Reply #12: These are the same folks that unduly burdened Bill Clinton with their demands for a "quota."

[IndianaGreen]

This is not an issue of "quotas." Putting bourgeois women in key positions in an Obama Administration will do little to address the oppression that all women (and men) face. As Frederick Engels wrote in his essay The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State there is a direct correlation between class and gender oppression. Women are oppressed by the same -isms used by the patriarchy to keep the working class confused and divided: racism, heterosexism, ageism, fundamentalism, etc. We must recognize and respect the differences in oppression suffered by members of our society, including LGBTs (many of which are women). It is only through revolutionary social change, with women at its vanguard, that we can free the working class from the chains of capitalist slavery.

The exploitation of women hasn't changed that much since the days of Marx when he described the industrial utilization of women and children in England, in what he described as the conversion of "human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus-value":

Married women, who work in gangs along with boys and girls, are, for a stipulated sum of money, placed at the disposal of the farmer, by a man called the “undertaker,” who contracts for the whole gang. “These gangs will sometimes travel many miles from their own village.

Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S3

Marx also understood that without women in the vanguard of revolution, social justice was impossible:

(V)ery great progress was demonstrated at the last congress of the American ‘Labor Union’, inter alia, by the fact that it treated the women workers with full parity; by contrast, the English, and to an even greater extent the gallant French, are displaying a marked narrowness of spirit in this respect. Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex.

Karl Marx. Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_12_12.htm