By Susan Price
Women today face a concerted ideological backlash and escalating attacks on our rights as the leaders of neo-liberalism attempt to eradicate many of the hard won gains of the second wave of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and '70s.
New restrictions on abortion access, eroded working conditions and the widening gender wage gap, the growing prevalence of sexist advertising, lack of access to affordable child-care, and the introduction of fees for higher education are all impacting negatively on most women's lives.
As well, the governments of the First World are engaged in an ideological campaign to strengthen the traditional family institution again, to reverse a declining marriage rate and move the burden of child-care, welfare and social support away from the state and back onto the individual family unit. Women are being encouraged by tax incentives to stay at home and/or are being modelled into a flexible reserve work force through casualisation of employment.
In the neo-colonial countries of the Third World, women are bearing the brunt of International Monetary Fund and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs, being pushed back into the dark ages by the rise of religious fundamentalism and are the largely invisible victims of the increasing number of localised wars over ever shrinking resources.
Faced with this stark reality, we can either accept it or struggle against it.
To accept that greater poverty, violence, sickness, exhaustion and exploitation are women's lot is to give in to the idea that women, because of their biology, have always been and will always be second-class citizens.
Marxist feminists reject this, arguing that campaigning for women's liberation is not just essential if we are to defend the progress that feminism has made in past decades, it is a fight which will, by its very nature, challenge and weaken the basic structures of inequality in world capitalism. Therefore, the struggle for women's liberation is intertwined with and essential to all struggles for human liberation -- against racism, imperialism, homophobia and all forms of exploitation.
Ideas and theories that elevate biological functions and differences into the determining force in social relations are being revived to assist the conservatives' efforts to push women to take more responsibility for the welfare of family members. Sociobiology and “evolutionary psychology” are the catch-cries of this new conservatism. Their proponents are being given increasing space in the mainstream media to try to convince us all of the supposed parallels between human society and the insect world, for example.
These theories are inherently sexist and reactionary. In reducing human behaviour and relationships to products of biological triggers, they perpetuate the idea that women (and men) are prisoners of their biologically “determined” (“natural”) roles in society -- motherhood, emotional nurturing, doing the bulk of unpaid labour, etc; they cannot possibly liberate themselves from these roles.
Within radical feminism, too, biologically determinist arguments have been the cornerstone of explanations of women's oppression. Radical feminism has thereby had a conservatising impact on feminism.
An interview with well-known radical feminist Andrea Dworkin in the June 17 Sydney Morning Herald reveals the extremely conservative conclusions that are ultimately drawn by feminists who use biology as their starting point. In that interview, Dworkin argues that the creation of a women-only state (“Womanland”) would liberate women, and that a woman should be allowed to kill a man who has raped her.
On the face of it, these may seem “radical” solutions to the horrific levels of violence against women within the family and in society in general. However, behind the radical veneer is a strategy which not only ignores class differences and relations, but, by reducing the liberation of women to achieving full separation from men, accepts and perpetuates the view that gender conflict and oppression is inevitable, so can merely be avoided rather than transformed.
Dworkin's separatist solutions fit snugly with those that shape the anti-women laws and practices in right-wing and religious fundamentalist regimes in many parts of the world. For example, women living under fundamentalist regimes in parts of the Middle East are segregated from men in all public spaces and “protected” from them by being forced to wear the veil and never to venture outside unsupervised. They are also mutilated or executed for adultery or other such “honour crimes against the family” and prevented by law from participating fully in all spheres of public life. For these women, separatism is about as far from liberation as you can get.
Marxist feminists struggling under these oppressive conditions have not drawn radical feminist conclusions like Dworkin. Instead, they are struggling to make alliances with all progressive forces, including men who support their demands for equality, against the real enemy: the ruling elite and their religious mouthpieces.
In contrast to the right-wing biological determinist theories of the likes of Dworkin, Marxism takes as its starting point a social and historical analysis of society which enables it to explain when and why women's oppression began, how it developed and how it can be eradicated. Marxism shows that the full liberation of women is not only possible but also necessary if human society is to develop.
Since Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first developed their materialist conception of history in the 1840s, Marxism has sought to understand and combat the oppression of women. Engels' explanation of the roots of women's subjugation in the main institutions of class society -- private property and the family -- rather than in nature or biology, was a huge step forward and lay the foundations for a scientific understanding of women's plight which made it possible, for the first time ever, to conceive that women's liberation was possible.
The development of industrial capitalism created the material conditions that made gender equality a realisable goal by incorporating women into waged work and giving them a degree of economic independence from men. And while advanced capitalism has granted women full formal (legal) rights, women will remain the “second sex” for so long as private property and the economic and social shackles of the traditional family form which prop it up remain intact.
A basic tenet of Marxism is that the struggles against all oppression must come from below if they are to fully succeed. Such struggles against specific oppressions -- by women, people of colour, nationally oppressed peoples, etc. -- take many forms and require many and varied alliances with others to win because capitalism fosters divisions between oppressed groups to keep them all separate and weaker, less able to bring down the system which benefits only a tiny minority (principally white, male capitalists).
Women's oppression as a sex provides the basis for the organisation and mobilisation of women to achieve their own demands for justice; that is, the development of an independent women's liberation movement.
An independent movement is one which is organised and led by women and takes the fight for women's rights and needs as its first priority, refusing to subordinate that fight to the interests, decisions or policy needs of any other social group or organisation. This is the only sort of movement which can remain open to all women who wish to fight against their oppression as women, who are willing to carry through the fight by whatever means and together with whatever forces prove necessary.
The failure of even the richest capitalist societies, those with the most complete “democracy”, to eradicate gender inequality, and the failure of the undemocratic Stalinist states (most notably the Soviet Union) to do likewise, show that such an independent mass movement is necessary and that women's liberation will not come from above.
Both ideas -- that women can be liberated within the framework of capitalism and that the socialist revolution will in itself automatically liberate women -- have been proven false.
It is an impossibility for women to be liberated within a social system (capitalism) which relies on their exploitation in the family order to survive. But even when the material basis for women's oppression is removed (that is, when capitalist economic relations have been overthrown), women will not be able to live as equals to men until they are able to participate fully in all spheres of economic, social and political life. This requires that private domestic labour be replaced by socialised services and that there is a thorough-going, conscious struggle against the sexist culture and ideas which have permeated the preceding capitalist society.
Only then, in a democratic socialist society, will all women be free from violence, poverty, exploitation and compulsion. Partial measures, reforms without fundamental change, are inevitably, eventually, reversed. Marxism shows that the goal of complete liberation is not only historically possible, it is socially necessary if human society is to progress. All we need do is join together to fight for it.
