It is estimated that, at the present rate, it will take 40 general elections before women are equally represented in Parliament. Perhaps it was this, along with statistics showing women's pay falling far behind that of men, which prompted Harriet Harman to announce a new equality law to end discrimination in June. The stark inequality between women and men in wages, work and conditions has been highlighted, not eradicated, by the "quiet revolution" which now sees more than 12 million women in the workforce. Meanwhile, sexual freedom is all too often misrepresented by lap-dancing clubs or scenes of binge drinking women than it is by confident, strong and independent women. It wasn't meant to be like this. The women's movement, which took off 40 years ago, promised a new world for women. Women's biology would no longer be their destiny and women fought for the right to be equal at work, at home and in society. Women's liberation began in the US against a background of mass movements for black civil rights and later black power, against the Vietnam war and the student movement. The term "women's liberation" was consciously adopted in identification with the national liberation movements against colonialism taking place around the world.
So, from the start, the women's movement identified with radical change. Many of the students who came from the northern states to campaign for black equality in Mississippi and elsewhere in the south were women. They endured often very dangerous conditions and were part of a brave and idealistic generation. The feminist academic Lise Vogel was probably typical. She came from a middle-class Jewish communist family. Her parents' worries when she was growing up were "money and McCarthyism." This is how she describes her experiences in the south in the early 1960s. "I got far more out of being in Mississippi than I ever was able to give back. In the end, I knew that I had participated in history, that what we did made a difference and that I had been tried and not found wanting." Yet Vogel and many women like her had become disillusioned with the movements by the late 1960's because they felt that women were sidelined or ignored and that issues of what came to be called women's oppression were either not recognised or were ridiculed. At one conference in 1967, where women tried to raise issues of women's liberation, the future feminist writer Shulamith Firestone was told by one man: "Move on, little girl, we have more important issues to talk about here than women's liberation." A popular slogan of the US movement against the draft to Vietnam was "girls say Yes to guys who say No."
Little wonder that a movement for women's liberation emerged and, by 1968, was holding meetings, publishing papers, organising activities all aimed at full equality for women and prepared to adopt militant tactics to get it. The movement spread to Britain where the first conference was held in Oxford in 1970. Here, the movement developed in a different way. It was more influenced by the left and the trade unions and took up strikes from its inception. The fight for equal pay by the Ford women machinists in 1969 and the night cleaners campaign led by May Hobbs were the two best known. In Britain, the 1960s and early '70s also saw major legislative changes which liberalised society and benefited women. There were laws on abortion, divorce, gays, equal pay and sex discrimination. More women were going out to work, a layer of young women was going into higher education and women were more in control of their bodies with major changes in contraception. Attitudes also changed. It became more acceptable for married women to work, for children to be born outside marriage and for couples to dispense with marriage altogether. Heterosexuality began to be challenged as the norm. The women's movement highlighted and campaigned around diverse issues including abortion, equal pay, domestic violence, rape and images of women. But the advances made by the left and working people in those years didn't last.
The second half of the 1970s saw a series of defeats and the decade ended with the historic election of a woman prime minister, but one committed to policies which would attack working people in general and working-class women particularly hard. The late '70s also saw the splintering and often disintegration of the women's movement, most spectacularly in Italy but also in Britain where the 1978 conference broke up in disarray. Many of the changes in women's lives which began in the '60s have turned out to be permanent. Women are present in the workforce in unprecedented numbers and there is much greater openness about sexuality and relationships. But women at work are also differentiated by class, with an important and successful layer of women employers, managers and higher professionals who have benefited from a limited opening in a man's world, but who have shown little sisterhood with their working-class counterparts. Working mothers' conditions are under attack as women are expected to compete with men in a workforce characterised by flexibility, long hours and low wages. Alan Sugar once asked a woman on the Apprentice about her plans for having children and the US feminist, now Democratic Party senator, Dianne Feinstein supported the overturning of a law reinstating women after maternity leave on the grounds that "we want to be treated equally … now we have to put our money where our mouth is."
