Women form one of the target groups for Maoist mobilization in India today. The movement is said to attract a large number of women, especially rural poor and tribal women. The Maoist agenda for larger socioeconomic transformations also includes the goal of women's equality and emancipation. Through the people's war, the Maoists in India today, who declare their ideology as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, seek to usher in a ‘New Democratic Revolution’, which they believe will also alter existing unequal gender relations.

While the women's question usually forms an important part of the Marxist revolutionary agenda, it is seen as resolvable through class struggle itself. Frederick Engels (1884) was perhaps the first to elaborate on women's oppression. For him, the origins of patriarchy lay in the formation of class society. Consequently, its solution lay in the struggle against capitalism. The women's question within Marxism has always been a source of considerable debate.