Abstract

This paper discusses two systems of inequality, patriarchy and capitalism, and how they are able to jointly reinforce the oppressions of women internationally. The issues discussed include women’s oppression through perspectives and practices, privilege and inequality, media and culture, inscribed gender, and women’s work inside and outside the home through a critical feminist lens that proposes theories from several feminist scholars. The theory I will apply in this paper is how capitalism is inherently connected to and founded on patriarchal values and structures, and how it could not exist or benefit from a society that did not have a dominating, hegemonic system of division amongst the genders that society inherently values. In observing how these systems work together to perpetuate each other, I use examples including critiques and observations of, the structural injustice within the domestic workers’ movement, the “beauty” ideal and how corporations make use of it, and how capitalism works to target women as consumers in different contexts. I conclude by acknowledging that since capitalism was founded on the patriarchal system of inequality, there will always be a divide amongst genders unless we deconstruct patriarchal order, because the oppression of women is useful to the capitalist system and such a system could barely survive outside of patriarchal values that promote gendered differences among other intersectional differences.

Keywords: patriarchy, capitalism, feminism, oppression, gender

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Introduction

          Women have been oppressed by systems of inequality for centuries, but patriarchy and capitalism in particular are able to perpetuate each other and women’s oppressions in the sense that capitalism exists on the pre-existing foundation of patriarchal values. In simplest terms, patriarchy can be defined as the oppression and objectification of women by men, in which it values white, heterosexual, middle-class men above all else. Patriarchal oppression can be expressed in many ways, notably through language, kinship relations, stereotypes, religion, culture, and economic form, which is why capitalism is able to feed off of this system for profit. Patriarchy, in combination with capitalism, represents the invisibility of women’s work as well as how the American political system is “a system of white male rule” that perpetuates a negative relationship with women, especially if they are members in more than one oppressed area such as racial and sexual castes (Combahee River Collective, p. 33).

          The issue with capitalism is that it uses and needs patriarchy for its own reproduction, further reinforcing white, male-centric domination, and the way it makes women’s work invisible, as well as how it manifests women’s oppression, both historically and currently, in the cultural, domestic, private, and social spheres. In a time of economic globalization, this issue is more prevalent and relevant than ever because different economic logics can reinforce this joint oppression. What I mean by joint oppression is that male supremacy and capitalism are defined as the core relations determining the oppression of women, and important to understanding how it manifests in women’s lives is understanding the dynamic of power involved, which derives from both class relations of production and the sexual hierarchical relations of society. These systems of privilege and inequality are exemplified in women’s everyday life, and through the analysis of perspectives and practices on how these systems perpetuate each other alongside women’s oppressions, I will reveal how the values of patriarchy and capitalism are entangled with inscribing gender on the body, media and culture, and women’s work inside and outside the home.

          Although patriarchy is an oppressive system that enforces a range of women’s issues that are not universal to all races, minorities, or sexual orientations, it needs to be further analyzed how other systems of inequalities like capitalism reinforce the global domination of men over women through a lack of fundamental rights, male-centric cultural and social domination, and the underrepresentation of women in politics, poverty, economic marginalization, and fostered gender discrimination and inequity. In this paper, I will use several feminist critiques and theories to analyze specific examples of the ways in which patriarchy manifests in the lives of women, and how capitalism thrives off of these manifestations to reinforce each other as systems of inequality, as well as perpetuate the vicious cycle of the oppressions against women.

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Context Narrative

          Patriarchy and capitalism are systems of inequality in which capitalism thrives off of the pre-existing system of patriarchy to reinforce the oppression of women internationally. As mentioned before, these systems manifest in many spheres within women’s everyday lives. The issues involved in these manifestations include how forms of gender-based oppression and exploitation partly depend on other social characteristics and systems of inequality in people’s lives, which is highlighted in Audre Lorde’s experiences with dominant social structures and reinforced systemic inequalities. Drawing from Lorde’s experiences, she recognizes social positions that argue for intersectionality in the sense that her own social position in society is a black lesbian woman, in which this trifecta of oppressed groupings is highly stereotyped against

and neglected by patriarchal standards that primarily promotes whiteness, heterosexuality, and above all, maleness.

