The anti-globalisation protests, the mass anti-war movement, and the founding of Respect are radicalising a new generation of young people for the first time since the late 1960s. But, as JANE the gains from that period have been cared for 24/7, but that care should be available to enable both work and leisure activities. Why is this still important?
Some may say that women, now half the workforce, have largely gained their equality. Men play a greater role in raising children than ever before. In education, girls and young women do at least as well as their male counterparts.
The walkouts from schools during the Iraq War, often led by young women, attest to their growing independence and self-confidence.
However if we look back at the four demands of the WLM agreed at the Ruskin Conference of 1970, free abortion and contraception on demand; equal pay; equal educational and job opportunities and free 24 hour nurseries, none has been successfully achieved.
Despite equal pay legislation first D
passed in 1975, women still earn only about 75% of male wages; the vast majority of women doing paid work do so in a segregated labour market; abortion is still not freely available and child care in Britain is disgracefully expensive and often poorly organised
So whatever the post-feminists may say, women have achieved neither equality nor liberation.
Historically women have organised together and raised their demands most successfully during periods of general militancy and class struggle. Feminist activities are also linked to rising levels of female employment.
The suffrage movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries coincided with the growth of general unionism and the preWW upsurge of struggles such as the strikes of miners.
And the growth of the WLM of the 1960s and 1970s was of course linked to the youth radicalisation of the late 1960s as well as looking to the Black Civil Rights Movement in the US.
This suggests that we may see a renewed upsurge of interest in and battles around the rights of women developing today. How will the left respond? And how can revolutionary Marxists take the lead?
In the 1970s most of the left groups,
including Militant and the SWP characterised
the WLM as 'middle class'. Confusing the
social position of many of the activists who
were students or young professionals with
the radical potential of a movement of the
oppressed, they approached it from a workerist and often opportunist standpoint.
In particular the issue of autonomy - the
right of an oppressed group to organise
together to work out which issues they
wanted to fight over - was confused with
separatism - oppressed groups demanding
to organise and fight on their own.
Militant maintained this opposition to the
right to autonomy for the oppressed until
the 1990s.
The SWP took a different course, it tried
out a version of autonomy with the launch of
Women's Voice in 1972. Its focus was on the
battles for equal pay and the National Abortion Campaign (NAC) but, as Lindsay
German writes in her 1989 book, Sex, Class and Socialism, "it 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."
The SWP were, as German admits, confused about the role of Women's Voice and its groups. Unfortunately they misunderstood the relationship between the party, the united front and the autonomous movements.
nstead of involving themselves in the
broad WLM, building it and attempting
to steer it towards alliances with the workers movement, they built a party front, which had an unclear relationship to the party and a sectarian relationship to the broad WLM - the worst of both worlds
This had disastrous consequences for Women's Voice, for they nonetheless came under pressure from ideas originating from within the WLM. Thus some in the Women's Voice project sought a greater autonomy from the SWP, even contemplating a separate women's revolutionary organisation, while others wanted it aligned more closely to the SWP.
The closing down of the magazine and the groups it had organised took place in. |982 after a prolonged and bitter internal battle. A similar fate befell their black organisation. Without thoroughgoing internal democracy the chance for a constructive and educational debate on the issues was lost, and many left the group.
The role played by women from the
International Marxist Group (IMG) in the
WLM was based on different premises. They
supported and built the autonomous movements including the WLM.
This process did throw up some major
and sometimes bitter debates within the
group - over whether men benefit from
women's oppression for example - but in the
main these differences were contained within the democratic structures of the group.
Such arguments were educational for mer
as well as for women members and led to
some sophisticated understandings of the
nature of women's oppression, as well as
some major achievements such as building the Working Women's Charter, the magazine Socialist Woman, long-term work in
NAC, and later in the conferences of Women 4 Socialism and Women and AntiImperialism
while women in the IMG supported the rights autonomous organisation for all groups of the oppressed - only they can know what oppresses them and how to fight it - there was never a question of autonomy internally.
Instead the right to caucus, as and when it was seen as necessary, was the way to overcome inevitable sexist practices inside the group
Nor did the group have any truck with separatism, without the support of as many women and men as possible, few women's rights would have been won.
Thus in 1979, organising against an attack on abortion rights by Corrie, NAC managed to get the TUC to support the demonstration of many thousands of women and men.
And while the IMG sought to build move ments and campaigns led by working class women, no woman was ever dismissed because of her class. They argued that all women are oppressed, and therefore have an interest in fighting for their rights, wherever they come from.
Throughout the 1970s many of the demands of the WLM were won within the unions, and the provision of creches was one that was taken seriously.
The decline of the movement, echoing the retreat of the workers' movement, has resulted in the erosion of many of these gains. But while there is less pressure from the women's movement, we should not forget that the left should make provision for all, including crèches to enable parents to attend meetings.