How is one to explain the sudden upsurge of political activity among women who have joined in thousands the women's liberation movement in the advanced capitalist countries? This cannot be ascribed only to economic causes.
Their traditional duties are perhaps lighter and less time-consuming, and they have some control over their bodies via cheap contraception. But already a hundred years ago women were marching and organising for their rights. The answer must also be sought in the changing political context of the recent decade, the wuning belief that bourgeois democratic society can deliver the goods.
Legally women are on the whole equal to men. In actual life, however, their position is quite unequal: they get worse education, worse jobs and less money.
The choice of having a family or working is predetermined: having children usually means leaving the job, or doing it part time until the children grow up. Household chores leave women little time for, political or trade union activities. This means that they are not often unionised and therefore a cheaper and more manageable labour force from the employers point of view. Within the econoric structure there is a rigid definite division of labour between the sexes. Women are in fact second-rate citizens, in this sense comparable to racial or religious minorities.
THE PAST The suffragette movement of a hundred years ago started more or less from scratch: women had virtually no civil or political rights, so that the demand for these rights united women across the class divisions and hurled them into often violent confrontation with the state. A hundred years before that, women were The Red Mole 8-22 March 1971 Page 6 an active force behind the French RevoJution (in 1791 they marched to Versailles, arrested the king and brought him to Paris to be tried). Not only were they members of the various political factions, they also organised for specific women's rights. And earlier still? Little is known about women in history, but the agitation for specifically women's rights came only with fully-fledged bourgeois development. Because of its mode of production based on the sale of individual labour, capitalism has been historically committed to granting equal legal rights to all citizens, women included-although the case of Switzerland, where men gave women the right to vote only last month (and in oppostion to a great section of female opinion in the country) reminds one of the fact that even fully developed capitalism with all its democratic trappings does not necessarily grant equal rights to all citizens. The male population in England gained voting rights in stages: bourgeoisie in 1832, working class by 1884-women not until 1929. It was not the increase in cheir militancy in the later stages that won them the vote; rather their services rendered to the ruling class in the imperialist war of 1914-18. Women say today: we have got the right to vote, so what? Legal equality has meant very little. But one has to remember the importance of this issue in organising thousands of women in a struggle for basic civil rights. The suffragette movement had a mixed class character, but there is no doubt that theirs was an important part of the class struggle. The existence of of obvious legal inequalities in society (whether inflicted on women or blacks) only weakens the proletariat, and (with some exceptions) the revolutionary movement has put the question of women's rights on its political agenda, recognising that men cannot be free until women are free.
BOURGEOIS EQUALITY, MALE CHAUFEVISI However, the bourgeoisie did not intend that women should really be equal to men and that on acquiring legal equality they would actually exercise it. In their world-view women may go out to work, or take part in other social activities, but women's primary responsibility is the welfare of their husbands and children. This view is inscribed in social organisation: bourgeois society cannot dissolve the family and liberate women. True, women, like men, are allowed to choose alternative bourgeois governments, but real freedom would necessarily involve the destruction of bourgeois society itself. Today, as a consequence af female agitation and militancy, it is seen that male chauvinism in the working class (the acceptance of the bourgeois image of women) is purt and parcel of the cultural hegemony that the bourgeoi sie maintains over the proletariat. This ideology is not only a personal failing: it represents an alien ideological presence in the proletariat—a class which cannot tolerate inequality among its members without damaging itself. The question of women's liberation must be seen as a political question of highest importance for the revolution.
ROLE OF THE FAMILY It is plain that legal equality is a spurious equality in a society in which some own all and some nothing but their labour power. It is therefore conceivable that this society can iron out the remaining legal differences between the sexes aa well as grant women formolly equal opportunity in workie. opportunity to take up jobs traditionally granted to men. But bourgeois society can never liberate women from the hold of the family, and as long as the family persists women cannot be equal to men. Murx and Engels in their writings emphasised the role of the family in the social position of women. The intimate ties betwee the family and production were broken only with the industrial revolution (although wealth stayed within the family and is passed on from parents to children) Previously women of the labouring classes had worked within the family; now they went out to work and thereby acquired an economic independence on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile bourgeois women stayed at home, as housekeepers and ornaments to their hushands, Writing at this time on the condition of women, Marx and Engels were clear what an important historical step this participation in public production was in the emancipation of women, but they insisted that economic independence would be partial as long as women wete engaged in work at home. Thus the precondition of their liberation was the dissolation of the family as the economic unit. The nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth was a struggle to win civil rights within the bourgeois society: it was well worth it for today women can see that they were only drops in the ocean. Bourgeois society is committed to the family becatise it carmot break the separation between private existence (the family) and public (production) which characterises its class rule. Production is social but ownership is in private hands: It is symptomatie that the capitalist owner presente every attempt by the workers to increase wages or control the routine of their work as selfish greed of a minority against the "public interest" (Le. the private interest of capital). When a strike breaks out, the government and employer appeal to "the public" that is, to housewives (sex strikes against their striking husbands is one of their recommendations to women) and to workers at home (Hence the "public" opinion polls that ure always conducted at home or in the streets, but never in the place of work). Can such a society which shackles women to housework and child-rearing be rearranged to give women freedom? Obviously it cannot, and women today are becoming aware that it is not the lack of their rights that oppresses them but the social system.
THE BOLSHEVIK EXPERIMENT The Bolshevik revolution already in its first two years not only proclaimed the legal equality of women, to an extent unthinkable in a bourgeois "democratic" society, but also attempted to create the