[page 19]
1 am bewildered-this issue is filled with readable and politically relevant articles, with the shrieking exception of Hilary Wainright's review of Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Maybe I am wrong, but 1 was under the impression that your paper is aimed at a wide readership -including women working in all areas.
If so, I wonder how housewives react or how women working in factories react, when they buy a copy and open it to find an article reviewing, in an intellectual fashion, a book on such an abstract issue.
I found Juliet Mitchell's book totally unreadable-yet as a student I am used to reading theoretical stuff. To me it seemed to be full of unnecessary jargon and written in a heavy academic style. Far from enlightening women, surely it only serves to mystify us further-that is, if we even manage to decipher more than the first few pages.
1 hope Socialist Woman is not going to fall into the same trap as Juliet Mitchell and so many writers of the feminist movement-and the left generally. Surely the important thing is to communicate with each other-with the mass of people, not to compete for apProval in academic circles. Yours in sisterhood, Marianne Craig, Edinburgh.
There are two points to untangle in reply. If the point that Marianne is making is that the style of the book or the review (or both) is too intellectual or abstract, to be understandable, then that is one which could be corrected.
However if the point is being made that to include such a review of such a book, no matter how well written, is a waste of time because it doesn't rei. ate to the experience of women working in factories, then we must disagree entirely. That there will be no revolutionary movement, without revolutionary theory, is as true today as it was when when Marx was alive. His work was not the most readable, yet where would we be today if the common attitude had been This is too abstract to relate to workers'?
Juliet Mitchell has been in the fore front of developing a theory of women's liberation in Britain and her work is therefore worthy of examination, Psychoanalysis is one area of treatment of so-called "mental illness" or instability, which has been very much neglected or dismissed by the revolutionary left. To say that the subject is irrelevant to working women, is to ignore the fact that for better or worse, many doctors and social workers base their explanations of wom en oppressed by their family drudgery and isolation on Freudian principles.
Many of Freud's ideas are implicit in contemporary literature and it could grained in the common consciousness of most people in modern capitalist society. How often do you hear phrases like 'subconscious fear?
we examine the validity orotherwise of such theories, especially in the light of how it hampers or contributes to a better understanding of the oppression of women, as Juliet Mitchell has tried to do in her book.
the grounds that she doesn't make the importance of her findings explicit enough and that our reviewer also failed to do it for her, but we can not use the argument that the task wasn't worth attempting. That way lies the position that theory is unimportant.
inantly working class women. We have a series of pamphlets planned for the increasing numbers of women becoming radicalised, but who are inevitably unfamiliar with many of the ideas and assumptions of the women's movement. Hopefully this will solve some of the problems you have raised.
As you know, we are publishing Liberation News Konomichi-Hitosugi. And many women here are very interested in what is happening now in the American and English women's movement.
If you have any interesting news, please send it to us! We would be very happy if you will do this.
Please send articles to the Lib Shinjuku Center, 410, Toto Residence, 28-5, Yoyogit-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
We have set up a study to investigate the occurrence and treatment of rape, and as an important preliminary to our research we would be interested to hear from any doctors who have encountered this problem. We would like to know how far doctors consider rape as a medical problem and what advice and information they offer. We are interested to learn how the potential physical consequences of rape are managed e.g. possible VD and non-venereal genital infections, pregnancy, psychological effects (Both long and short Anyone who would be interested in co-operating, please write to us for a short questionaire.- Rape Medical Study Group, 26 Talfourd Road, London SE 15. be said that Freud's theories are now inIf this is so, surely it's desirable that We might be able to criticise her on Incidently, we do not see the readership of Socialist Woman as being predom- Editors movement. One day Women and Socialism conference on Perspectives for Building the Women's Liberation Movement as a Mass Movement. March 23 at Queen Mary College, Mile End Road, London E1.
Further details and information from Ann Fainder, 2 Cobs Cottage, Bishops Sutton, Aliesford, Hants.
Working Women's Charter Campaign Badges and Posters available: Posters, in a variety of colour: 20p each, 17%p each for 10, 15p for 20. Badges, white on red, 10p each, 8p each for orders of 20.
Contact S. Handley, 24 Vicarage Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham 14.
The Women's History Research Centre is being forced to disperse its collection through lack of funds.
This Center maintained an International Women's History Archive and a Topical Research Library of 2000 files documenting the position of women: past and present, in many countries, organisations, and events.
Some material has been micro-filmed. Further details from: Women's History Research Center, Inc., 2325 Oak Street, Berkeley, California, USA, CA94708 socialist evolution A quarterly Marxist journal that provides theory information, and debate around a wide variety of topics related to the building of a popular socialist In the current issue (no. 21)
Ell Zaretsky. "Male Supremacy ana ene Unconscious.* Michael Lerner, "Putting Socialism on the Agenda Selections from the Australian Communist Party.
with an introduction by Dorothy Healey.
In Recent Issues:
Stanley Aronowitz, "Food, Shelter and the American Dream" (no. 20)
Mina Caulfield, "Imperialism, the Family, and Cul tures of Resistance" (no. 20)
Andrew Feenberg, The Future of the French Left"
(no. 19)
SOCIALIST REVOLUTION MINDA PUBLISIENE COMPANY SAN FRANCISCO, CALIPORNIA SER
[page 20]
Women and their Sexuality in the New Film by Joan Mellen, DavisPoynter, $3.50.
Jean-Paul Sartre said in his book What is Literature? that it would be impossible to write a great novel which was anti-semitic. Doesn't the same apply to the equally oppressive idcologies of male chauvinism and sexisto? Yet how many writers have questioned to any great extent the oppressive image of women presented in the realms of popular culture? And more importantly, what can be done to change it?
An attack on sexism is beginning to take place inside the media -in publishing, journalism and television for example -with the code against sexism presented at the Women's Media Union Confcrence held in January. The ideas in this important book could point to the beginnings of a critique of the ideological role that much of the contemporary cinema plays in maintaining and intensifying women's oppression.
The core of the critique is spelled out in the first sentence of the book: "One scarches in vain in the contemporary cinema for a new perception of women which assumes their capacity and value." But Mellen's is not a feminist critiqueshe clearly relates the state of portrayal of women in the cinema to the development of late capitalism.
She argues in a fascinating thesis that the Hollywood films of the 40's, in the characters of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, etc. presented an image of independent, self-reliant women of self-esteem, which contemporary cinema has not surpassed.
### REGRESSION
Mellen argues that there has been a regression. Such an image of women in the 40's coincided with the Second World War and the need for women to work in the factories. "The needs of capitalism in temporary crisis required of women those qualities which were crushed during more stable times when, as passive property, they would return to sustaining the family and conditioning the young After that brief interlade, Hollywood reverted to form, with the presentation of women as simpering, dependent hysterics or undulating sexual manikins, epitomised by Marilyn Monroe:* But as well as being firmly in opposi tion to capitalism, she attacks quite correctly the films of the workers' states, particularly China, with its glorification of the regimented struggle of the impersonal woman, which serves simply to cel ebrate the wisdom and virtue of the burcaucracy. For Mellen (and for us):
"The governing ideas of both the so-called socialist and the capitalist nations are bourgeois. They focus on to the nuclear family presided over of bourgeois values and institutions men.
book to the theory of a cinema which portrays the liberation of women is that it must depict that liberation as part of lynch-pin of her approach to the problem them and conspires to limit and suppress real alternative become apparent.
### DEPICTING
Without the accompanying potential of change and rebellion, such traits implicitly remain eternal "natural' characteristics.
beings, both men and women, will be ineach other until a revolutionary change transforms the institutions which stifle them from cartiest childhood."
tacks one of the so-called masters of the book:
the family as the primary social institution and define women in relation by a strong patriarch. This persistence in the film art of the countries claiming to be socialist precludes the devclopment of a liberated image of woOne keystone of her approach in this a process of enlarging choices. The second is that only if films relate the sexual activity and mental state of women portrayed, to the corrupting society which surrounds them, can the possibility of change and a By simply depicting female neurotic misery and sexual and social debasement, no matter how sympathetic, is not enough.