          According to Lorde’s open letter to Mary Daly (1979), there are differences of the patriarchal systems between white women and black women that go unrecognized in Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, which dismisses the heritage of all other non-European women as well as distorts and trivializes their archetypal experience within white patriarchy. Lorde acknowledges that, as women, there are differences that expose all women to various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which they share and some of which they do not within white patriarchy. Therefore, I add that there are also inherent differences in how capitalism affects women with intersectional identities and social positions due to its foundation on white patriarchy that produces systemic inequalities beyond gender and womanhood, which is demonstrated in Minu Basnet’s article on feminist border rhetoric through the twenty-first century domestic workers’ movement.

          Basnet’s article analyzes the domestic workers’ movement, primarily consisting of immigrant women, and offers a focus on the intersections of nation, gender, and labor that contribute to the impact of borders, whether that border is a physical and visible border like the U.S.-Mexico border or invisible and does not imply movement, on domestic workers in the United States. According to Basnet (2019), “Over 90% of women, overwhelmingly women of color, [are] fulfilling various levels of caregiving roles within the home,” and based on a 2012 survey of domestic workers in the United States (Burnham & Theodore), with interviews from at least 71 countries, “46% of domestic workers were not born in the United States” (p. 116). Thus, domestic work in the United States is represented by immigrant women, primarily third-world women, in which they are fighting for their rights and protesting the conditions that they encounter as part of their labor within the systems of patriarchy and capitalism.

          Capitalism has the ability to build up from the foundations of patriarchy because it uses the oppression of women as a tool to enable capitalists to manage the entire workforce to their own profit. This theory is validated through the ways in which capitalism takes advantage of patriarchal values and standards that have been put on women, such as the capitalist exploitation of the “beauty” ideal for women demonstrated through Judith Taylor’s analysis of the Dove Real Beauty Campaign (Taylor et al., 2016). In the context of capitalism and consumerism, the analysis of how the Dove corporation’s use of feminism to sell Dove brand products undermines feminist ideas at the same time as “women are sold ideas of empowerment, choice and individualism—ideas that take particular hold in a neoliberal consumer culture” (Taylor et al., p. 271), which backhandedly reinforces patriarchal value and capitalist exploitation.

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Literature Review

The Origins and Goals of Patriarchy and Capitalism

          The oppression of women is very ancient and existed before capitalism, but there is a long history of male dominance in all spheres of life (Lorber, 1991). Patriarchy is a social construction as well as a system of oppression that promotes dominant values within society to boost their own power relations. The progression of capitalism has formalized the separation between production places (enterprises/corporations) and reproduction places (families), thus women’s oppression preceded capitalism, but the latter profoundly transformed it through the pre-existence of patriarchy. According to Lorber (1991), gender is constantly created and recreated out of human interaction, out of social, and it is the uniformity and order of that social life. In this sense, human society depends on a predictable division of labor through social constructions such as gender that has resulted from how patriarchal order legitimizes gendered structures by their own accounts of religion, law, science, and essentially the society’s entire set of values.

          My contribution to the theoretical framework of these systems of oppression is that I would argue that capitalism would not have thrived if it were based on systems of equality rather than systems of inequality such as patriarchy, and it only reinforces this male-dominant structure. According to Johnson (2014), patriarchal dynamics reveal an underlying, pervasive domination- and-control mentality that is destructive to men and women, but with a focus on women. Patriarchy cannot be considered as independent from capitalism because they are both complex social orders based on domination and exploitation relationships (Smith, 2013), and therefore, patriarchy is a founding principle of capitalism, because capitalism without gender oppression has literally never existed.

