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In Spain, increasing numbers of women are being arrested and jailed. Eight women have recently been charged with the bombing of a cafe in Madrid in September 1974. In this bombing, 13 people were killed and 50 were wounded. Although the left groups have denied, and even condemned the bombings, the Franco regime continues to lay the blame at their doorstep.
Two of the arrested women are EVA FOREST and LYDIA FALCON. Both are well known activists in the newly emerging women's liberation movement in Spain. Lydia Falcon-who has written several books about the oppression of women was the victim of such brutality upon her arrest, that it was necessary to hospitalise her Eva Forest is a doctor and a psychiatrist. She has recently written a book about Cuba, and has been an active supporter of anti-imperialist struggles-particularly in the Vietnam Solidarity movement. Forest was subject to similar brutality upon her arrest: she was kept in solitary confinement for 40 days and tortured for ten days.
Now the dictatorship has charged Forest with the execution of Carrero Blanco (former Prime Minsiter of Spain). Antonio Duran, past leader of the Pegaso car factory strike in "68 and of building workers" struggles in '71-72 has also been charged. EVA FOREST subjected.
An account of Eva Forests torture at the hands of the Spanish police was recently published in a French daily. It recounts the systematic beating, the rapes and the insults and obscenities to which she was These two comrades, Forest and Duran now face the death sentence. Their fate depends upon the willingness of the working class to mobilise in their defence. For us in the women's movement, this task has a particular seriousness.
An international committe of solidarity has been set up in France, Because Eva Forest is well known in the French women's moverpent, it isn't surprising that women's liberationists have been in the forefront of organising such solidarity.
Some 500 prominent women activists have signed an appeal on behalf of Forest and Duran, The signatures include such names as Simone de Beauvoir, Francoise Sagan, Delphine Seyring, Michelle Vian.
So far, the campeign in Britain has been led by the London Spanish Solidar ity Committee. It is urgent that trade union bodies, student unions, and women's groups throw their weight behind the campaign. Further information about the Committee from the Red Weekly. 01-837-6954
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Since Labour has come to office, virtually none of the promises in their election 'Charter for Women' have materialised. Rather than providing real opportunities for women, and not making polite noises about equality', the Labour Government has responded to the desperate economic straits of British capitalism with policies which will make the working class pay for the crisis.
Because of women's social position bearing responsibility for the family and working outside the home for peanutsthey are bearing the brunt of many aspects of this attack.
Three of the major features of the economic crisis affect women particularly severely. Inflation (which is now running wild at over 20 per cent a year) piles up extra tasks at a woman's doorstep, for she is expected to carry out the same domestic duties with less money to do so, and often must take on part-time work to make ends meet.
Women will be among the hardest hit by increasing redundancies. In London we have had a taste of what is to come in the dispute at Hoover's. Here management retaliated against the production workers-mainly women-for supporting a strike by the toolmakers with 100 lay-offs a week. At present the recession is hitting two industries-cars and constructionin which the workforce is predominantly male. Figures of redundancies and lay-offs will vary according to the structure of the workforce but even when industries employing predominantly women are involved, it is difficult to determine the severity of the crisis. For example, The Economist recently noted that of all people unemployed, 8 per cent of the men were not registered, whereas as much as 54 per cent of womAnother feature of the crisis which affects women in a number of ways is the slashing of the welfare state expenses. According to Chancellor Healy's budget there is to be a 5 per cent cut in public spending. Historically, one function of the welfare state was to ensure the efficient functioning of the family, so these cuts will have a profound effect on the social relations of the family, and , in particular, on women's role in If the state can't keep up its ends of the stick, if the few nurseries that exist are closed, for example, then these tasks will fall back on the family and into the lap of women. Elisabeth Wilson in "Women and the Welfare State' argues that the family has consistently been used in the post-war period as a handy institution for shoring up or supplementing inadequate social welfare provisions. She pinpoints a number of examples, beginning with the 1959 Mental Health Act, which laid emphasis on the care of the mentally disordered 'in the community'- meaning, of course, by the mother (since the community provisions of day-centres and work-shops have nefer materialThe cuts introduced by the Labour Government in the fields of health, housing and education have thus added a further impossible burden to the list of domestic responsibilities women already have.
