Halo Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The observation by Doctor Samuel Johnson that, ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’ was recorded in 1763 in Boswell’s biography of Johnson. Well Doctor, you misogynist you, have you got egg on your face now because the first female Church of England archbishop of Canterbury has been appointed to the position? If that isn’t worthy of cheering around the flag-post what is? What …you didn’t know that and you don’t care? LOL. The only bishops of any value are those on the chess board.

A 2018 survey found that about ten million people identified as C of E. The C of E came into being because the English king at the time was told by the catholic pope that he couldn’t marry someone else so he said some rude words to the Vatican and made up his own religion so that that he could have as many wives as he wanted.

A religion that is basically irrelevant to the vast majority and has no impact on the daily lives of most is – whilst we continue to live in a social system that uses, or tries to use, religion as a method of control – arguably preferable to one that exercises a devastating impact upon the lives of those who blindly adhere to it.

***

‘Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!’ comes from a 1784 poem by Robert Burns, Man Was Made To Mourn: A Dirge. History is, unfortunately, littered with examples but what of Man’s inhumanity toward women in the name of religion? A September Daily Telegraph report stated that following a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in Afghanistan women were left to die because of Taliban rules forbidding unrelated men from having contact with them so all male rescue teams were forbidden to do so (tinyurl.com/2s3wbazf ).

Also in September In Morocco a feminist activist Ibtissame Lachgar was sentenced for the heinous crime (sarcasm) of ‘offending Islam’, to 30 months behind bars and a 5,500 dollar fine. She was arrested after posting online a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt with the word ‘Allah’ in Arabic followed by ‘is lesbian’ (tinyurl.com/55uj2f5z).

‘A fire on 11 March 2002 at a girls’ school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killed fifteen people, all young girls. Complaints were made that Saudi Arabia’s ‘religious police’, specifically the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, had prevented schoolgirls from leaving the burning building and hindered emergency services personnel because the students were not wearing modest clothing’ (tinyurl.com/mzcku99w ).

In Afghanistan a few years ago females between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one were imprisoned, for the heinous crime (more sarcasm) of having ‘failed’ a virginity test. The report said that that more than 200 young women and girls were incarcerated. Their release, it was said, would see them all expecting a future ‘full of shame, exclusion and poverty.’ ‘Although supposed to be imprisoned for only three months, many are held for a year or a year and a half’ (tinyurl.com/yz5uw7ke).

DC

Women, work and wages (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 28 April, a large number of schoolgirls spent the day in various workplaces up and down the land. Not because of a wish on the part of our capitalist exploiters to reintroduce child labour to the UK (although it could be argued that child labour never disappeared) but because a would-be charity called "Taking Our Daughters To Work" wished to "develop a forum whereby negative stereotypes about girls and their abilities are challenged and ultimately destroyed".

In a pamphlet entitled Taking our Daughters to Work: Exploring Tomorrow’s Choices, circulated to schools, employers and trades unions, the organisation argued that, due to social conventions instilled into them from birth, girls regard their career options as more circumscribed than boys do their own. Its aim is to encourage parents, teachers and employers to take schoolgirls aged 11 to 15 into a whole range of workplaces for the day, in order to widen the girls’ employment horizons.

In support of their case, the organisation cited statistics compiled by the Equal Opportunities Commission to the effect that, although women represent 45 percent of the current workforce, they account for less than one-third of managerial and administrative positions; and under 40 percent of professionally-qualified jobs. Over 40 percent of working women have no male colleagues, being employed in female employment ghettos, in what have come to be seen as women's jobs — such as typing and secretarial work, cleaning and catering.

Although this is the first time such a scheme has been attempted in Britain, Taking Our Daughters to Work ran a similar exercise in the USA in 1993, when nearly one million American girls took part. The project was greeted, according to their own literature, with enthusiasm by parents and employers, the media and politicians.

Economic imperative

It is the enthusiasm of employers that is of the greatest significance. No doubt many individual employers, as people, genuinely believe that women should be afforded the same opportunities as their male colleagues. But as managers of profit-making enterprises, they cannot treat the employment of women — or any aspect of Equal Opportunities — in a philanthropic manner. The concept of equal opportunities for women, and any initiative taken to further the concept, must be, and is, examined from the point of view of the gains, or likely costs, for the business in question. This is an economic imperative.

Anyone who doubts that this is so need only consider the question of childcare as an equal opportunities issue. During the mid-1980s — boom years for at least some British industry — considerable gains were made by women’s groups and trades unions campaigning for employer-sponsored childcare facilities. Nurseries sprang up in many areas, subsidised by employers, including those run by government departments and local councils. Employers banded together to run holiday playgroups; or issued childcare vouchers, supplied by a subsidiary company of Luncheon Vouchers Ltd. But in the recessionary 1990s, where the demand for an expanded labour force has gone away in most sectors, many schemes have foundered. Certainly, it is a lot more difficult now for a union to persuade an employer to start any new scheme or to increase its investment in an existing one. Labour is in plentiful supply; there is no longer a pressing business need to attract women, in general, into the workplace, so any benefits to a particular company has very often been outstripped by outlay.

The organisers of Taking Our Daughters to Work have recognised the economic imperative. Knowing that they had to get employer support if their scheme was to get off the ground they argued that "the organisations which recognise the skills potential of women will be the ones that benefit". In fact, they were so anxious to press the economic case for their idea, they fell quickly into the trap of making new stereotypes, to replace the ones that they are try ing to overcome, when they went so far as to say that "research has shown that women . . . are more flexible and adaptable and better at team-working, managing change and networking (than men)".

And it seems that quite a number of organisations have bought the line. Participants in the British scheme in 1994 included the BBC, Body Shop, ICI, the Industrial Society, London Underground and Sainsbury.

Of course, they could easily afford to take part. Although any potential benefits will take a long time to come through, the PR may well be valuable. And the cost of hosting a one-day seminar for a few schoolgirls is minimal. At the same time, a sop is thrown to women’s rights activists; and to those trades unions with a record of campaigning for equal opportunities, usually the white-collar unions and the general unions representing unskilled workers. And it enables businesses to do this without committing them to any further action, such as implementing the terms of the Equal Pay Act.

In 1992, the Equal Opportunities Commission found that women in full-time employment earned 75-79 percent of the average hourly earnings of their male counterparts. Groups like Taking Our Daughters to Work and many others, tend to regard that difference as a matter of discrimination. But it is also helpful, and accurate, to view it as a symptom of the exploitation of working people as a whole.

