Sexism crucial to boosting 'family

Scan page 8

If EEC "surveys" were to be believed, 50% of women in the Common Market are happy to stay at home as housewives, and 60% regard More important than those absurd statistics, however, is why the hard-boiled capitalist leaders of the EEC saw fit to spend good drinking money on commissioning such a survey.

The reason is clear. As the capitalist economic crisis forces employers onto the offensive it becomes increasingly important for them to split and divide the working class to minimise its resistance.

Racialism, nationalism and sexual discrimination are crucial means to this end.

And ' as social services crumble, education and nursery facilities are axed and hundreds of thousands of women workers find themselves forced out of employment through closures and cuts, the most conscious sections of capitalist ideologists recognise the necessity to bolster up the flagging argument that "a woman's place is in the home" • This reactionary line was taken up during the 1979 Election in the emphasis placed by both Tory and Labour leaders on the importance of the individual family unit.

But not even the most rabid sexist in the Labour or party has yet reached the level of hysteria attained by irish Professor Louis Smith, who has developed a theory that spells out beyond all doubt. the interconnection between peddling the 'values' of the bourgeois family unit and the repression of homosexuality.

Lesbianism

According to Professor Smith, only single women should be allowed to work.

A married woman's place, he says, is in the home.

Indeed if women are allowed any form of economic independence of their husbands, there is "a real danger I!! some may develop lesbian fendencies."

In the view of Professor Smith-who has six childrenthe growing tendency of wives in Ireland to go out to work could have serious consequences for female sexuality, breaking down the "team concept" in marriage.

His evidence? Well, of course such a "case" composed as it is of mediaeval superstition and sheer bigoted ignorance doesn't really need evidence.

But Prof. Smith has decked out his pronouncement with a pretence of authenticity by referring to San Francisco.

Irish women beware That city, he said, has one of the highest incidences of working wives in the world. And homosexuality obviously assessed by the same EEC team) had reached a reported 38%!

Irish women should beware!

Of course Prof Smith did not refer to the USSR, where an even higher number of working wives runs alongside official figures which "prove' the absence of any homosexuality at all!

But lest anyone should miss the political significance of his arguments, Prof Smith spilled the beans.

It is hardly worth working, because women who work earn on average only 60% of male earnings, he stressed. And because of these low wages. few can afford adequate child care.

Stay at home

His message is clear: women should not fight for adequate wages, bút tamely stay at home, rearing children and shouldering the burden of domestic labour in total isolation, contenting themselves with the fact that they are helping to uphold what Smith sees as "normal sexual relationships" between men and women.

Our message is equally clear: those reactionaries like Smith and others who seek to repress homosexuals and intensify domestic oppression of women must be exposed in their true colours-and the echoes of their arguments must be challenged wherever they surface within the ranks of the labour movement. Prof. Smith's ideal family unit?

Scan page 9

Whilst the public expenditure cuts dominate the headlines at present throughout the media, there can be little doubt that for combativitiy of the worktorce.

And, returning to last winter, the Ford workers smashed the 5% limit not with a sensible and just claim, but by immediate and tenacious strike action in support of what they wanted.

After saying all this, it is hardly worth repeating that it was only in Camden, where the local council workers took all out action, that the full £60/ 35 hour week claim was all but conceded whilst elsewhere selective actions met a wall of silence.

----- pull-quotes -----

housework not as a chore, but as "very pleasurable."