Against the Current Trend in the Women's Movement
SULABHA BRAHME
RAJANI DESAI
SHARAYU MHATRE-PUROHIT
RESEARCH UNIT FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY
Second Edition, 1988
INTRODUCTION
Context in which this paper was written:
IN 1981, a seminar, "Impact of Development on Rural Women", was held by ILO, South Asia region. This seminar had a 'target-oriented' approach to the problems of women in this region, the purpose of such an approach being to ensure that women got the fruits of development.
As part of the co-ordination committee, we were asked to assess a number of papers commissioned for this seminar. Considering these papers, and the approach ILO expected in analysing various situations in which women work, we felt that there was a tendency to see all women as a homogeneous class exploited and oppressed by men. Certain basic material factors affecting women's lives were being disregarded.
We were expected to write a summing up of all the papers. This became difficult because of the different approaches incorporated in the various studies which we were expected to sum up. We would have had to sum up critically, showing up misleading conclusions of the studies which were not warranted by the empirical facts of the papers themselves. Besides, the papers did not always take into account the economic and social determinants (national and international) of the societies in which women lived.
As we were 'co-ordinators' of the seminar, appointed by the ILO, we felt it would be improper for us, at that late stage so near the seminar, to make such a fundamentally critical summing up. Our summing up paper thus became a position paper from which the validity of analytical frames and conclusions of empirical studies on women could be judged.
The basic premise was that we are interested in the emancipation of women
in society, i.e., in practical terms, of the vast majority of women in society.
However, we felt we cannot be ensnared by abstract values concerning the
'rights of women'. In specific social contexts which are exploitative (however
you may further characterize that exploitation) the abstract preoccupation
with rights of women boils down to the rights of elite women.
Why we are bringing it out today:
We are publishing that summing up paper today, with all its shortcomings of having been written for a specific occasion and for a specific type of audience, because the diversionary trends we have talked about in that paper have by now got consolidated in our country.
Clearly, whatever the shortcomings of the paper were from our own point of view, it was not an innocuous document. Though the paper was written at the instance of the ILO, it did not receive the approval of the organisers of the seminar. They did not wish to discuss the paper with us and they quietly dropped the multiplication of the paper as well as the discussion of it scheduled for the final session. Only on our insistence till the very end was it allowed to be read. Even then it was not allowed to be circulated. Its reading was followed by one of the most virulent diatribes by a champion of the 'women's studies' establishments in India supported by the organisers as well as many of the participants.
The diatribe, while not meeting any of the points raised in this paper head-on, accused us of a number of things.
One of the principal charges was that we do not acknowledge the contribution that funded studies about women have made to the women's cause.
A second was that we were extreme and 'communist' in our statement, and that we were 'ideological' in our approach.
A third was that in 'subordinating' the cause of women to the general cause of 'people's emancipation' we were effectively being anti-women.
We were surprised at the venom in the attack and the absence of any attempt to discuss any of the points we had raised. Instead, there were accusations which we felt were wide of the mark.
There is no doubt in our minds that studies of situations in which women work and live are crucial in the building of a women's movement for emancipation. This is true for the building of any movement. Studies of actual situations are essential for mapping and organizing any section of people.
In fact all such studies are 'ideological' in one way or another -- call it by any name: 'theoretical frame', 'conceptual framework', 'differences of perception'. They all have premises of interconnections of interests and the relative importance of different interests, and it is the differences in these premises that lead to different judgements, conclusions, and directions taken. Our point is that this theoretical frame is determined by the material interests (and hence the point of view) of the researcher -- or of those she/he is researching for.
We are concerned with the interests of women -- i.e., the majority of women. As such we are most concerned to (a) investigate in what social, political, economic situations most women stand a chance to win their rights lost at the very birth of civilisation, and (b) to know in what conditions a women's movement can be built and sustained.
And here we assert the purely empirical finding that, as ordinary people organise themselves in a socially progressive movement, the women, too, not only take part in it but both they and their men become increasingly conscious of women's rights. This link between the larger social movement and the women's movement is crucial, and the women's movement will ebb and flow accordingly.
