The DSP and its associated youth organisation, Resistance, came into existence out of the same struggles that led to the rise of the women's liberation movement in the early 1970s. A firm commitment to women's liberation has been integral to the building of the party over the last 20 years.
The DSP and Resistance have played their part in the struggles and campaigns of the movement-from the first Sydney women's liberation conference in January 1971 and the first big International Women's Day march in Melbourne 1972 to the IWD marches and the campaigns of today.
We have been involved in most of the major campaigns for women's rights over the past two decades-in the fight for women's control over their reproduction and fertility organised by the Women's Abortion Action Campaign; in struggles to get the trade union movement to take up working women's demands through the Working Women's Charter Campaign; and in struggles to break down sex segregation and discrimination in industry-for example, in the Jobs for Women Campaign which forced BHP to employ women in its Port Kembla and Newcastle steelworks and to pay compensation to the for its discriminatory hiring practices. This campaign established the first class action case in Australia.
We have struggled on the job for better wages and conditions for women; in the community against violence and rape, for better services for women; against discriminatory practices on all fronts-in education, jobs and in the community.
We have been part of the social and ideological struggle to free women from the narrow definition of their role as wives and mothers within the family. The ideological struggle has increasingly shifted into the realm of stereotyped images of women peddled by the media and advertising with their destructive impact on women's health, threatening their very lives. In part this fight has been to reassert positive self-definitions and images of women by women, as well as the struggle against censorship so that women can examine and explore their own bodies, their health, their fertility and their sexuality without accusations of obscenity and the consequent acts of repression.
Today the women's liberation movement is under attack as increasingly the media proclaims the end of feminism. Efforts to drive back women's rights, gained over the past twenty five years, gather momentum. Attacks on women's control over their fertility and their bodies, unequal wages, domestic violence and sexual abuse, lack of access to decent jobs and continued discriminatory practices are all part of what has been termed the ``backlash'' against the women's movement.
Feminists themselves are divided about which way to proceed-whether to go on the offensive, or simply defend the gains of the past-or even to sacrifice the needs of the great majority of women in order to preserve gains for a privileged few.
Calls for censorship to ban pornographic images, or for suppression of reproductive technology because it is a ``male plot'' to subvert women's unique creative function, are examples of the accommodation of some feminists to the right-wing ``backlash.'' As a result of these views some feminists have lined up with the reactionary moralistic advocates of women's traditional roles of wife and mother, i.e., with those who have been the major opponents of any liberation for women.
This resolution advocates a very different strategy. It evaluates the state of women's rights and feminism today around the world-in the industrialised Western nations, the Third World, in the former Soviet bloc as well as Cuba and Central America, explaining women's oppression from a Marxist perspective. It outlines a strategy to protect today's gains and to build an inclusive women's liberation movement that can win new ground.
The basic outlook of the document is simple and clear. It explains women's oppression as a product of class society. This oppression will only be ended when we get rid of all the vestiges of class society. The struggle projected is a united one. It is not the struggle of women against men as their oppressors, but a struggle against the oppression and exploitation of class society.
The document asserts that unless feminism develops a strategy of building alliances with other sections of the oppressed and exploited it will not be capable of eradicating the basis of women's oppression.
Pat Brewer,
September 1992
The first country in which this radicalisation of women appeared as a mass phenomenon was the United States. Thousands of women's liberation groups blossomed and tens of thousands of women mobilised on the August 26, 1970 demonstrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the victorious conclusion of the US women's suffrage struggle.
But the new wave of struggles by women in North America was not an exceptional and isolated development, as the emergence of the women's liberation movement throughout the advanced capitalist countries soon demonstrated. By the early 1980s it had become a truly international phenomenon, spreading across Third World countries as well.
In Australia, as in other advanced capitalist countries, the women's liberation movement developed as part of a more general upsurge of the working class and other exploited and oppressed sections of the population. Here the upsurge took many forms-from workers' struggles for the right to strike (as in the 1969 general strike against the jailing of union leader Clarrie O'Shea), to struggles to win equal pay for women and the right of married women to permanent employment, to struggles by Aborigines against racist oppression, to mass demonstrations against Australia's role in the imperialist war in Vietnam.
Although the women's liberation movement began among students and professional women, the demands it raised, combined with the growing contradictions within the capitalist system, began to mobilise much broader layers. It began to affect the consciousness, expectations, and actions of significant sections of the working class, male and female.
But in virtually every case, the women's liberation movement arose outside of, and independent from, the existing mass organisations of the working class, which were then obliged to respond to this new phenomenon. The development of the women's movement thus became an important factor in the political and ideological battle to weaken the hold of the bourgeoisie, and its political agents within the working class.
This new radicalisation of women has been unprecedented in the depth of the economic, social, ideological and political ferment it expresses and its implications for the struggle against capitalist oppression and exploitation.
In country after country, women have taken part in large-scale campaigns against reactionary abortion and contraceptive statutes, oppressive marriage laws, inadequate childcare facilities, and legal restrictions on equality. They have exposed and resisted the myriad ways in which sexism is expressed in all spheres-from politics, employment, and education to the most intimate aspects of daily life, including the weight of domestic drudgery and the violence and intimidation that women are subjected to in the home and on the street.
Women have raised demands that challenge the specific forms their oppression takes under capitalism today, and called into question the deep-rooted traditional division of labor between men and women, from the home to the factory. They have demanded affirmative action programs to open the doors previously closed to women in all arenas, and overcome the legacy of centuries of institutionalised discrim- ination.
They have insisted upon their right to participate with complete equality in all forms of political, social, economic, and cultural activity-equal education, equal access to jobs, equal pay for equal work.
In order to make this equality possible, women are searching for ways to end their domestic servitude. They have demanded that women's household chores be socialised and no longer organised as ``women's work.'' The most conscious have recognised that society, as opposed to the individual family unit, should take responsibility for the young, the old, and the sick.
At the very centre of the women's liberation movement has been the fight to decriminalise abortion and make it available to all women. The right to control their own bodies, to choose whether to bear children, when, and how many, is recognised by millions of women as an elementary precondition for their liberation.
Such demands go to the very heart of the specific oppression of women exercised through the family system and strike at the pillars of class society. They indicate the degree to which the struggle for women's liberation is a fight to transform all human social relations and place them on a new and higher plain.
Women's oppression has been an essential feature of class society throughout the ages. But the practical tasks of uprooting its causes, as well as combating its effects, could not be posed on a mass scale before the era of the transition from capitalism to democratic socialism.
The struggle for women's liberation poses the problem of the total reorganisation of society from its smallest repressive unit-the family-to its largest-the state. The liberation of women demands a thoroughgoing restructuring of society's productive and reproductive institutions in order to maximise social welfare and establish a truly human existence for all. Without a socialist revolution, women will not be able to establish the material preconditions for their liberation. Without the conscious and equal participation of broad masses of women, the working class will not be able to carry through the socialist revolution and bring into being a classless society.
Before the development of class society, during the historical period that Marxists have traditionally referred to as primitive communism (hunter-gatherer societies), social production was organised com- munally and its product shared equally. This did not mean that different tasks were not carried out by the various sub-groupings based on age, gender, etc. within the larger social group. But it meant that there was no exploitation or oppression of one sub-group by another. No material basis for such exploitative social relations existed. Both sexes participated in social production, helping to assure the sustenance and survival of all. The social status of both women and men reflected the indispensable roles that each played in this productive process for the survival of the group as a whole. Social differentiation was not linked to inequality.
In these specific socio-economic conditions, as the exploitation of human beings became profitable for a privileged few, women, because of their biological role in production (i.e., the social production to maintain the existing generation and their production of the next generation), became valuable property. Like slaves and cattle, they were a source of wealth. They alone could produce new human beings whose labor power could be exploited. Thus the purchase of women by men, along with all rights to their future offspring, arose as one of the economic and social institutions of the new order based on private property. Women's primary social role was increasingly defined as domestic servant and child-bearer.
