For Marxists, the root cause of all forms of oppression consists
in the division of society into classes. For many feminists, on the
other hand, the oppression of women is rooted in the nature of men.
It is not a social but a biological phenomenon. This is an entirely
static, unscientific and undialectical conception of the human race.
It is an unhistorical vision of the human condition, from which
profoundly pessimistic conclusions must flow. For if we accept that
there is something inherent in men which causes them to oppress
women, it is difficult to see how the present situation will ever be
remedied. The conclusion must be that the oppression of women by men
has always existed and therefore, presumably, will always exist.
Marxism explains that this is not the case. It shows that, along
with class society, private property and the state, the bourgeois
family has not always existed, and that the oppression of women is
only as old as the division of society into classes. Its abolition
is therefore dependent on the abolition of classes, that is, on the
socialist revolution. This does not mean that the oppression of
women will automatically vanish when the proletariat takes power. The
psychological heritage of class barbarism will finally be overcome
when the social conditions are created for the establishment of real
human relations between men and women. But unless and until the
proletariat overthrows capitalism and lays the conditions for the
achievement of a classless society, no genuine emancipation of women
is possible.
In order to bring about the socialist revolution, it is necessary
to unite the working class and its organisations, cutting across all
lines of language, nationality, race, religion and sex. This implies,
on the one hand, that the working class must take upon itself the
task of fighting against all forms of oppression and exploitation,
and place itself at the head of all the oppressed layers of society,
and on the other, must decisively reject all attempts to divide it –
even when these attempts are made by sections of the oppressed
themselves.
There is a fairly exact parallel between the Marxist position on
women and the Marxist position on the national question. We have an
obligation to fight against all forms of national oppression. But
does this mean that we support nationalism? The answer is no. Marxism
is internationalism. Our aim is not to erect new frontiers but to
dissolve all frontiers in a socialist federation of the world.
The bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists play a pernicious
role in dividing the working class on nationalist lines, playing on
the understandable feelings of resentment caused by long years of
discrimination and oppression at the hands of the oppressor
nationality. Lenin and Russian Marxists waged an implacable struggle
on the one hand against all forms of national oppression, but also on
the other hand against the attempts of bourgeois and petit bourgeois
nationalists to make use of the national question for demagogic
purposes. They insisted on the need to unite the working class of all
nationalities in the struggle against landordism and capitalism as
the only real guarantee for a lasting solution to the national
question in a socialist federation.
In other words, the Marxists approach the national question
exclusively from a class point of view.
It is the same with the attitude of Marxists towards the
oppression of women. While fighting against all forms of
discrimination and oppression, we must decisively reject bourgeois
and petit bourgeois feminism which sees the essential problem as a
conflict between men and women, and not as a class question.
Actually, the whole history of the movement shows that the class
question is primary, and that there has always been a sharp struggle
between the women of the oppressed classes, who stood for
revolutionary change, and the well-to-do women "progressives" who
merely used the question of the oppression of women for their own
selfish purposes. At every stage, this class difference has
manifested itself, and moreover in the sharpest forms. A couple of
examples will suffice to illustrate this point.
As early as the 17th century, women began to advance the demand
for their social and political emancipation. The English Revolution
saw an increasing participation of women in the fight against the
monarchy and for democracy and equal rights. In 1649 we had the
Women’s Petition of the city of London which states that: "since we
are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest
in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportional share in the
freedoms of this Commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that
we should appear so despicable in your eyes, as to be thought
unworthy to petition or represent our grievances to this honorable
House.
Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in
those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right,
and the other good laws of the land?" (From J. O’Faolain and L
Martines, Not in God’s Image, pp. 266-7.)
