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WOMEN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM
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By Norah Carlin
First published March 1985 Reprinted January 1986
by the Socialist Workers Party PO Box 82, London E3
Typeset by Kate Macpherson Photosetting (TU), Clevedon, Avon.
Printed by Laneridge Limited (TU all depts), London E3.

CONTENTS

* Introduction
* The case for women's liberation
* Class society and class struggle
* Women's oppression and class society
* Women workers fighting back
* The family, right or wrong?
* The revolutionary tradition and women's liberation
* Are there any alternatives?
* Conclusions

INTRODUCTION

SINCE THE REBIRTH of the women's movement in the mid-1960s there have
been many arguments about the relationship between women's liberation and
socialism. Socialists want to change the world, to get rid of the rotten society we
live in and build a better one based on workers' power. Feminists also want to
change the world, so that women can be free and equal. Are the two struggles the
same, or separate? Can feminists unite with male socialists and trade unionists, or
must their struggle always be against men?

In practice, events during the miners' strike of 1984-5 showed how unity can be
achieved in struggle. Through the strength of the women in the mining
communities, who stood beside the miners on picket lines and took part in strike
committees, as well as organising soup kitchens and food parcels, the unity of men
and women became a fundamental fact of the strike.

Socialists, who had often argued that women can fight only as workers, were
reminded that wives, mothers and daughters are also part of the working class,
whether they have jobs or not. Feminists, who often assume that being a wife
means only conflict with the husband, had to face the fact that there can be
solidarity in the working class family as well as conflict.

The strike brought many women who thought of themselves as feminists into strike
support work for the first time, on local miners' support committees, in their
workplaces and in their communities. It also changed the lives of many miners'
wives who had not thought of themselves as feminists but found themselves going
to meetings and picket lines, or travelling to raise support in other parts of the
country, while their men minded the kids or made the tea.

In action, the politics of class struggle may cut through the knot of academic and
sectarian argument about the relationship between socialism and women's
liberation, but the problems remain. Many men in the labour movement are not
convinced that women need to fight for themselves, though they reckon women
fighting to support men is all right. Many feminists are not convinced that male
workers can really be allies in their struggle: they point to sexist attitudes and male
domination of the labour movement as proof that women's fight is still basically
against all men. And some women who have been very active during the strike
don't think that feminism has anything to do with them: they think of it as
meaning women refusing to have anything to do with men--an image deliberately
exaggerated by most of the press and television.

These problems can be worked out only by looking seriously at the meaning of
class struggle and the politics of revolutionary socialism. For Marxists like the
Socialist Workers Party, class struggle is the only way to change the world for the
better--to get rid of our present ruling class and have a society, run by and for
working people, where everyone can be in control of their own lives and free from
the threats of poverty, powerlessness or nuclear annihilation. Women must be part
of that struggle, and women's liberation essential to its aims: a socialist society
must be one where women are free and equal, sharing control with men in every
way.

We do not try to justify the situation in present-day Russia, China or Cuba, which
claim to be socialist societies but where it is quite clear that women have not been
liberated. None of these are societies where the working class is in control; they are
ruled, and harshly ruled, by a class of bureaucrats whose aims are at the bottom
the same as the aims of our own ruling class: to exploit working people,
accumulate capital and compete with one another internationally. This point is
fundamental to the politics of the Socialist Workers Party. To claim that socialism
liberates women and at the same time to claim that these societies are socialist
would be a fraud.

Nor do we defend the way the labour movement is organised and controlled at
present, for it is dominated by men to the almost total exclusion of women from
any power of decision making or leadership, even where the majority of a union's
members are women. Trade unions should not be run by professional 'leaders' on
high salaries, often appointed for life, who haven't worked in the factory, office or
mine for years and who see their job as being to perform a balancing act between
employers and workers. They should be run by the rank and file members--women
and men--from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

Nor do we accept the idea that there are stages of struggle: women can't wait to be
freed somehow after the socialist revolution; nor can the struggle for socialism be
postponed until all workers have changed their old ideas about women's place.
Ideas begin to change through struggle, but the changes cannot be completed until
the world we live in is changed--until society is organised for human needs instead
of for profits. That change can come only through a socialist revolution.

These are the politics of revolutionary socialism: rank and file control in the
struggle, the overthrow of our present capitalist society based on profit, and the
establishment of workers' power for a new society of equality and freedom.
Women's liberation can and must be part of the struggle to achieve these ends.

THE CASE FOR WOMENUS LIBERATION

IN OUR SOCIETY today, women are discriminated against in pay, jobs, education
and welfare. Most women are financially dependent on a man, and, without
assistance, carry the burden of looking after children and caring for the sick and
old. Society's 'opinion formers', from judges to journalists, cabinet ministers to
advertising copywriters, take it for granted that women are inferior. And in the
end, they reduce all women--whatever their occupation, experience, politics or
interests--to one dimension, sex, and judge them by whether they measure up to
what men desire.

Women are more than half the population and 40 per cent of the workforce. But
women's earnings, on average, are only two-thirds of those of men, and women
workers are found mainly in low-paid, low-status jobs. Three-quarters of all
catering and clerical workers are women, but only 22 per cent of doctors, 4 per
cent of architects and half of one per cent of engineers. There are very few women
in positions of power or influence of any kind: less than 14 per cent of managers in
industry, 2 per cent of company directors, and 4 per cent of members of
parliament, for example.

Although girls get more 'O' level passes than boys, and there are more women than
men at technical colleges and evening classes, the situation is reversed when it
comes to higher education. Only 38 per cent of university undergraduates are
women, and only a third of all post-graduate students.

More women than men live in poverty. Added to those who live in poverty with
men, there are seventeen times as many single mothers as single fathers, and two
and a half times as many women old age pensioners as men, living on social
security. Married women who care for the sick at home do not get Invalid Care
Allowance, and widows get neither sick pay nor unemployment benefit even
though they may have paid full insurance for years.

This is usually justified by saying that it is women's natural role to look after the
home and children, and men's job to be breadwinners. But history shows, as we
shall see, that the care of home and children has not always been separated from
other kinds of work as rigidly as it is in our society. In order to look after these
things, women are expected to give up everything else--education, work (or at least
decent, well-paid work), and outside interests of all kinds, including trade union
and political activity. A woman is supposed to devote herself entirely to the care of
a man, his children and his or her parents when they get old.

Because most women do what is expected of them and lavish a great deal of love
and care on their families, often in very difficult circumstances, the world assumes
that women are stupid, or at least simple-minded, unable to understand what goes
on outside the home. Most women are economically dependent on men because
they can't carry the burden of household tasks and hold on to a decently paid full-
time job as well--but the world says that women are dependent on men because
they are weak and helpless without them.

>From being described as women's natural role, home and children come to be seen
as women's only role, even when they are obviously doing something else. In 1981,
a Liverpool councillor addressed council clerical workers on strike in the city as
'the wives, mothers and sweethearts of citizens of Liverpool'. The strikers pointed
out that they were 'typists, machine operators and clerks, not wives, mothers and
sweethearts' and were citizens of Liverpool themselves as well!

Yet young women are encouraged to see marriage and the family as their only aims
in life, and are discouraged from learning most skills or studying the same subjects
as boys. They are pointed in the direction of jobs such as typing, packing and
assembling to 'fill in' the time till they get married and have babies. Then they
marry with high expectations of family life--but it doesn't work out like the ideal
family of the advertisers' dreams, especially when money is short and a husband's
job insecure.

Most women are trapped in the family. However much they love their husbands
and children, they know they have little choice about it. It is harder for a woman
than for a man to get out of a marriage that has gone wrong, and most women
whose marriages break down are left to bring up children on their own with little
or no support.

