EDITORIAL
APOLOGIES, apologies: firstly for the delay in getting this issue out – we seem to have been very busy in the last few months cruising up and down the A1 going to conferences, meetings, etc., and it’s been difficult getting us all together at one time to work on it. Secondly, for the way it looks – we were thinking of dishing out endurance medals to anyone who actually manages to read it all the way through without falling asleep/ confusing the pages/ ruining their eyesight or in some other way succumbing to that feeling of numbness which large quantities of sheets inevitably brings upon the reader. However, we think the content of this issue – in spite of appearances – is very interesting and worth reading, so we recommend taking it slowly, page by page, preferably line by line…… next time it will look better, we promise. We are exploring the possibilities, cost, etc. of getting it litho-printed; failing that we’ll try some other way of getting it done in a more readable fashion.
THE THEME OF THIS ISSUE, or the subject which links the articles together, is the socialist-feminist current itself – its history (herstory), its practice in one area of work, and its future. The piece on the history of the socialist-feminist current is one we were asked to write for one of the European conferences and we had to do it very quickly, so we are under no illusions about its completeness. However, having to think about and reflect upon our experience within the Women’s Liberation Movement and our relationship to the left during the last 5-10 years was both interesting and very revealing. It so happened that the Working Women’s Charter National Conference was coming up at the time of writing it. We had been heavily involved, through our local Charter group, in trying to alter the orientation of the Charter towards a more feminist (as opposed to traditional left) approach to working with women. Reflecting upon the history of the socialist-feminist current and the role of the Charter within it, helped to put our current problems with the Charter and our battles with the Charter Secretariat into perspective. The articles on the Charter in this issue take up the question of its orientation, the problems relating to practice and the socialist-feminist intervention at the national conference. The question of how, or whether, socialist-feminists continue to work around the Charter needs to be discussed quite urgently and we hope a meeting will be arranged on this soon.
During the time that the Charter had been going as a National Campaign there have been other campaigns coming out of the Women’s Liberation Movement – the National Abortion Campaign, and Women’s Aid, perhaps being the largest, so far. What part has the socialist-feminist current played in them? What can we learn from all these campaigns about the best ways of organising mass campaigns? We would welcome papers from anyone who has been involved in these campaigns, looking at these kinds of questions. In the process of looking through all the papers we have amassed over the years from different conferences and elsewhere, we found several which were related to struggles sisters in left groups were having in trying to get their organisations to take feminism seriously. We feel that the exposure and discussion of these struggles too, would be useful since they would help to clarify our understanding of different left groups’ changing position on questions relating to women. A final general comment on this history paper; we would like sisters to comment on our interpretation of how the socialist-feminist current has developed, and fill in any gaps which exist or enlarge upon any aspect of it which they think is of particular interest or importance.
The British sisters’ participation in the two European Socialist-Feminist conferences marks the beginning, we hope, of a new phase in the development of our ideas and practice. We include two articles on the conferences which give a general overview of what went on at them. Papers from both conferences are to be circulated eventually and when we receive them we will use them in future issues. Given the different levels of class struggle in the different countries in Europe and the different ways in which women are organising themselves and raising their demands, greater knowledge and understanding of these events elsewhere in Europe should help to clarify our own theory and give us some ideas about practice, too. For example; in France and Italy (and perhaps elsewhere) in the course of struggles at work, womens groups have developed in some factories to discuss questions of womens oppression not directly related to the work situation. At the Charter conference mentioned above, a resolution from Lambeth Charter Group calling on the Charter campaign to set up similar groups provoked scorn and wrath from the left groups who rejected the idea as bourgeois feminism. This is just one of the many areas we hope to look at more closely in future issues.
Finally, we are happy to say that we are receiving more material from the regions, meetings and conferences. We hope that this flow will continue so that, when we have our typing and printing problems sorted out, we will be able to get SCARLET WOMEN out more frequently.
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NEWS FROM THE REGIONS
EAST – JO BRADLEY
A one-day Fem/Soc conference was held on 11th June, attended by women from the University of East Anglia Women’s Liberation Group, Cambridge and Norwich Women’s Groups. Papers were presented on Wages for Housework, Radical Feminism and Socialism, Women and History. And an interesting one from Norwich Town Women’s group about the problems of putting across feminist ideas, let alone socialist ones, to the traditional womens groups to whom they speak.
SOUTH WEST – WENDY HOLLOWAY
The potential for setting up a specifically fem/soc group in the S.W. at the moment seems small. However on May 21st the Bridgewater group held a Women’s Liberation Conference, which women from Penzance, Exmouth, Shepton Mallett, Exeter, Bath and Bristol attended. Over 60 women turned up, and workshops included Abortion, Women’s Health, Non-sexist children’s books, women and mysticism, sexuality and ideology, country women, and a body workshop. Wendy spoke about the Soc/Fem network and has started a small list of women interested in a future fem/soc group. For further info about Women’s Liberation activities in the region, contact Bristol Womens Centre Newsletter, [redacted], Bristol. Tel. [redacted]
NORTH WEST – NUALA MORTON
Manchester Wm and Soc Group have been having a series of discussions on topics that are both contemporary and historical. Among topics discussed, and on which discussion papers are being written are one on Rape, Women in the Labour Force, Wages for Housework, Children as Property, the Lesbian Left paper on Relationships and politics of emotions. They also hope to prepare papers on “The politics of Race”, “Working Class Women and the Women’s Liberation Movement”, Older women in the WLM and ageism”. Anyone wanting copies please send large stamped addressed envelope to Nuala, [redacted], Bolton. A regional Fem/Soc conference has taken place in Manchester on 16th July. We will have details for next issue. (See also note on proposed Soc/Fem National Conference).
NORTH – ANN TORODE
Our individual groups continue to meet, but so far we have been unable to get a further regional meeting off the ground. Activities locally seemed to take priority – particularly the Abortion Campaign and involvement in setting up an anti-fascist group to counter the activities of the National Front in the area. We plan to hold a weekend meeting in Middlesbrough in September, but topics have not yet been decided.
LONDON – JANE DEIGHTON, TAMMY WALKER, KAREN MARGOLIS
The recent series of workshops “What is a Socialist Feminist Practice” were well attended with about 200 women taking part in each, except for the “Feminism in Ireland” meeting in which about 100 women took part. We hope to have reports on the workshops, particularly the final one which drew together the experiences discussed in the other three. We hope to print these, as well as some of the papers on Feminism and Ireland in the next issue. Details of future activities from Planning Group, [redacted], London, SE5.
SCOTLAND – MARY BRAND
Although the network in Scotland is small, a lot more women are becoming interested as a result of a fem/soc workshop at the Scottish Womens Liberation Conference held in Aberdeen in May. N.E. Scotland held a half-day conference in Aberdeen in June and out of that have formed a soc/fem group.
In Glasgow and Edinburgh groups are holding small local workshops, building towards a Scottish Soc.Fem conference in the autumn. Edinburgh held one on 17th July. Details of further activities from Mary Brand.
MIDLANDS – HELEN GUNDON
A one day conference on “Women and the Crisis” was held in Birmingham on 9th July. Further information on papers, future activities from Womens Centre, [redacted], Bilshall Heath, Tel B’ham [redacted].
INTERNATIONAL
As a result of contacts at thr Amsterdam Conference we now have women from France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Sri Lanka, Finland and West Germany wishing to subscribe and interested in setting up similar networks in their own countries.
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LESBIAN LEFT
Lesbian Left as the name suggests, is a collective of lesbian socialist feminists. The group has been meeting regularly in London over the past year. In traditional political terms, we are a broad front, consisting of feminists who are non-aligned and also feminists in the Communist Party, I.M.G, in other groupings. Our feminism and our lesbianism cut across, inform and enrich these different political allegiances, and in turn are complicated by them.
In an attempt not to assert polemically the links between socialism and feminism, but to begin trying to work these out in practice, we have been active on a number of levels.
We have supported the picket organised by the TRICO women in their struggle for equal pay; the picket organised by the workers on strike at Grunwick’s factory; the EGA picket organised by the hospital workers fighting to keep the women’s hospital open in the face of cuts in the NHS. We have also begun to come involved in anti-fascist work, dating from our involvement in the anti-NF demo protest in London last April.
On the level of ideas we have individually produced papers and discussed them within the group. Topics considered include: Male Gay Camp; definitions of class; idealism in the womens movement. Individual women in the group produced a series of papers on aspects of lesbian/feminism/socialism for the national WLM conference in April 1977, where we chaired a workshop. We gave the same papers at a one day workshop in London on sexuality in the “What is a Feminist Socialist Practice?” series.
