Women's rights under attack; feminism is not the problem

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"feminism was a response to the failure The women's movement has accomplished remarkable gains in the past 15 years. Hundreds of laws discriminating against women have been overturned, affirmative action programs have been won in jobs and educational institutions, and women have been awarded millions of dollars in back pay for previous discrimination. In addition, issues such as sexism and rape have become subjects of serious concern and effort.

Yet the women's movement has been unable to translate these gains into concrete improvements in most women's lives. Women earn 62 cents for every dollar a man makes, and it takes a woman four years of college to earn, on the average, about the same pay as a male high school graduate. Less than half the back pay awarded to women has ever actually been collected, and the of the American family..."

only new area in which there has been a really significant increase in the percentage of women workers is the professions.

Unfortunately, this seems to be related more to the proletarianization of professional jobs than to the opening up of new horizons for female employment. As the pay rates, skill levels, and degree of control over working conditions have been diluted for college teachers and low-level "managers, women have been increasingly recruited into these positions.

Internationally, the figures are even worse. Women are half the world's population and one-third the official labor force, yet they account for two-thirds of the world's working hours and take home only one-tenth of the world's income.

Meanwhile, the gains we have made are being rolled back. The ERA was defeated, and took a long time dying. Indeed, no state had approved it since 1977. Legal and political victories are being nullified by court rulings and by administrative interpretations that cut the hearts out of discrimination suits and affirmative action. The courts have now held, for example, that to be awarded back pay and promotion in many cases one must prove not only the fact of discrimination but the intent to discriminate. There are moves in Congress and dozens of states against women's abortion rights, and the New Right has launched a "pro-family" offensive that attacks every single right won by women and children over the past 20 years-not to mention some rights we thought we had firmed up 60 years ago!

Why are these gains under attack?

Why are we under attack in this way? And why have we been losing so many battles in the recent period? Many politicians and establishment journalists would have us believe that our demands have alienated people by their radicalism. We should get further into mainstream politics, they argue, and not push feminism too far. Recently even some supporters have begun to agree that it's our own fault.

Christopher Lasch argues that the women's movement has contributed to the weakening of the family-our one source of refuge from the impersonal relations of market society. He maintains that we need to defend the integrity of the family and extend its relations and values outward into the workplace, instead of allowing the family to be taken over by the market and state.

Socialist Action June 1984 Betty Friedan's latest book, "The Second Stage" (New York: Summit, 1981), argues that the women's movement has increased the conflict between men and women, thus alienating women who want to relate to men and to children. She maintains that the movement now needs to work out a cooperative approach to human rights, one that does not attack family values.

Now, I think we need to bend over backwards to be fair to these people. Lasch is not advocating a return to the patriarchal family of the 19th century, and he does put his finger on a real problem with liberal feminist approaches to the family. They often allow the capitalist state an extraordinary amount of freedom to manipulate family life along the lines laid out by "experts" whose aims may be very different from those of feminists or socialists.

Friedan is dealing with a real dilemma felt by many feminists. Those who thought that the route to liberation was simply finding a career have been sadly disappointed. They have found that real personal satisfaction and a sense of self-fulfillment elude them in the job market just as surely as in the home.

These findings are surprising to anyone whose initial analysis was that women's only problem was not being in the public arena on the same terms as men. One response might be to question whether this was or is the only problem.

Militia women of revolutionary Nicaragua.

Friedan's conclusion, however, is not to challenge her original analysis but to retreat from her original solution to that analysis.

Friedan's retreat

We need to build up families, she says, because the family "is the symbol of that last area where one has any hope of individual control over one's destiny... of nourishing that core of personhood threatened now by vast impersonal institutions and uncontrollable corporate and government bureaucracies.... Against these menaces, the family may be as crucial for survival as it used to to be against... the old, simple kinds of despotism" (pp. 229-30).

Friedan does not advocate that we return to an isolated nuclear family. She does suggest ways of getting families more in touch with each other, ways of reorganizing space so that there are more communal aspects to family life. Ultimately, however, her idea that the family should be the "new feminist frontier" boils down simply to changing relationships within the existing family structure, so that financial support and household work are shared equally.

