This year International Women’s Day (IWD) 2026 came in the midst of a world characterised by genocide, multiple wars, the undermining of democracy, and a deepening political crisis, one of the characteristics of which is a deliberate attack on women’s rights. Reproductive freedoms are being rolled back, feminist movements are increasingly vilified, and gender equality itself has become a key terrain of political conflict. From the emboldened reactionary orbit around Donald Trump in the United States to the consolidation of far-right forces across Europe, misogyny has re-emerged as a core organising principle of authoritarian politics. Anti-abortion campaigns, anti-“gender ideology” movements, and attacks on LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly functioning as part of the political glue binding together a far-right coalition.
Reactionary gender politics are also increasingly providing a framework through which real anxieties about housing, workers rights and public services are redirected toward migrants, feminists, and other supposed cultural enemies. In this way, the far right offers a distorted explanation for genuine social insecurity while leaving the underlying economic structures untouched. At the same time, its defence of “traditional family values” implicitly promotes a social order in which households, and within them, women, absorb the costs that states and markets refuse to bear. Women’s unpaid labour becomes a stabilising mechanism for an increasingly fragile economic system. Misogyny, in this sense, operates not merely as prejudice but as political strategy.
Confronting the backlash
In this context the typical IWD corporate campaigns and empty symbolic gestures that have come to dominate the day were even more vacuous and trite than usual. They stand in stark contrast to historical roots of IWD which are found in socialist and worker movements who understood women’s liberation as inseparable from struggles over work, equality, and democracy. The realities facing many women in 2026 are also far less celebratory: rising economic insecurity, persistent workplace inequality, and renewed political battles over bodily autonomy. If IWD is to mean anything today, it must be reclaimed not as a marketing exercise but as a moment to confront the structural forces that continue to define and limit women’s lives, and struggle for genuine liberation.
In the context of the global backlash against women, Ireland may appear, at first glance, somewhat removed from this trajectory. The 2018 referendum that repealed the Eighth Amendment marked a historic rupture with a system of reproductive control in which Church authority and state power had long been intertwined. But the idea that Ireland somehow occupies a settled, post-feminist terrain is a serious mistake. The structural conditions that sustain gender inequality remain firmly in place, and in many cases are intensifying.
Access to abortion remains uneven and constrained, and centre-right parties have shown little interest in addressing these barriers, instead working to close down any serious discussion of further liberalisation. Childcare costs remain among the highest in Europe. The housing crisis continues to shape the everyday lives of working-class women in profound ways with the Department of Housing own figures revealing that 4,603 children in 2,164 families are living in appallingly ill-suited emergency accommodation, a record high. Low-paid care workers travelling between clients on insecure hours, retail workers juggling unpredictable schedules, hospitality workers struggling to afford rent, and lone parents navigating an overstretched social welfare system are living with the consequences of a political economy organised around the interests of big tech, pharmaceuticals, financialisation, privatisation, and precarious work.
Alongside these economic pressures, the persistent threat of gender-based violence continues to structure the everyday lives of many women in Ireland, revealing how power operates not only through markets and institutions but through the intimate terrain of everyday life. The lived reality of the majority of women today reveals something the left cannot afford to ignore; that the current backlash against women’s rights is not simply cultural or ideological. It is rooted in the structural crises of capitalism itself. Understanding that relationship is essential if socialist politics is to respond effectively to the present moment. This is precisely why socialist feminism is not an add-on to the “real” struggle but an indispensable part of it.
If the crises shaping women’s lives in 2026 appear fragmented, housing here, childcare there, violence somewhere else, that is, in part, because the dominant frameworks through which politics is discussed and understood encourage us to see them that way. Economic policy is treated as separate from social policy; gender equality is cordoned off from discussions about housing, wages, or public services. Yet, as we know, the everyday experiences of working-class women reveal how artificial these divisions really are.
Capitalist connections
To understand the present moment, we need a framework capable of understanding how these different pressures are connected. The political philosopher Nancy Fraser offers one of the most compelling accounts of this relationship. In Cannibal Capitalism (2023) Fraser argues that capitalism cannot be understood if our analysis remains confined to the narrow sphere of wage labour alone. Capitalist production depends upon a wider set of social conditions, including systems of care, political institutions, ecological resources, and forms of racialised extraction, all of which make economic life possible, yet are treated as external to the economy itself. In recent decades, Fraser argues, this relationship has become increasingly destructive. Capital does not merely rely upon these background conditions; it systematically depletes them. She describes this configuration as “cannibal capitalism”, a system that consumes the very social and ecological foundations upon which it depends. At the centre of this dynamic lies the organisation of social reproduction, a term that simply refers to the vast range of activities, often invisible, that are involved in sustaining and reproducing human life.
Some socialist feminists have thought of social reproduction exclusively as housework, but for Fraser this is too narrow. It’s not just about cleaning and cooking and washing within the confines of a family home. Social reproduction should also be thought of as including all the activities and relationships that are involved in sustaining human life. This includes not only raising children and caring for family members, but also education, healthcare, community life, all the networks of care and solidarity that make social existence possible. Every society must organise these activities in some way, but capitalism does so in a distinctive and deeply contradictory fashion.