On top of that, many women are trapped in their homes by violence or the threat
of it. Some men end up beating the woman they live with because they are ground
down at work or don't have enough money to meet their family's needs--they make
women suffer for what isn't their fault, and most women have no way of fighting
back and nowhere to turn to when this happens. What kind of society is it that
puts women in this position? Only a society that insists that the family is 'private',
and that women belong to the men they marry as if they were pieces of property,
whatever the law now says.

In rape, women are exposed to a kind of violence which men don't face, perhaps
the most humiliating of all. Women are encouraged to look sexy and attractive to
men, and to feel as free as men to enjoy themselves--a freedom long overdue after
centuries of a double standard for men and women--but when an attractive woman
is raped most men think she must have been 'asking for it'. How can women feel
free when this is going on?

In our society, women don't have equality, they don't have freedom, they don't
even have respect in any meaningful sense. What can be done about it? Women
have to be able to fight back, for themselves and for the future of all women. This
doesn't mean an out-and-out conflict with all men all of the time. Separatism--the
view that women can fight for liberation only on their own and against men--is a
counsel of despair and a way of dividing women and men still further. Women
have a right to organise with men to fight against the society that keeps us all
down, to make men see that the world has to be changed. This doesn't mean that
women can't organise their own meetings, demonstrations, pickets or whatever,
when appropriate-- we have that right, too--but we should be trying to reunite
women and men in the struggle for socialism.

The people who have power in our society--governments and employers--want to
keep men and women divided. They want women not to think about what is
wrong with the world and, even more, not to do anything about it. They want
strikers' wives to nag them to go back to work, not to support them like the
miners' wives. They want women as a cheap labour force too, handicapped by
household cares and discouraged from fighting for equality. They want to sell us
images of the small, private family as the only way to live, and of women as
feather-brained sex objects turning overnight into empty-headed household
drudges, because they want to sell us more goods.

For too long the struggle against this society has been divided, not by feminism but
by men, who have seen the labour movement as purely a male concern. Men who
have put down, excluded and ridiculed women who do want to fight back; men
who have expected their wives to keep quiet and service them while they do the
fighting back; men who think women are good for sex, having babies, cooking and
nothing else. Seventy years ago Hannah Mitchell, a working-class woman fighting
for the vote, wrote that 'those of us who were married had to fight with one hand
tied behind us,' and any married woman who has ever thought of fighting for
something today must recognise that picture.

In playing the employers' game, working-class men are tying themselves hand and
foot to the governments' and employers' world, and all the exploitation and
injustice that it contains, as well as denying women their right to freedom and
equality. In demanding that men fight for women's liberation too, we are calling on
them to free themselves.

CLASS SOCIETY AND CLASS STRUGGLE

AS MARXISTS, we say that we live in a class society. We don't mean by this that
some people have different life-styles from others, live in different areas or have
snobbish attitudes and different accents. Class is the material reality on which our
society and all others in the world today are based.

The vast majority of people--women as well as men--work to produce profits for
the few, whether they assemble cars or televisions in a factory, type figures into a
word processor or check out groceries at Sainsbury's. Or else they sweep streets,
dig coal or scrub floors for the 'public sector' so that the system can keep going,
with the rich making as much profit as possible and the needs of the poor supplied
at the lowest possible cost. This is the working class, and without its labour the
lights would go out, food and water would be cut off, communications would
break down and society would cease to function.

At the top, a tiny minority of people own most of the wealth and exercise most of
the control. They decide when factories will close, when prices will go up, when
capital will be moved around so as to browbeat governments into doing what they
want. Some belong to families who have held wealth and power for generations,
others insist that they have 'worked their way up' and are 'still very working class'.
But they are all part of the ruling class, and their wealth gives them power.
Governments must look after their interests, and keep everyone else quiet enough
for the system of power and profits to go on working.

In between, there are the middle classes--small employers, management and the
upper layer of professional people. Most small employers and managers identify
with the ruling class, because a society based on profits suits their own interests
best. Some professionals--doctors, lawyers and the upper levels of the teaching
profession--are the managers of society's services, and think much the same,
though sometimes government policies such as cuts in their own professional areas
may rouse their opposition.

Most professional workers, however, school teachers, nurses, civil service and
council clerks, and most social workers, are simply doing routine jobs with no
element of control or decision-making. They are really part of the white-collar
working class, along with office workers, draughtsmen and technicians. In the last
few decades large numbers of them have joined trade unions because their interests
and their need to organise are very similar to those of manual workers.

The point about women is that they are part of all these classes, even though they
are second-class members of them. There are rich and powerful women, women
workers carrying society on their backs, and women at all levels in between. Can
women unite for their own equality and liberation, or does the division of society
into classes prevent them?

Up to a point, women do have a common interest in equal rights and can unite to
fight for those rights. The gains that were made by the women's emancipation
movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries applied to all women,
such as the right to own money and property, the right to have custody of their
own children, and the right to an education. A hundred and fifty years ago, when
married women could own nothing, whether wages or landed estates, when
mothers had no legal right to keep their children, whether little lords and ladies or
half-starved infants of the slums, and when even the daughters of the rich had little
education other than learning to read and write in their own homes, women of all
classes needed to fight for these basic rights.

But the effect of the struggle for equal rights was to leave women more divided,
even though the legal rights were a gain and the struggle for them a necessary one.

In 1831, married women could own no property . In 1981, the wife of a Tory
cabinet minister was able to purchase in her own name a six-bedroomed house in
Somerset with extensive grounds, while in the same year in the same county a
woman living in a caravan with her disabled husband was refused a council
tenancy because neither of them had a regular job. (Source: Labour Research
Department pamphlet, Unfair Shares, 1981)

In 1832, virtually the only women employed outside their homes were factory
workers, domestic servants and governesses. In 1982, there were women on the
boards of giant companies such as GEC and the Midland Bank, and awards such
as 'Business Woman of the Year' went to women running catering and clothing
firms--in industries that are traditional exploiters of low-paid women--and to one
woman who took over her husband's precast concrete firm and made more profits
than he ever did. Yet the vast majority of women are still confined to poorly-paid,
low status jobs.

In 1839, a woman could not go to university, practise as a lawyer or enter
parliament. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher--university educated, a successful tax
lawyer, and independently wealthy as well as the wife of a very rich man--became
prime minister. The contrast between Thatcher and a politically ambitious woman
of 1839, Caroline Norton, is instructive. Caroline Norton pursued her ambition by
becoming a political hostess and close friend of a male politician, Lord Melbourne.
As a result, her husband dragged her through a notorious divorce case, and when
he was granted a separation he refused her access to her children--even when one
of them was dying. Though Caroline's politics were every bit as reactionary as
Thatcher's (each would recognise the other's 'Victorian Values' very well), Caroline
became a campaigner for women's rights. Thatcher does not campaign for
women's rights because she does not need to: the struggles of earlier generations of
women have put her where she is.

Equality with men is not enough, because men are themselves not equal. As long as
we live in a class society, some women will be able to use their improved position
to exploit and oppress others, and they will do so without sisterly qualms or
scruples. There are still comparatively few women politicians, employers and
managers, but is more of them what we need? Do women employed by GEC
benefit because there is a woman (Sara Morrison, prominent member of the Tory
Party) on the board of directors? The answer has to be no--the aim of the company
is to make profits, and that means keeping down the wages of women factory
workers and closing factories when it suits GEC's plans for profit.

Would other women benefit if half the Tory cabinet were women? Or if all of them
were? The performance of the 'hang 'em and flog 'em brigade' at Tory women's
conferences is enough to suggest that they would not--Tory women are actually
more reactionary than Tory men. Any Tory government would come to power on
the employers' terms, and carry out policies ruinous to working-class women.

Women in top jobs also exploit other women directly as cleaners, housekeepers
and nannies to take over the burden of housework and family duties, which for
most working women means a double shift of drudgery. Nanny agencies openly
admit that they recruit young women looking for a short-term career between
leaving school and getting married, and the wages these women earn are certainly
not in proportion to the increased earning and career opportunities they provide
for their employers. The more wealth and power high-paid women enjoy, the less
they need to challenge the conventional roles of men and women in the family--all
is taken care of by the discreet, and invariably female, modern domestic servant.

