Women's work in capitalist societies: a question of alienation and overexploitation

Abstract

Different feminist movements are seeking to promote social change through the recognition of the role that all women embody in social, political, and economic spaces. Particularly, equality and liberal movements focus their attention on work as the main mechanism by which women can reach emancipation and economic autonomy.  Nonetheless, their perspective is limited because it does not consider that work under capitalism involves forms of alienation and exploitation, and therefore wage labour only results in a situation of subordination for workers and overexplotation for women. This paper aims to discuss under the light of Marx's theory, the features of wage labour in capitalism and consequently show the boundaries of the argument that work is the only way to reach women's economic revindication. For that purpose, this paper is divided into three sections. In section 1, we discuss the historical and theorical basis of Equality and Liberal Feminist movements that consider work as the most valuable factor in their struggle to promote women's revindication. In section 2, we analyse the different characteristics of labour in capitalist societies, and lastly, in section 3, we explain the reason why women's labour instead of being a liberating activity represents an alienating mechanism that leads them to be overexploited.