Marxism And Women's Liberation

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781608463404
• eBook ISBN: 9781909026995
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Social Sciences

For most women, discrimination and oppression are still very much the lived experience today. While much has changed for women, too much has not. Rising sexism and anger about sexual violence have led to an explosion of ideas and activity around the politics of women's liberation. This book looks at the history and source of women's oppression and at the struggles to overcome it. Using a clear Marxist framework, it focuses on how best we can achieve real liberation.

1

Great expectations

Why are women, half the human race, still discriminated against? Women are overrepresented among the poorest on the planet, they face oppression in all societies and are treated as inferior beings in a million different ways. Why are women more often to be found on the sticky floor of low pay than above the glass ceiling where the rich and powerful reside? In Britain two thirds of those on the minimum wage are women and only six of Britain’s top 100 companies are run or chaired by a woman. In fact more people called John run such companies than women.

Women on average earn around 18 percent less than men. Britain has fallen out of the top 20 countries for gender pay parity because the gap between men’s and women’s incomes is so wide. The latest economic crisis has hit working class people hard, but it has hit working class women the hardest. Women in Britain have suffered as much as 85 percent of the cost of the cuts and austerity launched by the Tory led coalition government of 2010-15. This is calculated on the basis of the impact of the cuts in tax credits and other welfare benefits on which working class women are more reliant. Women also disproportionately work in public sector jobs which have been cut or have seen their pay slashed or frozen.

The sexual freedom we thought had been won in the struggles of the 1960s appears to have just given us the opportunity to be even more crudely defined as sex objects than ever before. Old fashioned sexism hasn’t gone—the Sun newspaper still insists on putting pictures of semi-naked women on its page three.

But today there is also a different sort of sexism—raunch culture. It has a twist; we are meant to revel in it as ironic. No longer is stripping demeaning, it’s been rebranded as lap dancing and sold as empowering. In the 19th century Karl Marx wrote of the ability of capitalism to turn intrinsic parts of our humanity into alien objects to be bought, sold and possessed. This affects even the most intimate aspects of our lives, including our sexuality, which are transformed into things alien from us. New freedom of expression, which was hard fought for, is distorted by the system’s drive to turn everything into a source of profit.

Women’s sexuality has become trapped in a new cage of clichéd stereotypes in the name of liberation. Women’s bodies are treated as sex objects whether they are an Olympic champion encouraged to pose in bikinis for magazine covers or a shop worker whose contract mandates the wearing of make up.

Women feel the pressure to conform to ever more exaggerated caricatures of what is deemed to be sexy, while men are encouraged to see themselves as helpless prisoners of their testosterone—sexually aggressive and insatiable. A fresher arriving at any university campus in Britain will find sexism has become a routine part of student life. They will be faced by posters, flyers, club nights and pole dancing societies using sexist stereotypes of women which are flaunted as fun and proof of liberated times. The more traditional sources of sexist behaviour have thrived in this atmosphere—they don’t feign irony, they simply have more confidence to express pure misogyny. For example protests forced the students union of the London School of Economics to suspend the Rugby Club in 2014 for a year after it gave out a grossly offensive leaflet at freshers fair calling women “mingers” and “slags”.

Sexual harassment is not just a problem for young people in college, as the Everyday Sexism project has shown. Thousands of women have posted their experiences online and it makes sobering reading. A YouGov poll found that two-thirds of people agree that sexism is still a problem in the workplace, three-quarters of women compared with 56 percent of men.¹

It can sometimes feel like the clock has turned back and the struggles of the past were in vain. But women have made important material gains that would have seemed completely out of reach by previous generations. A hundred years ago women did not have the right to vote and had marched in their hundreds of thousands to demand suffrage. Fifty years ago abortion was illegal and a woman died every ten days after going to the back street. In Northern Ireland abortion is still illegal today. Only 25 years ago rape in marriage was not a crime—a wife was seen to have consented to be sexually available to her husband whenever he wanted.

