Capitalism facilitates two methods to dismantle traditional boundaries set for women. A) Innovation medically advances female status and B) capitalism disregards hierarchies based on gender and race. Historical analysis proves.

While capitalism is often defended for its wealth creation or its promotion of freedom, it is not often seen as specifically promoting women’s material well-being or freedom. The most important ways that women’s material wellbeing is promoted by capitalism is through innovations in technology that most improve the quality and length of their lives: maternal and infant health that increases life expectancy, birth control, and the technology that reduces women’s domestic labor. Capitalism’s most important form of freedom creation for women comes from its tendency to destroy or fundamentally transform traditional culture. By traditional culture I mean a culture in which social roles and relationships are determined by traditional rules and norms, and a person’s place is determined by these rules according to their status at birth, and not by merit, desert, or personal preference. Tradition can be defined as the set of beliefs and values, rituals, and practices, formal and informal, explicit and implicit, which are held by and constitute a culture. Because tradition constitutes social meaning, though, it is the vehicle by which oppressive beliefs and desires are formed. Our beliefs about value come largely given to us by our culture. We learn them as children from our parents and other significant adults, who in turn learned them from their parents and others. Traditional cultures habituate people to evaluate each other according to their given status. We rarely have reason to question the values we are given, and traditional cultures often enforce them on pain of ostracism or violence. The background beliefs we have are the shared meanings of our culture, and they allow us to formulate the beliefs and desires against which some of the beliefs and desires can be understood and questioned.

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Of course, not every means of overthrowing traditional culture is good. My claim is that capitalism can be a progressive way of disrupting tradition because of the goods that capitalism brings and the values it promotes. Capitalism opposes tradition by promoting innovation and freedom. First, capitalism by its nature directly promotes technical innovations that tend to improve quality and length of life, particularly for women. Innovation is the primary way that societies make material progress, and capitalism inherently provides incentives to innovate. With a fixed set of technologies, there can be only so much improvement of the productivity of labor, and resources become ever scarcer as they are exploited in production. At a certain point in the life of a given technology, profits become difficult to achieve through that technology. However, innovations allow new techniques and resources to be exploited; successful innovations are those that bring about great changes in the way things are made, information is transmitted and managed, people are transported, and generally in how life is lived. (Baumol, et.al. 2007, p.87) Capitalism is the only system in which we see such rapid and revolutionary technical innovation, the kind of innovation that changes the way we live. Looking at the history of the twentieth century, for example, the only significant technical innovations made in non-capitalist countries were in government driven enterprises, mainly military defense. Confining innovation to such enterprises reduces the chances that there will be wholly new kinds of technologies since the number of areas that governments will concentrate attention on, even in a centrally planned economy, is lower than an economy driven by the variety of interests of private citizens. This is not to say that non-capitalist societies did not make improvements in technical efficiency; everyone knows that in fascist Italy the trains ran on time. But the kinds of technical improvements that tend to emerge from non-capitalist economies are of this minimally advancing type, and not the revolutionary type exemplified by the development of the locomotive, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the television, the transistor, or the personal computer. Or, more to the point here, the clothes washing machine, the sewing machine, or the birth control pill. Even more radically, capitalism also indirectly promotes social innovation, in particular the destruction of harmful, patriarchal traditions. By promoting transportation of people, ideas, and things, technical innovations create rapid social change. Capitalist development tends to bring women out of the home and into public life in the marketplace by making their labor outside of the home more valuable than it is within. Capitalism exposes women and men to new ideas through the vast mixing of persons, different cultural practices, and things. Capitalism reduces the oppression of traditional societies that impose hierarchies of gender and caste. Those who want to maintain traditional cultures must fight against the inevitable tendency of capitalism to stir things up.