An autonomous women's movement has to be autonomous from ruling class interests
and funding -- not autonomous from men.
Our future course:
In times to come, we shall be putting out papers on various aspects which
are controversial on the matter of how to set about emancipating women. In
the mean time, we would like to let this paper out in an attempt to initiate
a widespread discussion.
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POSITION PAPER, 1980
Written for Seminar on "Impact of Development on Rural Women"
RAISING the very question of the impact specifically on women of the sort of economic development there has been, presumes that women in some way occupy a distinct position in that society from men.
Certainly the sexual division of labour was the very first in human history. It was based on the reproductive capability of women's bodies. This was a functional division which helped the perpetuation of the human race at a time when methods of production were elementary and survival a bitter struggle. It also, no doubt, gave women a valued position in society. With methods of production improving over ages, surplus production became possible.
With it arose the use of labour to create, perpetuate and accrete further surplus. And with the creation of sufficient surplus came the employment of labour other than women's labour for the purpose, and the relegation of women to their reproductive tasks as well as their use as objects of men's desires requiring their decorative role. The reproductive function assumed the role of providing heirs to the men who in time controlled the surplus production of society as their 'private' property. Provision of 'heirs' required the fidelity of the women married by law to men of property.
While these regulations and customs seeped into various lower strata (or classes) of society, since the rulers' (ruling classes') moral necessarily rule society at large, this was never systematically so. The material pressures and requirements of survival imposed far more rigorous labour-vale standards on ordinary people, to the detriment of ruling class morality.. Nevertheless, the family emerged throughout civilisation as the unit of not only passing down property, but also of reproduction of a new generation of workers and fighters and of reproduction of their labour power by sustaining them with house-keeping, cooking, etc.
Women thus have occupied a subservient position in society -- throughout 'civilized' human history. They have been denied, by their very domestication (barring the very few who by dint of birth and property, extraordinary gifts, or audacity, have broken into the male world) the widening experience of free concourse, travel and contact that was relatively more easily available to men. But even this has to be said with severe qualifications. The freedom available to the slave and serf and proletarian worker has been the freedom to experience direct exploitation, and over a period in history to react as a class against that exploitation.
In other words, the dichotomy throughout the history of civilisation is not primarily between men and women but between the propertied and the non-propertied, between those who earn by the ownership or control of the means of production and those who labour using those means of production.
True that basically the division between men and women has penetrated these other class divisions and has been reinforced by the physical capabilities (or incapabilities) of the two sexes. But the movement of history cannot be explained by the sexual division as it can be by the class division -- i.e., by the division of society into segments defined by their relation to the means of production or subsistence and the further development and refinement of these means (development of the forces of production) stemming from the contradictions or conflicts among the different classes and the working people's capacity to work upon, transform, and master nature around them.
There is not the slightest doubt that women's subservience and secondary position in relation to men has imposed crippling limits on their development, hardships and torments that come out of having to 'belong' to men to justify their existence. Certainly this cannot be allowed to continue as some women, and then more, realise that they, or at any rate those who are to come after them, do not have to live in a world and society fashioned singularly by men, do not have to use a language dominated by men's experience and needs, do not have to apologise for their presence in a world of work supposedly for men and only permissively for women.
But the overriding fact still remains that -- whether in the advanced capitalist world, today's 'socialist' countries, or the once-colonised 'under-developed' countries -- most men still do not fashion even the so-called men's world and most women share their lives with these most men.
Therefore, to single out women to examine the impact of development on them can in certain situations prove diversionary. The target group approach to women to decide official development policies stems from this singling out. So also does the attempt (much in vogue in the West today) to build up an autonomous women's movement. And both, by being diversionary, could go against the long-term interests of women.
The fact is that the solution to the question of women's rights is linked to a permanent transformation in the present socio-economic system. Women can be really emancipated only in a society in which social equality of all people has been achieved. And it is as part of the broader working class movement of their country that women can achieve self-emancipation.
The position of women in family, in production, and in public life is influenced by the political, social and economic shifts that have occurred in different socio-economic eras. Today, we see that women's participation in the life of society varies from place to place and is principally related to the level of political, social and economic development of the societies to which they belong.
