[A SOCIALIST ACTION SUPPLEMENT SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1989…]

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A SOCIALIST ACTION SUPPLEMENT SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1989 9 changed consciousness. More recently we've seen the enthusiastic response to NOW's call for the April 9, 1989, March for Women's Equality/Women's Lives in which 600,000 demonstrators converged on Washington D.C We've seen the immediate outpouring of outrage to the Supreme Court's Webster decision and the tremendous potential for the Nov. 12 demonstration—a rally which NOW President Molly Yard forecasts will draw a million people to Washington.

Many of the participants in today's pro-choice demonstrations came of age after the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. They grew up believing the decision on when and whether to have children is theirs alone.

Endemic discrimination

While there is a great awareness of the need for women's rights, the material conditions of women's existence have not substantially changed. Women still earn about 64 cents for every dollar men earn-and men's wages have declined somewhat with the massive layoffs, plant closings, and concession bargaining of the '80s.

Despite the well-publicized entrance of some women into better-paying "men's" jobs, the overwhelming majority of women are still confined to the same spectrum of traditional low-paid "women's" jobs. Many of those who did temporarily win better-paying jobs have since fallen victim to the last-hired practice in an economy with large-scale permanent unemployment.

Sixty percent of U.S. working women have no legal right to maternity leave and many lack any health benefits. Low pay and poor benefits lead to economic deprivation for many women, with 35 percent of all single women living below the official government poverty line.

Massive cutbacks in social services, including health and education, dispro(continued on next page)

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... Marxism and feminism The attack against women's rights will add to the burden already suffered by oppressed minorities-African-Americans, Latinas, Asians, and others.

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portionately affect women. The Equal Rights Amendment, a simple recognition of legal equality, was defeated. A campaign is underway to roll back those gains women have won on the right to choose abortion, access to birth control-—and even sex education. (In Illinois, the legislature recently nearly banned high-school clinics from giving out birth-control information.)

The campaign against abortion has taken a brutal turn. In addition to legal threats, antichoice groups employ such terrorist methods as arson, bombing, kidnapping of staff, and intimidation of women patients. After a wave of physical assaults against clinics, the FBI ruled there wasn't enough evidence to pursue an investigation, thus giving the green light to continued attacks. Emboldened by this, the misnamed Operation Rescue has tried to physically shut down clinics in many cities.

These violent attacks follow the gradual erosion of the right to choose through federal and state funding cuts. Many poor women have already effectively been denied the right to a safe, legal abortion. Medicaid no longer pays for abortion in 37 states, and several states are currently enforcing parental-consent laws.

Origin of women's oppression What is the source of this contradiction between the needs and aspirations of women and what actually exists today? To answer this, it is necessary to step back, take a look at the society as a whole, and ask what the origin of women's oppression is. This requires looking beyond the policies of any one administration and examining women's historical position.

From a Marxist perspective, all human societies in recorded history have been class societies. They are composed of opposing classes defined by their relationship to production-slaves and slaveowners, serfs and lords, or, in today's capitalist society, workers and capitalists.

In each of these societies, while other classes and layers exist, the opposition between the producing class and the owning class decides the shape of that society. Today, this is expressed by the antagonism between the workers—the wage slaves who produce all the wealth—and the capitalists—who appropriate all this wealth through their private ownership of the means of production. Production, therefore, is carried out for private profits, not human needs.

The oppression of women is not biological or natural, but social. While women have alcraftsmanship and commerce, produced a growing social surplus. This opened up the possibility some humans could live and prosper by exploiting the labor of others. The family and patriarchal inheritance was a way to regulate and uphold this unequal distribution by passing this property on from one generation to the next.

Along with preserving the private Joe Ryan/Socialist Action enforced women's dependence and subordination, religion provided the ideological justification for women's inferior status.

Role of the family The form of the family evolved with the forms of class rule. The slave-owning states of ancient Greece and Rome had different family forms than the medieval European equally true for the millions of women capitalism drew into the paid labor force.

As the Industrial Revolution forced family after family off the farm and into the mines and factories, it was women and children who most easily found work. The owners consciously hired women to destroy the previous male monopoly on skilled trades and drive down wage levels, using gender to divide the working class and increase their profits. Thus, the factory system was built on the superexploitation of women.

Lower wages were justified on the basis of women's domestic responsibilities. As one apologist for the manufacturers, Dr. Andre Ure, explained, "Factory females have in general much lower wages than males, and they have been pitied on this account with perhaps injudicious sympathy, since the low price of their labor here tends to make household duties their most profitable as well as agreeable occupation and prevents them from being tempted by the mill to abandon the care of their offspring at home. Thus Providence effects its purpose."

Women's oppression in society as a whole is tied to their role in the family. Continued responsibility for childcare, emotional and psychological support for other family members, and economic dependence shape the situation of women. It continues to serve as the justification for keeping women in low-paying jobs. After all, why invest in training someone who might prove an unreliable worker, taking off to care for sick children.

Sometimes women who do manage to enter into better-paying so-called men's jobs find it impossible to keep them because of their other unpaid job as wife and mother.

Two women who were hired the same year I was illustrate my point. The first never made it through probation. She was fired for excessive abstenteeism when she took time off work to be with her two-year-old son who was dying from cancer. The second lasted a year. She quit after being denied an unpaid leave of absence to return to Kentucky to take care of her dying mother.

Women's response

Women have responded to these conditions by creating a movement with a revolutionary dynamic; a movement that has the potential for inspiring a vision of a completely transformed society. After initial attempts to dismiss the women's movement with ridicule and scorn failed, the rulers of the United States and other advanced capitalist countries responded by paying lip service to women's demands while seeking to contain them

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