In any event, attempts to improve the lot of women — as with any attempt to reform capitalism — will meet with no success unless there are sound economic reasons for employers to agree to the particular measure being proposed. To use the childcare example again, a Treasury circular to government departments thinking of making such provision instructs Permanent Secretaries and Chief Executives to "ensure that a childcare arrangement returns value for money to (their) organisation". Ways of doing this include "balancing the savings in recruitment and training that result from retention of staff against the cost of providing the childcare arrangement" (Making a Case for Childcare).

Rate of failure

There are those who argue that the pursuit of Equal Opportunities within capitalism is not reformism per se, but will in fact lead to a real and radical shift in attitudes. This view ignores the rate of failure in the pursuit of Equal Opportunities.

The 1970 Equal Pay Act, as amended, makes different treatment of women over remuneration illegal. Yet the Equal Opportunities Commission figures quoted above make it quite clear that this very direct form of discrimination is still prevalent. And of course the campaign for equal pay did not begin in 1970. The Women’s Trade Union League was campaigning for fair treatment on pay, as on other matters, in the early 1900s.

Similarly, in spite of various employment acts, the 1976 Sex Discrimination Act, and the EC Equal Treatment and Equal Pay Directives, a 1994 report of the Office of Science and Technology states that girls accounted for just 22 percent of Physics A-level passes in England and Wales in 1991, 36 percent in Maths and 41 percent in Chemistry. Where women do opt for scientific subjects in Higher Education, the bulk read medicine or a biological science. Those going for other sciences or engineering are still heavily outnumbered by men. And in the engineering industry in 1990, 75 percent of clerical positions were occupied by women, against only 20 percent of administrative and professional posts, and a mere five percent of scientists and technologists jobs (The Rising Tide: A Report on Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, Office of Science and Technology, 1994).

The prime aims of the women’s liberation movement can be identified as a redivision of domestic labour and childcare, an end to the idea of "women’s work", an end to women’s dependence on men, and changes to the ideas relating to gender, sexuality and the family. No socialist can possibly argue with the need to achieve these aims. But — given all that has been said above — it has to be concluded that attempts to reform capitalism so as to achieve them are doomed to failure.

In our Declaration of Principles we state that "the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex". If the Declaration had been written in 1994, instead of 1904, we would have substituted "humanity" for "mankind" but the point remains the same. Men and women are not enemies. The exploiting men and women are the enemies of the exploited men and women. Only in a non-parasitical society, where the profit motive has been abolished, can women and men truly be free — and equal.

Paul Burroughs

Letter: Women's Movements (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women's Movements

It is seldom that the Socialist Standard gives cause for complaint on factual grounds, and also it seems rather churlish to quibble at anything in the lavish, and extremely interesting, 70th anniversary issue.

But in The First and Only Liberationists I read that “the idea that (women) might need a wider horizon than could be provided by a home and family had scarcely dawned”. And the writer also asks, “Who else (other than the founders of the Socialist Party) in 1904 was interested in the freedom of women?”

The answer is, women. The modern assumption that the women’s movement only started up recently is false. The evidence is that there have been women demanding “emancipation” or “equal rights”, as a sex, since the Eighteenth century. In America the First Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls in 1848 and resolved “that the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities”.

Other national conventions were held annually in America right through the nineteenth century and the Washington Convention in 1900 was dominated by the question of working class women and women’s position as wage-earners—“without political expression woman’s economic value is at the bottom of the scale . . . She must do better work than men for equal pay or equal work for less pay”. (Voices from Women’s Liberation) That such a situation still prevails today is proof of our Party’s contention that it is nothing to have a vote if you don’t use it properly.

If I can add something personal on this question, it is that as a women I am proud to be a member of this Party which has never treated me as a (mere) women, has never pigeon-holed me into some specifically “woman’s” work, but has always treated all members, white or black, male or female, as comrades in a common struggle.

C. Sultan 

Woking

Reply:

Thanks for the compliments, which are among very many received, on the Anniversary Issue.

In the context of that article it was not possible to enlarge on the point but “scarcely dawned” was not meant to imply that no one had questioned the  rôle of women in society. Rather that this questioning was not widespread. It is of course true that some women, and a few men, had been actively involved in campaigns for women’s rights over many years. For example the first leaflet on female suffrage had been issued in 1847. The vote was originally seen as a way of obtaining “social justice”. To the sometime scorn of the modern women’s movement its attainment became an end in itself.

The question “who else” was, at that time, interested in women was about political parties. Here the position taken by the SPGB at its formation, in 1904, was unique.

Editors.

Origins of patriarchy (2025)

Book Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. By Angela Saini. 4th Estate £10.99.

Friedrich Engels referred to the ‘overthrow of mother-right’ as ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’, meaning that women became subordinate to men and ‘the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude’. This implied an earlier time where women had far more power and authority, in matrilineal or matriarchal societies. The Socialist Party’s 1986 pamphlet Women and Socialism criticised this account on the grounds that there was no universal stage of matriarchy and that relationships between men and women have changed over time to meet the needs of society.

In this book Angela Saini makes a similar point, that early societies varied greatly, and ‘the emergence of patriarchy could never have been a single catastrophic event’. A lot of material, in different places and at different times, is covered, but often it is hard to draw firm conclusions.

Societies where descent is traced through the female line are found in many parts of the world, though rarely in Europe. The Khasi community in north-east India, for instance, is matrilineal, with a child belonging to her mother, and men do not have rights over property or children. But it is not matriarchal, as family authority rests with the mother’s brother, though this power is not absolute. Some men have objected to this system recently, but others have defended it. In North America the Seneca have adopted a patrilineal naming system, but tribal membership remains matrilineal, despite the efforts of missionaries and government agents to institute a more patriarchal system.

Unfortunately, the book’s main claims are let down by an unconvincing chapter on the status of women in Russia and Eastern Europe under Bolshevism, in what is termed here ‘state socialism’. Abortion was legalised in the USSR in 1920, though this was reversed under Stalin in 1936, in order to boost birth rates, and it was made legal again in 1955. East Germany saw a massive increase in the number of crèche places, and by 1959 almost every pharmacist in the Soviet Union was a woman. On the whole, though, patriarchy was ‘dented’ rather than smashed. Saini does not discuss this, but the division into rulers and ruled was of course not even dented (see chapter 3 of our 1986 pamphlet for more on women in Russia.)

In Iran many women supported the movement against the Shah, but the Islamic Republic clamped down on women’s freedoms, with abortion made illegal and the wearing of the veil being mandatory. As this and other examples show, patriarchy is ‘being constantly remade in the present, and sometimes with greater force than before.’ And patriarchy is not a single phenomenon, rather there are plural patriarchies, existing in different ways in different cultures.

Paul Bennett

Letter: Religion and Birth Control (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion and Birth Control

Dear Editors,

Termination of pregnancy and contraception are very difficult. It is misleading to link the two as the article on religion and birth control did in the October issue.