Along with the private accumulation of wealth, the family unit developed as the institution by which responsibility for the unproductive members of society-especially the young-was trans- ferred from society as a whole to an identifiable individual or small group of individuals. It was the primary socio-economic institution for perpetrating from one generation to the next the class divisions of society-divisions between those who possessed property and lived off the wealth produced by the labor of others, and those who, owning no property, had to work for others to live. The destruction of the egalitarian and communal traditions and structures of primitive communism was essential for the rise of an exploiting class and its accelerated private accumulation of wealth.
The oppression of women was institutionalised through the family system. Women ceased to have an independent place in social production. Their productive role was determined by the family to which they belonged, by the man to whom they were subordinate. This economic dependence determined the second-class social status of women, on which the cohesiveness and continuity of the family has always depended. If women could simply take their children and leave, without suffering any social or economic hardship, the family would not have survived through the millennia.
The family and the subjugation of women thus came into existence along with the other institutions of the emerging class society in order to buttress nascent class divisions and maintain the private accumulation of wealth. The state, with its police and armies, laws and courts, enforced this relationship. Ruling-class ideology arose on this basis and played a vital role in the degradation of the female sex. Women, it was said, were physically and mentally inferior to men and therefore were ``naturally'' or biologically the second sex. While the subjugation of women has always had different consequences for women of distinct classes, all women regardless of class were and are oppressed as part of the female sex.
There is no other institution in class society whose true role is as hidden by prejudice and mystification as that of the family. Bourgeois moralists claim that the family is the basis for the natural and moral unity of society. Bourgeois anthropologists perpetuate the myth that the family unit has always existed. They deny the fact that the family originated with and flowed from the development of private property, class society and the state. They obscure the fact that in pre-class society the basic social unit was the clan and that within each clan goods were shared in common. Clan structures are not the same as the family system, which is based on a legally binding marriage contract that enables the transmission of private property.
Throughout the history of class society, the family system has proved its value as an institution of class rule. The form of the family has evolved and adapted itself to the changing needs of the ruling classes as the modes of production and forms of private property have gone through different stages of development. The family system under classical slavery was different from the family system during feudalism. Under classical slavery, the family institution was restricted to the slave-owning class (there was no family system among slaves). Under feudalism, the family system was extended to the laboring class, the serfs, who owned some means of production (small plots of land, animals, and hand tools), and was the basic unit through which social production was organised. By contrast, the urban ``nuclear'' family of today has ceased to be a unit of social production.
Moreover, the family system simultaneously fulfills different social and economic requirements in reference to classes with different productive roles and property rights whose interests are diametrically opposed. For instance, the ``family'' of the serf and the ``family'' of the nobleman were quite different socio-economic units. However, they were both part of the family system, an institution of class rule that has played an indispensable role at each stage in the history of class society.
The disintegration of the family under capitalism brings with it much misery and suffering precisely because no superior framework for human relations can yet emerge. In class society, the family is the only institution to which most people can turn for the satisfaction of some basic human needs, including love and companionship. This is especially true of those doubly oppressed on racial, ethnic, etc. grounds. However poorly the family may meet these needs for many, there is no real alternative as long as class society exists. Nevertheless, the main purpose of the family is not to provide such basic needs. It is an economic and social institution whose functions can be described as follows:
Among the bourgeoisie the family provides for the transmission of private property from generation to generation. Marriages often assure profitable alliances or mergers of large blocks of capital, especially in the early stages of capital accumulation.
Among the classical petty-bourgeoisie, such as farmers, craftspersons or small shopkeepers, the family is also a unit of production based on the labor of the family members themselves.
For the working class, while the family provides some degree of mutual protection for its own members, in the most basic sense it is an alien class institution, one that is imposed on the working class, and serves the economic interests of the bourgeoisie not the workers. Yet working people are indoctrinated from childhood to regard it (like wage labor, private property and the state) as the most natural and imperishable of human relations.
It is absurd to speak of abolishing the family. Democratic socialism seeks to remove the economic and social compulsion that drives the vast majority into the family system at the present time, and to give individuals a far wider and freer range of choices as to how they live. Nevertheless, a socialist transformation will inherit many of the institutions of the old society, including the family. The role of the family will only wither away as society as a whole takes increasing responsibility for people's needs.
Capitalism has refined and modified the oppression of women to suit its own needs and ensure economic benefits. Yet the emergence of capitalist industrialisation contains many contradictory features for the maintenance of women's oppression:
Among those fighting for women's rights were different political currents. Many of the suffragist leaders were women who believed the vote should be won by showing the ruling class that they were loyal defenders of the capitalist system. Some linked the suffragist struggle to support for imperialism in World War I and often opposed the right to vote for propertyless men and women, immigrants, and non-whites.
But there was also a strong current of socialist women in a number of countries who saw the fight for women's rights as part of the working-class struggle for the abolition of voting based on property qualifications and mobilised support from working- class women and men on that basis. They played a decisive role in the suffrage struggle in countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany. They also raised and fought for other demands such as equal pay and contraceptive services.
In Australia, women's right to vote was much more tied to electoral manoeuvring by bourgeois parties at the State level rather than large-scale mobilisation of women. Women received the vote in South Australia and Western Australia in the 1890s. Negotiations to establish federation led to the adoption of universal franchise by 1902 in the Commonwealth. The other States lagged behind, but by 1908 women had the vote in all States.
The leading organisational force advocating women's enfranchisement across Australia was the Women's Christian Temperance League, whose main activity was directed toward changing the morals of the working class and restricting drinking hours. Specific suffragist groups were established only in NSW and Victoria. These groups in turn divided along political lines. These political divisions-between the conservative parties, the Labor Party, the small socialist groups within and outside the ALP, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) -- continued as women mobilised around the conscription issue during the First World War.
Women's suffrage, following or sometimes accompanying universal male suffrage, was an important objective gain for the working class. It reflected, and in turn helped advance, the changing social status of women. For the first time in class society, women were legally considered citizens fit to participate in public affairs, with the right to a voice on major political questions, not just private household matters.
Through struggle, women in most advanced capitalist countries won, to varying degrees, several important civil rights-the right to higher education, the right to engage in trades and professions, the right to receive and dispose of their own wages (which had been considered the right of the husband or father), the right to own property, the right to divorce, the right to participate in political organisations and the right to stand for public office.
Even though the underlying cause of the subordinate status of women lies in the very foundations of class society itself and women's special role within the family, not in the formal denial of equality under the law, the extension of democratic rights to women gave them greater latitude for action and helped later generations see that the manifestations of women's oppression lay deeper.
While such medical techniques are more widely available, reactionary laws, reinforced by bourgeois customs, religious bigotry, and sexist ideology often stand in the way of women exercising control over their own reproductive functions. Financial, legal, informational, psychological, and ``moral'' barriers are fabricated to try to prevent women from demanding and exercising the right to choose whether and when to bear children. In addition, the limits placed on research due to capitalist profit considerations and sexist disregard for the lives of women, have meant continuing health hazards for women using the most convenient methods of birth control.
This contradiction between what is possible and what actually exists affects the lives of all women. It has given rise to powerful abortion rights struggles, which have played a key role in building the women's liberation movement internationally.
2. Labor market participation.
The prolonged economic boom conditions of the postwar expansion significantly increased the percentage of women in the labor force.
For example, in Australia in 1950, 19% of all women 15 to 64 years of age were in the labor force. By 1975 this had doubled. Between 1960 and 1975, nearly two-thirds of all new jobs created were taken by women. Working women accounted for 20.5% of the total labor force in 1901; 22.8% in 1954 and 41.8% by 1991. Equally important, the percentage of working women who were married increased dramatically, from 12.5 in 1933, until today when over half of all mothers with dependent children under 14 years are in the workforce.
As the influx of women into the labor force has taken place, there has been substantial change in the degree of wage discrimination against women. In many countries this differential between the sexes has actually widened. In Australia the right to equal wages wasn't won until the late 1960s and the plan to implement the shift was phased in between 1972 and 1975. But equal pay only applied to ``work of equal value'' and was interpreted in the narrowest way to mean only identical work. So this hasn't meant that women's wages now equal men's. Sixteen years on, the average female wage is 33% lower than the average male rate. Even where women work in comparable jobs with men their earnings are 5-6% lower.