Today in Britain women can divorce, access safe abortion and have a right to equality under the law. Women have grown up with the assumption that they will work for a living and have financial independence from men. They have access to jobs and a level of education denied to their grandmothers. The number of women going to university has outstripped men since 1992.² Women have never had more freedom in their personal lives. They have won the right to express their sexuality, they can choose never to marry, to have children outside marriage without being ostracised or not to have children at all.

Some women have done very well. In fact we are often told that women in the West are living in a golden age. The US trade advertising magazine Ad Age described our time as “a new era in American society and culture: The New Matriarchy” because “women have increased their economic power in society and taken on more and more leadership roles”.³ In Britain Prowess, an organisation devoted to women in business, wrote in 2015, “It may indeed be the best time there has been for ambitious women who want to get to the top”.⁴ Business woman Stephanie Shirley has compared her working life in the 1960s with today and railed against women complaining of sexism saying, “We’ve never had it so good. It’s time we stopped whinging and got on with it”.⁵

But pointing out that discrimination and oppression is still the lived experience of the majority of women is not whinging. Much has changed for women but too much has not and indeed in some aspects of our lives things are going backwards.

The higher you go in society the fewer women you see. Women are 51 percent of the population but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the green benches in parliament. When the government headed up by Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 women made up 3 percent of MPs. The 2015 general election saw more women MPs elected than ever before, up by 14 from 2010—women now make up 29 percent of the House of Commons. But this means men are more than two thirds of all MPs—no wonder Westminster is still a bastion of chauvinism. Some members of the ruling class can barely hide their distaste at the presence of women in institutions they still see to be the preserve of men.

Cameron tried to counter the view of the government as run by a bunch of public school boys when he appointed women to a third of posts in his cabinet after the May 2015 election. Previously his cabinet contained more millionaires than women. Yet Cameron’s true attitude towards women was revealed when he cracked sexist “jokes” at women MPs on both sides to play to the reactionary gallery that is the Tory party. He described fellow Tory MP Nadine Dorries as “extremely frustrated” during one House of Commons debate. During another he told Labour MP Angela Eagle, then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, to “calm down, dear” to guffaws from his back benchers.

Parliament and the top 100 companies are not the only institutions dominated by men. Only 5 percent of all newspaper editors are women and within the legal system just 13.6 percent of the senior judiciary are women, and when you get to the highest court in the land there is the sum total of one female supreme court judge.⁶

If you are in work and have the temerity to get pregnant get ready to fight for your job. Some bosses don’t even hide their reluctance to uphold equality laws; four in ten admit being wary of employing women of childbearing age—that covers a lot of women.⁷ The numbers of women taking out tribunals for unfair dismissal because of pregnancy went up by a fifth between 2008, the start of the recession, and 2013. Since 2013 funding cuts mean complainants now have to pay £1,200 to go to a tribunal and this has had a dramatic and immediate impact on the number of women getting justice—pregnancy and maternity claims have fallen by a quarter.⁸

Look beyond Britain and the impact of capitalism and crisis can be a matter of life and death for millions of women. A woman in Sierra Leone is 183 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in Switzerland. Across the globe 22 million women undergo an unsafe abortion every year, although denial of abortion rights is not only a problem in the global south. Savita Halappanavar died in an Irish hospital on 28 October 2012 after being denied an abortion when she was miscarrying.

Women own just 1 percent of the world’s wealth; those lucky enough to be earning are paid up to 30 percent less than men. And they are sometimes in the worst conditions. In Bangladesh 85 percent of the country’s 3.5 million garment workers are women. They earn £25 a month, well below the living wage set at £45. Women workers suffer sexual harassment and discrimination and face 14 to 16 hour shifts seven days a week. It’s also dangerous: factory fires in buildings with locked doors and no escape routes are common and 1,130 workers, mainly women, died when the Rana Plaza garment factory outside Dhaka collapsed in 2013. Women also make up two thirds of all those in the world who cannot read and write—that’s 493 million women.

