The relationship between class struggle and women's struggle has been a recurrent theme among socialists and revolutionaries. That is not surprising. Women in the working class and the working people are subject to class oppression, which they share with the men of their own class. But they are also subject to gender oppression, which they share with women of the other classes. Therefore they encounter pressure from two sides: from the women in the bourgeoisie and the higher strata of the petty bourgeoisie, who want to mobilize them to women's struggle uninfected by all the issues dealing with class contradictions. The women's rights magazine New Country expressed it like this in 1903 (referred from Hagemann, 1977, p. 103):
"Nobody can say that our magazine has not, from its onset, had a certain sympathy for labor organizations among our working women. But no one can blame New Country for preferring to see them based on women's rights rather than on 'the foundation of class struggle' ..."
The same contradiction also appears in views regarding the relationship between women's struggle and imperialism. Many white, western women would not accept that the battle against imperialism has anything to do with "women's struggle". This is how the Bolivian miner's wife Domitila describes her discussion with Betty Friedan from the USA at the women's tribunal in Mexico in 1975 (1980, p. 193):
"The day the women spoke against imperialism, I also held a speech. I made them understand how totally dependent we are on foreigners in every way, how they decide over us both in the economic and the cultural area. /.../ This led to a discussion between myself and Betty Friedan, the great feminist leader from the USA. She and her group had suggested some changes in the "worldwide plan of action". But they built on purely feminist questions, and we did not agree with them because they did not pertain to problems which were important for women in Latin America.
Betty Friedan called on us to follow her line and asked us to give up our "war-like activities". She said we were being "manipulated by the men", and that we "only thought about politics", and that we didn't have a proper grasp of the real women's questions.
From another direction men in the working class and the working people exert pressure, perpetually warning against "the gender struggle becoming superior to the class struggle". The main function of women's organizations tied to socialist movements and in socialist countries has often been the mobilization of women to carry out the movement's or the party's general political policy, not to conduct a separate women's struggle.
At this crossroad, the majority of women have to map out their strategy for independence. But it is not a question of "pure" contradictions between the sexes and "pure" class contradictions. As I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, women's oppression is woven into both capitalism's economic basis and into the rule of the bourgeoisie. The oppression of women serves the bourgeoisie as a class.
The goal of the bourgeois women's movement has been, and is, full equality within the framework of the capitalistic system. Is this possible? One shouldn't underestimate the changes that can occur. Revolutionaries, too, can easily become caught up in what their times conceive of as "natural" and "obvious", and therefore have difficulties in imagining dramatic changes.
But full equality? In my opinion history up to now has shown two things: first, it is possible for women to fight for, and obtain, real improvements during capitalism; secondly, the basic structure of women's oppression survives through all changes, often through the oppression taking on new, more obscure forms, such as, the unpaid housework surviving despite technological advancement and the production of consumer goods. Pay differences between women and men survive despite "equal pay" through a gender divided labor market mechanism. Women's subordination under men survives despite the ideology of equality through "voluntary" subordination due to "love" and "personal characteristics". The "sexual revolution" and the use of contraceptives have, to use Bell Hooks words (p. 102), "given men unlimited access to women's bodies". Through role models like Joan Collins and Jane Fonda, the concept that a woman's life is over when she turns thirty, has been replaced by the insane demand that women should be just as sexy and youthful long into the twilight years. This calls for far more effort and intensive concentration on body and appearance than women before us have known.
The discussion about whether full equality is possible during capitalism or not, has often taken on a rather frustrating form. Those who think that capitalism must be overthrown, often end up sitting around looking for the decisive logical trick which will make it impossible for capitalism to survive without women's oppression. Those who think that equality can be realized within the framework of the capitalistic system say "yes ,but if ... yes, but if ..." and end up in a hypothetical construction which bears little resemblance to the capitalistic societies known throughout history. Moreover, there are at least two possible interpretations for what "full equality during capitalism" might mean:
I have little faith in the decisive trick. But let us look at the two possible interpretations of "full equality during capitalism" seen from today's reality, and see if they appear to be sensible strategies for women's struggle.
Let us look at interpretation one. This would have to mean, first, that the family was gradually dismantled as an economic unit within the framework of the capitalistic system. How could this happen? One possibility is that all the work that today is carried out in the family, was transferred to a large, public sector with free or very inexpensive services. This possibility is not very realistic. One of the large problems in capitalistic countries today is that which is often called "crisis in the public economy". The public sector takes such a large portion of the surplus value that is produced, that it threatens the tempo of capital accumulation and becomes an independent source of crisis tendencies within the capitalistic system (see Minken, 1986). In all countries, no matter the kind of government, authorities attempt to meet this crisis with budget cuts, cut-backs and privatization. If the public sector were to become so large that it overtook all the work that is now conducted in the family, this crisis would be dramatically increased.
