Hester Eisenstein - Gender Equality in a Post-Capitalist Society

Hester Eisenstein, a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York and author of Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Paradigm Publishers, 2010), discusses gender equality in a post-capitalist society at the Fifth Annual Human Security Forum hosted by the Centre for International Studies at Cape Breton University on November 4 and 5, 2011. The forum was titled "Life After Capitalism: Imagining an Alternative World." Visit the CIS website at http://cbu-cis.ca/



Free-Market Feminism
Johanna Brenner

Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), 272 pages, $26.95, paperback.

Feminism Seduced, written for a general audience, presents a powerful, historically grounded critique of liberal feminism. Drawing on three decades of writing by socialist/Marxist feminists and women-of-color feminists, Eisenstein weaves a compelling account of how the central ideas of “hegemonic feminism” have legitimized the corporate capitalist assault on the working class in the United States and on small farmers and workers, both urban and rural, in the global South.

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On one hand, liberal feminism’s campaigns against discrimination in employment and education, against sexual harassment, for affirmative action, and so forth have been crucially important; their success has transformed the landscape of our economic and political system, where women are increasingly able to access the higher reaches of professional work, managerial leadership, and political power. On the other hand, the very ideology that forwarded the legal and cultural changes opening opportunities for professional/managerial-class women has also been used to justify the exploitation, impoverishment, and marginalization of working-class women in the United States and abroad. While purporting to represent all women, mainstream feminism has primarily advanced the interests of women with higher education, so that after forty years of feminist activism, there is now an enormous class divide among women workers. To understand how and why this has happened, Eisenstein traces the history of feminist ideas and politics in the context of the fundamental restructuring of the global economy and the rise of the neoliberal political order.

Taking globalization as the framework for describing this “sea change” in the world capitalist political economy, Eisenstein identifies deindustrialization, the rise of export processing zones in the global South, the growth of the service sector, the explosion of the financial sector, and the employers’ offensive against unions as key to the transformation of women’s relation to waged labor. In the North, globalization entailed a precipitous decline in men’s wages, marking the end of the “family wage” for men who had often provided sole financial support in traditional male breadwinner marriages. At the same time, the rise of the service economy opened up a huge demand for low-wage, female labor. In the South, the “new enclosure” movement threw women into an expanding labor market. Insofar as mainstream feminism had lauded paid employment for women as a route to escape the oppression of patriarchal marriage, feminism in the United States helped to create a new pool of labor that capitalist employers could use to cut costs. Women’s willingness to enter the workforce in massive numbers allowed corporations to resist the pressure for wage increases. And, by identifying freedom with paid work, mainstream feminism offered the perfect cover to multinational corporations exploiting women’s labor in free trade zones. In short, feminism became the language of capitalist modernization.

The restructuring of the U.S. economy was accompanied by a concerted assault on organized labor, aided and abetted by a resurgent conservative movement that first came to power with Reagan’s election in 1980 and continued to strengthen its hold throughout the following decades. Dismantling the welfare state was central to the conservative political agenda, and “welfare reform” one of its wedge issues. Eisenstein argues that because of mainstream feminism’s exclusive focus on paid work as a route to independence, feminists were left without arguments to defend single mothers’ right to income support. This was especially the case once centrist Democratic politicians, such as Bill Clinton, joined the welfare-reform bandwagon, campaigning to “end welfare as we know it.”

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Eisenstein concludes her book with a passionate but reasoned call for feminists to come back to class analysis and to build a movement that puts the needs and interests of working-class women, women of color, and women of the global South at the center. Drawing on recent struggles—from the California Nurses Association, to Inuit women in Quebec, to the school teachers of Oaxaca—she offers glimpses of what an anti-capitalist, democratic, feminism might look like. I hope her readers are inspired to develop that feminism in the struggle ahead.


http://monthlyreview.org/2010/12/01/free-market-feminism





Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: How I Came to Write This Book

Chapter 1 Globalization and Women's Labor

Chapter 2 Women, Work, and the Mainstreaming of Feminism

Chapter 3 Fault Lines of Race and Class

Chapter 4 In the United States: A Political and Economic Sea-Change

Chapter 5 In the Global South: "Women" Replace Development

Chapter 6 Islamophobia and the Global War on Terror

Conclusion

References
About the Author