A year ago Black Dwarf declared 1969 the "Year of the militant woman"
A lot has happened in 1969. There has been action by women at work ranging from the lavatory attendants who struck against the White Paper, to the women at Industrial Mouldings plastic plant in Coventry who secured the same rate as the men. In jobs like nursing and teaching where women are very numerous, there has also been an important and determined militancy. Apart from local agitation, the National Joint Action Campaign for Women's Equal Rights organised a demonstration in the summer which included women from the potteries, buses, GPO, and engineering.
In the student movement the secondary role women play was raised at the RSSF conference in the spring. Since then there has been discusion Within all the lett socialist groups as well a he Communist and Labour Parties. Various women's liberation and socialist women's groups have started, and two papers have ap peared, Socialist Woman and the Shrew Our weaknesses are apparent: lack of communication, lack of empirical information, lack of theory and lack of confidence. Our strength is our willingness to work with one another and our determination to base any analysis on the actual situation of women now. For many women the simple discovery that they were not alone has been important. It has given us the confidence to argue and to act without feeling we were freaks. Here the stand taken by Lil Bilocca and the fishermen's wives in Hull, the sewing machinists strike at Ford's, helped, as did the news of the women's liberation movement in America and Germany, and less directly the impetus from the experience of Black Power.
EMERGENCE OF DISCONTENT Discontent has emerged from very different situations.
Consequently il rellects ditterent emphases.
different preoccupations, and looks to different objectives. Working-class women have complained about their pay, about the way jobs are graded, about lack of training, lack of creche facilities, about the difficulty of combining work and housework, about lack of representation in union positions, about being regarded as a decoration at conferences. Young educated middle-class girls, often students or ex-students, are particularly sensitive about their sexual situation. They know that contraceptives have brought them the possibility of enjoying sex without worrying. But this hasn't really affecwrapped up and traded to the highest bidder. your virginity hopefully intact. Now you're "free" to circulate on the open market. The protective wrapping of your "niceness", your sex neus. yo, restina commodity. on socia- , is stripped off. You're on the counting equally and developing fully, it never seems to be applied to them. They are begin ning to demand that it should. Young working-class girls are in a similar, often more contradictory position. An alternative is less clear to them but they re asking awkward questions. Why is it always naked women on the tube, against the Pill." "l'd like to take boys out in a car late at night in the rain and push them out in the road and make them walk home.' "Every boy in this place is a raving sex maniac, and yet they say they want to marry a virgin. There are stirrings too amongst older women who are housewives and don't work. They feel the isolation and trivialisation of their lives! They resent their confinement inside. They feel pushed on one side. They are told that they're failures if they can't adjust. They are complaining about the false choice they are forced to make between neglecting their children or dropping all the things which they were interested in before they were married. They see right through separation of bra's and make-up. There is still through the hypocrisy which mutters piously about motherhood and does nothing to make their lives easier. They are absolutely essential definition, recognition and human beingness.
Instinctively women's groups stress everyone speaking, distrust leaders and figures. It's important to understand every aspect of the very different ways all women experience subordination in capitalism. There's a tendency to try and and restrict it to particular groups and particular areas. Middle-class women are described as experiencing psychological oppression, working-class women economic oppression. Discussion of non-economic oppression is seen as diversionary. Well, you can't zone off oppressions and then stick them mechanically together with a percentage and say this = exploitation, and leave it at that. If you do, you'll end up with an identikit, not a person. You'll find the spheres of oppression overlap and interact so much that you either go round in circles, locating the origin of one oppression in another, or you'll disentangle them but produce an abstracted clarity which doesn't express what it feels like.
Both these miss the way particular experiences merge and particular oppressions reinforce one another. They ignore the way groups interact on one another. Young middle-class girls could be encouraged to look at their own situation differently by the action of working women. A group they start could be important in involving more working women.
COMBINATION OF DISCONTENT Think how subordinations combine in the situaton of the working-class woman. She suffers straightforward economic exploitation, she gets something like half the average wages of men.
She exists in what amcunts to a permanently underdeveloped section of the working force.
