According to the 2010 U.S. Census data, the poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent, the highest rate in 17 years. The “extreme poverty rate” among women, meaning those earning less than half of the federal poverty line, was the highest ever recorded, at 6.3 percent. That puts more than 7.5 million women in that dire category, among 17 million women in poverty overall.
These figures are substantially higher than poverty rates among men. The situation is even worse for older women, whose poverty rates are double that of elderly men. For Latina and Black women, the poverty rate increased even faster and rose higher—to 25 percent.
More than 40 percent of single mothers are now living in poverty. The poverty rate for children jumped to 22 percent.
A global problem
Although the poverty gender gap is higher in the United States than any other developed country, the “feminization of poverty” is a global problem. The Global Poverty Project estimates a staggering 70 percent of the world’s poor are women.
According to the United Nations, women “earn only 10 percent of the world’s income and own less than one percent of the world’s property.” This is not because women do less work. Quite the opposite: Women produce half of the world’s food and by some estimates work two-thirds of the world’s working hours!
How did this come to be? Archaeological and anthropological research indicates that, for the vast majority of human existence, women were not oppressed. Women and men did different work based on the demands of childbearing and the community’s reproduction, but all people were valued for their contributions to the survival of their society. Women were held in the highest esteem.
Once society separated into social classes, however, women were pushed into a subordinate role. Men dominated private property and its inheritances from generation to generation. Women became the property of their fathers and husbands in the same way that slaves were the property of their owners.
Women, both enslaved and free, were largely without independent property and legal rights. Under feudalism, the product of their labor, both in the home and outside of it, was controlled by the men. All sorts of justifications were invented to rationalize this subordination as the “natural order.”
Capitalism and women’s oppression
In early capitalism, women were largely constricted to grueling, but unpaid, household labors. Over time, however, capitalism brought millions of women into the wage-based labor market. This was because of the capitalists’ thirst for profits, not any desire to overturn women’s oppression.
Women are generally super-exploited workers, earning 77 cents for ever dollar a man makes doing comparable work in the United States. The wage gap is widest for women of color, dipping below 50 cents to each dollar that white men earn. Globally, women earn about half of what men earn.
In the United States, economists and statisticians reserve the term “work” for activities that people do for pay, which leaves out all of the unpaid work that society still considers “women’s work”: cooking, housework and raising children. By some estimates, this unpaid work represents 25 to 50 percent of all economic activity.
The ruling class profits enormously from all this unpaid labor, which maintains and reproduces the working class. Imagine if they had to pay for all that!
Although many women now hold full-time jobs, they are still expected to be the primary care providers at home. The UN Action Platform Committee states, “Raising children is one of the major reasons why women, as a group, are poorer than men. Children cost money -— a lot of it. They need food, clothing, diapers, housing, toys, school supplies, shoes and lots of other things. But more importantly they need time. The time and energy that are necessary to raise healthy children makes up the biggest part of the unpaid work performed by women…around the world, drastically reducing women’s ability to participate in the paid workforce. Like other unpaid work, the work of caring for children is often unnoticed and not valued as the important economic contribution that it is.”
The struggle for women’s rights has made critical gains, but clearly, even with complete legal equality, under capitalism women’s oppression cannot be eradicated. The legal right to equal pay has not closed the wage gap in the United States, for instance. The legal right to an abortion has not made them affordable and accessible to all working women.
The feminization of poverty is a global problem, but that does not make it a permanent one. A socialist society would quickly abolish poverty, and lay the basis to completely eradicate the sexist division of labor that has held women subordinate for so long.