At the same time, a number of gains are under attack, with attempts to reduce the abortion time limit, a shamefully low level of conviction for rape, the acceptance of lap-dancing clubs. Women's liberation has been turned on its head, so that anything goes as long as women are prepared to accept some of the worst conditions. The ideology of women's equality has been traduced by right-wing politicians such as Sarkozy or Berlusconi who accept women cabinet ministers so long as they conform to sexual stereotypes. Benefit cuts are sold by the new Labour government in the name of doing something for women and families. The bombing of Afghanistan is justified in the name of liberating oppressed Muslim women. Women's liberation led to a challenging of ideas and assumptions, which changed much about society. Yet, the limits of liberation are clear today. Women's liberation did not sufficiently confront the structures of oppression and, especially, the roots of women's oppression that lie in class society. So, feminism became an ideology that spoke to and for the women who could make it in a man's world. Meanwhile, millions of working women around the world have seen their lives worsen in the past two decades as they try to juggle increasingly stressful work with the demands of children, home and family.
This basic contradiction has never been resolved and cannot be until the wealth of society is used not for wars, Trident or luxury lifestyles of the super-rich but for creating resources which allow decent child care and an end to the double burden which women face. That means challenging the way that our society is organised and the class basis on which it is organised, not just arguing for more women in certain areas, welcome though that is. Today, women are a key part of the unions and are prominent in movements such as the anti-war movement. They play much greater roles in public life and have achieved many things that previous generations would have thought impossible. But, if we want real equality, then this time around we have to see socialism as central to women's liberation. And the division won't just be about gender but about class.
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Monday, 29 March 2010
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Rape, sexism & the police force
The recent revelation that a London taxi driver drugged, abused and raped tens of female passengers has rightly shocked many people. But the case revealed something more astounding – the police response to the reports of rape. Several women went to the police when they realised they had been abused after being given a drink spiked with drugs. In one case the number plate of the cab was captured on CCTV but police failed to pursue the allegation and released the driver. Police marked many of the allegations as “no crime”. The women often had a hazy recollection of events, which points to the use of drugs, but police failed to pick up on this.
It is little wonder that few women see any use in reporting rape – it is thought that 95 percent of rapes are never reported; just 6.5 percent of reported rapes between 2007 and 2008 resulted in a conviction. The police attitude to rape victims is disgraceful and needs to be addressed. But ultimately, solving the problem of rape means challenging a society that has women’s oppression at the heart of it. Tory leader David Cameron used the low conviction rate for rape as an excuse to condemn the “moral collapse” of British society - this is the latest way that Cameron has tried to tap into a feeling of social crisis. The low conviction rate for rape is a problem. Of reported rapes in 2006-7 the conviction rate was just 5.6 percent – a startling figure that itself ought to condemn our criminal justice system. But the statistics say more about women’s position in society than about an alleged decline in moral standards.
We are facing an ideological backlash in which the right is attempting to roll back the gains that women in Britain have won over the last few decades. We live in a society where the dominant ideology tells us that women’s oppression no longer exists. Yet rape is itself a product of women’s oppression. The denial of the fact of this oppression leads to a huge problem in understanding rape. At the same time, the real gains that women have made over the last few decades mean that more women now have the confidence to report rapes that occur within relationships. But these cases don’t fit the dominant ideology – which tells us that rapes are predominantly carried out by strangers – and are less likely to result in a conviction.
The low conviction rate shows how old ideas about rape have not gone away. In the 1970s and 1980s, women were told that they encouraged rape because of the clothes they wore. Today women are blamed for drinking and thereby putting themselves in a “vulnerable” position. Our society tells us that it’s the responsibility of the woman to avoid rape. There has been an attack on the idea of date rape – with some saying, “One person’s rape is another person’s bad night.” Men are still portrayed as being unable to control their “natural urges”. Meanwhile we are surrounded by sexualised images of women that supposedly reflect our “empowerment”. Language and behaviour once condemned as sexist are increasingly acceptable. Whereas once stripping was seen as exploitative and degrading, now even prostitution can be portrayed as empowering. The degradation of gender equality has been hampered by right-wing regressives, from conservatives even to fascists, condemning equality as "political correctness", a scourge in their twisted, mysogonystic minds. All of this adds up to a misinterpretation of the reality of rape and confusion about why it occurs.
Rape is a product of the way that capitalism distorts our relationships and turns women and sex into commodities to be bought, sold and sometimes stolen. Popular mythology conjures up the image of a woman being attacked in a dark street by a stranger. But most women who are raped are attacked by people they know – and often by people in their own family. In home office figures, only 12 percent of rapes are defined as “stranger rapes”. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels identified the family under class society as the key to women’s oppression. The family as we know it today emerged at the same time as private property and the state. Before this men and women lived in hunter-gatherer societies where they had equal status. Marx and Engels called this “primitive communism”. The ideology of the family generally saw women as a form of property and subservient to men. Engels described women’s resulting reduction in status as “the world historic defeat of the female sex”.