We hope to duplicate more of these papers and distribute them as widely as possible. A group from Lesbian Left wrote the section on ‘Lesbianism’ In the new English edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”. Our group was represented at both the International Socialist Feminist Conferences in Paris and Amsterdam.
As a group we have had, and continue to face, many problems both practical and theoretical, possibly reflecting the difficulties and contradictions to be found within the women’s movement, the gay movement and on the left generally. We have no quick answers to offer but see ourselves as specifically lesbian members of the wide socialist feminist movement working towards a revolutionary change. This incorporates our understanding of the particular oppressive relation women have to capitalist society through the sexual division of labour in the home and at work, the ramifications of which affect all women.
The group is open and meets every Thursday, at A Woman’s Place, [redacted]. However we occasionally have our meetings elsewhere so its always best to check with the newsletter.
In Sisterhood,
Melanie
Editors Note: For reasons of space we have had to leave out a statement of aims they sent us some time ago. Any sister interested in further information contact Lesbian Left c/o Wendy, [redacted].
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE SOCIALIST CURRENT WITHIN THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Note: We were asked to write this paper at short notice; it is based upon a combination of the papers we have collected over the years plus memories of conferences we attended. Inevitably, therefore, it is by no means a complete history. We do think however, that the events and conflicts which we outline here do reflect in general, the development of the Socialist-Feminist current within the Women’s Liberation Movement.
The late 60s saw the emergence of the Women’s Movement in Britain. In 1969 in London the Women’s Liberation Workshop established itself, developing consciousness raising groups and attempting to articulate and understand the ways in which women felt themselves to be oppressed and exploited. In the same years, a group of socialist women active in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign started producing a journal called ‘Socialist Women’, whose aims were both to impress upon the left the importance of the ‘Woman Question’ – to publicise the struggles of women in Britain and internationally and to try to develop a socialist analysis of women’s oppression, it was to be distributed through the newly formed Socialist Women’s Groups.
The first Women’s Liberation Movement Conference was held in Oxford in 1970. It was felt that the movement had already grown sufficiently to need a national structure in order to co-ordinate the increasingly diverse activities of women’s groups around the country. Women in left groups saw this as an opportunity to influence the political development of the Women’s Liberation Movement and managed to dominate the National Committee. This Women’s National Co-ordinating Committee formulated four demands which were adopted by the Women’s Liberation Movement – equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and 24 hour nurseries for all under 5’s. However the Women’s National Co-ordinating Committee degenerated into sectarian squabbles between the different left factors represented and was disbanded by the Skegness Women’s Liberation Movement Conference in 1971. It left behind a great deal of hostility amongst feminists towards socialist women and a deep distrust of structures and methods of organising which were associated with the male left. Instead the small, relatively unstructured consciousness-raising group was taken to be the model for structure and organisation in the Women’s Liberation Movement.
There were however, many women who regarded themselves as both feminists and socialists. Those who were in left groups were getting hammered for being “bourgeois feminists”; those who were not in the left groups but were active in the Women’s Liberation Movement were getting hammered for being “male dominated socialists”. Thus when a group of women in Birmingham who had organised their own Marxist study group called a conference on “Women’s Liberation and Socialism” in March 1973 several hundred women attended both from left groups and from non-aligned women active in the Women’s Liberation Movement. All agreed in the need to analyse the position of women from a Marxist perspective and most agreed that the existing analysis was inadequate for understanding the specific problems raised by radical feminists in the Women’s Liberation Movement.
A series of Women’s Liberation and Socialism Conferences were planned. Four conferences took place: London, September 1973 on Autonomy or Separatism?; Oxford, March 1974 on the four demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement; Birmingham, September 1974 on Women in the Family; and London, March 1975 on “Perspectives on the Women’s Movement”. There was also at least one day conference organised – on the Working Women’s Charter, Leeds, November 1974 – and probably others. “Red Rag” a journal for socialist feminist women was also started in 1972.
At first the political differences between those women whose primary political orientation was within the revolutionary left groups, and those whose orientation was within the Women’s Liberation Movement were obscured behind the collective euphoria generated by discussion of new ideas and new understandings. However, by the Oxford Conference, these differences were becoming more obvious and the final conference in London 1975 saw the alliance between the two tendencies end in bitterness and anger.
What were these differences? They related both to ideas about organisation and structure of the socialist current and to its orientation – how should we be organised and who should we be organising.
(a) Non-aligned women felt that the Women’s Liberation Movement had a great deal to offer the left in terms of how meetings should be structured; that it was important for socialist-feminists not to separate themselves off from the movement in any organised way and that the Conferences were useful in drawing together and developing a socialist-feminist theory and practice within the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Left group women felt that conferences should be organised in the traditional structured way and some felt that the socialist current should be more independent of the Women’s Liberation Movement in terms of structure, orientation and programme.
(b) Non-aligned women took the position that since all women were oppressed and exploited by capitalism it was essential to organise around issues relating to women at home and in the community as well as those in paid employment..
Women in the left groups, however, tended to take the position that socialists should orient themselves to the working class only – by which they meant women at the work place – struggles around working conditions, unionism, pay etc.
These political differences were exacerbated by differences in the degree of organisation of the two tendencies. The women from left groups were part of organisations in which issues could be raised, discussed and positions worked out. They had the facilities to write and produce papers together and they had the experience of articulating their views at large meetings. Non-aligned women were on the whole politically isolated within their women’s groups around the country and thus had little opportunity to get together with like-minded sisters and had relatively little experience in putting forward their positions in large meetings. Thus these differing political perspectives were never argued out on an equal footing and women from left groupings increasingly dominated the discussion and decisions at the Conferences.
At the last conference, the only papers produced were from left groups and both their content and the manner in which they were presented finally so alienated the non-aligned women present that many just walked out. The conference came to a premature end amid confusion and chaos.
For the next two years there appears to have been no more collective discussions of socialist-feminist theory and practice within the Women’s Liberation Movement – although Red Rag, the Socialist-Feminist theoretical journal, was still being published and several of the left groups were putting out women’s papers.
Many Socialist-Feminists devoted their time and energy to various campaigns – in particular the National Abortion Campaign and the Working Women’s Charter.
In retrospect, the manner in which the Charter was taken up by the socialist current is very illuminating. It came originally from London Trades Council and was adopted at the Oxford Women and Socialism Conference – It was more or less seized upon by sisters as a way of focusing the energies of the socialist current because it appeared to be a practical way of relating to working class women and to the trade unions movement; a way of uniting ‘home’ demands with ‘work’ demands.
As a non-aligned women said at the Leeds Charter Conference eight months later:
“There is no doubt that many in the socialist current took up the Charter without enough thought and discussion… The politics of the Charter were treated as if they could be read off from it, and not recognised as at least partly dependent in the tactics used… The crucial question wasn’t asked: What is the Charter, or what can it be, in relationship to the Trades Union in the one hand and the Women’s Liberation Movement on the other?”
Even before the collapse of the London Conference of 1975 then, the tendency represented by the left group women became predominant through the adoption of the Working Women’s Charter. The socialist current was organised in campaigns directed towards women at work in a way that precluded discussions about practice and the theory behind it.
At the 1976 Women’s Liberation Conference in Newcastle, a workshop was convened by some sisters on Tyneside on ‘The Socialist Current within the Women’s Liberation Movement’. The workshop was packed out. The discussion centred around our experience as ‘mindless militants’ and the need for combining the development of theory with practice. Women active in NAC felt particularly the lack of overall theoretical perspective. Non-aligned sisters complained of their isolation within the Women’s Liberation Movement. Sisters from left groups spoke of the need for support in their own struggles with their male comrades. Suggestions that a socialist-feminist conference should be organised were rejected – the memory of London 1975 was still too vivid. What was agreed was that a newsletter should be started with the aim of providing a communication network for socialist-feminists and discussing socialist-feminist theory and practice. Since then the socialist-feminist current has been growing again – groups have started around the country, several regional conferences have been held, and a national conference is being planned for later on this year. There are still political differences between the non-aligned socialist-feminists and those involved in left groups – the disagreement between the British sisters involved in the planning for the Socialist-Feminist Conference and their subsequent split, some organising for the Paris conference, others for the Amsterdam Conference, is a reflection of these differences. The area of differences remain the same: the orientation – just women in the labour force, or women in the community as well – and the question of structure and organisation. However, the level on which discussions amongst socialist-feminists are taking place now has changed. The non-aligned sisters after several years in the wilderness are coming together with a new strength and conviction that feminism is essential to the development and effectiveness of socialist theory and practice. We are confident that this time the socialist current in the Women’s Liberation Movement, firmly rooted in both feminism and Marxism, will be able to resolve its differences and make an important contribution both to the Women’s Movement and the left in this country.