Another possibility is that all the unpaid work is paid, which would mean transferring it to the market. This has happened with a good deal of the housework. Bread can be bought in a store instead of baked at home; we go to a clothing store instead of sewing clothes at home; etc. This solution would have the advantage, from the capitalists' viewpoint, that it expanded the market.
There are several problems with this alternative. If most people were to be able to pay for things that are now done without pay (go to restaurants or cafes every day, use a cleaning agency instead of doing their own housecleaning, put their elderly in private nursing homes, etc etc.) they would quickly encounter the same problems as Domitila's husband: their pay wouldn't be enough! Pay would have to be substantially increased, at the expense of capital's profit. In an economy where modern technology appears to be making mass unemployment a constant phenomenon, capitalists are in an advantageous position for holding wages down. Everything points towards all the fancy, private services remaining for the few, not for most people. In addition, this "solution" is contingent upon the family's continued existence as a unit of support, where those with the strongest economy will have most of the power, and children will be totally economically dependent upon their parents. This can hardly be called "gradually dismantling the family as an economic unit."
In addition, the gender divided labor market and "women's wages" would have to be abolished. Because this is linked to society's organization in families, difficulties in dismantling the family as an economic unit would also set limits to how far it was possible to get in "equalizing" the labor market. A capitalistic wage system without poorly paid jobs is hard to imagine. There would, for example, always be demands to keep wages down for the large employee groups in the public sector; pressure like "the crisis in the public sector" would be particularly strong. And if labor power in labor intensive industries became too expensive, Capital would move somewhere else, or would rationalize and automize. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to imagine that capitalism can abolish women's jobs through the introduction of truly equal pay.
Women are also a flexible reserve army for Capital. This kind of reserve army is created again and again as a link in the very process of capital accumulation. A capitalistic system without a reserve army of labor power is unthinkable.
The oppression of women, and the family as a hierarchy of power, also serves another important function in terms of maintaining the bourgeoisie's rule. The oppression of women contributes to splitting the working people and to "corrupting" the male segment so that they have a certain objective interest in the survival of the system. They are also "infected" by some of the ways in which the bourgeoisie perceive the world. The family also preserves the notion of "natural" hierarchies, and socializes new generations into these ideas. Of course, it isn't unthinkable that capitalism could develop other oppressive mechanisms, replacing this system in the bourgeoisie's use of power. But this isn't very likely.
A capitalistic system without the conditions that are now oppressive to women, can hardly be anything other than a hypothetical construction. But what of the other possible interpretation, that men and women equally share the burdens?
It is undoubtedly possible to make advances in dividing, for example, housework, compared with where we stand today. Old fashioned attitudes, however, do not alone produce this unequal distribution - material conditions also contribute. For the most part, men have higher wages than women. This gives them both more power in the family, and, if they are to get everyday life to function, it makes it unprofitable for the family to let the man work part-time instead of the wife. Often the man works a lot of overtime in order for the family to manage economically. Then, the possibilities for equally dividing housework are even more difficult. An equal division is therefore contingent upon equality in the labor market: equal work time and equal pay. It is in families where the wife earns as much or more than the man we are likely to find that housework is most evenly divided. At the very least, it is far from becoming the norm. As I pointed out above, capitalism has built-in barriers against this type of development.
Moreover, the family has an important place in society's hierarchy for the maintenance and recreation of conditions of oppression and subordination. It is very difficult to imagine a fully democratic, bourgeois family. The main point of the family's existence during capitalism is the very fact that there should not be equality there. Demanding that the family within capitalism should stop reproducing social genders with decidedly oppressive and subordinative relations, is about the same as demanding that the school should stop reproducing social classes. All studies show that the school, despite its stated goals of "equalizing", is a sorting machine with unfailing class consciousness (see Ericsson and Rudberg, 1981). The family seems to be a sorting machine with unwavering gender consciousness, no matter what the gender role conscious parents' stated goals are.
