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I have been listening to your speech and to an analysis of what you have been saying. Now I have something to say to you. I firmly believe that you unaware of how poor people exist are and 1 am the person to enlighten you because I am poor. 1 am a married woman but separated from my husband and have custody of our one child, a boy of 12. I am fortunate, I actually receive my maintenance, but it in taxed at 8/3 in the C. I work full time and am taxed as a single person. on emergency code although I have worked at the same company since May 1970. Deductions from my pay are 15/national insurance, 1/2 graduated pension, 16/- tax. My total income is C12 12s 10d per week. 24 of this I must NOT spend, it pays my rent C2 10s, rates 10/- and the other c I save for my electricity bill. we are left with C8 12s 10d. My other expenses which have to be met are as follows:is d per week coal D milk papers private insurance TV 6 11 For food, cleaning materials, i.e. toothpaste, soap, soap powder, vim, floor polish, shoe polish and clothes 1 am left with the vast aum of S6 5e 1d per week. First food, coffee has gone up from 4/1 to 5/10, sugar from 1/4 to 1/6 for 2 1b, flour between 1/7 to 2/1 for 5 Ib, tea between 2/6 to 5/1. The cheapeat butter lins gone up from 1/5 to 1/7 for 21b.
Are you letting the price of food go up so that when we creep into the Common Market you can say there now, they aren't so much higher are they? But we gre feeling the pinch now, you aren't fooling anybody with this ruse.
I have applied for a rent rebate and at the time of writing am awaiting a ту воп.
and a duffle coat.
I am still So a joint either.
Find this one. hand me downs decision. I have also applied for and received a grant for school clothes, free meals and one pair of shoes for The clothes grant was for CIO. I was informed that I could buy two pairs of trousers, two shirts, one pullover, one school tie, one blazer In actual fact I bought one pair of long trousers, two shirts and two pullovere - that came to 29 158. They are not top quality and I bought them plenty big enough so he can grow into them, In York alone there are an estimated 800 women who are widows, divorced or separated. Do you expect them to struggle on for ever? Have you ever stood at the meat counter of a large store (where I might add the meat is the cheapest) and watched an old age pensioner pick up the cheapest Joint she can find, look at the price, put it down and turn away? You want ta weep as you wonder what she will have for her Sunday lunch. I can't afford Since when did you have sausages for your Sunday lunch? The firm I work for do not supply luncheon vouchers as many do in London. I don't know of any firm that does supply them in York. I take sandwiches. Don't suggest I get a better job, it took from November 1969 to May 1970 to All my clothes are from kind friends, my shoes are birthday or Christmas presents. I haven't been in a store to buy a coat or dress for years, I am sick and tired of the eternal struggle to make ends meet, If I hear another report where someone says the housewife will have to bear the cost I'1] scream, Another phrase that makes me contemplate murder is 'pockets of poverty'. Believe me, this is a myth, There are old age pensioners, mentally handicupped, physically handicapped, one-parent families, low-income families, just to mention a few. There are blankels, huge blankets of poverty, Stop inis propaganda where people think there are just a few here and there.
Has it ever occurred to you what would happen 11 the entire working population of women went on strike for equal pay or for beiler social benefits for
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people in desperate need? | know men emile at the thought of women on strike but the idea is spreading, believe me. we could bring the entire country to a Just think for a moment of all stop. the places where women are employed today, from doctors and lawyers to char ladies.
So the Tories have got what they want, POWER, what are you doing with it? Helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? If so, the one thing that I value above all else on this earth I will have to give up, my son will have to go into care. He will lose the parent he has left, to be looked after by people who don't know him or love him. Because I can't struggle on for much longer.
So the next time you open your fridge door, switch on your central heating, hear the noise of a vacuum cleaner or washing machine, just think of all the people who haven't got these so-called necessities, and for God's sake help 115.
Reprinted from 'SCARLET WOMAN', journal of York Women's Liberation Group. SEXUAL POLITICS.
By Kate Millett.
