Women and Class: What Has Happened in Forty Years?

By Stephanie Luce and Mark Brenner

The 1960s through 1980s saw major changes in the status of working women in the USA. Legal barriers to gender-based employment and pay discrimination were eliminated.

By 1970, occupational segregation by gender began to fall substantially for the first time since at least the turn of the century.1 The gender wage gap narrowed, with women earning 59 cents an hour to every dollar earned by a man in 1964, but 77 cents per hour in 2004.2 The percentage of women in the labor force with a college degree went up from 11.2 percent in 1970 to 32.6 percent in 2004, rising at basically twice the rate for men.3 And yet, certain things didn't change much at all: women continued to carry the major responsibility for household labor, child rearing and other kinds of care work, and women were still more likely to live in poverty than men.

Meanwhile other trends that had been improving began to stagnate or reverse in the 1990s, such as the degree of occupational integration between men and women. Occupational segregation between white women and black women increased in the 1990s, and wage inequality between women with high school degrees or less and women with advanced education began to rise. An employment gap between young white and black women began to appear for the first time.

The authors look at what has changed in the past 40 years, and at what hasn't.

They conclude: "as feminists, we want to see individual women succeed: to gain access to higher education, to have the opportunity for economic independence, and to find meaningful work. But it isn't enough for a few women, or even a lot of women, to succeed. Because under capitalism, their success in leaving the class only means others are left behind. Under capitalism, you can't have a manager without the managed, and you can't have a winner without a loser. And who is losing? It remains primarily women and people of color who lose the most under capitalism, overrepresented among the working class and the poor. And, in addition, many of those women who are "winners" by virtue of their new degrees and jobs aren't really winning. They may have more money and more power, but capitalism still constrains their options for caring for others and being cared for. In this way, the women who "win" under capitalism, as well as those who lose, need a cross-class women's movement to fight for a different model of production and social reproduction that allows us to construct our lives around human needs.

(Monthly Review; July-August 2006)