Working Women in the United States

Read our editorial on International Working Women’s Day 2026 here.

In commemoration of this year’s International Working Women’s Day (IWWD), March 8, we honor the strategic role of working women as a courageous and powerful force for proletarian revolution.

The Historical Development of Working Women in the US

Women have been a vital part of industry since the emergence of capitalism but have never been placed on an equal footing with their male counterparts.

With the rise of the textile industry in the northern mills of the United States, women entered garment work. The capitalists of these mills preferred women workers because they could be paid less, were easily hired when demand rose, and were dismissed easily when production slowed.

Likewise, in canneries and in food production, women were called upon to work during peak periods and let go once orders declined.

This pattern made women an important part of the industrial reserve army of labor—that part of the working class that is unemployed and hired only when profitable.

At first, backward men disparaged the inclusion of women into production, citing that it reduced their own wages by increasing competition over those few jobs that did exist. Chauvinist bourgeois reformers who endorsed the theory of the “deficient feminine nature” of women saw women’s participation in production as corrupting of the innocence of women.

Recognizing that women’s participation in production was a necessary historical process, Karl Marx asserted that the inclusion of women into the proletariat class was progressive and inevitable, even while it was damaging to the physical bodies and families of those workers:

“However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under capitalism, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless modern industry by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes…. Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the laborer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.”

Women’s participation in production indeed opened up new battles toward reaching that “source of humane development,” which is socialist society.

In the garment industry in the US, women workers worked 65 hours a week. Despite receiving meager wages, women were expected to supply their own sewing machines. In 1909, a general strike across the whole garment industry in New York City broke out, with 20,000 women walking out of their shops and taking to the streets.

The strike’s victory would inspire German Communist leader Clara Zetkin to call for International Working Women’s Day as an international working class holiday. In 1911, the first IWWD was held.

Working Women in the US Today

The economy has changed considerably since women first entered the ranks of the proletariat, but the pattern of inequality and insecurity for women workers remains.

Today, 57% of adult women are wage workers, entering the workforce in greater numbers beginning in the 1970s to make up for the lost wages of their husbands as they were laid off amid worsening economic conditions.

Before the 1970s, women who played a permanent role as key wage earners within their household appeared as something exceptional. Today, most working-class families depend on two incomes to even maintain the most basic standard of living, while numerous, crucial sectors of the US economy are now propped up by women workers.

In manufacturing, women make up a third of the workforce. Women are still heavily represented in textile production and manufacturing, particularly in Los Angeles, North and South Carolina, and its old center of New York City. In Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, women work in motor vehicle, computer, and electronic product assembly.

In food production, women work in commercial bread plants, in fruit and vegetable preserving, and in meat and seafood preparation, particularly in the Great Lakes and Midwest, as well as in the Central Valley of California and elsewhere.

In transportation and logistics, women make up 40% of the workforce. In Amazon warehouses and delivery stations where many are going on strike and fighting management, almost 50% of warehouse workers and drivers are women.

Women are also predominant in healthcare, education, childcare, and other service professions. Before capitalism and during its emergence, these were roles of social reproduction that largely fell to women within the home itself. The consolidation of capitalism and modern industry led to the socialization of these processes on a large scale.

These women workers are disproportionately affected by budget cuts to health and education spending, and face part-time schedules, irregular hours, poor staffing, and surveillance.

For women workers here, the demands are not just around pay, but around questions that affect the general conditions of the people: for nurses, demands around safe staffing and scheduling, and for teachers, demands for smaller classrooms and more resources for students.

These sectors tend to have higher strike frequencies, which enjoy popular support and galvanize other sections of the working class to fight to improve their conditions. This speaks to the strategic role of women workers, who are typically the main participants and leaders of teacher and nurse strikes.

Recent examples include the mass wave of educator strikes and protests between 2018 and 2019, which saw over 375,000 participants across several states, and the Kaiser healthcare strikes earlier this year, which had around 34,000 healthcare workers participating.

Foreign-born working women are a particularly important section of the class. They typically work in retail, restaurants and hotels, agriculture, and as building and grounds maintenance.

Many who come on work visas are employed as home health aides and personal care aides, caring for children, elderly people, and the disabled. Some immigrant women, as part of the imperialist domination of the colonies and semi-colonies, are contracted to work as nurses and in more highly skilled healthcare jobs. They are often paid far less than their US-born counterparts and are placed in temporary, non-union positions where they lack protection.

Fight for the Emancipation of Women and the Liberation of the Working Class

As class-conscious fighters everywhere conclude their celebration of International Working Women’s Day 2026, we are called upon by the international proletariat to advance the struggle for women’s emancipation with greater determination, energy, and strategic discernment.

We must pay special attention to the immediate issues of working women in hospitals, schools, shops, fields, and the unemployed. These struggles are pertinent more than ever, from the struggle against low wages, the high cost of living with housing and groceries, to demands for better unemployment benefits, childcare, and healthcare benefits.

Connect these demands with the struggles of oppressed and working women internationally and the working class as a whole as part of the fight against imperialism, for national liberation and New Democratic revolution in the Third World, and for socialism and the liberation of the working class in imperialist countries.

Working women are a decisive part of the working class. The intensified exploitation of women proletarians is necessary for the imperialists to maintain their dictatorship. The organized resistance of working women is strategic and essential to abolish imperialism, class society, and the oppression of women.

Image: Textile workers on strike in 1934. Credit: Southern Labor Archives of Georgia State University.

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