Women and Work: A Feminist Overview of Women’s Undermined Labour and Its Intersection with Capitalism

Abstract

The two-thirds of the entire work in the world is done by women, and still they are neither paid nor valued for the majority of the work which they do, instead they are deemed as non-working housewives. This not only undermines the work which they do in the household but also lays the foundation of a continuous cycle of exploitation of their labour in the house as well as outside it by linking the work which they do with their gender roles in the society (Mies, 1981). Women are ‘overexploited’ at their workplace and ‘overworked’ in comparison to men owing to their paid as well as non-paid labour which they do in the household. Capitalism uses patriarchy to appropriate its unequal wages and overexploitation of women workers by deeming the work they do as less productive than men, a distinction that has been created by the patriarchal genders roles and the gender division of labour in the household. Capitalists use a large pool of women workers as cheap labour whom they can lay off conveniently as per the market demands and also use their low wages to justify the overall decrease in pay rates. Women were oppressed in pre capitalist societies also but the advent of capitalism has aggravated their exploitation for the purpose of maximising profits (Comanne, 2017).