Middle-class women, the women in between, can identify with ruling class women,
demanding equal access to top jobs and business opportunities; or with working-
class women, fighting for equal pay. better social services, or the right to organise.
Very large numbers of lower-grade professional workers, especially, are women:
they hold two-thirds of all posts in education, health and welfare although these
services are mostly managed by men. Their jobs often bring them into close contact
with working-class women and children.

Since the mid-1960s, middle-class women have been the main organising force
behind the women's liberation movement, and they have moved left or right
according to the situation. Up to the mid-1970s, when many women workers were
getting organised and fighting for equal pay, most of the women's liberation
movement saw working-class struggle as important and gave it support. We have
seen something of this again during the miners' strike of 1984-5. But between these
years, middle-class women mostly became preoccupied with other strategies, such
as separatism, pacifism, and equal opportunities to move up the career ladder.

Why does class struggle matter for women's liberation? The answer can be put in
many different ways, but two things need to be said straight away. The first is that
as long as we have a class society, all women cannot be equally liberated by having
equality with men. It is one thing to be the equal of a cabinet minister, a cabinet
minister or a Whitehall mandarin; it is quite another to be the equal of a miner, a
bus driver or an out-of-work labourer. If this is all that women's liberation means,
then you can't expect working-class women to be particularly interested in it.

The second thing is that only class struggle holds out any hope of getting rid of this
system of inequality that we live in now. Class struggle is not just the gut reaction
of downtrodden men and women to the nastiness of the ruling class. It is not, as
many pacifist women claim, just another form of destructiveness and aggression. It
is also the way forward to a better world.

Marx said that socialism is 'the self-emancipation of the working class'. Women,
too, can liberate themselves by being part of that struggle. The self-emancipation of
women cannot be by a struggle of women 'as women', across all classes, because
such a struggle would liberate some a lot more than others. Only by joining forces
with the working class can we ever win liberation for all women.

WOMENUS OPPRESSION AND CLASS SOCIETY

IT IS SOMETIMES SAID that women have always been oppressed by men, that
the antagonism between men and women has its origin deep in human psychology
or biology, and that the way women suffer in our society is nothing but the same
old story that has been going on ever since human life began.

This is such a pessimistic view that it is hard to understand why it is so popular
with feminists today. If women are put at a disadvantage by human nature itself,
how can we ever change things? Either an all-out war against men could lead to
men being forced to change their ways without changing their basically anti-
women ideas; or a few women could separate themselves off from the rest of
society and be free in a sense; or the human race could be destroyed by women
refusing all co-operation with men. None of these conclusions can be very
appealing for the majority of women.

On the other hand, the view that women are oppressed simply because men (and
most women too) have the wrong ideas about women can be too optimistic.
Liberating women is seen as just a matter of persuasion and education, of
explaining to men that they have got it wrong and that they really should share the
housework and the top jobs because it would be more fair.

History shows that all ideas can change: none are so deep-rooted in human nature
that nothing can be done about them. But they can't be changed by persuasion, by
the light of reason alone, because ideas depend on material relations between
human beings.

The idea that black people are inferior, for example, belongs to societies that
exploit black people, either as slaves or as cheap labour. To get rid of the idea once
and for all we have to get rid of the system that produces the idea. This doesn't
mean that we can't argue or organise against racism here and now, but it does
mean that persuading people that they have the wrong ideas is only the first step to
getting rid of the society that is responsible for them.

The idea that women are inferior comes from societies that are divided into classes,
where one set of people control the labour of others and enjoy wealth and power
as a result. Our own capitalist society is far from being the first society divided into
classes, though we hope to make it the last. In ancient Greece and Rome, slaves
were exploited by slave-owners, in Europe in the middle ages lords lived off the
labour of serfs on the land, and there have been variations of these societies at
other times and places. With the rise of manufacture and the Industrial Revolution,
those with wealth to invest as capital found new ways to make profits out of wage-
earning men and women. In all these forms of society, women have been
oppressed.

But there have been, even in quite recent times, societies that were not divided into
classes, and where women did not have an inferior position. These were the
societies we call primitive, where there was no production other than the gathering
of wild plants and hunting of wild animals. Nowadays, most of these societies have
been affected by contact with European traders, rulers and missionaries, who have
changed their ways of life. But when white men first came into contact with most
of the native tribes of North America, Australia and the Pacific islands, these were
societies without classes and in which women were as strong and as powerful as
men.

When production was simple and population low, women's role as the bearers of
children was important and respected. Though men and women might have their
separate tasks and rituals, women as well as men took part in the most important
decisions, such as whether to move a settlement or make war on another band or
tribe. Couples might live together with their children, but sexual relations were
more free and separation easier than in later societies.

When production increased, agriculture appeared, and flocks and herds of animals
were kept for food and wealth (for fields and cattle were the first forms of private
property), class divisions began to appear. Men of wealth could make others work
for them, buy slaves and take advantage of others' poverty. They began to own
wives, too, like cattle, and pass on their wealth to their male children. As Engels
argued a hundred years ago, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State, the oppression of women began when class society began.

Many of the details of Engels' case have been challenged or corrected by
anthropologists (most of whom have been male and have worked for imperialist
powers--which gave them a vested interest in challenging him). But his basic
argument still stands. The oppression of women is not universal; women are strong
and equal in societies with simple production and no class divisions; all societies
must have started out like this.

No one could really wish for the whole of humanity to return to this primitive
state: the vast majority of people alive today would be wiped out by hunger and
disease. Equality for women in the future would have to be based on the full
capacity of modern science and technology to fulfil human needs--a capacity that
today is largely wasted by the capitalist system, with its drive for profits and
lunacies such as nuclear weapons. Women could be strong and free in such a future
society because of their role as producers and creators of all kinds, and not just
because they bear children or grub roots out of the ground--as they did in primitive
society. But to achieve this, it is necessary to get rid of class society.

History shows that there have been as many ways of keeping women down as there
have been class societies, and that the position of women has always been different
for different classes in the same society. This is important because it helps us to
understand the particular ways in which capitalist society oppresses women today
and the reasons why. History shows that there is no one 'natural' role for women.

Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies. Slave women had no rights over
their own bodies at all: they could be sexually used by their master or sold to
others, and their children could be taken away from them and sold too. The
masters' daughters, on the other hand, were married off at an early age and closely
confined to their homes to show that they were of the slave-owning class--to be
seen going to market, or washing at the well, was to admit to the shame of not
being able to afford slaves. Women valued the respectability that slaveowning gave
even though it meant many restrictions for them. There were slave women who
tried to pass themselves off as free, but no free woman ever tried to become a slave.

In Europe in the middle ages, serfs tilled the land for the lord of the manor, but
unlike slaves they lived in families on their own plot of land and could pass the plot
on to their children. Serf women were obliged to marry serf men and reproduce the
labour force of the manor, and most of them lived in small households of one
couple and their children. Noble women lived quite differently, in large extended
family households, and when they were married (usually at an early age) they
brought property and valuable political connections into their husbands' families.
As heiresses or widows they often owned land and serfs, acting as lady of the
manor in their own right and keeping armed retainers to fight for them.

When the mass production of goods for the market began to spread in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these were at first produced in the homes of
craftsmen and cottagers, by women and children as well as by men. In these
families, neither men nor women went out to work, but produced goods at home
for the merchant capitalists. Production was so essential to them that babies were
sent outside the household to wet nurses almost as soon as they were born, cared
for by servant girls or older sisters when they were weaned and returned (if they
survived), and sent out again as apprentices and servants at any age from seven
onwards. The bond between parents and children must have been very different
then from what it is now.

Meanwhile, the merchants' wives withdrew from the shop or warehouse into
comfortable homes with domestic servants to relieve them of work altogether. The
separation of work and home, men and women, into separate spheres had already
happened for these middle class families.