If women and men are to "share the burden equally", this would demand a new "programming" of social gender within the framework of the present system. One reason for women taking on the large burdens which unpaid labor entails, is their very psychological structure. On the other side, in men's psychological structure, identity is closely tied to work, to having a job. This can be seen clearly in situations where they lose support for their identity, through, for example, retirement or unemployment. A large number of men die from retirement. And unemployment often becomes a psychological, not just an economic, catastrophe. The personality is broken down. Ingham (1984, p. 27) quotes an unemployed man who says, "My wife's right, it affects me as a man, it's not the money so much as the feeling men have." To totally reprogram this within the framework of the existing system is a formidable task.
Substantial changes have occurred, and major changes between the sexes can still occur. Nonetheless, it is still difficult to imagine a capitalism that, in one way or the other, does not have the oppression of women woven into its fabric, in the economic basis and in the power apparatus. It is nearly impossible to conceive of this as a practical political movement. When those at the bottom truly rise up it will be because their entire situation is crushing them. They will not be analyzing what is "pure" women's struggle and what is "pure" class struggle, but they will rise up from the interwoven reality they live in, a reality which has become intolerable. The movement among the working class and the working people's women today, both in Norway and in other parts of the world, contains just this quality of totality: it has both a woman's aspect and a class aspect. A massive, powerful movement from those at the bottom, can hardly avoid threatening those who are at the top. The timid demand for reform toward full equality within the capitalistic system is an impossible, utopic goal.
In periods when the women's struggle has had wind in its sails, warnings that the women's struggle shouldn't be "superior" to the class struggle have not been lacking. This has several aspects: the fear that women and men will use their energy fighting each other rather than uniting against the bourgeoisie; the fear that socialist and revolutionary women will go over to a "classless equality policy" in the women's struggle; and probably also the fear that their own male privileges will be under fire.
Agnete Strøm (1986b) put it like this: a class standpoint without a women's perspective is a class standpoint based on oppression. This is important for an understanding of the relationship between class struggle and the women's struggle.
In the days of the 2. International there were representatives present who spoke of a "socialist colonial policy" (see Myrdal, 1986, p. 67). Workers in the imperialistic countries were to accept imperialism (which might give them short-term benefits) yet develop an alternative colonial policy which was "socialistic". Today the expression "socialist colonial policy" just seems grotesque. If you are a socialist, you must fight against imperialism, you must take sides with the oppressed nations in the struggle against the bourgeoisie. A class standpoint without an anti-imperialistic content is a class standpoint based on oppression. With this kind of class standpoint you are in reality supporting the system that you want to fight.
A class standpoint without a women's per-spective is a kind of "socialist colonial policy". The male workers would then accept the oppression of women (from which they have some short-term benefits). But just as with the "socialist colonial policy" is support of imperialism as a system and the bourgeoisie as a class, a class standpoint without a women's perspective supports capitalism as a system and the bourgeois as a class. The desire to keep women in unpaid housework, the desire to build an identity as a "man" on power over women, is at the same time contributing to preserving the economic conditions and power structures which capitalism depends upon.
At the same time, the oppression of women means a splitting and weakening of the working class. It is not difficult to concretely argue that the women's struggle strengthens the working class' struggle, not weakens it.
Today women make up half of the employed working class in Norway, and they make up an even larger portion of the lowest ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, the working class' closest ally. Pulling these large masses into an active battle against the bourgeoisie, would surely be an enormous strength for the entire working class. But in order for this to happen, it must be kept in mind that in many important areas working class women and men are not in the same objective situation. Women in the working class must fight on their own terms, and be mobilized on their own terms, as women. A worker policy that does not consider women's special situation, and which does not bring up demands that are especially important for women, would, then, be a bad worker policy, and would be incapable of mobilizing the full strength of the working class. Siri Jensen's pointed remark is therefore entirely correct, "It's not that too much emphasis on women's issues would split the working class. On the contrary, far too little emphasis on women's interests today is hindering the working class' struggle!" (Jensen 1986).
Far too little emphasis on women's interests hinders the current working class struggle in at least three ways:
The message to men who want to be consistent in their opposition to the class system should therefore be clear: you have to be on the women's side and actively participate in the battle against women's oppression. A "unity in the working class", which presupposes the oppression of women is in the long run contrary to their own interests.
Historically, this has, without a doubt, been the situation. There has been a division between the bourgeois/petty bourgeois women's movement and the proletarian women's movement, and these two directions have stood for different things. This is, of course, due to the objective fact that the women belonged to different classes. Classes are not a "categorization which was invented by patriarchy in order to divide and conquer", as the modern feminist Robin Morgan claims (1984, p. 119).
