Women, Oppression and Social Work

Issues in Anti-Discriminatory Practice

Lesley Day, Mary Langan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415076111
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134902828
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

Many of the gains of the women's movement over the past 20 years now seem threatened by the combined effects of prolonged economic insecurity, reductions in the scope of welfare provision and a general shift in the climate of public opinion to the right. Social workers are faced with the growing damands of a more inpoverished and more unstable society, with less resources to meet these demands. In response to these pressures, feminist social work has begun to move beyond some of the limitations of both the traditional and radical social work models of the past. The emerging anti-discriminatory model recognizes the diversity of oppresions according to race, gender and class as well as those of age, disability and sexual orientation. Women, Oppression and Social Work offers a new perspective on feminist social work which takes account of the complexity of the manifold oppressions that affect the lives of most women and most social work clients.

1 Women and oppression: race, class and gender

Lesley Day

Introduction

Any consideration of the experiences of women as social work clients and workers should not proceed without examining the intersections between racial, class and gender oppression. The debate within social work about these different forms of oppression has a somewhat chequered history. The radical social work movement, informed by a Marxist analysis, introduced class as a central organizing concept; then feminism raised gender as a crucial issue; and most recently, anti-racist activists have put race and racism on the agenda of social work practice. However, it has not necessarily been the case that the relations between class, gender and race have been clearly identified, or how these relations affect women’s lives. The objective of this chapter is not directly to examine this social work literature, but to focus upon feminist ideas and the black feminist critique as a way of enhancing our understanding of how class and race affect the experiences of women.

Women and class

The radical social work movement of the 1970s and early 1980s was largely gender blind (see for example Bailey and Brake 1975; Bolger et al. 1981; Jones 1983). In their concern to put an analysis of class and class inequalities on to the agenda for practitioners, these mostly male writers ignored issues of institutionalized sexism and gender inequalities. At the same time, however, the women’s movement has been criticized both from within and without for being a middle-class movement. This criticism takes a number of different forms, but one common objection is that it has paid insufficient attention to the specific experiences and interests of working-class women, and has thus contributed to the failure to engage with them personally and politically (Mitchell 1986; Wilson 1989). This class blindness, argues Mitchell, was not surprising given that many feminists were middle class. Hence the women’s movement tended to project the particular concerns of middle-class women as the universal interests of all classes of women. As we shall see, it also treated white women’s experiences as if they were universal.

The women’s movement embodied different analyses of women’s oppression. Radical feminists argued that the unequal and disadvantaged position of women flowed fundamentally from the exercise of male power; they insisted on patriarchy as the central organizing category. Thus, as Hartmann points out, some radical feminists argued that the ‘original and basic class division is between the sexes’ (Hartmann 1981:13). However, defining women as a class raises difficult theoretical and political issues. Women have different—indeed antagonistic—class interests, and thus their experiences and perceptions of their position vary; as a result working- class women confronted the women’s movement about its classism (Wilson 1989). Black women have also challenged the radical feminist analysis, arguing for recognition of the specificity of their experiences as black women living in a racist society.

A different kind of criticism has come from Erik Olin Wright, who has argued that women cannot be conceived of as a class, and that class domination is not the same as oppression. Like men, women own what he terms different types and amounts of productive assets, and thus occupy different positions within the social relations of production. Women may, therefore, exploit one another. Wright rejects the radical feminist analysis:

This assimilation of women’s oppression to class has had the effect both of obscuring the specificity of the oppression of women, and of reducing the theoretical coherence of the concept of class. A more constructive strategy is to examine the relationship between class and gender mechanisms of oppression to try to elaborate a dynamic theory of their interaction and the conditions for the transformation of each of them (Wright 1978:130).

Wright’s approach has much in common with the socialist feminist perspective. Socialist feminism insists on the need for historical specificity about the relationship between the nature of women’s oppression and the economic and social organization of society (Barrett 1980; Hartmann 1981). The exploitation of women’s labour, paid and unpaid, has to be understood within the context of capitalist society. However, many socialist feminists also take it as axiomatic that gender relations are not solely the effect of capitalism. Patriarchal relations existed before capitalism and ‘as far as we can tell, a socialist revolution would not of itself abolish these’ (Barrett 1980:9). Thus, we have to attempt to identify the manner in which patriarchy has become embedded in, and partially constructed by, capitalism.