Contraception enables an individual to control family size and fertility if they wish to make this choice. Termination ends the life of another, although very small, individual.

If people stopped linking termination and contraception then maybe religious leaders would stop linking the two and hopefully realize that contraception is a good thing and that by more people having access to it without all the guilt there would be less terminations, less women dying in back-street clinics, less women becoming worn out at an early age from having many children, less deaths of infants, etc, etc.

The only religious people who will not be convinced by separating the two issues are idiots like the Pope who do not care about the unborn child, because once it is born it is then condemned to a life of poverty and even early death. The Pope and his cronies want to control the sexuality of worshippers and keep women uneducated and producing kids until they wear out.

Most Catholics I know do not agree with termination as the life of a baby is ended, however they nearly all use contraception, thinking that if the Pope cared about babies he would stop condemning contraception and positively encourage it.

It will surprise many with stereotyped views on pro-lifers that most of my religious friends support abortion and my humanist atheist friends are mostly against it.

The only way to stop termination is to make contraception easily available, give all kids a good sex education with an emphasis on equality, relationships, love, safety and respect for each other, an end to poverty, equality and choices regarding jobs and education for girls and women all over the world.

Also it is not just religious cultures that oppress women. Secular Western cultures have sick attitudes to women, on the whole we are just sex objects who must be slim and available for the use of men whenever they demand it. Women in the West are still lumbered with child care, have little choice about careers or staying at home. Capitalism forces us into crappy, underpaid jobs and at the same time we have to hold a family together. We can’t even choose not to go out to work because of capitalism. (And who wants to work for this system anyway?)

So it is not just the fundamentalists of the Vatican, Iran and the American Bible Belt who oppress women.

Ali Browning,

Bradford

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

$8 Million Gold-Plated Rolls Redefines Excess. Nothing says class warfare quite like an armored, gold-plated car that costs $8 million:

[Link.]

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.

[Dead Link.]

On Saturday night, as rioters in Tottenham threw fireworks and bottles at police officers, one man shouted, “This is our battle!” When asked what he meant, the man, Paul Rook, 47, explained that he felt the rioters were taking on “the ruling class.”

[Link.]

“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.” That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. Rich people are scared of global unrest, Frank reported, citing a survey by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of people with liquid assets of $1 million or more (translation: folks who have or can get their hands on $1 million in cash fairly easily) that says 94 percent of the wealthy are concerned about “global unrest” around the world. He noted: Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features:

[Dead Link.]

Starving parents are marrying off girls for food as famine devastates Africa. Nearly half of kids in Kenya and Somalia had not eaten at all for a day this week, research reveals today and desperate mums and dads are selling girls as young as nine for just £100. Under-18s cannot legally marry in Kenya and child brides face terrible abuse, but World Vision UK’s Philippa Lei said: “Girls can traditionally be sold for a bride price, cattle or food. But now girls are being sold off much earlier.

[Link.]

“We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?” Halima Mohammedi, an Afghan teenager whose love for another teenager, Rafi Mohammed, set off a riot by flouting their village’s tradition of arranged marriages. “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them.” Kher Mohammed, her father:

[Link.]

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to one organizer, a scrappy former bank teller named Wu Lijuan, there are at least 70,000 people seeking to regain their old jobs or receive monetary compensation, a sizeable wedge of the 400,000 who were laid off during a decade-long purge. Like many other state-owned companies, the banks slashed payrolls and restructured to raise profitability and make themselves more attractive to outside investors. “They tossed us out like garbage,” Ms. Wu, 44, said before a recent protest, scanning fellow restaurant patrons for potential eavesdroppers. “All we’re asking for is justice and maybe to serve as a model for others who have been wronged.” For a government determined to maintain social harmony, the protests and petitioning are vexing. Compared with farmers angry over seized land or retired soldiers seeking fatter pensions, the bank workers — educated, organized and knowledgeable about the Internet — are better equipped to outsmart the public security agents constantly on their trail.

[Link.]

“Women demand men have houses and cars, why can’t men demand women be virgins?” asked one man on the Tianya site. “So, greedy women, remember, you have to protect your hymens, because those are big dowries for you to exchange for money.” Some men who were interviewed agreed about the importance of finding a virgin. “I really care about virginity,” said Xia Yang, product manager for a technology company. “If you go to buy a cellphone, of course you’d want to buy a new cellphone. Who would spend the same amount of money to buy an old cellphone that’s been used for two years?” The virginity debate also underscores a contradiction in modern China: As the nation becomes more freewheeling, there remains a deeply conservative core.

[Link.]

The report listed numerous areas in which China’s military is on the march. China is deploying a new class of nuclear-powered submarines equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is pouring money into space warfare systems and cyber-warfare capabilities. It is developing a “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missile. China has “the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world,” the report said. Beijing “now possesses one of the largest” forces of surface-to-air missiles in the world, it added. And it has the “largest force of principal combatants, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships in Asia.”

[Link.]

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

While the world has been devouring reality television shows, many Argentines have been opting this Christmas for reality board games, such as Eternal Debt, involving the International Monetary Fund.

[Paywalled Link.]

For seven years, Jennipher was forced to breastfeed the puppies of her husband’s hunting dogs. After drinking and smoking heavily, Nathan Alowoi would appear at the marital bed, bind his young wife’s legs and hands together and force the mewling animals to her nipple. He had handed over two cows to his father-in-law as part of the “bride price” for his new wife. So, he reasoned, if the cows were no longer around to provide milk then his new purchase would have to provide for the pups. “I had to feed them all through the night; then in the morning he would untie me,” his wife, now 26, explains matter-of-factly.

[Link.]

Israel will begin distributing its entire population with gas masks in two months, though no reason has officially been given by the Israeli government.

[Dead Link.]

Most Britons have little confidence in official statistics and believe that they are distorted by politicians, according to a survey for the Financial Times. Only about 10 per cent of adults believe that official figures are accurate, while a similar proportion think that figures are produced without political interference, according to the survey conducted by Harris.

[Paywalled Link.]

That isn’t stopping some restaurants from putting together the usual intricate New Year’s dinner — and in some cases, charging astronomical prices. At New York’s Aureole, for example, diners will be getting a five-course meal including big-eye tuna sashimi, chestnut ravioli, Canadian lobster, and N.Y. strip loin. The price: a mind-boggling $650.

[Link.]

The Family Way (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The position of women in society is one of the most significant examples of social, political and economic subordination; various major social movements have arisen committed to changing this situation, ranging from the Liberal feminism of the Suffragettes to the biological determinism of one of the current supporters of “Women's Liberation”. Women as a group share a common oppression for three main reasons: firstly, as potential child-bearers they lack the power of completely determining when and in what circumstances they will bear children; secondly, right across the class structure women are found in subordinate positions in economic and political organisations; lastly, women are socialised and educated to take a domestic role and to be attractive to men rather than to be part of economic activity outside the family.

