The liberation of women is inseparable from the liberation of the working class — only socialist revolution can end the oppression rooted in private property
Marxism-Leninism does not regard the oppression of women as an eternal feature of human nature or as a product of biology. It is a historical phenomenon that arose at a definite stage in the development of human society — the stage at which private property, the family, and the state first appeared. Before the emergence of class society, in the epoch of primitive communism, women occupied a position of equality and in many societies held a leading role in social organisation.
Friedrich Engels, in his foundational work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), demonstrated that the subordination of women arose with the development of surplus production and the institution of private property. The need to transmit property through the male line required the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction. The monogamous patriarchal family was not a product of love but of economics — it was the institution through which the first ruling class secured its wealth across generations.
Engels described this as “the world-historic defeat of the female sex” — the moment when women were reduced from equal participants in social production to dependents confined to the household, excluded from public life and social labour.
Women’s oppression is not biological but historical. It arose with private property and class society. What history has created, history can abolish — but only through the revolutionary overthrow of the economic system that sustains it.
“The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)Not all feminism is the same. Marxist-Leninists draw a sharp distinction between bourgeois feminism and proletarian feminism. These are not two wings of the same movement — they represent the interests of antagonistic classes.
Bourgeois feminism seeks to secure for women of the ruling class an equal share of the privileges that come from exploiting the working class. Its demands are framed in terms of individual rights, glass ceilings, boardroom representation, and legal equality — without ever challenging the economic system that produces inequality in the first place. Bourgeois feminism celebrates women CEOs, women generals, and women prime ministers as victories for “all women,” while the mass of working-class women continue to be exploited, overworked, and impoverished.
The suffragette movement in Britain, while winning an important democratic demand, was led overwhelmingly by upper- and middle-class women whose vision of liberation did not extend to the factory floor. Today, bourgeois feminism has been absorbed into the ideology of liberal capitalism, serving as a cover for imperialism (“feminist foreign policy”) and corporate exploitation (“lean in” feminism).
Proletarian feminism understands that the root cause of women’s oppression is the capitalist system and that women’s liberation can only be achieved through the class struggle of the entire working class — men and women together — against capital. It does not deny that women face specific forms of oppression, but it insists that these can only be ended by abolishing the economic system that generates them.
The proletarian women’s movement has always understood that the interests of working-class women are bound up with the interests of their class as a whole. The factory woman fighting for shorter hours, the domestic worker fighting for recognition, the care worker fighting for decent pay — these struggles are part of the general struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation. They cannot be resolved within the framework of capitalism, no matter how many laws are passed or how many awareness campaigns are launched.
The historical record confirms this analysis beyond any doubt. Every lasting gain for women — the right to vote, maternity protection, equal pay legislation, access to education — has been won not by polite petitioning but by the organised struggle of the working class. And every one of these gains remains under constant attack so long as capitalism endures.
Clara Zetkin, the great German communist and pioneer of the proletarian women’s movement, put the matter plainly: the working woman has more in common with the working man than with the bourgeois woman. The bourgeois woman fights for the right to exploit; the proletarian woman fights for the abolition of all exploitation.
Bourgeois feminism asks: “How can women get an equal share of the spoils of exploitation?” Proletarian feminism asks: “How can the working class — women and men together — abolish the system that exploits and oppresses us all?”
“The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.”
— V. I. Lenin, to Clara Zetkin (1920)Under capitalism, working-class women suffer a double burden. They are exploited as workers in the labour market, where they are paid less than men for the same work, concentrated in lower-paid sectors, and subjected to sexual harassment and discrimination. At the same time, they are expected to perform the bulk of unpaid domestic labour — cooking, cleaning, childcare, and emotional care work — that sustains the working class and reproduces the next generation of workers for capital.
This double burden is not an accident or an oversight of an otherwise fair system. It is a structural necessity of capitalism. The capitalist mode of production requires a constant supply of fresh labour power, and the reproduction of that labour power — bearing, raising, feeding, clothing, and caring for workers — must be accomplished as cheaply as possible. By offloading this essential labour onto women within the private household, capital obtains it for free.
This unpaid reproductive labour is not a private matter — it is an essential function of the capitalist system. Capital benefits enormously from the unpaid labour of women in the home. If the capitalist class had to pay for the full cost of reproducing the labour force — childcare, elder care, cooking, cleaning — its profits would be drastically reduced. The privatisation of domestic labour within the family is therefore a structural feature of capitalism, not a cultural relic that can be reformed away.
