Marxist Perspectives on Women’s Labor Movements

Why do millions of women across factories, fields, and home-based workshops earn less, work longer, and remain almost invisible in trade unions? Marxist theory offers one of the sharpest lenses to answer this question. By treating women’s labor as a class issue rooted in the structure of capitalism itself, Marxist thinkers connect the dots between unpaid housework, low wages in factories, and the difficulty of organizing women workers into collective movements. This framework continues to shape how scholars and activists understand women’s labor struggles today.

The Marxist analysis of women’s work
The reserve army of labor
The hidden subsidy of unpaid work
Engels and women’s entry into public labor
“Back into public industry”
Where Engels’ optimism falls short
Gender segmentation in labor markets
Why is women’s union membership so low?
Organizing the unorganized: the SEWA model
Why these theoretical assumptions still matter

The Marxist analysis of women’s work

Classical Marxism argues that exploitation happens when workers produce more value than they receive in wages. The capitalist pockets this difference as surplus value. Marxist feminists extend this logic to show that women face a double form of exploitation: they are underpaid in wage work and, on top of that, perform unpaid domestic labor that keeps the entire workforce alive and functioning.

Think about a typical day for a woman working in a garment unit. She stitches clothes for ten hours at piece-rate wages, then returns home to cook, clean, fetch water, and care for children and elderly relatives. Her factory wage is calculated as if she were a free individual entering the market. The cost of feeding her family, raising the next generation of workers, and emotionally supporting tired wage earners is treated as a private matter – invisible, unpaid, and outside the economy. Marxist feminism argues that this invisibility is not accidental. Capitalism actively benefits from treating reproductive work as natural duty rather than labor.

The reserve army of labor

Marx described a “reserve army” of unemployed workers whose existence keeps wages low. Marxist feminists point out that women form a particularly useful section of this reserve. They can be pulled into factories during booms or wartime shortages and pushed back into homes during recessions, without society treating either move as a crisis. During the World Wars, women across Europe and North America were drafted into industrial work in massive numbers, only to be sent home once men returned. The same pattern shows up today when contract workers in export-oriented factories are hired and fired with the season.

The hidden subsidy of unpaid work

If domestic and care work were paid at market rates, the cost of labor would rise enormously. Capitalism, in this reading, depends on a hidden subsidy provided largely by women. Social reproduction theorists argue that bearing children, feeding them, teaching them basic skills, and absorbing the emotional shocks of family life are all forms of labor that produce the most important commodity in any economy – labor power itself. Yet this work is excluded from GDP calculations and from most definitions of “the economy.”

Engels and women’s entry into public labor

Friedrich Engels offered one of the earliest systematic Marxist accounts of women’s oppression in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. His central argument was historical: women’s subordination was not a fact of nature but a product of the rise of private property and class society. Before class divisions emerged, Engels claimed, kinship-based communities did not systematically subordinate women. The monogamous patriarchal family appeared, in his view, alongside the accumulation of wealth that men wished to pass on to their biological heirs.

“Back into public industry”

From this analysis, Engels drew a striking conclusion. The first condition for women’s liberation, he wrote, was bringing the entire female sex back into public industry. For Engels, women’s confinement to the private household was the material foundation of their dependence on men. Earning an independent wage, participating in collective workplaces, and being part of the public economic life of society were preconditions for breaking patriarchal control.

This was a radical claim in the 19th century. It linked women’s freedom directly to wage labor and to socialism, rather than to legal reforms alone. Engels believed legal equality was necessary but insufficient. Without economic independence and without socializing housework – through public childcare, collective kitchens, and shared care responsibilities – formal rights would remain empty for working-class women.

Where Engels’ optimism falls short

Later feminists have pointed out important limits in Engels’ argument. Entry into public labor has not, on its own, freed women. As later Marxist analyses recognize, women enter the labor market under unequal conditions because they continue to bear the primary responsibility for reproduction and domestic care. Employers know this and use it to justify lower wages, fewer promotions, and concentration of women in jobs labeled as “naturally suited” to feminine qualities. The result is the well-documented “double burden” – paid work outside plus unpaid work inside the home.

Critics also note that Engels relied on anthropological evidence from his time that has since been challenged. Still, the core insight remains influential: women’s position in production and reproduction must be analyzed together, not separately.