The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the
separation of work from home for the working class as well. At first it was women
and children who were drawn out of their homes and into the factories, followed
by the men as more of industry was mechanised. But women and children in the
factories worked in such appalling conditions of overwork and physical danger
that working-class people began to fight to defend the family as a place of refuge
for women and children, the sick and the unemployed.

Women, especially in the textile factory districts, often had to go out to work until
their children were old enough to take their place as the second wage-earner,
because men's wages were not enough to support a family. At the same time,
conditions in nineteenth-century industrial towns made heavy housework a
necessity, and as there were no alternatives for the sick, the very young and the
very old but to be cared for in the family home, women took on these duties too.
No wonder they gave up factory work to take care of the home whenever they
could afford it. The demand for a 'family wage' for men that would enable wives
to stay at home and do the job properly (a target which was hardly ever achieved
as far as the majority of the working class were concerned) was popular with
women workers as well as with men--women cotton workers on strike in Preston
in 1854, for example, fully supported it.

In our own century, the role of working-class women has again changed
dramatically. About 60 per cent of all married women are now also working for
wages. The typical woman worker is no longer young or single but a married
woman between the ages of 35 and 49. There are many reasons for the change,
among them the decline of the older heavy industries and the increase in services;
inflation and the falling purchasing power of men's wages (four times as many
families would be below the poverty line without the wife's wages); and the fact
that people have fewer children in a shorter time than before, and live longer after
their children are grown up.

All this suits modern capitalism very well. It gives many industries a more flexible
labour force, for one thing. But it is also an advantage for working-class women.
As housewives, women are isolated, divided and dependent on men; they can fight
the system only in exceptional cases where the whole community is threatened, as
in the miners' strike of 198~5 or the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915. As workers,
they begin to have a chance to organise and act together, and by earning wages of
their own they gain a certain amount of self-respect and independence, even if not
as the main breadwinner. It has taken a long time for capitalism to bring women
back into the workforce in large numbers, after starting the process in the cotton
industry in the early nineteenth century, but in the long run that is the way it has
been going. There is no turning back, nor would most women wish it: a new age
has begun for working-class women as workers in their own right.

WOMEN WORKERS FIGHTING BACK

THE VAST MAJORITY of working-class women today are workers, but they have
not simply become like male workers. There are differences between women's
work and men's that affect their experience, their consciousness and their struggles.

Two out of every five women workers are part-time (including two out of every
three who have children under sixteen). Part-timers have fewer legal rights--
redundancy, sick pay, notice, maternity leave and so on--and are paid less by the
hour than full-timers doing the same job.

Cuts in public services such as school meals, hospitals, nurseries and nursery classes
make it even more difficult for many women to take and keep a full-time job.
Sickness in the family, a patient who should still be in hospital being sent home to
recover, or the collapse of makeshift childminding arrangements--all these can
mean loss of earnings or even the sack for a woman worker.

Most women are in a worse bargaining position than men. Large numbers of
women work for small firms with a high turnover of labour. Most of the skills that
women have--such as typing, sewing or cooking--are not scarce skills, so are not
paid as skilled work. Because there are always at any one time large numbers of
women moving back into the labour force after a break for having children or
other reasons, there is a 'reserve army of labour' keeping women's wages low.

Men's weekly earnings are on average 56 per cent higher than women's, and this
rises to 67 per cent in manufacturing industry. These figures include overtime and
shift pay, which men get more of than women, but even women's hourly earnings
are less than 75 per cent of men's, and the proportion has been going down since
1977.

What all this adds up to is that while women have especially good reasons to get
together and fight for themselves at work, they face special difficulties in doing so.

Women can organise and fight back at work. Two-thirds of all new trade union
members in the past twenty years have been women, and although women workers
are still less fully unionised than men, union organisation is now normal in many
fields of women's work where it was virtually unheard of twenty years ago, such as
hospitals and offices.

Women were very much part of the rise in working-class militancy in the late
1960s and early 1970s. The Ford's sewing machinists struck in 1968 for upgrading
of their skill, and won a substantial wage increase though they are still, in 1984,
fighting for the principle of upgrading. In 1970, twenty thousand clothing workers
went on strike in Leeds, reinventing the flying picket shortly before miners and
building workers picked up the idea. Up to 1977, there were equal pay strikes in
hundreds of workplaces.

Women fought employers and governments; they fought racism (at Imperial
Typewriters in Leicester, for example), and they fought male workers who tried to
obstruct them. They occupied factories, such as the Fakenham shoe factory in
Norfolk in 1969, when factory occupations were almost unheard of in Britain.

Even in the 1980s, when it is harder to fight because of the economic recession and
anti-trade union legislation, women have been prominent in the struggles that have
taken place: the Lee Jeans occupation at Greenock and the Liverpool typists' strike
of 1981, the civil servants' and hospital workers' disputes of 1982, and so on.

Though women and men have often stood together in strikes, women have also
often had to raise the question of their collective relationship to men workers in the
same workplace. In many of the equal pay strikes of the 1970s, for example, men
were unwilling to support the women's demands; but if the women could convince
the men and get their support, they were more likely to win (see the pamphlet by
Anna Paczuska, Sisters and Workers, published in 1980). Clearly, it is better to try
to convince the men that a victory for women is in the interests of all; that the
women's struggle is against the employer, against whom all workers have common
cause, but if men workers insist on sticking to their differentials, then women trade
unionists will have to fight them.

The way to fight back at work has to be through the trade unions. But it has to be
said that the unions have often failed to do much for women. They are mostly run
by men, even when they have a majority of women members, and they often don't
take women's needs seriously.

The way to make trade unions a better weapon--and this goes for men as well as
women--is by rank and file organisation. The strength of a union depends on how
well its members support each other in the struggle, not on who is leader or how
well-trained its officials are. All leaders and officials should be elected by the
membership and easily recalled by them, from shop stewards to general secretaries.

The trouble with most trade union leaders today is not that they are men (though
most of them are), but that they are remote from their members' concerns. Women
officials are just as capable of becoming remote from their members and selling
them out as men. The new woman president of the printworkers' union SOGAT in
1984, for example, was getting Fleet Street clerical members (most of them women)
to back down from a long-standing dispute within a few weeks of taking office.

The way branches and meetings are run in many unions is offputting to most
women: not because they are run by men--in fact, the majority of men members are
clearly put off as well, to judge by low attendances. While there must be some rules
for the conduct of meetings, otherwise the person with the loudest voice and
strongest personality will dominate everything, the aim should be to encourage
participation, not prevent it.

Instead, many trade union meetings are conducted so as to prevent too many
members from talking or raising awkward problems. This is not because there is a
man in the chair, but because he is usually a particular kind of man (backed up by
his mates the branch secretary and treasurer, and egged on by the district official),
the kind who don't want action or trouble, but a quiet life and a long service medal
when they retire.

Shop stewards and other workplace representatives who want 'respect' from
management, plenty of facility time, and perhaps the convenor's office next door to
Personnel, don't want to fight for their members but to smooth things over by
negotiation. They often dread shop floor or section meetings more than they do
interviews with management, because it is harder to satisfy their members than to
agree with the powers that be.

Unfortunately, this is what trade unionism has come to mean for many people
today: getting union positions for the status they bring, becoming skilled at
persuading people to give up their grievances for a compromise, and attending
conferences and committees where 'big' decisions are made. Some women argue
that women need to play this game in competition with men--to get more women
officials appointed, more women leaders at the top, more women delegates to
committees and conferences.

It is not that these are bad things in themselves, but that they are useless while the
unions are bureaucratically run from above. Getting women on to union executives
by reserving places for them, or appointing women as district officials, is only
removing the most active women from day-to-day contact with workplace
members and so making them less effective in terms of any real fight back.

