Women and Capitalism: Oppression or Emancipation? A Review Article

Abstract

In the last few years, work in social history and the history of women has centred on the transition to capitalism and the great bourgeois political revolutions-also variously described as industrialization, urbanisation, and modernisation. Throughout this work runs a steady debate about the improvement or deterioration brought about by these changes in the lives of women and working people. On the whole, sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s and many recent historians have been optimistic about the changes in women's position, while feminist and Marxist scholars have taken a much more gloomy view. 1 There has been little debate between the two sides, yet the same opposed arguments about the impact of capitalism on the status of women crop up not only in accounts of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also in work on women in the Third World, and cry out for critical assessment.

Class Struggle on the Homefront

“…The difference would be that the increase in labor force participation by women, in particular, would be coupled with an attack on the cultural foundations for single wage earner multi-person households, growth in consumerism, and a cultural campaign to normalize the role of women workers in corporate structures. Janet Thomas (1988) describes the orthodoxy of modernization theorists from the 1950s to the early 1970s as arguing that "industrialism" (Thomas remarks that capitalism was not an explicit term used in these modernist intellectual products) would result in dramatic improvement in the social position of women by allowing them access to wage labor employment. Women were freed to participate in larger numbers in the labor power markets.…”

Women and the Public Sphere

“…Linda Colley, in examining women's involvement in patriotic activities during the Napoleonic War, suggested that a renewed emphasis on separate spheres could potentially reflect increasing rather than diminishing participation by women in public life. 12 For the time being I do not want to address these debates directly, but to suggest some different questions. As my hurried sample suggests, the contrast between public and private worlds throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew not on one, but on multiple contrasts.…”

Capitalism with a Female Face

“…2 When historians like Edward Shorter argued that capitalism benefited women, they treated capitalism as a historical actor. 3 As Froide observes, "Women's Journal of Women's History 142 Spring historians have been reluctant to consider that women participated in and were agents of capitalist enterprises, as much as capitalism was something that acted on them" (2). These five studies find women's agency in social orders, ranging from the financial capitalism of early eighteenth-century imperial Britain to the corporate capitalism of mid-twentieth-century Cold War America.In Silent Partners, Froide uncovers white Englishwomen's financial activities, demonstrating the importance of what she calls women's "financial patriotism" both for themselves and the British imperial project (202).…”

“…Using vignettes of the "gilded suffragists" to bring her story to life, Neuman expands on accounts of individual suffragists by creating a database of more than two hundred wealthy white women. Utilizing personal papers and journalists' accounts, she found common traits and social connections (3,158). Recent studies in the history of capitalism have focused on male networks, but the aspects that linked men were not always those that connected women.…”

“…Connections between the two causes appear more evident with the funders rather than the leaders of specific causes; for instance, Katharine McCormick and others funded both Carrie Chapman Catt and Margaret Sanger (175, 206). The idea of continuity is additionally relevant as Johnson identifies the implications of the "possibilities and problems of women's [past] financial contributions" for today (3). The challenge is not only that women are "still underrepresented in philanthropy, both as donors and beneficiaries" but that there is a critical need to learn from and "avoid the resentment and power struggle that plagued the suffrage movement" (224).…”