The entry of women into the workforce under capitalism did not liberate them from domestic labour — it simply added a second shift. Working-class women today work longer total hours than any other group in society, yet they remain among the poorest and most precarious. The gender pay gap, far from being a residual injustice that enlightened legislation can fix, is a structural feature of a system built on the exploitation of labour and the subordination of women.
The October Revolution of 1917 produced the most dramatic advance in women’s rights in human history. Within months of taking power, the Soviet government implemented measures that bourgeois countries would not match for decades — and in many cases still have not.
These were not gifts bestowed by benevolent leaders — they were the direct product of working-class power. When the working class controls the state, it can reorganise society to meet the needs of the majority, including the specific needs of working-class women. When capitalism was restored, these gains were systematically destroyed. The restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union was accompanied by a catastrophic decline in women’s social position: the return of mass prostitution, the collapse of childcare provision, the gutting of maternity protections, and the resurgence of domestic violence.
The Soviet Union proved that women’s liberation is possible — not through moral appeals or corporate diversity programmes, but through the revolutionary transformation of the economic base of society. The destruction of these gains after 1991 proved with equal force that there is no lasting liberation without socialism.
“In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe, more has been done to emancipate woman, to make her the equal of the ‘strong’ sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, ‘democratic’ republics of the world taken together.”
— V. I. Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919)The Marxist-Leninist tradition produced towering figures in the struggle for women’s liberation — women whose theoretical contributions and practical achievements far surpass those of any bourgeois feminist.
Clara Zetkin was the founder of the international proletarian women’s movement and the originator of International Working Women’s Day (8 March). A leader of the German Social-Democratic Party and later the Communist Party, Zetkin fought tirelessly against both bourgeois feminism and male chauvinism within the workers’ movement. She insisted that the women’s question was inseparable from the class question and that the emancipation of women required the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Her conversations with Lenin on the woman question remain essential reading for communists today.
Alexandra Kollontai was the first woman in history to serve as a government minister, appointed People’s Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Soviet government in 1917. She was the driving force behind the revolutionary legislation on marriage, divorce, abortion, and maternity protection that transformed the lives of Soviet women. Kollontai also made pioneering theoretical contributions on the relationship between sexuality, love, and social revolution, arguing that the communist transformation of society required not merely economic change but the transformation of personal and intimate relations between human beings.
Nadezhda Krupskaya, often reduced in bourgeois historiography to “Lenin’s wife,” was a major revolutionary figure in her own right. She was the architect of the Soviet education system, which achieved the elimination of mass illiteracy — a precondition for the genuine emancipation of women. Krupskaya developed the theory and practice of polytechnic education, combining academic learning with productive labour, and oversaw the creation of a network of libraries, reading rooms, and cultural institutions that brought education to the most remote corners of the Soviet Union. Her work on pedagogy and women’s education laid the groundwork for the unprecedented advancement of Soviet women in science, industry, and public life.
The struggle for women’s liberation has been inseparable from the struggle against imperialism and colonial oppression. In every genuine national liberation movement, women have played a decisive role — and the depth of their participation has been the measure of the revolution’s seriousness.
In every case, the depth of women’s liberation achieved after the revolution corresponded directly to the depth of women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle itself. Where national liberation movements failed to integrate women as equals, the post-independence gains for women were correspondingly limited.
“The status of women is the most reliable indicator of the degree of civilisation of a people or an epoch. In this sense, only the proletariat has achieved the greatest advance in civilisation.”
— Clara Zetkin, On the History of the Proletarian Women’s Movement (1928)In recent decades, the dominant approach to women’s oppression in the capitalist world has shifted from even the limited framework of bourgeois feminism to the still more limited framework of identity politics. Identity politics treats gender as a self-contained axis of oppression, separate from and parallel to class, race, sexuality, and other identities. This framework is fundamentally incompatible with Marxism-Leninism and incapable of achieving women’s liberation.
The problems with the identity politics approach are structural, not merely tactical:
Identity politics is not a radical alternative to Marxism — it is a bourgeois alternative. It emerged in the imperialist countries precisely as a substitute for class politics, channelling the anger of oppressed groups away from the capitalist system and into forms of struggle that pose no threat to capital.
Marxism-Leninism does not postpone the struggle for women’s liberation to some future revolution. It integrates the struggle against women’s oppression into the general class struggle now, while insisting that the complete emancipation of women is only possible through the socialist transformation of society. The concrete demands of the communist programme include:
These demands are not utopian. Every one of them was realised, at least in substantial measure, by the Soviet Union and other socialist states. They are achievable — but only when the working class holds power and organises the economy to meet human needs rather than private profit.
