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Women and Socialism by Hilda Scott (Allison & Busby, £2.95)
In a pamphiet 'Protection of Women and Children in Soviet Russia", published in 1932, A.W. Field quoted Lenin as having said that every intelligent woman should know how to cook. Lenin, of course, had never said anything of the sort; what he had written in State and Revolution was that every kukharka (woman cook) should take part in government. A. W. Field's confusion, though, is not so absurd as it might seem, for neither women cooks, nor men cooks for that matter, had any political power, and all women cooked for their families.
Things have changed since 1932, but the women's movement has suspected that as regards cooks and women the situation has improved but little. Women and Socialism is a detailed study of the daily life of women in contemporary Eastern Europe; it is a first-hand account that offers ampic evidence to confirm suspicions that women in Eastern Europe are less than liberated. Anyone who still believes that the women of the GDR, of Poland, etc. enjoy full equality or are drawing steadily nearer this goal should read this book. Those who do not believe the claims of equality should read the book too, both for the information value and because it takes the discussion a step forward: Hilda Scott does not just want to prove that women in Eastern Europe are not equal, she wants to know why they are not equal and what, anyway, precisely is equality?
Constant reference is made throughout the book to the position of women in Western countries, and background material on the views of Marx and Engels and Bebel on the woman question" and on the development of the socialist women's movement is supplied. This makes it easier for the reader to contrast and compare the facts presented and evaluate social trends and government measures in the light of socialist theories and expectations. The author, however, lived for over twenty years (Irom 1948 to 1973) in Czechoslovakia, working for the last ten of these years as a journalist specialising mainly in questions concerning women, and so it is through a careful case study of the Czech experience that the probiems of realising in practice the liberation of women are posed and answers sought.
Women, we are told, were 38 percent of the work-force when the Communists came to power in 1948, but 1.2 million of the 2.1 million women workers were employed in agriculture. By 1969 over 80 per cent of women of productive age were at work and the overwhelming majority held jobs outside agriculture. Alongside this drive to bring women into production, social secutiry provisions were introduced with the aim of enabling women to combine their maternal and productive functions: eighteen weeks paid maternity leave was granted for instance, and retirement for women was set at 55 (it was 60 for men). The extension of pre-school facilities was promised, and by 1967 10 per cent of children under three and 55 per cent of children between the ages of three and six had places in creches and kindergartens. But despite these achievements, full quality did not materialise and in the '60s the government and the media began to expose the failure. Although the expansion of female education had been apparently successful, female students constituting over half the student body in academic and vocational secondary schools and nearly 40 percent in higher education, women's wages were still much lower than men's. At the Telsa-Pardubice electrical engineering plant in 1965, for example, 70 percent of men but only 0.3 per cent of women earned more than 1,200 crowns monthly. The number of women to hold responsible administrative positions did not seem to be rising; in 1973 women accounted for over half the employees in the food processing industry but only five of the 579 plant directors.
Emphasis On Psychology Several factory managers and specialists of one kind or another are quoted as expressing their surprise at the limited progress women had made and their inability to find a suitable explanation. Hilda Scott, herself, seems to favour an explanation that sees both the economic and psychological patterns in the countries of Eastern Europe as having provided an obstacle to women's social advancement. But it is the psychological patterns that take precedence in her account. *The engincering industry, the spearhead of the country's economic drive', she writes, in spite of its need for labour soon began to demonstrate its reluctance to accept girls for its apprentice-training programme.* In other words, male reluctance' is seen to be the main reason why women have not taken up skilled and well-paid jobs in proportion to their level of education. Male planners, she argues in her concluding chapter, find and will always find enough other projects that need tackling more urgently than the ones that would liberate women. In reviewing Women and Socialism in Red Rag, Katriona Graham makes explicit the conclusion which is implicit in the book: "In socialist countries male dominated governments and state institutions cannot by definition articulate and isolate the myriads of ways in which women are controlled and limited by that very system of male domination."
Between the women of Eastern Europe and their liberation there thus stands only the necessity of teaching their children non-traditional roles. changing male attitudes, and smashing the male dominance of government and state institutions.
These tasks, in Hilda Scott's view, will not be easy to achieve. On the contrary, she feels that the position of women in the countries of Eastern Europe is likely to deteriorate, their importance in social production is likely to become more marginal, and women are likely to drift back to the home. For one thing, women are not theoretically equipped to fight their battles, and for another (and this is the main reason) the economic patterns are against them. "Even in a socialist society", she writes, everything that is subsidised by society has to be paid for by the production of new values, and the more that is subsidised by society, things that are given away or sold below cost, the more efficient the production required in other spheres." Thus it transpires that, even though traditional values are having a negative influence on the rate of progress, the economic situation means that it would be impossible even with the most enlightened attitudes to afford the socialisation of child care. In Czechoslovakia, for example, the money spent on creches, schools, maternity benefits, etc. represents 25 percent of social and cultural funds and 10 per cent of the entire national expenditure. So it would be unrealistic to expect improved services in the immediate future. Liberation is a far more expensive process than socialists had imagined in the past and many women's movement theorists imagine in the present. Society can only afford what is profitable. "Nursery hospitals for sick children were suggested to relieve women of the necessity of continually having totake time off work, but the idea was pronounced unprofitable and shelved.
Hilda Scott accepts the logic of this kind of economic rationality without question. Economic development happened because it had to happen; it could have happened in no other way. Socialism, she admits, was supposed to have eliminated the sexual division of labour, but when it did not, 'society fell back upon its stereotypes. When socialists found themselves in power they had to take the kind of decisions for which they had criticised the capitalists: The captains of socialist industry... were quite content to have a reservoir of inexpensive labour power which did not offer any real competition with men on the labour market.' Again, Katriona Graham's review develops this thought further and draws the conclusions that are implicit in the book but never clearly expressed: *Taking this a step further, we could say that, in a situation where the primary goal is the raising of the level of production and this imperative sets social priorities, then the very forces of production determine the dual role that women play. Even in a planned socialist economy, there continues to be conflict between the forces of production and reproduction".
But do we have to draw this conclusion? Surely there are questions that have to be asked and assumptions that have to be questioned. It is not enough simply to state that socialism was supposed to have eliminated sexual divisions but did not. Hilda Scott explains at another point that one would have expected a campaign against traditional roles but part of the problem was that no vocational guidance existed in Czechoslovakia at the time. This is only to rephrase the question. Why was there no vocational guidance? Why were traditional sex roles left unchallenged? What kind of socialism is it that values women as cheap, uncompetitive labour? And if, under socialism, a certain level of contradiction between the interests of women and of society as a whole is inevitable, must the problem manifest itself in the acute form observable in Eastern Europe? In order to find answers we need to look at the political and social context in which the attempt to liberate women was being made. In 1948, when the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia, it was not a model socialist plan of economic development that they were introducing but a specific system that had evolved in the USSR in the 1930s under the conditions of Stalinist rule. This unwieldy, highlycentralised system of industrial planning was accompanied by an undemocratic, highly-bureaucratic system of government, also of Soviet origin, to which any initiative from below was anathema. The first few years of the Communist regime saw the decimation of the workers movement and the growth of the security forces. In 1952 the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, was brought to trial and another ten members of the government were hanged. During the purges 60,000 Communist Party members were imprisoned and over 100,000 people served sentences in the camps.
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Hilda Scott only mentions the optimism and idealism of the early years. For her the history of Eastern Europe shows what happens when a comprehensive programme for women's quality was made part of the overall objective of governments and during this period", she insists, *an attempt was made.. to put a consistent body of ideas into practice in a changed social order. ' Optimism and idealism there certainly was, but in every country of Eastern Europe the history of repression was the same. The political system was designed to safeguard the interests of the few at the expense of the many. In a situation where the organisation and activity of the working class was illegal, and where ordinary people had no control over government decisions, a project to liberate women was doomed to failure. Bureaucratic rule depended upon the passivity of the mass of men and women, and the regime could not therefore have afforded to initiate the action campaigns or to set in motion the questioning of all authority and accepted social norms that the socialisation of the family would have involved. The Women's Union suffered the fate of all independent organisations: in 1952 it was closed down and replaced by a rubber-stamping Czechoslovak Committee. Women — in the same way as workers, peasants, young people, national minorities — were deprived of the opportunity to defend their specific interests.
Failure Of Economic Reforms In the 1960s the governments of Eastern Europe found that their economies were refusing to grow at the required rate. As the societies developed and the conomies became more complex, the old system of planning and administration was no longer suitable. Hence economic reforms were tried, introducing market mechanisms and rationalising. among other things, the work-force. The reforms, however, did not seck to alter the balance of power, to restrict the power of the burcaucracy and give more control over events to the working people; consequently, after some initial successes, the performance of the economies did not improve. In recent years the policies of the '60s have therefore been abandoned and other ways of increasing production have been tried.