In all capitalist economies there is a difference in power, income, status and responsibility which operates against women and turns them into a disadvantaged group. (Women are obviously also disadvantaged in other forms of society too. but in this article attention is focussed on capitalism). It is to the property relations of capitalism that we must look in order to explain this all-pervasive inferiority of women. Women's condition is an historically changing aspect of the material situation — the division of labour has developed from division based on sex. natural predisposition, physical strength and so on to a formal institutional division firmly based on the ownership of property. The structure of the present-day family and the role women play within it and in society at large, have been determined by past developments in the organisation of production and will continue to change in response to future changes in capitalism until eventually they are transformed in socialist society.

The transition period from feudalism of capitalism was a crucial one in this long process of change — the lives of women were inevitably profoundly affected. Engels pointed out that the monogamous family had come into being as a result of economic development. In The Origin of the Family. Private Property and the State, he writes “Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural but on economic conditions, viz: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism”. He goes on to elaborate on the change for women that these larger changes involved:

“Supremacy of the man in the family and generations of children that could be his offspring alone and were destined to be the heirs of his wealth — these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be the sole object of monogamy . . . Monogamy then does by no means enter history as reconciliation of man and wife, and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other".

The transition in Britain, from feudalism to capitalism destroyed and undermined many relations in the old society, not least of which was the structure of the family. Out of the upheaval were to come the bourgeois proletarian family. Under feudalism, land had been the immediate source of life for rich and poor alike — men and women had lived in predominantly self-sufficient rural households. The feudal family was the unit of production and women played an important and acknowledged role in the survival of the household. However, by the 1640s there were an estimated half million workers who had been ‘freed from the soil’ and their lack of property became the basis for the accumulation of wealth by the growing capitalist class. In Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels wrote 

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his '‘natural superiors’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. than callous ‘cash payment’ . . . (It) has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” 

The landless poor, their ranks swollen by dispossessed and unemployed craftsmen and tradesmen, were forced to rely entirely on selling their labour power. As a result a new family structure came into being, and many women found their lives profoundly altered. They could no longer combine child-bearing and rearing with their work: without land they could not contribute in the same way to their families’ livelihood. The family, in fact, ceased to be the basic economic unit and wives became dependent to a far greater extent on their husbands. Many peasant women became financial liabilities to their menfolk and the family was undermined as an institution.

Just as the lives of the peasant women were changing as the proletarian family was forced into existence, so too the growing affluence of the bourgeoisie meant that they developed a lifestyle and a family structure appropriate to their new economic roles. As the division of labour became more complex and specialised, the successful craftsman or tradesman hired others to work for him: his wife tended to withdraw from her previous activities in the workshop and she became increasingly confined to the home. The roles of husband and wife became more specifically differentiated and the home ceased to be a productive part of the community. “The external world of work became the sphere of the man exclusively. The internal world of the family and the household was the proper business of the women . . . Not to work, for the women of the middling people became the mark of class superiority at the very moment when their men were establishing work as the criterion of dignity and worth” (Women, Resistance and Revolution, Sheila Rowbotham). The administration of the household lost its public character and women were excluded from participation in social production.

Thus, as feudalism gave way to capitalism women's lives changed radically and they found themselves increasingly at a disadvantage in the new organisation of industry. The process was a continuing one, affecting different groups of women in very different ways. For some the separation of the workplace from the home reduced their productivity and limited their role. For others, the introduction of a new machine excluded them from production, or alternatively their position in the guilds and crafts organisations was weakened sufficiently to drive them out, and trades which had been reserved for women were taken over by men. Yet other women moved out of the search for work outside the home altogether and into leisure and domestic isolation. “Modern industry in overturning the economical foundation on which was based the traditional family and the family labour corresponding to it. had also loosened all traditional family ties” (Marx. Capital. Vol.l)

Women’s position in society and their role within the family have changed greatly in the past 400 years, and they will continue to change as capitalism itself develops. However, so long as capitalism remains, the exploitation of women will also remain Not until we establish a system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means of production will everyone — both women and men — be able to realise their full potential.

J.S.

What is women’s liberation ? (1978)

From the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women are not inferior to men. They are quite capable of participating to the same extent as men both in the production of wealth and in the general running of social affairs. That they do not do so today is not due to any inherent disability but to their having been denied the same opportunities as men to acquire the skills needed for such participation. This may seem to be stating the obvious, especially in the columns of a socialist publication, but there is a widespread popular prejudice, reflecting itself in discriminatory practices, which denies this.

An increasing number of women have come to resent and oppose this prejudice and discrimination in a movement which has become known as Women’s Liberation — misleadingly since this suggests that the disappearance of these anti-women prejudices and practices would amount to the liberation of women. Which would be far from being the case as all the demands of the women’s movement, even the most radical, are compatible with capitalism and in fact amount to no more than demanding the creation of conditions that would permit women to compete on the labour-market with men.

The capitalist state has long accepted equality of women with regard to the vote and property ownership and has recently legislated to try to ensure equality over wages, recruitment, promotion, pensions and social security. Socialists, who understand how the economic laws of capitalism function, have doubts about how effective legislation can be in ensuring equality of wages as long as the quality of the labour power of many women is impaired by the discrimination they suffered when they were brought up and educated. In these circumstances to force employers to pay equal wages for unequal labour powers can only lead to them choosing not to employ the poorer quality — to increased unemployment amongst women.

Paying “wages” for housework (presumably by the state) would come up against the same economic laws of capitalism and lead to a reduction in wages generally since the wage of a man with children at present includes an element for maintaining the family. If this were paid directly by the state then the employer would no longer have to pay it. This was long a trade union objection to family allowances which, now that they are paid direct to the mother, are a sort of “wage” for housework.

It is a recognition of this harsh economic fact that the skills of many women are at present inferior to those of many men that has led some sections of the women’s movement to go even further and challenge the way women are brought up and educated. They complain that, from the earliest age, girls are taught to consider themselves as the “weaker sex” and to concern themselves with activities connected with the home rather than with more outward-looking activities reserved for boys.

Of course this handicap is not insurmountable and many women have overcome it but it still remains an obstacle which results in women being at a disadvantage with men when competing on the labour-market. On the other hand, it leads to women accepting jobs that are more like the activities they were brought up to consider a women’s role such as teaching, nursing and being secretaries, thus reinforcing the prejudice that it is only these jobs that women are capable of doing.

It is in this sense that some sections of the women’s movement are quite logical, in terms of the aim of achieving equality of opportunity for women to compete with men, in directing their criticisms against the way in which girls are at present brought up. But however radical their proposals in this connection may be — and they involve a complete revision of all children’s books and even nursery rhymes — these still remain compatible with capitalism.

