Letters

Bread and roses

I write to ask CPGB members to consider the use of the term, ‘bourgeois feminism’, introducing the article on Women of the Waterfront, and the implied view that feminism is not relevant to working class women (Weekly Worker March 6).

I am proud to identify myself as a feminist with political alignment to the socialist feminist tradition. I respect both radical and liberal feminism, but identify with the critique of these traditions’ lack of class analysis.

Socialist feminism is inspired by the class analysis of Engels, Marx and Lenin, but, as Rosa Luxemburg knew, class oppression is not the only source of our inequality and suppression. The title of this letter was used as an essay title by McAfee and Wood and was the name of a group of American feminists inspired by the Massachusetts textile workers’ strike of 1912.

Bread and roses argues that the women’s’ movement could be made more relevant to women who are poor and working class women if it stressed simultaneously economic oppression (issues of ‘bread’) and the psychological effects of sexism (‘roses’). In Britain the tradition of socialist feminism has done so with the recognition that class oppression combined with patriarchy prevents women’s equality.

Please read and understand the following quote from this essay in this context:

“A movement organised by women around the oppression of women, they say, is bound to emphasise the bourgeois and personal aspects of oppression of working class women and men.

“This attitude toward women’s liberation is mistaken and dangerous. By discouraging the development of a revolutionary women’s liberation movement, it avoids a serious challenge to what, along with racism, is the deepest source of division and false consciousness among workers. By setting up (in the name of Marxist class analysis) a dichotomy between the bourgeois, personal and psychological forms of oppression on the one hand and the ‘real’ material forms on the other, it substitutes a mechanistic model of class relations for a more profound understanding of how these two aspects of oppression depend upon and reinforce each other” (my emphasis).

Thus I call on comrades in the CPGB and Scottish Socialist Alliance to reject an economic determinist view. I state unequivocally that I reject biological determinism. Men do not oppress us simply because of their gender, but through the complex relationships of gender and the constructed social arrangement men and women are forced to live under - the divisive capitalist system.

Neither are women joined by ‘something to do with hormones’, but by the reality of experiences - experiences which include sexism, rape and violence and exclusion, as well as the joy of relationships between ourselves and men and children (if we choose these relationships).

The “gangsters’ molls”, partners of the bosses, may also experience oppression. Domestic violence transcends class issues as well as being a class issue (man, brutalised by wage slavery, may punch his wife rather than the boss, assert his authority in the home when he cannot in the workplace).

The oppression of women is based on class divisions, a division of labour between the ‘stronger’ and the ‘weaker’, the owner and the owned. All women, including those of the ruling class, are oppressed in the sense that fulfilment is linked to their role as girlfriend, wife or mother. The “gangsters’ molls” are in a subservient role.

With respect to the dockers’ and miners’ wives, why are women defined as ‘wives’? Why are women not dockers (remember women crane drivers could not get employment post-war) or mineworkers (don’t dare say we lack the physical strength - tell that to Eastern European and Russian women miners)? Why is the Fire Brigades Union not stamping out sexual harassment of women firefighters?

I support the right of any oppressed group - black, working class, young people, older people, Irish and so on - to organise separately. I do not therefore expect, for example, black separatists to be racist. Thus I won’t support women’s groups which are anti-male. For women whose ill-treatment has included sexual, physical and emotional abuse I respect that they cannot work alongside men. I now choose to join with socialist men, but respect organisations such as Scottish Women’s Aid, who cannot work with men.

It is not possible to always work with the oppressor and the oppressed, impossible to support the perpetrator and the abused. I have respect for both the Campaign Against Domestic Violence and the refuge movement and was pleased to hear the call for coexistence from Ann Lynch of Scottish Militant Labour and CADV, who shares with me the position of SSA women’s officer. But each must respect positions which may appear contradictory, but are not. I respect women’s organisations whose energy and commitment is in supporting women only, and simultaneously support the CADV in involving men in debate. For ultimately men have to take responsibility for the individual and collective harm of women.

I was shocked by the lack of awareness in the Weekly Worker on the domestic violence issue. For me the slogan, ‘The personal is political’, has real meaning. For I am a survivor of partner violence. Without the women’s movement I would not have had a refuge to go to when my partner battered me (during pregnancy) and may not have had the strength to leave when he broke my arm.

This experience has not made me anti-men - I live with a man; I have two sons. I love and respect them dearly. I am pained when my sons (and all the sons and daughters) cannot find work in this rotten system. Both sons have been unemployed for six to eight years with brief periods of exploitation in crap jobs.

