Maybe it's just a coincidence.

In his attempt to bust the public sector unions of Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker decided to target only certain unions, exempting firefighters and law enforcement. Maybe it's just coincidence that those unions largely supported his election. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the very unions he believes must be dismantled largely support the Democratic Party.

Maybe it's just a coincidence that, as Dana Goldstein noted, women comprise the overwhelming majority of the union now most demonized by Gov. Walker and his fellow Republicans.

About 80 percent of American teachers, for example, are female; at the elementary school level, nearly 90 percent are women. Nursing is 95 percent female. Nationwide, the majority of public sector union members, represented by AFSCME and other groups, are women. Meanwhile, over 70 percent of law enforcement workers in the United States are men. Our firefighting ranks are 96 percent male and over half of all professional firefighting departments have never hired a woman.

Maybe it's all just a coincidence.

Throughout history, women's work has been undervalued in our society. There is, of course, the unpaid work women perform as mothers who follow the Republican edict to stay home and raise children. Every year, Salary.com calculates the cost of the unpaid work mothers perform—as "laundry machine operator, janitor, van driver, computer operator, housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, chief executive officer, psychologist, and facilities manager"—and puts that figure in the six figures. And then, of course, there is the forfeit of Social Security benefits those women aren't earning while they perform the unpaid work they are told is the most valuable job a woman can do.

Meanwhile, working-class women who have not had the luxury of being able to afford to forfeit a paycheck and benefits, have always done exactly that: worked. They worked in factories, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where, in 1911, 146 garment workers, mostly women, were burned alive, locked inside the building by their bosses who did not want them to be able to leave their 13-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week jobs, even to use the bathroom.

They have worked as domestics, performing the cooking and cleaning and childcare for wealthy families, for little pay and no benefits.

Even as women gained access to the professional class, their work was undervalued and underpaid. Not until the Equal Pay Act of 1963 did the government decide that employers should not be allowed to pay women less than men for the same work performed. Employers had previously justified such pay discrepancies because women didn't "need" their paychecks to support their families, as male employees did. Today, Republicans are still fighting against stronger protections to ensure that women are paid equally because despite the enormous gains women have made, women still make less than men in nearly every single profession. Those who insist women no longer need such protections point to the fact that more women than men now earn college degrees. But those college degrees aren't making the difference in their paychecks because those men are still earning more than their female counterparts once they graduate.

Critics will point to the current recession "mancession" and the fact that women will soon represent the majority of the work force. We don't need to worry about women's economic hardships, critics argue; it's men who should now be the protected class.

But this is hardly good news for women. Employers have figured out it's good for their bottom line to hire women because women are relatively cheap labor by paying them less, and putting them in part-time jobs that don't require benefits. Yeah, great deal for women.

There is something that makes a big difference for women, though, in the size of their paycheck and the benefits they receive: unions.

A 2008 study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research found that not only does joining a union increase a woman's salary; it also greatly increases the likelihood that she will have health insurance. In fact, the study's author concluded:

All else equal, joining a union raises a woman's wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree.

The study also found:

In 2007, women made up 45 percent of union members. If the share of women in unions continues to grow at the same rate as it has over the last 25 years, women will be the majority of the unionized workforce by 2020.

Those numbers are even greater among the 15 lowest wage occupations.

The study concludes:

These findings demonstrate that women who are able to bargain collectively earn more and are more likely to have benefits associated with good jobs. The data strongly suggest that better protection of workers’ right to unionize would have a substantial positive impact on the pay and benefits of women in the workforce.

Republicans are waging an outright war on women. They're even willing to shut down the government in order to win. This war has many fronts. What has received the most attention in the traditional media is the war against women's health care—by trying to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the largest health care providers to low-income women; by attempting to redefine "rape" and "rape victims"; by attempting to legalize the murder of doctors, in South Dakota and Iowa and Nebraska, who provide health care to women; by suggesting that women who miscarry should receive the death penalty.

But the war on women is not merely about their health and safety. It is also a war on women's paychecks. And a woman who cannot support herself, and who cannot provide for her children, as the government continues to systematically strip away the resources that have existed to help women, is less likely to be politically engaged in the political system that oppresses her. In the last election, for example, even as increasing numbers of women were earning college degrees and dominating the work force—supposedly proving that equality has been achieved—fewer women bothered to vote. Sure, maybe it was because they felt their political goals had all been achieved and their political participation is no longer necessary. Or maybe they just didn't see the point.

Maybe Gov. Walker doesn't know any of this. Maybe he doesn't realize that busting the teachers' unions disproportionately impacts women. Maybe he doesn't understand that depriving women of their livelihood directly impacts children—you know, that most sacred class of Americans, according to the party of "family values." Maybe Gov. Walker doesn't realize undermining women's economic power is yet one more front in the larger war on women. Maybe Gov. Walker doesn't care enough about the consequences of his war on workers to understand who suffers most if he wins. Maybe he doesn't care.

And maybe it's not a coincidence after all.