The same goes for other demands like challenging the necessity of a woman taking her husband’s name on marriage and the replacement of "Mrs” and "Miss” by a common "Ms”. There is in fact no way in which the current practices can be rationally defended once the premise that woman are human beings in their own right who should enjoy the same treatment as men is accepted, but who would argue that their abolition would pose a threat to capitalism?

Another of the handicaps women face when competing with men in the labour-market is their biological nature as child-bearers which requires them, whenever they have children, to withdraw from working for wages for a while. The women’s movement proposes as the solution here the provision of more nurseries including at the place of work; to which neither employers nor the capitalist state have any objection in principle and which they are often prepared to provide, even if as inadequately as all so- called “social services” under capitalism.

The demand of the more radical sections of the women’s movement for "free contraception” and “free abortion on demand" is also in the end a proposal to overcome this handicap to equal competition. For, if implemented, one of its aims would be to permit women, like men, to engage in sex without having to worry about their wages career being unexpectedly interrupted by having to bear children.

To say that the demands of the women’s movement are compatible with capitalism is not to say that these demands are not worth having (especially those concerning the treatment of women as equal human beings), but is to answer those who mistakenly argue that these demands are inherently anti-capitalist and that the women’s movement is therefore somehow implicitly socialist.

Capitalism is a system of society based on the exploitation of wage and salary earners for a profit. All wealth, including that portion which under capitalism takes the form of profits, is produced by the application of human labour power to Nature-given materials. The more productive workers are, the more profits they can produce. This is why capitalism as an economic system is not interested in the language or the skin colour or the sex of workers; it is interested only in their productive capacity.

Capitalist employers are now coming to realise that discrimination against women denies them a huge source of productive talent which they could be using to increase their profits; how many women who would make good mechanics, engineers or scientists are denied the opportunity to work in these fields because of out-dated prejudices and practices inherited from the patriarchal societies that preceded capitalism (and which capitalism was itself in its early days when family businesses were the predominant form) and from the religious dogmas that went with them?

This is why modern capitalism could easily tolerate, in fact would positively welcome, equality of opportunity for women in the labour-market. It could also tolerate even the radical changes in family structures that achieving this fully would have to involve. Despite the dubiously scientific psychology of those who argue with Wilhelm Reich that capitalism requires the patriarchal family in order to breed the authoritarian and repressed personalities needed to prevent people challenging it, capitalism could — and does — accept what used to be called “free unions” in which the man and woman don’t bother to get a licence from the state or church to live together and in which they treat each other as equal partners. Indeed the vast majority of those who practice this — which of course will be the basis of relations between the sexes in socialism — are not socialists but supporters of capitalism and even members of the capitalist class itself.

Capitalism, in other words, could "liberate” women if "liberation” is to be restricted to meaning the equal treatment of women with men on the labour-market and, as a condition for this, in the home too. If this is seen as a step forward for women even within capitalism, it does not represent the real liberation of women.

If we accepted that it is then we would have to accept that men — or rather, to be precise, those men, the great majority, who are forced to work for a wage or salary to gain a living, the men of the working class — are already liberated. Which denies that capitalism is a system based on the exploitation and oppression of the working class in which the producers are wage slaves in the sense that they are economically dependent on the class of capitalist employers to whom they must sell their mental and physical energies in order to live. The implementation of the full programme of the women’s movement would leave women equal wage slaves with men.

Real liberation for the women and men of the working class can only be achieved through the establishment of socialism — by the conversion of the means of production and distribution into common property under the democratic control of the whole community. On this basis the wages system — working for an employer for a wage or salary — would be abolished and the production and distribution of wealth proceed on the basis of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs". Women and men would cooperate with each other in order to produce an abundance of wealth to which they would then individually have free access according to need. Individual free access for all members of society, including women and children, to consumer goods and services will put an end once and for ever to the economic dependence of women on men and of children on parents which so poisons relationships today.

In socialism women would participate equally in the running of every aspect of social life. An equality of women with men is, we have argued, theoretically compatible with capitalism but it would then only be an equality in wage slavery, leaving untouched the fundamental inequality between the women and men of the capitalist class on the other. Women's equality will only acquire real meaning in socialism where all humanity would be liberated, freed from the economic slavery of the wages system and from the inevitably anti-human operation of capitalism and its production for profit. This is why we argue that real “women’s liberation’’ can only be achieved as part of the general human liberation that the establishment of socialism will bring.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not support the women’s movement nor advocate its demands, not because we are necessarily opposed to the demands but because it is our general policy not to advocate reforms of capitalism however desirable they may seem.

As a matter of fact we agree entirely with the philosophy behind the women’s movement that women are not inferior to men and should be treated as equal human beings. This is an integral part of the socialist case, dating from the early part of the 19th century when the Utopian Socialists were amongst the pioneers of women’s equality.

So we don’t advocate women’s equality under capitalism because we don’t advocate reforms of any kind. And we don’t advocate reforms because we don’t want to attract the support of people who merely want to reform some aspect or other of capitalism. History has shown that parties which try to combine advocating reforms with advocating socialism end up by becoming reformist organisations which forget altogether about socialism.

If we were to advocate equality for women under capitalism we would run the risk of attracting the support of those who wanted this change without wanting socialism. That this would be a real danger can be seen from our demonstration above that not one of the demands of the women’s movement is incompatible with capitalism. To the extent of course that we succeed in propagating socialist ideas we combat prejudice and discrimination against women under capitalism, since becoming a socialist involves among other things discarding such prejudices and practices. The spread of socialist ideas under capitalism will thus help breakdown prejudice and discrimination against women. But it will also pave the way towards the establishment of socialism which will, in the words of Clause Four of our Declaration of Principles, mean the “emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.

Adam Buick

Halo Halo! (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Dawkins says, ‘I’m phobic’. Apparently the things that trigger his phobia are women being whipped for the crime of being raped, or for being out with a male friend; stoned to death for adultery; subjected to genital mutilation; forced to cover their hair and faces, leaving only a slit for the eyes, and compelled to stay indoors, while boys roam free (whyevolutionistrue.com 10 August).

The Iranian Tehran Times strap-line is ‘Straight Truth’. On 30 July an article, written by a female, was published under the headline, ‘No other religion defends rights of women as much as Islam’. This is not believed to be a parody on the part of the writer or the publisher.

The Guardian (13 September) has ‘Women in Iran face up to 10 years in prison if they continue to defy the country’s mandatory hijab law, under harsher laws awaiting approval by authorities. Even businesses that serve women without a hijab face being shut down.’