I work with damaged and disadvantaged young people. Most are homeless. I recognise the class oppression which made them poor and homeless. But I also ask readers to recognise that it is men who crawl around in cars, often looking for the youngest face, to ‘buy sex’, to sexually exploit vulnerable women. Our daughters stand on street corners, bodies racked with drug use, often non-survivors of early abuse, servicing men sexually. Don’t offend me by denying my right to be part of a movement which named this abuse.

On route to the protest at Cornton Vale jail with Alice Sheridan, we found common ground as socialists. Women are sent to this jail for petty offences and gender oppression is most evident. Activities on offer - cleaning, sewing, hairdressing, cooking; whereas in male jails (I know: full of working class men) at least you get to do some work or Open University courses.

Alice said that what had revolutionised her life were socialist advances; the provision of welfare, education. I said what had revolutionised my life, made it different from my mum’s, was the women’s movement. For without the women’s movement the complexities of women’s relationships to the welfare state would have remained a mystery: for example, my treatment during childbirth and post-natal depression, explained by Ann Oakley, socialist feminist; our complex interface with welfare, explained by Elizabeth Wilson, socialist feminist (read Women and the welfare state).

The awareness raised by feminism is crucial at this time, with ‘family values’ (the site of our oppression as well as the source of joy) on the political agenda. Major and Tony Blair call for a return to the rosy era of 1950s values, neglecting the plight of women silently screaming, stuck to the kitchen sink in the home when we never had it so good (?)

Read Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique. Women who had taken full part in society over the war years (see the short film Rosie the riveter), then forced back to the domestic realm with Bowlby’s maternal deprivation theory to feed our collective guilt. This theory is still being expounded in social work courses. Ever wondered why the majority of social work clients are women? And why are social work bosses men?

The women’s movement encouraged women to get involved: eg, Women’s Action for Peace, Greenham, miners’ support groups, ‘A woman’s place is in her union’, direct action groups. My political education I owe partly to a working class woman, Mary, whose awareness humbled me. It would be sad indeed if Women of the Waterfront divorce themselves from our history.

My position in the SSA is to ask for women’s issues to be part of the socialist campaign. Issues of women abuse (including domestic/partner violence), which means the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of women by men (I understand that men are also abused. I work with young men who are non-survivors of abuse, and I also accept that some women abuse, but not on the same scale as men). Stop sexual exploitation of women; stop criminalising women forced into prostitution; stop the exploitation of women as carers, as consumers, as house workers, as workers in wage slavery; have solidarity with the women of the third world (I struggle with the term, ‘developing world’, preferring post-Marxist concepts of underdevelopment, appropriation and exploitation).

And for the unconvinced, please read Marilyn French’s The war against women and learn of the suffering of women, particularly in the third world: of female genital mutilation, of women burning in India, of female infanticide, in China and elsewhere. Domestic violence is global. In Britain five or six children in every classroom witness or overhear women’s abuse, abuse of their mother, on a regular basis.

Until I spoke of these issues at the SSA founding conference I had rarely heard them mentioned at socialist gatherings. Are we to deny that our socialist brothers might also be beating/exploiting their partners? Congratulations to SML for having these debates with men, and to the CADV for raising awareness among men. Do not silence women.

Finally the oppression of women predates the rise of capitalism and is global. Even when socialist advances have improved conditions for women (read accounts by women in the African National Congress and in the Sandinista era), the exploitation of women continues. To deny this is to render invalid my life experiences as a woman and the lives of our sisters internationally.

Socialism cannot exist without feminism. Let’s work, together and separately, for the socialist and feminist revolution. It is not bourgeois to believe in this revolution.

Vive la revolution socialist and feminist!

Ann Morgan
Women’s officer, Scottish Socialist Alliance

For a Scottish parliament

Personal experience taught me that being a councillor brings few rewards. This has been the case under various governments, including Labour, who in the ‘national interest’ demanded cuts.

The situation today is out of control, with Edinburgh city council agreeing to throw more than 800 of its workers onto the scrapheap. The Tories can rightly be blamed, but Labour councillors were elected to defend jobs and services.

Twenty years ago a few bravehearts on the former Lothian Regional Council refused the dictate of Callaghan’s government and the international bankers to attack the poor. These rebels were denounced by the party bureaucracy, but they made their point. As one of them, it saddens me that New Labour should again say that local democracy doesn’t count, because Tory economic policies will continue, even with a change of government.

This explains why Ted Heath and other Tories have no problems with a Mickey Mouse Scottish assembly and a national minimum wage of £2 an hour.

All radical MPs, backed by sympathetic trade unionists and councillors, should call a special meeting in Edinburgh after the general election to establish a real parliament for Scotland with a socialist agenda.

Perhaps this sounds ‘over the top’, but anything worthwhile for the unemployed, low paid, pensioners, disabled and homeless people must be fought for politically. Otherwise workers face another betrayal.

Ron Brown
former MP, Edinburgh