These changes in economic policy had a direct and crucial effect upon the position of women in Eastern Europe. During the '60s it was observed that women were the less skilled and productive workers, and the question was raised of the desirability of interpreting equality to mean that women must take an equal place in production. It might be more sensible, it was argued, to send some women home; over-employment would in this way be reduced, and less money would have to be paid out in providing facilities. In recent years the argument has still been to send women home, but the reason now is not that such a measure will rationalise the labour force, but that it will increase future reserves of labour — women will be able to have and raise larger families. In all the countries of Eastern Europe there has been a steady drop in the birth-rate since the 1950s, and the governments, now they have abandoned whole-scale rationalisation, have become concerned at the prospect of dwindling reserves of labour. Hence they have introduced a number of measures to make the idea of more children more attractive to more women. Paid and unpaid maternity leave has been extended. In Poland, women can take three years unpaid leave and then return to their old job; in Hungary women can take the same period off without losing their jobs, in addition receiving a monthly grant from the government (which is worth roughly one third of the average wage). In the GDR women are given a day off every month to help them cope with their domestic responsibilities.
Hilda Scott does on occasion note the effects of economic policies. For instance, she mentions measures taken in 1963 to put services on a 'paying basis which resulted in the closure of many canteens and price rises in others. Two years later the government withdrew millions in subsidies that had previously heiped to finance services: in consequence, prices in the laundries rose on average by 33.4 per cent, and between January 1964 and the end of 1970 retail prices in the service section increased by 40 per cent. But she does not draw any conclusions about the nature of the reforms, and about the nature of a government that could introduce such reforms. According to her view the uprisings in Eastern Europe are the result of maladjustment of the Soviet model — 'Where the model was not adapted to fit it creaked and still creaks today' - and the low level of service provision is the result of the expropriation of the small craftsmen after the Communist seizure of power.
Much of the book is taken up with a discussion of the debate within Czech society on the relative merits of collective versus family care of children, and on the significance of the family unit in socialist society. This discussion likewise accepts the framework of the existing economic structure. In the 1960s concern began to be expressed at the strain being placed on women: they had to bear both a physical burden in their responsibility for the housework, and an emotional one in their responsibility as home-maker. One Czech pediatrician asked: *Does today's overworked woman and mother have time, strength and ability to create a good emotional atmosphere? Indeed, with the present tempo of life, is she not herself emotionally deprived?' There was also concern that young children, particularly those under three, were being emotionally deprived by being placed in nurseries. The abrupt break in routine when a young child enters a nursery, and the long day spent there while the mother travels, works, travels home and shops, is undoubtedly upsetting. Hilda Scott describes an influential documentary film, 'Children Without Love', that illustrated the retarded development of children institutional care and the anxicties of those who spent all day in nurseries. The film was shown to the Czech parliament and helped to win official approval for those who were questioning the emphasis Soviet educators had always laid on the value of the 'collective'.
Psychologists began to consider seriously ideas current in the West about the importance of family relationships (Freud) and of maternal as opposed to institutional care (Bowlby). The main result of this in practice was that working mothers began to feel guilty, and the programme of nursery building stagnated. At the same time sociologists attempted to analyse the Czech family and were struck by its similarity to the Western family, and by the common problems that West and East faced with regard to increasing divorce rates and the question of how best to bring up children. They suggested that the idea of a "socialist family" existing in Czechoslovakia was therefore misleading, and that the democratic nuclear family", having lost its patriarchal character, was emerging in all industrial societies. Ideas of convergence' are not liked by the authorities (and generally ignore important social and economic distinctions), but their promise that the scientific and technological revolution will make possible greater quality in the "egalitarian socialist family" sometime in the future is not very convincing. As Hilda Scott points out, this waiting for the scientific and technological revolution is another version of pie in the sky. But she herself is not optimistic about the possibilities for significantly changing the situation. All the suggestions for improving child-care hinge either on the mother giving up some of her working time — a process which inevitably reinforces sex-role divisions - - or on greatly increased expenditure to improve the quantity and quality of facilities — which seems unlikely. Hence her pessimism. She writes: It is apparent that the real prospect for taking the responsibility for all care of children out of the hands of their parents in any society is remote. Recognition of this calls for a re-evaluation of the importance of the family (not just the mother) to the child, and for a re-thinking of the ways by which the family could be made an institution not for the enslavement of women but for their greater emancipation.* The main features of Eastern European society are taken as inevitable and as inevitably limiting future developments: in other words, its economic priorities are fixed, money allocated to social expenditure cannot increase, people will continue to lead highly atomised lives at work and at home, unable to help one another out. Within this framework, the only room for manocuvre left that Hilda Scott can see is the reform of the family. Although she calls on the last page for experiments in family arrangements and personal relationships, it is with the belief that the basic unit of heterosexual couple and children can and should continue to exist. She takes the research of the '60s at its face value, accepting that it throws doubt on the desirability of collective care, and welcoming the abandonment of the mechanistic application of Marxist thinking. In fact the research of the '60s was obviously inspired by the economic debates of the time, and the emphasis on the family reflected the government's awareness of its importance to the maintenance of the social structure. Hilda Scott does not mention the role of the family as a means of social control; she does not appear to recognise it as such. Communists generally, she remembers, were embarrassed by the experiments at abolishing the family in the early days of the Soviet Russian revolution. and Czech intellectuals never questioned the need for the family unit. She quotes without comment the 1948 constitution which stated that the institution of marriage, the family and motherhood are under the protection of the state', and the opinion that the Family Code of 1950 was a 'model of common sense. In her chapter on Engeis she questions the possibility of collective forms of social living ever replacing the family. This attitude, along with the omission of any reference to lesbianism and sexuality, is another indication of her failure to look beyond the alternatives that Czech society seems to offer.
