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Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women
212 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2024
About the author
Mary-Alice Waters
79 books16 followersSocialist feminist, journalist and activist in the United States.
Waters became involved in Trotskyist politics at a young age, and joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1960s. She became the editor of their youth paper, Young Socialist, and the national secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance.
In the early 1980s, Waters, along with Jack Barnes and others in the SWP leadership, began to reject the label of "Trotskyism" and the theory of Permanent Revolution, in favour of building links with the Cuban Communist Party and Sandinista National Liberation Front.
Today, Waters is the President of the Pathfinder Press and the editor of New International magazine. She has written a number of books on political topics.
Waters became involved in Trotskyist politics at a young age, and joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1960s. She became the editor of their youth paper, Young Socialist, and the national secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance.
In the early 1980s, Waters, along with Jack Barnes and others in the SWP leadership, began to reject the label of "Trotskyism" and the theory of Permanent Revolution, in favour of building links with the Cuban Communist Party and Sandinista National Liberation Front.
Today, Waters is the President of the Pathfinder Press and the editor of New International magazine. She has written a number of books on political topics.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 29, 2025
This was my review of the previous edition. When Goodreads gets around to showing the current cover, I'll update the review or add a comment at the end. (Finally done, but no further comment necessary). This new second edition is better in several ways--one is that the photo pages really connect with the text. The new preface and introduction by Mary-Alice Waters, and the piece by a Cuban women's leader also add to it.
Even More Relevant Today!
At the center of this book is a debate that took place in the Socialist Workers Party in 1954, yet the discussion is as relevant or even more so today. The issues involved were (1) Marx’s explanation of the fetishism of commodities (in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1) and (2) the Marxist view of anthropology, which is evolutionary (see The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).
Women have been oppressed since the very beginnings of class society, and for most of that time treated as the property of first their fathers, and then their husbands. In this country women’s rights to control their own bodies has always been challenged (since Roe v. Wade was never based on women’s rights, but on medical criteria). Even in this country, changes to the laws are fairly recent, and across the world one can see there are more than just remnants of this.
Capitalists use the insecurities of women to sell enormous amounts of cosmetics and clothing. Not to mention plastic surgery, all kinds of “beauty treatments,” etc. This doesn’t diminish, it grows. While Mary-Alice Waters updated all this in her introduction, today there is even more to add. Social workers, therapists, doctors, and influential college professors are preying on young women’s insecurities to convince them that if they have problems, it’s because they should have been born men! Up until recently gender dysphoria was almost totally a male phenomenon, usually ending in a few years, or the person's discovery they were gay. (See Waters’ introduction to the new book Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History and also Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier, and no, it doesn’t make the slightest difference that her book was published by a conservative firm. The real scandal is no liberal publisher would touch it! This accompanies the demise of women’s studies, replaced by gender studies, and almost no college classes where the origin of women’s oppression is discussed.
What passes for feminism today is mostly, like #MeToo, a glorification of victimhood, not a struggle against oppression. For further reading, see Feminism and the Marxist Movement by Waters, and Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution within the Revolution by three leaders of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) with an introduction by Waters, Women and the Family, a Trotsky collection, and The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin.
Even More Relevant Today!
At the center of this book is a debate that took place in the Socialist Workers Party in 1954, yet the discussion is as relevant or even more so today. The issues involved were (1) Marx’s explanation of the fetishism of commodities (in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1) and (2) the Marxist view of anthropology, which is evolutionary (see The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).
Women have been oppressed since the very beginnings of class society, and for most of that time treated as the property of first their fathers, and then their husbands. In this country women’s rights to control their own bodies has always been challenged (since Roe v. Wade was never based on women’s rights, but on medical criteria). Even in this country, changes to the laws are fairly recent, and across the world one can see there are more than just remnants of this.
Capitalists use the insecurities of women to sell enormous amounts of cosmetics and clothing. Not to mention plastic surgery, all kinds of “beauty treatments,” etc. This doesn’t diminish, it grows. While Mary-Alice Waters updated all this in her introduction, today there is even more to add. Social workers, therapists, doctors, and influential college professors are preying on young women’s insecurities to convince them that if they have problems, it’s because they should have been born men! Up until recently gender dysphoria was almost totally a male phenomenon, usually ending in a few years, or the person's discovery they were gay. (See Waters’ introduction to the new book Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History and also Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier, and no, it doesn’t make the slightest difference that her book was published by a conservative firm. The real scandal is no liberal publisher would touch it! This accompanies the demise of women’s studies, replaced by gender studies, and almost no college classes where the origin of women’s oppression is discussed.
What passes for feminism today is mostly, like #MeToo, a glorification of victimhood, not a struggle against oppression. For further reading, see Feminism and the Marxist Movement by Waters, and Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution within the Revolution by three leaders of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) with an introduction by Waters, Women and the Family, a Trotsky collection, and The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin.
Displaying 1 of 1 review