For women of different classes different problems arise as the most pressing. It is no coincidence that Katti Anker Møller resigned in frustration from the first board in the Norwegian Women's National Committee. Katti Anker Møller was concerned with abortion, contraceptives and unmarried mother's situation (see Tokheim, 1977). These were the issues that affected the working class women most, and Katti Anker Møller found little support for the issues she burned for in the National Committee which had a bourgeois dominance.
As a rough sketch one could say that the bourgeois/petty bourgeois women's movement has been a civil liberties movement, a movement for equality within the framework of the system. It has been directed towards the different treatment of women and men, with democratic demands for equality. At the onset, it was a women's rights movement marked by a liberal view of society, and the desire for free competition between individuals without a handicap for either sex.
The women's movement in the working class has often been tied to the working class' political parties, and has been less preoccupied with equality than with demands that arose from the working class women's material and social situation. Making allowance for the need for unity in the working class (a unity for which men have set the terms), has often made the proletarian women's movement a little tame in its battle against the specific oppression of women. In her article about the Labor Party's women's association from 1901 to 1909, Kirsten Flatøy (1977, p. 76) writes:
"In 1904 the woman's branch of the Labor Party criticized the women in the bourgeois women's rights movement on the very grounds that the battle they fought was directed towards the man and not towards the existing social system. It was said that their primary goal was to achieve formal rights in society and to advance in competition with men on the labor market. For the working class women the goal was not to obtain what they saw as more or less artificial equality with the man, but to achieve improvements for the working class as a whole."
This can serve as an illustration which suggests how the divisions went. But both directions had important built-in contradictions.
The bourgeois women's movement had (and has) a contradiction which arises from the bourgeois women's conflicting interests as a gender and as a class. As a gender they are oppressed by a system from which they simultaneously receive benefits as a class. The bourgeois women's movement has attempted to resolve this contradiction by making "women's rights" into something "unpolitical", something that has no connection to other issues in society. "For the women's rights women the goal therefore was equality, neither more nor less. They didn't want any changes in class conditions, and they stayed away from questions that they saw as 'political'. Women's rights were for them unpolitical," wrote Gro Hagemann about the situation in Norway in the first decade of this century (1977, p. 108). Later, the bourgeois-influenced sector of the new women's movement has also brought up issues other than those which only deal with formal equality between the sexes. But the idea that there are "pure" women's issues, which have nothing to do with politics, has survived. The polemics between Domitila and Betty Friedan in Mexico illustrate this. The working class woman Domitila from a Third World country, Bolivia, has a different view of what "women's issues" are than the white middle class woman Betty Friedan from the USA.
While the bourgeois women's movement struggles with the built-in problem that their goal, full equality within the framework of the system, is impossible, the proletarian women's movement has its own problems. The most obvious problem is the relationship to men in the working class and the working people.
The labor-related women's movement has perpetually been met with demands that they direct their fight against "society", not against the "man". This demand is not merely something that has been forced on them from outside sources. The women in the labor movement have, themselves, seen the need for a unity between the sexes in order to be as strong as possible in the fight against class oppression under which both the sexes suffer. Fighting against the oppression of women which is conducted in "society", or by the "system" or in the "bourgeoisie", while one does not bring up the oppression carried out by "men", is, however, impossible. The oppression that is carried out by "men" is a part of the total gender system which contributes to maintaining the bourgeoisie's rule. When the man has the advantage of having a private servant in the home, Capital simultaneously has the advantage of reproduction costs being held down through women's unpaid labor. When a man dominates "his" woman, the bourgeoisie simultaneously profits from half of the working people being held at bay, and from the maintenance of the concept of a "natural" hierarchy. The depth and breadth of "society's" or "the bourgeoisie's". oppression of women cannot be understood when "men's" oppression of women is not included in the analysis. When it is a taboo to fight against "men's" oppression, this only leads to important aspects of the gender system being preserved. In reality this has been the result, both in earlier working women's movements and at times in parts of the "new" women's movement.
In contrast to the situation for the bourgeois women, no objective built-in contradictions exist for women of the working people.
On the contrary, both the battle they fight as a gender and the battle they fight as a class, pull in the same direction: it threatens the bourgeoisie as a class and capitalism as a system. This is important to understand, both for women and men. It is important for the women to understand so that they can resist both the bourgeois women's attempts and the working men's attempts, from each their direction, at limiting the battle which must be fought. And it is important to understand the working men's dual role as victims and profiteers of capitalism's gender system. Without realizing this dual role one risks swaying from "unity against the bourgeoisie" on male chauvinist terms, to a one-sided animosity with no attempt to convince and form alliances on progressive terms. In order to serve their own class interest, it is important that men understand the function of women's struggle; only this understanding will make them capable of resisting the role of "useful idiots".
