Today, women represent more than half of society. More important, they are the majority of the new class of the poor. They are the most oppressed, exploited segments of our society and they have the potential to redefine feminism and class politics across the globe.

The first stages of the women's social or political movement began over a century ago with bourgeois women fighting to inherit their husband's wealth. This had nothing to do with the slave woman or the woman living in a shantytown and working for fifty cents a day.

When the National Organization for Women (NOW) emerged, it focused on the needs of middle class white women. Later it focused also on the needs of working class women. NOW, and other organizations for women are now making every effort to reach our most desperate communities.

Such groups are working to take us back to the roots of International Women's Day.

It was born out of the struggle of women garment makers in a sweatshop in New York in 1911. Trapped in a horrible fire behind locked doors, 146 people perished, but the factory owners were acquitted of any wrongdoing. In memory of those workers, March 8 was designated as the day in which people all over the world remember the unique contributions women have made to society.

But as we look at the sacrifices women have made, we can't overlook the common struggles they share with workers at the bottom of the economic system regardless of gender.

The application of electronics and robotics to production has lowered the cost of the necessaries of life. Consequently, life itself has become cheaper on the global labor market. As globalization of production spreads, the economies of most countries have become a race to the bottom. The sweatshops of Indonesia, China and El Salvador are becoming the norm, with devastating effects on all workers.

Reflecting this general debasement of humanity, rape, murder and kidnapping of women around the globe have become commonplace. The growing antagonism between the possibilities of a better life and the reality of debasement indicate the revolutionary potential of the expanding struggle of working class women.

In the past 30 years, the system has opened up to women, in part as a result of women's struggles and in part as a result of technological changes that let women leave their dependency on men and enter the workforce. Today, however, most women are still denied social and political equality by the capitalist system and many are losing the relatively small economic gains they had made.

There can be no further progress for women - or for any worker at the bottom of the system - until class politics becomes the force that guides our struggle for a new world. Why? Because we are leaving an era based on the exploitation of human labor and entering an era marked by the end of work.

The death of Betty Friedan gives us a chance to recognize who are the most exploited women in today's society and focus the movement on them - and on the ideal that liberating women trapped at the bottom of society is really about liberating all of humanity.