The right likes to focus on individual men as the source of the problem because it distracts us from facing up to the institutional oppression that is part of capitalist society. The dominant ideology dwells on rape by strangers because acknowledging that women are more likely to face violence within the home would mean challenging a fundamental institution of capitalism. Instead people like Cameron seek to bolster the ideology of the family, with their talk of tax breaks for married couples and the like. Over the past two decades reported rapes have been on the increase. Between 2001 and 2005 reported rapes rose by just under 4,000. But it’s hard to tell if rapes have increased or if reporting has risen. And of course, many rapes still go unreported – an estimated three out of four. This is hardly surprising. According to figures from the home office, over two thirds of reported rapes don’t make it to court. One quarter of reported rapes were subsequently “no crimed” by the police, with cases where the complainant and suspect knew each other being most likely to be “no crimed”. Half of all rapes defined as a crime led to no further action by the police.
The low conviction rate needs to be challenged. It sends a message to men that they can get away with rape, and to women that there’s little point reporting it. It is a reflection of the value that our society attaches to women. But we need to recognise that the answer to the problem of rape is not a legal one. Right wing politicians try and use the issue of rape as a means to attack the so-called “permissive” nature of our society and call for a stronger state to put things right – hence the demand for longer sentences for convicted rapists. Focusing on longer sentences in a situation where most cases don’t even result in a conviction is unhelpful. It also means avoiding the cause of the problem. The reasons for rape are embedded in the kind of society we live in. It occurs because women are oppressed – and to end it we need to end that oppression.
It is little wonder that few women see any use in reporting rape – it is thought that 95 percent of rapes are never reported; just 6.5 percent of reported rapes between 2007 and 2008 resulted in a conviction. The police attitude to rape victims is disgraceful and needs to be addressed. But ultimately, solving the problem of rape means challenging a society that has women’s oppression at the heart of it. Tory leader David Cameron used the low conviction rate for rape as an excuse to condemn the “moral collapse” of British society - this is the latest way that Cameron has tried to tap into a feeling of social crisis. The low conviction rate for rape is a problem. Of reported rapes in 2006-7 the conviction rate was just 5.6 percent – a startling figure that itself ought to condemn our criminal justice system. But the statistics say more about women’s position in society than about an alleged decline in moral standards.
We are facing an ideological backlash in which the right is attempting to roll back the gains that women in Britain have won over the last few decades. We live in a society where the dominant ideology tells us that women’s oppression no longer exists. Yet rape is itself a product of women’s oppression. The denial of the fact of this oppression leads to a huge problem in understanding rape. At the same time, the real gains that women have made over the last few decades mean that more women now have the confidence to report rapes that occur within relationships. But these cases don’t fit the dominant ideology – which tells us that rapes are predominantly carried out by strangers – and are less likely to result in a conviction.
The low conviction rate shows how old ideas about rape have not gone away. In the 1970s and 1980s, women were told that they encouraged rape because of the clothes they wore. Today women are blamed for drinking and thereby putting themselves in a “vulnerable” position. Our society tells us that it’s the responsibility of the woman to avoid rape. There has been an attack on the idea of date rape – with some saying, “One person’s rape is another person’s bad night.” Men are still portrayed as being unable to control their “natural urges”. Meanwhile we are surrounded by sexualised images of women that supposedly reflect our “empowerment”. Language and behaviour once condemned as sexist are increasingly acceptable. Whereas once stripping was seen as exploitative and degrading, now even prostitution can be portrayed as empowering. The degradation of gender equality has been hampered by right-wing regressives, from conservatives even to fascists, condemning equality as "political correctness", a scourge in their twisted, mysogonystic minds. All of this adds up to a misinterpretation of the reality of rape and confusion about why it occurs.
