Theoretical Assumptions Behind Women’s Mobilisation and Resistance

When you picture a major worker’s strike from history, what do you see? Perhaps you imagine gritty images of coal miners, railway workers, or factory hands, banners held high, demanding fair pay. Now, look closer at those images. Who is overwhelmingly present? Men. This isn’t just a coincidence, and it’s not because women weren’t working. The story of women’s work, and their fight for rights, is tangled in a complex web of economics, social theory, and hidden barriers. To understand why women’s mobilization has often followed a different, more difficult path, we need to look under the hood at the theoretical assumptions that shaped the world of work itself.

For centuries, the way we work, who gets paid, and who holds power has been analyzed through various lenses. One of the most powerful and persistent is the Marxist perspective. This framework provides a critical starting point for understanding why mobilization-like forming a union-is a necessary part of the economic system, and why, for women, it’s been a much steeper climb.

The world as a marketplace: A Marxist view on work 🔗

At its core, a Marxist analysis of society is about economics. It argues that the dominant economic system-in our case, capitalism-is the primary force that shapes our social relations, our laws, and even our ideas. The engine of this system is the logic of profit. For a business to survive and grow, it must generate profit. To do this, it must minimize costs, and one of the most significant costs is labour.

This economic structure, according to Marx, fundamentally splits society into two groups: those who own the “means of production” (the factories, the land, the technology) and those who do not. This second group, the vast majority, possesses only one thing to sell: their ability to work. This is what’s known as wage labour. You are forced to sell your time and energy to an employer in exchange for a wage, which you then use to survive.

This relationship is inherently one of conflict. The employer wants to get the most work for the least pay (to maximize profit), while the worker wants the highest pay for their time. This tension, this “class struggle,” is the central drama of the system. The primary tool the working class has in this struggle is collective action. By organizing into trade unions, workers can negotiate as a group, giving them the power to demand better wages and safer conditions.

The overlooked engine: Unpaid domestic labour 🔗

This analysis was revolutionary, but it had a massive blind spot. When these theorists talked about “labour,” they almost exclusively meant public, paid labour-the work done in a factory or a mine. They didn’t have a category for the work being done inside the home, which was almost universally performed by women.

This is where feminist critiques of Marxism come in. Think about it: a wage worker can’t just show up to the factory day after day. They need to be fed, clothed, and cared for. When they have children, that next generation of workers needs to be raised from infancy. Who was doing this vital work? Women. This domestic labour was, and often still is, the invisible engine that keeps the entire capitalist system running. It refreshes the current workforce and creates the next one, all without costing the employer a single rupee.

This creates a “double burden” for women. They are oppressed by the capitalist system, forced (eventually) into wage labour just like men, but they are also oppressed by the patriarchal system, which demands they perform a second, full-time, unpaid job at home. As Marxist feminists argue, this division makes women’s economic reality fundamentally different from men’s.

Engels’ radical idea: Could the factory set women free? 🔗

One early thinker who did try to connect these dots was Friedrich Engels, Marx’s long-time collaborator. In his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels made a groundbreaking argument. He claimed that the root of women’s subjugation wasn’t just biology or ideas; it was their economic exclusion from public life.

He argued that in pre-capitalist societies, the work women did in the home was considered a vital, public contribution. But as private property and the “patriarchal family” emerged, women’s domestic labour became a private service, stripping them of their social power and making them dependent on the male head of household.

Engels’ prediction was radical for its time: he suggested that the only way to liberate women was for them to enter the public marketplace. He believed that the very capitalist factory system that oppressed the working class held a revolutionary seed for women. By earning their own wage, women could gain economic independence from their husbands. More importantly, by working side-by-side in shared conditions, they would develop “class consciousness”-a collective awareness of their shared struggle as workers-which would allow them to mobilize alongside men.

The reality check: A ‘men only’ club? 🔗

Unfortunately, this prediction ran into a harsh reality. While women did enter the workforce in huge numbers, especially in sectors like textiles, the tools of mobilization-the trade unions-were not waiting with open arms. Early trade unions were often organized around skilled, male “crafts.” These male-dominated groups frequently saw women not as comrades, but as a threat.

Because employers could get away with paying women a fraction of what they paid men, established unions feared that a flood of female labour would drive down everyone’s wages. Instead of organizing women and fighting for equal pay, many unions actively sought to exclude them or campaigned for “family wage” policies that would push women back into the home. This initial hostility set the stage for systemic barriers that would hamper women’s mobilization for decades.

Why the union gates remained closed 🔗

Even when women wanted to organize, the structure of the labour market and the very design of the unions themselves created massive, often insurmountable, obstacles. These barriers are not just historical footnotes; many persist in new forms today.

The ‘pink-collar’ ghetto and the ‘family wage’ 🔗

One of the most significant barriers is the gendered segmentation of the labour market. Put simply, jobs are often unofficially (or even officially) designated as “men’s work” or “women’s work.” “Men’s jobs” (like construction, manufacturing, engineering) were more likely to be unionized and offered higher pay and a path for advancement. “Women’s jobs” (like clerical work, textiles, caregiving, and later, service jobs) were often labelled “unskilled,” paid poorly, and had little to no union presence. This “pink-collar ghetto” physically isolates women from the traditional heartlands of union power.

This segregation was powerfully reinforced by the concept of the ‘family wage’. This was an idea, pushed by many male-led unions, that a man should be paid a wage high enough to support his entire family (a wife and children). On the surface, it sounds like a noble goal. But the dark side of this concept was that it built on the assumption that the man was the primary breadwinner and the woman was, at best, a secondary earner. It inherently devalued women’s work, justified paying them less, and made their participation in the workforce seem optional or temporary. This structural bias remains a challenge, as unions still grapple with how to best represent workers in female-dominated sectors.

The high cost of resistance in the informal economy 🔗

Perhaps the single greatest barrier, especially in a country like India, is the informal or unorganized sector. This includes jobs that fall outside the protection of standard labour laws-think domestic workers, street vendors, agricultural labourers, and home-based piece-rate workers. These jobs are characterized by a lack of formal contracts, no social security (like pensions or health insurance), and no legal recourse against unfair dismissal.

[Image: Chart showing the high percentage of women in India's informal economy]

A staggering majority of India’s workforce is in the informal sector, and women make up a disproportionately large share of it. For these women, the risks of organizing are exponentially higher than for a formal factory worker. If a factory worker goes on strike, they have a union and some legal protections. If a domestic worker protests her pay, she can be fired on the spot, with no appeal. How do you organize workers who are isolated in private homes, scattered on city streets, or part of a complex, hidden supply chain? The traditional union model, designed for large, centralized workplaces, simply doesn’t apply.

This is why the success of organizations like the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India is so remarkable. They had to invent a new model of mobilization, one that functions more like a cooperative and advocacy group, to reach women that traditional theories and unions had left behind. They recognized that for these women, the fight wasn’t just for a better wage; it was for basic dignity, legal recognition, and a safety net.

The early theories gave us a lens to see the economic struggle, but it’s been a long and ongoing battle to make that lens wide enough to see the whole picture-one that includes the unpaid work at home, the “pink-collar” ghettos, and the millions of women organizing in the shadows of the informal economy.

What do you think? Given the rise of the ‘gig economy’, which often mirrors the insecurity and isolation of the informal sector, do you think women face new versions of these old barriers? How can modern movements and unions better address the ‘double burden’ of paid work and unpaid domestic labour?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-marxist/
2. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/womens-participation-trade-unions-india-analysis