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Contributions to the Oppressions of Women

          Audre Lorde recognizes that there are differences that expose all women to various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which they share and some of which they do not within white patriarchy, and this is an important aspect to understanding how these systems of oppression are able to manifest on multiple levels. Although there are levels of oppression for all women alike, there must be recognition of the degrees of patriarchal oppressions that creates differences among them. For instance, Lorde points out statistical facts among nonwhite women in America that aren’t shared with white women, such as the fact that black women have “three times as many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted” (p. 70). When considering patriarchy against the global backdrop of capitalism within the community of women, there are other reality forces, such as racism, heterosexism, and classism to name a few, that white feminism doesn’t consider, and sometimes doesn’t even acknowledge according to Lorde.

          On the basis of the domestic workers’ movement, Basnet expands her argument to transnational feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders (2003), offering a critical lens to understand how masculinist and imperialist ways of knowing impact women and transnational interconnections. In relation to Mohanty’s work, by observing the ways in which gender is intertwining with other intersecting inequalities, we may see that there are both visible and invisible borders (in/visible borders) that domestic workers encounter and navigate in their fight for gaining basic labor rights as women, furthering our understanding of borders and bordering practices through a gendered lens. In contribution to these in/visible borders is how the domestic workers’ movement is historically entangled with heterosexist and racializing attitudes, in which I argue that these gendered implications are at the immediate fault of white patriarchy against the backdrop of global capitalism. Continuing on the basis of women’s work inside and outside of the home, according to Cowan (1976), job inequalities are a good lens to use in order to understand the perception of women in society, and in the domestic sphere, women are very undervalued. Although women are more present on the job market today versus fifty years ago, it is still women who are mostly touched my unemployment, low salaries or underemployment, and it is still women doing most ‘invisible’ labor such as domestic house work (Cowan, 1976).

          In terms of beauty ideologies, according to Taylor et al. (2016), it can be said that the beauty ideology is embedded in political economic systems of capital growth, but it is also profoundly embodied in the feelings and material practices of women’s lived experience. In regards to the beauty ideology, “capitalist exploitation intersects with race and gender inequality in daily practices, ideals, and self-esteem” (Taylor et al., p. 271). While such ‘feminist consumerism’ efforts to manipulate women consumers by targeting insecurities about their physical form to promote their brand, it not only reinforces how such beauty standards are founded in patriarchal value of how a woman should physically look, but also takes advantage of individual resistance to dominant beauty ideologies to channel back into new beauty products with a subversive feel. Such inauthentic engagement with feminist ideas is at the heart of what perpetuates patriarchy and capitalism, producing more of a faux feminism above anything else, and sustaining women’s oppression internationally.

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Gap in Knowledge

          Feminist scholars have looked at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism as separate forces that have reinforced patriarchal norms and the naturalization of inequalities in terms of the undervaluing of women’s work in the private and public spheres (Cowan, 1976) and in terms of the confinement and inferiorization of women as an opportunity for capitalism (Higgins, 2018). However, scholars have not looked deeply into how one can only exist within the pre-existing theoretical framework of the other and how they perpetuate each other as well as other systems of inequality and oppression. In understanding feminism as politics, with the consideration of how patriarchy and capitalism are anti-woman yet pro-women’s oppression, feminism aims to transgress the accepted norms within these systems, making it inherently anti-capitalist.

          While some have argued how capitalism can be gender-oriented and biased, there is little research into how capitalism has never existed outside of the gendered construct within patriarchy or whether it could survive a more equalized economic structure in general. As the world continues to become more globalized, I examine patriarchy as the foundation of capitalism to understand its pervasive use in the lives of women. Therefore, the question to consider is how patriarchy and capitalism jointly reinforce the oppression of women in the sense that our current capitalism can only survive on patriarchal order that uses the objectification of women to gain power in society. I plan to contribute an understanding of how global systems like capitalism are founded in dominant social constructs that perpetuate the oppression and marginalization of women internationally by drawing from the discussed examples to demonstrate what these oppressions look like around the world based on different degrees of patriarchy, and considerably how they would be nonexistent if gendered structures hadn’t already been formed by patriarchy priorly.