Women were active in radical groups and religious sects on the
left of the revolutionary movement which held that women could be
preachers and ministers. Mary Cary, for example, was associated with
the "Fifth Monarchy" movement. In The New Jerusalem’s Glory
she wrote: "And if there be very few men that are thus furnished with
the gift of the Spirit; how few are the women! Not but that there are
many godly women, many who have indeed received the Spirit: but in
how small a measure is it? how weak are they? and how unable to
prophesie? for it is that that I am speaking of, which this text says
they shall do; which yet we see not fulfilled… But the time is
coming when this promise shall be fulfilled, and the Saints shall be
abundantly filled with the spirit; and not only men, but women shall
prophesie; not only aged men, but young men; not only superiours, but
inferiours; not only those that have University learning, but those
that have it not; even servants and handmaids."
Feminism and the French Revolution
By the time of the French Revolution, the situation was much
changed. Class relations had become clearer, sharper. And so had
consciousness. The Revolution no longer had any need to clothe
itselves in Biblical garb. Instead, it spoke in the language of
Reason and the Rights of Man. But what of the rights of Woman?
The French Revolution can only be understood from a class point of
view. The different parties, clubs, tendencies and individuals, which
appear in bewildering array, rising and falling like waves on a
troubled sea, were merely the expression of different classes
struggling for mastery of the situation, and the general law of every
revolution that the more radical always tends to displace the more
moderate trend, until the revolutionary momentum has exhausted itself
and the film of revolution begins to unwind and go into reverse. This
is the inevitable destiny of every bourgeois revolution, where the
impulse that comes from the masses eventually founders upon the
contradiction between their illusions and the real class content of
the movement.
The class divisions within the revolutionary movement were
manifested from the very beginning. The so-called Girondins
represented the bourgeois trend which wanted to halt the revolution
half-way and do a deal with the king to establish a Constitutional
Monarchy. This would have been fatal to the Revolution, which only
acquired the necessary sweep because the masses erupted onto the
scene and began to settle accounts with the reaction in revolutionary
plebeian style. It was the eruption of the masses – so brilliantly
described in Kropotkin’s book – that guaranteed the victory of the
French Revolution and so thoroughly dissolved the old order.
It is not generally realised that women played a leading role in
both the French and the Russian Revolutions. But we are not referring
here to the educated middle class feminists, who did emerge in the
course of the revolution, but to ordinary working class and plebeian
women, who rose in revolt against the oppression of their class. The
plebeian and semi-proletarian women of Paris who started the French
Revolution in 1789 rose up on the question of bread, not initially on
the question of the oppression of the female gender, although
naturally this emerged in the course of the Revolution itself.
"Excluded from the vote, and from the majority of popular
societies, women could, and did, play a very significant role in
insurrections, particularly those of October 1789, 10 August 1792,
and, most prominently, the risings of the Spring of 1795 (known as
the risings of Germinal and Prairial Year 3 according to the names of
the months of the Revolutionary Calendar introduced in 1792). Women,
even the most radical of them, rarely demanded the vote, conditioned
as they had been by the eighteenth-century gendered distinction which
placed men in the ‘public sphere’ and women in the ‘private sphere’.
They did set up women’s popular societies, the most famous of which
was the Society of Revolutionary-Republican Citizens; but this club
would only last from May to October 1793. Nonetheless, as historians
like Dominique Godineau and Darlene Levy point out, this does not
mean that women did not share the men’s political and economic
programme. Women supported, even encouraged, men to action. They sat
in the galleries of the popular societies; they created their own
political space outside bread-shops, in the market-place, in the
streets." (The French Revolution, 1787-1799. The People’ and the
French Revolution, by Professor Gwynne Lewis.)
A revolution stirs up society to the depths, releasing feelings
and aspirations long pent up within the masses and every oppressed
layer. The demand for the emancipation of women therefore assumed a
burning significance. But this demand was understood differently by
different tendencies which ultimately rested on different class
interests. It was no accident that the women of the poor Parisian
proletariat and semi-proletariat led the way. They were the most
oppressed layer of society, those who had to bear the brunt of the
suffering of the masses. Also, they had no experience of political
struggle and organisations, and came onto the scene unencumbered by
prejudices. By contrast, the men were more cautious, more hesitant,
more "legalistic". This contrast has been seen many times since. In
numerous strikes, where women have been involved, they have
consistently shown far greater militancy, élan and courage
than the men. Significantly, it was on the class issues – the
question of bread – that these women began to move. The same was true
over 100 years later in Petrograd.
