Lindsey German looks at what we’ve achieved and what we’ve still got to fight for

With Trump in the White House, the misogynist Andrew Tate back in the US, despite facing charges of rape and trafficking in Romania, and abortion rights under attack in a number of countries, there’s a lot to be concerned about this International Women’s Day.

The rise of overt sexism from many on the right wing, celebration of degrading and demeaning language about women, the plethora of porn images which depict violence against women, and the growing cries that equality for women has ‘gone too far’, are all reminders that the massive gains women have made over the last half century are not necessarily permanent but have to be fought for.

Hearing all of this, you would not think that women’s equality has never been achieved: that women receive far less pay than their male counterparts, that the jobs done predominantly by women are in the lowest cohort of pay, that women work less hours than men in paid work, but far more than them in unpaid work.

That responsibility for domestic labour lies in the most part with women, and this is predominantly the responsibility for childcare. Nor would one believe that violence against women – domestic violence, rape and sexual assault – is at epidemic levels.

Instead we have supposedly liberal capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg claiming we need more ‘masculinity, praise for the sexist ‘manosphere’, even, in the US, the ‘trad wives’ movement which argues that women’s place is in the home, servicing their husbands. And here, far-right Reform leader Nigel Farage has called for a rise in the birthrate.

What is happening and why is this backlash taking place? Women work in unprecedented numbers outside the home. This has given them freedom from the narrow constraints often imposed within the family, has given them a degree of financial and social independence and has increased the expectations of working-class women in particular. But this has not freed them from the expectations that they will still play a major role in the home and a subordinate one compared to most men.

The changes in sexual relations and home life that women’s domestic work entails places all sorts of pressures on personal relations. So does women’s work outside the home. Under neoliberal capitalism both men and women face worsening conditions, lower wages and intensified pressures at work. Both men and women work increasingly long hours and struggle to care for children or have time for any kind of life beyond work, caring and domestic responsibilities.

Despite two wages coming into the household, they are completely inadequate to cover what Marx called the ‘costs of reproduction’ of working-class people, hence increasing debt and borrowing, and many workers having to work extra jobs just to make ends meet.

The falling birthrate is in part because women do not want to have many children, as was often the case with previous generations. But it is also because many people cannot afford housing or childcare even with two full-time wages.

The nostalgia some on the right have for the home-based role of women is an attempt to roll back many of the gains women have made.

They dress up their concerns as defences of masculinity or in terms of male crisis. But women’s equality is not a threat to men who have everything to gain from a society where there is real equality and freedom between men and women regardless of their sexuality.

Genuine freedom and equality is however a threat to the capitalist class which stands to gain from every division of the oppressed which it uses to further its exploitation.

International Women’s Day was founded by socialist women before the First World War. They understood there was no sisterhood of women with the likes of Hillary Clinton or Kemi Badenoch but that they were on the opposite side of the class divide.

Women’s liberation will only be won by challenging the priorities of capital, not by assuming that all women have something in common. But that requires a fight for women’s liberation, and against the reactionary right’s attempts to limit our rights. And that means women and men fighting for a change that will benefit the whole of humanity.