Scarlet Women Collective
May 1977
SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS WITH THE WORkING WOMEN’S CHARTER CAMPAIGN/ TOWARDS A FEMINIST/SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
(written by three women active in the WWC for one of the workshops in the London series “what is a Socialist/Feminist Practice”)
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
When the WWC was passed by the London Trades Council in March 1974, it was seized upon by feminists on the left both aligned and non-aligned, as a vehicle for reconciling their socialism and their feminism. Here was a means of taking the demands of the women’s movement into the labour movement, that of organising working-class women around demands relating to their specific oppression as women, rather than just “as workers”. Here was a means of challenging the time-worn assertion by unionists and the organised left that if women were not interested in organising around demands put forward by male workers, then they were “backward” or “just not militant enough”. The WWCC appeared ideally as a basis of organising women workers because its demands seemed to relate both to women in their place of employment and to women in the home.
This recognition that women (and blacks) cannot simply be organised in the same basis as male workers was a step forward for the revolutionary left and the organised labour movement. However, beyond this simple recognition, and the broadly agreed aim of the WWC to “take the demands of the women’s movement into the labour movement”, large areas of confusion remain, and are becoming all the more glaring in the current discussion on the way forward for the WWC.
Since 1974, the WWC has been formally adopted by 12 national unions, 45 branches of other unions, 37 Trades Councils, and 85 other organisations. However, it has failed to build a base among working class women even where it has given active support to their struggles. Because of this failure to build a base at grassroots level it has been possible for trade unions to simply adopt the Charter while doing nothing more to fight for its demands or even campaign for support from their members, men or women.
Local groups (there are 30) are disoriented and the lack of focus for their activity, and lack of discussion, have caused them to have relatively short lives. The WWCC is split at the national and local levels, with local groups working in isolation from each other and from the national structure. We believe these problems stem from fundamental confusions by the Charter of how women’s oppression relates to class struggle.
STRUCTURE. The present structure of the WWCC was adopted at last year’s National Conference. This annual national conference is the policy making body of the WWCC, and in between conferences it is the national co-ordinating group (3 monthly) to which local groups send delegates. The Secretariat, elected from national conference, does administrative work and acts as a co-ordinating body. An Editorial Board, taken from the Secretariat, is responsible for the Charter Paper.
The WWCC is renowned for the bureaucratic nature of its structure. National Co-ordinating Group meetings have been poorly attended. Attempts as contact between local groups (e.g. national planning meetings) have failed, essentially because local groups have not found that these are geared to their needs. The same is true of the Secretariat’s circulars to the local groups, which bear little relation to their situation and resources. So the groups carry on with their usually isolated activities. The Secretariat should have simply a co-ordinating role, but it tries to lead the WWCC in particular directions, which only increases the distance between itself and the local groups. It is important that less than half the Secretariat themselves belong to local groups, while the ratio of members of the political groups (IMG, ICL, WP) is far higher than in a typical geographical group.
The rally is an example of this split between the national and local elements of the WWCC: the size and scale were totally out of proportion to the local groups, while its impact was aimed not through the work of these groups, (apart from the impracticable Women’s Rights Committees!), but independent of them. The reasons for holding the rally and the specific conceptions behind it have not been clearly discussed in the Rally planning meeting, let alone by the groups themselves. The whole event was bulldozed through from “above”.
Although the formal structure of the WWCC is appropriated to a tightly organised group committed to definite policy and unified strategy, it is not appropriate for the Charter since it does not have this. IT is important to understand that the WWCC was always keen to differentiate itself from the “loose structurlessness” of the Women’s movement, and to adopt a structure compatible with the traditional labour movement. Thus the structure was very much oriented to being similar to male initiated structures of the labour movement and of the left, so that the Charter would be accepted by these organisations, and also be and effective movement.
Emphasis in the Charter has been on organising women and men together around the demands. Only recently has the call for women to organise independently of men in women’s caucuses in trade unions has been seriously argued by some women in the WWCC. But it has always been argued that local groups should be mixed – why in practice are they almost all exclusively men? Thus the aim of gaining support and active commitment from male trade unionists has been allowed to override the conviction of the feminist women’s movement that women need to find their own specific organisational forms in order to organise effectively (both inside and outside the labour movement).
The debate about structure cannot be separated from the debate about overall strategy and aims.
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
- Orientation to Working Class Women
Who precisely are these working class women that the Charter has agreed to orientate towards, and why are we orienting to them rather than to other women? Most women in the WWCC would agree that while all women are oppressed, the class position of some allows the, privileges that make them unlikely to identify with women as an oppressed group, or with the struggle for socialism. Therefore we orientate to working-class rather than ruling class women.
But it does not follow from the above that we should orientate to women in the industrial working-classes rather than, say, women in the service industries; or to women in the unskilled services rather than the professional services. Or again should we orientate towards working-class women in the home rather than in the workplace? For it is not clear on what basis the class membership of a women is defined: on the work they are employed at, or if they are not employed, on the work they are qualified to do or on the class membership of their husbands.
There is an obvious sense in which we all know perfectly well what we mean when we say a man or woman is “working-class” based on a loose picture involving accent, dress, lifestyle, as well as workplace. But this criteria has little to do with a Marxist sense of the term, which depends on the person’s relationship to the production process, they have to sell their labour to live, or by extension, are they dependent on another who has to sell their labour?
The debate on strategy and orientation then concerns: which section of the working class is potentially the most militant? Which section of working-class women is potentially the most conscious of their oppression and the most likely to struggle against it?
If the answer could be based purely on the membership of the WWCC, the answer would be: women in white collar service industries, with a strong bias towards the professions. Usually these women are in their 20s and have no children. From this, two conclusions may be drawn:
i) women from this section of the working class can no longer be written off by the left as “petit bourgeois”, and thus by implication, non-revolutionary.
ii) the WWCC has failed to build a base among the very women it has been orienting to as “working-class women”, i.e. women who work in industry, or in the unskilled services (and who probably have two young children by the time they are in their 20’s). Is the reason for this simply that the WWCC has failed to take account of the practical difficulties for these women to take part in time-consuming meetings, when they are more likely to be bogged down in family responsibilities than the “professional” women? While the situation of having children obviously restricts one’s activities, it would be naïve to be satisfied with this as an explanation.
2. Orientation to Women at the Waged Workplace
There has been increasing emphasis in the Charter on organising women at the waged workplace. While this is important, it is also essential to organise women from the home. But even within its orientation the WWCC has shown itself unable to relate to women involved in workplace struggles.
Since the WWCC has taken the male T.U. definition of ‘working-class’ – where one is defined through one’s workplace – it inevitably concentrates on the employed women. All the points in the Charter have been taken up within this workplace context rather than in the basis of women’s oppression stemming from our reproductive and domestic role. For instance, nurseries have been campaigned for from the viewpoint of providing an essential facility for working women, instead of from the feminist standpoint that collectivised childcare will free women from the oppression of isolated mothering. The WWCC has not realised that women under capitalism are defined primarily by their domestic and reproductive role, and that their role as waged workers flows directly from this.
Traditionally, the T.U. ‘s have only taken up economic workplace issues such as pay and redundancies, but not issues like unemployment and housing. Because the WWCC has oriented itself to taking up issues within the male-dominated working class organisations, it has fallen into the same economistic trap, presenting women’s oppression merely as a series of practical demands. It was so concerned to get the male trade unionists to adopt the Charter that it failed to orientate itself towards working-class women, by taking us issues important to them which would in effect fundamentally challenge the concepts and practice of the unions.
The charter has always been seen as linking women’s oppression in the home and at the workplace; or rather as bringing their oppression in the home into the workplace context, by virtue of its demands which relate to both. But the demands in effect relate to one or the other: some to the home, some to the workplace, and there are none that relate to our sexual oppression which occur wherever we are, and which is used to keep women in a subordinate position in every situation: at home, in bed, at work, on the street.
The inadequacies of the way in which the WWCC has raised women’s oppression are clearly shown by the experience of the Trico strike.
TRICO
Before intervening in any struggle, one must work out why it is important to do so, and what you want to achieve though that intervention beyond the success of the struggle. Such an analysis within the Charter never occurred over Trico – either before or after involvement.
During the whole of the strike, the WWCC was split between on the one side the Charter ‘leadership’ and the numbers of political organisation whose main concern was to put over their ideas to the strike committee, and to attend the mass meetings in order to monitor the strike from class quarters, and on the other side the many Charter members and women from all over London who were supporting the picket lines. These who saw themselves as ‘political leaders’ based their credibility on those who were the picket ‘fodder’ (and who were often ashamed to admit their membership of the WWCC!), rather than gaining their own credibility by doing regular picket duties themselves. In general, if they did turn up on the picket line it was often for just an hour or so, just like the T.U. bureaucrats who ‘graced’ the picket lines with their presence!
It is hard for people outside to see the unity of an organisation, especially when that organisation is itself split, and one group appears on the picket lines and the other at their own meetings. It is not surprising that when the latter tried to expose the C.P. leadership to the women strikers, they received little support, even though this criticism was often valid. If they had taken up issues that related more to the women they might have had more success. Also if the WWCC had extended its role further to campaign for active support for the strike among the “union base” it claims to have, it would have gained more credibility from the Trico women.
For instance, throughout the duration of the strike no crèche facilities were organised and so women with children were unable to participate. The Charter suggested a crèche, and the strike committee turned round and said “great idea – you set it up”, – not the answer they had hoped for! The crèche should have been organised by the strikers themselves, since in this way they would have acknowledged its importance. Disillusioned, the Charter dropped the idea. If the Charter had first approached some of the women, and had gained their support for a crèche, the strike committee would not have been able to dismiss the idea so easily. And to just drop it was to give it as little importance as the strike committee had given it. What would have been so wrong with positively helping some of the strikers to set up a crèche?
Again, the Charter never took up the issue of sexism which the women were continually having to face. Many of the men at the factory had not supported the strike. Many women were not being allowed to go on the picket lines by their husbands. And many women felt a conflict between commitment to the strike and their family responsibilities. Here was something that all women were experiencing and the Charter could have exploited to give a wider understanding of sexual oppression. Instead they restricted themselves to much talk about the Equal Pay Act and its inadequacies – something of which the strikers were already aware.
Because of the Charter’s orientation towards the working class it failed to take advantage of another facet of the strike. Many women not active in the Charter campaign had come to help the Trico women on the picket line. Here was an opportunity to draw them in to the Charter to help with support activities for Trico in their own local areas e.g. meetings, fundraising, publicising the strike and raising the issue of women’s oppression. Instead, the Charter concentrated on the strike committee, the opportunity was lost and the numbers in the Charter campaign continued to shrink.
Trico is often used as a shining example of the Charter’s credibility within the labour movement, yet no credibility was actually gained. The intervention by the “leadership” was a political failure – no wonder the Trico speakers did not turn up to the Charter Rally.
DEMANDS OF THE CHARTER
Membership of the WWCC has been though agreement with the Charter’s demands and attraction to the concept of an “overall” women’s campaign. A fundamental strategy for the WWCC is not developed on, beyond the broad aim of “taking the WWC demands into the labour movement”. Indeed, how many Charter members agree with this statement from the literature on the coming conference: “The WWC outlines the basic pre-requisites for complete equality at all levels of a woman’s social economic and political life”? Discussions around such central motions as – emancipation or liberation?; the material and ideological basis of our oppression; are the Charter demands reformist or revolutionary?; how does the WWCC take them up?; how should we orientate to the Labour Party – have rarely if ever taken place. Certainly most local groups are under too much pressure to be “active”, that discussion has little place in busy meetings. Discussion and development of political understanding is not assumed to be a necessary part of the WWCC, and is generally hived off into one or more of: a c/r group, a women’s group, a study group, a revolutionary group. The almost exclusively campaigning nature of the WWCC has contributed to the fact that at conference, discussion is again limited to “relevant” things e.g. specific demands, details of these and campaigns around them, without analysis of the overall context.
The criticism of mindless militancy can be levelled at the practice of the WWCC. The local groups have been left to pick a demand to campaign around with no generally agreed approach for this choice. The orientation of each group has varied with the inclination of its members, as well as with the general political situation.
As the Charter is seen merely as a series of demands, the way one demands links in with the others is not immediately explained. It requires a feminist analysis to see the connection and the Charter has always shied away from this, giving merely practical explanations e.g. women need control over their own bodies in order to be able to avail themselves of equal opportunities at work. Thus the linkage has remained very much a paper one. Demands have been taken up individually within single issue campaigns which, although often initiated by the WWCC have remained very much outside of it. The only real link between the WWCC and those campaigns has been the women who have worked in both. This is partly due to the reformist nature of the campaigns which the WWCC has not challenged e.g. NAC ahs oriented itself towards legislation and has not taken up the essential question of women’s sexuality.
STRATEGY
Now that the campaigns which many local groups have initiated are becoming even more difficult to keep going (particularly the nursery campaigns in the situations where the cutbacks have been accepted) and that the local membership that has not by now completely dropped out of the WWCC is becoming increasingly frustrated and dissatisfied, the question of overall strategy and the way forward for the WWCC is starting to be discussed. Any proposed strategy is based on certain analysis of the roots of women’s subordination; and this must be fully and openly discussed. The WWCC is in danger of totally disintegrating unless the demoralisation of many members can be turned into enthusiasm by talking and working through our difference conceptions and experiences. The women’s struggle at this time is particularly threatened because of the general lack of resistance to attacks on the working class (the economic cuts which effect women’s lives and jobs) and because of the strengthening of the state in ideological terms (Benyon’s Bill, levelled specifically at working class women). Our priority is to re-orientate ourselves while understanding the experience of the WWCC since its conception.
The theme of the National Conference on May 21st-22nd is “which way forward for the Charter Campaign?” We believe that this conference is crucial to the very continuation of the campaign, and that if a more realistic and perceptive orientation is not worked out many women will leave the WWCC and may drop out of political activity at an important time. But the current debate among the three left groups around whether or not to amend the Charter is not the key issue. Nor are we happy with the provisional agenda for the conference since it places too much emphasis on resolutions and too little on real discussions and exchange of local group experiences and lessons learnt. (Approx. 1 hour is allotted to workshop discussion on “problems of local WWCC groups” over a whole weekend!) We urge Charter groups to see this conference as a real priority, to help change the agenda to allow information and decisions to go from the grass roots upwards through the structure, and to allow themselves discussion time before the conference and hopefully write their own papers.
The perspective of “No to the Social Contract” becomes vital in order to take up the Charter demand sin any other than a reformist way, given the economic crisis and the attack on women as an economic group. We must refuse to allow any cuts on our money, health, education standards, or to accept any additional burdens put on us by the state for economic and/or ideological reasons. And instead of simply stressing changes in policy, whether it be union, local or national government, we must take up these issues by relating them to how women are directly experiencing this objective situation. We must relate to women on the basis of our common oppression and sexuality under capitalism. We must argue too that the fight against sexual oppression in all its forms is central to the class struggle. Male workers must not accept or retain any privileges above women workers or men above women, since “divide and rule” serves to help only the ruling class.
Women are truly “the slaves of the slave”, yet the basic sexual oppression which is our everyday experience is not mentioned in the Charter demands. Why is the 6th demand of the Women’s movement not even referred to in this Charter? Precisely because of the convenient idea that if women are “released” from the “chains” of unequal opportunity, domestic work and childcare we will be able to “be just like men” and play a normal part in society, especially the unions. But due to our subordination – our particular gender role conditioning and experiences – we have a different consciousness. It is this consciousness the women’s movement has told us and is telling us so much about. As feminist socialists, we aim to organise women themselves to change society as a means towards their own and our own liberation.
The Charter up to now has attempted to resolve the conflict between feminism and socialism by cutting out the feminist part. These Socialist Feminist Workshops are searching towards a feminist socialist synthesis which is the essential task that we must undertake. One lesson we take from the charter is that any attempt to organise women on a non-feminist basis is doomed to failure!
TOWARDS A FEMINIST SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
The WWCC fails to understand that sexism must be exposed and opposed directly. It prevents and undermines our attempts to change our position. For instance, a married employed woman going on strike immediately has to face the choice of leaving the activity to the men – and the single women – or refusing to carry out her domestic responsibilities at home. On top of this, she faces the expectation from men involved in the strike, from other women, and often from herself, that she is capable only for a secondary role e.g. in Trico, male trade union bureaucrats used sexism to dampen down initiatives and control the strike. Not only is the women’s time and energy divided, but she is psychologically undermined by the expectations from her workmates as well as her husband and her employers that she fulfil this role, regardless of her actual home situation. This expectation is expressed at the workplace through the men relating to the women as sex objects and servicers i.e. objects existing for their sexual/ego titillation or to satisfy other physical or emotional needs. It is precisely our silent compliance with this, and failure to collectively confront it, that undermines the possibility of women organising on a truly solid basis and of challenging the emptiness of formal equality which bears little relation to our actual experience of oppression.
Women must constantly fight their submissive relations to men at work at home and in society generally. We must develop ways of overcoming the split between the “personal” (which has oppressed us for years within the Left itself) and extend this into the ongoing politics of women’s oppression. It is necessary that we provide our own leaders in this fight, that we organise independently yet not separately from men. The building of women’s caucuses in the unions, the development of women’s groups outside the workplace, and an autonomous Women’s Movement which embraces within it a feminist socialist movement, are an essential part of the strategy towards liberation.
P.S. Sorry if this paper is so negative about the Charter. This is not because we are denying the importance of the role of the Charter, but because we feel that constructive criticism is what we need now.
March 1977 Written by: Sue Oppenheimer, Margaret Page, Celia Shalom
EXTRACT FROM A LETTER SENT TO THE NATIONAL SECRETARIAT OF THE WORKING WOMEN’S CHARTER.
Several women still involved in the WWC campaign have pressured us to write down something about the reasons for the dissolution of the Coventry Campaign. As we’ve now left the Charter Campaign, we are unwilling to do anything which might be construed as launching an attack from outside but feel that this might be an appropriate context in which to explain why Coventry Charter Group decided to dissolve itself.
There are lots of reasons for it, many of them local in character, pertaining to the development of this particular group, but there were also factors which we know are shared by other groups.
One of the problems which we had from the start was how to work on the charter. Before starting the Charter group, we had been working as a socialist women’s group on various issues as they arose locally, and probably most consistently on abortion. As a charter group we found it difficult to delineate areas of work. We felt that we should work on the Charter as a whole, yet in practice this prevented any sustained activity in a particular area. We found ourselves taking on general commitments of a propaganda and publicity character – e.g. talks to trade union branches, a trade union seminar on the charter, an exhibition on women’s work in Coventry – but this was at the expense of any deeper involvement in any single area. We tried forming sub-committees on some of the areas where the Charter’s demands lay (e.g. nurseries) but these failed to really get off the ground because our forces were split in working on each of them. We practically gave up our involvement in abortion campaigning because we felt that as a charter group we shouldn’t be involved in something which was primarily the responsibility of the NAC group. (During the time that the Coventry charter group was active NAC in the area pretty well folded up completely.)
There were of course advantages in working in the Charter campaign: we took it up originally partly because we wanted to secure an entry in trade union work and contacts, and to widen the basis of a group which was primarily academic, middle class, etc. We succeeded in building up excellent trade union contacts which we retain. However we did not manage to widen our membership significantly, for reasons which we feel were partly to do with the Charter. Over the 2 years or so that we were meeting, dozens of women came to a few meetings, but did not join the campaign. We know from talking at length to a few of them, that what they wanted was a wider contact with the Women’s Movement and its ideas than a Charter group gave them – they felt it was too narrowly concerned with working women, did not raise questions of sexism, socialisation of children, etc. This confirmed our own feelings that the charter was a good basis on which to approach the traditional institutions of the labour movement, but that it didn’t go far enough and was not sufficiently comprehensive for some of the women who were not likely to be interested in a socialist/feminist perspective. What we needed was a less rigid perspective, and a wider one.
We felt that this became more marked after the 1976 conference. Previously we had been fighting against our own tendencies to bureaucracy and what we increasingly felt was an inadequate set of demands. As a group we felt that the proposal changes to the charter discussed in April 1976 were even more inadequate, and after the conference engaged in a number of meetings to discuss amendments to the Charter. Although we finally produced a set of amendments, we felt that the time and effort spent on them was not worthwhile, (and assume that other groups had similar feelings.) We felt over the 6 months or so after the April conference that an actual conflict was developing between our interests as a local group trying to interest women in feminism and socialism and mount local activities, and our membership of a national campaign which (though I am sure it was not intentional) appeared extremely remote, continually sent us large amounts of written material which seemed to have no real connection with us, and seemed to have no relevance to our activities at a local level. Our meetings became more and more devoted to “business” which emanated from the Secretariat, and to discussing amendments to the Charter. Now work in Coventry went by the board, now members found the meetings irrelevant. In the end, so did women who had been committed, active and regular members of the Charter group from the start. So demoralised and lacking in identity as a group were we that when a long women’s strike for union recognition started un Coventry in October 1976 we reacted to it largely as individuals, not as common members of a campaign. It was this experience which made us realise that the group in Coventry did not really exist any more other than as a name. After a series of meetings to discuss the situation, we decided to dissolve the group, and members of the campaign have now gone into different areas of work.
Written by: Coventry Working Women’s Charter Group
SOME NOTES ON THE SECOND NATIONAL WORKING WOMEN’S CHARTER CONFERENCE
You didn’t have to listen to the speeches at the Second Working Women’s Charter Conference, held in London from 22nd to 23rd May to realise that there was something seriously wrong with the Campaign. Attendance was down from around 350 last year to barely 200 this year and even less on the second day. There appeared to be less than a dozen Charter groups present (no-one knew whether the others were unrepresented or simply didn’t exist) and only four of these – Bath, North Tyneside, Newcastle and Hull – were from outside of London. There were perhaps 70 trade union delegates from trade union branches or trades councils, but only a few of these seemed to represent active Charter caucuses and only one trade union branch had put forward resolutions. With the exception of North Tyneside and Lambeth WWC groups, women from IMG, ICL and Workers Power were the only ones who had seriously prepared fro the conference, putting forward papers on perspectives and specific resolutions on action and structure. The crèche was slow to get started on Saturday and on Sunday had to be staffed by volunteers from the conference, when it became clear that no one else had turned up to run it and that small children running round the conference hall was going to have a disruptive effect on the proceedings. No-one came to the disco in the evening.
Early in the conference, women from IMG joined with a non-aligned group of feminist socialist women to argue that it was impossible to amend the Charter (the original purpose of the conference agreed at the previous one) without a thorough discussion of experience so far and that the agenda should be reorganised to allow for greater discussion. Although strongly opposed by ICL and Workers’ power, who were committed to amending the Charter, the re-organised agenda was accepted. Workshops held in the afternoon focussed on the themes “What is the nature of the Working Women’s Charter and its demands? What kind of a Charter do we want? and How do we use the Charter? And looked specifically at experience in the workplace and in the community and relationships with the Labour Movement and the Women’s Movement. The reports of these discussions in the Sunday plenary revealed not only that many people had experienced severe problems in using the Charter and that most of the groups were in disarray, but also that there were irreconcilable differences of opinion amongst those present about the way forward.
Sadly the depth of the confusion and disagreement was never acknowledged by the conference as a whole and it sailed on into discussion of ‘perspectives’ on the Sunday morning entirely dominated by left groups. The discussion in practice was confined to proposals for the national campaign including relationships with NAC, fighting the Social Contract and so on. Voting was half-hearted, everyone seemed to sense that there was not the collective will to put decisions made at the conference into action. Although we had been active earlier in the conference, the socialist-feminist caucus was unable to make any effective intervention in the ‘perspectives’ discussion. A resolution acknowledging that “the specific nature of the exploitation of women in paid employment is inextricably linked to the oppression of women arising from our reproductive role” and committing the conference to “working around issues affecting all women whether paid for their work or not” was defeated. A further resolution to sexual oppression was only narrowly passed. In the final session, the conference was presented with a choice of structure for the campaign. Possibilities for a more decentralised campaign suggested by North Tyneside and IMG were rejected in favour of a modified version of the current structure in which the secretariat is elected from the conference, put forward by ICL and Workers’ Power. When the voting for the secretariat took place only members of left groups and one trade council delegate chose to stand. In the end only 8 out of 15 places on the secretariat were filled. The left groups have found themselves in sole control of an organisation without any base.
Workers Power and ICL were preoccupied throughout the conference with getting the Charter amended. Their analysis of the failure of the campaign to transform ‘paper resolutions’ into action was that the ten demands of the Charter are too reformist, too easy to pass without thinking about. They wanted the Charter to embody a revolutionary programme geared to the present state of struggle, featuring specifically a woman’s right to work, opposition to the social contract, sliding scale of wages and so on. Their idea is that the Charter should be updated every two or three years to ensure the demands remain appropriate. The view of IMG was that to amend the Charter would only serve to further confuse the trade unionists who had passed it. They believe that as it stands it provides a way of drawing the widest possible labour movement forces into the campaign and in the long term, lays the basis for a mass women’s movement. It is significant that both factions were entirely preoccupied with the ‘National Campaign’ and the direction for the Secretariat. The people who actually actively support the Charter – the local groups – were assigned only a marginal role.
For all the difficulties of the conference, I found the positions being presented in the plenary counterpoised by the discussions of grass roots experience un the workshops quite helpful in clarifying my ideas about why things are so clearly going wrong with the Charter Campaign and the lesson for socialist feminists inside and outside of the Campaign.
Socialist feminists were attracted to the Charter Campaign because they saw it as a way of making the ideas of the thus far rather inward-looking Women’s Liberation Movement relevant to working class women. Because the Charter focused on what were seen as the material pre-requisites of women’s liberation the Charter was seen as a way of raising basic questions by talking practicalities: nurseries, abortion, working conditions and so on. It seemed to provide a way of organising round specific issues – like nurseries – in a way which gave these struggles a context, a way of talking about and linking up all the problems women face. We argued that “working women” means all women whether or not they are engaged in waged labour and saw the Charter as a way of linking up women at work and in the home. In practice, however, these assumptions have not proved viable.
First, the Charter has failed to attract the mass support envisaged. Although it has achieved considerable paper support in the trade union movement, this has not turned out to be very active support. Crudely, the theory behind the Charter appears to have been that women will see the demands of the Charter make sense individually, begin to struggle around them, realise they are all linked up and to implemented require a completely re-organised society. In fact, most women probably know that the demands of the Charter cannot be achieved without fundamental change and so choose not to bother even to begin to struggle. In practice the Charter Campaign’s active supporters have had, in the main, a revolutionary perspective. But precisely because it was meant to be a mass campaign, it has never been seen as the place to conduct theoretical discussions, so the assumptions of the campaign have never been scrutinised. Within the Charter, for instance, there is enormous confusion about the role and function of the ten demands. Every one has a different answer to the question “are the demands achievable under capitalism and if so is this the kind of Charter we want?”
Second, local groups have encountered real difficulties in using the Charter to ink up the issues women face and draw out more general questions about women’s oppression. Although they have found little difficulty in getting local labour parties and trade councils to support the Charter it has been difficult to turn this into active support. Local groups have found difficulty in sustaining their membership; turnover has been high. Somehow the problem was what the Charter group could actually offer its members. Inevitably the group ended up involved either in one over-whelming campaign – like nursery campaigns or NAC – or sitting on endless committees without making any significant progress in any direction.
Third, the Charter has not proved a particularly useful weapon for directly confronting sexism. Many women at the conference reported that passing the Charter has not helped in changing fundamental attitudes in the (predominantly male) labour movement. For all that we may think that the Charter links women at work and at home, it does not do so explicitly. Trade union men may well see themselves fighting on behalf of, or even along side of their comrade sisters, but don’t see that the Charter has anything to do with their wives or daughters. Precisely because the Charter hedges the question of why women want nurseries, free abortion and contraception or whatever, it fails to provide a framework for arguing anything more than the right of women to go out to work.
Where now?
The Charter was drawn up in a hurry at a time when it seemed important to translate the demands of the Women’s Movement to the Labour Movement. At the time, however, many of us had not absorbed quite basic ideas about the importance of domestic labour to capital. We had hardly begun to think about patriarchy or to use the idea of reproduction to help us understand the role of women in capitalist society. In our anxiety to reach out to working class women we took on ideas about action/practice from the organised left. The labour movement and the working class were synonymous. The aim was to reach the formal labour movement and so we took on a ‘labour movement’ style of organising – resolutions and delegate conference – rejecting the models offered by the WLM.
Over the last three years we have been happy to avoid confronting some of the central contradictions of the Charter campaign because we wanted to take part in building a broad campaign. It is clear however that the Charter as an organisation is no longer viable. Over the last year several groups have come to and end and many more women have taken individual decisions to leave. The effect of the recent conference can only be to accelerate the collapse of local groups (what will happen to the secretariat and the support within the trade unions is less clear). If we are to use the experience of the Charter in a positive way to help us develop a more appropriate socialist feminist practice, we need to look again at domestic labour and develop a politics where it is no longer confined to the margins. Three areas for discussion seem particularly crucial:
- Recognising the central role of women and the family in capitalist reproduction, we need to work out what kinds of demands would make sense to women, provide a basis for a broad campaign and be effective in challenging capitalism and patriarchy. Similar discussions have been going on in relation to the six demands of the WLM. (In working out our demands, too, we need to be clear who or what it is we are making demands of, making use of our understanding of the welfare state).
- Charter experience raises a wide range of questions about the way we use a list of demands, whatever their context. Are they meant to be transitional demands? How central are they to our strategy? What kind of context should we put them in?
- We need to re-examine our attitude to the Labour movement – What’s the significance of the fact it’s mainly run and controlled by men? How central is it to our theory of change – and develop a practice which is linked to our analysis.
Jeanette Mitchell
13/6/77
PARIS – AMSTERDAM – was the split necessary?
FIVE OF US spent an afternoon talking about the two European Socialist-Feminist Conferences, trying to decide how to report on them. Three of us had been to Paris, two to Amsterdam. Since the papers from both conferences are to be put together by the conference organisers and circulated later, we hope to be able to comment on them in a later issue. In the meantime we felt it was important to say something about what we got out of the conferences, and the kind of perspectives which we felt were being put forward. Inevitably what follows is a subjective account and we hope others will send in comments on what they think were the most important aspects of the conferences.
The most obvious difference between the two conferences lay in the number of women at each, and this difference inevitably affected the way in which the conferences were structured and the degree to which participants could get a grasp of what others were thinking. At Paris over 4,000 women turned up – the Monday was a Bank Holiday in Europe which presumably was one reason for this. At Amsterdam, the conference was restricted from the start to 250 because the conference location could not accommodate any more. The Paris organisers were clearly overwhelmed by the numbers of women willing to travel from all over Europe to a conference on Socialism and Feminism – a nd how many of us would have anticipated that there would be so many women in so many parts of Europe concerned with questions of both feminism and socialism? For those of us who went to Paris the clear evidence that socialist-feminism or (feminist-socialism?) reflects a large and energetic new area of political development and activity amongst women throughout Europe was exciting and almost in itself made the conference worthwhile.
In terms of the structure of the conference, however, sheer numbers at Paris made it very difficult to get to talk to women from other countries on anything but a superficial level. The Saturday plenary session, at which women from different countries spoke on specific aspects of their work was useful and interesting in a general way, but there was no opportunity to discuss what was said. The following day was devoted to workshops on various aspects of the themes: women and work; violence; rape; repression; women’s centres; sexuality; and abortion, health and motherhood. The workshops were packed; language was a problem if you couldn’t speak anyone else’s and there was no-one who could translate; and because sisters tended to move from one workshop to another there appeared to be – in the workshops we went to – very little development on the discussion. The Monday plenary session on reports from workshops however did give us some idea of the range of issues and views expressed on the different topics.
At Amsterdam, however, there was much greater opportunity for women to get together with others from other countries and get an idea, from a personal involvement perspective, of what was happening. The first workshop was organised so that sisters from different countries were split up and allocated to different workshops. The first session tended to be introductory – sisters talking about where they came from what was happening in their country and what they were involved in. Later workshops discussed themes; feminist-socialist women and the left; women in left organisations; women and the crisis; women and sexuality; organising with women; sex and class; women and housework. There were additional workshops on health and anarcho-feminism. Since sisters tended to stay in the same workshop groups, they were able to develop the discussion at a theoretical level as well as at the level of exchanging experiences. The plenary session on reports from the workshops enabled sisters to get some idea of the ways in which discussion developed in groups other than their own.
One problem which emerged at both conferences at an organisational level was that of language. At Paris there were instantaneous translation facilities for the plenary sessions for three languages, for a thousand people in total. This meant that at best one language group consistently missed out on translation and the workshop sessions were inevitable to some extent self-selective on the basis of language. At Amsterdam the conference was in English only – which put the English sisters in an advantageous position. They were given the task of reporting from the workshops, which re-enforced their position, a fact which the sisters themselves were aware of. It is clear that if European conferences are to become more frequent, we will all have to make a real effort to become at least bi-lingual – or perhaps we should revive Esperanto or make up our own international language!
Turning to the content of the conferences – what, if anything, can be said about European Socialist-Feminists (or feminist-socialism – that is one area that requires clarification, for me, anyway!). At both conferences it appears that there was a wide spectrum of views on the relative importance of feminism to socialism and vice versa – that is, at both conferences, there appeared to be women who regarded themselves primarily as socialists, and others as feminists, and a range of positions in between. Perhaps the Paris conference reflected a greater orientation towards the straight revolutionary left, and the Amsterdam conference tended towards the more libertarian and feminist positions, but it seems that the differences were far from clear. Given that the Paris conference was organised to a large extent by Fourth Internationalists, we were surprised – and perhaps they were, too – at the emphasis given by the participants to questions relating to our experience of oppression as women rather than as female workers; rape, violence, issues relating to the control of our bodies came across as the most urgent areas of struggle for socialist-feminists.
One aspect of this which came across at both conferences was the difference in experience between women from Southern Europe (France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece) and those from Northern Europe. It appears that in Southern Europe the issues of women’s oppression are being raised in the context of a level of class struggle which is much more intense than in Northern Europe. Thus the questions relating to the family, the right to abortion, etc., and men’s attitudes towards women generally, are being thrashed out within the context of a much higher level of political consciousness than exists within the working class of Northern Europe.
In Northern Europe our experience is different and the problems we face are different. Feminist movements in these countries have developed outside the context of the labour movements, which tend to be economistic and have a relatively low level of political consciousness. Socialist-feminists in these countries are trying to take into their labour movements not just relating to women but are also having to come to terms with the fact that unless the political consciousness of the working class is raised at the same time, the revolutionary perspective of feminism will be lost. Hence at the Amsterdam conference the view was expressed that the straight revolutionary left was inadequate to lead the struggle for socialism unless it incorporated the analysis and objectives of revolutionary feminism, and that feminist-socialists were in face the most politically conscious grouping and had to play a leading part in developing a strategy for revolution.
An account of these two conferences has to include a mention of Wages for Housework, who were there in force at both. Because the Campaign talks about essential aspects of women’s oppression, and our collective power as women, they are able to get through to women at a gut level. Why aren’t we doing this, too? The arguments of Wages for Housework have to be countered, but it is not enough to deal only with the inadequacies of their solutions – we have to recognise that they draw upon the wellspring of the womens movement by stressing both the pain of oppression and women’s power – and they have done this consistently at a time when the socialist current – in this country anyway- was failing to do so.
SO WHAT IS THE FUTURE for European socialist-feminists? Very little concrete came out of the conferences – where the Amsterdam conference was concerned this was intentional, for the Paris organisers, this was possibly a disappointment. (In fact the Paris conference collapsed in confusion, partly due to Wages for Housework, and partly due to the disappointment expressed mainly by the Italian women but probably felt by many others, that the conference had not been the opportunity they had hoped for to talk to women from other countries about their experiences, and they then felt they had got nothing out of it). From the Amsterdam conference it seems that there is a basis for a European socialist-feminist network and the newspaper ISIS is to be used to circulate information about events in Europe. From the Paris conference there is to be a delegate only meeting in Rome on 22/23 October to discuss the question of Repression and to plan activities for International Women’s Day around abortion and employment.
Although the corporate results seem to be limited, for us there is no question about the importance of the conferences. The Socialist-Feminist (feminist-socialist?) current/tendency/movement exists, not just in this country but all over Europe, too. We have a tremendous amount of experience and ideas in common and we have a great deal to learn from one another. There are political differences, clearly, but how deep they are, how much they owe to differences in experience, and to unworked out and unclarified theories, it is difficult to say. Perhaps a greater understanding of the relationship between feminism and the class struggle in different parts of Europe will also help to clarify our theoretical understanding of the relationship between the two. Meanwhile we’d better start organising our feminist language classes!
Penny Remfry
AMSTERDAM – another view
This is a subjective impression of the Amsterdam Feminist-socialist workshop, but contains elements agreed on by all the British women who attended. It is added to the above by Penny Remfry because in many ways Amsterdam was a ‘model’ European Fem-Soc conference, for reasons outlined below. It seems important to talk at once about some of the questions of theory and practice thrown up by the workshop at a later stage.
We found the workshop tremendously exciting. Because the numbers were limited and we were able to spend the entire daytime (and for some, the night as well) in the Vrouwenhuis (women’s centre) where the workshop took place, eating, drinking and socialising all together, it was very easy to identify particular women from other countries, meet them again and again over the weekend, and get to know what they were thinking and doing. It was a good idea to have the first half-day just for getting to know people (though this could have been more structured, with a social, disco or theatre group)
One thing that contributed to the success of the weekend was the wide range of papers available, about national and local experience and about theory – in plentiful supply – and the workshops actually generated more papers during the weekend – always a good sign! A good range of papers must be axiomatic for a successful weekend with women from so many different backgrounds. We felt that they should be printed in three languages at least (e.g. English, French and German) to give sisters who don’t speak English a better start to a conference.
The idea of allocating people at random to a first workshop on the same theme was again an excellent one for an international conference. Some groups found this so good that they stayed together for the entire weekend. (Some people did “break the rules” and went in clusters to the first theme workshops and this was slightly disruptive). Other first workshops parted but when women joined the second, third and fourth workshops on the various themes (see Penny’s article) which had been selected, they stayed together for the rest if the weekend, which was most helpful. Many of the first workshops spent most of their time just finding out what other people were doing, and as (strangely, or predictably, depending on your cast of mind) there were entirely disparate accounts of the campaigns going on in the same country from different women, the conference could have ended up as four ‘swop’ sessions people had not disciplined themselves to staying with people they were already getting to know. We felt that the technique of allocated workshops and/or the discipline of staying together in one subject workshop for the entire conference could lend itself to a larger conference of up to 500 women; it broke down the anonymity which could be such a hindrance to any meaningful exchange of ideas.
It was very exciting to discover that not only similar campaigns but a similar development of the theoretical approach had been taking place in different countries at the same time. For instance, one woman from West Germany told me that three years ago, some of them had written a paper on mothers and the WLM, at about the same time as some of the Coast Women’s Group wrote “Are we a movement for the liberation of women, or a movement of liberated women?” and set off the “Conference about children at conferences”. In the particular workshop which I attended the “Sex/class” workshop, (which was added to the list of workshops by a handful of women and was eventually attended by 40-50), papers on a number of theoretical approaches to what was called by some “Sex/class” and by others “Radical Feminism and Socialist Feminism” and by yet others “Patriarchy and Capitalism”, showed that throughout Europe, women had been looking for a theoretical basis similar to the class analysis on which to locate the position of women and the relationship of this to capitalism, and to outline the revolutionary perspective of the theory.
As at least one other workshop came out in it’s report back with conclusions very like those of the “sex/class” workshop, I concluded that what women wanted, and got, out of the conference, was a place to develop and sharpen their own theoretical approach. The campaigns that feminists are involved in are similar – those around reproduction, violence & rape, childcare, women and work, etc. – what was problematic was the theoretical base of the campaigns – were they reformist? – how could a reformist campaign be made strategic and revolutionary while seeking immediate small improvements for women? What appeared to me to happen was that as women found sisters across national boundaries who were sympathetic in their theoretical approach, and sat down to develop their arguments together, some of the divisions within national fem/soc groups actually polarised.
Because of this opportunity to develop half-formed and tentative theory with others also trying to extend their understanding there was a feeling in some workshops that people’s understanding had actually been extended – I felt as though I had gained a year or two which would have been lost thinking these things out from the “narrow” (in one sense) base of a local group, or on my own, and other sisters seemed to feel the same. I came out with the exhilarating feeling that the feminist-socialist movement, far from being “un-aligned” is now THE left – and that it is up to left groups to realise that their definition of the class struggle, so narrow, so narrow, and so devoid of any real understanding of the relationship between the patriarchy and capitalism, is incapable of taking people forward without a redefinition according to feminist socialist theory and practice. This is an exciting feeling – but it is also frightening, as it puts much more responsibility onto us, if we really believe it.
One criticism of the conference, which may seem organisational, but it is actually crucial to feminism. The British WLM, (and apparently at least the West German too, see above) has been wavering backwards and forwards on it’s commitment to the crèche, as a positive experience for both mothers and children (I am typing this in a public library typing booth with a crying baby in a sling on my back!) I feel that this is ebbing in Britain at the moment, and it is obviously going to be, though it shouldn’t be, a continuous struggle. The Dutch women didn’t run a crèche because they said they had written to ask women if they wanted a crèche and nobody replied. It seems that the women’s movement can’t grasp the fact that you don’t ask people if they want a crèche – this puts pressure on mothers who feel that they are going to put someone out – and someone’s babysitting arrangements are bound to fall through at the last moment – what you have to do is organises a crèche and then if no kids come, disband it. As it was, there were two small children and two fraught mothers at the conference. Neither of these women could ask for a crèche at the first plenary, and I felt, (perhaps wrongly, who knows?) that if I had suggested a crèche, it would have been those of us who are mothers who would have organised it and the non-mothers would have escaped their obligation to the mothers who had to bring their daughters with them (they themselves had too much to gain and nothing to lose, so they couldn’t ask). Please can we establish that we are all responsible for our children – putting the responsibility onto mothers is just visiting the sins of the fathers on mothers – again! – and it makes our apparent eagerness to fight on behalf of women less credible.
Anna Briggs
REPLY TO SCARLET WOMEN COLLECTIVE FROM WOMEN AND IRELAND GROUP
April 1977
Dear Sisters,
In the February issue of Scarlet Women (S.W.) you wrote an editorial on “Women in Ireland” and published two articles on the Peace Movement. While we welcome the discussion that has begun to take place in the WLM on Ireland and the part that S.W. is playing in this, we think I is necessary to criticise the ways Soc/Fems are analysing the Irish struggle.