Searching desperately for films which begin to tackle this task, Mellen commends Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism. This film, inspite of its anarchic and undisciplined technique, asserts that human capable of free, unrepressed responses to On the other hand, she viciously atcinema, Ingmar Bergman, who is traditonally and stupidly praised for having some special insight into women. Her bitter chitique of one of the latest films of this much vencrated director Cries and Whispers is one of the finest concrete analyses in the "Far trom being his 'favorite people" as one feminist critic supposed, Bergman exposes himself once again to be one of those film-makers most hostile to a vision of women as free, creative, autonomous, self-sufficient, productive, satisfied or even gentle. His women anather chained to bodies which leave them little freedom or opportunity to transcend the jices, demonic drives and subordmation peculiar to their gender....Cries and Whispers in fact provides one of the most retrograde portrayals of women on the contemporary screen... Bergman has made victims of his women precisely at the moment when they are rapidly rendering obsolete his vision of their natures.
In her chaper specifically on female sexuality in films, she shows by an analysis of fims, such as Klute, Carnal Knowlege, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday that women are most offen presented. as a)seductive mother-figures bicastrating bitches or c)passive, childlike recipients of male brutality. If they transcend the social norms in sexual terms they are often confused, disorganised neurotic (Alex in Sunday, Bloody Sunday). Most contempoary directors, whose films relentlessly, if increasingly subtly, work to drive women back into the stifling clutches of the family, by depicting the supposed horrors of indep endent life outside it.
A scene from Nichol's Carnal Knowledge, which Mellen analyses in depth.
The main thesis of Mellen's book, which I have attempted to outline, is developed in the first three sections. The rest, though fascinating, consists of essays of different directors or films, written at different times which only occasionally amplify her main themes.
Mellen includes, however, a crucial chapter on the depiction of lesbianism in the cinema, which is central to her argument and ends with a look at the consciously devised counter-revolution in the cinema, with the film Up the Sandbox which unsuccessfully attempts to debunk and undermine women's liberation and radical moveThis is, despite the fragmentary quality of the later passages, a brilliant readable and committed critique of modern cinema which anyone wishing to understand the ideological role of popular culture should read.
[page 21]
Daughter of Earth was first published in 1929. Together with Agnes Smedley's other works it went out of circulation during the US's post-war anti-communist hysteria, and has now been reprinted by the Feminist Press of New York.
The book is a largely auto-biographical novel dealing with the first part of Smedley's life up to her departure from the West in 1928 and before her long stay in revolutionary China. In factual terms the story tells of the childhood of Marie Rogers in a poor farming family in Missouri. She tells of her family's endless wanderings as her father searches for some kind of fulfilment, moving from one job to another, and Marie's own grasping at wider experience, education and ideas as she grows into adulthood, to save herself from the disintegration she sees most of her family members undergo.
The story develops against a background of extreme poverty and exploitation (imposed by the great mining monopolies the urban American socialist movement with its often sterile intellectualism, the struggles of the International Workers of the World, and the anti-war movement, and the intense and dangerous activity of exiled Indian nationalists organising against British PERCEPTION All this is presented with great power and perception. Marie Rogers describes herself as one who always "felt and acted first and thought afterward", and throughout the book the reality of every situation comes over on all levels of experience. physical sensation, colour, texture, atmosphere; an incredible awareness, in herself and other people, of nuances of consciousness, associations and relationships; the recognition of huge social and class forces at work; and Marie's own ability to give to an ordinary scene a visionary quality beyond the readily explicable. 'I was never clear," she says. What was truth and what was fancy I could not Goaded on by her 'desire to know everything in the world even if it hurt, she painfully learns the realities of society when she finds her hard-won superiority in class and "beyond the tracks" counts for nothing at the birthday-party of the doctor's daughter:
* *Her father hauls bricks and she lives beyond the tracks and she says her father can lick my father!" Clarence piped.