Sisterhood Is Global is the title of a book edited by Robin Morgan. And it is true that all women in the world are oppressed as a sex, and therefore have something in common. But in the battle to rid ourselves of this oppression we can only go so far together.
Women of the working people have good reasons for cooperating with and supporting the bourgeois influenced women's movement as long as it operates as a "civil rights movement", that is to say, as long as it makes democratic demands for equality between the sexes. First, because the demand for equality is fair, and it serves the female sex as a whole. Second, because it is true that the more formal equality that can be reached, the easier it is to see real inequality. Women received the vote, but not political power. Most jobs were opened for women. But women are still concentrated in a small number of jobs with low pay and prestige while men are spread over the entire specter. The women received equal pay. But they still don't get a wage on which they can live. The more discriminatory formal rules that are tidied away, the easier it is to see that it is something other than these formal rules themselves that maintains the oppression of women. This parallels the relationship between the classes. The more formal democratic rights the working class fights through, the clearer it becomes that capitalism cannot keep the promise of equality for all. The exploitational relationship gets in the way.
Therefore working women have every reason for supporting "classless" demands for equality, though they might have little direct significance for their own situation. It is right to support demands that women should be able to be bosses, priests and governing monarchs, though we are neither priests, bosses nor governing monarchs. These demands are also a part of the battle for formal and legal equality from which the working class can benefit. One example of an important democratic demand which the bourgeois/petty bourgeois women's movement has raised in our time is the demand for gender quotas. The women discovered that they were placed poorly in the fight for high positions and different kinds of offices, no matter how qualified they were. The demand for gender quotas, in a more or less radical form, is a democratic demand for equal representation for the sexes.
Therefore, a proletarian women's movement cannot differ from the bourgeois/petty bourgeois women's movement by going against the "classless" demands for equality. A proletarian movement must go farther, by also bringing up the real inequalities, and setting them in connection with the capitalistic system's way of functioning.
Today there is not much left of the bourgeois women's movement as a civil rights movement. It has for the most part used up its progressive possibilities, though the bourgeois women's rights women still make themselves known in some areas, for example when it comes to the fight for gender quotas in upper level positions. The one, large question where formal inequality is still an eyesore, mandatory military service, is only brought up by a few lone souls among the bourgeois women.
The women's movement in the world today is marked by a myriad of directions, ideas and key issues. It is difficult to find earlier time's clear dividers between the "bourgeois" and "proletarian" directions. The class foundation for today's women's organizations is more mixed. But many of the same contradictions are still reflected. In the new women's movement in Norway, for example, there has long been dissention as to whether anti-imperialism has anything to do with women's struggle (Strøm, 1986, p.51):
"There are several reasons for this split (between the Women's Front and the New Feminists, my note) but the most visible reason was the view on international women's solidarity. Support to freedom movements, the fight for a country's freedom, were not seen as important demands for all. The word imperialism was regarded as a word the Women's Front had inherited from the male dominated organizations."
Here, we can recognize the concept of the "unpolitical" women's cause. It was no coincidence that it was the Women's Front, the organization among the new women's organizations which most clearly placed itself in the "proletarian" tradition, that were in the forefront raising the issue of international solidarity as an issue for the women's movement. Nor was it a coincidence that it was not the Women's Front that led the way in bringing up issues like wife battering and rape. The inheritance from the "proletarian" tradition also played a part in this: one should direct the fight against "society" not against the "man".
Women split up, and sisterhoods disintegrate, when the women's struggle starts to threaten the bourgeoisie's class interests. In our times this happens fairly quickly. The low paid, double-working woman in a woman's job, who needs a wage on which to get by and not just an "supplemental wage", who needs a 6-hour normal workday, who needs childcare centers built and care for the elderly, who needs an independent labor movement and free labor rights to be able to fight for these demands, quickly comes into direct opposition to the bourgeois hunt for profit. One of the bourgeoisie's weapons in this battle is the current image of women, with the women as a self-sacrificing mother and daughter and supported "subordinate person" in the family. A women's movement for the majority of women must have as a starting point the situation and interests of the women in the working people. This demands that it is versatile, and takes up the fight against "the gender system" in its full breadth.