why women dont have real equality??

8/14/2019 Why WOmen Dont Have Real Equality??

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Sir Stuart Rose, executive chair of Marks and Spencer proclaimed in the Observerrecently that women have got "more equality than you ever can deal with".According to Sir Stuart: "There are really no glass ceilings, despite the factthat some of you moan about it all the time".

Eleanor Donne looks at the reality women face in Britain and asks: Have womenreally 'made it'? Do we now live in a 'post feminist' society and what are theroots of women's oppression?

It is true that there have been significant changes in the lives of women over thelast 35-40 years. Most of the direct discrimination has been removed and womenhave equality with men, in the eyes of the law at least.

Women make up at least half of the workforce and half of university graduates (upfrom one third in 1970) and girls are outperforming boys in nearly all subjects atschool and university. Access to contraception and safe abortion is no longerrestricted to wealthy women, as in the past. The dramatic rise in numbers of womenin work, albeit mostly in part-time, low-paid work, has been significant in itselfin raising women's confidence and expectations. Yet clearly women do continue tosuffer discrimination.

Women at work

Rather than having to deal with 'more equality' as Stuart Rose of Marks andSpencer suggests, there is evidence that women are already beingdisproportionately affected by recession - losing full-time jobs at twice the rateof men.

The overall pay gap between men and women increased last year for the first timesince the Equal Pay Act came into force in 1975.

Although men and women graduates in their 20s earn about the same, having children(which women are doing later and later) still results in a significant drop inearnings for women in their 30s and 40s, compared to men.

An estimated 30,000 women a year are sacked for being pregnant (although this isof course illegal) and there is an indication that this is increasing on the basisof the recession. The government has now shelved plans to extend paid maternityleave to a year, paternity leave to up to 26 weeks and flexible working to parentsof children over six years old because this may be 'burdensome' to business duringa recession.

Around 70% of women in Britain now work outside the home, including many withsmall children. This significant social change has been against the backdrop oframpant, neoliberal capitalism, which has led to increased commercial exploitationof all aspects of life.

Women have been a source of cheap and flexible labour, which was exploited by thecapitalist economy in the west and in the developing world.

Traditional gender roles, reinforced under capitalism, are used to excuse low payand casual work for women because their primary role is defined as bringing up thefamily and 'keeping house'.

Whilst there are now more women than men qualifying as solicitors, the majority ofworking-class women are still concentrated in 'the three Cs' - caring, childcareand cleaning, which are seen as an extension of what they do in the home andtherefore relatively 'unskilled' and low status jobs.


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Sexism

Women and girls daily are bombarded with images of women from advertisements,magazines and the tabloids, telling them how they need to look to be successful inlove and life generally.

The message that women are judged more by how they look than what they do or think

is still loud and clear, constantly played on by a multimillion pound 'beauty'industry. No wonder then that only 1% of young women feel 'completely happy' withthe shape of their body and more than half of ten to 14-year-olds girls areworried about being fat.

The sex industry has increasingly entered 'mainstream' society, with lap dancingclubs frequented by celebrities - men, and sometimes women keen to show how 'broadminded' they are. The playboy bunny now even adorns children's pencil cases andlunchboxes.

The porn industry has grown, fed by easy access for consumers via the internet anda 'supply' of desperately poor women, particularly from the ex Soviet Unioncountries. Individual women and men are often directly exploited in the production

of pornography. But it also has wider implications for women as a whole, as in thecontext of a capitalist society with structured inequality for women, it reflectsand reinforces stereotypical views of women as sexually available, and reducesthem from whole beings to body parts. Commercial exploitation of sex is theopposite of genuine freedom of sexual expression for both men and women.

It is important to challenge sexist images and attitudes, but they are a symptomof women's oppression, not the root cause. This goes back to early history and thedevelopment of class society and the family.