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Discussion

Recontextualizing the History of Patriarchy and Capitalism

          It is important to understand what the intentions are behind patriarchal order and the power systems involved that lead inequality in order to understand how it was used to create another system of oppression. I have touched on what patriarchy entails and how patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence, but I would like to further add that patriarchy works as an oppressive social system that all men and women participate in. All genders participate and have no control in whether they participate, but they have control in how they participate, which has the ability to create and enforce gendered social norms and structures that capitalism is then able to target for their own gain.

          If you were to recontextualize the history of patriarchy into a new form that didn’t focus on men with all of the power relations, unless this new form followed similar gender norms and

structures that conveys inequality, our current understanding of capitalism would have no foundational basis on which it could exploit for capital gain. Patriarchy could continue without capitalism without a doubt, but if patriarchy, the ‘natural’ enforcer of women’s oppression, did not exist, then the capitalist system would no longer be able to make use of the highly divided power relations within patriarchal order that oppress women.

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Social Inequalities in the Work Sphere

          In the context of immigrant domestic work in the United States discussed by Basnet (2019), the domestic workers’ movement is historically entangled with heterosexist and racializing attitudes that contribute to the in/visible borders created through patriarchy and capitalism. In/visible borders and anti-immigrant policies have helped to turn attention away from the issues of global capitalism among more privileged sectors of the working class and convert immigrant working women into scapegoats for the crisis, thus deflecting attention from the root causes of the crisis—white patriarchy and capitalism—and undermining working-class unity. Through these in/visible borders, most domestic workers choose to remain silent about abusive employers because of assumptions that their labor is mere housework, in which this assumption is highly influenced by connotations within patriarchal value that aims to mark domestic work as an undervalued work position, which is hardly considered ‘real’ work, to promote cheap labor for capital gain.

          Women are overexploited in their workplace, and due to patriarchal values, there is a social order based on a sexual division of labor in terms of household chores and family responsibilities, which is why it is primarily women in the domestic work force. Without the patriarchal values of promoting women in the domestic sphere of work as well as the patriarchal tendency to devalue non-whiteness and immigrant-status workers, capitalism could not benefit from this cheap form of labor for undervalued job positions. Domestic workers encounter numerous human rights violations that primarily immigrant women have to combat with because of the patriarchal foundations that legitimates the inequality in relationships of exploitations and oppression to further capitalist gain. Therefore, this line of domestic work would not be able to continue or exist with such harsh conditions and low wages if it weren’t based in the values of patriarchy and, thus, the values that capitalism exploits for beneficial gain.

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Capitalism in Consumerism

          Patriarchy has a great capacity to adapt to social change, and with more and more feminist theory on the rise of current issues in hegemony, we can see how capitalism only favors a certain type of emancipation of women for the sake of profit but remains attached to the traditional family institution warranted by patriarchy. Relating back to the article about the Dove Real Beauty Campaign by Taylor et al., the Dove corporation’s branding techniques appropriated feminist movement ideals to sell Dove brand products to focus groups of young, feminist- identified women, in which we can see the phenomenon of ‘feminist consumerism’ (2016). On the surface level of our culture, Dove’s message argues that ‘all women can be beautiful,’ and although that seems empowering and inclusive, it does not challenge the imperative of compulsory beauty, which is “the ideology that beauty is not only a priority for women, but is a necessary component of a woman’s self-worth and social value” (Taylor et al., p. 273). Due to campaign’s subversion of dominant notions of beauty, the significance of being ‘beautiful’ is actually reinforced in mainstream society rather than challenged if it were created on actual feminist scholarship instead of capitalist gain, and such corporate advocacy is only influenced by the profit-motive.

