The coming decade of austerity will hit the oppressed hardest including women, especially working women. As the resistance to austerity cuts develops, the question of how oppressed groups in society can fight against their oppression, and on what basis, could come to the fore as it did during the 1970s. Jane Kelly examines what the left can learn from women’s struggles of the 70s and 80s.

The histories of women’s struggles reveal that not only do women always play a significant role in revolutionary change, but that demands for equality and women’s liberation are most successfully raised and sometimes achieved during periods of general militancy and heightened class struggle as we expect to see over the next decade. The development of mass campaigns for women’s rights is usually linked to the levels of class struggle generally. This does not mean that a revival of the women’s movement cannot happen before a rise in working class militancy, or that women should wait. Rather it would be a sign, or harbinger, of a new situation inside the working class. Similarly, Leon Trotsky, referring to a new rise in militancy by students and intellectuals, explained that ‘the wind often blows the tops of the trees first.’ It was the mass actions of women who sparked developments in both the French and Russian revolutions.
Any analysis of the effectiveness or otherwise of women’s organisation has thus to be politically and historically contextualised. This includes looking at the important social changes in the position of women that have occurred since the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Also, the developments since the turn of this century of international mass anti-capitalist and anti-war movements have radicalised a new generation of young people and re-politicised older generations. Combined with the current capitalist and ecological crisis this may lead to renewed struggles around issues of oppression, and both could stimulate a shift in working class consciousness.
Women and work
Women’s issues are likely to come to the fore again in the next period because of the profound changes that have taken place over the last twenty years or so in the ways we work. Both for women and for men, working conditions have undergone dramatic changes during the last decades of the twentieth century, affecting social relations both in and beyond the family. Despite the fact that women now make up at least half the workforce, we still only earn around 80% of the male wage. In addition as women’s work is often related to our assumed female skills such as caring, the work itself is usually in a segregated labour market, often undervalued and underpaid.
Marx’s concept of the ‘reserve army of labour’ suggests that both women and young people have been used to undermine the notion of ‘a job for life’, previously the prerogative of male industrial and skilled workers. Now all workers – women and men, old and young – have to work as part of a flexible workforce, including part-time, temporary jobs and with periods of un- and under-employment.
This process has undermined many traditional and long-held beliefs about social and sexual relations. It is no coincidence that in this period of quite major change, when many cannot or do not want to accept changes which capitalism has imposed on them, at least 10% of the population in Britain are on medication to treat depression. We can be sure that this 10% is composed of a majority of women, and a high proportion of black people. How can we account for this?

Women’s oppression and the Women’s Liberation Movement

One reason for this is that the experience of these changes is worse for those who are already oppressed. While all the working class population is exploited for the surplus value their labour produces, women, black people, lesbians and gay men and the disabled carry an extra burden of oppression.   Of course, doing paid work outside the home increases women’s independence, and, as Engels pointed out, is a precondition for women’s liberation.  Since, however, most women continue to do the bulk of domestic labour and to take responsibility for childcare at home, integration into the waged workforce is a double-edged sword. Roles within the family, so aptly described by Engels – ‘Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat’ – continue, despite the changes in working conditions that have taken place.

The analysis by Engels of the oppression suffered by women – all women – within the bourgeois nuclear family was once more widely understood than it is today. It led many socialist and Marxist feminists of the 1970s and early 1980s to recognise the importance of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), with all its divisions, as a mass movement that revolutionary socialists should work within and build. Not that we should simply accept the parameters of the majority of its participants (mostly reformist), for their reforms – on equal pay, child care, equal opportunities for example – have hardly made any real changes, but in debate with them to try and orient the movement towards the organisations of the working class. Everyone recognised that these latter organisations were inherently sexist, but for the demands of the movement to be achieved, alliances between the movements of the oppressed and those of the working class would be necessary, for the working class is the only class capable of overthrowing capitalism.

History lessons

If a similar formation arose again today or in the near future, it will be important to learn the lessons of the demise of the movement so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. In an article in International Socialism, 2003, Lindsey German, while making an interesting analysis of the changes that have occurred over the last twenty-five years, nonetheless fails to analyse the rise and fall of the movement in the context of other struggles, solely blaming feminists when much more decisive factors were at work.
After the oil crisis of 1976 and particularly after Thatcher’s election the working class and its allies were increasingly pushed onto the defensive.  Important trade union struggles continued until the great Miners’ Strike of 1984-5, whose defeat marked the shift in the balance of forces against the working class.  Under these conditions, including the weakness of the Marxist left, it was very unlikely that the WLM, in any guise, could have achieved more than a few minimal demands, and it declined rapidly.

