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ploitation of women in the job situation was related to, and heightened by the position in the family as wives and mothers, there was a certain amount of confusion. A number of trade unionists and members of the Communist Party tended to ignore this point by insisting that the exploitation of workers, was simply a class question. Whether they were male or female was largely irrelevant. This left out the whole dimension of discrimination against women not only by the employers, but by the trade union movement itself. This lack of understanding was ironically highlighted by the organisation of the conference. In spite of the fact that there had been a resolution to the Trades Council for a creche to be provided at the conference, the women who turned up with voung children found that no facilities had been made available.
The discussion on organising Little, unfortunately, was resolved at the first delegate conference of the London Women's Charter Conference, held on 26 October, and called by an ad-hoc organising committee which was first formed shortly after the campaign began last March.
But the problem, so far as determining future perspectives, and even electing a committee were concerned, was the lack of structure for the main policy session. This has necessitated a recall conference.
In spite of these problems, which understandably led to the frustration of many of those who came, decisions were taken to hold a national Charter campaign conference, and to publish a national bulletin. This national focus is essential in a period where mass redundancies are at the top of the workers. this. Women's Day were put to the vote.
The only proposal put forward by members of the International Socialist group was that the demands of the Charter-and principally those of "direct relevance' to women on the shop-floor should be taken up at their Rank and File conference. It was pointed out that at a previous R & F conference, the demands for free abortion and contraception would not fit into a programme which could gain maximum unity among Members of the Communist Party, who, when the Charter was first drawn up had agrued that it was merely necessary to have it adopted by union district committees and executives, said that all the talk abour 'union bureaucrats was unfair. They should be made to support the Charter. The CP members failed to point out that in the vast majority of cases it requires mass struggle to achieve
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First instalment of a review of Juliet Mitchell's PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM One of the ways in which the women's movement challenged the complacency of liberal feminism was by rejecting its basic method of identifying oppression only in terms of whether women complained in an articulate way about their situation. This definition of the problem fuelled the ideology of the fifties and sixties which assumed that the majority of women were "happy" with their lot as housewives and mothers. Through questioning the idea that women had chosen this lot, through providing a context in which the daily, guilty neurotic, private expressions of ambiguous discontent could become politicised, the women's movement identified the hidden shapes and mechanisms of oppression - an oppression which is objective, which exists whether or not women are fully conscious of it.
Once the objective nature of our oppression had been identified in this way, it was no longer possible to take as natural the psychological characteristics that have been woven within us in the formation of our female identities. Characteristics which have formed an intricate web of emotions and myths, blurring our consciousness and deadening our capacity for change, turning us into "happy" housewives.
Our analysis of this process is relatively underdeveloped compared with both our analysis of the material basis of this culture and with our initial rejection of bourgeois definitions of discontent. One reason for this underdevelopment of our understanding of how sexist ideology actually works is examined in Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Here Juliet Mitchell implies that we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater by rejecting psychoanalysis as a tool because of the use to which it has been put, for example, by the tendency to establish femininity in a patriarchal framework. She argues the need to re-consider using this particular tool within the framework established by the women's movement. This would not only Hilary Wainright open up new horizons for the development of theory within the movement, but would also serve to counter the 'integrationist' use to which psychoanalysis is put. This use has interacted with ine development of the science ai 1 has overlaid it with massive ideological distortions, particularly in the direction of biological determinism.
But, as Octave Mannoni* argues, "Freud never concerned himself with the adaption of his patients to the society of his time: he enabled them to solve their problems themselves, and their reiationship to their milieu was one of them - no more and no less - for example -than their marital relationship, one he did not treat at all on a realistic plane as a counsellor would have There remains, however, the problem of the ambiguities in Freudian theory which made its ideological use and development possible and Juliet Mitchell does not avoid this question. For example, she goes into considerable detail about the changes and consequent lack of clarity involved in many of his uses of the concepts of "masculinity" and "femininity".
She also accepts the fact - which inspites the majority of feminist attacks on Freud - that in his personal life Freud was thoroughly imbued with the patriarchal culture whose workings in the formation of mental structures he sought to understand. But she argues tnar this is irrelevant to his contribution to our understanding of its workings.