Many male trade unionists have reactionary ideas about women. For example, they
may call for women to be sacked first if there are to be redundancies. This is not
only an attack on women--the vast majority need their jobs just as much as men,
and their families depend on them, too--but an admission of weakness in refusing
to challenge the need for redundancies at all and in trying to shift the burden onto
someone else instead.

These ideas are not going to be changed by a high-handed union official, or even
by a conference resolution, but by women union members constantly organising,
arguing and showing their strength. Changing ideas this way is, of course, a longer
and harder job than winning an election or canvassing conference votes, but it is
what trade unionism really should mean.

The most important thing about women's trade union struggles is that they should
aim to strengthen trade unionism as well as fighting men's reactionary ideas, not
weaken it. So feminists who wanted to see the Thatcher government break the
NGA print union in 1983 because it is a male-dominated union were undermining
the trade union rights that enable other women to fight back too. A defeat for the
NGA set all trade unions back.

This is not to underestimate the problems of an industry such as the print, where
the newspaper proprietors have been trying to use new technology and cheaper
female labour to break the power of the unions, and union members have become
even more anti-women as a result. But it is just not on for women to ally with the
bosses, still less with the Tories and their anti-union legislation, because they are
weakening themselves by doing it.

In the USA, under the Positive Action Programme, women have gained access to
many skilled jobs from which they were previously excluded, by allying with the
state, through compulsory arbitration, to impose these concessions on the unions.
As a result, many of the unions are still hostile to the women who have entered
these jobs (for example in the mining industry), and the women may still suffer
from poorer pay and conditions than the men. Overall, such Positive Action has
made little difference in the USA: 80 per cent of women workers are still in
'women's jobs' in clerical, service, sales and manufacturing firms, and in 1982
women's average earnings were still only 62 per cent of men's (worse even than in
Britain).

But Positive Action has also come to mean getting women into management posts
rather than skilled jobs. As noted before, the number of women in white collar and
lower grade professional work has expanded while the managerial hierarchy
remains predominantly male, and seeing well-qualified women passed over for
promotion can often rouse women to protest.

Being bossed around by men is certainly something women should fight against,
but do we want to be bossed around by other women instead? Once they get there,
women managers are not necessarily more sympathetic to the real needs of the
women under them, and sometimes even harsher. While women have as much right
to management posts as men, demanding more women managers is not a good
strategy since it benefits only a few, and if successful it divides women from one
another more than it unites them.

A better way to fight male management is by attacking what are grandly called
nowadays 'management prerogatives'. Why should decision-making, discipline,
hiring and firing, and so on, be imposed as if by absolute power from above? The
more restrictions the workforce can place on management's power to do as they
like, the stronger and better off its members will be. If women in a workplace can
organise, for example, to prevent women being disciplined for taking time off to
mind sick children, they will gain far more than if they get a woman into
management.

The very words 'Positive Action for Women' suggest that negative actions such as
challenging management power, upsetting production or going on strike are to be
avoided. You have to remember that what is positive for the bosses is negative for
the workers and vice versa. Otherwise you end up saying, like the authors of a
recent guide to positive action, that 'Good business means getting the best from
everyone--the under-utilisation of women is bad business' (S Robarts, A Coote and
E Ball, Positive Action for Women, The Next Step, published 1982). Good business
is greater exploitation of the workforce, and we want to end it, not to make it
work better!

THE FAMILY, RIGHT OR WRONG?

WOMEN'S POSITION at work can never be completely separated from their
position in the family, as long as the family continues to exist as we know it. As
long as people live in small, private households of one couple and their children,
with a distinct division of labour between women and men, women will be at a
disadvantage in the world.

Many people feel that the love, warmth and security that family life provides are
sufficient compensation for any disadvantages. The nuclear family seems 'natural'
(though our brief account of history has shown that it is not universal), and
timeless, even though it has in fact changed as much as any other human
institution.

Socialists often describe the advantages of co-operation in terms of family
relationships: fraternity, sisterhood, the brotherhood of man and so on. Trade
unionists are Brothers and Sisters; branch officers in the print have been Fathers of
the Chapel for hundreds of years, but have recently been joined by Mothers of the
Chapel in some branches.

The family life of the working class has often been threatened by poverty and harsh
laws. The Old Poor Law of Queen Elizabeth I broke up families by taking women
and children 'on the parish' only when they had no man to support them--thus men
who were unable to support their families through unemployment or poverty were
forced to desert them, as the only way they could get any support.

This law also separated poor children from their mothers at the age of seven and
sent them to be apprenticed. The New Poor Law of 1834 threatened destitute
families with the workhouse or 'Poor Law Bastille' where men, women and
children were separated, disciplined, and often half-starved into the bargain as a
punishment for their poverty (or 'pauperism', as it was called).

Working people all over the country, but especially in the new manufacturing
districts, organised resistance to the harsh New Poor Law. They also organised to
demand an end to the exploitation of women and children in the factories. They
defended their right to a decent family life, not because middle-class preachers and
philanthropists told them that was how they ought to live (though they did tell
them), but because without the family they had nothing. Victorian society provided
no alternative for the sick, the old, the very young, or the day-to-day needs of the
working class.

Today we have a Welfare State which (even under Thatcher) is humane by
comparison with the Poor Law Bastilles. Yet it is still no substitute for family life.
The more it is 'rationalised'--in other words costs cut and managerial authority
increased--the more impersonal, bureaucratic and obviously inadequate it becomes.

It is probably true, for example, that patients recover better at home than in a
large, impersonal hospital, even if that means a wife or mother sacrificing her job.
But what happened to the small, local convalescent homes and cottage hospitals?
We are told again and again that children who go to nursery grow up with more
problems than children who stay at home with their mothers. But if nursery
provision is so low that there are places only for children who have problems at
home already (which is the way it is in most parts of the country) the 'facts' don't
prove anything at all.

It is often said that even a bad family is better than a good institution, and this
opinion has had great influence on the modern Welfare State, which has been even
more reluctant to provide good institutions than to provide real support for
families who need it. It is, of course, nonsense.

Even Victorian schoolmasters like Dickens' Wackford Squeers rarely beat children
to death; in Britain today, three hundred children a year are killed in their own
homes by a parent or parent's partner. No one knows how many battered wives
there are, but a serious estimate of the number of places in women's refuges
required to satisfy the known needs of battered women is one place per two
hundred families. Over half of all women murder victims are killed by the men they
live with, and 25 per cent of all violent crime reported to the police is domestic
violence (even though most domestic violence is not reported to the police).

What is 'love' in the modern family if it can include all this? The small family
household is a boiling cauldron of intense emotions focussed on a few people--hate
as well as love, selfishness as well as caring, competition as well as sharing--with
the lid screwed down ever more tightly by modern notions of privacy. As we have
smaller households, less contact with other relatives and neighbours, and more
indoor entertainments and preoccupations, it is no wonder that family explosions
can be so terrible.

The family is changing under the pressures of modern capitalism, but it is not yet
disappearing--as many people fear and a few, perhaps, hope. The divorce rate is
higher than ever before, but many marriages that are broken in the divorce courts
today would have been broken by death in the past. In 1911 the average bride
could hope to survive for 22 years from the wedding day, and the average
bridegroom 17 years. Now the figures are 42 years for the bride and 40 for the
groom--'till death us do part' means twice as long as it used to! The number of
divorced people who remarry is constantly increasing, too: though many marriages
fail, most of those involved try again sooner or later.

The number of single-parent families is also increasing, especially the number of
women bringing up children on their own (about 11 per cent of all families with
children). If this is a sign that the family is breaking up, it is a very unfavourable
one for women. Most single mothers are not like the middle-class women in their
thirties who are constantly telling the Guardian women's page what a wonderful
experience it all is (one wrote that she decided to have a baby because 'I had my
own home, I had fur coats, I'd had rich lovers, I'd had this, that and the other . . .
'). More single mothers are very young women who, faced with long-term
unemployment when they leave school, find having a baby is the only 'adult'
occupation open to them, and who find themselves much worse off than married
mothers as far as housing, jobs (fewer single mothers work than married ones) and
general freedom of action are concerned; many later marry as the only way they
can see of improving their position.

