Rosemarie Tong Marxist Analysis

As revealed in Rosemarie Tong’s discussion of the Marxist analysis of class in Feminist Thought, a group of people slowly becomes a class as they struggle together over time (97). It is not until they reach class-consciousness, the collective awareness of this struggle, that a group can be seen as constituting a class (97). Women are an interesting group to think about with these ideas in mind. Marxist and socialist feminists have frequently debated whether women constitute a class (97). In order to come to some conclusion regarding this topic, it is necessary to compare and contrast bourgeois and proletarian women, as well as discuss the drawbacks of viewing all women as belonging to a single class. The collective power of women as a whole
Let us think about the idea of labor and wages among women of different economic status. Bourgeois women who are married to bourgeois men probably can be supported economically by their husbands and do not have to work. They would not then be concerned with the gender pay gap, as they remain in the private sector. Proletarian women married to proletarian men, on the other hand, probably need to work. They would be keenly aware of the gender pay gap. This is something that such women have struggled against since they entered the workforce. Liberal feminists lobbied for equal pay for equal work, which contributed to the passing of the US 1963 Equal Pay Act (118), but even this did not solve the problem. In fact, “in the United States, women earned 81 percent of men’s wages in 2010” (116). However, the bourgeois women earlier discussed would not be involved personally in this common struggle over time. It then seems logically unreasonable to classify women in general as a
Probably no one would disagree that unity, such as among a class of people, can be a means of power, an extremely positive and useful tool when fighting systemic problems of oppression. Individuals bound together have historically contributed to mass change. However, it is questionable how unifying and effective any movement calling all women together can be. Such events tend to ignore difference among women, such as that discussed above among proletarian and bourgeois women. Even today, there are efforts to unify women to fight together against the struggles they face that must be looked at carefully. The Women’s March on Washington in January of 2017 was one recent attempt to unify women in the struggle against potentially harmful policies under the presidential administration of Donald Trump. Early on in the event’s organization, people interested in women’s rights critiques the event for a lack of intersectionality. As Jia Tolentino reveals in The Somehow Controversial Women's March on Washington, even Bob Bland, one of the early women involved in organizing, admitted, “The reality is that the women who initially started organizing were almost all white”. When voices of color are not part of the conversation, an event such as this cannot be said to be representative of all women. Similarly, though in theory a powerful means of