At every key turning-point of the French Revolution – at least in
the early stages – the women of the lower classes gave a lead.
In October 1789, while the gentlemen of the Constituent Assembly
talked endlessly about reform and constitutions, the poor women of
Paris – the fish-wives, washerwomen, seamstresses, shop girls,
servants and workers’ wives, rose up spontaneously. These female
sans culottes organised a demonstration and marched to the
Paris Town Hall demanding cheaper bread. They shamed the men to march
on Versailles and bring back the king and queen (they made no
distinction between the two – if anything the "Austrian woman" was
more hated than her husband) under virtual house-arrest. The scene is
well described by George Rudé in The Crowd in the French
Revolution:
"By now, the women had begun to take a hand. The bread crisis was
peculiarly their own and, from this time on, it was they rather than
the men that played the leading role in the movement. On 16 September
Hardy recorded that women had stopped five carts laden with grain at
Chaillot and brought them to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. On
the 17th, at midday, the Hôtel de Ville was besieged by angry
women complaining about the conduct of the bakers; they were received
by Bailly and the Municipal Council. ‘Ces femmes [wrote Hardy]
disaient hautement que les hommes n’y entendaient rien et qu’elles
voulaient se mêler des affaires” ["These women loudly
proclaimed that the men could understand nothing and that they were
going to sort things out themselves."] The next day the Hôtel
de Ville was again besieged, and promises were made. The same evening
Hardy saw women hold up a cartload of grain in the Place des Trois
Maries and escort it to the local District headquarters. This
movement was to continue up to and beyond the political demonstration
of 5 October." (George Rudé, The Crowd in the French
Revolution, p. 69.)
And again: "From these beginnings the women now converged on the
Hôtel de Ville. Their first object was bread, the second
probably arms and ammunition for their men. A merchant draper,
passing by the old market hall at half past eight, saw groups of
women stopping strangers in the streets and compelling them to go
with them to the Town Hall, ‘où l’on devait aller pour se
faire donner du pain’. The guards were disarmed and their arms handed
to the men who followed behind the women and urged them on. Another
eyewitness, a cashier in the Hôtel de Ville, described how,
about half past nine, large numbers of women, with men amongst them,
rushed up the stairs and broke into all the offices of the building.
One witness said they bore sticks and pikes, while another insisted
they were armed with axes, crowbars, bludgeons, and muskets. A
cashier, who had the temerity to remonstrate with the invaders, was
told ‘qu’ils étaient les maîtres et les maîtresses de l’Hôtel de Ville’. In their search for arms and powder the
demonstrators tore up documents and ledgers, and a wad of a hundred
1,000-livres notes of the Caisse des Comptes disappeared from
a cabinet. But their object was neither money nor loot: the City
Treasurer later told the police that something over 3.5 million
livres in cash and notes were left untouched; and the missing
banknotes were returned intact a few weeks later. Having sounded the
tocsin from the steeple, the demonstrators retired to the Place de
Grève outside at about 11 o’clock.
"It was at this stage that Maillard and his volontaires
arrived on the scene. According to his account, the women were
threatening the lives of Bailly and Lafayette. Whether it was to
avert such a disaster or merely to promote the political aims of the
‘patriots’, Maillard let himself be persuaded to lead them on the
twelve-miles march to Versailles to petition the king and the
Assembly to provide bread for Paris. As they set out, in the early
afternoon, they removed the cannon from the Châtelet and [wrote
Hardy] compelled every sort and condition of woman that they met
-‘même des femmes à chapeau’- to join them." (George
Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, pp. 74-5, my
emphasis, AW.)
Here we see perfectly the way in which the working class women of
Paris understood the struggle. Frustrated and impatient with the
inaction of their menfolk, they launched themselves into the struggle
with tremendous élan that swept all before it. But at no time
did they see the struggle as one of "women against men", but a
struggle of the whole class of poor and exploited people against the
rich oppressors. Beginning with economic demands ("bread"), they
marched to the town hall, and in the process another demand emerged
almost of its own accord: the demand of arms: "Their first object was
bread, the second probably arms and ammunition for their men". The
objective was to shame the men into action – and in this the women of
Paris succeeded brilliantly and saved the Revolution.
The emergence of the masses on the scene of politics is the first
and most fundamental element in every revolution. This is
particularly true of the women. In the French Revolution, the women
were by no means content to leave politics to the men. In Paris we
saw the establishment of the pro-Jacobin Citoyennes
Républicaines Révolutionaires (Revolutionary
Republican Women Citizens) who wore a uniform of red and white
striped pantaloons and red liberty bonnets and carried arms on their
demonstrations. They demanded votes for women and the right of women
to hold the highest civilian and military posts in the Republic –
that is, the right of women to full political equality with men, and
the right to fight and die for the cause of the Revolution.
However, the Revolution itself was characterised by a constant
struggle of parties and tendencies in which the more radical tendency
constantly overtook and replaced the more moderate trends, until the
Revolution had finally exhausted its potential and began to unwind in
a downward spiral that led to Bonaparism and Waterloo. This party
strife at bottom reflected the struggle between different classes.
The Girondin faction represented that section of the bourgeoisie
which feared the masses and was striving for a deal with the king.
These class antagonisms – which assumed a particularly bitter form in
the French Revolution – also affected the woman question in a
fundamental way.
The Girondin women activists – some of whom held quite advanced
positions on the formal question of womens’ rights – posed the
question in a different way to the Sansculotte women – sarcastically
baptised as the tricoteuses by hostile historians because of the
habit of doing their knitting while aristocratic heads fell into the
basket. The women of the poor classes of Paris were undoubtedly
motovated by a strong revolutionary spirit, class consciousness and
an undying hatred of the rich. The Girondin women, coming from
privileged middle class and bourgeois families, did not have the same immediate
interests as the women of the poor Paris districts.
The Girondins passed a law on divorce which was undoubtedly an
advance for women. But the Girondin women laid heavy stress on
women’s property rights. At the time of the French revolution, such a
demand was by no means a burning issue for the majority of women, for
the simple reason that neither they nor their husbands possessed any
property. The women sans culottes who had played such an
outstanding role in the Revolution were opposed to the "sacred right
to property" because they understood the revolution from their own
class standpoint. Hostile to the well-to-do bourgeois, even when they
wore the red bonnet of revolution, they instinctively strove for a
Republic in which all men and women would be truly equal – not just
equal before the Law – that is, they strove for a classless
society, a world without rich and poor. We now know that this was
an impossible aim at the time. The productive forces which are the
material basis for socialism had not yet achieved a sufficient level
of development to permit this. The class nature of the French
Revolution was bourgeois of necessity. But this was by no means clear
to the masses who so enthusiastically rallied to the Revolution, and
who sealed its victory in their own blood. They were not fighting to
hand power to the bourgeois – whether men or women, but to secure
justice for their class.
The struggle between the revolutionary and the moderate tendencies
was expressed in the ranks of the women in a very acute form. Olympe
de Gouges (1748-93) was typical of the Girondin feminists. Born Marie
Gouges, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and a butcher’s wife
from Montauban in southern France, she rebelled against the
narrowness of provincial life and the way her father had treated her
mother. After an unhappy marriage, she ran away to Paris, changed her
name and went on the stage. Typical of the type of middle class woman
who was inspired by the Revolution, without ever really grasping its
essence, she took to writing plays and pamphlets, calling for the
abolition of the slave trade, public workshops for the unemployed (an
idea later adopted by the reformist socialist Louis Blanc) and a
national theatre for women. In 1791 she published the Declaration of
the Rights of Women, an answer to the Assembly’s Declaration of the
Rights of Man.
There is much that is of interest in this document, with its
stiring appeal to women: "Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is
being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. The
powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice,
fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has dispersed
all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied
his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having
become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women!
When will you cease to be blind?"
She also wrote a new form of Social Contract Between Man and Woman
– to replace the existing marriage vows, beginning with the words:
"We, _____ and ______, moved by our own will, unite ourselves for the
duration of our lives, and for the duration of our mutual
inclinations, under the following conditions: We intend and wish to
make our wealth communal, meanwhile reserving to ourselves the right
to divide it in favor of our children and of those toward whom we
might have a particular inclination, mutually recognizing that our
property belongs directly to our children, from whatever bed they
come, and that all of them without distinction have the right to bear
the name of the fathers and mothers who have acknowledged them, and
we are charged to subscribe to the law which punishes the
renunciation of one’s own blood. We likewise obligate ourselves, in
case of separation, to divide our wealth and to set aside in advance
the portion the law indicates for our children, and in the event of a
perfect union, the one who dies will divest himself of half his
property in his children’s favor, and if one dies childless, the
survivor will inherit by right, unless the dying person has disposed
of half the common property in favor of one whom he judged
deserving."
"I offer a foolproof way to elevate the soul of women; it is to
join them to all the activities of man; if man persists in finding
this way impractical, let him share his fortune with woman, not at
his caprice, but by the wisdom of laws. Prejudice falls, morals are
purified, and nature regains all her rights. Add to this the marriage
of priests and the strengthening of the king on his throne, and the
French government cannot fail." (From "Olympe de Gouges, ‘Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen’," in Darline Gav Levy, H.
Applewhite, and M. Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris,
1785-1795, pp. 92-96.)
However, de Gouges’ whole outlook was that of a Girondine – that
is, a bourgeois liberal woman. It will be noted that, in the
new marriage contract, the main stress is laid on the question of
property. And at the end, she argues in favour of
"strengthening the king on his throne". This is entirely in
the Girodin spirit, since the moderate wing of the Convention was
striving for a deal with the king and the establishment of a
constitutional monarchy. Later, she published an appeal against the
execution of the king, which settled her fate. She was executed by
the Jacobins. On her way to the guillotine she made a speech that
included the words:
"Scaffolds and executioners – are these then the results of the
Revolution that should have been the glory of France, spreading
without distinction over the two sexes and serving as a model to the
universe?" These words, uttered by Olympia de Gouge as she was led to
the guillotine, show how little she had understood of the reality of
the Revolution. The execution of the king was a sharp dividing line
that separated the two phases of the Revolution in the period of its
ascent. It dealt a decisive blow against the nerve-centre of the
counter revolution, from which plots were constantly being hatched;
it cowed the aristocracy; it sent a defiant message to all the
crowned heads of Europe; above all, it drew a line in the sand,
separating all the half-hearted and vacillating elements from those
who fervently wished to carry the Revolution forward.
Philistines have condemned the French Revolution for its use of
violence. The Terror has been universally condemned in terms that
recall the words of de Gouges. But without the revolutionary Terror
of the Jacobins, the Revolution would not have survived. The masses
needed to employ desperate measures to defend themselves against the
threat of royalist counter-revolution which would, if successful,
have drowned it in blood. All history, starting with Spartacus’ slave
revolt, shows that the bloody cruelty of the ruling class when it
takes revenge against the masses knows no limits. The Terror used
against the aristocrats, priests and counter revolutionaries in the
fist period had a progressive character. The Terror later used
against the revolutionaries in order to consolidate the Thermidorian
reaction was counter revolutionary. Those who cannot see the
difference may deserve our condolences, but can never be taken
seriously.
Another example of a Girondin feminist was Théroigne de
Méricourt (1766-1817). Having made her living as a courtesan
before the Revolution, she took up the question of women’s rights,
but again, from a purely Girondin point of view. This unfortunate
feminist was attacked by Jacobin women as she walked through the
Tuilleries gardens in June 1793, stripped naked and pelted with
stones. She ended her life in a lunatic asylum.
From a humane point of view we may sympathise with these
unfortunate women who, after their fashion, aspired to improve the
lot of women – albeit of bourgeois women. But what this shows beyond
any doubt is that a class abysm separated the bourgeois feminists
from the revolutionary women of the downtrodden classes, and that the
line that separated rich from poor, Girondin from Jacobin, was drawn
in blood. Appeals to unite all women, irrespective of social
class, got no echo at all among the mass of working class women who
fought alongside their men folk to win a more just society.
Class divisions among the Suffragettes
The early years of the rise of the Labour Movement in Britain was
also a period of intense agitation among the working class and also
among women. The New Trade Unionism was born at the end of the 19th
century in a series of militant strikes, which aroused the
unorganised workers, sections never previously involved. Some of them
involved working class women, such as the famous match girls’ strike.
Among middle class women, there was a growing agitation for the right
to vote. However, the middle class suffragettes were only interested
in obtaining formal equality – and would have been quite contented to
get votes for women property owners – that is, for women of their
own class. Let us remember that at the time, many men did not
have the vote. However, events soon demonstrated the reactionary
nature of bourgeois feminism, which demonstrated its hostility to the
cause of the working people – whether men or women.
As Jen Pickard correctly points out in her article on
Sylvia Pankhurst: "The names
of the Pankhurst family are synonymous with the struggle to win the
vote for women, but what distinguished Sylvia Pankhurst’s approach
from that of her mother Emmeline and her sister Christabel were class
issues. It resulted in the 1920s, after nearly twenty years of
struggle, with Emmeline standing as Tory Parliamentary candidate and
Sylvia becoming a founder member of the British Communist Party."
The Women’s’ Social and Political Union was set up in 1903 as a
result of the dithering of the Independent Labour Party on the issue
of votes for women. The WSPU grew rapidly and by 1907 had 3,000
branches, drawing in teachers, shopgirls, clerks, dressmakers and
textile workers. Their newspaper Votes for Women sold 40,000
copies a week. They were able to fill the Albert Hall and organise a
demonstration of 250,000 in Hyde Park.
In 1911, at the same time that the Liberal government of Asquith
was promising Home Rule for Ireland, it also held out the prospect of
votes for (propertied) women. But the Liberals betrayed both
promises. When the suffragettes resorted to direct action for their
cause, they were met by the most brutal repression: beatings, arrest,
and the torture of force-feeding. This campaign was mainly organised
by middle class women. But the tactic of breaking windows, advocated
by the bourgeois wing of the suffragettes, led nowhere. The ruling
class remained implacably opposed to votes for women.
The real way forward for the movement for women’s’ rights would
have been to forge links with the workers’ movement, which at that
time was involved in a bitter struggle with the employer class. This
was a time of rising class struggle in Britain, with mass strikes of
the dockers and transport workers. The "Liberal" Asquith sent the
troops to break a miners’ strike in South Wales. One section of the
womens’ movement attempted to do this with some success. Sylvia
Pankhurst chose to adopt the methods of agitation and propaganda
among working class women in London’s East End. In Bermondsey, in
South London, striking women from a food factory were joined by
15,000 others from local factories and workshops at a mass meeting in
Southwark Park. They demanded an increase in wages – and the vote.
This was the way forward: to use the weapon of the class struggle to
link the fight for economic demands to political demands, especially
the demand for votes for women.
