“What is ‘reserve army of labour’? Present the position of feminist scholars on this.” (2019)
Karl Marx (Capital, Vol. I, 1867) described the industrial reserve army, or relative surplus population, as a pool of unemployed and under-employed workers that capital accumulation itself produces. It supplies labour in booms, absorbs layoffs in slumps, and through competition disciplines wages.
The concept
Marx distinguished three forms:
- Floating: workers repeatedly hired and fired in modern industry.
- Latent: people in agriculture and the household, ready to be drawn into wage work.
- Stagnant: those in irregular, casual and sweated work.
Marx did not theorise gender. Feminists asked whether women, especially married women, form a distinctive reserve.
Feminist positions
1. Marxist-feminists: women as a reserve
- Margaret Benston (“The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation”, 1969) argued that capitalism benefits from women as a reserve labour force, keeping wages down.
- Veronica Beechey (“Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production”, 1977) argued that married women are an ideal reserve. Their subsistence is assumed to come from a male “family wage”, so they can be paid less. Less unionised, they can be “returned” to the home in slumps at little political cost. Wartime entry and post-war withdrawal seemed to fit.
2. Empirical qualifications
- Irene Bruegel (“Women as a Reserve Army of Labour”, 1979) tested this against Britain’s 1970s recession. Part-time women in manufacturing were shed faster, but occupational segregation protected women’s jobs in the expanding service sector. Women were a reserve only in some segments.
3. Critics: patriarchy, not capital alone
- Floya Anthias (1980) criticised Beechey’s account as functionalist: it assumes capital’s needs explain women’s position without explaining why women fill that role.
- Heidi Hartmann (“Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex”, 1976) and Sylvia Walby (Patriarchy at Work, 1986) showed that male unions and the family-wage demand actively excluded women or confined them to lower grades. This is a dual-systems explanation.
4. Global and Southern feminists
- Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 1986) argued that “housewifisation” makes Third World women a permanent, cheap and flexible labour supply rather than a temporary reserve.
- Guy Standing (1989) went further: under flexible capitalism women are the preferred workforce, not a residual one.
Indian relevance
Rural Indian women resemble Marx’s latent reserve. Female LFPR rose from 23.3% (PLFS 2017-18) to 41.7% (PLFS 2023-24), mostly through self-employment and unpaid family help. Many economists read this as distress entry.
Conclusion
The reserve army thesis rightly ties women’s employment to capital’s needs. But segregation, patriarchy and global flexibility have turned women from a reserve into a structurally cheap core.