While gender differentials in over-award payments is a factor, inequality of wage levels are primarily because the increased employment of women has not been spread evenly over all job categories. In nearly all countries women represent from 70-90% of the work force employed in textiles, shoes, ready-to-wear clothing, tobacco, and other light industry-that is, sectors in which wages are lowest. Women also account for 70% or more of those employed in the service sector, with the great majority of women occupying the least remunerative positions: secretaries, file clerks, health workers, teachers in primary schools, keyboard operators.
In Australia, the sex segregation of women by industry group into the three major areas of clerical, sales and services is the highest in the world. Women's work in these areas is not valued at an equivalent rate to the work of men in similarly skilled, predominantly male industries. And estimates of future employment growth continue this trend-tomorrow's worker will be a female, working part-time in the private services sector of industry.
There has been further work force segregation within Australian industry in this period. Shortage of labor led to the massive immigration program from the late 1940s onward. Increasingly, non-English speaking immigrants have moved into the unskilled areas of work in both traditionally male and female-segregated industry. The failure of the labor bureaucracy to combat the discrimination faced by non-English speaking immigrant workers, particularly women workers, has weakened unionisation and led to greater wages differentials and erosion of conditions in areas predominantly employing these workers.
Women are further disadvantaged in promotional opportunities and career paths. Until the late 1960s married women could only occupy temporary positions in the public service. Since State and Commonwealth public services provided many of the clerical opportunities for women workers, and promotion depended on length of permanent service, women were highly under-represented in the medium and upper levels of the occupational hierarchy where higher rates of pay apply. Other factors such as discriminatory hiring practices and interview techniques for promotion exacerbated the gap in wages.
Despite their growing place in the work force, women are still forced to assume the majority, if not the totality, of domestic tasks in addition to their wage labor. This has led to a significant increase in part-time work by women-either because they cannot find full-time employment, or because they cannot otherwise cope with their domestic chores in the absence of cheap quality child care. But part-time work invariably brings with it lower wages, less job security, fewer working condition benefits, and less likelihood of unionisation.
Increasingly, since the early 1970s, employers have moved to lower labor costs, erode conditions and increase productivity. This has led to a decline in full-time work and a massive growth in part-time and casual work. These moves have disproportionately affected women workers and their wages. Men form 59.8% of the paid workforce, but they hold almost 70% of full-time jobs; 51.9% of employed women work part-time, i.e., women account for 78% of all part-time workers.
The growing proportion of women in the paid work-force has had a strong impact on the attitudes of their male fellow workers, helping to break down sexist stereotyping. This is especially true where women have begun to fight their way into jobs in traditionally male-dominated industries from which women were previously excluded.
But women workers still face many forms of discrimination and sexist abuse-promoted, organised and maintained by their bosses. Their fellow workers are often not aware of these, and/or are imbued with backward, anti-woman attitudes. The labor bureaucracy blocks the use of union power to overcome many of the special obstacles women workers face-such as lack of maternity leave, health hazards, discriminatory job practices, and harassment by foremen and supervisors who use their control over jobs to sexually pester women and try to pressure them into sexual relations.
Yet, as the employment statistics indicate, the percentage of women holding jobs commensurate with their educational level has not kept pace. In all areas of the job market, from industry to the professions, women with higher educational qualifications are usually bypassed by men with less education. Moreover, throughout primary and secondary education, girls continue to be pushed-through required courses of study or through more indirect pressures-into what are considered women's jobs and roles. For example, while women outnumber men among university undergraduates in Australia today, women are still concentrated in the arts faculties rather than in science, engineering and commerce.
As women receive more education and as social struggles raise their individual expectations, the stifling drudgery of household chores and the constrictions of family life become increasingly unbearable. Thus the heightened educational level of women has deepened the contradiction between women's demonstrated abilities and broadened aspirations, and their actual social and economic status.
As the standard of living rises, the average number of children per family declines sharply. Industrially prepared foods and other conveniences become increasingly available. Yet, in spite of the technological advances, surveys in a number of imperialist countries have shown that women who have more than one child and a full-time job must put in 80-100 hours of work per week-more hours than similar surveys conducted in 1926 and 1952 revealed. While appliances have eased certain domestic tasks, the shrinking size of the average family unit has meant that women are less able to call on grandparents, aunts, or sisters to help.
With all these changes, the objective basis for confining women to the home becomes less and less compelling. Yet the needs of the ruling class dictate that the family system be preserved. Bourgeois ideology and social conditioning continue to reinforce the reactionary fiction that a woman's identity and fulfillment must come from her role as wife-mother-housekeeper. The contradiction between reality and myth becomes increasingly obvious and intolerable to growing numbers of women.
This contradictory state of affairs is frequently referred to as ``the crisis of the family,'' which is expressed in the soaring divorce rates, increased numbers of runaway children and rising reported incidence of sexual abuse of children and domestic violence.
Cracks in the privacy of the institution of the family have opened up as women have become more confident and more self-assertive. Physical and sexual violence within the family has been challenged. Women's refuges, youth housing, and rape crisis centres have been established but are far from adequate to cope with the demand for their services. Laws and legal practices concerning rape in marriage and domestic violence have and are being put in place.
While the brutal degradation of women in the family has been opened up for greater scrutiny, the family system itself has not been abandoned:
*There has been a shift to serial monogamous families, that is, couples who marry, then divorce, then marry a new partner. So monogamy becomes relative to the current partner and the children from such relationships are linked to several family units.
*There has also been an increase in the number of non-married cohabiting couples and of children born outside of marriage. The capitalist state has sought to reintegrate these relationships within the family system by establishing the legal category of ``de facto relations,'' i.e., de facto marriages.
*While the number of single parents, mostly women, with children has dramatically increased, through restrictions and cutbacks on state subsidised social services such as child care the ruling class has kept them within the family system, with women still carrying out the unpaid domestic labor of child-rearing. As a result, there has been a sharp increase in the number of women living in poverty, a phenomenon known as the ``feminisation'' of poverty. Some 80% of adults classified as living below the poverty line are women.
Greater democratic rights and broader social opportunities have not ``satisfied'' women, or inclined them to a passive acceptance of their inferior social status and economic dependence. On the contrary, each achievement towards equality exposes even further ways, often in quite subtle forms, that sexist barriers operate in capitalist society.
The initial development of the women's liberation movement served only to emphasise the depth and scope of women's oppression. Even those with many advantages in terms of education and other opportunities were, and continue to be, propelled into action. The most oppressed and exploited are not necessarily the first to articulate their discontent.
From the beginning, the new upsurge of women's struggles was strongly affected by the international youth radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the increased challenge to bourgeois values and institutions that accompanied it. Young people-both male and female-began to question religion, to reject patriotism, to challenge authoritarian hierarchies from family, to school, to factory, to army, and to reject the inevitability of a lifetime of alienated labor.
Women's awareness of their reproductive functions and their physical and health needs flowed on into struggles for women to control their reproductive choices as well as special women's health and abortion clinics. Women's support and counseling services grew to provide alternative information and services to mainstream medicine where research and general practice reinforced women's traditional role in the family.
The sexual revolution opened up a climate in which female sexuality and sexuality in general came under intense scrutiny and debate. This led to splits in the women's movement as a growing number of feminists made sexuality the focal issue of their concerns. But the sexual revolution also enabled a massive rethinking and questioning about the extremely restricting gender roles of masculinity and femininity and the human misery suffered by the majority of individuals who are forced to try to fit these idealised norms under class society.
Although lesbian sexuality has rarely been legislated against, lesbians face a number of specific denials of their democratic rights. There is no social or legal recognition of the validity of a relationship between two women. There are numerous cases of women being denied access to their partner by the partner's family against the express wishes of the partner following injury or disability; of women being denied access to accommodation and personal belongings such as photos and joint possessions, following the death of one partner. Lesbians who are mothers are often not viewed as ``fit and proper'' guardians of their children by the courts and even their own families.
