Socialism and Women’s liberation

The novelist Rebecca West wrote nearly 100 years ago:

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."

Today women who want to differentiate themselves from doormats face some of the same problems. More than 40 years after women's liberation became part of radical politics the fight for equality and liberation goes on.

There have been very great changes in women's lives in the past few decades. They include much more openness about sexuality, millions of mothers going out to work, women breaking into new industries and professions, and acceptance that women will work outside the home, have children outside marriage, and have the right to control their own sexuality.

But work and personal life have been distorted by the constraints of capitalism and have fallen far short of liberation. So there is still as much to fight for.

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The family – Haven and Hell

Politicians and sections of the media are panicking about the decline of marriage. If fewer people marry, they say, it will be harmful for their children. And they also go further and say that a decline in marriages will be bad for society as a whole. They also react in horror at the prospect of gay marriages.

Of course, many people find comfort in the family. But for most, it is far from the idealised vision that those at the top of society constantly promote. And for others, it is a place of fear, abuse and violence.

So why do our rulers remain so obsessed with pushing one version of how we should live our lives?

The answer lies in the benefits of the “nuclear family” for Capitalism. The state puts enormous economic and ideological pressure on people to conform to a stereotypical ideal. A very narrow vision of how people should conduct their relationships remains at the heart of Capitalism.

Understanding the role that the family plays is at the heart of understanding sexual and women’s oppression. Production is social but reproduction remains private.

In difficult economic times, families seem to provide a safety net against the worst aspects of capitalism – and indeed it sometimes does. As council and welfare services are cut, caring for the sick, old, disabled and unemployed is increasingly thrown back onto the family, rather than being paid for by society.

This burden usually falls on women. Some reports have worked out that if women were paid for housework, its value would be over €700 billion a year.

Socialists are fighting for a world where men and women have a genuine choice about how they live their lives. We want to end the economic constraints that can make people stay in relationships they’d rather leave, and the oppression that still puts the burden of care onto women.

Once the economic basis for the ideology of the family has gone, that ideology will melt away. The demonising of single mothers and of gay people will no longer make sense.

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The origins of the family and Women’s oppression

Women’s oppression is the most deeply entrenched oppression. It is seen as biological, psychological, universal and age-old. This view impacts on how we understand and challenge oppression.

Marxists approach this subject from a materialist perspective. Frederick Engels explained, “According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of immediate life…

“On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production. On the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.”

The things that make us different from other animals is our ability to adapt to all parts of the globe, and the ways in which we work socially to meet our needs. Engels argued that for most of human history the social organisation of people has not been class-ridden or defined by domination and oppression.

The earliest human ancestors appeared two million years ago, while homo sapiens have only existed for around 200,000 years, and the earliest forms of agriculture appeared around 10,000 years ago. So for 95 percent of human history, “wealth” was not a concept that would make any sense. People lived in small collective groups enjoying relative equality. Engels referred to this as “primitive communism”.

The concept of the nuclear family, with monogamous parents owning their children, did not exist. It was with the rise of class societies that women came to occupy an inferior place in society.

Under primitive communism there was a division of labour between men and women, but this did not confer privilege to men. Women, who tended to be the main gatherers, were often given authority over men - because their work provided the main source of nutrition for the group.

The development of more advanced agriculture was the turning point. The invention of the plough meant the ability to produce more than was immediately needed by the group. In hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies women were able to fulfil their role as producers as well as playing their role in reproduction. Heavy ploughing and the use of domesticated animals changed this. A pregnant woman or one with small children couldn’t easily carry out these tasks and they increasingly fell under the remit of men.

Agriculture also demanded labourers. Where hunter-gatherer societies had tended to limit the number of children so as not to deplete resources, agriculture could be more productive with more children needed to help in the fields.

So as men became exclusively responsible for production, women saw their primary role shift to that of child-bearer.

Greater productivity benefited every member of the group but once the surplus fell into the control of a minority, inequalities and classes began to form.

The division into “public” and “private” spheres of society appeared - with women operating mainly in the “private” sphere.

Men, because of their economic role, became heads of the household, passing their wealth on to their sons. The private family became the mechanism by which private wealth could be passed on from one generation to the next.

As Engels wrote: “The overthrow of mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also. The woman was degraded and reduced to servitude.”

So the family was a consequence of the development of class - not an age-old “natural” hierarchy.

Engels’s argument shows how it was economic compulsion that set off the train of class society and the inequality and oppression it entails.

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How the family changed through history

The peasant family, which existed before industrial capitalism, was a productive unit. Men were heads of the household, but women and children produced goods in the home that contributed to the family income.

They would tend the family plot and look after domestic animals. Women had an important role in the collective life of the village, which was the central economic unit of society.

The Industrial Revolution ripped this way of life asunder. The labouring masses were torn from the land and thrown into new towns and cities that were springing up.

Capitalism created for the first time a class of workers who had no control over the means of production. Members of this new class were forced to labour for someone else to earn a wage.