Gender segmentation in labor markets

One of the most powerful applications of Marxist analysis is in understanding why labor markets are so deeply segmented by gender. Segmentation means that men and women are sorted into different kinds of jobs, with different pay, conditions, and prospects. In India, this segmentation is severe. Gender-based segmentation persists in both manufacturing and services despite decades of trade liberalization and economic reform.

Women are heavily concentrated in low-wage, labor-intensive, unskilled work – bidi rolling, garment stitching, agricultural labor, domestic service, street vending, and home-based piece work. Men in the informal sector tend to be spread across a wider range of positions. Women largely occupy the bottom rung of different industries, while men are distributed more evenly. This is not a matter of individual choice but a structural feature shaped by gender ideology, household responsibilities, restricted mobility, and the way employers design work.

Why is women’s union membership so low?

Trade union density in India is already low overall. Less than 8 per cent of the workforce is unionized, and women form a very small fraction of that membership. Several intertwined reasons explain this.

First, most women workers are in the informal sector, where traditional union models do not work well. There is often no single employer to negotiate with. A home-based worker rolling bidis for a contractor, or a domestic worker employed in five different households, faces a fragmented work relationship. India’s informal economy accounts for around 93 per cent of the labour force, and these workers have little work security, income security, or social security to begin with.

Second, organizing in domestic spaces is structurally harder than organizing on factory floors. Home-based workers are physically isolated from each other. They cannot meet during lunch breaks or after a shift. Domestic spaces present significant barriers for union activity compared to streets, public spaces, and industrial areas where male informal workers are typically located.

Third, women carry the double burden of paid and unpaid work. After a full day’s labor and household responsibilities, finding time for union meetings, training sessions, or strikes is genuinely difficult. Union meeting times, leadership norms, and styles of speech often assume a worker who is male, mobile, and free of childcare duties.

Fourth, social and cultural factors discourage women from public political activity. Restrictions on mobility, fear of harassment, family disapproval, and the lack of female leadership inside existing unions all push women away. Many traditional unions have been slow to take up issues that matter most to women workers – sexual harassment, maternity protection, childcare, sanitation at worksites, and the value of unpaid care work.

Organizing the unorganized: the SEWA model

India has nevertheless been a pioneer in finding new ways to organize women in the informal sector. The Self-Employed Women’s Association, founded by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad in 1972, is the largest such effort. SEWA challenged the very definition of a trade union. When Bhatt approached the registrar, officials asked who the union would fight against, since these women had no single employer. Her answer reshaped labor law in practice: a union of the self-employed could exist to fight against poverty, social exclusion, and the absence of legal recognition.

SEWA has since grown into a movement of millions of members across multiple states, combining trade unionism with cooperatives, banking, healthcare, and skill training. Its approach blends collective bargaining with mutual support, recognizing that women in the informal economy need not just better wages but also access to credit, childcare, and protection from harassment. This is what scholars call “social unionism” – a model that addresses the whole life of the worker, not only the workplace.

Why these theoretical assumptions still matter

The Marxist framework, refined by feminist scholars, gives us tools to see what mainstream economics often hides. It reveals that women’s low wages are not a market accident but part of how capitalism extracts surplus from the entire household. It explains why entering paid work has not automatically liberated women, as Engels once hoped. And it helps us understand why mobilizing women workers requires forms of organization that go beyond the factory gate.

These insights matter directly for policy debates today – on minimum wages for domestic workers, recognition of gig work, maternity entitlements, public investment in childcare, and the rights of platform-based workers, many of whom are women. The questions Engels raised about socializing reproductive labor have returned in new forms as countries struggle with care crises and falling female labor participation.

What do you think? If unpaid domestic and care work were counted as part of the formal economy and compensated in some way, how might that change women’s bargaining power both at home and in the labor market? And what kind of trade union model do you think would best serve a young woman working as a delivery partner or a gig-platform beautician in your city today?

References

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Marxist Perspectives on Women’s Labor Movements

Table of Contents

The Marxist analysis of women’s work 🔗

The reserve army of labor 🔗

The hidden subsidy of unpaid work 🔗

Engels and women’s entry into public labor 🔗

“Back into public industry” 🔗

Where Engels’ optimism falls short 🔗

Gender segmentation in labor markets 🔗

Why is women’s union membership so low? 🔗

Organizing the unorganized: the SEWA model 🔗

Why these theoretical assumptions still matter 🔗