Women’s Struggle

MAN’S WORLD by Sheila Rowbotham This is a very valuable book and should be tead by every militant and revolutionary as it provities a lot of insights into the reasons for a Women’s Movement and provides useful criticism of the traditional Marxist parties in Britain before the Women’s Movement came into existence. The book provides a basic and readable introduction not only to a whole host of problems concerned with womens oppression, but it tries to link womens oppression into the whole fabric of capitalism. This is a very important task because many good militants see womens oppression as a minor factor to be dealt with later while on the other hand the book provides a ready criticism of the tendency within the Women’s movement to see men as the enemy.

Cultural oppression One important area which the book tackles is the pr@blem of women’s oppression in relation to all the cultural learning processes which every person undergoes; and which lead to actual internalised repression (i.e. women absorb continuously from the moment they are born a belief as to the exact nature of themselves as women, a belief which is reinforced by everything around them.)

An important area of this cultural repression is normal everyday-language. Language is an instrument of domination in that it makes those who are oppressed try and accommodate to it. For instance when, a striker goes on television the whole of the media is designed so that the most sophisticated and educated part of society — the ruling classes and their servants — can confuse and dominate the worker even though he has an excellent case.

Similarly although on a less obvious level women have to accommodate to a language which sees and refers to everything through the eyes of men and takes the male way of looking at things as normal.

The book touches on the fact that women learn about their psycholdégy and their physiology from ideas developed by males to support the actual society they are already living in. It is a pity Rowbotham did not explore these ideas further and develop them into a full attack on the mythical ‘scientific objectivity’ which is so often used to defend the most appalling crimes upon humanity, _ However she does state quite clearly that revolution for women must involve exploration into the internal areas of consciousness in order to break the cultural of an oppressed section of society. This is the same idea that came to predominate at the height of the Black struggle in the U.S.A. “Black is Beautiful” was the expression of a new cultural awareness among Blacks against the ideas that they were inferior people.

Although Rowbotham gives a very enlightening criticism on the general cultural domination of women as a subjugated sex, she does not give many good ideas on how to break this down. Firstly the problem of women cannot be seen in isolation to the rest of the political work carried out by revolutionary groups, it is an integral and important aspect of any revolutionary groups perspective. The real understanding Rights”.

Role of the family of oppression will only permeate through to the working class at a time of overall political awareness, this means that womens liberation groups must involve themselves in all aspects of the class struggle, and through this realise in themselves the overall repressive nature of capitalism, realise that the immediate oppression of both men and women is a different one to that of radicalised sections of middle-class women, The best way to tackle this is to join a revolutionary group and to educate the men within that group as to the necessity of recognising the repression of women as something far greather than just demands for ‘Civil The book shows extremely well the position the family plays within the capitalist structure as a whole. it exposes the contradictory sentimentalisation of the ‘sanctity of the family’ by the mass media “|. and then have a buile-in hydraulic slide with a powered downfeed to the wheelhead sprocket, you see”" small reliefs a family can bring. The prime example that she uses is the increasing use of the 3 shift shystem, which leads to mental exhaustion in the worker and quickly leads to corresponding tensions within the home itself, causing a high rate of mental illness and marriage problems.

The major error in the book is her support of the concept that the women in the home constitutes a ‘mode of production’ within capitalism itself, She supports this by saying that a marriage relationship is basically a feudal one, and that women do not sell their labour power as a commodity as men do, so houseword is therefore a different mode of production.

This error comes from an incorrect method of analysis. The correct way is to ask what part does any particular phenomena play within the capitalist framework as a whole? The family is an integral part of capitalism without which it could not survive. The family acts as a unit of socialisation, to teach people their place within society, it reinforces the hierarchial social structure outside. Economically the family provides the man with more motivation to work hard, that the wife does the housework enables the man to work harder. The family also acts as a huge pool of labour. In times of expansion women can be sent out to work, and in times of recession women can be laid off and sent back to the family without causing undue strain on the social services. For these reasons it can be seen that far from being a separate mode of production, the unpaid labour and the availability of a women labour force show that womens position in the family is as an absolutely crucial FACTOR within the CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION AS A WHOLE.

Overall despite these criticisms it is an important book and should be read, by Revolutionaries.

BELFAST