Review: Socialist Feminism versus Marxism

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Socialist feminism versus Marxism 'A New World for Women' - Sheila Rowbotha siography of Stella Browne - is reviewed here Elizabeth Thompson ira, ab. Ve Vorld C Ste Ipsi for l la Back in 1973, Sheila Rowbotham's book Woman Consciousness, Man's World made one of the earliest form- ulations in recent history of the position that "the personal is political". This kind of statement has become a truism among certain sections of the left, particularly among feminists, but it has acquired this eminence without gaining any clarity. It has become standard for periodicals such as Socialist Challenge (as well as more excusably polygot productions such as Spare Rib and Time Out) to carry pious references to the "relationship between political and personal concerns", or to click their tongues in indignation over the tendency among revolutionaries to underestimate this connection. But no serious analysis of the connection, or of its possible implications for socialist theory or programme, has been attempted. The description which Rowbotham's book offered-concentrating on the existential aspect of the question, the day-to-day effects of capitalism on people's lives and relationships, and the extent to which participa- tion in the struggle against capitalism does not undo, but indeed sometimes exacerbates, those effects-(i.e. knowing it is capitalism that makes life awful doesn't make life any less awful under capitalism) -has not been developed into an analysis in Marxist terms of the relationship between capitalism and the individual male or female personality.

Rowbotham's most recent book, A New World for Women. certainlv attempts no proaress towards this goal.

inadequacy, of course, for it is pr which disrupts her own attempts a entire political orientation of her l on a notion of the revolutionary the basis for immediate changes this reformism is "corrected" from of the author's socialism.

But this fails to do binaunnh. whink aunana ecisely the contradiction t "socialist history". The sook is reformist, relying struggle as constructing in personal living"; but time to time by avowals justice to the book's defects as wuyraphy, ween are astounuing. rew biography can have been written whicl phrases such as "there could have beel been" ', and "probably". The book is so contains so many disclaimers as to the the lack of available materials, that might wonder why it was attempted i preference, for example, to a biogr colleague, Dora Russell, on whom an a lished material exists. works or history or 1 rely so heavily on i", there must have under-documented, problems caused by an innocent reader n the first place, in aphy of Browne's sundance of unpub- One answer immediately suggests itself; Browne was both a "socialist and feminist", and though the book makes no attempt to define either position, or the relationship between them, this combination is of particular "relevance" and usefulness to the "marxist-feminist" movement which has recently emerged out of the women's liberation move- ment, and in whose ranks Rowbotham counts herself.

In narticular Rawne'e prancenation with ahartion It is a brief biography of Stella Browne (a feminist" as the subtitle proclaims her), wh 1912 until her death in the 'fifties to alert f Communist Party and then the Labour necessity for abortion reform. But the book on the standard formulation: Browne, endeavoured continually to stress the between sexual politics and socialism".

But her manner of maintaining "socialist and o fought from irst the British Party to the passively relies we are told, "connections seems to reforms, belief in this "connection" nave consisted or a literiong struggle tor particular accompanied by an unflagging assertion of her "socialism". Rowbotham is unable to perceive this reform makes it even more convenient that out of a hat for her relevance to the movement. The book is really a socialist-femi the sort of biographies, short on facts but intentions, which are written for schoolgi usually about great ladies, such as Queen E Catherine the Great, but Stella Browne does great woman. she be pulled current NAC nist version of long on good ris; these are lizabeth 1 and very well as a Browne was, in fact, clearly a figure of some historical significance. Like Dora Russell and many others she saw the limitations of the woman-suffrage struggle as it foundered on the 1914-18 Imperialist War, and struggled against the Page 23

bureaucratic leaderships of the Labour Party for positions which would effect important changes in the lives of men and women. These old "war-horses" worked within the perimeters of the Labour Party for decades, increasingly disappointed and bewildered, and finally embittered, at the failure of a series of Labour governments to institute the reforms (substantial maternity leave, family allowances which would provide housewives with some independence, a health service which could provide universal access to birth control and abortion) for which they had spent their lives and energies. But to simplistically update Browne, to make her smartly pre-figure contemporary socialist-feminism, is to do injury to the specific historical role of her positions and their significance. (Rowbotham for instance shows no interest at all in the significance, for Browne's development or for that of the British Communist Party, of Browne's 1923 departure from the CP).

