segregated, always underpaid, stagnant, sex-stereotyped. In the
United States in 1981 women earned 56 to 59 percent of what men
earned. Women are paid significantly less than men for doing comparable work. It is not easy to find comparable work. The consequences of this inequity— however the percentages read in any given year, in any given country— are not new for women. Unable
to sell sex-neutral labor for a living wage, women must sell sex.
“To subordinate women in a social order in which she must
Proudhon in the mid-1800s, “is to
of the producer extends to the value of the product;. . . The
woman who cannot live by working, can only do so by prostituting
herself; the equal of man or a courtesan, such is the alternative. ” 26
Proudhon’s egalitarian vision could not be stretched to include
women. He wrote D’Hericourt:
. . . I do not admit that, whatever reparation may be due to
woman, of joint thirds with her husband (or father) and her
children, the most rigorous justice can ever make her the
EQUAL of man;. . . neither do I admit that this inferiority of
the female sex constitutes for it either servitude, or hum iliation, or a diminution of dignity, liberty, or happiness. I maintain that the contrary is true. 27
D’Hericourt’s argument constructs the world of women: women
must work for fair wages in nonsexual labor or they must sell
themselves to men; the disdain of men for women makes the work
of women worth less simply because women do it; the devaluation
of women’s work is predetermined by the devaluation of women as
a sex class; women end up having to sell themselves because men
will not buy labor from them that is not sex labor at wages that
will enable women to divest themselves of sex as a form of labor.
Proudhon’s answer constructs the world of men: in the best of all
possible worlds—acknowledging that some economic discrimination against women has taken place— no justice on earth can make women equal to men because women are inferior to men: this inferiority does not humiliate or degrade women; women find happiness, dignity, and liberty in this inequality precisely because they are women—that is the nature of women; women are being treated
justly and are free when they are treated as women—that is, as the
natural inferiors of men.
The brave new world Proudhon wanted was, for women, the
same old world women already knew.
D’Hericourt recognized what Victoria Woodhull would not:
“disdain of the producer extends to the value of the product. ”
Work for wages outside sex labor would not effectively free women
from the stigma of being female because the stigma precedes the
woman and predetermines the undervaluing of her work.
This means that right-wing women are correct when they say
that they are worth more in the home than outside it. In the home
their value is recognized and in the workplace it is not. In marriage, sex labor is rewarded: the woman is generally “given” more than she herself could earn at a job. In the marketplace, women are
exploited as cheap labor. The argument that work outside the
home makes women sexually and economically independent of
men is simply untrue. Women are paid too little. And right-wing
women know it.
Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal
