The crisis of the women’s liberation movement continues. No book has made as big an impact on this crisis since the famous Beyond the Fragments as the recently published Sweet Freedom by Anna Coote and Bea Campbell. Valerie Coultas argues that it charts an articulate but reformist perspective for the women’s movement.
Anna Coote and Bea Campbell: Sweet Freedom, Picador, 1982, £1.95
Sweet Freedom is at its best in its account of the birth of the modern Women’s Liberation Movement and its changing fortunes over the last decade. It captures the spirit of the early 1970s — the ‘elation of sisterhood’ — and analyses the influence that movement has had among women, trade unionists and on politics in general. Feminists, unsure about exactly how to fight back against the Tories, will no doubt look to it for solutions to the question on so many women’s lips today — what can be done?
The answer Sweet Freedom gives is one that would not have been popular 10 years ago. Search in this book as hard as you like, nowhere will you find the call for a socialist or even a feminist revolution. ‘As feminists,’ say Coote and Campbell at the very end of the book, ‘we are concerned with disturbing consensus.’ The consensus they wish to disturb is that between men and women. The consensus that they accept is the existence of the capitalist system. This book codifies a process which has been going on for sometime now. It represents the crystallisation of a professional, reformist feminism — a layer of women who have entered the media, the trade union bureaucracy’s research department and the higher professions and see the economic crisis as a threat to their continued social mobility. Pessimistic about the prospects for radical change they no longer focus on social transformation to achieve women’s liberation, they simply want more jobs for the girls.
This will appear a harsh judgement to many feminists. They will point out how the book is useful in describing the ideological backlash against feminism. They will note the detailed analysis of how women’s responsibilities in the home have caused a segregation within the labour market between women’s and men’s jobs. They will applaud the analysis of the toothlessness of Labour’s equality legislation. And they will welcome the pluralistic approach of the book to lesbianism and heterosexuality.
But to acknowledge that Sweet Freedom is good at describing the issues and dilemmas of feminists today is not to agree with its solutions. Women have learnt over the last decade that sisterhood is powerful but that it cannot hide political differences among women about strategies for the future.
Reformist Feminism
Anna Coote and Bea Campbell identify the central problem facing the Women’s Liberation Movement as follows: ‘Despite the spread of feminist influence into publishing, into TUC debates, into the language we use and into strong feelings of solidarity among diverse groups of women, there has not been a redistribution of wealth within the family.’ (my emphasis).
The book documents how the pattern of low pay for women has maintained despite government legislation because of women’s domestic responsibilities and because women’s voices are only rarely to be heard when bargaining takes place. Demands by feminists that were geared to an expanding capitalist market have not fared well under the present recession. Trade unionists don’t admit it but the ‘fight against female disadvantage is no longer a [illegible] economic context, the authors argue, that the ideological and cultural backlash against the feminism has to be understood.
But to identify a lack of redistribution of wealth within the family as the major problem is quite wrong. Coote and Campbell locate the unequal earnings between women and men as the key problem, urging men in the trade unions to become ‘more active parents and homemakers’ in order to ‘alleviate women’s domestic responsibilities’. Redistribution of wealth, real wealth this time rather than wages, across society (ie between social classes) is only mentioned as an afterthought. Bea and Anna’s argument is for a feminist incomes policy to be added into the Alternative Economic Strategy.
Indeed the very idea of social transformation as a strategic answer to women’s continued subordination is ridiculed: ‘Some now argue that profits are the rightful source of extra pay and benefits that are due to women’. In principle the authors agree but dismiss the idea in practice because ‘women will not wait till the revolution’.
The sentences are the key to the reformist strategy of the entire book. For revolutionaries there is no contradiction between the goal of socialist transformation and the fight for democratic reforms today. Indeed the fight for reforms today — for women, tax reforms, increases in child benefit, nursery provision, fertility control — is vital to lay bare the reality of the class system under which we live. It is not the lack of legal rights but the social, class-based institutions like the family which are the real source of women’s oppression. We can see this clearly today as women’s role as mother and wife is glorified by the Tory politicians in order to justify women’s loss of jobs. Marxists reject the Coote and Campbell method that we should fight for a few peripheral changes now because socialism’s a long way off. What we fight for now must be informed by our strategic goal of a socialist revolution.
The caricaturing of the arguments of revolutionaries in the book is quite deliberate. Coote and Campbell wish to sneak a social democratic perspective in through the back door. Who says you have to ‘wait till the revolution’ to attack the profits of the employers? What’s so terribly ‘wild’ about suggesting that equal pay and positive action programmes, including quotas to break down [illegible], should be paid for by the [illegible] in the context of [illegible] jobs for all workers? How many times have women got up in trade union meetings and argued that they were not fighting over the size of their slice of the cake, that the struggle was about taking over the whole bloody bakery?
The assumption that there should be transfer of wealth from men to women runs throughout the book. Coote and Campbell talk of the ‘patriarchal bonus’, the fact that men are far more likely to receive bonuses in their wage packets because of the pattern and continuity of women’s employment in contrast to men’s. They make the point that even in professions like teaching the philosophy of the ‘family wage’ means that women without any family responsibilities are confined to the lower scales and paid less than men.
It is, of course, true that the idea that the man is the real breadwinner and that women only go out to work for the ‘extras’ is strongly held among many trade unionists. It is equally true, as Sweet Freedom points out, that the trade union and Labour Party leaders have been more willing to mobilise against attacks on social issues like abortion — in alliance with groups like the National Abortion Campaign — than to take a stand on job opportunity, pay and promotion. Centuries of discrimination over women’s pay and job opportunities are real problems and few socialists deny that they need to be tackled now through positive action policies if women are to begin to enter the struggle on a more equal basis with men. But socialists also have to say why women are in this position and who is responsible for this discrimination.
Anna and Bea are crystal clear about this. Men’s interests conflict with women when it comes to pay and promotion. Trade unionists would need ‘pure altruism’ to champion women’s cause wholeheartedly and this has no ‘part in the tradition of British trade unionism’. ‘For if men see themselves as breadwinners-in-chief, how are they to view the prospect of women gaining equal opportunity and equal access to all jobs, with equal pay and job security? Especially at a time of recession, when jobs and money are in short supply, they will probably conclude that there will be less to go around for themselves.’ (my emphasis).
This is the voice of Eurocommunism gone wild. Male workers do not always look at things from the point of view of men. Sometimes, just sometimes, they have looked at things from a class point of view. That probably explains why thousands of men from the East of London demonstrated week after week in support of votes for women just before the outbreak of the First World War. It’s also why many male trade unionists have supported strikes for equal pay and regrading by women workers over the last ten years. It also accounts for the solidarity the NHS workers are receiving today from many trade unionists. Isn’t it just a bit too cynical to suggest that men support the demand for abortion for selfish ‘male’ reasons as Sweet Freedom implies?
Class consciousness has been known to cut across the divisions within the labour movement and propel the movement, as a whole, forward. This has nothing to do with ‘altruism’. Marxism is not a utopian world view, it is a scientific one. If working class men really had a vested, class interest in the oppression of women you’d never win them to fight for women’s demands by moral exhortation.
Bea and Anna say it would require ‘self-denial’ on the part of men to support women’s liberation, ‘without hope of future gain’. What nonsense. Don’t working class men ultimately gain from proper day nurseries and equal pay because the family income goes up and women can’t be used as cheap labour by the bosses? Doesn’t the class as a whole move forward when it fights for the demands of the most oppressed groups within that class? Women, the group most directly affected, will lead the fight for their demands but in the process they must and will win men to see where their real class interests lie.
Of course it’s difficult to see this if you accept that in a recession there are only a few jobs to go round and the nasty male trade unionists are grabbing what they can and leaving women out in the cold. But why should we swallow the argument of the employers that there are only limited number of jobs available? The struggle for women’s liberation is an anti-capitalist struggle. It challenges the capitalist state’s use of women as a source of cheap labour and free domestic labour. It is part and parcel of the broad movement for social change in our society. Women don’t want to take jobs off men. They want to see a fight against unemployment as a whole and within that context an extension of opportunities for women.