‘The stricter dress code, which amounts to gender apartheid’, UN experts said, comes one year after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested for wearing the Islamic headscarf incorrectly and then beaten to death by police, which led to the largest wave of popular unrest for years in Iran.’

‘A new sculpture, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, has been designed to celebrate women who wear hijabs. The artwork, called Strength of the Hijab’ – was Strength through Joy considered, do you think? – ‘will be installed in the Smethwick area of the West Midlands in October. It is believed to be the first sculpture of a woman wearing the traditional Muslim head covering. The sculpture is five metres (16 ft) tall and weighs about a tonne’.

Can you calculate the weight of oppression women face every day? (BBC News 19 September)

In a Newsweek interview, (20 September) Jamileh Alamolhoda, wife of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, said: ‘Men in Iran prefer not to ask their spouses to work or bring money home. Women are regarded as persons sharing love with men in the position of mother, spouse or daughter…

You might find it very exciting and interesting that women in Iran have not fought for their rights because ‘they already enjoy their rights.’ All said straight-faced!

Middle East Eye (29 September) reports that, ‘At the beginning of the new academic year, Iran’s health ministry told medical students they were banned from having curly hair and wearing bracelets. Female medical students not complying with the Islamic hijab law can find themselves downgraded. They should not wear false eyelashes, have nail extensions, tuck their trousers into boots or wear lace socks. Also banned are visible tattoos and piercings.’

Prohibited as well: ‘clothes with printed images of women, love sentences, swearing, comic and meaningless pictures, anti-religious symbols, logos of rap, and heavy metal bands.’

In early November the Islamic Republic of Iran takes over the Chair of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum.

DC

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.” The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million. “It’s a very good country for the rich man. Chauffeurs, servants, big houses. The question is, who is suffering? The common man.” :

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The anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom party (PVV) won 24 seats and third place in the Dutch national election last month, says he is forming international alliances to launch branches of his Islamophobic party across the Western world. Almost 1.5m Dutch people voted for the PVV in June. “The message, ‘stop Islam, defend freedom’, is a message that’s not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world.”

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The United Nations estimates that each year 5,000 mostly Muslim women and girls are shot, stoned, strangled, stabled, burned, or smothered by family members with the intention of cleansing shame from the family’s name. While most of these crimes occur in the Middle East and South Asia, immigration is taking them around the globe.

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Fears are growing for the fate of thousands of young girls in rural Mauritania, where campaigners say the cruel practice of force-feeding young girls for marriage is making a significant comeback since a military junta took over the West African country. Aminetou Mint Ely, a women’s rights campaigner, said girls as young as five were still being subjected to the tradition of leblouh every year. The practice sees them tortured into swallowing gargantuan amounts of food and liquid - and consuming their vomit if they reject it.

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As 14-year-old Nguyen Hoang Anh was being branded with hot irons, had solvents poured in his wounds and had his teeth pulled out with pliers, those who heard him ignored his cries. In most countries, suspicions of any kind of child abuse, let alone such a horrific case, would rouse a small army of social workers and police. Vietnam, however, has no such public system and only loose laws protecting children and other vulnerable people. “We don’t consider beating a child to be violence against children,” concedes Nguyen Hai Huu, director of the Ministry for Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs’ child-protection unit.

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An Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares, reports said Saturday, after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names. Two judges at the Bombay High Court on Friday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha. “Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to Indian newspapers.

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Life and Times: Behind the crime (2023)

The Life and Times column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

We all make bad decisions. Sometimes the consequences aren’t that bad, but sometimes they are. That may depend on the circumstances at the time, but it may also depend on the long-term build-up to the decision. This came out clearly in a recent BBC radio programme which looked at the life of a woman whose bad decision – in fact whose series of bad decisions – caused her to end up in prison.

Marriage, abuse and incarceration

Sinem was the daughter of a Turkish family who had fled from persecution in their own country to settle and start a new life in the UK. She told us that, as a young girl, she did well at school but found it hard to fit in with others of her age largely due to the strictures of her home background. This sent her somewhat off the rails. As a teenager she was found in bed with the son of another Turkish family and, given the culture, that meant only one thing – marriage. She quickly had children, which, though it somehow made her feel more secure, did not satisfy her and she managed to enrol on a university course and get a degree. But employment was hard to find and she eventually took a job as a prison officer – in a men’s prison.

This is when things really started to go downhill. Her abusive husband was violent to her and she decided she had to leave him. But in doing that she lost the extended family support she had previously had to help look after her children. This meant she had to reduce her hours of work, and this caused her acute financial difficulty. To be able to pay her rent and other expenses she fell into debt. And this triggered another bad decision. She started smuggling drugs into the prison she was working in to raise money. Inevitably perhaps she was found out and arrested.

But it’s what happened then that, as a listener to this programme, I found particularly interesting and noteworthy. When her smuggling activity was discovered, she was not shunned or blamed by her fellow workers in the prison but treated with great understanding and compassion. Though she had, in a sense, betrayed them, during her arrest they carried on supporting her and treating her like the human being fallen on hard times they knew she was. And when she herself was prosecuted and sent to prison, they carried on keeping in touch with her.

Understanding and compassion

This behaviour by her co-workers seems to accord well with the view now widely expressed by writers and commentators that the age-old idea of an inevitably ‘nasty’ human nature is no more than a myth and that, given half the chance, human beings will be kind to, cooperative with, and supportive of one another – including, and perhaps especially, when someone is ‘in trouble’. Rutger Bregman’s recent massively influential work, Human Kind, for example, argues that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal, kind-hearted and cooperative, something that seems to be confirmed by what happened in Sinem’s case. And Sinem’s incarceration also then turned out positive for her. In the open prison she was sent to, again she found enormous support, especially from the ‘mentor’ assigned to her. This helped her to recover from being the ‘broken person’ she said she was and to be then granted a day release arrangement to begin studying for a further degree and afterwards, when released completely, to end up as a university lecturer in criminology.

So a sort of happy ending. But a lucky one too, since, as the programme pointed out, we are all profoundly marked by the string of experiences that constitute our life. And of course in many cases this does not have a happy ending. In Sinem’s case the earlier experience of a repressive culture, an oppressive partner, and then the pressure of poverty led to an act which could have seen her life spiral entirely out of control. The fact that it didn’t was, to a large extent, due to the kindness of others. This made her realise that, regardless of the ‘crime’ she’d committed, some people were on her side. And this made it possible for her to gain sufficient strength to make a relatively stable life for herself and her children, and also to help educate others.

