"What is women's liberation? Aren't women free already?"
First of all, women are not free. In the U.S., women make only 75 cents for every dollar men do; abortions are harder and harder to get because of the right-wing onslaught against a woman's right to choose; affordable child-care is no where to be found; and "welfare mothers" are the target of Democrats and Republicans alike.
So why are women oppressed?
It is not because of "inherent" or biological differences. There were societies in which women's oppression didn't exist; the Iroquious, for example, could only declare war if a woman's council voted for it. Instead of life-long marriage, women could put their lovers' shoes outside their home, and the relationship was over. Children were cared for by everyone in the tribe, and it wasn't just the mother's individual responsibility.
Women's oppression today doesn't stem from male-chauvinism - the opposite is true - it stems from the family set up, and women's role in that set up. Women do the bulk of the housework and look after children, and we're told that this is their "natural" or "God-given" role. And since most people grow up in nuclear families, they take women's role in the family for granted. The people who don't fit in to the nuclear family - gays and lesbians for example - are stigmatized and labelled "bad" or "immoral."
The capitalists encourage people to live in these families through the media and the legal system because the family serves a useful purpose: it puts the cost of rearing the next generation of workers on individual workers' families. The bosses don't have to pay for day care, or food; and workers who accept sexist ideas are weaker when they fight the bosses.
Most working people accept, and indeed, long for, the family. With no control over their lives, or their life's work, the family seems to many to be a haven, a place where you can relax and be with those you love. But the family is often a prison, a hell, of spousal and child abuse. Abuse in the home occurs more often than not because of outside pressures - financial problems especially - and frustration or anger is taken out on the weaker family members. It's not the case that abuse in the home is mostly men beating their wives; surveys have shown that it is unemployed women who are most likely to beat their children.
The idea that the family is a haven - despite the brutal disappointments - will live as long as people have no control over their own lives, their work, and society as a whole.
Despite what the Republicans and the Christian right say, the family - and with it, women's oppression - has not always existed in the way it does today. In early human societies (see examples above) women lived in relative equality with men. They played an equal role with men in the process of production, and so equal rights were naturally accorded to them. Men and women formed partnerships with each other, but not individual households. The entire group - village or tribe - put in their fair share to produce what was necessary for the group to survive. Everyone was equally responsible for rearing children.
Because of the low level of technology, women couldn't control whether or not they would have children, and so jobs were often divided along lines of sex. But this sexual division of labor wasn't rigid - sometimes men would mind the children and women would participate in hunts.
But when the level of technology changed, so did women's position in society. Now, a tiny minority could live without their lives being consumed by back breaking toil. This male minority - male because women were weighed down by pregnancy and child care - took control of the surplus that society produced, and the system of mutual cooperation broke down. Society became divided into classes, exploiters and exploited; laws legitimizing exploitation were passed, and "armed bodies of men" - the state - arose to enforce these laws.
For the first time in human history, all children were not treated equal; some were the children of the surplus-holding minority, others were the children of the exploited majority. Private property arose out of the tiny minority taking control of society's surplus. Because of the division of society into haves and have-nots, the question inheritance became the crucial question in sexual relationships. Women were forced into monogamous marriages and subordinated to their husbands so that there would be no question as to who inherited what.
The splitting of society into hostile classes was, as Frederick Engels put it, "the world historic defeat of the female sex." But it wasn't just women who suffered - the majority of men were forced to work, often as slaves, for the new ruling class. The subordination of women coincided, and cannot be separated from, the subordination of the majority of men.
For centuries people lived in families based around agricultural production. Marriage was very often permanent, since the family was the center of production, and every member of the family helped produce the necessities of life. When capitalism first arose, it transformed society tremendously. Production was torn from the home and put into the factory; production was no longer the concern of individual families working independently of one another, it was the concern of thousands of people working together (most of whom were total strangers). Because of capitalism, society could now produce enough to free everyone from lives of toil; communal kitchens, free day care, and industrial laundries could free women from enslavement from the home.
This had a tremendous impact on the institution of the family. Wives of capitalists abandoned their productive role, and accustomed themselves to lives of leisure; their role was to look pretty and provide heirs. Doctors developed "theories" claiming that women were naturally submissive, passive, and maternal, while men were naturally strong and virile.
