WSL launches new women's

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TRI LUPE says:

£60 Air Empios EMA dc NUPE OFFICIAL STRIKE Working women are in the front line of attack as the Tory government sets out to slash jobs, living standards and social services for the working class as a whole.

But at the same time women workers have been at the forefront of struggles for unionisa. tion, against low pay in the Penny Woolcock reviews 'Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a woman of the Bolivian Mines' by Domitila Barrios de public sector, and against cu health care and education.

The special problems that they face in playing their full role in the fight against the betrayals of trade union and Labour leaders are real, material problems created by capitalist oppression and intensified in the present conditions of mass unemployment, attacks on union rights, nursery cuts and closures and crumbling social services.

Woman Worker, the new women's paper launched this week by the Workers Socialist League, addresses itself to these problems and to the political development of leadership amongst working class women.

This is not, of course, to say that only working class women are oppressed by the social relations of capitalism.

Socialised facilities

But as Marxists we do insist that the oppression of women in the individual family unit can only be ended with the ending of the capitalist system. of production, and the establishment of a socialist society in which the individual drudgery of domestic labour, child care and health care can be replaced by socialised facilities.

At present the family unit serves capitalism by both creating and rearing the next generation of workers and by servicing the worker for daily It serves as a means of disciplining and repressing youth, of dividing the class strength of the working class, and as a sitting target for capitalist marketing and advertising techniques selling every conceivable consumer product.

Within the home the woman worker and mother is doubly oppressed and exploited-both directly as a worker and also as a woman in carrying the weight of domestic labour and main responsibility for child care.

Confined to home

The task of Woman Worker is both to attract the most militant layers of women workers and to break down the isolation of those women who find themselves confined to the home-through unemployment, lack of nursery facilities or caring for the sick and elderly.

The paper will focus On particular problems facing women:

*Unionisation. Despite growing numbers of women in the unions, women's involvement in leading positions and union meetings remains slight.

Many women are also in low paid jobs and face the prospect of bitter struggles for the most basic right of trade union organisation.

Woman Worker will raise the questions of political leadership involved in these struggles and fight for the full involvement of women in the unions at every level.

*Low Pay. The problem of lower pay for women is more the general fight against low wage rates than of women's inequality.

Woman Worker will fight for wage increases, linked to cost-of living clauses to protect against inflation.

*The Cuts. With so many women working in the public services, the cuts hit women particularly hard through loss of jobs. Hospital and nursery closures also force women in the home to shoulder added burdens of child care and care for the sick.

Woman Worker, drawing on the WSL's experience of struggles in the cuts fight will fight for strikes and occupations to stop the cuts.

#Abortion Rights. : The Thatcher government's NHS cuts will hit at the right of working class women to obtain an abortion. But there is also the near certainty of a new right wing Tory Bill to restrict existing legal abortion rights.

Woman Worker will fight for every woman's right to free, safe abortion on demand.

* Internationalism. The crisis that spurs on the Tory attacks is an international crisis-affecting workers in Ireland, Iran and Spain at the same time as in Britain.

Woman Worker will bring in these international developments and show the role of those political leaders who head off struggles there just as Callaghan and the trade union bureaucracy do in Britain.

In addition Woman Worker will struggle against those bourgeois feminists who see the answer to women's problems not through socialism but through an all class "sisterhood" of all women.

It will spell out clearly the need for women to fight for revolutionary leadership in the working class as the only answer to the material problems they face-the kind of leadership fought for by the Workers Socialist League.

Woman Worker is on sale now. It is available, price 6p, from Socialist Press sellers or (15p including postage) from the WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR. struggle against oppression