But lesbians are not just discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality, they are also oppressed as women. Many radicalised as women first and felt the discrimination they suffered because of their sexual orientation was only one element of the social and economic limitations women face in trying to determine the course of their lives. Thus many lesbians were in the forefront of the feminist movement from the very beginning. They have been part of every political current within the women's liberation movement, from lesbian separatists to revolutionary Marxists, and they have helped to make the entire movement more conscious of the specific ways in which lesbians are oppressed.
Because of the lesbian movement's insistence on the right of women to live independent of men, they often become the special target of attacks by reaction. From hate propaganda to violent physical assaults, the attacks on lesbians and the lesbian movement are really aimed against the women's movement as a whole.
As the feminist movement has developed in the advanced capitalist countries, women of the oppressed nationalities and racial groups have begun to play an increasingly prominent role. As members of oppressed nationalities or racial groups, as women, and frequently as superexploited workers, these women suffer a double and often triple oppression.
Immigrant women too face many similar aspects of oppression. In Australia, they are exploited as workers in the lowest paid jobs with the worst conditions, excluded from an understanding of unionisation and their rights by their lack of English and the disregard of unions for their conditions, and they also suffer racist and sexist oppression.
But there has generally been a lag in the pace with which women of oppressed racial groups and immigrant women have become conscious of their specific oppression as women. There are several reasons for this:
*For many, the depth of their racial oppression initially overshadows their oppression as women. Many radical anti-racist movements have refused to take up the demands of women, calling them divisive to the struggle against racism.
*The organised women's movement has often failed to address itself to the needs of the most oppressed and exploited layers of women and understand the special difficulties they face.
*The hold of the family is often particularly strong among non-Anglophone immigrant women and among women of oppressed racial groups since the family provides a partial buffer against the devastating pressures of racism and cultural annihilation.
Nevertheless, experience has already shown that once the radicalisation of these women begins it takes on an explosive character, propelling them into the leadership of many social and political struggles, including struggles on the job, in the unions, on campuses and in the communities, as well as the feminist movement. They rapidly come to understand that the struggle against their oppression as women does not weaken but strengthens the struggle against their ethnic or racial oppression.
Christianity and Judaism, which mark the cultures of the advanced capitalist countries, have always upheld the inequality of women and denied them the right to separate sexuality from reproduction. As these have weakened, there has been a rapid growth and organisation of Christian fundamentalism in imperialist countries which has been exported to the Third World as part of imperialism's efforts to bolster right-wing forces. This effort has been aimed at countering many of the gains of the women's movement in particular, and more generally, anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World which have radicalised sections of the Catholic Church through liberation theology.
The upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment and struggles in many parts of the Muslim world has had a contradictory impact on the situation of women. Because of the economic backwardness of many of these countries, which has been maintained by imperialist domination, religion has a powerful influence among the poor and oppressed. Their struggles against imperialist domination have thus tended to find ideological expression in religious terms. While such anti-imperialist struggles have mobilised broad masses of women, as was the case with the 1979 revolution in Iran, the religious garb in which these struggles have been cloaked has helped the Islamic clergy to reinforce reactionary anti-women attitudes and practices.
Women's role in the fight against erosions of democratic rights has been major and women's resistance to the economic, political, and ideological offensive of the ruling class has been stiffened by the heightened feminist awareness. Their struggles have been a powerful motor force of social protest and political radicalisation and their participation in the forefront of other progressive social struggles has increased.
In each case the aim has been the same, whatever the tactics-to contain the nascent radicalisation within the framework of minimal reforms of the capitalist system.
In many industrialised countries, there have been moves to expand maternity benefits by extending leave, raising the percentage of pay women receive while on leave, or by guaranteeing work after a maternity leave without pay. In other countries, governments have extensively debated the justice of promises for equal pay laws, or liberalised divorce laws.
Under the pressure of women's mobilisation and organisation most governments have introduced a series of legal reforms on women's rights-anti-discrimination laws, equal rights legislation, and even the notion of affirmative action programs in some form. However, these laws have generally had little practical impact on the daily lives of the majority of women.
In Australia, such moves have led to legal judgments against individual cases of discrimination after long, exhaustive and protracted courtroom battles. In some cases these legal rulings have backfired on the victims of discrimination, leading to further harassment and notoriety which has distressed and damaged the woman complainant even though she may have won her case. In most cases the lack of major penalties and the individual case-by-case approach has meant that the impact of such rulings has been minimised. The one major exception to this general situation was the Jobs for Women campaign where 34 women took on BHP in a class-action suit against discrimination in hiring. What was unique in this case was that it did not rely on the legal process alone but was the basis for an active campaign over a 10-year period until the case was won.
Affirmative action and equal employment opportunity guidelines, while set in place in the public sector and in the large private companies, have proved very little more than a monitoring assessment procedure of the level of female employment across sectors and promotional levels. There are no penalties for non-compliance with raising participatory targets. At best such projects have raised awareness of discriminatory employment and promotion practices.
The increased public consciousness about discrimination against women has led both conservative and liberal bourgeois parties to engage in wide-ranging tactics to win over women voters. And indeed there has been a shift in women's voting patterns as their social and economic situation has changed since World War II-their votes have tended to shift toward liberal (including Social Democratic) parties and away from the conservative parties.
Bourgeois parties across the spectrum have responded by increasing the number of women standing for office. But as governments are formed the number of women who have achieved cabinet or executive positions has been minuscule.
While liberal parties have played the most lip service to issues specifically affecting women, the feminist ideas and concerns have also had an impact on the most conservative parties.
In Australia, the coalition between the conservative Liberal and National parties has been strained by the question of women's rights-particularly by the question of women's right to work as unemployment rates began to rise. The liberal split from the Liberals, the Australian Democrats, has shifted leftwards during the 1980s. This shift has been reflected in the Australian Democrats' adoption of policies supporting many of the demands raised by the women's liberation movement and their promotion of women to their parliamentary leadership.
However, when it comes to social programs that would have immediate and significant economic impact-such as the expansion of cheap, high standard, child-care facilities-the gains made by women have been virtually nonexistent. Capitalist governments and bourgeois politicians have made abundant promises. But as the long-term capitalist economic crisis has deepened, cuts to the already limited child-care facilities have been some of the first to be made. These have been accompanied by other cuts to areas traditionally viewed as private-those involved in the reproduction and maintenance of labor, driving back many health and community services into the unpaid sector of domestic labor.
In every country where women have made measurable progress toward establishing abortion as a right, it has rapidly become clear that this right is never secure under capitalism. Real reproductive choice, particularly abortion, isn't guaranteed under capitalism where access to legal abortion is viewed by the ruling class as a necessary evil rather than as a guaranteed personal choice by the woman concerned, backed up by health service alternatives, information and counseling.
Wherever women begin to fight for the right to control their own reproductive functions, the most reactionary defenders of the capitalist system have immediately mobilised to prevent that elementary precondition for women's liberation from being established. The right to choose is too great a challenge to the ideological underpinnings of women's oppression.
However, it is politically important to see clearly that far-right organisations such as ``Laissez les vivre,'' ``Oui a la vie,'' ``Right to Life,'' and ``Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child,'' which are linked to xenophobic, clerical, racist, or outright fascist currents, are nourished by official governmental policies. They function as fanatical protectors of the status quo, attempting to appeal to and mobilise the most backward prejudices within the working class and petty bourgeoisie, and they render a valuable service to the rulers. But without the backhanded-and sometimes open-encouragement of the dom- inant sections of the ruling class, their role would be far less influential.
The clearest indicator of this is provided by the attempts in the USA to erode access to abortion and reverse the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling which recognised a woman's constitutional right to abortion. Federal and State governments and courts have eroded this constitutional right by reducing the period of pregnancy in which an abortion can be performed, or by limiting women's right to decide (giving greater power to parents or partners, demanding parental permission for minors, etc), and by restricting access to health services or cutting back funding to the health system in order to make access to abortion difficult. The opposition of the Reagan and Bush administrations to women's right to abortion and the weakening of this right by Supreme Court judgments, has been combined with and encouraged a fanatical grass-roots mobilisation by extreme sectors of the ``Moral Majority'' and evangelical churches, taking the form of arson attacks on abortion clinics and mass pickets to physically prevent women from entering them.