The communist programme for women’s liberation is therefore both immediate and revolutionary. It fights for every partial demand that improves the lives of working-class women today, while explaining that the complete emancipation of women requires the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.
Lenin was emphatic that communists must fight male chauvinism within the working class and within the party itself. In his conversations with Clara Zetkin, Lenin insisted that no communist worthy of the name could tolerate the subordination of women, and that the party must wage an active struggle against backward attitudes inherited from bourgeois and feudal society.
The revolutionary party must be a model of the society it seeks to create. If it reproduces patriarchal relations within its own ranks — if women are excluded from leadership, confined to administrative tasks, or subjected to harassment — it has no credibility as an instrument of liberation. The struggle against male chauvinism is not a concession to bourgeois feminism; it is a precondition for the party’s effectiveness as a revolutionary organisation.
At the same time, the Marxist-Leninist approach rejects the notion that men and women within the working class are enemies. Male workers who hold chauvinist attitudes are not the principal enemy — the capitalist class is. The task is to raise the consciousness of the entire working class, men and women alike, to the point where they recognise that the oppression of women weakens the whole class and that the struggle for women’s liberation strengthens the struggle of all workers.
History demonstrates this principle clearly. In every revolutionary upheaval — from the Paris Commune to the October Revolution to the Cuban Revolution — the active participation of women transformed the character and deepened the radicalism of the struggle. Conversely, movements that failed to challenge male chauvinism within their own ranks were weakened and ultimately defeated. The revolutionary party must be the most advanced organisation of the working class in every respect, including the struggle for the equality and dignity of women.
The struggle against male chauvinism is therefore not a distraction from the class struggle — it is an integral part of it. A working class divided by sexism is a working class weakened in its fight against capital. Every concession to backward attitudes, every toleration of harassment or discrimination within the movement, is a gift to the class enemy. Communists must lead by example, building organisations in which women are fully equal participants, leaders, and theoreticians.
“The proletariat cannot achieve complete liberty until it has won complete liberty for women.”
— V. I. Lenin, to Clara Zetkin (1920)The oppression of women takes its most brutal forms in the countries subjugated by imperialism. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, the exploitation of women is compounded by the exploitation of entire nations. Women in the oppressed countries suffer a triple burden: class exploitation, national oppression, and patriarchal domination — all of which are reinforced and perpetuated by the imperialist system.
Imperialism does not liberate women in the countries it dominates. On the contrary, it systematically reinforces the most reactionary patriarchal institutions where they serve the interests of colonial rule. The British Empire upheld feudal and tribal patriarchal structures across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East as instruments of indirect rule. The deliberate preservation of dowry systems, child marriage, and the exclusion of women from education served the interests of imperial control by keeping subject populations divided and demoralised.
The structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank on developing countries since the 1980s have fallen disproportionately on women. Cuts to public healthcare, education, and food subsidies — demanded as conditions for loans — have pushed millions of women deeper into poverty, forced them into precarious informal labour, and stripped away whatever minimal social protections existed. The privatisation of water, land, and public services has destroyed the communal resources on which women in rural areas depend for survival.
Sweatshop production in the garment, electronics, and agricultural sectors of the Global South is overwhelmingly female. Young women in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Central America work twelve- to sixteen-hour days for poverty wages, producing the cheap commodities on which the profits of Western corporations depend. This is not a failure of globalisation — it is globalisation working exactly as intended. The super-exploitation of women workers in the oppressed nations is a structural feature of the imperialist world economy.
Today, the imperialist countries use “women’s rights” as a propaganda weapon to justify military intervention and regime change. The invasion of Afghanistan was marketed as a war for women’s liberation — yet after twenty years of occupation, Afghan women were no freer, and the imperialists handed the country back to the Taliban without a second thought. Genuine women’s liberation in the oppressed nations can only come through national liberation and socialist revolution — not through bombs dropped by imperialist air forces.
Imperialism does not bring liberation to women in the oppressed nations. It reinforces patriarchal structures where useful and invokes “women’s rights” as a pretext for war where profitable. Anti-imperialism and women’s liberation are inseparable.
“There can be no real mass movement without the participation of working women. It is the women workers and peasants who provide the inexhaustible reserves of the working class.”
— Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1909)The struggle for women’s liberation is the struggle for socialism. Deepen your understanding with our AI assistant and study materials.