This slightly edited report was presented on behalf of the Women’s Commission to the CPUSA Peace Conference on Nov. 8, 2025.

The Communist Party USA is committed to defending rights for women and progressing the movement for broader gender liberation. It is with this commitment in mind — and our party’s mission to eradicate the gender-based oppression imposed by capitalism — that we as the Women’s Commission come into this Peace Conference with a call for our movement to take part in the peace movement and work towards a just transition to a peace economy.

The CPUSA approach to fighting for women’s rights and equality is one rooted in an understanding of the two spheres of labor taken up by working women: productive, paid labor and reproductive, unpaid labor. This overburden of work is the reality of many working class women daily.

In Detroit, like many cities across the U.S., we are in a fervent struggle against ICE and Border Patrol to resist their hunt of immigrants and the tearing apart of families. What has been reported from the front lines of this fight is how disproportionate the burden of reproductive and productive labor falls on the women in families when the breadwinner of a home is taken — from mothers and grandmothers to sisters and daughters. In response to this, our communities most affected by ICE have built mutual-aid efforts, primarily led by public school teachers, many of which are women.

And while our public school teachers are organizing to protect their students and families, cuts to public education are persistent, either by the federal government, or by our local government.

Meanwhile, it’s no secret that our tax dollars help fund this terrorism at home. In their 2024 Tax Day report, the Institute for Policy Studies found that the average U.S. taxpayer paid $98 to border patrol, deportations, and immigration detentions.

Also in 2024, the average U.S. taxpayer paid $3,707 towards weapons and war. This includes $2,929 to the Pentagon, and the remaining to nuclear weapons and foreign militaries. This, however, was under the previous administration. We know the number has increased since.

What return, then, do American workers see in their tax dollars being spent?

As per the report, our 2024 tax dollars went to social programs as follows: $1,823 to Medicaid, $787 to the Dept. of Education, $120 for school lunch and nutrition programs, and the remaining $662.76 was dispersed across other public services such as public radio, libraries, food assistance and the National Labor Relations Board.

The sum of these amounts show that under the Biden Administration, U.S. tax payers paid more to war and weapons than they did to social programs which help working class people. What we have seen in the past year with the Trump Administration is the widening funding gap between services for working people and the terrorist missions at home and abroad.

These amounts are far more than just numbers on a report. In conjunction with Trump’s tyrannical cuts to social services, these numbers are a living reality to working Americans every single day. Thus, the reproductive labor, unpaid, which disproportionately affects women daily has just become more burdensome while families struggle to fill in the widening gap. Additionally, the cost of war, and the further consequences of trade wars, inflate the costs of basic needs — including for menstrual care, reproductive care items, and hormone therapy.

These are the devastating consequences of the war economy we live in. Through this economy, the super exploitation of women further cultivates misogyny. Gender-based violence is also inseparable from the activities of imperialism. This sort of violence is emboldened by war-time violence. It is systemic and, in most cases, it is encouraged.

This was seen in Vietnam when American troops and their allies committed a number of sexual abuses against Vietnamese women, sometimes with the twisted use of their weapons. Vietnamese women also became particularly vulnerable to the violence of the sex trade, a trade which was and still is intrinsically tied to the grossly devastating human trafficking scheme that hides in the shadow of war.

We see this gender-based violence continue today in U.S.-funded terror globally, the most stark example being Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Demonstrating their proclivity toward demeaning women, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces have repeatedly shared posts online posing with the undergarments of Palestinian women whose homes they’ve raided or destroyed.

It is clear from the examples abroad — from today and throughout the past — that gender-based violence is a principal strategy of the agents of U.S. imperialism to further oppress its subjects.

We see this same strategy used on the domestic front in work places and in state-sanctioned violence. Within ICE facilities, the hostages detained face regular abuse by staff. A number of sexual abuses take place through medical misconduct and false hygiene checks. This continues the long history of forced sterilization within immigration facilities, a practice which runs in the same vein as the forced sterilization of working class women — primarily Black and Native American women — throughout the 20th century.

It is the movement for gender equality that can make a better world possible for women, but it cannot be done without active participation in the movement for peace. A just transition from a war economy to a peace economy with full employment would bring about massive strides in progress toward an end to gender-based oppression. It would not only mean funding social programs to help working women across the country. It also means defunding entities which exploit reproductive labor, promote gender-based violence across the globe, and divide workers through sexism and misogyny.

Images: Women in Tigray receive UNFPA dignity kits by usaforunfpa (Creative commons); UT Votes to Fix Law That Limited Some Sexual Assault Suits by ProPublica (Creative Commons).