It has taken a long time for Soc/Fems to begin to look seriously at the question of Ireland. This is not a unique situation, many attempts have been made by small groups of socialists to build support for the Irish struggle and opposition to British imperialism and the military occupation over the last 8 years and most have failed to win support. Although this is due to many reasons not least is the racism against the Irish for which none of us brought up in Britain can escape. The struggle against racism is just beginning in the WLM.
The specific event which pushed feminists, including Soc/Fems, into a debate on Ireland was the emergence of the Peace Movement. Ireland took on a significance it didn’t have before when the Peace Movement (P.M.) was taken up by the British press. Irish women were “seen”, for the first time, to be organising together as women. The fact that they had been actively involved and organising together from the very beginnings of “the troubles” was lost. Soc/Fems took up the representation of the P.M as a women’s movement and have argued since that it is an expression of Irish feminism.
We think it important to answer two reoccurring arguments from Soc/Fems with regard to Ireland: (a) that the Peace Movement is progressive because it is women organising together; and (b) that Ireland is so complex and confusing we should not take up easy slogans like “Troops Out Now”. These two arguments have implications not only for an analysis of the Irish struggle but also for our own struggle as women and as socialists.
S.W.’s editorial poses the question “Would a Soc/Fem attitude to the P.M. be different from the traditional left”. In reply, we think Soc/Fems would analyse two elements of the P.M. – (1) the significance of women organising together and (2) the political nature of the movement. Our position is that, firstly, women organising together should never be viewed as necessarily progressive. The fact that there have been a number of situations where women have organised separately as women around demands concerned with the home and have in the process given support to extremely reactionary and anti-feminist politics should mean that we as Soc/Fems take this question a lot more seriously than we have. Two recent examples of women’s struggles have been to the Chilean women’s “Pots and Pans” demonstrations against the Allende Government when sections of Chilean women identifying themselves as women and as housewives organised around the extreme right’s demands. Again with the “Cowley wives” demonstrations against their husbands’ pay strike and in support of the factory bosses. Both these examples merely point to the problems, they don’t explain what was involved in each case but they do show that feminism does not inevitably rise out of women organising together.
The P.M. raises the same problems – it was predominantly led and supported by women and initially received very wide support. However, it is wrong to think that this has been the only issue women have come together around. In both the Republican and Loyalist areas women have demonstrated, picketed, and worked together. To give just two examples – the Catholic women’s defence committee to keep the British Army out of the ghettos and the Loyalist women’s demonstrations to bring down the power-sharing Executive. An analysis of the P.M. looking specifically at women shows that it received its support from certain sections of the Protestant and Catholic middle class who were wanting a return to the relative tranquillity of pre-68. These women have not been so affected by the economic crisis and political repression, It also received support from women in the working class catholic ghettos who were war-weary, tired and exhausted by the deaths and brutality which has been going on for so long and seems never-ending. Working class protestant women who were also exhausted by the situation and the abuses of the loyalist para-militaries gave it their support. Broadly speaking, the popularity is also a product of the general suppression of women’s interests by all the political organisations in Ireland. It is women who bear not only the day to day physical violence, the constant harassment by the army, but also the heaviest emotional load – particularly the Catholic women – of the fear of husband’s and children’s deaths. (Nearly 2,000 people have died, in British terms 69,000). As well, the strength of religious ideologies of women as healers, sufferers and bearers of peace has to be taken into consideration.
The demands for the P.M. are for an unspecified peace. They present Irish “problems” as religious ones and put forward the solution of a non-sectarian religion. Proposals for change are in the form of school de-segregation, etc., arguing that through changes in education you can change the structure of northern Ireland. Although there was a predominance of women no demands for women’s rights emerged. The P.M.’s emphasis on violence was officially against all forms of violence but it was the IRA that mostly came under attack. The only critical statement the Peace Leaders made against the British Army was after a 13 year old boy was shot dead outside his home by a British soldier. After this they said “we believe that the army should be playing it low key. They should take account of all the emotions of the people”. Two days later, after “howls of protests” from loyalists, the Peace leaders issued the following statement: “We fully support the rule of law until the northern Ireland community themselves evolve their own community institutions and form legitimate upholders of the rule of law”. (October 14, 1976). These are very political statements – they are based on ideas that the Northern Ireland statelet can be reformed and that the loyalist RUC and the British Army are the defenders of such reforms.
This brings us on to the other main argument from British Soc/Fem, that Ireland is too confusing and complex a situation and that we should not support the slogan for Troops Out Now. This has a validity only inasmuch that any attempt to analyse a concrete situation s extremely difficult. However, a part of the confusion around Ireland seems to be occurring because attempts are made to apply “theories” of feminism, of violence being male, of working class solidarity and parliamentary socialism in the abstract. The religious divisions and the armed struggle become confusing only when we start morally pronouncing on the situation without understanding the historical basis to the present situation. Britain has a long history in Ireland, a history of exploitation, oppression and fundamental restructuring of the economy, of politics and the population. Religion has been bound to the development of class forces because of the history of catholic oppression. The partitioning of Ireland was won by an alliance of class forces in the North between manufacturing capitalists and sections of the protestant working class who won the majority of protestants to the fight to stay within the British empire and to maintain their ascendancy over the native Catholic Irish. The northern Ireland statelet was structured accordingly. British interests were in maintaining an economic dominance and a political place in Ireland and although there have been economic and political developments, both in the north and the south since partition, which have altered the economic relations between Britain and the South and the North, Britain’s interests fundamentally remain the same. Religion has continued to express both political and ideological relations and religious sectarianism has continued to be a principle vehicle through which contradictions in Ireland are expressed.
The argument that Troops Out Now is an easy slogan rests on notions of British Army neutrality, of the Army entering Northern Ireland as a “peacekeeper”. This idea is contrary to a Marxist theory of the capitalist state which understands the state to be part of a social whole, and sees it as the factor of cohesion in a class system determining the domination of one class over others. The function of the State and the interests of the dominant class coincide. This is not to say that the British state is simply the tool of the capitalist class. But it is saying that the role of the army is not to keep Protestants from invading Catholic ghettos it is instead to ensure that Ireland remains a stable home for British interests.
The issue of the P.M. and the demand for Troops Out is political. For Soc/Fems to support the P.M. despite its political objectives and despite the forces in Britain who support them – the Government, the Army, the Press and the Church – on the basis that it is women organising together, assumes that it is merely the process of women “getting together” that produces ideological change. This relies on the belief that feminism inevitably asserts itself in women and that there is such a thing as a feminist essence. This has implications for our struggle for women’s liberation (for the theory and practice of Soc/Fem; perhaps all we need to do is to wait.
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At the National Conference Workshop on Women’s Liberation and Socialism it was agreed to set up a socialist-feminist network within the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Regional co-ordinators and a national newsletter would be instrumental in developing this network throughout the country.
TASKS OF THE SOCIALIST-FEMINIST NETWORK:
To link up those sisters involved in different activities and campaigns in and around the Women’s Movement in a way that will promote discussion of practical and organisational problems arising out of our activity.
The network will:
- Help to overcome any feelings of frustration, demoralisation, isolation and aimlessness we may experience by enabling us to see our work in the context of some kind of perspective.
- Hopefully lead to the development of a theory closely related to our practise – we will be able to pool our experience, generalise and theorise our practise;
- Lay the basis for practical work and in this way help overcome factionalism.
THE REGIONAL CO-ORDINATORS:
Will be responsible for contacting socialist-feminists in their areas and arranging regional meetings and conferences to discuss topics and issues which people feel should be taken up in their regions and/or also nationally.
The Newsletter – ‘Scarlet Women’
Will provide a forum for discussion and to publicise and co-ordinate activities organised in the regions. It can be used to develop links between groups, individuals, etc. It can also carry suggestions for topics for workshops and conferences.
The newsletter will not lay down the ‘correct’ line – it will rather pin-point and isolate problem areas in the development of our perspective. In publishing contributions and regional reports, it will raise issues that could be taken up for further discussion at regional meetings.
REGIONAL CO-ORDINATORS
Scotland: Mary Brand
North: Anne Torode
North West: Nuala Morton
Yorks: Jenny Owen
Midlands: Helen Gurdon
East: Jo Bradley
South West: Wendy Holloway
South East: Jane Clarke
London: Jan Deighton,
Tammy Walker
Karen Margolis
[All addresses redacted]
To ALL Subscribers:
Have we still got your correct address – please keep us up to date on addresses and telephone numbers as we cannot afford to send copies more than once! (Assuming you are reading a friend’s copy!!)
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