IN OUR SOCIETY today, women are discriminated against in pay, jobs, education and welfare. Most women are financially dependent on a man, and, without assistance, carry the burden of looking after children and caring for the sick and old. Society's 'opinion formers', from judges to journalists, cabinet ministers to advertising copywriters, take it for granted that women are inferior. And in the end, they reduce all women--whatever their occupation, experience, politics or interests--to one dimension, sex, and judge them by whether they measure up to what men desire.
Women are more than half the population and 40 per cent of the workforce. But women's earnings, on average, are only two-thirds of those of men, and women workers are found mainly in low-paid, low-status jobs. Three-quarters of all catering and clerical workers are women, but only 22 per cent of doctors, 4 per cent of architects and half of one per cent of engineers. There are very few women in positions of power or influence of any kind: less than 14 per cent of managers in industry, 2 per cent of company directors, and 4 per cent of members of parliament, for example.
Although girls get more 'O' level passes than boys, and there are more women than men at technical colleges and evening classes, the situation is reversed when it comes to higher education. Only 38 per cent of university undergraduates are women, and only a third of all post-graduate students.
More women than men live in poverty. Added to those who live in poverty with men, there are seventeen times as many single mothers as single fathers, and two and a half times as many women old age pensioners as men, living on social security. Married women who care for the sick at home do not get Invalid Care Allowance, and widows get neither sick pay nor unemployment benefit even though they may have paid full insurance for years.
This is usually justified by saying that it is women's natural role to look after the home and children, and men's job to be breadwinners. But history shows, as we shall see, that the care of home and children has not always been separated from other kinds of work as rigidly as it is in our society. In order to look after these things, women are expected to give up everything else--education, work (or at least decent, well-paid work), and outside interests of all kinds, including trade union and political activity. A woman is supposed to devote herself entirely to the care of a man, his children and his or her parents when they get old.
Because most women do what is expected of them and lavish a great deal of love and care on their families, often in very difficult circumstances, the world assumes that women are stupid, or at least simple-minded, unable to understand what goes on outside the home. Most women are economically dependent on men because they can't carry the burden of household tasks and hold on to a decently paid full-time job as well--but the world says that women are dependent on men because they are weak and helpless without them.
From being described as women's natural role, home and children come to be seen as women's only role, even when they are obviously doing something else. In 1981, a Liverpool councillor addressed council clerical workers on strike in the city as 'the wives, mothers and sweethearts of citizens of Liverpool'. The strikers pointed out that they were 'typists, machine operators and clerks, not wives, mothers and sweethearts' and were citizens of Liverpool themselves as well!
Yet young women are encouraged to see marriage and the family as their only aims in life, and are discouraged from learning most skills or studying the same subjects as boys. They are pointed in the direction of jobs such as typing, packing and assembling to 'fill in' the time till they get married and have babies. Then they marry with high expectations of family life--but it doesn't work out like the ideal family of the advertisers' dreams, especially when money is short and a husband's job insecure.
Most women are trapped in the family. However much they love their husbands and children, they know they have little choice about it. It is harder for a woman than for a man to get out of a marriage that has gone wrong, and most women whose marriages break down are left to bring up children on their own with little or no support.
On top of that, many women are trapped in their homes by violence or the threat of it. Some men end up beating the woman they live with because they are ground down at work or don't have enough money to meet their family's needs--they make women suffer for what isn't their fault, and most women have no way of fighting back and nowhere to turn to when this happens. What kind of society is it that puts women in this position? Only a society that insists that the family is 'private', and that women belong to the men they marry as if they were pieces of property, whatever the law now says.
In rape, women are exposed to a kind of violence which men don't face, perhaps the most humiliating of all. Women are encouraged to look sexy and attractive to men, and to feel as free as men to enjoy themselves--a freedom long overdue after centuries of a double standard for men and women--but when an attractive woman is raped most men think she must have been 'asking for it'. How can women feel free when this is going on?
In our society, women don't have equality, they don't have freedom, they don't even have respect in any meaningful sense. What can be done about it? Women have to be able to fight back, for themselves and for the future of all women. This doesn't mean an out-and-out conflict with all men all of the time. Separatism--the view that women can fight for liberation only on their own and against men--is a counsel of despair and a way of dividing women and men still further. Women have a right to organise with men to fight against the society that keeps us all down, to make men see that the world has to be changed. This doesn't mean that women can't organise their own meetings, demonstrations, pickets or whatever, when appropriate-- we have that right, too--but we should be trying to reunite women and men in the struggle for socialism.
The people who have power in our society--governments and employers--want to keep men and women divided. They want women not to think about what is wrong with the world and, even more, not to do anything about it. They want strikers' wives to nag them to go back to work, not to support them like the miners' wives. They want women as a cheap labour force too, handicapped by household cares and discouraged from fighting for equality. They want to sell us images of the small, private family as the only way to live, and of women as feather-brained sex objects turning overnight into empty-headed household drudges, because they want to sell us more goods.
For too long the struggle against this society has been divided, not by feminism but by men, who have seen the labour movement as purely a male concern. Men who have put down, excluded and ridiculed women who do want to fight back; men who have expected their wives to keep quiet and service them while they do the fighting back; men who think women are good for sex, having babies, cooking and nothing else. Seventy years ago Hannah Mitchell, a working-class woman fighting for the vote, wrote that 'those of us who were married had to fight with one hand tied behind us,' and any married woman who has ever thought of fighting for something today must recognise that picture.
In playing the employers' game, working-class men are tying themselves hand and foot to the governments' and employers' world, and all the exploitation and injustice that it contains, as well as denying women their right to freedom and equality. In demanding that men fight for women's liberation too, we are calling on them to free themselves.