Rape is a product of the way that capitalism distorts our relationships and turns women and sex into commodities to be bought, sold and sometimes stolen. Popular mythology conjures up the image of a woman being attacked in a dark street by a stranger. But most women who are raped are attacked by people they know – and often by people in their own family. In home office figures, only 12 percent of rapes are defined as “stranger rapes”. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels identified the family under class society as the key to women’s oppression. The family as we know it today emerged at the same time as private property and the state. Before this men and women lived in hunter-gatherer societies where they had equal status. Marx and Engels called this “primitive communism”. The ideology of the family generally saw women as a form of property and subservient to men. Engels described women’s resulting reduction in status as “the world historic defeat of the female sex”.
The right likes to focus on individual men as the source of the problem because it distracts us from facing up to the institutional oppression that is part of capitalist society. The dominant ideology dwells on rape by strangers because acknowledging that women are more likely to face violence within the home would mean challenging a fundamental institution of capitalism. Instead people like Cameron seek to bolster the ideology of the family, with their talk of tax breaks for married couples and the like. Over the past two decades reported rapes have been on the increase. Between 2001 and 2005 reported rapes rose by just under 4,000. But it’s hard to tell if rapes have increased or if reporting has risen. And of course, many rapes still go unreported – an estimated three out of four. This is hardly surprising. According to figures from the home office, over two thirds of reported rapes don’t make it to court. One quarter of reported rapes were subsequently “no crimed” by the police, with cases where the complainant and suspect knew each other being most likely to be “no crimed”. Half of all rapes defined as a crime led to no further action by the police.
The low conviction rate needs to be challenged. It sends a message to men that they can get away with rape, and to women that there’s little point reporting it. It is a reflection of the value that our society attaches to women. But we need to recognise that the answer to the problem of rape is not a legal one. Right wing politicians try and use the issue of rape as a means to attack the so-called “permissive” nature of our society and call for a stronger state to put things right – hence the demand for longer sentences for convicted rapists. Focusing on longer sentences in a situation where most cases don’t even result in a conviction is unhelpful. It also means avoiding the cause of the problem. The reasons for rape are embedded in the kind of society we live in. It occurs because women are oppressed – and to end it we need to end that oppression.
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
We Can Afford Gender Equality
The recession means that women can’t have equal pay with men. Astonishingly, that is what the government body charged with safeguarding equality believes. The Equality and Human Rights Commission told the government this week that businesses should not have to undergo equal pay reviews as they would be too expensive. The government agrees. It is understood to have dropped the reviews from its forthcoming Equalities Bill after discussions with the bosses’ CBI organisation. Women’s pay is on average 17 percent less than men’s, and this gap increases to 36.5 percent for part-time women workers. And the divide is increasing. Yet there is more than enough money in the system to give women equal pay. The bosses are still raking in profits and the government can afford to throw billions at the banks.
Women in Britain have made great gains since the days of the Women’s Liberation Movement; females are now a permanent part of the workforce and have a degree of economic independence previously denied to them. Access to legal and safe abortion, however limited, has saved thousands of women faced with an unwanted pregnancy from risking their lives in backstreet abortions. Easier access to divorce and acceptance of relationships outside of marriage have enabled millions of women and men to make different choices about how they live together. Yet we are still a long way from liberation.
The Equal Pay Act was passed over three decades ago but the average wage for women is still around 18 percent less than men. A recent TUC report talked of a “motherhood penalty” and showed that women who have children are most affected by pay inequality. Many are forced into part time work, where the pay gap is at its greatest, as they juggle work with inadequate and expensive childcare. There are also many who want to roll back the gains we have made, and the right of women to control their bodies is still contested. Around 83 percent of the population support abortion being legal but the anti-abortionists have not given up. Their tactic is to target the small minority of women who need abortions, often in desperate circumstances, at the upper end of the 24-week time limit.
When it comes to the sexual commodification of women’s bodies it certainly feels like the clocks have turned back. Lap dancing is now big business and strip clubs are sold as a great night out for both women and men. Women who object are denounced as prudish or sexually repressed. But what is liberating about commercial sex sold for a profit? We fought hard in the 1960s and 1970s for more openness in society about sex and sexuality. Now capitalism wants to repackage it and sell it back to us as a commodity. The obsession with women’s appearance breaks new boundaries. Women are supposed to ape skeletal celebrities and aspire to be the mythical size zero, according to current trends veering toward perilous obsession. And if you can’t achieve the perfect body by going hungry you can always go under the knife. Cosmetic surgery is now mainstream with “breast enhancement” the most popular operation.
