International Socialists

In recent years, with the notable exception of the struggle for paid parental leave, practical demands which would help the majority of women have been passed over by the feminist movement in favour of explorations of "gender theory" and a disturbing new cultural relativism, which leads Germaine Greer to condone female circumcision if performed by women. Hazel Croft examines some aspects of the women's movement.

 

 

The first wave of national women's liberation demonstrations took place in Britain, the US, New Zealand and Australia almost thirty years ago. On 6 March 1971 over 2,000 men, women and children marched in London demanding equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24 hour nurseries and free contraception and abortion on demand - the four pillars of the newly flourishing women's movement.

 

The march was a revival of a much older celebration of International Women's Day, first organised by socialists in Europe in 1911.

 

May Hobbs of the Cleaners' Action Group told the marchers of her struggle to organise London office cleaners, many of whom were forced to work at night due to the lack of nursery facilities. She stressed the importance of women organising against the bosses in the workplace. The first national women's liberation conference in 1970 attracted 600 people. A local socialist newspaper described them as "a mixture of old and young, students and workers, (who) came as individuals fighting for emancipation. They were members of trade unions, radical single-issue pressure groups and from many left organisations." The vitality of the group was summed up by the angry disruption of the Miss World contest in the same year. Women threw smoke bombs, flour, stink bombs, leaflets and rattles. One witness described how "Bob Hope freaked out, ran off the stage"!

 

International Women's Day was revived at a time of growth in working class struggle the world over and in particular the struggle of women workers. There had been a number of strikes for equal pay - most significantly in the UK, where 20,000 textile workers in Leeds went on strike in 1968.

 

Other women workers took action for better working conditions and unionisation, such as teachers, post office telephonists, and the night cleaners. In 1973 the first national hospital workers and NAGLO strikes involved large numbers of women in collective struggle for the first time.

 

In this atmosphere of rising class struggle many in the new movements the world over looked towards the struggles of workers, both women and men, to further the fight for women's liberation. A 1971 article in the British Women's Newspaper described how the threat to conductors' jobs shows "very clearly the way the women's struggle is connected with the struggle of all workers against the bosses and for control over their lives."

 

But the women's movement failed to attract working class women and never related to workers' struggle on a collective and organised basis. Working class women who became involved did so as individuals.

 

Even at its height only a small number of women were active in the loose networks of unstructured groups and workshops. These groups tended to orientate on personal politics. The slogan "the personal is political" - while highlighting the way society limited and stunted women's "private lives" - drew women away from collective struggle and towards individual solutions.

 

By 1974 the leading feminist Sheila Rowbotham could comment that feminist politics had become "preoccupied with living a liberated life rather than a movement for the liberation of women."

 

The diversity of political ideas accelerated the fragmentation and internalisation of the movement. As the level of working class declined in the mid 1970s, many women in the movement became disillusioned in the ability of the working class to change the world. Increasingly, working class men became seen as battle for women's liberation is far from over. It is a struggle which is inextricably linked to the struggles of the vast majority of the society, those of us who create the wealth but do not control it, to forget a new, democratic society.

 

The struggles of the 1960s radicalised thousands of young women around the world who wanted to change the foundations of the system which oppressed them. The women's movement failed to achieve that task. The words of Clara Zetkin, the German socialist who originally proposed the idea of an International Women's Day in 1910, have never been truer: "We can conquer the future only if we win women as a class of fighters."