The role of the family

The word 'family' to most of us means our relations, parents, partners, and

children - people we may have close personal relationships with. However, togovernments and the ruling class 'the family' is also a vital social institution.They use it to pass on and consolidate their property and wealth, to reinforcetheir ideas and 'values'.

Most importantly for a capitalist system, the family is an economic unit. Under acapitalist economy, big business shareholders and their apologists in governmentwant to maximise profits by keeping their costs to a minimum. This applies notonly to actual wages but also to what is known as the 'social wage' - the tax costof feeding, clothing, housing and educating a new generation of workers. They dothis by offloading these costs as much as possible onto individual families.

Margaret Thatcher during the recession of the early 1980s said: 'there is no such

thing as society, only individual families'. The government used this idea of thefamily as a provider of services to justify cuts and hospital closures and blamedsocial problems created by their economic policies on the 'breakdown' of thefamily.

This process is likely to be repeated in the current recession. The FinancialTimes reported that councils in England have axed about 10,000 jobs, with 70%expecting further losses due to the recession. Cuts in social and health careservices affect women especially, as workers, but also because they will beexpected to 'take up the slack' as carers in the home.


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The family is also used as a means of reinforcing the hierarchy in society in manyways. This may not seem so obvious now as in Victorian times or under a feudalsystem when men's authority as 'head of the household' had the full weight of thelaw and the church behind it.

After all, in Britain we are generally free to choose our partners and to endrelationships. Women can no longer be imprisoned for adultery or locked up inmental institutions as degenerates for having 'illegitimate' babies (which

happened here as late as the 1960s).

However, it was only less than 20 years ago that law lords finally ruled thatmarital rape was illegal. The idea of 'conjugal rights' can still give many men asense of entitlement to sex, as statistics on rape indicate. The legal right ofhusbands to beat their wives was removed 150 years ago, but domestic violencecontinued to be viewed as a private matter, generally ignored by the police anduseful in keeping women in 'their place'.

Today, home office statistics show that, on average, two women a week are killedby their partner and one in four women will suffer violence from a partner orboyfriend at some point in their lives.

Nature or nurture

It is in the interests of the ruling class in society to promote the idea thattheir system, the way society is organised, including the family, is a reflectionof the 'natural order' of things rather than something that they have imposed.Religion played a key role in this, but an emerging capitalist class also misusedscience, medicine and psychiatry to 'prove' the inferiority of non-white races,women, the lower classes and 'sexual deviants'. Homosexuality was made a crime in1885. Women, it was said, were designed only for childbearing, domesticity andlooking decorative, and attempts by them to enter politics or public life wouldresult in anything from a withered womb to mental illness.

The ruling class imposed their model of personal relationships, the 'bourgeois

family' - with male breadwinner and dependant wife and children, onto society as awhole. This was what the working class should aspire to, even though in realitythey rarely had the financial resources to allow a 'stay at home' wife and mother.In most families even the children had to work.

This ideology was challenged, most notably by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx'sclosest collaborator. Anthropologists had found, often to their surprise andsometimes disgust, that women in 'primitive societies' had a degree of status andsexual freedom that was unheard of in the capitalist societies.

Using the best evidence available at that time, Engels explained that theoppression of women, far from being natural and timeless, was very recent in humanhistory. For 90% of our time on the planet men and women lived in groups in what

are usually known as hunter/gatherer societies, where resources were shared andchildren were the responsibility of the whole group.

Men and women often had different roles, but this division of labour did not meanthat the tasks women undertook were less valued. Women were as free as men were topair up and separate and there were no economic implications to this for them orany children they had.

The patriarchal family with the man as ruler of the household, and with it theinstitutionalised domination of men over women, became a feature of human societyabout 10,000 years ago, when it was possible through agriculture and later, trade,


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for some groups to produce more than subsistence levels of food, clothing etc.This type of work was mainly the preserve of men, so the wealth and statusgenerated was closely associated with men, a minority of whom rose above societyand became a political elite.

