Question

Does capitalism demean women?

Comments

what do you mean by 'demean?' and why the emphasis on women? if everyone is 'demeaned' by such loathsome (imo) epithets as 'consumer,' 'worker,' 'labor,' and 'bawss,' isn't this demeaning toward, a rendering of, everyone into a basic uni-dimensional commodification?

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[I don't have time to write a complete answer, but will record a thought here as a supplement to FA's answer.]

Many traditional female gender roles seem oriented towards maintaining relationships and providing labor that is difficult to commodify. These things are devalued in a capitalist society, so women either get displaced from the traditional roles or are insecure in them. To what extent one complains about this  depends on one's opinion of those roles in the first place. I think that the activities previously associated to women are among the most vital to peoples wellbeing. (I also think that appropriate gender roles are an important adaptation to our diversity, but that's another discussion, I think?)

But does this "demean" women? There's a lot of assumptions there that not everyone may be comfortable with. In particular the word "demean" is gendered in some manner I'm not entirely sure of (check out the graph  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=demean+men%2Cdemean+women&year_start=1950&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdemean%20men%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdemean%20women%3B%2Cc0 )

Answer 1

yes. just as it demeans men, trannies, youngsters, and every other actually existing individual that is not part of the upper crust (and maybe them too).

if you meant to ask if capitalism is a particularly patriarchal system, i would say: systemically (and ideologically), probably not. capitalism is about profit, and a corporation's primary (some would say only) responsibility is to maximize shareholder profits. nothing gendered about that. if a company could make more profit by turning patriarchy into matriarchy, it would not think twice.

but in practice, women are typically exploited even more than men (ie, pay scales, sexual misconduct, unpaid household work, etc). patriarchy does impact virtually every aspect of modern life as i know it, and capitalism is right there to piggy-back on it.

[edited to add another example in the above paragraph]