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Last term, the Women's Action Group at Brunel University joined forces with the Students' Union in a fight for adequate nursery provision in the college. In the Week of Action of the NUS Grants' Campaign, the Vice Chancellor's office was occupied and demands placed on the adminsitration. Through joint action, they succeeded in winning E10,750 for a nursery.
Over the past few years, women's liberation groups have sprung up in colleges, universities and polytechnics all over the country. They have undertaken militant struggles on a wide range of issues: the provision of nursery and creche facilities; against sexist activity on campuses: for free abortion and contraception; countering anti-abortion groups; the married women's grants campaign; and actions in support of women workers in struggle both on and off the campus.
For a long period, the NUS had been able to treat the question of women's oppression in a token fashion, by distributing information, passing resolutions, and setting up committees. But the increasingly organised weight of women students has forced the union to set up a national campaign around the issues confronting women students. Its Relation to the Student Movement However, it is important that the Women's Campaign does not take place in isolation from the other struggles of the student movement. The general economic and political situation means that students must fight to achieve the demands of the grants campaign and defend student living standards in the face of educational cut-backs. There are specific implications for women students.
Grants for married women students are low because they are determined on the basis that married women are automatically dependent on their fathers or husbands incomes. The new grants structure will leave many married women worse off than at present. Single women students with children are also discriminated against through the low The demand for adequate nursery and creche provision in the colleges has taken on a new prespective since the cut-backs, and now involves taking on the college authorities and the Department of Education in a fight to increase educational expenditure.
Women campus workers- already a low paid sector- will be especially hit by the job rationalisations which will inevitably come in the form of heavier work-loads and redundancies.
At the present time, these issues must be a priority for the Women's Campaign by virtue of the immediate problems they pose for women students and women campus workers alike. The women's campaign must show that these issues are integral to the central struggle of the student movement. Only then will they gain the sort of support from students necessary if the demands are going to be met.
The nursery struggle at Brunel provides an excellent precedent for the women's campaign. Within the NUS women are clearly under-represented on all leadership bodies, both locally and nationally. Male chauvinist attitudes towards women student militate against the possibility of women playing a full part in both leadership bodies and the active campaigns of the NUS Brunel demonstrates very clearly that it is through placing demands which are of particular interest to women within the main campaigns of the NUS that the possibilities are opened up for women students to partici pate fully.
The education system in this country - as in all capitalist countries - is used to re-inforce and uphold a particular set of values. In this way, the exploitation of the mass by a small minority, the oppression of blacks, women and gay people are rationalised as natural' and 'inevitable' Thus the education system plays an important role in re-inforcing women's position of inferiority. An ongoing task for the women's campaign must therefore be to challenge this education both in terms of the access which women have to it and in its content The Campaign must do this by taking up and organising around demands for equal entrance qualifications, the introduction of more training courses, apprenticeship and day relcase courses for women: for an end to quotas which discriminate against women, and for the introduction of women's studies courses.
Finally, an important aspect of the Women's campaign must be to encourage wide support within the student movement for issues which have a general importance for all women, and which are being taken up nationally by the womens liberation movement • issues such as the rapid growth of the anti-abortion groups like LIFE and SPUC The campaign must demonstrate that not only is the reactionairy ideology put forward by these organisations a threat to women, but that it is also a potential threat to the student movement.
The women's liberation groups in the colleges have consistently fought around these issues in the past and it is now their organised strength and developed analysis which is going to play a key role in the success of the campaign. It is essential that they now develop an awareness of the issues which are affecting students so that they are able to push forward on demands which concern women in a way that will force the whole of the student movement to support them. Yvonne Taylor
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IMPERIAL TYPEWRITERS