In any analysis of the women's movement, it is necessary to consider not only the characteristics of the socio-political systems in which this movement grows, but also the variation in the class interests of women.
Women do not form a class by themselves but form a part of each economic class. And for this reason, despite superficial similarities, the demands of one class of women can never be the same as those of another. That is why different political parties have different lines on the question of women's rights. Each party approaches this question in keeping with its ideological orientation.
Therefore, women's movement comprises a variety of trends. Indeed, there cannot be single autonomous women's movement, because there is not an objective common material base on which it can be propelled forward.
The bourgeois and reformist points of view on the women's question either ignore or play down the class roots of this question. They reduce this problem to one of relationships between man and woman. The underlying assumption here is that it is possible to provide women with equal rights with men within the framework of a capitalist State.
The two positions stated above -- viz, the one which sees the women's movement as a part of the broader struggle of the working masses to transform the present social structure, and the other which seeks to reform women's condition within the capitalist framework -- represent the two ends of a spectrum along which most of the points of view regarding women's movement can be placed.
Experience of all liberation movements has shown that women's participation in them was a key factor in their success. This is a two-way relationship. Women's participation in socially productive work leads to the healthy development of her personality, and the society is enriched by the contribution women make to its mental and manual labour pool.
To achieve this, women must be freed as much as men are from domestic work and child-rearing which is almost always unpaid, and only the State and the society can create conditions where this is feasible. For this, it will not be enough to give women political and legal rights; it also requires an effective implementation by women themselves of these rights in day-to-day practice and through achieving along with the men a progressively growing and just economic system.
Whenever a movement gathers momentum in a society, historical experience shows that women have always been a part of it. This is true of the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution in Russia, the Chinese Revolution, and many other social transformations through history.
As women constitute about half of the population of any society, it would be difficult to conceive of a movement for change in society which does not evoke the direct participation of women. For this reason, no movement -- whether Marxist, reformist, or conservative in nature -- ignores the contribution of women. But if the ideological inclinations of the movement are not aligned to the long-term interests of the working masses, it is likely to betray the latter including working women (paid or unpaid), as soon as it has achieved its goals which are those of classes other than the working masses.
Therefore, if women wish to ensure that movements, of which they are a part, should safeguard their fundamental and long-term interests, they should align themselves only with such of them which have an ideological approach in harmony with the establishment of an equalitarian society. It is only by participating, in an articulate and vigilant manner, in such broader socio-political movements linked with other oppressed groups in their society that women can achieve long-lasting and basic changes in their position.
As women do not form an independent class, they cannot form by themselves a movement which will consistently fight for changes in the position of women. We have stated above that any change in women's position so far has come about as a result of broad-based movements in society and the participation of women in them.
The European and North American feminist movements began in some cases as a critical response to the attitudes of the communist parties towards the women's question. The women saw that their comrades within the Left parties were in many ways the same as the menfolk they knew outside of these parties.
While granting the partial truth of this experience, it is explicit that these attitudes of party comrades have to be combated within the class organisation and not by forming separate organisations.
There is therefore, scope for women's meetings and women's groups within the overall organisation and movement of working people. Such groups and meetings help women to be conscious of social oppression in addition to the social exploitation they share with their men. Dalits and adivasis in India are comparable with women, in that they suffer social oppression beyond the economic and social exploitation their class-brethren belonging to other superior castes suffer. All of these have to represent and struggle against their special oppressions from within their class organisations. For this they could form conscious groups.
As the class interests of women differ, and as there is no real basis for the mobilisation of an autonomous movement of women which will safeguard the interests of all women, such a movement in the absence of a socio-economic base which can sustain it is likely to degenerate into a movement controlled by the elite women and a movement of which the long-term goals will be defined by this controlling group.
This is what seems to have happened to the North American and West European feminist movements which appear to have given up the notion of any link-up between the problems faced by working men and those of working women and are, by and large, seeking momentary and short-term gains for women within the capitalist framework.
This type of movement would prove to be a wasteful digression and a luxury underdeveloped countries cannot afford.
International Women's Year and much of the activities following therefrom -- of a gimmicky and superficial nature -- may have a reformist significance, temporary in its effect.