In Australia, restrictions on women's access to abortion have taken the form of repeated attempts to pass legislation taking abortion out of the public health insurance scheme; attempts to limit the time period when abortion is available; or attempts to limit abortion facilities to hospitals by trying to get rid of clinics, particularly feminist ones. These attempts have been defeated due to widespread public pressure focused by pro-choice mobilisations.
The Social Democrats' responses to the women's liberation movement have varied from one country to another, depending on the strength of the movement, its impact upon the working class, and the Social Democrats' own proximity to responsibility for the government of their own capitalist state. But in every case the reflexes of the Social Democrats have been determined by two sometimes conflicting objectives: their commitment to the basic institutions of class rule, including the family; and their need to maintain or strengthen their influence in the working class if they are to contain working-class struggles within the bounds of capitalist property relations.
The rise of the women's liberation movement forced the Social Democrats to adapt to the changing political situation. The year 1975 in particular gave rise to a flurry of position-taking, partly in response to the initiatives of the bourgeoisie in the context of International Women's Year.
Even though Social Democratic parties officially have been reluctant to recognise the existence of the independent women's movement, individual women members have often participated actively in the new organisations that emerged.
Faced with a growing women's movement in Australia in the early 1970s, the Whitlam Labor government attempted to win political support by granting subsidies to numerous small projects initiated by the movement, such as women's health centres and refuges, introducing supporting mothers pensions, removing tax from contraceptives, and putting in place a three-year schedule for the introduction of equal pay for work of equal value. While these moves were not major in economic terms, they served to temporarily draw the attention of women away from the inadequacy of their overall policies (on abortion and child care, for example) and helped the ALP to project itself as a ``pro-woman'' government. Responding to their success in wooing the women's vote, anti-discriminatory and equal opportunity laws were established by State Labor governments.
The ALP and the trade union bureaucracy have actively sought to integrate feminists into the institutional framework of bourgeois reformism, producing changes that appear as the natural evolution of a ``democratic society'' and thus blurring the role and combativity of women in winning these changes. Women's advisory committees have been set up and many of the early women's activists have been incorporated into the governmental and union bureaucracy as upper-level management, researchers, and advisors. While these ``femocrats'' have been long on speeches for women's equality, in practice their lack of executive power and their respect for official policy has put real limitations on their activity.
Many feminists have taken the fight for equality into the ALP so that today affirmative action policy guarantees women access to preselection as candidates in proportion to their overall numbers in the party. Positions held by women in the ALP officialdom have also increased although not in the same proportion. These ``victories'' have been won at the cost of the fight for the implementation of social policies to improve the situation of the majority of women.
While loudly proclaiming their commitment to easing the burdens of working-class women, the Social Democratic parties have not hesitated to impose the austerity measures demanded by the bourgeoisie. The record of the Hawke Labor government, elected in 1983, has provided a graphic illustration of this.
Through its Accord with the ACTU the Hawke government embarked on a decade-long austerity program that cut wages and living standards across the board. The Accord was sold on rhetoric about the need to address the plight of lower-paid and the traditionally ignored sections of the working class, women workers in particular. Cuts in real wages were thus to be traded off against improvements to the ``social wage,'' i.e., social and welfare benefits and tax reforms.
Under the various versions of the Accord over the years, welfare, health, education, and child care services have all been massively slashed. These austerity measures have been implemented under a rhetorical veneer of seeking ``social equity,'' of improving the lot of the disadvantaged, particularly women. Yet during this period the decline in real average wages has been in the order of 25%.
Questions such as child care and the socialisation of domestic work, and affirmative action programs for women have been raised with greater frequency in the union movement. In some cases women have explicitly posed these demands in the general framework of the need to break down the traditional division of labor between men and women.
By raising these issues, women workers call into question the reformists' attempts to maintain a division between economic and political issues and otherwise limit whatever struggles develop. They help the working class to think in broad social terms.
As women try to win the union ranks and leadership to support their demands, they are obliged to take up the question of union democracy as well. They have to fight for the right to express themselves freely, to organise their own commissions or caucuses, to be represented in the union leaderships, and for the union to provide the kinds of facilities, such as child care during meetings, that will permit women to be fully active in the workers' organisations.
The right for women to organise themselves into separate committees and women's structures has been recognised by some union leaders as ways to increase union membership and respond to the particular needs of women workers articulated through these bodies. Others have seen such organisations as ways to marginalise and thus ignore women's demands. But the gender segregation of the workforce, the growth of the tertiary sector, the growth of the new information technology and the increased unionisation of traditional white-collar areas such as banking, the public service, welfare services, nursing, etc., have led to an increase in the number of women joining unions at a time when male union membership has declined dramatically.
On the other hand, the Accord's restrictions on strike action, its trade-off method of bargaining, and its emphasis on tripartite negotiations between the employers, the government and the unions has led to a real decline in working-class activity, including the struggles of women workers. Many of the gains won by women in the industrial arena remain limited in their impact because the will to fight to have them implemented across industry has been eroded. Enterprise bargaining will further erode these gains.
The restructuring of industry, the trade-union movement and the industrial relations system has weakened the unions as organs of struggle for the moment. This weakening of the unions has been masked by phrases championing their heightened awareness and commitment to women's equality. Thus, while the living standards of women workers have been reduced under the Accord, the ACTU has paraded the increased representation of women on its executive as evidence of major advances by women unionists.
However demagogic they may have been at times concerning women's double day of work, the demands raised by the Stalinised CPs were most often proposals to rearrange things so women had an easier time meeting the tasks that fall on them in the home. From better maternity leaves, to shorter hours, to improved working conditions for women, the fight was often justified by the need to free women for their household chores-rather than from them by socialising the domestic burdens women bear. The other solution, which they sometimes proposed, was to demand that men share the work load more equitably at home.
But the rise of the women's movement, the attempts of the bourgeoisie to capitalise on it, the responses of their own ranks, all compelled the Communist parties to modify and adjust their line. Even the most hidebound and rigid followers of the Stalinist bureaucracy, like the Communist Party of the USA, were forced to abandon some of their most reactionary positions such as opposition to an equal rights amendment to the constitution.
The deeper the radicalisation, the more adroitly the CPs have had to manoeuvre by throwing themselves into the movement and adopting more radical verbiage. This has particularly been true of those CPs in the imperialist countries that sought to demarcate themselves from the Soviet bureaucracy from the late 1960s on in order to widen the base of public support-the so-called Eurocommunist parties. However, this shift did not involve a turn by these parties toward revolutionary politics. Rather it involved a systematic codification of the reformist orientation imposed on the Communist movement by Stalin in the mid 1930s.
The Eurocommunist CPs let their women members engage in public discussion and develop scathing condemnations of capitalism's responsibilities for the miserable status of women. But when it came to program and action, their approach to women's liberation duplicated their opposition to a class-struggle fight for other needs of the working class. Theses parties were ready to shelve any demand or derail any struggle in the interests of consolidating or preserving whatever class- collaborationist alliance they were working for. Thus, despite the Italian Communist Party's formal shift and decision to support the liberal- isation of abortion laws, in 1976 the PCI parliamentary deputies made a bloc with the Christian Democrats to kill abortion law reform because it was an obstacle to advancing toward their ``historic compromise'' with the latter.
Moreover, there was often a conflict between the positions taken by the CP locally-where they sometimes expressed support for struggles to establish child-care centres or abortion- contraception clinics-and the actions of the CP nationally-where they supported austerity measures to cut back on such social programs.
The discrepancy between the formal positions of the Communist parties and their class-collaborationist practice brought about some sharp tensions within those parties and in the trade unions they dominated. This was especially true because the absence of internal democracy within the CPs deepened the frustrations of many women who began to see the contradictions between their own personal commitment to women's liberation and the line of their party. They had no way to influence the positions of their organisation.