* "That doesn't matter, dear, that doesn't matter! Now just eat your icecrcam.' But I saw her eyes rest disapprovingly on me and I knew it did matAs an adult, she brings a similar openess to bear on her relationship with the New York Socialists, who, faced with a real member of the working class, 'automatically extended a hand, but their eyes were on someone else and they were speaking to others. I might have been one of the chairs they were gripping in passing... They left in me a feeling of confusion, of impotence, of humility, and even of resentment. I did not know how to learn the things they knew, and they had no time or interest to tell me how." Still she passes no judgment; she merely notes the difference between of the degraded position of married women arouse strong feelings of shame and disgust in her, and provide what is possably the most powerful motivating force in her struggle for personal independence. While recognising the psychological price paid, she maintains a deep pride in her beautiful aunt, Helen, who prostitutes her herself to buy clothes for her sister, Marie's mother, thus retaining a kind of independence.
Early in life Marie overhears an exchange which sums up for her the true position of the husband and wife in the marriage relationship', and which permanently festers in her consciousness:
nant wife. From childhood, Marie's observations Damn it kid, you know I love you!' she begged through her tearsfor now she could not go back to work even if she wished."
Marie's resolve to have nothing to do with sex and love, as weaknesses leading only to personal subjection, is too deeply ingrained in her being to be densed when she finds it in conflict with the more sensitive expectations of her middle-class first husband, Knut: "There was a merciless war being waged within my own spirit, a war between my need and desire for love, and the perverted idea of love and sex that had been ground into my being from my first breath, POISONED Marie comes to understand that it is in part her inability to resolve this conflictan inability forced on her by society which poisoned her attitude to love and sex-which wrecks her close second marriage to the Indian revolutionary Anand; having been raped by a comrade of the movement, she can only feel guilt and Anand himself cannot come to terms with the implications for himself of public dis cussion of the subject amongst his comrades. Again it is Marie who sees the elements of the situation clearly enough to make the only possible decision to give up both love and her long involvement in the Indian nationalist moment.
As Marie Rogers, Agnes Smedley draws no tidy political conclusions, She readily and actively identifies with the struggles of the exploited and oppressed, and the declaration of a Socialist friend that everything cheap and ugly in the people of her origins was made so by 'the system" comes back to her repeatedly, though, she says, *I did not know exactly what he meant by the "system".* In her quest to find out she finds herself more at home with the workers of the WW than with the intellectuals of the Socialist movement, and although she diligently studies Indian economics, finds a more lasting meaning in In the maybe inevitably rather arid atmosphere of revolutionary politics in Britain, Agnes Smedley's painful honesty to every aspect of her own experience is perhaps the most important message of the book for the left and for women's libThe book's Afterword calls attention to Smedley's fusion of the personal and the political, but appears to downgrade this this by speaking of the importance of "feelings and enthusiasm" in a radical movement. I personally would approach medley's method not as a welcome extra, but as an attempt at what must be a basic precondition, on both the individual and collective level, for the successful making of revolu-by Felicity Trodd.
[page 22]
Revolutionary Dynamics of Women's Liberation by Sabina Roberts, League for Socialist Action pamphlet, 15p.
The problem in reviewing this pamThe Economic Basis of the Status of Women, by Isabel Larguia, Warwick Univeristy Communist Party pamphlet, 10p.
In fact, during the twenties, an alarming number of working class men fearing for their jobs and their position in the family were accomplices in this "plot.
At the same time, a significant number of women defended their right to work in even skilled trades. During this whole period, the socialist movement was thrown
----- pull-quotes -----
ADVERTS ADVERTS-•
Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smed- ley, Feminist Press, £1.10
"Give back the clothes I bought you!' demands the husband of his now preg