Women certainly suffer from the negative effects of modern technology as well as of migration following from the concentration of capital. The concentration of production, the disappearance of small industries, and the rural migration into the urban market have an adverse effect on female employment. By reducing jobs also, advanced technology massively reduces female employment. Due to their inadequate professional training, women cannot compete for professionally skilled jobs. Discrimination in receiving higher education, difficulty in improving their qualifications and receiving promotions due to traditional prejudices are some factors responsible for female unemployment. Even when economic conditions are favourable and the demand for workers is high, unemployed women cannot fill vacancies because they do not possess requisite skills.
Sharp fluctuations in economic development and crises in production brings about mass unemployment. This creates a vast reserve army of labour of which women form the first component and a considerable proportion. In the so-called 'free' economies, however, one must remember that a majority of men also suffer from discrimination in educational opportunities as a result of belonging to economic classes who find the existing system of professional education way beyond their reach and are hence forced into semiskilled or unskilled jobs which are often insecure and sporadic.
Indeed, in such a society ridden by property-relations, the family comprising men and women assumes an insurance aspect for the working masses -- whereas for the propertied it is a means of further property aggregation. In an utterly insecure material world for the labouring people, the family -- for all the batterings members of it impose on one another -- is the final resort for recuperation and succour in the worst material crises. It provides a welfare system when the resources meted out for the purpose by the State are grossly meagre and inhuman.
Ironically, the family which helps perpetuate private property is also, in a society governed by property, the source of survival for the non-propertied. Hence any women's movement pitted against the oppression of family on women must first learn to fight against the property relations in that society.
(In the original paper, following this section was a brief analysis of planned
investments through the Five-Year Plans of the Government of India, and the
impact of these investments on women. As it was relevant for the specific
occasion in 1981, we are not reproducing it here.)
ADDENDUM: SIX YEARS LATER
Some basic characteristics of the feminist trend
today
The feminist trend tends to see the contradictions between men and women as antagonistic. Further, it tends to equate the oppression by the man in the family with the oppression by the exploiter at the place of work, and it represents both as equal 'enemies',
Most women, of course, know what it is to be put down every day of their lives by virtue of being women. The upbringing of women is full of the inculcation of the notion that they are somehow intrinsically inferior to men. Even their capacity to conceive and bear children (their reproductive function), instead of being seen as a very special physical capability most necessary for the perpetuation of mankind and hence a mark of their intrinsic superiority, and which, therefore, could qualify them to be excused from certain other obligations, is made out to be something of an 'animal' function and a natural handicap in their performance of the superior human functions.
Thus, instead of creating social services which would free the women of the constant crushing chores of reproductive labour (child-bearing/rearing, daily cooking/washing) which would in any case require a total restructuring of the economic order and the property relations in society, women are brought up to believe that this reproductive labour is their main function in life, and at most, they should marry well so that they can engage servants to help them in that labour.
Flowing from this debased regard of the 'main function' of their lives, they are thereafter treated as inferior beings who have to be shown their place constantly like all inferior beings.
Hence in mayor decisions about freedom to work with full devotion outside the house, as well as in niggling little matters of status within the family, the men think it their business to discipline the women (humiliate them) and sometimes pamper them (patronise them). (Wife-beating is indeed part of this 'disciplining', the attitude that this is an internal family affair reflecting the social right of men to control the family.) And it is thought thoroughly acceptable for women working outside the home to be fully responsible for the work within the home, even as a man is admired for putting his work over every other obligation.
Keeping this day-to-day social repression of women in view,
a) The fact is, though the relation between men and women in society today is one of contradiction, for the vast majority of men and women who suffer exploitation at the hands of the ruling classes, the man-woman relation within the family is a non-antagonistic contradiction.
On the other hand, the contradiction between this vast majority of men and women on the one hand and the ruling classes on the other is an antagonistic one. Therefore, the former have to jointly combat the latter and, in the course of that combat, have to resolve their own-internal contradiction.
It is in the course of this combat that women join the ranks of the organised people -- in the course of that and in subsequent struggle become more capable and conscious of their own rights and possible equality, and hence capable of organising themselves even as women.