Even if this were any kind of solution-and I will argue that it is not—it presents Friedan with a dilemma of her own. How do you avoid the personal, embittering struggle between men and women that she says has so hurt the women's movement if the only solution to our problems is for each individual man and woman in each individual household to work out for themselves how to share the tremendous burdens of keeping up a home and raising children in an age of unemployment, inflation, and declining social services? Even from Friedan's "pragmatic" point of view, this seems a solution doomed to raise the divorce rate further.

Friedan's solution-reforming the family so that it allows both males and females to meet their personal needs within it while they also participate in the existing systems of work and politics-rests on a misunderstanding of the history of the family.

The family under capitalism The family has never been a refuge against either "the old, simple kinds of despotism" or the new complex ones. Patriarchal family values were not developed as an alternative to state control but as a microcosm of it, a place to prepare children to accept the hierarchy in society at large. The idea that the family can serve as a "democratic" institution fulfilling our personal needs is a relatively recent one, inextricably linked to the rise of capitalism.

As work and home moved apart and the traditional security of the propertied middle class vanished in class polarization between employers and employees, the middling ranks of society turned to the private nuclear family as a source of the personal interaction they no longer found in work or community. They stressed intense emotional ties between mothers and children, to wean their children away from the peer pressure of working-class neighbors and to inculcate the personal characteristics that would win their children trusted positions as managers or assistants to the capitalists.

Although the personal exercise of patriarchal power by the household head was somewhat modified in this process, other family members did not win freedom from male dominance and hierarchy. Their dependence was simply enforced less through the personal power of the paterfamilias and more through the "impersonal" workings of the economy, the dominant bourgeois culture, a new kind of state intervention into family life, and the pervasive illusion that the private family—a creation of capitalist society—could be an escape from it, if only the perfect family could be created.

As working-class militancy and ethnic organization increased at the end of the 19th century, threatening the status quo with new social and economic solidarities, the private family was forcibly imposed on the working class in the form of housing "reform" the campaign against boarding and lodging, new welfare restrictions, and the invention of "juvenile delinquency?' All these innovations were used to break down working-class and ethnic peer-group associations and to isolate people into separate, competitive nuclear families. Corporate advertisers played on the isolation of both working-class and middle-class families to create new "needs" for their products.

The "democratic" family was a failure from its inception. It forced women into emotional and financial dependence, taught children to- distrust and compete with their peers, and haunted men with the prospect of not being able to provide for their "dependents.' Its inherent contradictions— not feminism-caused such reactions as the rise in divorce, the creation of a "youth culture" the high rate of female depression, and the escalation of male hostility toward being "trapped" in marriage and fatherhood. Feminism was a response to the failure of the American family, and cannot cater to nostalgia for a nonexistent time when the family supposedly "took care of its own""

Crisis of social system To the extent that we accept the idea that the family must be so arranged as to meet all the emotional and material needs of its members, we are accepting the idea that people's emotional and material needs are neither a social responsibility nor an appropriate subject for collective action-that they are solely a private concern. We are accepting an economic system that takes no responsibility for our most important social resource-our children-and a social system that penalizes any collective action to provide ourselves with physical and mental satisfactions.

What Friedan sees as the crisis of the family is in fact the crisis of our present social system. It is a crisis that does not revolve around the personal ways that individuals relate within the family but around the lack of social ways for them to relate in the larger community. The solution to the crisis must be to challenge the private nature of both our "public" lives and our family lives: to oppose the idea that there are no social rights to jobs, education, food, or social interaction and that these needs should only be met by a limited circle of relatives or friends.

"But wouldn't such just

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...women's rights exacerbate the situation?" I suppose Friedan would counter. Wouldn't they just further alienate us from the people who are already turned off by the lengths to which feminism has gone? This, too, stems from a false premise. The crisis of the women's movement has not been caused by our alienating people who think we have gone too far. It has been caused by our inability to go far enough within the present system and the refusal of leaders of the women's movement to admit that.