What happened to women in the ruling class was to eventually impact all women. As Marx argued, "the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class."
But the impact of the new ruling class family on the working class family was not immediate. Capitalists preferred to hire women because few women had an independent livelihood and could be forced to work for less. Getting a job at a factory opened up the possibility of being financially independent from their husbands. Engels observed that this "turned the family upside down. The husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks." Many women participated in strikes and the illegal trade union movement in the early days of the industrial revolution.
So why didn't the industrial revolution liberate women? Why did workers grasp for and cling to the family, which was modelled on the families of the rulers?
Wages and conditions in the early industrial system were absolutely horrible and many women and children were injured or harmed in these conditions. Those without families - the elderly, young children, or the unemployed - had no one and nothing to fall back on. It seemed the only way to get a better life for everyone was to demand a "family wage" and the "protection of women" from the hell of the textile factories, which was the majory employer of female labor. New legislation, combined with the textile industry's decline, pushed women out of the workplace and into the home, where they cooked, cleaned, and took care of the "bread winner" (the husband) and the next generation of workers (the kids).
The "family wage" was a myth - only about 1 in 5 workers ever earned enough to up their family, but the oppression it meant for working women was all too real.
The capitalists' profits depended on workers coming to work healthy enough to work, skilfull enough to operate machinery, and docile enough to obey foremen. It also saved them a bundle by making sure that these service were provided for free; that is to say, through the unpaid labor of millions of women. Responsibility and loyalty to the family also kept male workers from fighting back. Laws were passed to regulate marriages and births and the treatment of children. Homosexuality and any thing else that interfered or deviated from the new family was outlawed, and where it wasn't outlawed, it became taboo.
During and in the decades after World War II, capitalism experienced its most significant boom ever. The boom drew millions of women out of the home and into the work place; women today make up a permanent part of the workforce. Almost half of all women have jobs outside the home. This is crucial to women's liberation, because the workplace breaks women out of the isolation of the home, unites them with men and women, and places in their hands the power to stop the capitalist system and overthrow it all together.
So the fight for socialism is tied inextricably to the fight for women's liberation. In a socialist society, raising children would be the task of the whole society; communal laundries and cheap restaurants with good food would eliminate much of the "women's work" that women do; and affordable day care would be provided so that women could have jobs and be full, equal participants in running society as their male comrades.
Women's liberation has only been on the agenda for the majority of women workers in periods of revolutionary upheaval. The Russian Revolution de-criminalized homosexuality, gave women the right to an abortion on demand, and communal laundries and day care were provided. Divorce was made available because of the demand of either party. Because the revolution was isolated, and eventually defeated, the gains women made were taken away; under Stalin, homosexuality was re-criminalized, abortions were outlawed, and women were given medals for having large families.
So does that mean women have to "wait for the revolution" to make any headway? Far from it.
Socialists have historically the most committed to women's rights. International Women's Day - which used to be Working Women's Day - was first celebrated by the socialist parties of the Second International in 1911. It was women textile workers who began the demonstrations in February in 1917 that eventually toppled the Tsar. In Flint Michigan, women organized themselves into a Women's Emergency Bridge to beat back police attacks - and in the process, earned the respect of their striking boyfriends and husbands. Up until the Great Strike of 1984, the miners' union paper featured a 3 page pin-up in the middle. But when miners' wives and girlfriends became a central part of the year long fight to save their jobs, the pin-ups disappeared. Women gained confidence and joined men on the picket line and spoke out at meetings.
Struggle doesn't only give women more confidence to challenge their oppression - it makes male workers more sympathetic to their demands. And in a socialist society, after workers win the struggle for power, human relationships will be transformed. There won't be the inequality, poverty, powerlessness, and frustration that give rise to battering and rape. Women will be seen and treated as human beings, not passive sex objects.
"What will there be knew?", asked Engels.
"That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other consideration than real love, or refuse themselves to their lover from fear of economic consequences.
"When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody thinks they ought to do, they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion - and that will be the end of it."
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