The importance for us of women such as Browne is not in some miraculous contemporaneity but in the historical limitations of their positions, in the analysis that might be made of their errors and confusions, their failure to link impatience with the reformist perspective of Labour Party leaders to some more consistent challenge to that leadership. This was a problem of which they themselves demon strated more consciousness than Rowbotham ever displays: Dora Russell's 1974 autobiography is fraught with a sense of personal and political betrayal and a deep, intuitive hostility to the Labour Party leadership, and exposes far more clearl than Rowbotham's book. the limitations of the political position long struggle against of, reformism. To annex to deal not in the particular learned from it. Rowbotham affinity for this vignettes out of which she the limits, and Browne shared, a life- but never outside the terms them histor charac to contemporary socialist-femi y but in fantasy, and to deny ter of their struggle and what nism is as well can be of sort the course has always of pseudo-history: suppressed history demonstrated the production of women, wh 85 8 Thompson's gene ation of Stalinists, for is the most extreme form of economic reductionism. Taken to be utterly true, in its clumsy way, this "Marxism" nevertheless is seen as lacking in subtlety and needs to be augmented, supplemented by the "theories" which arise from the experiences of various oppressed groups; in particular, by feminism. What is crucial of course is that it is not "Marxism which is being represented here or in much of the literature produced by the current socialist-feminist movement, but a real ignorance of the work of Marx and Engels and its developments by Lenin, Trotsky and others.

There is of course theoretical work to be done by Marxists on the questions of family life and the role and experience of women in capitalist society, but this is work which can only be done by Marxist theory and not by an "alliance" between Marxism and feminism. The notion of such an alliance seems to rely on a weird, sexist mythology.

as though Marxism and feminism were the male and female of theory, and the revolution was to be their bright-faced offspring. The question remains whether the assertion that the "personal is political can be elevated above the level of banality which it presently occupies, and given a political force in the analysis of, and the struggle against, capitalist society. And the question must be posed not as providing a feminist face-lift for Marxism, but in terms of the develop- ment of the Marxist theory of the role of the family, and the way in which the family effects and reinforces the connections between personal life and political struggle; and an elaboration of the political tasks which may arise from a more developed analysis of the family.

For as Marxists we do not of course seek to make unprincipled links with feminists and reformists such as Sheila Rowbotham, but to make clear the differences which exist between them and ourselves. Marxists aim to under- stand all aspects of life under capitalism, not to ease the pain of such living, but to end the conditions of its possibility. will serve as trilling examples or contemporary struggies.

Each book (her other book-length works are Women, Resistance and Revolution and Hidden From History) has featured a further degeneration of the method, so that the modesty with which she characteristically claims to be "only filling in a corner" (handing on the torch of women's history to some other, as yet undesignated, sister) seems in the case of the present book to be amply justified.

Rowbotham's model as a historian is, obviously E.P.

Thompson. Like him, she is concerned with the rescue for recorded history of experiences which have gone, for clear political reasons, unrecorded: the history of working class men (women don't come in for much notice in Thompson's books) before the 1832 Reform Bill which Thompson constructs in his Making of the English Working Class; or of the "hidden revolts" of women, omitted or misrepresented by both bourgeois and Marxist historians, which Rowbotham attempted to sketch in her earlier books Like Thompson, Rowbotham is concerned with noting "patterns of resistance" , instances of emergent class- consciousness or moments of rebellion, but not, fundamen- tally, with analysing the significance of, or the relations between, these instances.

The finition of work re seems to de ies Marxism o derive, too, n whi from ch Rowbotham's the Marxism of

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