Coote and Campbell are pessimistic in their view of men and of the prospects of achieving liberation for women because they make no distinction between the traditions of the leaders of the British labour movement and of the ranks. In fact they share a common framework with many of these leaders and the ‘social contract mentality’ is never challenged throughout the book. The authors give little coverage to struggles that show the bureaucracy up in a bad light and when they do, as in the case of the NUPE dispute at the end of the last Labour government, they use the excuse that workers are sexist to get the bureaucracy off the hook.
British trade unionism was craft based in its origins, its leaders are timid, conservative social climbers who are unlikely to put themselves out for their most-oppressed members. But, despite anti-women prejudices, you can’t place the ranks in the same bag as their leaders. Chartism, the New Unions in the 1880s, the Shop Stewards’ movement before the First World War, the battles around regrading and equal pay in the early seventies, and the fight for jobs today represent quite another tradition.
Campbell and Coote reinforce the popular prejudices that many have towards the rank-and-file of the trade unions giving male workers a much more hostile treatment than either the employers or the bureaucracy. A false enemy — men — becomes the main target in the book while the ruling class and their allies in the trade unions get off scot-free.
A False Record
No historical record of the Women’s Liberation Movement will ever be non-controversial. A movement that involved such diverse and broad-ranging ideas will always contain different understandings of its own history. An attempt to draw a balance sheet is a bold and useful project in itself.
But the lessons that Sweet Freedom draws reflect the concerns and orientation of the layer of professional feminists mentioned earlier. They do not look at the past or present of the women’s movement from its point of contact with the mass of women and their solutions are not ones which encourage mass self-confidence and self-activity. An introspective record produces introspective conclusions. After explaining that despite women’s ‘guerilla warfare’ against it, the institution of the family is still as strong as ever, they announced (with an extremely witty footnote) that the issue of sexuality ‘holds within it a fundamental challenge to Patriarchy’. It’s as if there is a Chinese Wall between the experience of the family for the mass of women and the experiments with sexuality of the feminist elite. ‘What distinguishes this movement from others is that women have begun to confront the political implications of the physical and psychological aspects of human life and to challenge conventional notions about sexuality.’
They see these notions coming under threat in an alliance with the labour movement because of its ideological backwardness. According to Sweet Freedom this is the reason for the urgency behind demands for more full-time trade union officials, researchers, MPs, editors and heads of schools and colleges. Consciousness has to be raised on a grand scale by capturing the citadels of ideological power.
The problem here is that our eyes are constantly being focused on the top of these institutions. We’re never allowed to look down into the ranks, where the mass of women most definitely are. Because a small layer of women within the broad movement for women’s liberation have had the economic independence and the cultural leeway to challenge conventional notions of sexuality and begin to make inroads into previously all male enclaves, this is projected as the way forward for everyone else.
But the vast majority of women are not in this position. Single parenthood for most women means poverty, real poverty. That’s why marriage lives on in our society and even when women divorce, they usually remarry. It’s why women go back to men who beat them up. The rise of a ‘lesbian culture’ is a symbol of women’s greater choice today about how they live their lives but it is not a choice that the mass of women can openly opt for. Again economic dependence as well as cultural factors mediate against this. Experiments in free love — as the women’s movement has always understood — are open to male manipulation. The solution to the sexual liberation of women is intimately tied up with their social and economic liberation. It is true that many women’s personal lives are being transformed by the political struggles women have engaged in over the last decade.
But the ultimate solution to the sexual, psychological and social oppression of the mass of women in our society does not lie in changing lifestyles as a strategy. It can only be based on the overthrow of capitalism and full economic independence for women.
The political impatience that working class women have often expressed about the obsession of modern feminism with sex has some validity here. Challenging traditional views about female sexuality is, of course, an important part of modern feminism. But there are objective constraints on this process and if these are not faced up to a feminist lifestyle can become a substitute for political campaigning, an escape route away from the direct action and militancy of the feminist movement.
