The Woman

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The position omen in If w capitalist society was stressed time and again by Lenin and Trotsky, and Trotsky in the Transitional Programme, the founding document of the Fourth International. underlines the importance of bringing women into the revolutionary party. Yet this is a field which has been allowed by the British Trotskyist movement to remain in the domain of middle class liberals.

Speaking to conterenc

working women Union on 23rd September, 1 1919, Lenin said:

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases, housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does notin any way promote the development of the woman. (Lenin, Collected Works. Vol. 30. pp. 40-6 OPPRESSION and we all know that this is still the situation in the tamily today. Of course, it can be argued that the technological developments made since 1919 have considerably lightened the 'arduous work of the housewife. Similar developments have decreased the manual labour of workers in industry, but this in way lessens the oppression of workers by the employers. For the content of this oppression lies in the social relations of capitalist production. So the essence of woman's oppression must be understood by undertaking a serious study the social relations within the tamily. As Engels wrote, in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State:

"Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the carner the bread-winner of the family,. and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the Jamily, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat. (emphasis added) (Marx and Engels Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 247)

The gains won by women since Engels was writing the right to vote, the Married Women's Property Act, the omission from the marriage service of the word 'obey' etc. have done nothing to change this basic inequality. As Engels goes on to explair., democratic legal equality won will serve to expose where the real roots of the oppression lie - in the capitalist system:

"In the industrial world. however, the specific character of the economic oppression that weighs down the proletariat stands out in all sharpness only after all the special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been set aside and the complete juridical equality of both class is established. The democratic republic does not abolish the antagonism between the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the field on which it is fough• out. And similarly the peculiar character of man's domination over woman in the modern family, and the necessity, as well as the manner of establishing real social equality between the two. will be brought sut into full relief only when both are completely equal before the law It will then become evident that the first premise for the emancipation of women is the re-introduction of the entire female sex into publi industry; and that this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the eco nomic unit of society be abolished." (as above)

This was clear to Lenin after the October Revolution, when full legal equality was provided for women, restrictions on divorce lifted. abortions freely available, etc., and the requirement was then for women to fully productive woik:

TRANSFORMATION "Not withstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-wracking stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins. against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its whole. sale transformation into a largescale economy begins "

And he goes on to explain the means by which this transformation can take place .. Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens - her we have examples of these shoots. here we have the simple, everyday means. which can really emancipate women, means) were created by capitalism they these but remained first a rarity and secondis either profit-making enterprises acrobatics of bourgeois charity (Lenin Collected Works, Volume pp. 428-9, emphasis in original)

Let us look at the situation in western capitalist countries today: mothers of young children drugged by anti-depressants in order to face the "petty, nerve-wracking drudgery. state nurseries provided for children of unsupported mothers only and even here there is great pressure on the mother to stay at home, causing almost complete isolation from the outside world - and private nurseries for those rich enough to pay. Nursery schools exist but, as the Plowden Report emphasised, this prevision is strictly for the child's education and certainly must not assist the mother to take employment outside the home. Playgroups have been organised by groups of mothers because of the State's refusal to provide these basic services but again, because of their limited hours, they are of no value to the working mother. Public eating places and laundering facilities of course exist strictly as capitalist enterprises and certainly do not regard service to people d'etre. • The plans of the October Revolution were to provide a finished system of social care and accommodation: child-care centres, social dining rooms, schools, hospitals, etc. However, as Trotsky explains in Revolution Betrayed, the actual liberation of women was unrealisable on basis of "generalised want". (In other words not until the raterial conditions exister.) The growth of the Women's Liberation wearcracy under Stalin's icadership was accompanied by the movement away from the social dining rooms of the more well-off layers, and generally the child care centre in provision: which the child feels worse than he does at home is not a childcare centre but a bad orphan asylum" reported Soviet newspaper in the mid-1930's. "You cannot abolish the family you have to replace it" said Trotsky, and Stalin's refusal to make adequate provision opened the door to the re-introduction of the woman's role in the home. Subsequently divorce and abortion laws were tightened up and the modern situation is summed up in the experience of a Polish mother who has to get up at 5.30 in order to take the child across the city to his kindergarter return and do a full day's work in her local factory, shop, fetch the child home and then cook and ciean up for the whole family ''orkine class housewife The growth of the Women's Liberation movement over the recent period shows the possibilities for women traditionally, by virtue of their isolation in the home, completely unorganised - to become a fighting force. However this movement is almost totally comprise: of women from the middle class and completely refuses to entertain the idea of leadership, maintaining that every woman must be left free to regain her confidence after a lifetime of domination by the male sex. Thus the emphasis on individual solutions and certainly not on any class analysis of society.

Here the, socialist women in Women's Liberation from the IMG and IS bear the major responsibility for this lack of fight for a clear political leadership in he movement. Much of the activity Women's Liberation revolves around the Consciousness Raising groups where small groups of women meet regularly in 'closed' sessions to delve deeply into their innermost thoughts in order presumably to purge themselves of their feelings of inadequacy which the domination of the male sex throughout their upbringing has nurtured. These sessions inevitably turn into discussions and Frank" Ten. revelations about sexual problems. Lenin was very clear on these kind of groups which were prevalent in the feminist movement at his time:

"It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience. This masked respect for bouregois morality seems to me Just as repulsive as interfering in sexual matters However wild and revolutionary the behaviour may be, intellectuals and of the sections hoa it to the p. party, in the class There is no place conscious, fighting proletariat." (In discussion with ara Zetki tumn 1920; Reminiscences of Lenin, Klara Zetkin)

The biggest danger activity Movement is that it diverts away from a materialis approach to the problems facing women: of this futile, un-Marxist way of And what is the result dealing with all this? That the great social question appears as an adjunct as a part, of sexual problems. The main thing becomes a subsidiary matter. That does not only endanger muddies the thoughts of the class on that question itself. conscious women generally now the time to amuse proletarian women with discussions on how one loves and is loved, how one ABORTION LAW The Women's Liberation movement is also, though, attempting to mobilise action for legal reforms. We support completely the fight against the new abortion law proposals introduced in Parliament by the MP White which would restrict drastically the availability of abortions merely to cases of extreme medical risk. The decision have children should lie with the woman whose life will be radically altered by becoming a Halth service should operate in and with her alone. The Health order to protect the health of women, who would otherwise be forced into the hands of the "back-street" abortionists with dangerous consequences.

The fight for the Working Women's Charter must. also be supported However the only way to mobilise a fight in the working class on these issues is through the organisations of the working class -the trade unions - and central to this fight is the fight against the reformist leadership in the trade unions which has held back on the fight on the Equal Pay Act and which we have recently seen in action at the NUT conference against a delegate proposing action for the Working Womens Charter. The struggle must be to build revolutionary leadership in the unions which will fight on these issues and begin to mobilise working women in the struggle for socialism, and thereby gain material conditions for lifting the oppression of women.

We are totally against any concept of separate organisation for women. As Lenin said:

"The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out. That will draw clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the and SO bind firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the Our ideological conceptions dictate the principles of organisation: no special organisations for women. A woman communist is a member of the party just as a man communist." (Lenin to Klara Zetkin, Autumn 1920: Reminiscences of Lenin, Klara Zetkin)

This article is intended to provide the basis for a discussion within Trotskyist movement on the revolutionary party can raise the level of women's day-to-day struggles to show the necessity of the socialist revolution.

We invite readers* comments contributions to this discussion.

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SOCIALIST ESS, Thursday May Ist, 19 should not be replaced.

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