But oppression is not simply economic. Sexual repression and objectification are a potent part of the way women are both trivialised but also in some cases brutalised simply because they are women. In Mexico women are being targeted in a wave of violence and murder that has reached epidemic proportions. It’s estimated that seven women are murdered every day and the number is rising. A well of anger about the issue of sexual violence burst across the globe in 2012 when a 23 year old woman died of appalling injuries as a result of being gang raped on a Delhi bus on her way home from the cinema. Tens of thousands joined protests across India and worldwide to demand justice. The case brought home the shocking reality of women’s oppression in the 21st century.

Sexual violence

In Britain the revelations that broke in 2012 of the scale of horrific sexual abuse carried out by celebrity and establishment figure Jimmy Savile have opened up the floodgates of reports of child sexual abuse. Hundreds of Savile’s victims, children and teenagers, mainly young women, have come forward. But the scandal goes far beyond Savile. The cover-ups and corruption that allowed such abuse to carry on unimpeded exposed the rotten core of the British establishment, some of whom were abusers themselves. Child abuse cases have been brought against dozens of celebrities, politicians and other public figures. Many people, including middle aged women and men who suffered sexual abuse as children, have spoken out for the first time. They hope that finally they might be listened to and get some sort of justice, even if decades after their ordeals. Police, politicians and the media colluded in the cover up. Those who did complain were disbelieved, ignored or told to keep quiet.

The police declare that such a scandal would never happen today. They claim that their treatment of women who come forward is sensitive and supportive. Yet time and time again the police are found to be dismissing and failing to pursue allegations of rape—often without even informing the woman. The government admits that only 15 percent of all rapes are reported. Reports of rape have risen by 22 percent, yet at the same time the proportion of rape convictions has actually gone down. As many as 77 women in Britain were murdered by their partners or ex partners in the year 2012-13.⁹ This is all at a time when rape crisis centres and refuges are seeing their funding cut back.

In 2014 Rashida Manjoo, a United Nations representative who came to Britain to investigate the position of women, described it as having a “boys’ club sexist culture”. She denounced the impact that cuts were having on services for women, in particular those who have suffered domestic violence. She cited figures showing that 7 percent of women in England and Wales reported having experienced domestic abuse during the previous year. Organisations dealing with domestic violence have seen their funding cut by a third between 2010 and 2012.¹⁰

To document the sheer extent of the suffering of women could take a book in itself. Instead this book is not simply about describing the problem, but about answering the question of why women face this sometimes brutal inequality and oppression and how we can fight it.

Today’s debates

The rise in sexism and anger about sexual violence has led to an explosion of ideas and activity. For many new activists the ideas of feminism are the first and automatic political expression of being against sexism and for gender equality. Feminism stands for a basic rejection of discrimination and oppression of women and that is what all of us who oppose sexism have in common. Feminist ideas are not a single school of thought and never have been, so a single definition of “feminism” will by necessity not cover all the possibilities. Even when there was an organised women’s movement it included people with myriad different political outlooks.

Many feminists also see themselves as socialists and there is much common ground between feminism and socialism. But there are also some important theoretical differences about the cause and sometimes the way to fight oppression, which will be explored in this book. The influence of the left and the organised labour movement on the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1970s and feminist ideas has always been stronger in Britain than in the US (see Chapter 7).

US Marxist feminist Martha Gimenez has pointed out that Marxism has been a constant touchstone for ideas on women’s oppression. Even those feminists who reject Marx, such as Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett, often shape their polemics in terms of that disagreement. Gimenez writes:

If Marx’s work (and the Marxist tradition by implication) were indeed substantively afflicted by all the shortcomings that social scientists and feminists attribute to it, it would have long been forgotten. But Marx’s intellectual power and vitality remain undiminished, as demonstrated in the extent to which even scholars who reject it must grapple with his work’s challenge, so much that their theories are shaped by the very process of negating it.¹¹

The r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Great expectations
• 2 Oppression explained
• 3 The origins of women’s oppression
• 4 It’s a family affair
• 5 Gender: boys will be boys and girls will be girls
• 6 The first wave of the women’s movement
• 7 The second wave
• 8 The renaissance of feminism today
• 9 Why sexual liberation is important
• 10 Trading places: can we win under capitalism?
• 11 Why class offers agency
• 12 Women and revolution
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author