Under capitalism, economic production is formally separated from social reproduction. Wage labour takes place in workplaces concerned only with the pursuit of profit, while the work of sustaining life is pushed largely into households, communities, and public institutions. Historically this division has been organised along gendered lines, with women expected to shoulder the majority of unpaid or underpaid care work. This arrangement has always been unstable. Capital depends upon the continuous reproduction of workers and communities, yet it has little incentive to support the institutions that make that reproduction possible. Instead, the system persistently attempts to shift the costs of care onto households, public services, or poorly paid workers. Over time this dynamic produces recurring crises. When wages stagnate, public services are cut, and social supports erode, the capacity of families and communities to sustain everyday life begins to break down. Fraser describes the resulting tensions as “boundary struggles”, conflicts over where the line should be drawn between profit and care, between the economy and the social conditions that sustain it. Seen from this perspective, many of the struggles shaping contemporary politics, from housing and childcare to reproductive rights and racial and migrant justice, are not peripheral to class politics; they are struggles over the very organisation of social life under capitalism.
Contesting boundaries
Fraser’s use of the concept “boundaries” allows us to understand how capitalism determines what activities count as economic, what responsibilities belong to the state, and what forms of labour remain invisible. But, it is important to remember that these boundaries are not fixed, they are continually contested through political struggle. Historically, workers movements fought to limit the reach of the market into workers’ lives. In the nineteenth century workers organised to campaign against child labour, to struggles for limits on the length of the working day, and to demand workplace safety. These were all struggles over how far the pursuit of profit should extend into human life. The same dynamics continue to shape contemporary struggles. When the Irish government reduces the allocation of Special Needs Assistants (SNAs) in schools, it effectively shifts the burden of care back onto families and communities. When precarious workers in companies such as Covalen organise within Ireland’s tech outsourcing sector, they are challenging the model that underpins the government’s cherished technology and tax-haven economy. Students at UCD organising against the institution’s failure to respond adequately to sexual assault are confronting the boundaries that allow powerful institutions to externalise responsibility for gender-based violence.
Similar struggles are unfolding internationally. Communities in Minneapolis organising against ICE agents’ invasion of their neighbourhoods are contesting the racialised regimes of policing and border control that sustain contemporary labour markets. In Italy, mass strikes against the genocide in Palestine have linked trade union organising to international solidarity, challenging the separation between economic life and geopolitical violence. These are not peripheral disputes or distractions from class politics. They are struggles over the social organisation of life itself — over where the boundaries of the market should be drawn and who should carry the burdens capitalism seeks to offload.
Care work in capitalism
Ireland today is shaped by precisely these kinds of conflicts. Childcare remains largely commodified and prohibitively expensive. The government’s strategy of refusing to build public housing and leaving housing in the hands of private developers and international landlords has created an unprecedented housing emergency where people and families are left to fall into homelessness with little or no safety net. Home care for older people is chronically underfunded and poorly paid. Hospitals operate under permanent strain while community services struggle to fill the gaps. Yet the system continues to function because reproductive labour absorbs the shock.
Consider the case of a home care worker travelling daily across Dublin’s northside between elderly clients. Her labour enables families to care for relatives and allows hospitals to discharge patients. Without it, the health system would grind to a halt. Yet her employment is characterised by low wages, insecure hours, and minimal support. This is not an oversight, or an unfortunate exception to an otherwise functioning system. It is a structural feature of capitalism’s organisation of care. Capitalism depends upon reproductive labour while systematically refusing to support it.
If all these conflicts are understood merely as isolated issues, their structural character disappears. Yet this is precisely what much of liberal feminism tends to do. It treats gender as an add-on to existing political and economic arrangements, rather than recognising how deeply gender inequality is embedded in the organisation of capitalist society and the structures that govern social reproduction. In contrast, socialist feminism begins from the recognition that care, reproduction, and social life are not peripheral to capitalism but fundamental to its operation. If the current system is generating a crisis of social reproduction, then feminist politics must confront capitalism itself.
Joining up the struggles
What does this mean for us today? It means fighting to remove the infrastructures that sustain everyday life from the logic of the market: universal childcare, publicly funded healthcare and education, large-scale social housing, and proper welfare provision. It means securing living wages and union protections in feminised sectors such as care, retail, and hospitality. It means insisting on a genuine separation of church and state.
But it also means building alliances across the movements already contesting capitalism’s boundaries: trade unions organising precarious workers, housing movements challenging corporate power, migrant justice campaigns resisting racialised exploitation, and reproductive rights movements defending bodily autonomy. These struggles are precisely where the limits of the market and the organisation of social reproduction are being fought over today. Recognising this is not the task of socialist feminists alone but of the entire socialist movement. These are not separate struggles but interconnected conflicts over how society reproduces life itself. A socialism that cannot see this, or refuses to seriously organise around it, is a socialism that has already failed.
The backlash against feminism is not occurring because the movement has gone too far. It is occurring because capitalism itself is entering a period of deep instability. As the system devours the infrastructures of care, housing, and ecological stability, conflicts over those resources intensify. In this context the choice facing the left is clear: either we settle for a politics that celebrates representation while cannibal capitalism erodes the foundations of social life, or we build a movement capable of confronting the structures that generate inequality and backlash alike. Liberal feminism cannot meet this moment. Only a socialist movement grounded in class struggle and committed to transforming the organisation of care, housing, and work can. The task before us is not celebration but organisation — and the struggle to remake the conditions of life itself.