Within this theoretical framework, the organization of the domestic household is regarded as being closely connected with the nature of paid work undertaken by women in the labour market. Women occupy a position within the sexual division of labour in which they have always been the primary carers for children and other dependent adults. Men are seen as the primary breadwinners upon whom women and children are assumed to be financially dependent, although for many working-class households the notion of the family wage has always been an unattainable ideal: staying above the poverty line still necessitates a two-wage household (Low Pay Unit 1989). This sexual division of labour has weakened women’s position in paid employment and has often restricted them to low-paid, insecure and part-time work (Lonsdale 1985; Pascall 1986).

However, while the socialist feminist analysis directed particular attention to the social and economic position of working-class women, and thus to the way the sexual division of labour was mediated by class, the women’s movement as a whole never pushed these issues to the forefront of the debate. Looking back over the past twenty years from 1986, Mitchell has argued that the women’s movement went through two stages. Firstly, it wanted to ‘right the wrongs’ experienced by women, by arguing for equal pay and employment opportunities and altering the way in which women’s sexuality was viewed. Secondly, it aimed to question and reverse men’s views of women as simply mothers and carers. This work needed to be revalued, but it was also something men needed to share. Equality with men, both in paid employment and in the household, was the aim. Mitchell points out, however, that: ‘In recognising on paper the class and race distinctions of women but being unable, by definition, to make them the focal thrust of our movement, we contributed to an ideology that temporarily homogenised social classes’ (Mitchell 1986:45).

The women’s movement gave insufficient attention to the meaning of the ‘double shift’ for working-class women. It failed to examine the particular consequences of its perspectives for the lives of working-class women. A woman’s experience of the double shift has a different meaning depending on the kind of paid work she does, the wage she receives, the status attached to this work as a female employee, the physical environments in which these different forms of labour take place, and the resources she has to manage and carry out the organization of the domestic household and child care. Some women are able to gain or retain their professional position within the labour market, and thus receive a greater economic reward despite remaining responsible for the organization of the domestic household and child care.¹ Some women may have the choice to be able to pay for other women to take responsibility for some of the domestic labour as well as the manner in which this occurs; they can hire a nanny rather than a childminder, a house-keeper rather than a part-time cleaner. This is not to ignore the fact that all women, directly or indirectly, are primarily responsible for domestic labour and child care, or that the costs of becoming a mother are high in any social class (Moss 1989). It is important to recognize, however, that women’s experiences of the sexual division of labour are mediated by their class position.

If the class position of women is seen as central to understanding their everyday lives and experiences, then it follows that we have to take account of how their gendered experiences of the welfare state, and particularly social work, are mediated and affected by living in a class-divided society. Women are much more likely than men to experience social work intervention, because of their roles as mothers, wives, and carers of other dependants (Brook and Davis 1985). The experiences of working-class women make it much more likely that they will seek help from the personal social services, whether because of housing or financial difficulties, or because these or other circumstances have affected their own personal and emotional lives or those of other members of their family. Intervention in their lives may also occur even when it is not sought by them; for example, someone for whom they are thought to be responsible may be deemed to be at risk either physically, emotionally or mentally, and considered to be in need of protection.

As we are, therefore, primarily concerned with working-class women’s experiences of social work intervention, we have to understand how sexism and classism can affect the way in which their predicament and experiences are analysed and responded to. Certainly, a radical analysis of the welfare state (Gough 1979) has encouraged a more sophisticated understanding of the contradictory experiences of working-class people who become the recipients of welfare and social work. Yet, this analysis has remained largely gender blind, and has ignored the fact that a working-class woman’s experiences of the welfare state are different from those of a working- class man (Williams 1987). The feminist critique of welfare has demonstrated that the welfare state supports and reinforces patriarchal relations, thus confirming the primary responsibilities of women as domestic unpaid workers and child rearers (Wilson 1977). In the late 1970s, however, class and gender analyses of the effects of the welfare state tended to be relatively discrete, and this separation was reflected in the radical social work and feminist social work literature, the former taking class as central, the latter gender.²

Clearly both a class and gender analysis are needed if we are to make sense of the specific experiences of working-class female social work clients. We must also take account, however, of the question of race.

