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In February this year, the National Council for Civil Liberties organised a conference on women's rights, attracting nearly 600 women. The aim was to provide a setting for the discussion, sharing of information, and organising of activity on problems faced by women in employment.
A number of unions sent delegations along, and a wide variety of women also turned up in other capacities-schoolgirls, pensioners, manual and professional workers, housewives, unsupported mothers, claimants, and students.
Danger! - Women ar Work is the NCCL's report on that conference. Reflecting the workshop structure, the pamphlet has sections on the major areas in which working women are penalised by their social role and which represent the main institutional channels by which their oppression is perpetuated:
Equal pay, anti-discrimination, maternity and childcare provisions: protective legislation: social security, national insurance and pensions. training and further education, and the general problem of women's relationship to the trade unions.
The booklet reproduces the background papers produced for each workshop and attempts to summarise the main points MEN'S WORK which arose in discussion of each topic.
FACTS AND PROBLEMS Not having attended the conference, 1 found this method of presentation provides a very clear and useful introduction to the basic facts and problems of each area: for example, the section on maternity leave summarises the TUC's activity on the question, lists the demands worked out by Mothers in Action, and gives a comparative table of arrangements in EEC countries.
The broad nature of the conference meant that a variety of experience was brought to the workshop discussions, which is useful in highlighting problems that might not be immediately obvious-for example the fact that women given 'equality" by being allowed to clean dangerous machinery would get less compensation if injured.
in the introduction, is that opposing points of view couldn't be worked out in the time available, and there was little chance to formulate plans for action, except in a very general sense.
and contributions are unduly weighted towards legislative and reformist activity: the proposal for workplace nurseries in the childcare background paper was criticised in workshop discussion, but the social security discussion report has the group apparently agreeing that women should be assumed innocent of cohabitation until proved guilty!
BEYOND REFORMISM However, the background notes on training and further education prepared by Arsenal WLG go beyond the usual statistics and proposals for reform to try to set the problem WOMEN'S WORK NOW in a wider social context and to consider the attitudes girls leaving school have to their own education.
in women's liberation about the way girls are moulded into a stereotyped femininity, the effect of women's essential work in the family on the position of women in the labour market, to the detailed but often separated knowledge which exists in the question.
The negative aspect of this, which is noted A number of the background papers and work accepted, nised workers.
WORK 1975: AFTER THE EQUAL PAY' ACT They stress the need to 'connect the ideas trade union movement about women's position in industry', and propose joint women's liberation/trade union discussions on the STRUCTURES OR ATTITUDES? The nature of the problems likely to be encountered in this field is highlighted in the report of the women and trade unions discussion. The report summarises reasons for the unionisation of women workers (begging some questions on the way-eg in proposing a "fair rate" for 'genuinely and objectively evaluated jobs) and the main difficulties briefly: prejudice, women's dual role, the exclusion by unions of activity on the 'social" issues which affect women, the extra effort needed to remedy this, and the need to get women's right to The priority given to subjective factors is echoed in the speeches of guest women unionists: in particular Pat Turner of the GWU, apparently assuming the trade union movement is structurally OK, blames women for not putting themselves forward and for their lack of confidence-and later takes the same attitude to low-paid, unorgaOverall the pamphlet provides a useful starting point for further investigation and or activity, and is well worth the 50p for. the summary it provides of a wide range of basic information. A guide to further sources is also included.
Finally, Liz Mackie's cartoons alone speak volumes-and at a guess will be cropping up in women's papers and leaflets for some time to come.
FELICITY TRODD *Pamphlet available from NCCL, 186 Kings Cross Road, London WCIX 9DE
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Elizabeth Wilson's pamphlet is an important contribution to the discussion on the demands of the women's movement and to an understanding of the Welfare State in Britain. It is one of the first attempts to attack the myth, perpetuated even by 'radical' sociologists, that the welfare state has improved the position of the working class and especially of women.
Instead Wilson examines through an historical outline of the development of the Welfare State as a form of class domination how it has distorted the quality of life, not improved it.
### WELFARE
STATE Keynes, who proposed taxation policies, plus full employment and increased conof the pre-war crisis; and Beveridge, who was the architect of the social security scheme intended to carry this out in practice.
aly of the 'economic problem-how to get more surplus value out of labour-but also the "political' and "social problems that workers, especially women, might organise independently of the State. The Welfare State and free collective bargaining Keynes and Beveridge helped to construct were posed as a 'middle way" between capitalism and communism.
education, health service, and so on) were aimed at people as part of a family, tying women closer to the home, or to their dual role as mother and worker. Thus it reinforces the ideology of the woman bringing comfort, happiness and creating the loving heart of the family. Wilson examines the whole baggage of mysticism, supported by psychology, of gender roles and sexuality.
The theorists of the Welfare State were sumption, designed to prevent a repetition class.
Wilson shows that they were aware not The Welfare State's provisions (housing, only the Labour Party wants to keep it, and even then only pretends to defend the symbol of the Beveridge ideal.
She sees this as a result of the contradictions within the Welfare State. What she fails to grasp is that the contradictions are within the capitalist system as a whole. The ruling class wants to maintain the Welfare State, but at the expense of the working So far from wanting to ditch the Welfare State-so useful in the past-ever since the "60s the bourgeoisie has been looking for resources to finance it. On the one hand, we see the growth of private schemes in health, housing and pensions. On the other, the systematic division of the working class into the better-off, and the poorest, with the latter being saved from destitution at the expense of the former.
Hence the increasing use of such devices as Family Incomes Supplement, and rent and rate rebates, as well as the greater emphasis on 'community action'. New ideas are constantly floated-prison 'reform", the Tax Credit Scheme and so on.
The implications for the women's move ment and for revolutionaries are that the proposed anti-discrimination legislation and Equal Pay Act will try to channel women's struggles into further reliance on the State, The Housing Finance Act and NHS reorgani sation make it more urgent for women to organise against any further oppression.
Secondly, we must also be clear about an important point Elizabeth Wilson only touches on in her pamphlet, when she says we must 'initiate forms of struggle to extend our control over the Welfare State's benefits'.! If such struggles are not to end in reforms of the present system, the extension of control must be independent of the State and pose alternative organs of power.