However, the specific methods of resolving the contradiction with their men are distinct. They are primarily those of discussion, persuasion and collective assertion -- not of combat which characterises their confrontation with their employers and exploiters. Even if women (and progressive men) may collectively beat up the occasional incorrigible male among their men folk, this is the exception that proves the rule of the general method of persuasive correction and self-correction of others.
b) The feminist trend today is proliferating and being nurtured by heavy foreign financing -- directly, and indirectly (through the Government of India). It would be naive to ignore the role of the huge foreign funding for the 'women's cause'.
It would also be naive to imagine that it is free of its own ideological weightage in a situation where a 'target-oriented' approach effectively means that women get a share of the non-opportunities.
It can only be aimed at diverting people's attention from the main fact of non-development, want, and non-opportunity, and a desire to divide people (in this case, division between men & women) in their fight over crumbs. This, needless to say, aptly suits the interests of our rulers who, therefore, support these programmes wholeheartedly.
c) Women should note that, barring the obscurantists, anyone who wishes to parade as a progressive (among them, our leading politicians) mouth the same slogans of equal pay for women and full employment for women. The question is how far they will stake their futures to bring about a situation (an economic order) in which full employment and equal pay can be actualised.
To take an example: Much attention is focussed on dowry and dowry deaths and the need to give capital punishment to those who are responsible for dowry deaths. While there is no doubt that this is amongst the heinous crimes in our society and has to be opposed, the question is how is it to be taken up from the point of view of a movement for the emancipation of women.
The question of dowry is intimately related to the ownership of property; and it exists in a situation where without a hold on private property men cannot hope to gain any self-respect and economic status. Given that in our society acquisition of wealth by whatever means is given economic and political recognition by the rulers and the State, there is a general degeneration of work and human values in relation to this institution of private property.
Bride-burning over dowry disputes is just one end of this spectrum of 'whatever means'. It should be clear from this that, until the women's movement addresses itself to whatever in our social order gives that degenerative position to private property, we cannot hope to solve the question of the use of women for the same -- i.e., for dowry -- i.e., for the acquisition of property and social status. The point here can be most easily understood by drawing a parallel with the connection between murder, punishment of murder, and emancipation of mankind. In any society, murder will be considered reprehensible and therefore will be most severely punished. It is also generally argued that such severe punishment for murder might deter future acts of murder. However, and quite sensibly, it is never imagined that punishment of murder will lead to the emancipation of mankind!
Similarly, while punishment for dowry deaths may be immediately socially necessary, as for any murder, and hopefully may deter families from precipitating dowry deaths, it is naive to imagine that such routine punishment of a heinous crime will emancipate women in any way. That is, that it will eradicate the conditions that lead to the routine exploitation of brides -- which only in extreme circumstances leads to dowry deaths. It is these material conditions and property relations that women must fight.
To take another example, the much tom-tommed issue of the importance of payment for household labour by the man in the family shows how a sound basic argument has been twisted away from its objective by the present trend among feminists. In fact, this twist serves to reinforce the class division in society and, even more, shows up the contradictions among women belonging to different classes.
The genesis of the idea of the unpaid domestic labour of most women is as follows: The employer (the exploiter at the place of work) pays the lowest wage feasible in the market conditions to the employee who is thus paid (an exploitative rate) for only his hours of work.
However, the employee is in turn sustained for this work by the day-long unpaid labour of the woman in the household who sustains him with her cooking and cleaning and companionship, and also bears for society the future generations of labourers and employees. This unpaid labour of the woman, towards the present worker/employee and towards the future generation of workers/employees, is made possible because the worker/employee shares his pay with her within the common household. And indeed if this sharing is unequal, it is because the very basic institution of private property is itself male-oriented and its influence percolates even to the non-propertied.
There is thus an expropriation by the employer not only of the employee's surplus value but of the entire unpaid labour of the woman. The present trend among feminists has put this argument on its head and deprived it of its force by arguing that, in whatever present conditions, the woman should be formally paid for her labour by the man of the house. This means that an unemployed man shall share his hunger equally, another earning Rs 500 should share that equally, and a man earning Rs 10 lakhs shall share that equally.