Race and gender: the black feminist critique

Our discussion of gender and class has highlighted the fact that feminist theory, politics and practice are riven with difference and difficulty. The absence of any single body of thought or practice has become even more apparent with the emergence of the black feminist critique. Over the last decade, black women have criticized consistently both the women’s movement and feminism for their racism, and thus have alerted us to the silence on issues of race and racism in the feminist social work debate up until very recently.³

Black feminists contend that women within the women’s movement have taken action, written and spoken about their experiences and those of other women from an almost wholly white (and middle-class) perspective. They have, therefore, been subject to racist bias, and much of the literature has rendered black women’s lives, and the specificity of their experiences, invisible. In addition, they argue that black women’s experiences cannot be simply ‘added in’ to feminist analysis to overcome their invisibility (Carby 1982; Ramazanoglu 1986). Rather, they insist that feminist theory must be transformed radically to take account of the institutional racism in British society, and thus the inequalities of power and resources which exist between white and black people (Bhavnani 1986). This means that we have to examine, for example, the power relationships between black and white women, white women and black men, and black women and black men. As Bhavnani and Coulson have argued, ‘White women entering these debates must acknowledge the material basis of their power in relation to black people, male and female’ (Bhavnani and Coulson 1986:82).

The analysis of racism fundamentally challenges some of the key concepts and assumptions of mainstream feminist thought (Carby 1982). How can we understand, for example, the position of black men as opposed to white men within the hierarchy of patriarchy? Are the concepts of sisterhood and commonality still valid? What are the parallels, if any, between racial and sexual oppression?

Black women writers have emphasized that, in a racist society, their central concern is racial oppression and the gender specificity of racism. Whether they are middle class or working class, black women experience racism. The analysis of racism centres around an understanding of the shared history of oppression experienced by black people from the Asian subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean as a result of colonialism, and the ways in which the British state and its institutions continue to reproduce racist oppression. The use of the term black signifies the commonality of black people’s oppression (Mama 1984). The Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent emphasized that black women share common ‘historical experiences as victims of colonization, and that their present experiences as second class citizens in a racist society create firm bonds between them’ (cited in Amos and Parmar 1981:131).

For anti-racist activists the key concepts are race and racism, and not ethnicity and ethnocentrism. They recognize the specific and different cultural experiences and histories of black women and men, but insist that to become preoccupied with, or to privilege, questions of ethnicity, is to introduce a source of potential ideological and political danger. Sivanandan has pointed out that a celebration of ethnicity and ethnic differences can lead to divisions within the black community, thus detracting from the common fight against racial oppression (Sivanandan 1985).

Furthermore, Carby argues that focusing upon ethnicity and ethnic differences can itself be racist, or at least legitimize racism, because this approach distracts us from a concern with the effects of racism on black women’s lives (Carby 1982). Instead, the day-to-day problems facing black women are interpreted as the result of cultural differences, or even, at worst, cultural inferiority. Where cultural differences are reinterpreted as deficits, black women as mothers may be identified as the bearers and transmitters of these deficits. The twists and turns of this approach mean that black women are open to blame whatever they do, and racist stereotypes about their lives and their relationships with men and their children are reaffirmed.

In defence of ethnicity, however, other feminist writers have argued that the category ‘black women’ excludes many women who are neither British nor black, but who share similar experiences of immigration and discrimination (Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1983). Clearly, women from different ethnic groups suffer the effects of immigration controls and difficulties in the labour market, yet the ethno-centrism of the women’s movement has meant that their specific experiences and needs have been largely ignored. Without denying the validity of these experiences, however, black activists reply that these do not justify conflating racism and ethnicity. ‘Discarding racism as an unhelpful concept and the black/ white distinction as unsatisfactory would neither eradicate racism, nor would it be acceptable to black women’ (Kazi 1986:89).

Carby insists that feminist theories cannot be sufficiently transformed by incorporating more knowledge of the diversity of cultures of black women and thus ‘blackening’ feminist theory. Rather the central tool of analysis has to be racism, and its effects upon black women’s lives.

Patriarchy—a white concept?

There is a wide range of criticisms of feminist theory in terms of its race blindness and racism. One of the fundamental challeng...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgement
• Contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Introduction: women and social work in the 1990s
• 1: Women and oppression: race, class and gender
• 2: Women’s psychology and feminist social work practice
• 3: Social work and power relations: towards a framework for an integrated practice
• 4: Who cares? Women in the mixed economy of care
• 5: Feminism, managerialism and performance measurement
• 6: Malestream training?: Women, feminism and social work education
• 7: The child sexual abuse ‘industry’ and gender relations in social work
• 8: Women with learning difficulties are women too
• 9: Working with black single mothers: myths and reality
• 10: Women in residential work: dilemmas and ambiguities
• 11: Lesbians, the state and social work practice
• 12: Social work and older women: where have older women gone?