At the same time as women are encouraged to dress and behave like porn stars they are still seen as the custodians of morality. Women’s sexual histories, clothing and behaviour are still brought up in court in rape cases to suggest that the victim is in some way responsible for an assault. The result is that any women wearing what is in the window of Top Shop can be deemed to be asking for it. Today only 5 percent of reported rapes end in conviction. These attacks are being challenged by a new generation of activists. There may no longer be a Women’s Liberation Movement, but there are many young women, trade unionists, and activists who want to fight for women’s liberation. In colleges and workplaces across the country women are standing up against the tide of raunch culture and refusing to be defined by the sexist stereotypes peddled by the media.
The struggle for equal pay continues. Last year the Abortion Rights campaign has already mobilised many women who have never had to fight on the issue before. History has shown that the fate of women in society is tied to the fate of the working class. We have won the most gains when the working class has been on the offensive. We have never been in a better position to challenge our oppression as part of a collective – women are now half the workforce. But the fight must be for more than just equality under capitalism. Class remains the deepest divide in society, defining our health, education, housing, jobs and pay and even our life expectancy. Winning equal pay with men would be progress, but not victory. The top 1 percent of population own over 23 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent’s share is only 7 percent. Equal pay can still mean gross inequality between the minority and the majority. For socialists the fight for women’s liberation is part of a struggle for the emancipation of the whole of humanity.
Women in Britain have made great gains since the days of the Women’s Liberation Movement; females are now a permanent part of the workforce and have a degree of economic independence previously denied to them. Access to legal and safe abortion, however limited, has saved thousands of women faced with an unwanted pregnancy from risking their lives in backstreet abortions. Easier access to divorce and acceptance of relationships outside of marriage have enabled millions of women and men to make different choices about how they live together. Yet we are still a long way from liberation.
The Equal Pay Act was passed over three decades ago but the average wage for women is still around 18 percent less than men. A recent TUC report talked of a “motherhood penalty” and showed that women who have children are most affected by pay inequality. Many are forced into part time work, where the pay gap is at its greatest, as they juggle work with inadequate and expensive childcare. There are also many who want to roll back the gains we have made, and the right of women to control their bodies is still contested. Around 83 percent of the population support abortion being legal but the anti-abortionists have not given up. Their tactic is to target the small minority of women who need abortions, often in desperate circumstances, at the upper end of the 24-week time limit.
When it comes to the sexual commodification of women’s bodies it certainly feels like the clocks have turned back. Lap dancing is now big business and strip clubs are sold as a great night out for both women and men. Women who object are denounced as prudish or sexually repressed. But what is liberating about commercial sex sold for a profit? We fought hard in the 1960s and 1970s for more openness in society about sex and sexuality. Now capitalism wants to repackage it and sell it back to us as a commodity. The obsession with women’s appearance breaks new boundaries. Women are supposed to ape skeletal celebrities and aspire to be the mythical size zero, according to current trends veering toward perilous obsession. And if you can’t achieve the perfect body by going hungry you can always go under the knife. Cosmetic surgery is now mainstream with “breast enhancement” the most popular operation.
At the same time as women are encouraged to dress and behave like porn stars they are still seen as the custodians of morality. Women’s sexual histories, clothing and behaviour are still brought up in court in rape cases to suggest that the victim is in some way responsible for an assault. The result is that any women wearing what is in the window of Top Shop can be deemed to be asking for it. Today only 5 percent of reported rapes end in conviction. These attacks are being challenged by a new generation of activists. There may no longer be a Women’s Liberation Movement, but there are many young women, trade unionists, and activists who want to fight for women’s liberation. In colleges and workplaces across the country women are standing up against the tide of raunch culture and refusing to be defined by the sexist stereotypes peddled by the media.
The struggle for equal pay continues. Last year the Abortion Rights campaign has already mobilised many women who have never had to fight on the issue before. History has shown that the fate of women in society is tied to the fate of the working class. We have won the most gains when the working class has been on the offensive. We have never been in a better position to challenge our oppression as part of a collective – women are now half the workforce. But the fight must be for more than just equality under capitalism. Class remains the deepest divide in society, defining our health, education, housing, jobs and pay and even our life expectancy. Winning equal pay with men would be progress, but not victory. The top 1 percent of population own over 23 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent’s share is only 7 percent. Equal pay can still mean gross inequality between the minority and the majority. For socialists the fight for women’s liberation is part of a struggle for the emancipation of the whole of humanity.
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