While put in this logical way it sounds absurd, this logic exposes how, this feminist stand, by narrowing women's equality to the frame of the household alone, underpins class society. Further still, it exposes how they approve the social division of women into classes that stand in antagonistic contradiction.
The real controversy today over the women's question, then, is not whether or not women should be emancipated. (Not even arch reactionaries today would openly question emancipation as a goal. It is the net result they do not achieve by the concrete steps they take, while going along with the fashionable lingo of emancipation, which helps us to recognise them as arch reactionaries.)
The real controversy is over how and by what steps to proceed; whether women will get emancipated by the rulers and social workers, or whether their own movement in the long run will step by step emancipate them; which class of women will be the main strength of such a movement; which questions will draw out and sustain the energies of these women in the promotion of their interests -- as people and as women.
Here it is useful to begin with recognising two basic material tenets (or truths) They are the following:
1) Women, the majority of them, are an inextricable part of the submerged, exploited majority of working people. Their emancipation is, therefore, unavoidably connected with the emancipation of the larger majority. This is why the fates of the democratic (people's) movement and the women's movement are enmeshed.
2) Women's consciousness (as that of all people) is determined by the material
conditions (and consequent social relations) governing their lives. If their
consciousness is to change, it will change only in the course of their changing
their own material conditions. Hence any intention to change women's
consciousness must be backed by a movement to change their material conditions.
These material conditions the women of each class largely share with the
men of their class. In their struggle for emancipation, in their own
self-interest, their men have to be active partners. The change cannot be
brought about by advising women alone or by mere conscientisation.
Two distortions:
We need to clear out of the way two misrepresentations of the above view made by the enthusiastic feminists -- misrepresentations which have gained credibility following the retrogression in general as also on the question of women that has taken place in societies which have earlier in the century undergone socialist revolutions.
Enthusiastic feminists, who would like to see the results of liberation here and now 'autonomously' of a people's movement, impose two caricatures on those who believe that the women's liberation movement has to be an intrinsic part of the people's movement.
(i) They maintain that, according to this view, the resolution of the women's question is postponed to the post-revolutionary period and that hence, again by this view, nothing need be undertaken on the women's question in the mean time.
(ii) They point out that, in any case, in countries where a socialist revolution has taken place, the women's question has not been resolved -- in that, women continue to be yet unequal and oppressed in many ways; they thus point out that overall social change by no means ensures progress towards women's emancipation.
These representations are indeed distortions.
First, there is no question of postponing the process of struggle for the final liberation of women. That is, women have to become conscious of their position in society and the reasons for their daily oppression. And they have to daily organise and struggle to establish their possibilities as working people and as social beings. Only then can they genuinely participate in the struggle for social Change. The point is that, whether we like it or not, the chance of progressive change in their status exists only when women and men are organised in a broader movement encompassing their joint demands. Women's demands earn attention and credibility when women show themselves capable of participating in larger social change. It is this entire process of organising men and women on their joint questions, as well as on the question of women, that can culminate in a revolution and win women their rights.
Secondly, the struggle for women's emancipation has in fact to be, in the
post-revolutionary period, an important platform for the continuing
class struggle. Quite apart from material support from the State for various
services that progressively free women from their domestic grind so that
they can be socially productive units of society, women along with men have
to organise to constantly expose the continuing inequalities and take steps
to change equations such that women have the concrete opportunities to exert
themselves as equally responsible members of society -- at work, in social
matters, and in the house. In fact, whenever the women's question has been
neglected and struggle for women's equal position and rights has been given
up, it has been a reflection of, as well as had a slowing down impact upon,
the necessary clans struggle even within socialist societies.
How to proceed:
To sum up, the question thus boils down to: which demands to take up first that will lead to the next step; which section of women to address primarily; what forms of organization to choose; and whom to ally with and whom to fight against.
As mentioned above, we shall be bringing out a series of notes dealing with the concrete problems related to the above questions. Meanwhile, we present our position paper and appeal to democratic women that they consider it seriously and uphold this position if they have not done so already.
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