She is a transient, denied training opportunities and consequently access to skilled work. Both the reason and justification of this are not simly that she is a member of the working class out that she is a woman. Because she is a woman her main commitment is seen to be making a "success" of her family. If the family breaks up, if the children are difficult, if his shirt cuffs are frayed or the washing-up not done, she blames herself, other women blame her, the family blames her, the advertisers, the sociologists and psychologists and everyone blames her. There's no way out of the guilt. It's consequently very difficult for her to put effort and responsibility into her work. She'll go for a Job which isn't too demanding, which allows her to think about her other preoccupations. Undoubtedly the money's important. The bit of economic independence is valued as well as the change. But so much of the work is boring, the pay so poor, that to think of it as emancipatory is starry-eyed. Some work obviously can be, but most of it, and most of the kind women do, is just crushing. The two spheres, work and home, invade each other. There's the remembering, the sheer practical difficulty of quite little things like shopping, collecting children when you're on shift-work.
Amidst all this, it's a very exceptional woman who takes on the extra job of shop steward or union work. It's also a very exceptional husband who'll encourage her. Not only will his comforts suffer. He'll have to face his friends. Eyebrows are still raised about wives who are always nipping off to conferences and summer schools and meetings, and leaving men baby-sitting. The man is partly seen as a sucker; partly felt to be hardly done-by. To stand out against this pressure, men have to be very convinced and rather brave. There's still the feeling, give them an inch, they'll take a yard. Men still mutter to one another about giving them a few kids so you know they'll stay put.
The individual working woman isn't just stuck in these ways. She's stuck in the memory and experiences of her own other women. Dolls, not soldiers, toy hopersof not cowboy outfits, little girls can cry but they can't get dirty. Little girls do not climb trees, jump off high walls, fight. They are not allowed to be a full member of the gang. There is the whole mystery of menstruation, the bewilderment of puberty, "pull your skirt down", the too the double standard, reputation-easy-old slag. Remember that factory girl sentenced to a remand home in Kidderminster last summer individual working-class woman. She can either sit like Cinderella taking it all, complaining masochistically to Buttons from time to time, and wait for the prince to come and take her off to a shiny comfortable world. Or she can dress up like a boy and go off to sea in he magination, and pretend she's a boy. But she always be sent off home again to be a woman as soon as she's discovered. No one ever heard of Cinderella organising Buttons into a trade union union, or undisguised girls capturing and occupying boats. If they did, you can bet there'd be no prince or pirate king who'd look at them Who wants to give up the definite possibility of princes and pirate kings for unpleasant struggles of doubtful outcome and no history?
Women are conditioned to leave the external world to men, to "go helpless", be suspicious, and regard all other women as poachers. The whole conscious world of articulation and organisation belongs to men. It's not surprising women often let themselves be pushed aroundthey're trained to-or don't stand up for themselves-they're not expected to. It's true there is an implicit solidarity. But it doesn't have words to describe itself, much less concepts to situate itself. It exists only in particular experiences, it is flashed between women in a look. It understands pain, humiliation, persecution, menstruation, abortion, being hit, ridiculed, the subject of dirty jokes and dirty postcards and dirty actions. It has its own strength, its own tough ness and its own code. "They're all the same"
"just like children", "they don't half go on"
"they're like that" or simply "Men!" Behind the stock phrases there's the feeling "If we eve had a chance", an affirmation of ability, worth importance. But the feeling is always accompa nied with a shrug. What's the point of fighting Whoever heard of winning? It's loaded in thei favour. You just lose what you've got nowcling on to it. It's always been this way. It's ius being a woman.
GENERALISATION OF DISCONTENT That's why Lil Bilocca's so important, and Ros Boland and Kath Fincham and Daisy Nolan and all the women you never hear about. They break through all the hopelessness, all the fatality, the resignation, the passivity. They make possibilities. Not only is their situation and action generalisable to all women; it can be extended to all men. We are all entrapped in these interconnecting oppressions. We are all separa ted and afraid. We are all unable to be fully our selves, to act consciously and creatively in the world. We are all passive victims. We are all devourers.
Sheila Rowbotham
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ted the way they see themselves as people or the way men see them. Before you were
list women there is a great irony; amidst all the talk about people controlling their lives, and
why aren't there naked men?" "The Pope must be bent. He doesn't like women, does he? He's
AND PASS BOOK