I think a lot of Marxists discredit the works of Krupskaya. She is such an important theorist and The Woman Worker is a really great pamphlet- it was the first Russian socialist pamphlet dedicated entirely to the situation of working class women.
It discusses the lives of women under the Tsar. However, I find that the issues working women dealt with then and there continue to prevail all over the world today as well.
Working women are treated much worse than working men. And then they are also expected to take on all of the work at home (which they are not paid for)- and they do all of this with an extraordinary amount of effort and no breaks.
The husband is considered the "head of the household," yet the wife holds the household together, often all by her lonesome and, ironically, in spite of the troubles brought into the home by the husband (and by the children, who the woman is expected to take care of without any help from her husband, at times).
On top of that, they are paid less than men are!
Of course, under these conditions, women resort to other ways of making money, like prostitution. And they are condemned for that as well. But they are blameless. Yes, it's technically a choice, but can something be a true choice when it is done out of pure desperation and it is sold to you as the only way out of having absolutely nothing? It makes up for the surplus value that the woman is not receiving as a worker. Krupskaya says in The Woman Worker, "Who can blame a poverty stricken woman for selling herself, for preferring the only readily available extra earnings to beggarly existence, hunger and sometimes a hungry death?"
The capitalist system is inherently abusive towards the worker, and especially towards the woman worker. No matter what you do, the work you do, you are being exploited and abused. The bourgeoisie profit off of YOUR labor, you are not paid the full value of what you produce with your labor.
Work under capitalism is also meant to harm the woman's health. The woman is paid less than the man, so she is encouraged to "cut down on food." She eats less. She is encouraged, more than the man, to work even when she is sick.
Still, women are forced to depend on men, although men do nothing for them. They are dependent on their family and then on their husbands. The man worker is often at odds with the woman worker, even the Marxist man will exclude and abuse the Marxist the Marxist woman because he benefits from her exploitation. He benefits from not being a woman himself. But "stopping women joining the struggle is the same as leaving half of the workers' army unorganised." The woman's struggle is an inherent part of the worker's struggle.
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