’s surprising that surrogacy contracts that can force a woman to have an abortion against her consent, or refuse her an abortion when she desires one, have not come under scrutiny. It’s equally surprising when news like the recent Ukrainian surrogate mothers being forced to remain in active war zones to give birth to children for wealthy western couples struggles to break into the mainstream.23 For a movement that claims to champion the working class, the silence on the reproductive exploitation and mistreatment of women in countries that permit surrogacy like India24 by the western bourgeoisie exposes an unshakable western-centric, misogynistic bias.
The issue that runs through the heart of all of these industries is that working class women being economically dependent on the men within their own social class creates an enviroment conducive to the bourgeoisie being able to exploit women’s sexuality and their reproductive abilities. When the Left chooses to ignore the coercive nature of these industries brought about by the bourgeoisie against working class women for profit, they’ve once again shown they’re willing to pretend proletarian women’s specific issues don’t exist to the advantage of the bourgeoisie.
That the necessary work of reproducing the working class is unpaid and often exploited for profit is beneficial to the bourgeoisie. Even with insurance, women are billed such high amounts by hospitals after giving birth that it often becomes medical debt, and they are then turned out into a society that has no regulated maternal leave, to preserve the bourgeoisie corporations profits; little to no access to cost effective childcare, because women can do that themselves “for free”; and a manufactored baby formula shortage that stems from the monopolization of nearly all aspects of our society in favor of the borgeoisie’s unending hunger for profit.
Those same hospitals, who rake in large profits every year, donate (or are rumored to sell25) women's placentas, unbeknowst to most women, which are then used to create scientific and medical advancements that often come with hefty price tags from companies owned and operated largely by bourgeoisie men26. Meanwhile, men benefit the most from medical advancements due to the male-as-default bias in healthcare, while those advancements are mostly accessible to the bourgeoisie due to price.
When returing to work after a pregnancy and birth is when the pay gap for women becomes the widest. They’re hit with the motherhood penalty, while men benefit from their wive’s reproductive labor by being rewarded with the fatherhood bonus; “fathers incur an average wage increase of more than 6 percent with each child, while women experience, on average, a 4 percent decrease in salary per child” with “low-to-average earning women incur[ring] the greatest motherhood penalty”27. Because men are largely aware they benefit within the workforce from women’s reproductive labor, it should come as no surprise that some men engage in reproductive coercion, with one study finding that “one quarter of adolescent females reported that their abusive male partners were trying to get them pregnant through interference with planned contraception”28. This issue will only become worse now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade, allowing men the legal ability to be the sole deciders of the reproductive choices within their relationship in states that have banned or criminalized abortion, as rape is essentially decriminalized through the nearly non-existent enforcement of the laws by police departments, prosecutors, and courts29. And thus the state has writ into law that women are men’s sexual and reproductive property within their own social class, aggravating the already existing power imbalances within heterosexual realtionships.
Because women can be considered property - and property is meant to be owned, used, and discarded - that’s precisely how some men treat the women closest to them. The number one cause of maternal mortality, outpacing all medical complications, is murder, the majority being committed by the woman’s intimate partner30. Black women face the brunt of this, “up to nearly three-fold higher risk of dying by homicide than those who are not pregnant”31, because they face the brunt of male violence; four Black woman are murdered every day in America32, and “Black women were murdered by men at almost double the rate per 100,000 than white women”33. It’s past time the Left reckoned with the growing problem of male violence and femicide.
"What bothers the left is when women apply to their own situation a materialist analysis; when they reject the ideology which says that they are naturally inferior or the victims of a culture which happens, unhappily but mysteriously (ie. without any material benefits for anyone), to be sexist. But women are now saying 'there is not mystery: we are oppressed because we are exploited. What we go through makes life easier for others'. And the left is afraid that women will call a spade a spade, the economic economic, and their own sufferings exploitation." Christine Delphy
At this point, many women are wondering: are Leftist men purposefully ignoring or obscuring these egregious issues that arise from the power dynamics between women and men because they’re aware they materially benefit from them?
Women are oppressed not only through their subjugation by the men closest to them, but also by the erasure and obfuscation of their oppression, because to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge men's shared class interests across social classes. Women's subjugation and exploitation begins in the home, where “within the family, the husband constitutes the bourgeoisie and the wife the proletariat” (Friedrich Engels), and is then exported and intensified within society in distinct ways that are predicated on their lower social status, their forced submissiveness under male domination, and their reproductive abilities - and then made invisible by a prevalent male-as-default bias. Until men within the Left acknowledge and fight against their class interests that stem from their subjugation of women and struggle with us towards women's liberation, they will remain the class enemy of women - playing directly into the class interests of the bourgeoisie.