Likewise, the strains to which the family is subjected are considerable. Take just one example. With slashes in both public and private expenditure cutting back on housing to the tune of over 100,000 homes since 1973, the rate of homelessness is increasing daily. This results either in the physical break up of the family, or in temporary measures which cram an entire family into cramped, one-room quarters. In either case the pressures are immense. They are reflected in such figures as the 110,000 divorces per year; 150,000 children handled by the courts each year following marriage break-downs; or the recent establishment of 17 homes currently opened for battered women in Britain.
This 'crisis in social relations' has not gone by unnoticed by the ruling class. Capitalism depends too much upon the smooth functioning of the family unit. Thus we see report after report commissioned by the Government to investigate how things can be patched up. The Finer Report, for example, emphasises " conciliation, reconciliation and counselling' before divorce proceedings are inWe also see alliances being made between an anti-working class group like SPUC or the National Front and supposed representatives of the working class, like Labour MPs, in attempts to furthur restrict the already limited right to abortion. All these measures serve to draw the family together and to ensure that women will be tied even more closely to it.
Thus at a time when the working class is under massive attacks, the family, as always in the past, playing its role as a central institution in capitalist society, is being used as the shock absorber' for the ruling class. The way forward in the fight against these effects is not to defend capitalism's 'shock absorber' but to defend the individual members of the family (men, women and children) from the effects of the crisis. This means building a political fighting unity to transcend the social relations of the family and fighting for solutions which ultimately will mean the end of the family, along with all the rest of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist system. With women this means pulling them out of the family by fighting for child-care facilities, free abortion and contraception on demand, etc - all which will serve to weaken their ties to the family.
Socialists in the women's movement must take up the fight against the attack on the living standards of the working class. This means showing our opposition to the Social Contract by organising against it. The Labour Government has called for "social and economic peace', for a truce on the wages front in return for social concessions. But the ruling class attacks have been directed at the 'social realm' both through an ideological battle and through cuts in social spending.
Through such campaigns as the Working Women's Charter we can draw together women's groups, housewives, tenants associations and trade unionists in a centralised fight on both fronts. We can organise solidarity actions for women workers fighting against redundancies and low pay. And -just as important- we can unite these groups in struggle for nursery facilities, in defense of the abortion law (and for its extension) and against the increasing closure of hospitals which serve women.
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For the past two years in the socialist current of the women's liberation movement, a debate has developed on the nature of domestic labour and its relationship to wage labour. Beginning with this issue of Socialist Woman we will devote two pages to contributions which take up aspects of the debate. ANN FOREMAN starts the series off with a discussion of a weakness in Wally Seccombe's pamphlet The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism: She argues against his 'mistake of ignoring totally the ways in which the law of value indirectly impinges on domestic labour and the domestic unit'. All contributions are welcomed and will be In the past few years, a number of important articles have appeared, inside the women's liberation movement -from Margaret Benston's The Political Economy of Women's Liberation to the more recent article of Wally Seccombe on The Housewife and her Labour Under Capitalism. The centrai weakness of all these articles has been their implicit acceptance at a theoretical level of the marginality of women and the separation of the domestic and industrial lives of women into discreet units.
Bearing this weakhess in mind, it is important to look more closely at the relation of domestic and wage labour.
With the onset of the industrial revolution which organised production on a labour extensive basis, women were brought into commodity production. However, with the development of capitalism on a labour intensive basis, and the acknowledgment that the proletarian family was weakening, public attention became focussed on the importance of women's role in the family.
It was in this period of public disquiet and with the aim of shoring up women's role in repreducing future labourers that the seeds of the modern welfare state were planted. This was done around the ready theme of * Let us glorify, dignify, and purify motherhood by every means in our power. 1 Although women remained in industrial production, they did so with their prime function publicly defined as being outside it. Thus they fulfilled the needs of contemporary capitalism both for a cheap and reserve pool of labour and a healthy (comparatively) and stable workforce.
