‘The fashion world became a capitalist gold mine’
https://themilitant.com/2021/03/06/the-fashion-world-became-a-capitalist-gold-mine/
March 15, 2021
Above, portrait of high society bourgeois soiree. Inset, members of
United Steelworkers of America Local 8888 picket in February 1979 in
successful battle for union recognition against Newport News, Virginia,
shipyard bosses. “The woman question cannot be divorced from the class
question,” Evelyn Reed writes in Cosmetics, Fashions, and the
Exploitation of Women.
PAINTING BY AVTANDIL MAKHAROBLIDZE; INSET, MILITANT/JOHN COBEY
Above, portrait of high society bourgeois soiree. Inset, members of
United Steelworkers of America Local 8888 picket in February 1979 in
successful battle for union recognition against Newport News, Virginia,
shipyard bosses. “The woman question cannot be divorced from the class
question,” Evelyn Reed writes in Cosmetics, Fashions, and the
Exploitation of Women.
Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women by Joseph Hansen,
Evelyn Reed and Mary-Alice Waters is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the
Month for March. This Marxist classic on women’s emancipation began as a
1954 debate in the Militant over the relation of big-business marketing
of cosmetics and fashions to the oppression of women. The excerpt is
from the chapter “The Woman Question and the Marxist Method” by Evelyn
Reed, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. She joined the second
wave of the fight for women’s liberation in the 1960s and ’70s,
authoring several books on the origins of women’s oppression. Copyright
© 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY EVELYN REED
The class distinctions between women transcend their sex identity as
women. This is above all true in modern capitalist society, the epoch of
the sharpest polarization of class forces.
The woman question cannot be divorced from the class question. Any
confusion on this score can only lead to erroneous conclusions and
setbacks. It will divert the class struggle into a sex struggle of all
women against all men.
Historically, the sex struggle was part of the bourgeois feminist
movement of the last century. It was a reform movement, conducted within
the framework of the capitalist system, and not seeking to overthrow it.
But it was a progressive struggle in that women revolted against almost
total male domination on the economic, social, and domestic fronts.
Through the feminist movement, a number of important reforms were won
for women. But the bourgeois feminist movement has run its course,
achieved its limited aims, and the problems of today can only be
resolved in the struggle of class against class.
The woman question can only be resolved through the lineup of working
men and women against the ruling men and women. This means that the
interests of the workers as a class are identical; and not the
interests of all women as a sex.
Ruling-class women have exactly the same interest in upholding and
perpetuating capitalist society as their men have. The bourgeois
feminists fought, among other things, for the right of women as well as
men to hold property in their own name. They won this right. Today,
plutocratic women hold fabulous wealth in their own names. They are
completely in alliance with the plutocratic men to perpetuate the
capitalist system. They are not in alliance with the working women,
whose needs can only be served through the abolition of capitalism.
Thus, the emancipation of working women will not be achieved in alliance
with women of the enemy class, but just the opposite; in a struggle
against them as part and parcel of the whole class struggle.
The attempt to identify the interests of all classes of women as a sex
takes one of its most insidious forms in the field of female beauty. The
bourgeois myth has arisen that since all women want to be beautiful,
they all have the same interest in cosmetics and fashions which are
currently identified with beauty. To buttress this myth, it is claimed
that fashion beauty has prevailed throughout all ages of history and for
all classes of women. As evidence, they point to the fact that even in
primitive society, women painted and decorated their bodies. To explode
this myth, let us briefly examine the history of cosmetics and fashions.
In primitive society, where there were no classes, no economic and
social competition, and no sexual competition, the bodies of both women
and men were painted and “decorated,” and it was not for the sake of
beauty. It was a necessity that arose out of certain primeval and
primitive conditions of labor, which I shall explain in detail in future
articles.
It was necessary at that time for each individual who belonged to the
kinship group to be “marked” as such. These “marks” were not merely
ornaments, rings, bracelets, short skirts, etc., but actual gashes,
incisions, tattoo marks, etc. as well as different kinds of painting.
These marks indicated not only the sex of each individual but the
changing age and labor status of each individual as he matured from a
child to an elder.
These marks identified the kindred members of the same group or labor
collective. Since primitive society was socialist, these marks also
expressed social equality. …
Then came class society. The marks that signified, among other things,
social equality under primitive socialism, became transformed into
their opposite. They became fashions and decorations that signified
social inequality: the division of society into rich and poor, into
rulers and subjugated. Cosmetics and fashions became the marks of social
distinction between the classes and the apex of this social distinction
is found in the French Court before the French Revolution. …
But as capitalism developed, there arose an enormous expansion of the
productive machine and with it the need for a mass market. Since women
represent half the population, profiteers in “beauty” eyed this mass and
lusted to exploit it for their own purposes. …
The fashion world became a capitalist gold mine with virtually unlimited
possibilities. All a big businessman had to do was to change the
fashions often enough and invent enough new aids to beauty and he could
become richer and richer. That is how, under capitalism, the sale of
women as commodities was displaced by the sale of commodities to women.
Correspondingly, natural beauty became more and more displaced by
artificial beauty; namely, fashion beauty. And that is how the myth
arose that beauty is identical with fashion. …
Beauty has no identity with fashions. But it has an identity with labor.
Apart from the realm of nature, all that is beautiful has been produced
in labor and by the laborers. Outside the realm of nature, beauty does
not exist apart from labor and never will. For the beauty of all the
products of labor, and of all the arts produced in and through labor,
are incorporated within these products and these arts.
Humanity itself, together with the beauty of humanity, was produced in
and through the labor process. As [Frederick] Engels pointed out, when
the humans produced, they produced themselves as humans. They cast off
their apelike appearance and became more and more beautiful. When the
capitalist social disfigurement of exploited labor is removed, the true
beauty of labor and of the laborers will stand forth in their true
dimensions.
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--
Charles Bukowski “For those who believe in God, most of the big
questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the
God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to
new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a
command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the
teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here
to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds
and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ―
Charles Bukowski