Organisationally, too, the Communist parties were forced to adjust. In a number of countries the Stalinists formed their own women's organisations after the Second World War. Faced with the new radicalisation of women, they invariably tried to pass these organisations off in the eyes of the working class as the only real women's movement. The independent movement threatened their pretense of being the party that spoke for working-class women, and their initial reaction was to deepen their sectarian stance.
The Maoists, who formed the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) in 1964, and the pro-Moscow current which constituted itself as the Socialist Party of Australia in 1971 maintained the traditional Stalinist approach to the ``woman question,'' i.e., defending the family system and seeing women's equality as being guaranteed through working-class struggle rather than through the independent mobilisation of women. Women's struggles are seen by them as limited to the economic arena-as women workers or women's auxiliaries to support their husbands in struggle.
The CPA itself, however, shifted its position in the mid 1970s. It made a deliberate orientation to women's liberation activists. However, it failed to overcome the legacy of its Stalinist miseducation.
The CPA leadership continued to identify Leninism with Stalinism, and as it moved to distance itself from its Stalinist past, it rejected its formal adherence to ``Marxism-Leninism.'' The economistic conception of the class struggle (and the opportunist orientation to the trade union bureaucracy and the ALP) the CPA had inherited from Stalinism was retained as the central core of its political practice. But around this central core it added an eclectic mass movementism to its political orientation-a shopping list approach in which the struggles of women, Aborigines, gays, for peace, for environmental protection, etc., were seen as separate from each other and from the working-class struggle against capitalism (which was identified with trade unionist struggles). In relation to women's liberation, the CPA leadership rejected Marxism as an inadequate theory, as ``outdated class reductionism'' and accepted various bourgeois feminist theories of the origin and nature of women's oppression.
This theoretical shift was mirrored organisationally. The CPA became organised sectorally. Women were organised in women's collectives rather than into all arenas of the party's activity and work. This had the effect of marginalising the question of women's liberation within the CPA, absolving the CPA leadership from educating all the party's members, particularly those in the trade union movement and leadership, on the need to take women's liberation seriously.
With the coming to office of the Hawke Labor government, the CPA's opportunist eclecticism became the means for providing a left apology for the ALP-ACTU Accord's austerity program. Indeed, key leaders of the CPA in the trade union bureaucracy were involved in drafting the original Accord document, and they were often the key promoters of it in the unions, using the argument that ``well-off'' male workers should hold back from wage demands to let women's wages catch up.
In seeking to defend its support for the class-collaborationism embodied in the Accord, the CPA leadership developed a right-wing version of gender politics by arguing against ``the old-time unionism of mobilisation and struggle'' and supporting calls for a ``feminist incomes policy'' explicitly aimed at increasing women's incomes at the expense of men's.
Peace, anti-nuclear, environmental, and women's liberation activists, as well as many smaller community-based movements and a substantial layer of left socialists, formed the Green Party as an electoral alternative in opposition to the right-wing evolution of the Social Democracy in West Germany. The German Greens' electoral success strengthened moves to construct similar parties in other countries, but these tend to have less of a base among activists in the social movements and have more of a single-issue appeal around environmental questions.
Where Green political formations have elaborated political programs on a range of social issues they have often incorporated many of the demands raised by the women's liberation movement. However, their lack of a revolutionary perspective and their tendency to see social change being achieved purely through parliamentary means has made them susceptible to opportunist deals with Social Democracy. Where, as in Germany and in Tasmania, the Greens have entered into such coalitions or ``accords'' with the Social Democrats they have alienated their activist base and undermined their credibility even as a parliamentary alternative to Social Democracy.
The Russian Revolution and each subsequent socialist revolution brought sig- nificant gains for women, including democratic rights and integration into social production. The measures enacted by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky demonstratively showed that the proletarian revolution meant immediate steps forward for women. Comparisons with the struggles of women in the most advanced capitalist countries of the same period demonstrate just how fundamental these immediate steps were.
Between 1917 and 1927 the Soviet government passed a series of laws giving women legal equality with men for the first time. Marriage became a simple registration process that had to be based on mutual consent. By 1927, marriages did not have to be registered and divorce was granted on the request of either partner. The concept of illegitimacy was abolished. Free, legal abortion was made every woman's right. Anti-homosexual laws were eliminated in 1918.
Free, compulsory education to the age of 16 was established for all children of both sexes. Legislation gave women workers special maternity benefits.
The 1919 program of the Russian Communist Party stated: ``The party's task at the present moment is primarily work in the realm of ideas and education so as to destroy utterly all traces of the former inequality or prejudices, particularly among backward strata of the proletariat and the peasantry. Not confining itself to formal equality of women, the party strives to liberate them from the burdens of obsolete household work by replacing it with communal houses, public eating places, central laundries, nurseries, etc.''
This program was implemented to the extent possible given the economic backwardness and poverty of the new Soviet Republic, and the devastation caused by almost a decade of war and civil war.
A conscious attempt was made to begin combating the reactionary social norms and attitudes toward women, which reflected the reality of a country whose population was still overwhelmingly peasant, where women were a relatively small percentage of the workforce, and in which the dead weight of feudal traditions and customs hung over all social relations.
As would be expected under such conditions, backward attitudes toward women were reflected in the Bolshevik Party as well, not excepting its leadership. The party was by no means homogeneous in its understanding of the importance of carrying through the concrete and deep-going measures necessary to fulfill its 1919 program.
While the economic foundations of the new workers' state were not destroyed, a privileged social layer that appropriated for itself many of the benefits of the new economic order, grew rapidly in the fertile soil of Russia's poverty. To protect and extend its new privileges, the bureaucracy reversed the policies of the Bolsheviks in virtually every sphere, from government based on soviet democracy, to control by the workers over all social and economic planning, to the right of oppressed nationalities to self-determination, to a revolutionary internationalist foreign policy.
By the late 1930s the political counter-revolution carried out by the Stalinist bureaucracy had physically annihilated the entire surviving Bolshevik leadership and established a dictatorship that kept hundreds of thousands in prison camps, psychiatric hospitals, and exile and ruthlessly crushed every murmur of opposition.
For women, the Stalinist counter-revolution led to a policy of reviving and fortifying the family system. Trotsky described this process as follows:
"Genuine emancipation of women is inconceivable without a general rise of economy and culture, without the destruction of the petty-bourgeois economic family unit, without the introduction of socialised food preparation and education. Meanwhile guided by its conservative instinct, the bureaucracy has taken alarm at the ``disintegration'' of the family. It began singing panegyrics to the family supper and the family laundry, that is, the household slavery of women. To cap it all, the bureaucracy has restored criminal punishment for abortions, officially returning women to the status of pack animals. In complete contradiction with the ABC of communism the ruling caste has thus restored the most reactionary and benighted nucleus of the class regime, i.e., the petty-bourgeois family." (Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1937-38 [New York, 1976], p. 129).
The most important factor facilitating this retrogression was the cultural and material backwardness of Russian society, which did not have the resources necessary to construct adequate child-care centres, sufficient housing, public laundries and dining facilities to eliminate the material basis for women's oppression. This backwardness also helped perpetuate the general social division of labor between men and women inherited from the tsarist period.
But beyond these objective limitations, the reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy consciously gave up the perspective of moving in a systematic way to socialise the burdens carried by women, and instead began to glorify the family system, attempting to bind families together through legal restrictions and economic compulsion.
The bureaucracy reinforced the family system for one of the same reasons it is maintained by capitalist society-as a means of inculcating attitudes of submission to authority and for maintaining the privileges of a minority. As Trotsky explained, ``the most compelling motive of the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by means of forty millions points of support for authority and power.'' (The Revolution Betrayed [New York, 1972], p. 153)
As part of this political counter-revolution, the old tsarist laws against homosexuality were dusted off and reintroduced.