          In a way, this example exemplifies capitalism’s durability, but it also hones in on how the agendas of feminism and capitalism cannot exist in harmony because capitalism inherently works off of the gendered structures and inequalities within patriarchy that feminism seeks to eliminate. Also, it demonstrates how even a capitalist attempt to cater towards feminist goals by ‘democratizing beauty’ doesn’t actually fit with a genuine feminist agenda, but primarily feminist consumerism, because genuine feminism “rejects compulsory beauty and inspires empowerment by other means” (Taylor et al., p. 278). In recognizing Dove’s attempt to call everyone beautiful in the Dove beauty campaign, we can see how corporations use manipulative and politically harmful contexts in marketing and selling their products as well as the emphasis in its message on the idea of dominant notions of beauty and how women should prioritize being beautiful, which supports how beauty ideology is embedded in political economic systems, specifically on the notions of capitalist exploitations on women through patriarchal values.

          The same thing can also be said about how capitalism targeted women during the industrial revolution and how it put even more constraints on women with the façade of being beneficial to women and their time (Cowan, 1976). New technologies in the household were catered to women as consumers because they did the domestic work in the home and were responsible for laundry, cleaning, cooking, and other household chores. It is a form of manipulation to make a woman feel obligated and responsible for domestic work through advertisements for these newer technologies that would otherwise shame women if they did not comply to the new standards. As said before, these new technologies that women were targeted for consumption only had a façade of being beneficial to women, arguing that it would save time for them to do other things, when it really meant it would save time for the women to do other house chores instead of waiting until the next day to start on another task. Essentially, capitalism can’t exist without patriarchy in this instance because capitalism is above all paired up with patriarchal values and order, and feminism aims at the possibility of decentering consumerism as a dominant social value and economic model, which would cancel the overarching values within both patriarchy and capitalism.

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Conclusion

          The capitalism in the world today would not be able to remain stable or existent without the foundation of patriarchal values and structures that foregrounds it into society. Unless we deconstruct patriarchal order, seeing as capitalism was founded on this system of inequality, there will always be an unfair divide amongst genders in all spheres of life. The oppression of women is too useful to the capitalist system to be able to match up with feminist ideals, and this backs up my position on capitalism because capitalism has never existed on any other foundation than on one of social inequality based on gender, which makes it hard to say that the textbook definition of capitalism in our world today could actually continue to exist on a more gender- equal foundation.

          In terms of understanding international women’s rhetoric, this argument can be used to understand how and why men tend to simplify women’s issues in the workforce, home life, etc., and how capitalism reinforces gender stereotypes that exist on a global scale. In allowing this dominant power to rule several social spheres, women have been forced into submission and have become semi-compliant with the constraints in which they live in because sometimes they don’t even realize their own oppressions because they have become so naturalized by male-

centric and male-dominated views of life and how it should be lived. If patriarchy had never been formed, there is a possibility that capitalism may never have been able to rise up either, because the two systems perpetuate each other in the way they endorse and foster gendered differences that continue to build upon the oppression of women.

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References

Basnet, M. (2019). Envisioning Feminist Border Rhetorics Through the Twenty-First Century Domestic Workers’ Movement. In Women’s Studies in Communication, 116-119.

A Black Feminist Statement. (1977). Combahee River Collective, 33–38.
Cowan, R. S. (1976). Household Technology and Social Change. Technology and Culture, 17. Higgins, C. (2020). The Age of Patriarchy. Gendered Voices Feminist Readings, 517-524.

Johnson, A. G. (1998). Patriarchy, the System. In Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (3rd ed., pp. 27–32). Mayfield Pub.

Johnson, A. G. (2014). The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy (3rd ed.). Temple University Press.

Lorber, J. (1991). The Social Construction of Gender. In Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (3rd ed., pp. 21–24). Sage Publications.

Lorde, A. (1979). An Open Letter to Mary Daly. In Sister Outsider (pp. 66–71). Smith, S. (2013), Marxism, feminism and women’s liberation,

http://socialistworker.org/2013/01/31/marxism-feminism-and-womens-liberation
Taylor, J. (2020). A Corporation in Feminist Clothing. Gendered Voices Feminist Readings, 270-279.