OECD Stats. “Time Spent in Paid and Unpaid Work, by Sex”, https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757
Bruce Drake. “Another Gender Gap: Men Spend More Time in Leisure Activities”, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gender-gap-men-spend-more-time-in-leisure-activities/
Yang Hu. “What About Money? Earnings, Household Financial Organization, and Housework”, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12590
Stanley A. Sedo, Sherrie A. Kossoudji. “Rooms of One’s Own: Gender, Race and Home Ownership as Wealth Accumulation in the United States”, https://ftp.iza.org/dp1397.pdf
George Mason University. “Married Men Really Do Do Less Housework Than Live-in Boyfriends”, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070827174300.htm
Joanna R. Pepin, Liana C. Sayer, Lynne M. Casper. “Marital Status and Mothers’ Time Use: Childcare, Housework, Leisure, and Sleep”, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-018-0647-x
University of Michigan. “Exactly how much housework does a husband create?” https://phys.org/news/2008-04-housework-husband.html
Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez, page 39
Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez, page 40
National Women’s Law Center. “Four Times More Women Than Men Dropped Out of the Labor Force in September”, https://nwlc.org/resources/four-times-more-women-than-men-dropped-out-of-the-labor-force-in-september/
US Chamber of Commerce. “MetLife & U.S. Chamber Special Report on Women-Owned Small Businesses During COVID-19”, https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/special-report-women-owned-small-businesses-during-covid-19
Moira Donegan. “Part of the ‘great resignation’ is actually just mothers forced to leave their jobs”, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/19/great-resignation-mothers-forced-to-leave-jobs
ASPE Research Brief. “Who are Low-Wage Workers?”, https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/who-are-low-wage-workers-0#Who
Cécile Andrzejewski. “The ‘invisible’ risks facing working women in France”, https://www.equaltimes.org/the-invisible-risks-facing-working?lang=en#.YdTPkYjMK3A
Sharan Burrow. “Face it: We are all sickened by inequality at work”, https://www.hazards.org/vulnerableworkers/ituc28april.htm
James T. Brophy, Margaret M. Keith, Michael Hurley. “Assaulted and Unheard: Violence Against Healthcare Staff”, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28899214/
From Who Cooked the Last Supper? Footnotes: “These comments are taken from a Factory Commissioners report on working conditions, and from the Handsard record of the ensuing debate in parliament - see Ivy Pinchbeck’s pioneering study Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1930), p. 94.
From Who Cooked the Last Supper? Footnotes: Report of the parliamentary commissioners; see the testimony of Sarah Gooder, age eight: “I’m a trapper [trap-opener] in the Gawber pit … I have to trap without a light, and I’m scared … I don’t like being in the pit, I would like to be at school far better … “ (Pinchbeck, p. 248).
HG.org. “Prostitution in the United States”, https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/prostitution-in-the-united-states-30997
ProCon.org. “How Many Prostitutes Are in the United States and the Rest of the World?”, https://prostitution.procon.org/questions/how-many-prostitutes-are-in-the-united-states-and-the-rest-of-the-world/#:~:text=80%20percent%20of%20the%20world,in%20age%20between%2013%2D25.
Ross Benes. “Porn could have a bigger economic influence on the US than Netflix”, https://qz.com/1309527/porn-could-have-a-bigger-economic-influence-he-us-than-netflix/
Kavita Joshi, Apoorva Srivastava , Onkar Sumant. “Surrogacy Market by Type (Gestational Surrogacy and Traditional Surrogacy) and Technology (IVF with ICSI, IVF without ICSI, and IUI): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2016–2025”, https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/surrogacy-market-A06580
Brooke Kato. “Ukrainian surrogates must return to war zone to give birth to Westerners’ babies”, https://nypost.com/2022/03/09/ukrainian-surrogates-must-return-to-war-zone-to-give-birth/
Vaishnavi Sundar. “Surrogacy in India: the Fallacy of 'Choice'“, https://4w.pub/surrogacy-in-india/
Arielle Pardes. “Hospital Regulations Are Forcing Women to Steal Their Own Placentas”, https://www.vice.com/en/article/xd57m3/heres-why-women-are-stealing-their-own-placentas-924
Tiyani Majoko. “BioTech: Profiting From Women's Bodies Without Their Consent”, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tiyani-majoko/biotech-still-profiting-from-womens-bodies-without-their-consent_a_23370620/
Kate H. Elliott. “The Fatherhood Bonus and Motherhood Penalty”, https://www.augsburg.edu/now/2017/11/16/the-fatherhood-bonus-and-the-motherhood-penalty/
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “Reproductive and Sexual Coercion”, https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2013/02/reproductive-and-sexual-coercion
Katharine Webster. “Why Do So Few Rape Cases End in Arrest?”, https://www.uml.edu/news/stories/2019/sexual_assault_research.aspx
Diana Cheng, Isabelle L Horon. “Intimate-partner homicide among pregnant and postpartum women”, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20502288/
Nidhi Subbaraman. “Homicide is a top cause of maternal death in the United States”, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03392-8
Stacy M. Brown. “At Least Four Black Women and Girls Murdered Each Day in 2020: FBI”, https://www.washingtoninformer.com/at-least-four-black-women-and-girls-murdered-each-day-in-2020-fbi/
Vanessa Handy. “Study finds that nearly all Black women murdered by men are killed by someone they know, often with a gun”, https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2020/10/08/study-finds-nearly-all-black-women-murdered-men-ar/