Reinforcement of the family enabled the bureaucracy to perpetuate an important division inside the working class: the division between man, as ``head of the family and breadwinner'' and woman, as responsible for tasks inside the home and shopping-in addition to whatever else she might do. On a more general level, it meant maintaining the division between private life and public life, with the resulting isolation that affects both men and women. Bolstering the nuclear family also reinforced the bureaucracy through encouraging the attitude of ``each family for itself,'' and within the framework of a policy of overall planning that had little to do with satisfying the needs of the workers, it allowed the bureaucracy to minimise the costs of social services.
The conditions created by the proletarian revolution and the Stalinist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union have not been mechanically reproduced in all the countries in which Stalinist regimes came to power in the post-World War II period. Important differences exist, reflecting historical, cultural, economic, and social variations from one country to another, even one region to another. However, despite differences of degree in the participation of women in the process of production or the extent of child-care centres and similar social services, maintenance of the economic and social inequality of women and policies aimed at reinforcing and justifying the domestic labor of women remained official policy in all of the ``socialist countries'' of Eastern Europe, China, Mongolia and North Korea.
Soviet women undoubtedly made considerable gains in these areas. For example, by 1986 92% of Soviet women were in the paid workforce or studying outside the home. Soviet women constituted 51% of the paid workforce, with their percentage of the population standing at 53%. Forty per cent of Soviet scientists and technicians were women. By the late 1970s the proportion of Soviet female students gaining college degrees was 82% that of male students, while in the US it was 62%. By the mid 1970s 40% of Soviet engineering graduates were women, compared with only 4.5% in the US.
Stalinist ideologues claimed that by opening up the way for masses of women to enter paid employment, real equality for men and women had been established in the USSR and Eastern Europe. But while women were formally equal under the law and made up more than half of the paid work force, the maintenance and reproduction of labor power continued to fall heavily and almost exclusively on their shoulders.
By maintaining the individual family as the basic economic unit of society, Stalinism maintained the economic oppression of women and concealed real social inequality between men and women. And by reneging on providing socialised alternatives to domestic labor, and reinforcing backward attitudes to the sexual division of labor, Stalinism encouraged barriers that held back women from full participation in social, economic and political life.
Perpetuation of the responsibility of women for the domestic chores associated with child-raising, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and caring for the personal needs of other members of the family unit is the economic and social basis for the disadvantages and prejudices faced by women and the resulting discrimination in jobs and wages. This deeply affects the way women view themselves, their role in society, and the goals they seek to attain.
While 53% of the wage earners in the Soviet Union were women, they were concentrated disproportionately in less skilled, lower paying, less responsible jobs and in traditional female sectors of production and services. According to the 1987 USSR Yearbook women made up 87% of the workforce in retail trade and public catering. Eighty per cent of all primary and secondary school teachers, and 100% of all preschool teachers, were women.
Soviet women were conspicuously absent from the higher managerial and top bureaucratic positions. In 1983, women made up more than 40% of elected officials (compared with only 8% for the US). However, they were concentrated overwhelmingly in local govern- ment bodies. In 1983, only 6% of the members of the CPSU Central Committee were women. In 1976, while more than 40% of all scientists were women, only three out of 243 full members of the USSR Academy of Sciences were women. Only 6.6% of all industrial enterprises were headed by women. This concentration of women in lower paid jobs, of course, had its reflection in gender wage differentials. In 1991, average women's wages in the Soviet Union were between 60-65% of men's-in comparison to 64.4% in 1924!
In the 1970s in the East European countries as a whole, the salary differential between men and women ranged from 27-30%, despite the laws on equal pay that have been in effect for decades in these countries. This reflected the fact that women do not work in the same jobs as men. Not only did they continue to be pushed toward the lower paid ``women's occupations,'' and not only were women often overqualified for the jobs they held, but very few of those who completed apprenticeship programs for better-paying, more highly skilled jobs (notably in heavy industry) continued working in these sectors. Domestic responsibilities made it difficult to keep up with new developments in one's speciality. Also, protective laws establishing special conditions under which women could work often had dis- criminatory effects that prevented them from holding the same job as men.
In fact, the Stalinist bureaucracies repudiated the view of Lenin and other leaders of the Russian Revolution that unrestricted access to abortion is a woman's elementary democratic right.
While legal abortion was generally available in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the '50s and '60s onward, sex education and widespread information on contraceptive methods were explicitly rejected in most East European countries until very recently. Even by the 1980s contraceptive devices and methods like the pill and sterilisation were strictly limited in their availability and very unreliable when they were available. Family planning centres were nonexistent so abortion remained the method of contraception by default.
In China, on the other hand, the Stalinist bureaucracy introduced special economic penalties for couples with more than two children, in order to try to limit population growth. But the principle is the same. The right of women to choose was subordinated to the economic decisions made by the bureaucracy.
In all the Eastern European countries, and in China, the bureaucracy promoted policies aimed at reinforcing sexual repression. The extreme housing shortage, the kind of education given to children from earliest infancy, the frequent refusal to rent hotel rooms to non-married couples, pressure to postpone marriage, all reflected the bureaucracy's oppos- ition to any form of sexual liberation. Exploration of sexuality was viewed with suspicion and labeled deviant. Given their place within the family, women bore the brunt of these repressive norms and policies.
In 1988, as the political situation began to open up in the USSR, one of the first public opinion polls noted that marital and sexual morals were beginning to loosen-that there was ``a narrowing of the possible types of behavior being roundly condemned.'' The previously condemned behavior included activities such as premarital sex, cohabitation with refusal to register as man and wife, and increased rates of divorce.
Prior to the collapse of their bureaucratically centralised planned economies in 1989-90, most of the Soviet bloc countries had full employment. Today unemployment is skyrocketing and women's jobs are disappearing faster than men's. Women make up the bulk of factory workers across Eastern Europe and the push to privatisation combined with the end of Soviet energy subsidies means factories are closing at an alarming rate. In Moscow in November 1991 77% of the unemployed were women. Eighty per cent of the job cutbacks in the Moscow city administration were borne by women.
At the same time, social services like child care, public laundries, access of married women to unemployment benefits-limited though they may have been under the Stalinist regimes-are now under attack.
The bureaucratic elite has sought to block the development of a unified resistance by workers to the massive loss of jobs and free social services that its ``free market'' policies have imposed by reinforcing the reactionary idea that women's ``natural'' role is inside the home, as mother-wife-housekeeper. As part of this offensive, significant sections of the bureaucratic elite, particularly in Poland, have accommodated to the demands of the Catholic hierarchy to have abortion banned. Similar moves have taken place in the re-unified Germany to get rid of accessible abortion in the former German Democratic Republic and to impose West Germany's criminalisation of abortion.
There are specific historical reasons for the long delay in the development of a mass feminist consciousness in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe:
Already some very limited organisation is taking place in Moscow. In March 1991 a women's congress was organised by feminists which was attended by 200 women from all over Russia. The most pressing questions of interest were economic and political rights of women in the ``new democracy''.
Women fighting for their liberation elsewhere often looked to the USSR and Eastern Europe and concluded that if this was what ``socialism'' did for women, they didn't need it. And of course many anti-Marxists pointed to the situation of women in these countries as ``proof'' that the road to women's liberation is not through class struggle. This led to enormous political and ideological confusion in the women's movement -- a confusion heightened by the post-1985 revelations of the state of social, economic and political disorder in these countries.
But there are enormous lessons to be learnt from these experiences-negative as well as positive.
The Bolshevik Revolution demonstrated how the conscious struggles for women's liberation and socialism are interlinked-that the struggle for women's liberation is not one of women against men but a united struggle in which women, as both a major component of the working class and of its allies, actively combined to improve the situation of all while, at the same time, championing their own specific demands. But Soviet history also strikingly confirms the fact that the family institution is the cornerstone of the oppression of women.
As long as women's domestic servitude is sustained and nurtured by economic and political policy, as long as the functions of the family are not fully taken over by superior social institutions, the truly equal integration of women in productive life and all social affairs is impossible. The responsibility of women for domestic labor is the source of the inequalities they face in daily life, in education, in work and in politics.
