Breaking down the question

The question has two clearly signposted parts. First, define the "reserve army of labour" — a concept from Marx. Second, present the feminist position on it. The word present asks you to lay out the feminist argument accurately; the sharper answers also show why feminists found the original concept both useful and insufficient.

The balance of marks should follow the balance of the question. A crisp Marxist definition earns the first portion, but the feminist material is where the distinctive content lies, so it deserves the greater share of your space.

How to approach it

  • Define the reserve army of labour in Marx's terms and state its function for capital.
  • Note that Marx's account was not, in origin, gender-specific.
  • Present the feminist claim that women constitute a distinctive reserve army, and explain why.
  • Add the feminist qualification and critique of the concept's limits.
  • Conclude on what feminism adds to the Marxist idea.

Model answer

The reserve army of labour is Marx's term for the pool of unemployed and underemployed workers that capitalism continually reproduces. This "relative surplus population" serves capital in several ways: it exerts downward pressure on wages, disciplines those in work by threatening replacement, and can be drawn into production during booms and expelled during slumps. The reserve army is thus not an accident but a structural necessity, giving capital a flexible and cheap supply of labour. Our notes on labour and society develop the concept within Marx's wider analysis; see also Karl Marx.

Feminist scholars extended this idea to argue that women, and married women in particular, form a distinctive reserve army of labour. Because women are ideologically defined as primarily wives and mothers, they can be drawn into paid work when demand is high — most visibly during wartime — and returned to the home when it falls, without this being registered as unemployment. Their domestic role thus makes them an especially disposable and flexible reserve, hired cheaply and shed easily. Writers such as Veronica Beechey argued that women's cheapness is reinforced by the assumption that their wage is merely supplementary to a male breadwinner's.

However, feminists also qualified and criticised the concept. Beechey and others noted that women are not simply expelled from the labour market but are frequently segregated into low-paid, part-time and precarious "women's jobs" — so they function less as a reserve pushed in and out than as a permanently cheap and segmented workforce. The theory is also faulted for ignoring unpaid domestic labour, which sustains the whole workforce yet lies outside the Marxist wage relation. Feminism thus retains the insight that women's labour is structurally cheapened, while insisting that gender ideology and the sexual division of labour, not class alone, explain how and why.

Examiner's perspective

The examiner is checking two things: an accurate grasp of a Marxist concept, and a genuine understanding of how feminism engages it. A common weakness is to define the reserve army well but then offer only a vague gesture towards "women being exploited", without the specific argument that domestic ideology makes women a flexible, disposable reserve.

Strong answers name the mechanism — women's primary definition as homemakers renders them expendable in paid work — and then show critical awareness that feminists both used and revised the idea, pointing to labour-market segregation and unpaid domestic work. That combination of accuracy and critical extension is what lifts a 10-marker.