More couples now live together without getting married than ever before--though
'common law marriage' has always been well known among the working class and
sex before marriage was for hundreds of years a well-established custom that the
churches never succeeded in stamping out. Most couples who 'live together' with
their children nowadays are families in every sense except the formal, legal one,
with very similar relationships to other families. The middle-class 'progressive
relationship' is not the commonest kind of non-married couple.

Only 40 per cent of households actually consist of a couple and their children
nowadays--but this does not mean that 60 per cent are childless or unmarried
people! Because couples now have fewer children over a shorter span of time, they
often live together without children for longer than they do with children. After
their children have left home, they may have to take on other responsibilities: a
survey in North-East England in 1979 found that more households included an
elderly or handicapped relative than children under sixteen. This contradicts the
picture painted by the Tory government of families having abandoned their
traditional responsibilities. The proportion of elderly people in institutions is now
many times smaller than it was at the turn of the century, when far fewer people
survived to grow old.

The family continues to exist because it is the most convenient way of reproducing
and caring for the workforce in a capitalist society. No government is going to
spend resources on providing a full range of alternative care--nurseries, canteens,
dormitories, and so on--and if they did these would probably be exactly the kind of
bureaucratic and regimented institutions that most people think of when they hear
such suggestions, because they would be planned from above for cost-saving and
efficiency.

In Western capitalist society, private property is transmitted through the family; in
state capitalist societies such as Russia and China, it is the privileges of the
bureaucracy that are passed on to their children through better education and job
prospects. Yet all these societies keep up a myth that people get where they are
because of individual effort: the myth of free competition in the West, the myth of
the classless society in the East! But in each case, the family reinforces existing class
divisions.

How can we change all this, and begin to live in a way that produces fewer
disasters and more freedom and equality? There is no way the family can be
'abolished' from above--like religion, banning it would simply drive it
underground. The family can disappear only when people choose to live
differently. Only a socialist society could offer a better way of life because it would
respond to human needs instead of to the drive for profits.

Many different ways of living together and sharing tasks could be tried, for
instance, if houses were not all built to the standard one-family pattern; if eating
good food outside the home was not an expensive privilege; if adults shared
children instead of owning them and smothering them with their own needs and
desires. If women and children were not financially dependent on individual men
(and if men were not dependent on individual women for personal services!) then
tasks might be more reasonably shared and everyone equally rewarded for the
work they do. If married couples were not so isolated they might be less possessive
and break-ups less frequent or at least less traumatic.

The way that people live will not change until the material conditions--such as
housing, social services, the structure of pay and production--change. But socialism
means more even than that, for there are ideas and feelings imposed on us by our
present kind of society that will be irrelevant and out-of-date in a society run by
working people for themselves.

Capitalist society produces people whose aims and desires are 'privatised'. Most
people have little or no control over anything outside their own homes. Work
consists of boring, repetitive tasks carried out under orders; the only thing that's
worse is not having a job at all. Democracy means putting a cross on a piece of
paper once every five years. The only place where people are free to make choices
and decisions, to do the things that really interest and absorb them, is Home.
Literally, you can call your home your own when nothing else is (even if it's
mortgaged for the rest of your working life).

In a really socialist society, where the working class was in control, the field of
choices and responsibilities would move outside the home. Working people could
call the whole of society their own, and would have access to a far greater range of
satisfactions than most of us have at present. When most people are busy and
happy running things over which they previously had no control, they will not
want to be cooped up at home any more.

This will not happen on the day after a socialist revolution, and presumably some
people will want to give up small-family life sooner than others, but it will surely
happen sooner or later if we manage to arrive at a socialist society. Family-centred
feelings will seem as outdated and irrelevant then as the feudal concept of fealty or
the ancient Roman idea of honour do now!

Some people already feel that they are happier outside a conventional family
situation, and think that if enough people changed their attitudes and lifestyle it
would just quietly disappear. That is all right for those who can afford it. It is
much easier for people with middle-class jobs and middle-class incomes to find
more flexible housing, distribute their time between work and home differently,
pay for good childcare and even afford not to cook for themselves so often. (It is
even possible for people on the dole to do a few of these things if they don't have
children and don't mind living in squalor.) For the majority of working people,
these alternative lifestyles are just not available.

People still turn to farnily life as a haven from a harsh and unpleasant world, even
if it often a very choppy haven and sometimes a downright dangerous one. The
only way this will be changed is by changing the world they are turning away from.
It will not be changed by moralising about the family, telling people how they
ought to live, or refusing to defend families when they are under attack--as many
working-class families are under the Thatcher government's programme of cuts,
restrictions and unemployment. There is no eternal right and wrong about the
family: it has always been a changeable institution, and it will go on changing
whether we like it or not, according to material conditions in the world outside and
not according to ideas of morality.

THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION AND WOMENS LIBERATION

UNLIKE THE WARS waged by one ruling class against another, class struggle has
never been an exclusively male affair. Women have been part of revolts, riots and
revolutions in past class societies, and in workers' struggles against capitalism in
modern times. Marxism comes out of this tradition of class struggle, and the link
between women and revolution is not new.

In the French Revolution of 1789, women played a crucial role in riots and
demonstrations, forcing the revolution forward despite the reluctance of moderate
leaders. They led the march from Paris to Versailles which forced King Louis XVI
and his family to move to Paris and recognise a new constitution. They took part in
the republican movement that led to the abolition of monarchy and the rule of the
radical Jacobin party, even though the Jacobins were unsympathetic to women's
demands. But women in radical groups and clubs such as the Club of
Revolutionary Republican Women were well aware of class and political divisions
among women as well as men, and were prepared to attack aristocratic women and
supporters of the moderate party physically as well as in words.

Despite the bitter defeat women suffered in this revolution--the downfall of the
Jacobins did not improve women's position, it made it a great deal worse--the
tradition of revolutionary action by women did not die, but reappeared in Paris in
the 1848 revolution, when the working class first appeared as a separate political
force in a revolutionary situation, and during the Paris Commune of 1871, when
thousands of women died on the barricades to defend a workers' government.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution had transformed workingclass life in many
parts of Europe, but first and foremost in England. Women were becoming
involved in the new movements of the industrial working class: they joined and
formed unions, went on strike, and took part in industrial protests. The poet
Southey wrote about a women glovemakers' protest in 1807: 'Women are more
disposed to be mutinous: they stand in less fear of the law . . . and therefore in all
public tumults they are foremost in violence and ferocity.' The ferocity of women
was also noted in the Derby silk riots of 1833 and the 'Plug Plot' strikes in
Lancashire in 1842. Women readily joined the trade unions that sprang up in the
1820s and 1830s, and were involved in Britain's first socialist movement, which
was led by the manufacturer Robert Owen but involved many working people (see
Barbara Taylor's book, Eve and the New Jerusalem, published in 1982).

But the rise of modern industry often set men and women against each other, as
employers tried to use women as cheap labour to undermine men's traditional
skills and organisations, while men tried to exclude women from many skilled
trades. Within the working-class movement there were many reactionary ideas
about women, the worst perhaps being among the followers of Proudhon in
France, who said, 'Woman must be housewife or whore,' and wanted to exclude
women from the workforce altogether.

By 1850, the still young socialist movement was beginning to divide on the
question of women, and on the question of class struggle too. The followers of
Proudhon believed in small property and gradual economic reforms; the Owenites
turned to philanthropy and experimental communities; and as trade unions became
more stable and permanent many of their leaders wanted to co-operate with
capitalism instead of opposing it.