The issue of inheritance became important and therefore, for the first time so didpaternity, as men wanted to pass on their wealth and needed to know which childrenin the group were theirs. Monogamy for women was strictly enforced by new

structures of society and women were no longer free to end their marriage.

Whilst women's sexuality became tightly controlled, men were free to take'mistresses'. This established a double standard between male and female sexualitythat still exists, with women judged much more harshly for being sexually'promiscuous'. This whole process took place over thousands of years, but by thetime of early Roman societies the patriarchal family was well established alongwith slavery.

The development of private ownership, concentration of wealth in the hands of maleelites, and the passing of wealth through the male rather than female line, led toa loss of status and freedom for women which Engels called the "world historicaldefeat of womankind".

Class and gender

Initially the women most affected by the rise of class society were those in thegroups who were accumulating wealth and power and rising above the rest. So theybenefited materially from the process even though as women they lost freedom andrights.

This contradictory process still applies today, as women of the ruling class andupper middle class experience domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment andcultural stereotyping in common with women of other classes.

But to end women's oppression means ending the class system that gave rise to it

and this brings about a conflict between the interests of their gender and theirclass. Some privileged women are drawn into campaigns on specific issues, such asdomestic violence and abortion rights.

However, for such campaigns to succeed in the long run it is vital to link theseto the overall struggle to change society. This means finding common cause withworking class men, as it is only a united working class that is capable of gettingrid of the current economic and social system, which is underpinned by andreinforced by women's oppression.

Whilst it could be argued that all men benefit to some extent from patriarchywhich gives them power and status within the family, the vast majority of men alsolost power and status in society as a whole with the development of class society

because they became the slaves, serfs and workers.

Women in struggle

Whether it is Mr 5% cuts or Mr 10% who wins the next election, the scale of publicdebt means that public services and public sector workers face a massive attack.Women will be in the forefront of the coming fight to defend public sector jobsand against cuts in services.

Past experience shows that, when women workers move into struggle, they becomemore conscious of their exploitation as women and demand that they be able to play


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a full role in the fightback.

It is no accident that the biggest movements of women, the early 20th centurycampaign for the vote and the 1970s women's movement, emerged at a time ofheightened class struggle when there was a growing feeling that the working classneeds, and can achieve, a fundamental change in society. The ruling class try todivide workers along gender and race lines, to undercut wages and to weakenopposition to their system. The Socialist Party, being Marxist, has always argued

for maximum unity of the working class, whilst recognising the importance at timesfor specially oppressed groups of workers to organise round their specificdemands.

If the Tories win the next election it is very likely that abortion rights willcome under attack again and the Socialist Party will renew its call for the tradeunion movement to take up this issue, including mobilising for a nationaldemonstration.

The need for socialism

Ros Coward, active in the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s, concluded bythe late 1990s that 'feminism has achieved its aims'. Liberal feminists were

always prepared to limit their demands to those that could be accommodated withincapitalism.

Yet it is now clearer than ever as the global economic crisis bites that thestruggle for equality, and even more so for the true liberation of women and men,also means a struggle to overthrow the current economic and social system. In theprocess of such a struggle many of the existing prejudices and assumptions, theideology that plays a crucial role now in reinforcing and legitimising women'smaterial inequality, will be undermined.

A socialist society, where the economic resources would be owned and controlledcollectively through a planned economy, could use these resources to provideservices such as decent childcare for parents that want to use it, socialised

laundry and ironing services, cheap, but good-quality restaurants. Hours at workcould be reduced with no loss of pay so that men and women get to spend time witheach other, their children and friends.

Access to affordable housing and a decent income, either through benefits or work,would allow women economic independence and mean that ending a relationship wouldnot lead to poverty and social exclusion as is often the case now.

Such a society would ultimately provide the opportunity to develop personalrelationships free from the pressures not just of poverty and overwork, but alsofrom structured gender inequality.

From The Socialist, CWI Britain and Wales

why women dont have real equality??

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