They were a group of women who had not imagined they could depend on husbands to support them. Lesbian feminist thinkers were among the first activists to raise the issue of class in the feminst movement, expressing their viewpoints in an accessible language. Yet the fact that privileged women gained in class power while masses of women still do not receive wage equity with men is an indication of the way in which class interests superceded feminist efforts to change the workforce so that women would receive equal pay for equal work. Reformist efforts on the part of privileged groups of women to change the workforce so that women workers would be paid more and face less gender-based discrimination and harrassment on the job had positive impact on the lives of all women. Working class women already knew that the wages they received would not liberate them. But only privileged women had the luxury to imagine working outside the home would actually provide them with an income which would enable them to be economically self-sufficient.
Their resistance to patriarchal male domination in the domestic household provided them with a connection they could use to unite across class with other women who were weary of male domination. It was this resistance that turned the issue of their working outside the home into an issue of gender discrimination and made opposing patriarchy and seeking equal rights with men of their class the political platform that chose feminism rather than class struggle.įrom the onset, reformist white women with class priviledge were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying. Occasionally, a few of these women defied convention and worked outside the home performing tasks way below their educational skills and facing resistance from husbands and family. Elite groups of highly educated females stayed at home rather than do the type of work large numbers of lower-middle class and working class women were doing. It was not gender discrimination or sexist oppression that kept privileged women of all races from working outside the home, it was the fact that the jobs that would have been available to them would have been the same low-paying unskilled labor open to all working women. And many of these working women, who put in long hours for low wages while still doing all the work in the domestic household would have seen the right to stay home as “freedom”. While they were complaining about the dangers of confinement in the home a huge majority of women in the nation were in the workforce. While this issue was presented as a crisis for women, it really was only a crisis for a small group of well-educated white women. Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique identified “the problem that has no name” as the dissatisfaction females felt about being confined and subordinated in the home as housewives. The issues that were most relevant to working women were never highlighted by mainstream mass media. However, as the feminist movement progressed and privileged groups of well-educated white women began to achieve equal access to class power with their male counterparts, feminist class struggle was born.įrom the onset of the movement women from privileged classes were able to make their concerns “the” issue that should be focused on in part because they were the group of women who received public attention. Conflict arose between the reformist vision of women’s liberation which basically demanded equal rights for women within the existing class structure, and more radical and/or revolutionary models, which called for a fundamental change in the existing structure so that models of mutuality and equality could replace the old paradigms. White working-class women recognized that class hierarchies were present in the movement. In the mostly white circles of a newly formed women’s liberation movement the most glaring separation between women was that of class. Class difference and the way in which it divides women was an issue women in the feminist movement talked about long before race.
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