Just as women of the 1920s often "oversold" the vote, pretending that this important democratic right was a total solution to the problems faced by women as workers and as mothers, so also have leaders of today's feminist movement often oversold our legal and political demands. Making sex discrimination illegal is an important democratic reform, but it doesn't touch the structural problems that define most women's lives. For more and more women, equal rights—or even affirmative action in any particular job category-doesn't mean too much, since they are being channeled into a dual labor market, where the few males involved have the same low wages as the women.

Women's lives worsen

At the same time, many women's lives have become worse in the past 15 years—not because of feminism, certainly, but despite it. The fastest growing poverty group in America today is that of woman-headed families. One in five children (and one in two Black children) now live in poverty-stricken families, most of them female-headed, while inflation and unemployment have slashed the living standards of even twoearner families.

This kind of situation makes us vulnerable to right-wing attack, unless we are very clear about what is responsible for the problem. There are those who say that feminism has caused the breakdown of the American family, that equal rights for women have put men out of work, that women's drive for autonomy has created the sense of powerlessness felt by most youth in today's society. And to the extent that feminists claim that we have won our most vital demands, or that we can solve women's needs within the system as long as we can hold off any last resurgence of "machismo", it is not unreasonable to blame feminists when, after all our so-called victories, people's lives still keep deteriorating. When our leaders call upon people to "defend" feminism, they may well be met with the remark that if we've already tried feminism, it's pretty clear that it doesn't work.

But if we're absolutely honest about the structural problems we face, the picture gets a little different. To those who say that feminism has caused the breakdown of the family, we can reply that feminism is a response to the breakdown of the family, which has been unable to withstand the social, economic, and psychological pressures put upon it when capitalism destroyed all the supporting institutions and communities that formerly shared the tasks of mutual self-help, identity-formation, and personal support.

Comparable pay for comparable work To those who claim that equal rights for women have put men out of work, we can show that the changing labor structure of capitalism has put men out of work. The threat to male employment is not from equal pay for equal their exploitation of the entire labor force. Women's work was first privatized in ancient state societies to "free up" males to be exploited in the public sphere. Later, as the market economy of early capitalism spread, women were cut off from independent access to the cash society and charged with the private reproduction of people's nonmarket needs. Once women were established as appendages of the family, daughters could be hired by employers who wanted a cheap, temporary workforce. Indeed, in the 19th century male crafts were systematically "deskilled" so that employers could turn over many jobs to women and children.

Since the Depression of the 1930s, wives have also been drawn into the labor market, as families have struggled to maintain living standards in the economic cycles of advanced capitalism. But their continued association with the family ties them to lower-paid jobs in the public sphere and the double burden of managing the home, so that working wives average an 80-to-90-hour workweek.

This dual oppression of women also hurts men in two ways. First of all, the greater the discrepancy between male and female wages in any particular locale or industry-and this holds for Black and white wage gaps too, incidentally-the lower the average wages of all workers in that area. So sex discrimination, like racism, pulls down everybody's wages. Second, cost experts estimate that the value of a woman's household labor, measured in terms of institutions in this society that could well afford to meet our needs. These are the same people and institutions that oppose us-not because they cannot afford the programs we demand but because maintaining their power and privilege requires our subordination. Capitalism is a system where the private property interests of the few are set above the needs of the many. The corporations and politicians are not about to voluntarily relinquish the advantages they gain by paying women and minorities unequal wages and pitting working people and families against each other.

It is no service to our cause to pretend that we don't have to challenge this system. In my opinion, the current crisis of the women's movement flows not from our critique of the family but from the fact that our leadership has retreated from the social implications of calls for equality, has backed off from mobilizing our power in the streets, and has pretended that we can win our demands by wheeling and dealing in the inner circles of power.

Women's movement leadership retreats The policy of relying on deals and power-brokering has disarmed the women's movement politically. Keeping a low profile has only given the right wing the courage to organize-in imitation of the tactics that we pioneered—while our own power has been negotiated away. In Georgia and Florida the NOW leadership, in return for promises of support for the ERA by "friends" of the movement in the legislature, agreed not to

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«Sex discrimination, like racism, pulls down everybody's wages"