The different class approach resulted in a split in the
suffragette movement on class lines. – and also a split in the
Pankhurst family. In January 1914, a few months before the War,
Sylvia was summoned to Paris for a meting with her mother, Emmeline
and sister, Christabel. Sitting in comfortable exile in Paris,
Christabel was a picture of health, while Sylvia was worn out by
prison and hunger strikes. In stark contrast to the class position
advocated by Sylvia Pankhurst, her sister Christabel stressed the
independence of the WSPU from all men’s parties Christabel
demanded the exclusion of the East London Federation from the WSPU.
That is to say, she demanded the expulsion of the working class
women from the suffragette movement.
This middle class female snob argued that the East London
Federation had a democratic constitution and relied too heavily on
working class women. It seems that their mother attempted to
compromise, but Christabel was adamant, demanding a "clean cut".
Thus, in January 1914, the East London was forced to break away from
the WSPU and form a separate organisation – the East Federation
Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). This illustrates perfectly the
attitude of middle class feminism towards the working class. Jen
Pickard comments: "This split in the WSPU reflected a general
polarisation taking place in British society. Between 1911 and 1914
every key section of workers (dockers, transport workers, railway
workers, engineers) were involved in strikes. Even amongst the
members of the WSPU, who were imprisoned and force-fed, it was
working-class women who suffered the worst conditions and treatment."
Here again, the class question was fundamental. The split in the
Suffragette movement shows the real attitude of the bourgeois
feminists to working class women, socialism and the labour movement.
By posing the question as a struggle of "men against women", they
play a negative role and inevitably end up in a reactionary position,
as was shown only a few months after the split. In 1914, the First
World War cut across the development of the class struggle in
Britain. Overnight, the feminist "rebels" Emmeline and Christabel
were immediately transformed into the most rabid chauvinists. The
name of the WSPU paper was changed from Votes to Women to
Britannia. Its motto was "King, Country, Freedom".
This was an abject and shameless betrayal of the cause of women.
It exposed the real class nature of bourgeois feminism, and the gulf
that separates it from the working class and socialism. For all their
verbal radicalism and demagogy, in the last analysis, they were
prepared to unite with the men of their class – the ruling class –
against the men and women of the proletariat: the ones that had
to do all the fighting, dying and suffering while they waved the flag
from a situation of comfort and safety. It is always the same story.
Sylvia Pankhurst, to her credit, opposed the War – although from a
confused pacifist standpoint – and waged a campaign in the factories
to get equal pay for the women who had been drafted into the arms and
engineering industry to replace men at the front. She published a
paper called The Workers’ Deadnaught and later joined the
Communist Party, where she held an ultra left position. Her
understanding of Marxism was very limited, but at least she attempted
to adopt a class position. In 1918 British women over thirty got the
right to vote. This was not the result of the tactics of the
suffragettes, but a by-product of the Russian revolution and the
revolutionary ferment that followed the First World War which shook
the British ruling class and compelled them to make concessions.
Here again, reform was shown to be only a by-product of
revolution.
The emancipation of women and socialism
The bourgeois revolutions of the past proclaimed the "rights of
man" yet in practice never achieved the equality of woman. In fact,
the advance of women under capitalism has been partly a by-product of
the class struggle and in part a result of the changed role of women
in production. Certain political rights have been won in the advanced
capitalist countries (a minority of the world), but genuine
emancipation has not been achieved and can never be achieved on the
basis of capitalism.
As early as 1848 Marx and Engels raised the demand for the
abolition of the bourgeois family. However, the family cannot be
abolished at a single stroke. This demand cannot be achieved unless
there is a material basis for it. This can only be achieved by the
overthow of capitalism and the establishment of a new society based
upon a harmonious and democratic plan of production, with the
involvement of the whole of society in the common tasks of
administration. Once the productive forces are freed from the
straitjacket of private property and the nation state, it will be
possible rapidly to reach an undreamed-of level of economic
well-being. The old mentality of fear, greed, envy and covetousness
will disappear to the degree that the material conditions that give
rise to it are removed.