Autonomy and cooperation

If we look more widely, how many times, in the society we live in – a society that is so advanced in technology and productive capacity but oh so backward in the way it makes use of these things – does lack of money and/or lack of the power and autonomy over their own lives (the two ‘lacks’ often going together) limit or remove an individual’s control over their own life, their freedom of choice, their ability to interact cooperatively and, above all, to make the ‘right’ decision? And how much more likely is it that, in the society organised on the basis of ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’ that socialists argue for, the cooperative ‘nature’ of humans will prevail. And how true too is the writer Tine De Moor’s statement that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’.

Howard Moss

Socialist? Feminist? (2001)

Pamphlet Review from the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the Ashes of the Old Century, A Better World’s in Birth . By Andrea Bauer. (64 pp. $4.50 from Red Letter Press, 409 Maynard Ave. S., Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98104, USA.)

This is the Political Resolution adopted by the 1999 convention of a US trotskyist organisation called the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP).

I’m not sure which “better world” the title of this pamphlet is referring to, but it is certainly not planet Earth. This is a world where the state capitalist dictatorships of the Soviet bloc were “workers states” and “. . . societies in which the profit system had been overthrown and production and distribution were organized essentially in the interest of working people”. A world where “nationalization of the credit system” is a socialist demand. A world where the working class must be led and directed by “trained, dedicated revolutionaries” rather than rely on our own conscious actions. Most unbelievably of all, a world where workers “. . . respond with anger and pressure, not cynicism and apathy, when the Second Internationalists (Labour and Social Democratic parties) fail to act as their representatives”.

Its somewhat upsetting that the FSP styles itself as a “socialist, feminist” organisation. An organisation which regards itself as feminist while defending state capitalist regimes as “workers states” should ask itself some questions. As a system of society in which the FSP claim the profit system had been overthrown we should expect women to have liberated themselves from the shit capitalism throws (disproportionately) on them. Was this really the case though? Not quite:

“. . . women in Eastern Europe lived under a system of formal, legislated equality. Women had the legal right to work, and most barriers to women’s employment were lifted. Mandated equality, however, is not the same as freedom. Women were not given a choice of lifestyle, but were obligated to work. Since “equality” was imposed by the state, there was no public dialogue about the changes in women’s roles, and sexism and discrimination persisted, both in the public and domestic spheres. Women were still expected to do all of the child rearing and housework, for example, while working the same hours as men.”

In Romania, women were required to bear four, and then later five, children; many died from illegal abortions, or were allowed to bleed to death if they refused to reveal the names of illegal abortionists. (http://civnet.org/journal/issue3/cfbeco.htm)

Life for working class women in the state capitalist/”communist” states was a life not a million miles away from that of a working class woman in the openly capitalist “west”. What sort of liberation is offered by the “workers states” which the FSP see as a model for socialism if we are just going to continue being wage slaves and women are going to continue to be crushed by the burdens of a patriarchal class society?

Even the high percentage of women in national legislatures and public office in eastern bloc countries relative to the west is deceptive when comparison is made with percentages of women in the Party bureaucracy:

“In the bodies which did have real power—the communist parties’ central committees, for instance—there were almost no women” (http://www.oska.org.pl/english/womeninpoland/perpectives/2.html).

Just like the western states these “workers’ states” were systems of minority-class economic, political and social domination, with male authority figures at the top. That women are suffering disproportionately in the changeover period following the collapse of the eastern state capitalist bloc and losing many of what gains were won under state capitalism is an argument for abolishing the capitalist system altogether, not going “back to the future” to a “workers’ paradise” that never existed.

Ben Malcolm

Tiny (URL) Tips (2009)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

 Who would have thought a wee little packet of fake blood could threaten to unravel an entire culture. But so great is the threat of the “Artificial Virginity Hymen” — a kit that helps women fake their virginity — that prominent Egyptian conservatives are calling for an all-out ban. Not only that, they are also demanding the exile of anyone who traffics it.

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“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

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The gap between wealthiest 10 percent and the rest of America is worse than at any time on record. Two thirds of all income gains from 2002-7 went to the top 1 percent. The Walton family alone is worth more than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. Wal-Mart is a major player in the “dead peasants insurance” game; it’s alleged that dead peasant insurance payouts are used for executive bonuses:

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Amnesty International has highlighted a case of a man facing execution in Texas. The human rights group has revealed a Texas man faces execution after jurors at his trial consulted the Bible when deliberating his fate:

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  Israel is making preparations to carry out military attacks in Iran after December, a French magazine reported overnight Wednesday:

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That Haiti needs the attention cannot be overstated. Unemployment hovers at around 70 percent, experts

say, and over half of the population lives in extreme poverty. Violence broke out in June as students demanded an increase in the minimum wage to $5 from $1.75 — which were daily rates, not hourly ones. Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh, make it so appealing:

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When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism. About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about Capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

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We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings…The rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones was just a logical step forward in the long-standing Republican effort to lock Americans out of the nation’s courthouses, an effort undertaken on behalf of corporate supremacy. A woman is gang-raped by her fellow employees at government contractor KBR. The company says her contract prohibits her from seeking justice in court.

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Women’s Lib has got it Wrong (1974)

From the July 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Baden-Powell wrote a book for young men called Rovering to Success in which the Rocks to beware in the Voyage of Life were drink, horses, irreligion, cuckoos — and women. “Cuckoos” meant holders of all political views other than raw patriotism, and of women Baden-Powell wrote:

This means on the part of the man a deep respect and tender sympathy for them, coupled with a manly strength of mind and strength of body with which to stand up for them . . . and even, on occasion, to help them against their own failings.

A main step to happiness in this direction is to select the right kind of girl. There are woman and there are dolls . . . You have got to catch yourself up in little bits of selfishness on your part, such, for instance, as grousing at the food because it isn’t exactly to your liking, and that sort of thing. Look at things from her point of view.

That was written in 1922. As an illustration that attitudes have not altered very much, a 1972 book on professional footballers called The Glory Game listed their answers to “Do you help in the house?”:

Jennings : I never help in the house. I couldn’t change a nappy. I’ve never washed a dish. She’s never asked me to. I wouldn’t expect her to, neither would she. 

Kinnear : I just want my wife to be a woman, you know, bring up the kids. I’d be the boss, but I'd ask her opinions. 

Pearce : The bloke has to be in charge. A wife shouldn’t be equal. I do the decorating but the baby’s hers. She looks after it.

This is part of one half of the population talking normally about the other half, and it would be surprising if the victims did not cut up rough and talk of “liberation”. The titles of Women’s Lib books are accurate reflections of Baden-Powell and the footballers: Woman's Estate, The Female Eunuch, The Captive Wife. Add to domestic servitude the fact that women are disabled throughout society — excluded, regarded as cheap labour, required to fall in with sexual expectations or be ridiculed. The case for ending such a gross inequality is self-evident to Socialists. The question is whether the Women’s Liberation movement has an analysis and policies which will end it.

