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This debate will be opened up fully in the next issue of Socialist Woman. However, we must recognise that the starting point for any strategy must be to analyse very precisely the relationship between women's role in the family and her relationship to the means of production.
The remainder of the conference was devoted to a discussion of the radicalisation of women over the past few years and whether the practices and organisation of the women's liberation movement enable it to draw in women fighting against their oppressionbe it as housewives, students, teachers, or trade union militants.
### MASS MOVEMENT
Many of the papers at the conference argued that the women's liberation movement should become the organisational focus for all women fighting their oppression. For them, the women's liberation movement should become a a mass movement with a working class base, which coordinates and centralises all the campaigns and struggles around womeus oppression. Such a broad based mass movement should have a basic pro gramme around which working class and other women could unite in struggle.
A paper produced for the conference by the IMG accepted that these proposals were a positive realisation of the need to unite with the increasing numbers of working class women taking to the streets for equal pay, better working conditions, nurseries, increased housing, etc. However, it was argued unrealistic and impossible.
times that the WLM represents a tives and strategies. The socialist current itself echoes these differences. Any attempt to thrust an organisational form on the WLM agreement could produce one of two dangerous results. Either we accept unity at any cost, under and in so doing completely stunt development of the movement.
continual debate about what is acceptable as a minimum basis forces at present involved in the broader movement and place a barrier against its growth and influence.
### WORKING CLASS
ing class based organisation must be seriously assessed. For this we must analyse the radicalisation of women in the women's liberation movement and of working class women radicalised outside of the WLM.
On the weekend of 22/23 September, 500 women met in Birmingham for the 3rd Conference of the ping in the women's liberation movement. Here, the women grappled with an assessment of the past practice of the women's movement and our future strategy.
The starting point of the discussion was a theoretical debate on the nature of domestic labour. It was clear that many womens groups have been involved in intensive study groups since the Last conference and have explored throughly Marx's economics and how this relates to women in the family.
that the exact forms proposed were WIDE SPECTRUM Firstly, it has been noted many wide specturm of political perspec1sm.
based on a common programmatic some umbrella term of 'sisterhood' the process of political debate and clarification which at the moment plays such an important role in the Or, by getting tangled up in a for the movement, we will exclude More fundamentally, the concept of the WLM becoming a work"Women and Socialism"
The WLM developed primarily from the contradictions within the material and ideological basis of the traditional female identity These had produced strains at a number of different levels. On the one hand due to the expansion of higher education, women received higher education on a mass scale compared with a favoured few in the prewar years. This latter group of women could usually find some privileged niche in the educational and welfare heirarchy of British capital+
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The women educated in the 60s, on the other hand, were faced with the contradictions of a job market totally inconsistent with the high expectations engender by their experiences of higher education and occupations in which sexism was rampant. This combined with a situation in personal relationships where the potentialities for economic independence were compl etely out of line with the culture of dependence which structured their emotions and feelings.
LEFT ORGANISATIONS The precise form in which these women organised around these contradictions, i.e. in the WLM, resulted from the lack of perspective offered by the traditional left organisationsthe Labour Party, and the Communist Party which accepted the bourg cois family. (In fact, in recent CP publications, the family is characterised as a pillar for future socialist society.)
The WLM, however, did not offer an organisational framework for working class women taking action around their own oppression. For the class position of women interacts with their sexual oppression, in such a way as to mold their specific experience of that oppression.
ferent organisational channels for overcoming these problems. Thus for the educated women, the gap (a career, economic independence, mitment to the family.
versities, etc. -a rejection of traditing the family) resulted. had no direct organisational links.
fic instances-cases like the Night Cleaners, and Pat Sturdy where WL groups were prepared to fill in the gaps left by the inactivity of the trade union movement. Such contact did not extend as far as an identification with the framework of the WLM-i.e. a rejection of the family.
ing class militants, their acceptance of the family role provided a break on militancy —of necessity broken in their period of struggle but very easily reverted to once the strug gle was over. icalisation process of women the WLM and of working class women Paigns.
Such an experience leads to difbetween what was in theory possible etc.) came slap up against traditional barriers-dependence on and comstruggles.
In a period of general political and social upheaval-VSC, Red Uniional authroitarian relations (includThe organised expression of this was the WLM.
LINKS For working class women the process was very different. NJACCER, tants. the Ford women's strike, although a adding impetus to the growing WLM Links were made in only very specinorms of the monogamous nuclear In fact, for many of these workSEPARATE FORMS An understanding of that radWeppler. has taken separate forms - provides the basis for any discussion of the organisation of our campAlthough for the reasons outlined above many women from white collar unions are members of women's liberation groups and are developing work in their trade unions, most working class militants do not turn to the WLM to centralise and coordinate their STRUGGLES A mechanical call-to working class militants-to join the WL groups in order to overcome their problems will be culturally and politically alienating except for a few individual working class miliInstead we should involve ourselves in existing struggles of working class women, through support committees, Charter campaign groups, trade union women's caucuses, etc. and attempt to develop these strug gles in ways that raise the more fundamental questions of women's sexual and economic oppression.
### ALLIANCE
What emerges therefore is an alliance between women's groups and organisations of the working class. The two organisational exp ressions of women's radicalisation remain separate but will often fuse together-sometimes in totally new organisational forms outside both the WLM and the trade union movement. Such fusions will allow important possibilities for the women's movement, the consciousness of women's oppression within the working class. This is the way the socialist current should be moving.
Celia Pugh, Ann Foreman, Dodie