Published by Rubert Hart-Davis at E2.50 This book arose out of a short paper prepared for a women's lib, meeting and grew into a long thesis. In it, the writer traces the sexual revolution! (or treform rather than revolution!), examining not only what actually happened, such as the fight for the vote, but also the ideas that inspired it - or tried to hold it back. Kate Millett obviously attaches great importance to the literature of the period, but whether because she feels it influenced people, or was a mirror of prevailing attitudes, is not quite clear. She then investigates the counterrevolution', and here Freud is enemy no. 1. Kate certainly tears into him with a vengeance, and I found this one of the most interesting parts of the book. There ie no doubt that we are all influenced by pop psychology', which is very invidiuus, but anyone reading this book has at least been warned. In this section, she also examines the postrevolutionry period in the USSR, as well as Nazi Germany. The last part of the book is concerned with the way Various male writers display their psyche. Kate Millett's main thesis is that sex has a frequently neglected political aspect!; by politics, she means 'powerstructured relationships!. Now, this is fine as far as it goes, but her contention is that the most important point about our society - and 'all other historical civilizations! - is that they are patriarchies. ' the primary social and political distinctions are not even those based on wealth or rank but those based on sex. For the moat pertinent and fundamental consideration one can bestow upon our culture is to recognize its basis in patriarchy.' In other words, that the pooreat man is in some way more privileged than any woman.
The trouble is that Kate Millett lacks a scientific analysis of society: she sees only one of the more obvious man¡festations of capitaliam and attributes Engels, not only for his analysis of pat- all our ills to it. Although she praises riarchal marriage and the family, but al also because he showed that it waa not a universal or inevitable system, she ignores the rest of Marxist analysis and this leads her into some serious mistakes and omissions.
For example, she says: "It is rather disturbing how the great changes brought about by the extension of the franchise and by the development of democracy which the eighteenth and nineteenth century accomplished, the redistibution of wealth which was the aim of socialism (and which has even had its effect upon the capitalist countries) and finally, the vast changes wrought by the industrial revolution and the emergence of technology -all had, and to some degree atill bave, but a tangential and contingent effect upon the lives of that majority of the population who might be female. Might, indeed! Even liberal economists have had to admit that the so-called 'redistribution of wealth'is an illusion; and it is
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the emergence of technology, whether in the factory, or as represented by the pill, which has been an important factor in the growth of women in the labour force.
And: 'Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is possible to argue that women tend to transcend the usual class stratifications in patriarchy, for whatever the class of her birth and education, the lemale has lever permanent class association than does the male. Economic dependency renders her affiliations with any class a tangential, vicarious and temporary matter.' In fuct, it could just as well be argued that women were parasitic on their class and would therefore (espeially upper-class women) cling to it more. "Thrown upon their own resources, few women rise above working class in personal prestige and economic power, and women as a group do not enjoy many of the interests and benefits any class may offer its male members. Women therfore have leas of an investment in the class system!
many bourgeous Jews helped to betray the victime of the gas chambers. *But it is important to understand that as with any group whose existence is parasitic to its rulers, women are a deperidency class who live on surplus. This is both meaning lese and wrong. Even if the second part followed from the first, what she is really saying is that all women live on profit, i.e. that their husbands' paypackets contain a little bit of the dividends for their wives! Not to mention those women who go out to work and who are paid 505 of a man's wage. It certainly is good of the boss to forgo some of his profite to provide employment for these parasites.
There are lots of good things in this book, but Kate Millett, like most of the popular writers on this subject (hence their popularity?) ducks the real issue - that our society is a class society which makes profit out of women's subordinate position, and that the only way to women's liberation is through an end to this profit system, (Which is not to say that liberation follows immediately on the overthrow of capitalisa, but that is a pre-requisite.) Because she cannot see the real causes, she cannot pose real solutions. After all the anger has errupted, anger that will find tany echoes in her readers, what has she to say about ending the 'root cause! all our troubles? The ultimate paragraph reads: 'It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last aecomplish it aim of treeing half the race from ita immemorial subordination - and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the hareh realities of polities, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.' Kate Millett G5 Mrs. Sarah Miles, Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party. talking about the vetting of prospective candidates' wives by selection committees, said on 25th Feb.: "The wife of an M.P. has just got to realise that she doesn't come first." COMMENT: - No, there are more important things, like property, privilege, profit...
G The Suffragette that knee in-irs Drawing Women Back: Militant Woran, c. 1910
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i am a POLITICAL PRISONER ДО РA0 mont diu angela Fi am al THE CORRUPT BLACK COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT (U.S.A) COULD NOT ACCEPT davis SUCH A COMBINATION'
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Leonora Lloyd SEXUAL POLITICS
The same sort of thing could have been said about Jewa in Hitler's Germany, yet