Marx and Engels, in their first important piece of political writing, the Communist
Manifesto of 1848, came down clearly on the side of both class struggle and
women's liberation. They rejected all utopian communities and ideas of benevolent
manufacturers or gradual reforms, insisting that only the working class could free
itself from the tyranny of capital. They ridiculed the reaction of the ruling class to
the shocking ideas of women's liberation:

'Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal
of the Communists . . . The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of
production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in
common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being
common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the
real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of
production.' (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848)

In the First International (known as the International Working Men's Association
in English), Marx and Engels argued against the anti-women ideas of other
political groups. They welcomed the affiliation of striking women silkworkers at
Lyons in 1869, and tried to have one of the strikers attend the Congress of the
International at Basle in support of a resolution on women's right to work and to
membership of the International; but this was prevented by the local section at
Lyons, under the influence of the anarchist Bakunin.

Both Marx and Engels were intensely interested in the history and origins of
women's oppression, though it was Engels who wrote the book they had both
planned, after Marx's death. By that time, the movement for equal rights for
women was well under way in England, and one of the most interesting things in
the book is Engels' comment on the question of legal equality:

'With regard to the juridical equality of man and woman in marriage: the
inequality of the two before the law, which is a legacy of previous social
conditions, is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of women . . .
The necessity, as well as the manner, of establishing real social equality between
the two will be brought out into full relief only when both are completely equal
before the law.' (Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884)

A hundred years on, when we have come much closer to complete legal equality
but are still a long way from women's liberation, Engels' words still ring true.

Since the days of Marx and Engels revolutionary socialists in the Marxist tradition
have tried to keep the link between socialist revolution and women's liberation,
despite the hostility of other tendencies in the labour movement and the reluctance
of many men in the revolutionary movement itself. It has been at the highest points
of class struggle, when the most working-class people have been involved, that the
link has been strongest. Many of these are dealt with in Tony Cliff's book, Class
StFuggle and Women's Liberation (published by Bookmarks in 1984), but the most
important is the Russian Revolution of 1917, because this did succeed, though only
for a few years, in creating a genuine workers' state.

In Russia, working women's struggles were sometimes ahead of socialist theory
from the start. Even before the first mass strike wave of 1905-7, women were a
substantial part of the new industrial labour force and had begun to take strike
action for specifically women's demands such as maternity rights, time off for
breast-feeding and laundry days, and the end of sexual abuse by management, as
well as for improved pay and other conditions. During the early years of the First
World War, women organised to fight falling wages and factory layoffs; they
formed unions of domestic servants, soldiers' wives, laundry workers and bakery
workers, as well as the older textile and manufacturing unions.

Leading members of the Bolshevik Party such as Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Klavdia Nikolaieva (a typesetter who had joined
the Bolsheviks as a girl of fourteen during the 1905 revolution) took part in
women's struggles and urged women to join the party. For a time in 1914 (until it
was raided by the police) and again in 1917, they published a paper for women,
Rabotnitsa or Woman Worker. They argued that working women could not and
should not join aristocratic and middle-class feminists in the women's movement
(who, like most of the Suffragettes in England, came out in full support of the 1914
war). They argued that working women should fight for and with their own class.
Women workers played an important part in the two revolutions of 1917, while
aristocratic and middle-class feminists were bitterly opposed to revolution,
especially the workers' revolution of October.

The newly-born soviet government of October 1917 soon took steps to carry out
the legal emancipation of women. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality were
legalised, the hold of the Orthodox Church over marriage was broken, and the
state took responsibility for the welfare of mothers and children.

But the Bolsheviks recognised that legal emancipation was only the first step to
women's liberation. Without far-reaching changes in social and economic
conditions, women could not obtain the freedom that the law promised them.
Russia was a huge and backward country with a mainly peasant population and
the hold of reactionary religious ideas was still strong. 'Women's Departments'
were set up in all areas to bring women together actively to change things.

For the oppression of women in the old Russian patriarchal family to end, state
provision for women and children had to become a reality, with maternity homes,
nurseries and schools for all. Experiments in collective living, too, were
encouraged, though the state had even less money to spare to support them than it
had for the essential facilities. The determination to tackle these vast problems was
there.

But by 1929, power in Russia had passed into the hands of a new ruling class
headed by Stalin, hostile to women's liberation and determined to do away with all
traces of workers' power--though they retained the rhetoric of socialism and
women's liberation to hide what they were doing. The Women's Departments were
closed down, and the progressive legislation of the 1917 revolution bit by bit
reversed. Many people continued to believe that Russia was still socialist, despite
an increasingly authoritarian regime; they had to pretend that women were
liberated in Russia because they drove tractors or mined coal. But to the few critics
of the retreat from socialism in Russia, the reversal of policies on women and the
family was one of the most obvious signs of the betrayal of the revolution. Leon
Trotsky, who was thrown out of Russia in 1929 for opposing the rise of the new .
authoritarian state, regarded the question of the family as crucial, and in his book,
The Revolution Betrayed (published in 1937), denounced the new family policies of
Stalin's regime.

It is the revolutionary socialist tradition that women's liberation goes hand-in-hand
with workers' power which we want to rebuild now. We reject all the other, anti-
women traditions that have existed in the labour movement, and the idea that
women's liberation can come about by other means. We want, some day, to be
able to carry on from where the Russian Revolution was forced to stop.

ARE THERE ANY ALTERNATIVES?

MANY PEOPLE think of feminism as an alternative to revolutionary socialism.
Because there is no organised feminist movement, no feminist programme, it is
often hard to tell what women mean when they call themselves feminist. The word
may simply mean that a person (woman or man) is committed to the cause of
women's liberation--and in that sense, as I have been arguing in this pamphlet, it is
fully compatible with revolutionary socialism.

But there has been, ever since the nineteenth century, a feminism that is definitely
incompatible with revolutionary socialism; indeed that is an obstacle to class
struggle and the participation of women in the socialist movement. This kind of
feminism centres on the view that all men are enemies of women, including
working-class men-- perhaps particularly working-class men, as middle-class
feminists seem a lot readier to denounce printers and miners for their sexist ways
than Tory politicians or captains of industry. Rather than trying to change the
outlook of working-class men, get them to support women in practice, and perhaps
change their ideas more radically too, such feminists simply say that there can be
no common cause of men and women in class struggle. In the early 1980s, this
view became widespread among feminists in Britain.

Yet it is remarkable how many women who thought of themselves as feminists
found themselves supporting the miners' strike in 1984-85, simply because miners'
wives were leading the way and a defeat for the Thatcher government seemed like a
good idea for feminists as well as socialists. Many feminists' ideas are vague rather
than clear-cut, and they do not accept all the consequences of a struggle 'against
men'. Many think of themselves as 'socialist feminists', but without accepting the
revolutionary tradition.

Most feminists are not in the least like the lesbian separatists pictured by the
media. Most lesbians are not like that either, since being attracted to other women
and wanting to live together doesn't necessarily mean lesbians have to be extreme
feminists in their political opinions. The opinion-formers in our society want to
create a picture of a threat that is at once political and sexual, and they play on
people's prejudices to create it.

But there is often among feminists a preoccupation with the personal and the
trivial--the way people (especially other women, as it happens) live, dress and talk.
In the 1960s, the slogan 'the personal is political' was a good one, because for
decades many questions crucial to women in the socialist movement had been
dismissed as private matters. But more recently it has become an excuse for
ignoring political arguments about class struggle because only the personal is seen
as political. The point is that the way most people live, dress or talk can't be
changed by moralising argument, but only by changing the world around us, by
working for socialist revolution; and if that is achieved, people will choose new
ways of living, dressing, talking (and loving) without instruction.

It is often considered essential to feminism to believe that women can only organise
and fight separately from men. Because men have for so long excluded women
from most organisations and struggles in the labour movement, women argue that
they can no longer take part in organisations with men, who will only try to
dominate them in the same old way. There is a problem about men's way of
running the labour movement without women, but it cannot be fought by
separatism, because this method avoids confronting men and insisting that they
give way on their 'own' ground.