Wally Seccombe, however, argues that with the advent of industrial cap- • italism men went into industry and women into the home. But the reality is that men went into industry whereas women went into hoth the home and industry.
Because Seccombe's analysis represents the first serious contemporary attempt to apply Marxist theory into considered by the Editorial Board.
this neglected area, we will deal in tion of housework.
it is outside of the immediate exercise of the law of value. That is, alof value does not operate upon it.
labour, not domestic labour-is subproved productivity because of the competition operating between capitalists. (This explains the technological backwardness and privatisation of housework).
However, he then proceeds to totally the ways in which the lawof some detail with it, His treatment of domestic and industrial labour as discreet units drastically affects his analysis of the social and economic funeHe points to the primary characteristic of housework as the fact that though the labour theory of value can be applied to domestic labour, the law By this, he means that only labour working directly for capital —ie. wage ject to the pressure for constantly immake the serious mistake of ignoring measures.
value indirectly impinges on domestic labour and the domestic unit.
There are three main areas where this takes place. Firstly, in the demand for female wage labour (an area whose existance and importance is structurally excluded by Seccombe's method).
Secondiy, in the development and extention of commodities for consumption and labour-saving devices. And thirdly, in the intervention of the state in the domestic unit and in the reproduction of labour power.
The industrial demand for female labour went hand in hand with the rationalisation of the family unitand to a certain extent-of the labour performed within it.
The most significant development in this area was the break up of the extended family. The need for labour mobility and greater efficiency in the production of labour power was realised by successive government housing and welfare policies whereby the extended family was physically dispessessed and the care of the aged and sick transformed to the State. Its replacement-the nuclean family- pivots around the husband and wife who are portrayed as acting as a 'team', both partners servicing in their own way, the needs of capital. To make this 'partnership' attractive and compelling, taxation, pension schemes, etc. were introduced which literally took the man and wife as one. Beveridge spells out the conception underlying this In any measure of social policy in which regard is had to facts, the great majority of married women must be
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regarded as occupied on work which is vital though, unpaid, without which their husbands could not do their paid work and without which the nation could not continue. In accord with facts the plan for social security treats married women as a speical insurance class of occupied persons and treats man and wife as a team.
In short, capitalism destroyed the extended family in order to enjoy itin its rationalised form of the nuclear family the better. Family law has been extended from an almost exclusive concern with the property and inheritance relationships of the bourgeoisise to the direct regulation of the family relationships of the proletariat. For example, marriage takes the form of a contract of social and economic obligation which is, if necessary, enforced by law.
In fact this contract regulates the responsibilities of the husband and of the wife much more closely than the contract between an employer and employee; the law that compels a mother to look after her children is almost as harsh as the law which compels the father to provide for his children.
The structuring of proletarian relations outside of production more and more tightly into the relations of the nuclear family has meant that although housework has been rationalised in pre-cooked food, etc. there has been no qualitative change in its privatised form.
pand the market for consumer goods has resulted in the production of labour saving devices for each individual family unit rather than being geared towards the socialisation of housework.
in a systematic way, and the absence fects domestic labour, gives his concinot reasons why capitalism should retain or abolish housework.
CHRISTMAS TOYS AVAILABLE AT LARGER STORES LITTLE HOUSEWIFE Laundry/washing-up/ cooking sets each some degree by labour saving devices, Indeed, the needs of capital to exAlthough Seccombe deals with some of these points, he fails to do so of considering the ways in which, as we we have outlined, the law of value afusions an ahistorical form. He can give 2. Ibid.
And like Engels and Juliet Mitchell, he puts nis faith in the struggle for equality at the work place as the solution to the problem of privatised hoasework. However, the relation betweeen industry and the home via the reproduction of labour power, together with the ideolgoical appearances of this relation is daily reproduced by the economic and social organisațion of ine capitalist mode of prod uction as a whole. It is only in the context of challenging all these relation ations that there is any perspective for abolishing privatised housework together with the nexus of oppression that determines women's inferior social position.
1, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's Women and the Welfare State, Red Rag pamphlet No.2