In the darkest Gray Ages of Soviet Communism, women were worked to exhaustion as wives and mothers after days of industrial toil. Though given equal-rights lip service, the irksome problem of woman's actual place was felt by Communist Man as a threat to his myth of worker equality, and was briskly swept under the Curtain (www.maotsetung.com).

Now that the West has in turn whisked the commies under the shag (www.ljudmila.org/lesbo), the "female question" has been fully resolved (www.finalsolution.com). The great steel pistons of the New Bottom Line know neither borders nor prejudice, and the Free Trade Woman is now rewarded for good hard work with ample buying power, just like her brothers (www.amazoncity.com).

Now Free Trade assures that only healthy competition will determine woman's role in today's global marketplace. But for Free Trade to work, it must be fully embraced not only in the freedom-conscious West, but in those areas of the world that once benefitted from Colonialism (www.india.com, www.vietnam.com). It is for this reason that positive images of Free Trade Women are crafted by our most accomplished male and female artists (www.allmodels.com) and exported worldwide through the efforts of commerce--one of whose most cherished desires, indeed, is that women everywhere will, as full and equal partners in the Free Trade equation, understand the importance of supplying global capital with the means to make it all happen (www.maquilaproperties.com).

To everyone's satisfaction, these efforts have paid off in pearls! Women of the liberal world, eager to engage in beneficial work when not busy creating domestic edens, have supplanted their male counterparts as the earth's primary labor force. These "Free Enterprise Ladies," secure on the acme of progress, now bravely make up 90 percent of the workers in multinational corporate production plants all over the world (www.maquiladora.com/Stories/stories.html). Equality--nay, superiority--is at hand!

A natural secretion for natural selection

After their 19th-century heyday, the number of U.S. "sweatshops" (places where middlemen "sweat" long hours from workers for miniscule wages) declined steeply because of trade unions and government reaction. But thanks to today's enthusiasm for a rational marketplace, helped by NAFTA, GATT and the WTO (www.totallyglobal.com), the colorful sweat industry is enjoying a full-on renaissance (www.maqguide.com).

To support and nurture this movement, dedicated female workers have joined the ranks en masse, sacrificing their health and safety to keep production costs at rock-bottom levels and efficiency sky high (www.profit.com, www.profit.org). These women offer flexible hours, unexampled obedience and remarkable savings: who could be ungrateful to these heroines of Free Enterprise living (www.starvation.com)?

The global village: a win-win situation

Also fulfilling their role in making yesterday's inequalities a thing of the past, the people's elected governments race to smash yesteryear's regulations--the irrational hand of caution--in order to offer up to industry giants, at ever lower costs, larger pools of increasingly free-thinking women (www.sweatshops.com). These industry giants, in turn, nurture this evolution by moving from country to country in search of the freest free women they can possibly find (www.freewoman.org).

On this burgeoning new frontier, companies stand firmly on the parallel pillars of the First and Third Worlds: their massive construction budgets and seven-figure executive salaries from the First World help them make certain (www.idefense.com) that Third World women find full satisfaction in their new states of helpfulness (www.freedom.com).

An eye to the future

Maintaining Third World labor in the proper attitudes requires, of course, that distractions like leisure, politics, education, and standards of safety and health take the back seat (www.idefense.com) to forward-looking financial logic. Pregnancy leave, for example, so costly to glutted Western economies, is eliminated entirely with mandatory pregnancy tests for the fully non-unionized ladies of the frontier.