“The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink
Together, dwarf’d or godlike, bond or free”
Tennyson
International Women's Day has come and gone for another year with
the inequalities highlighted and expressed by millions of women around the
world.
In 1904, long before women possessed the vote in the UK, the
Socialist Party said in its Declarations of Principles that “the emancipation
of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without
distinction of race or sex.” However, many are surprised to discover that the
Socialist Party did not campaign for votes for women, few seek to learn the
reason.
Women of the working class are led to believe that the
possession of the franchise would enable them – by means of Parliamentary
representation – to pass such measures of reform as will ameliorate in no small
degree their present economic position. And here we are over a hundred years
later with having women acquired the vote, protesting still against the
discrimination and prejudice based on gender.
Working class women, by contrast, share with others in their
class the condition of wage slavery. Whichever form it takes, whether it is
real prostitution or working on the assembly line, they have to sell part of
themselves — their labour power — in
order to live. As Marx put it: “Prostitution is only the specific form of the
universal prostitution of the working class”. Women ought to be criticising
capitalism and working for socialism, a class-free society of common ownership.
Eleanor Marx in 1886 she wrote the article “The Woman
Question” where she identified that ‘the position of woman rests on an economic
basis’ with ‘no solution in the present condition of society’ but in socialism
‘the woman will no longer be the man’s slave but his equal’.
Eleanor Marx criticised bourgeois women reformers who
advocated palliative not remedial measures but in the early 20th century
bourgeois women became prominent in the Suffragette movement which campaigned
for middle bourgeois women to get the vote on an equal property qualification
as men. The Socialist Standard in 1908 wrote that the Suffragettes, who were
campaigning in practice for ‘votes for rich women, were ‘a bulwark of
capitalism directly opposed to the interests of the working class’ and that
‘the salvation of working class women lies in the emancipation of their class
from wage slavery’. The Suffragettes suspended their campaign in 1914 to
support the Great War.
The Women’s Movement represents an impetus to the glacial
movement of ideas. It is impossible not to agree with some of their attitudes.
We must all feel sick at the commercial exploitation of sexual appeal and it
says a lot about capitalist society and women’s position in it that this
exploitation is so often a women’s sexuality and not a man’s. The aims of the Women’s
Movement—a free association between individuals, pure of the contaminations of
capitalist society—can be attained only when capitalism is no more. Conditioned
as we are to capitalism’s degradations, it is difficult to imagine what the
freedom of socialism will be like. How it will feel, for women and men to
associate only because they like and respect each other. How it will be when
sexual activity is not a matter of conquest and possession, not a suppressive
neurosis too easily exploited to sell cars, hairsprays, washing machines,
suitcases, toothpaste, politicians—but a pleasure. To reach that we need all of
us to be conscious of our role in society and the reasons for it. From there we
will not be far from the will to change our roles by changing society.
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