This brings us to the real meaning of the slogan ‘the personal is political’, so often put forward by feminists. It does not mean that changes in lifestyle and participation in ‘consciousness raising’ is the top rung of feminist political activity, a pre-condition for membership of an elite women-only club. Thousands of women have gone on strike for equal pay, argued in the office or factory about insulting pin-ups on the wall, demonstrated for nurseries, free abortion, and higher family allowances who have never been part of a ‘consciousness raising’ group. The real significance of the slogan surely lies in the shared understanding of thousands of women that what were previously conceived of as private, personal issues — rape, abortion, divorce — are public, social issues; that through collective action women can force their concerns into the centre of the political arena. They can hold governments to ransom as they did in Italy over the divorce referendum. This was how modern feminism come to life, building on the experiences of the struggle for the vote a hundred years ago. The books, the magazines, the women-only bands, the newsletters, the ‘discovery of the pleasure of other women’s company’ were all part of a fighting movement. This was why the anti-Corrie campaign was such an inspiring victory — because it showed women’s collective power and their collective strength in action.
Sweet Freedom does not grasp the radical traditions of modern feminism. It ignores its anti-capitalist, anti-establishment traditions. It wants women to ‘engage with power’. It attempts to steer them into the respectable channels of traditional politics, headships and editorships — the old middle class women’s roles of ‘educating’ the great unwashed and making a career for yourself as you do it.
For socialists, however, the kind of power that women need to engage with is the power of the working class movement. If our aim is to achieve the total abolition of capitalism we must line up with those forces who have the power to overthrow it, not simply pursue cosmetic changes. We need more women shop stewards, more women’s committees in the unions, more women with louder voices at the TUC and Labour Party conferences, and more action around women’s demands. Of course, socialists and feminists will urge women forward as trade union officials, councillors and MPs, but these women must be judged on their commitment to the class as a whole not just their record on women. We want positive discrimination so that women can play an equal role in the struggle to change the status quo in society, not to be co-opted into it.
Feminism does need to be revitalised in Britain today, but inspiration will not be found sitting around bemoaning the demise of ‘consciousness raising groups’. Certainly a new phase of the struggle for women’s liberation is opening up. But the autonomy of the Women’s Liberation Movement is a political concept, not an organisational fetish about women-only groups. It means women fight for their demands and don’t subordinate them to the needs of the capitalists or the bureaucrats. Sweet Freedom says go for piecemeal reforms, get access to the citadels of power and make the best of a bad deal. Revolutionary Marxists have a different answer — that it is not possible to defend women today if we don’t get rid of this rotten system. Our goal is revolution not reform. If women today can’t see that capitalism will never concede their demands than they must be blind.
‘Those who fight most energetically for the new are those who suffer most from the old’, wrote Trotsky in Women and the Family. It is among the ranks of the most oppressed women today that feminists will find inspiration for the struggles of women as a whole: from the school leavers, the immigrant women, the women workers. It means continuing to learn about and support the struggles of women world wide — in Ireland, in the Lebanon, in Nicaragua and El Salvador where women-only militias fight death squads armed and trained by American imperialism. These are the women whose voices are not raised in the pages of Sweet Freedom. The debate is sharper among women today because the options are fewer. Women can line up with the bourgeois individualism of the SDP and advance themselves at other women’s expense or they can stick with the mass of women. There is no room today for the shady utopian compromise that Sweet Freedom offers. Do Bea and Anna really believe they can persuade Len Murray to negotiate a feminist incomes policy anyway?
Revolutionary Marxists fight for a mass, campaigning orientation for the women’s movement. A visible active public profile on the key issues of concern to the mass of women. We take the demands of feminism into the mass organisations of the class, into the ranks, onto the shop floor. Moral exhortation will not change men’s attitudes towards women. Political action has always been the means whereby consciousness has changed and it will continue to be the best way to take forward. The [illegible] politicians — male or female — will only be [illegible] when they are pushed from the base. More pressure, not less, from within the labour movement is needed today than was [illegible] years ago to make them move for [illegible].
To opt for the reformist road of Sweet Freedom — more Room at the Top for us please — would take our energies in a different direction. It would decapitate the women’s movement at a crucial time. This book should be widely read but equally widely opposed.
VALERIE COULTAS is a regular contributor to Socialist Challenge and an activist in the women’s liberation movement