The question of women's organisation is above all a tactical one. During the
miners' strike, for example, women were usually mobilised into support of the
strike by setting up a women's committee associated with a pit or village--like the
Women's Auxiliaries often set up in the American strikes and occupations of the
1930s. But in many areas women also sat on the strike committee, which was even
more valuable because they were gaining admission to the sort of discussions and
decisions from which they had previously been excluded. Both of these were good
tactics: what is wrong is to insist that women can only or must always organise
separately.

Perhaps there could be a women's movement which, while not feminist in the sense
of being against all men, could be a separate but equal part of the class struggle?
This depends on what kind of organisation you believe the working class needs so
as to be able to fight effectively. In the end, the outcome of a revolutionary
situation like that in Russia in 1917 (and many others that have not resulted in
successful revolutions, like Spain in 1936 or France in 1968) depends on clear,
decisive and often rapid action. A loose alliance of separate organisations with
different ways of working cannot just suddenly jell into an effective revolutionary
force at the eleventh hour; it is necessary, from long before a revolutionary
situation arrives, to build an effective revolutionary party with a mass membership.
Therefore, it is necessary to make sure that women become an important and
recognised force in any such organisation, not outside it.

Our outlook on workers' organisation is, therefore, different from that of the
Labour Party. Large numbers of women who have been active in the women's
movement are now being drawn into the Labour Party (and to a lesser extent the
wing of the Communist Party that is closest to the Labour Party). Why do we as
revolutionary socialists refuse to join the Labour party, where, it is often said, we
would have the chance to influence more people and even affect policies at the
parliamentary level?

We are not in the Labour Party because we do not believe that society can be
changed by a series of gradual steps in the right direction. The people who hold
power in our society will not be removed except by the opposite power, the
working class. Parliament does not have real power to transform society: as soon
as it starts treading on the toes of big business it is brought back into line. The
hope that the position of women in our society can be radically improved by
parliamentary action is an illusion. Even the legislation that we do have, the Equal
Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts, have been ineffective in themselves: the only
thing that gave the Equal Pay Act some teeth in the mid-1970s was that women in
hundreds of workplaces took action to see that they got what it promised.

All feminist calls for reform assume that the state is a neutral force which can
redress the balance between men and women by action from above. But the state is
not neutral, even under a Labour government, and the inequality of men and
women is too deeply rooted in our system of society, the capitalist system, to be
removed by a few reforms from above.

In addition to this, most reforms that feminists in and around the Labour Party
have suggested in recent years have proposed to sacrifice the interests of the
working class as a whole to the supposed benefit of women. Such is the 'feminist
incomes policy' which, they claim, would hold men's wages down and allow
women's to rise. But the experience of all incomes policies shows that while they
can hold 36 wages down, they cannot make employers redistribute the difference
to lower paid workers. Incomes policies have in practice weakened lower-paid
workers, such as the council manual workers who were made an example during
Labour's incomes policies of the late 1970s even though they were among the
lowest paid.

Another feminist proposal, that the state should guarantee an adequate income to
housewives and mothers whether they stay at home or go out to work, sounds like
a good idea for making women financially independent, but could well have the
effect of driving women out of the labour force in large numbers. The arguments
for sacking women first when there are to be redundancies would be
overwhelming, and many women would prefer to give up the unequal struggle for
jobs and go back to being isolated in the home. Reforms like this, that tinker with
the system without attacking the root of the problem, capitalism itself, could do a
lot more harm than good for women.

At the local level, many feminists have been involved in left-wing Labour councils,
and see their aim as being to improve life for women in their area. This has really
amounted to two things. On the one hand, some small amounts of money have
been given to voluntary organisations and women's groups of various kinds, about
which the media have made a quite disproportionate fuss, usually based on
outright misinformation. On the other hand, women's officers and committees
have been set up within the councils' own administration, often involving new
posts at senior executive level to prove that women's equality is being 'taken
seriously', with salaries in the #15,000-#20,000 bracket even though the total
amounts are still a drop in the bucket of council finances.

Despite the many hostile comments from the press and television on these 'socialist
republics' or 'parish communes', the fact is that they are quite unable to improve
life for the majority of women who live in these usually poor inner city areas.
Central government (already under Labour in the late 1970s, but increasingly so
under the Tories) has been starving these councils of the resources needed to keep
essential facilities such as housing, transport and jobs at an adequate level, let alone
improve them and supply other things that women need such as nurseries, out-of-
school play facilities for children and refuges for battered wives.

What makes it worse is that the measures taken by even the most well-intentioned
Labour councils are handed down from above and on their terms. Some Labour
councils provide special facilities for women's trade union committees, while
keeping shop stewards' meetings to an absolute minimum; others finance research
into the changing position of women in the labour market, but denounce council
typists who are trying to prevent the loss of jobs by themselves controlling the
introduction of new office technology.

In circumstances like these, the news that a Women's Adviser has been appointed
at #20,000 a year or that women councillors use official cars to collect their
children from school because they are too busy with committee meetings to wait in
long bus queues like other mothers, is bound to infuriate many working-class
women. Women reformers in local government have sadly often widened the gap
that separates them from the women they claim to represent.

CONCLUSIONS

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY is not claiming to have womens' liberation
all neatly wrapped up in a parcel with revolutionary socialism ready to be delivered
on the doorstep of the ruling class. We do aspire to build a party that can make the
unity of the class struggle and women's liberation a fact, a party that can one day
be at the forefront of the class struggle with a clear revolutionary perspective for
getting rid of capitalism and achieving workers' power. We want to encourage
other women to join us and to play an equal (not a separate) part in that struggle.

We do not accept the divisions between men and women that have been built into
the labour movement by men's selfishness and shortsightedness and by
bureaucratic manipulation from above. But we do not accept, either, the divisions
that many feminists would insist on, setting working-class men and women against
one another and letting the class struggle grow weaker as a result.

We believe that the Marxist explanation of the origins of class society and women's
liberation is the key to understanding the position of women, but we do not regard
this as a purely academic argument. As Marx said, 'The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.'

The revolutionary socialist tradition holds out a glimpse of how the world can be
changed for the better, in the vision of the few years following the Russian
Revolution of 1917 before Stalinism took over.

We do not believe that feminism, in the sense of a struggle of women against men,
holds out any such hope of changing things. *

SUGGESTED READING

Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. For recent
comment on the debates over Engels' classic work, see Chris Harman's article,
'Women's liberation and revolutionary socialism', in International Socialism 23
(1984), especially pages 37~10.

Tony Cliff, Class Struggle and Women's Liberation gives an analysis of the political
differences between feminists and socialists as the history of each developed.

Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us is a history of the role
that working-class women played in the struggle for the vote in Britain

Cathy Porter's Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography is a history of women in the
Russian Revolution as well as a biography of the best-known woman Bolshevik.

Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries is the classic history of women in the Paris
Commune of 1871.

All available from good left bookshops, or by post from
BOOKMARKS
265 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, London N4 2DE, England.

The Socialist Workers Party is one of a group of international socialist
organisations:
AUSTRALIA: International Socialists, GPO Box 1473N, Melbourne 3001.
BRITAIN: Socialist Workers Party, PO Box 82, London E3.
CANADA: International Socialists, PO Box 339, Station E, Toronto, Ontario.
DENMARK: Internationale Socialister, Morten Borupsgade 18, kld, 8000 Arhus
C.
FRANCE: Socialisme International (correspondence to Yves Coleman, BP 407,
Paris Cedex 05).
IRELAND: Socialist Workers Movement, PO Box 1648, Dublin 8.
NORWAY: Internasjonale Sosialister, Postboks 2510 Majorstua, 0302 Oslo 3.
UNITED STATES: International Socialist Organization, PO Box 16085, Chicago,
Illinois 60616.
WEST GERMANY: Sozialistische Arbeiter Gruppe Wolfgangstrasse 81, D-6000
Frankfurt 1.

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