The road will be open for a radical transformation of the
conditions of life, and thus a transformation of the relations betwen
men and women, and of their entire way of thinking and acting.
Without such a giant leap, all talk of changing people’s character
and psychology will be just so much clap-trap and deception.
Social being determines consciousness.
The role of working class women was shown in Russia in February
1917. The tsar was overthrown by a revolution that began on
International Women’s’ Day, when the women workers of Petrograd
decided to strike and demonstrate despite the advice of the local
Bolsheviks who feared there would be a massacre. Guided by their
proletarian class instincts, they swept aside all objections and
began the revolution. We shall see many more examples like this in
the future.
The real emancipation of women is possible only when the working class
as a whole emancipates itself. Socialism will permit the free
development of the human personality and the establishment of genuinely
human relationships between women and men, free of brutal external
pressures, whether social, economic or religious. However, such a
society presupposes a level of economic and cultural development that is
on a higher level than the most developed capitalist nations. In Russia in October 1917, such a basis did not exist,
given the prevailing backwardness. Therefore, despite the enormous
advances made possible by the Revolution, the position of women in
Russia was thrown back, first by Stalinism, and now even more so by
the attempt to re-impose capitalism. The position of women in Russia
and Eastern Europe is now worse than ever. This should surprise
no-one. On the basis of capitalism, no way forward is possible
anywhere, and least of all in Russia.
Women will play an essential role in the overthrow of capitalism
and the building of socialism. But here again it is a question of
working class women, fighting for their own emancipation – and that
of the whole class. It is therefore not a question of either men or
middle class university feminists "teaching" women how to fight for
"womens’ causes" but of the working class women acquiring class
consciousness and confidence in themselves through participation in
the class struggle. In the process of fighting to transform society,
men and women will also transform themselves. We can see how in every
strike, the workers raise themselves to the height of real human
beings and cast aside the slave mentality. How much more true will
this be in the case of a revolution!
This is the only way to achieve genuine liberation – not of women,
but of women and men. Indeed, one thing is not possible without the
other. What we are striving for is the liberation, not of this group
or that, but of humanity itself. This does not at all signify
that women must set aside the struggle for immediate improvements. On
the contrary. Without the day to day struggle for advance under
capitalism, the socialist revolution would be impossible. But on the
one hand, it is necessary to understand that under capitalism, any
improvements will possess a partial, distorted and unstable
character, and will be constantly threatened by the crisis of the
system and the general deterioration of condition and social, moral
and cultural decay. On the other hand, it is necessary to link the
struggle against the oppression of women firmly with the struggle of
the working class against capitalism. That is the only possible road
to victory.
Of course, the psychological scars of class barbarism with its
selfish calculation, greed and egotism will not disappear overnight,
even after the overthrow of capitalism. A period of time must elapse
before all the old muck finally disappears. But from the very
beginning, relations between men and women will begin to improve. The
terrible economic pressures that blight lives and distort all human
relations will be abolished immediately with the introduction of
decent jobs, housing and education for all. A democratic socialist
plan of production will create the conditions for everyone to
participate in the running of society. This will, among other things,
abolish the old introverted family, and the atomised individual, and
create the conditions for the creation of an entirely different
psychology, rooted in the new, free and human relations.
The elimination of class society – and eventually of the slave
mentality that flows from the dirt of class society – will lead to
the creation of a new man and a new woman: free human beings, capable
of living together in harmony, as liberated persons, entirely free of
the old possessive slave psychology. Having freed men and women from
the humiliating pursuit of material things, which distorts and
degrades human life, it will be possible for the first time for
people to relate to each other as humans. The relationship between
men and women – that most beautiful and natural relationship – will
be free to develop without any external coercion, egotistical
calculation or humiliating dependence.