Groups and Demands

Women’s Lib came into existence in the late nineteen-sixties. Of course “feminist” organizations were in being long before, for particular purposes like that of the National Union of Women Teachers which ceased to exist when equal pay was granted. Juliet Mitchell, in Woman's Estate, says of the suffragettes:

And indeed when in 1918 in England it [the vote] was given to women over thirty who owned property, the most powerful wing of the movement was satisfied and the force of the struggle evaporated.

The aim of the modern movement is to go to the fundamentals of women’s position in society. Many of those who started it had been in left-wing and protest groups where, finding themselves required to make the tea while the men talked about justice and equality, they concluded that women needed a separate movement of revolt against “patriarchy’’ and “sexism”.

However, Women’s Lib is not a single unified movement. It consists of small autonomous groups under, roughly, four headings:— (a) political, incorporating or accommodating left-wing aims; (b) reformist, seeking particular improvements; (c) feminist, endeavouring to promote “female consciousness”; and (d) radical feminist, rejecting women’s biological rôle. The last is expounded most fully in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Its argument is that women’s basic oppression is child-bearing, and that technology — test- tube babies, baby farms, etc. — must be made to bring about an “androgynous culture” which will solve all the problems of mankind.

There is general acceptance of the four demands laid down by the first national women’s conference held at Oxford in 1970: equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand. In fact the Equal Pay Act was passed also in 1970, after being on the trade unions’ agenda and receiving only desultory attention since 1888; it remains to be seen how the employers find ways round it, and the extent to which it will affect women’s positions in the jobs they now hold.

Teaching Division

For — and this is the dilemma for these Liberationists as for all others — they are working within capitalism. Some are at least partly aware of it. For instance, an article “Towards a Statement on Women’s Liberation” by JL and RN in ORA Newsletter No. 4 in 1972 says:

Thus we should be able to explain how the "woman’s rôle” has developed under capitalism; where the origins of that rôle existed before the Industrial Revolution; and why it is that women as a group cannot be liberated under capitalism now.

The statement points out that in the present system “it is not only the woman who is restricted” but children and men are restricted too. It then lists a series of demands for women, beginning with the 1970 four and including campaigns against female fashions and women’s magazines.

But if the article’s own premises are correct, what would be achieved by the measures proposed ? The achievement could only be an exchange of female bondage for male: out of one cage, into another. Perhaps a radical feminist would argue that it is a less uncomfortable cage, but let nobody pretend it is liberation. However, it is not even a matter of different cages. The subjugation of groups by other groups — black by white, have-not by have, female by male — is only a collection of aspects of the single over-riding division on which capitalist society is founded.

Juliet Mitchell in her book gives an ingenuous example of this by speaking of the “anxiety” in Women’s Lib in the US over the “absence of black women in the movement”. Once the claims of groups and sections are acknowledged, it is anyone’s choice which has priority. We are often told of the “divisiveness” of sexism and racism. But the dividing is effective only when the subjects accept it and believe their interests are concerned predominantly with being female, black, or whatever. If it is rejected and the basic working-class identity of interests recognized, there is no obscurity over either the problem or its solution.

Women’s Lib responds to this by saying that the subjugation of women exists, due to men, independently of society and its classes (Millet and the other radical feminists); or that women’s struggles are a special way of attacking capitalism (e.g. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man's World)’, or that they are a precondition for achieving Socialism (variously understood). A Northern Region conference in June 1972 agreed that its statement of aims should begin with the words:

No women’s liberation without socialist revolution. No socialist revolution without women’s liberation. We aim to change the social relations of reproduction as well as to change the social relations of production.

It was honest, at any rate, for the report of the conference to add: “There was some discussion about whom this was intended for — it was pointed out that ordinary women would not find it very clear.”

Where Reforms Lead

But however the theorizing goes, in practice Women’s Lib lives to make immediate demands for reforms. In many ways it is itself a reflection of changes already taking place. The presumption, as always, is that society can be made to give way to their augmentation, and that if this happens it will end inequalities and confer benefits.

What should be pointed out at once is that the Socialist movement exists precisely because that was found not to be so. Reforms not only do not work like that, but all too frequently recoil. There are two outstanding modern examples of governments “liberating” women and thus obtaining an extra instrument for economic and social manipulation. One is in China, where women have been promoted impressively for the purposes of production, to the accompaniment of rigorous sexual repression. The opposite of the nineteen-thirties’ and -forties’ Russian cult of maternity is pursued, but likewise for demographic reasons: China, it is said, may be a pioneer country in State-authorized free contraception for all.

The other, still more relevant, example is Sweden. There women are little short of what is demanded by Women’s Lib in Europe and USA: wages near men’s, no discrimination in jobs or education, contraception and abortion and divorce all easily obtainable. Sweden should be acclaimed by the Liberationists, but is not. Mitchell affirms that concern with the position of women arises in all countries when their economies demand it:

But in Sweden this alteration is accompanied by a resurgence of explicit discussions (claiming to be disinterested) in women’s rôles. This overt debate can, in fact, obscure the issue; the economic expediency becomes invisible behind the social concern . . . The very stress that Swedish society puts on sexual equality makes it hard to see the oppression of women.

What makes them believe that the same reforms in other countries would not be taken as grist for capitalism’s mill? Indeed the same writer tells us that wages for housework (demanded by Selma James in Women, the Unions and Work) “was supported by conservatives (after all, it is a way of keeping women at home)” in Sweden.

Find the Right Answer

The Women’s Liberation movement is not different from other reformist organizations which choose to put immediate aims before a revolutionary change in society. Engels traced the origin of the suppression of women to that of private property, and he and Marx showed how it was maintained throughout historical transformations up to modern times. Private ownership turns liberation movements into the agents of ruling classes; common ownership alone can give the facility for new kinds of relationships.

The alternative case of the radical feminists, that women’s suppression is not societal but is the male at work, is no case at all. Their belief in this “human nature” argument is the antithesis of radicalism — what it supports is the ruling-class yarn that lords and masters are not made but born. On the other hand, some research done in the Women’s Lib cause provides fresh insights into capitalism and how things can be under Socialism: about parent-child relationships, or the studies of conditioning made in books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

It is a fact that some Women’s Lib has become (no doubt against others’ wish) a partial front organization for Communists, IS, anarchists and other left-wing groups with other aims. It is likewise a fact that, even were Socialists favourably disposed to it, male ones would be barred from most of its meetings; and we do not distinguish between male and female chauvinists. Socialists are opposed to Women’s Lib. We are for liberation, indeed — of the whole of mankind, and whoever wants the liberation of any part of it must join with us. And if from woman’s estate, she will find that in the Socialist movement the distinction is not made. We exist as comrades with one object in common.

Robert Barltrop