Because the oppression of women is historically intertwined with the division of society into classes and with the role of the family as the basic unit of class society, this oppression can only be eradicated with the abolition of private ownership of the means of production. Today it is these class relations of production-not the productive capacities of humanity-which constitute the obstacle to transferring to society as a whole the social and economic foundations borne under capitalism by the individual family.
However, the liberation of women cannot be achieved simply by abolishing
the capitalist economic system. This is necessary, but by itself it is
not sufficient. What is also required is a dynamic transformation and eradication
of all the social attitudes and ideological justifications which prop up
and justify the economic, social and political inequalities faced by women.
That can only be achieved by the conscious self- mobilisation of the victims
of such oppression-of women themselves.
There is great diversity in the economic and social conditions and cultural traditions in these countries. They range from an extremely low level of economic activity in some areas to considerable industrialisation in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea and Taiwan. All underdeveloped countries, however, are defined by the imperialist domination they suffer in common and the consequent distortions to their economies. This also has specific effects on women in these countries.
Using torture, extermination, rape, and other forms of terror on a mass scale, and in Africa through the outright enslavement of the native peoples, expanding European capitalism brutally colonised Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa and thrust them into the world market. With the European conquerors came Christianity which was usually turned to advantage as one of the central links in the chain of subjugation.
In the post-World War II period, under the combined impact of the weakening during the Second World War of the old European colonial powers, the desire of the new hegemonic imperialist power-the USA-to have unrestricted access to Third World markets and resources, and an upsurge of national independence struggles, most of the colonial countries of Asia and Africa won formal political independence. However, their economies remained dominated by the giant capitalist corporations of the imperialist countries.
Today, the imperialist banks and transnational corporations use the weapons of loans and unequal trading relations, rather than troops and gunboats, to plunder the resources of the underdeveloped world. This results in an enormous flow of wealth and resources from the world's poorest nations to the richest. The impact of this plundering is not only economic. Huge environmental damage is taking place as vast forest areas are destroyed; major pollutants are released in the air, sea, land and water table; massive soil exhaustion and erosion is occurring. These ecological consequences are adding to a long- term environmental crisis of global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, and the unchecked production of toxic products that are multiplying at a frightening rate.
For women in the Third World the penetration of the capitalist market has a contradictory impact: on the one hand, it introduces new economic relations that begin to lay the basis for women to overcome their centuries-old oppression. But on the other hand, it takes over and utilises the archaic traditions, religious codes, and anti-woman prejudices, initially reinforcing them through new forms of discrimination and superexploitation. In general, the situation of women is directly related to the degree of industrialisation that has been achieved. But uneven development in some societies can produce startling contradictions, such as relative economic independence for women who dominate primitive agriculture in some areas of Africa.
In the Third World, the development of capitalist production proceeds according to the needs of imperialism. For this reason, industrialisation takes place only slowly and in an unbalanced, distorted way, if at all.
Women play a decisive economic role. Not only do they work long hours in the fields and home, but they produce children to share the burden of work and provide economic security in old age. They marry at puberty and often give birth to as many children as physically possible. Their worth is generally determined by the number of children they produce. An infertile woman is considered a social disgrace and an economic disaster. Infertility is often grounds for divorce.
Because of its productive role, the hold of the family on all its members, but specifically on women, is strong. Combined with a low level of economic development, this brings about extreme deprivation and degradation for peasant women in the rural areas. In practice, they scarcely have any legal or social rights as individuals, and are often barely considered human. They live under virtually total domination and control by male members of their family.
In many cases the restricted resources of the family unit are allocated first of all to the male members of the family; it is not uncommon for female children to receive less food and care, leading to stunted growth or early death from malnutrition. Female infanticide, both direct and through deliberate neglect, is still practiced in many areas. Often illiteracy rates for women approach 100%.
The incorporation of these countries into the world capitalist market inevitably has an impact on the rural areas however. Inflation and the inability to compete with larger agricultural holdings using more productive methods lead to continuous waves of migration from the countryside to the cities. Often this migration begins with the males of the family leaving the women, children, and the elderly with an even heavier burden as they try to eke out an impoverished existence from the land on their own. But sometimes it is the young women who go to obtain work in the free trade zones established to encourage industrial investment and development, and which are specifically based on the cheap, superexploited labor of predominantly young women workers. Or sometimes young women are recruited to work in the brothels and bars as prostitutes.
The desperate search for a job eventually leads millions of workers to leave their country of birth and migrate to the advanced capitalist countries or to the oil rich countries of the Arab-Persian Gulf, where if they are lucky enough to find a job, it will be under miserable conditions of superexploitation.
The isolation and backward traditions of the rural areas tend to be challenged and broken down not only by migration to and from the cities but also by the diffusion of the mass media, such as radio and television.
In the cities the extended family as a productive unit rapidly disappears for most. Each family member is obliged to sell his or her labor power on the market as an individual. However, due to the extremely precarious employment situation, lack of social welfare support and the financial responsibilities that semi-proletarian city dwellers often have vis-a-vis their rural relatives, the familial obligations of the immediate family often still includes aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters and their children, besides father, mother, and children. Among the urban middle class and the more stable sectors of the working class, however, the family unit begins to become more restricted.
As they migrate to the cities, women have greater opportunities for education, for broader social contact, and for economic independence. The needs of capitalism, which bring increasing numbers of women out of family isolation, come into conflict with the old ideas about the role of women in society.
In taking jobs as industrial or service workers, women begin to occupy positions that were previously forbidden them by backward prejudices and traditions. Those able to secure an education that permits them to break into professions, such as teaching and nursing, also serve as examples that contradict traditional attitudes, even in the eyes of those women who don't work.
The myth of women's inferiority is increasingly called into question by this reality, which challenges their time-honored subordination.
Even for women who are not able to get an education or to work outside the home, city conditions help provide the possibility of escaping the mental prison that the rural family's isolation imposes on them. This happens through the greater impact of the mass media, the proximity of political life and struggles, the visibility of modern household appliances, laundries, etc.
As would be expected, women are concentrated in jobs that are the least skilled, lowest paying, and least protected by laws on safety conditions, minimum wages, etc. This is especially true for agricultural work, piecework in the home, and work as domestics, where a high proportion of women are employed. The average wage of female workers tends to be one-third to one-half of that of male workers. When women are able to get an education and acquire some skills, they are confined even more strictly than in the advanced capitalist countries to certain ``female'' occupations, such as nursing and teaching.
But women are also concentrated in industries such as textile, garment, food processing, and electrical parts and often make up a majority of the labor force employed there. Given the overwhelming predominance of such light industry in the more industrialised colonial countries, this means that, although they are a low percentage of the work force as a whole, women workers can occupy a strategically important place.
The employment of women in such industries is crucial for the superprofits of the imperialists, both because they are a source of cheaper labor and also because the employment of women at lower wages or in lower-paying jobs allows the capitalists to divide and weaken the working class and keep down the overall wage scale. The process of imperialist accumulation cannot be fully understood without explaining the role of the super-exploitation of women workers in the underdeveloped countries.
Unemployment and under-employment are of crisis proportions, and much of the responsibility for family spending and daily maintenance falls on women. To help their family survive, women are often forced to resort to such desperate and precarious sources of income as selling handicrafts or home-cooked food in the streets, or taking in laundry.
Hyperinflation means housewives in the cities have to go from market to market searching for the lowest prices, eating less so their children can have a little more, if there is any to have at all. Domestic labor is often carried out in urban fringe districts or shanty towns which do not have running water or electricity, medical facilities or schools. Prostitution is frequently the only recourse. The endemic unem- ployment also exacerbates alcoholism and drug addiction, which results in greater violence against women as well as even more desperate poverty.
In the countryside the situation for women is even worse. Lack of basic public services means that domestic labor has to be carried out in brutal conditions. Domestic labor itself is expanded to include care for animals and preparation of products for market. Women must cover huge distances to find water or wood. Possibilities for peasant women to find paid work have decreased forcing women to become unwaged tenant farmers, or day workers.