Gender and Class Formation: Female Clerical Workers

Abstract

Marxist categories, emphasizing class relations, essentially ignore the ways in which gender relations shape class struggle and class formation of women workers. Accounts of class formation use indicators such as unionization and strike activity as a yardstick of class capacities, thus denying the particular conditions women workers face under a dual system of domination: capitalism and patriarchy. Women are a significant percent of the total work force and an increasing percent of the total unionized work force. Yet women work in occupations which have been regularly viewed as nontraditional arenas for unionization. Our analysis looks at the labor process and gender domination as mechanisms of control within the workplace. We argue that an understanding of the differential forms of women's struggles should consider how capital structure and labor markets affect organizational capacities of women workers, and how the degree of gender domination corresponding to technically and nontechnically controlled workplaces shape the organizational form of resistance taken by female workers.