What then is this theoretical contribution that, in spite of these problems, Juliet argues we must study and develop into a full theory of our distorted femininity and of the conditions for liberation? Freud's concern was to explore the mental processes involved in the entry of the human animal with its bisexual psychological dispositions, into
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human culture and the laws of sexual differentiation -the laws of patriarchy. His major theoretical concepts such as the Oedipus Complex and the related Castration Complex, penis envy, and Narcissism refer to relationship» and desires involved in the process whereby this bisexual creature develops a sexed identity and comes to mentally live its biological distinctiveness according to the laws of the culture it has entered. These concepts cannot be evaluated or developed without an understanding of them as the theoretical hypothesis of the science of unconscious mental life. That is what psychoanalysis is; it attempts to discover the laws of the unconscious and its relation to normal thoughts.
The unconscious is not mysterious and unknowable. We have indications of its existence through dreams, our use of language, the jokes which occur to us, the apparently inexplicable emotions we feel towards other people and in particular contexts. It is made up of normal thoughts and desires which are repressed because of their culturally determined unacceptability to consciousness and are, therefore, transformed by the unconscious into acceptable thoughts and emotions. The wishes that are repressed and transformed in the course of our entry into human culture and in the course of the formation of our sexed identities, through our first human relationships - within the family -are thus ever present, speaking to us from our unconscious mental life. Their presence is continually indicated by being re-evoked in socially acceptable forms by certain situations and relationships. In the case of women they express themselves in those psychological characteristics of passivity, vanity and so on which have ties us to our subordination, and have made us agents of its reproductior. through the types of relationships that we enter into. In explaining this relationship between conscious and unconscious thoughts, Juliet gives the example of penis envy and its transformation into the culturally legitimate desire for a baby. The latter is not a basic drive on the same level as penis envy, it is the culturally determined expression of this repressed desire. As Juliet says, 'The two wishes are in fact one, and will continue to be active in different parts of the mental apparatus: the penis wish will remain repressed in the unconscious, the baby wish will be consciously expressed"
The anti-Freudian feminists, whose arguments Juliet, rather sketchily, criticises, have not evaluated the steps that Freud made towards a theory of femininity in their proper conext of his theory of the unconscious and its culturally produced laws of transformation and repression. This has led them to inaccurately attack Freud for implying that the baby wish is biologically determined, flowing from a woman's physical lack of a penis. It also leads them to paint an over rationalistic picture of mental life and therefore to underestimate the insidious workings of sexist ideology. They imply that it has been transmitted to us merely through a process, admittedly pastel shades, given dolls to play with, criticised for aggression, praised for coquettry and submission, taught to read with books that hold up marriage and motherhood as the models of adult life and so on. Flowing from this they imply that combatting sexist ideology is merely a question of consciously rejecting these expectations and roles. These aspects of our socialisatior are important but they do not in themselves explain the deep rooted nature of our sexual identity as it has been formed within bourgeois society. The first Red Collective pamphlet were not brought up according to the traditional sexual stereotypes, nevertheless in their relationships they found themselves reproducing all the characteristics of the traditional "couple' and thus setting the scene for the continued stability of the Bourgeois family. An account of women's socialisation that takes no account of the unconsciousness also underestimates the problems of struggle against sexist ideology. Committment to women's liberation does not immediately rid us of the psychological characteristics created by this ideology. We still have the emotions and fantasies that our feminist consciousness finds shocking and contradictory. Juliet Mitchell's reinterpretation of Freud seems to me to provide some basic tools for coming to grips with the significance of these experiences of the subterranean operations of sexism and with making sexuality a terrain of political practice in order to undermine these bperations. However, it is not possible to evaluate the extent to which she does this without reading Freud independently. I have only read Juliet's interpretation of Freud which is why this is only a first instalment and is intended to recommend that people read this book rather than to provide a full critique of it. In the next instalment I intend to look more critically at the limits of psychoanalysis and particularly at Juliet's conclusions for the struggle against sexism. †'Freud: The Theory of Unconscious' NLB page 183. This is an overall sketch of Freud's work which can very usefully be read along with Juliet Mitchell's book.
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Ed. Patricia Hewitt. NCCL, 1974. 50p.*
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very thorough, whereby role expectations have been continually imposed on us through, for example, being dressed in pretty,
The Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism, indicates why these theories of socialisation are so inadequate. Their discussions about themselves show how, in spite of the fact that they