Men, women and children all worked in factories, mines and mills, in horrendous conditions.

Women were employed in huge numbers in the textile factories - by 1856 women formed 57 percent of the workforce in the industry, and children made up 17 percent.

Women often did the hardest work in the worst conditions. One in eight women in 1850s Oldham died between the ages of 25 and 34.

The barbarity of capitalism prompted workers to seek sanctuary - and at least a partial relief from drudgery - in the family. Workers began to campaign for a “family wage”, allowing men to cover the cost of maintaining their wife and children.

Some feminists have argued that such demands were purely in the interests of men, who wanted to keep women oppressed in the home.

But it allowed a family to exist on the wages of one man, where previously three or four members of the household would have had to work to earn the same money. And it released women and children from hard labour.

In the harsh reality of industrial capitalism, isolation in the home was preferable to attempting to both work and raise children.

But this “private family” characteristic of capitalism was not formed purely as a result of pressure from below.

An ideological war was waged by the capitalist ruling class to instil “family values” into workers - and to force them to take on the burden of feeding and caring for the next generation of labourers for free.

Housing was built for workers, which was a massive improvement on the hovels city dwellers had first been thrown into. But the homes were laid out according to the structure of the nuclear family.

They would be just big enough for two parents and some children, with separate bedrooms and a kitchen, maybe a private yard or small garden with a fence around it.

Of course, many working class women still worked outside the home, but now women’s primary role was seen as that of housewife.

Along with this came the characteristics associated with a good wife and mother - caring, passive, submissive.

Women’s contribution was devalued again. In a world which only values things in monetary terms, the work that women do for free in the home - cooking, washing, educating - is valueless.

It was not the case that working class men were the major winners in the creation of capitalism’s private family. The role of breadwinner was one in which it was all too easy for men to fail.

If a man was unable to provide for his family, then he could lose their respect and that of society at large.

Out of the misery of industrial capitalism, the family took shape as both a haven fought for by workers and as an economic and ideological tool of the ruling class.

The second half of the 20th century saw women’s expectations shift again, as more and more entered the workforce.

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Women’s lives and the family today

At first, for many working class women, the family was simply seen as a better option than working down a coal pit.

Increasingly the notion of housewife - and therefore isolation for women from the “public sphere” - became something glorified and striven for.

But capitalism is an unstable and contradictory system. A home free from the stress of the outside world cannot exist.

The very things we seek to escape - economic pressures, social tensions, inequality and exploitation - all penetrate inside the family.

In the course of the 20th century, the family has had to deal with two world wars during which women entered the workforce on a massive scale, only to be thrown out again when men came back from fighting.

It has also had to endure mass male unemployment, the destruction of industries and women entering the workforce on a permanent basis, especially in the past 30 years.

And women are having fewer children. A recent study suggested that 20 percent of young women today won’t have children at all. Social changes such as the contraceptive pill have changed expectations.

The women’s liberation movement put women in a much stronger position. Changes also challenge the concept of the nuclear family and the stereotypes of how women should behave. Yet the family still stands as a powerful ideal and aspiration.

Women still tend to take “career breaks” to have children, and there is still an astonishing sexual division of labour in the workforce, with women concentrated in lower paid jobs such as retail, call centres and caring.

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Women’s liberation and Socialism

The sexual liberalisation fought for in the 1960s and 1970s has become a commodification of everything to do with our sexuality - the “raunch culture” described by Ariel Levy in her recent book, Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Far from being liberating, these images act to reinforce the idea of woman as sex object - only now we must also be successful careerists, full-time mothers and great cooks as well.

We are now told lap dancing and pornography empower women, yet at the same time a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is blocked.

We have a disgraceful media representation of women – what one author called the “rise of the stupid girl” – where women are encouraged to feign stupidity to gain acceptance.

A socialist revolution would challenge the roots of women’s oppression and make such ideas seem ludicrous.

The media under socialism would not reflect women’s oppression in society.

Capitalism has created the possibility of taking all those pressures off the shoulders of individual women.

Free social childcare could be provided, yet parents currently cover some 93 percent of the cost of raising children.

The family is ideologically buttressed by the state and the media. Women are made to feel like scroungers if they stay at home with the kids, and bad mothers if they work. Despite massive changes, the roots of women’s oppression remain untouched.

The contradiction between socialised production and privatised reproduction is still in place.

We need to close the profound break that came with the formation of class society. This is between the mass of producers and their product. Only then can we rid ourselves of that other break, between production and reproduction, thus between women and men.

Sexism has not existed since time immemorial. If this is the case then there is no reason why it has to exist in the future.

The history of fighting for liberation is not one of steady progress. Rather it is a history that shows that the biggest gains come when ordinary men and women take to the streets to demand change and challenge the structures that keep oppression in place.

On the question of the future the Marxist Frederick Engels said, “That will be settled after a new generation has grown up, a generation of men who never have had occasion to purchase a woman’s surrender either with money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences.

“Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do.”