It is also important to analyse the different currents within the movement – including especially socialist and radical or essentialist feminist as well as the few Marxist women and members of revolutionary groups such as those from the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Workers’ Party. The feminism of the 1970s was in its majority reformist, and did indeed increasingly adopt radical feminist rhetoric (much of it imported from the USA). This radical feminism tended to blame men for the problems women faced and they ignored the role of class. Indeed some of them, such as the American writer, Shulamith Firestone, argued that women themselves constituted a class and thus the clash between men and women was the first issue to face.
After the election of Thatcher in 1979 many feminists entered local councils, the Greater London Council, Parliament and university jobs, dropping the demands of their more militant past in the process. But this is true of much of the left at this time. In fact the rise of Bennism, a vibrant left wing of the labour movement with strong anti-imperialist politics combined with demands for greater internal democracy within the Labour Party, meant that at the end of the 1970s many revolutionaries too entered the Labour Party to be part of the Bennite movement. Rather than seeking to blame reformist feminists for its decline, it is more important to ask why the WLM declined. In fact the SWP had taken little interest in the internal debates and divisions of the WLM, as German admits in her 1989 book Sex, Class and Socialism. She says that the SWP ‘tended to ignore any arguments taking place within the women’s movement, so in practice it did not challenge the anti-socialist ideas which were coming forward.’(p 176) If they had engaged with these debates they might have made some difference, strengthening the Marxist and socialist feminist wing of the movement.
There were also some important campaigns after 1979, which were achievements. That same year the National Abortion Campaign organised against the Corrie Bill, which was intended to restrict abortion rights. The main demonstration, led by the TUC, and attended by many men as well as women, was an exemplary alliance of the WLM and the organisations of the working class that, along with pro-choice MPs, managed to defeat the reactionary legislation. And throughout the 1980s the women of the Greenham movement, while many were separatist and radical feminists, were influenced by the WLM as a whole and kept the issue of nuclear weapons alive. During the Miners’ Strike, many working class women from the Women against Pit Closures Movement visited the camp and adopted Greenham tactics of non-violent direct action and sit-ins, suggesting that they understood the importance of the self-organisation of the oppressed.

Lindsey German is right to point to the long retreat into ‘post-feminism’ after the election of Thatcher, but it is also true that postmodern ideas infected vast swathes of the left, not just feminists. Postmodernism attacked any idea of an overarching social theory to analyse society and its ills, and was especially damaging for feminism. It was explicitly anti-Marxist and became increasingly interested in theory for its own sake. It developed a kind of ‘pick an’ mix’ method, which might be fine when choosing sweets from the now defunct Woolworths, but was wholly inadequate when attempting to develop theories to liberate women. It developed careers for academics, both male and female, but its incoherence did nothing for political activists and campaigns. It undermined one of the powerful features of the early WLM – the ability to test theory against practice, developing both in the process.

However, it is important not to view the WLM as though it were homogenous, as this downplays the lively debates that took place on for example the question of patriarchy, and ignores those socialist and Marxist feminists who, as part of the movement, argued against it. It is not so much that the movement failed because patriarchy was and is incapable of addressing the very big problems now facing women, but rather that after 1979 and Thatcher’s victory and especially after the defeat of the Miners’ strike, the whole left went into a retreat a problem we are still suffering from today.

Autonomy versus separatism

The fact that, alongside other developments in the class struggle, the oppressed also organise around their oppressions is a huge gain. While I do not advocate a separatist approach, I would defend the right of the differently oppressed to autonomous organisation. This was a hard won right in the 1970s when many women found it difficult to get themselves heard amongst confident and often vociferous men. Women organising together were able to locate the issues that formed and reinforced their oppression to formulate the demands they wanted to raise. Only then was it possible to take them back to left parties, trade unions or revolutionary groups for both men and women to discuss the merits of the demand and how to fight for it.
The usefulness of this approach can be seen through the example of the experience of black women. While they recognised and suffered from the sexism of black men, they also had to deal with the racism suffered by both sexes. They needed to work out a way to deal with the complex interrelation of these different oppressions, to decide which one they wanted to raise, when and with whom. The only way to do this successfully was to meet autonomously, without the pressure of other white women arguing that sexism was the priority, or black men arguing that racism was more important. But autonomy is not separatism: the one implies alliances with as many as possible to win a demand, the other that the oppressed must fight for their demands on their own. This latter obviously a less than useful idea.

Women and class

The other question that vexes the left in relation to the WLM is that of class. Of course the alliance that needs to be built is between the mass movements of the oppressed and the working class: this is not always easy, but, as the Miners’ Strike showed, it is entirely possible. But this does not imply that the WLM should exclude all but working class women. The fact that many on the left characterised the WLM as ‘middle class’ was an error that would have ended up excluding those with jobs such as teachers, clerical workers, etc. This approach has little to do with Marxism.  It also hid a deeper error that saw only working class women as oppressed. This denies the understanding of Engels who argued that all women are oppressed. We would not, of course, have sought a WLM dominated by women from middle class or bourgeois backgrounds; on the contrary, but to exclude them would have been wrong. They are also oppressed by a male-dominated capitalist society, even as they escape its exploitation. And it is their contradiction, not ours, that they might wish to be part of a campaign fighting for a woman’s right to control her fertility, or against sexist laws on rape in marriage.

Will socialism inevitably solve the questions of the liberation of the oppressed? No: and that is the key to why women, lesbians and gay men, black people, the disabled have to organise in the here and now, to fight against the way society oppresses them. For if we succeed in changing society and create a socialist society, there is unfortunately no guarantee that our oppressions will disappear. The history of the Russian revolution, even before the counter revolution of Stalin, tells us that we will have to continue to organise, for who but the oppressed themselves can know what it is like? As Trotsky wrote in Women and the Family, ‘In order to change the conditions of life, we must learn to see them through women’s eyes.’ (P You could conclude that for Trotsky the position and rights of women is a marker of society’s progress, for there is no socialism without women’s liberation, and no women’s liberation without socialism.