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earns enough to keep alive - my world collapsed abour me. But later. when I had time to think, 1 said to myself, well, after having lived through an eight year sentence, because that it what my marriage has been, it's all the same if 1 am thrown in prison for six years. It can't be any worse in prison.
*Yes, my marriage has been hell since the first day. I had known my husband since 1 was only 14 years old. He was nine years older than me. I married at nineteen. And I took him seriously when, on our wedding night, he said to me that he would have liked me to be inspected by a doctor to know of I was a virgin. Later he became jealous about the period of our engagement. He became jealous and he started to spy on me.
*And money, he gave me the necessary amount each day, penny by penny and weighed the food that I bought. If there was just 20 grams short out of a kilo of lentils or sugar he made me go through the shame of taking it back. One time, after five years, I was so fed up with it all that I tried to kill myself. I took all the aspirins I had in a tube.
•We separated in July 1973. The day before my husband gave me a terrible beating. He was in a rage and insisted that I confess to having deceived him. He threatened to kill me if I wouldn't confess at the police station to having done it. He took me there and accused me, and I said "yes" to everything.
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OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS the "Women for Peace' movement in the Six Counties has caused a great confusion on the British left,and in the Women's Movement. Its endorsement by the Labour Government can be no surprise, since over the last eight years, in harmony with the Tories, it has tried to impose the "peace' of the army on the nationalist minority. But support, critical or not so critical, for the "Peace Movement' has also come from the British Communist Party, and the Militant grouping inside the Labour Party, who view it as an unclear but potentially progressive development. Similarly it has been seen by sections of the Women's Movement as a step forward for women's liberation. In a recent article in Women's Report (Sept/Oct 76) we are presented with the following view of the 'Peace Movement':
* we get glimmerings of the existence of a separate women's consciousness about the war in Northern Ireland and the sudden sprouting of a mass movement... (and in conclusion)... few people can doubt the positive effect the participation has had on the women involved.* In our view, the 'Peace Movement' represents a gigantic step backwards, right into the arms of the Church, the army and British imperialism. To the extent that it has the support of the left and the women's movement, it represents the latter's attempt to separate the struggle for democratic rights, for women's rights and for socialism, from the fight for national independence, from the anti-imperialist struggle itself. Such a separation is a death blow to women's liberation, and to the struggle for socialism in Ireland, leading only to an alliance with the Lord Longfords and Brigadier Kitsons.
Return to 'Peace' The avowed aim of the 'Peace Movement" is simply that of a return to 'peace". But what was this peace before the war? The division of Ireland represented an carlier peace, which was imposed on the backs of the Irish people after the nationalist movement had been defeated. It was the terms of this peace which are central to the roots of the suppression of women's rights in Ireland, and the 50 year suppression of the democratic rights of the nationalist minority in the North. With partition the alliance between Church and state in the South was confirmed, and with it the reactionary positions of the Church on abortion, contraception and the exaltation of motherhood and the family, have dominated women's lives. In the North an artificial state was created to protect British investment and to reward the supporters of British imperialism in Ireland, the Unionists. The condition for maintaining this state was the political and economic disenfranchisement of the Catholic minority.
It was precisely because this peace, based on the artificial division of Ireland to further the interests of British imperialism and unionist supremacy, involved the systematic suppression of the democratic rights of the Catholic minority, that the civil rights movement developed in 1968. National freedom and the elimination of the Unionist state as a precondition for restoring the democratic rights, was revealed by the response of the Unionists to this movement. From the attack on the civil rights demonstration in Burntollet, to the pogroms against the minority in the Bogside and Bombey Street, the intrinsic violence of the state as the guarantor of Unionist supremacy was made clear. It was as the defenders of the Catholic minority in their struggle for civil rights that the Provisional IRA emerged. The way was open for civil war which threatened to engulf the South -a development which would jeopardise Britain's plans for the continued economic subordination of Ireland. It was this aim of maintaining the conditions for continued British domination which led to the intervention of the British Army in the North. It is not possible to separate, therefore, the struggle for democratic rights from the anti-imperialist struggle. This means also that a movement for the liberation of women in the Six Counties must be based on an anti-imperialist commitment.
Grim Situation The position of women in the Six Counties is grim. For those who can work, the average weekly wage is only 53 per cent of the male rate, which in turn is only 88 per cent of the male average in Britain. Unemployment has reached drastic The growth of the *Peace Movement' has been consistently opposed in the columns of Red Weekly. Here, Cath Cirkit examines why this move ment has attracted women into BELFAST, OCTOBER 1976 A LEADER OF THE 'PEACE' MOVEMENT REA OUT TO A MEMBER OF THE RUC AND SAYS We fully support the rule of law... the R Ulster Constabulary and other security force the only legitimate upholders of law and orde