What Kind Of Societies?
The main problem with Hilda Scott's book is that it does not place the question of women in the context of the economic and political developments in Eastern Europe, and so does not consider the nature of these societies. It takes for granted that this economic and political framework is socialist, and that the problems of Czech society are an inevitable result of socialist change. Her main strategy is consequently to put pressure on men to face up to child-care and domestic work as a mutual responsibility, to change traditional sex roles (especially in children), and to discriminate positively in favour of women. This must be done, but it will be done far more effectively if accompanied by
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changes in coonomic and political life that begin to involve the masses of peopic in making decisions and fixing priorities. We need to question whether "the forces of production under socialism" inevitably lead to the inequalities described, and whether in fact we can call these societies socialist.
Lindsey German and Anna Paczuska, International Socialism No. 96, argue that, Eastern Europe is no different from capitalist Europe. "Impressive social reforms accompanied the entry of women into the labour force, but these are looked at in isolation. In fact, many such reforms were also introduced in the West during the post-war boom. They are not exclusive to socialism'. This is to ignore significant differences in the position of women in Eastern Europe and the West. In Czechoslovakia, women may be subjected to ideological pressures to have children, and abortion and contraception services are not all they could be, but women do have the right to control their own fertility. Women at work may still be in low paid and inferior jobs. and nursery provision could be considerably improved, but women do have the right to work. This is not just a theoretical question. German and Paczuska quote a Czech newspaper as saying: "Many people in management make no secret of the fact that in connection with the introduction of the new economic system the blow will fall where necessary on the discrimination, but the difference is that these women will not be pushed onto the dole queue the management is bound by law to find them alternative and comparable jobs. Certainly there is an offensive against women's rights, because at the present they clash with the bureaucracy's desire to rationalise the work force and increase the birth-rate, and this has led in some countries to the backward step of paying young mothers that time. reviewing the book in far from being socialist, being raised within Charter 77.
women first.? Of course this is perpetuates it.
ALIX HOLT AND BARBARA BROWN to stay at home and to the withdrawal of the right to abortion. However, women still have a choice in the matter. Jobs can be found, and it is significant that in Hungary in 1972, 60 per cent of women who had opted for the three year housewives allowance returned to work after only half Women in Eastern Europe do have some rights which women in capitalist countries do not enjoy, but these clearly do not add up to their liberation. This situation does not refute Marxist ideas about women's emancipation; it reflects the transitional nature of these socicties. Not only women, but also workers, ethnic minorities and intellectuals, find themselves oppressed and voiceless. The interests of all these groups are subordinated to the interests of the privileged elite at the top whose policies are designed to keep itself in power and not to promote the development of fully socialist relations. The struggle for an extension of women's rights is therefore a part, and a very important part, of the struggle against the bureaucracy. Years of oppression have made it especially difficult for women to organise a fight for their interests, but in Czechoslovakia a start was made by the Union of Women in 1967-68, and a recent report in the Guardian mentioned that the woman question was We should support any such steps towards the establishment of an autonomous women's movement in the Fast European countries. It is only by women themselves organising to discuss their problems that the best tactics and demands will be found for the fight against male domination in Eastern Europe and against the oppressive system that