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I have been invited to comment on the review of my book, Women and Socialism (Allison and Busby, London, 1976), by Alix Holt and Barbara Brown (published in the last issue of Socialist Woman). For the benefit of American readers, the book originally appeared in the US as Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Beacon Press, Boston, 1974). The two editions are identical except for the introduction.
When a person writes a book they usually limit themselves to a narrowly defined set of questions if they want the book to be digestible. If they stray from their declared intentions, they are usually pushed back into line (at least 1 was) by the publisher. Sometimes the particular set of questions which the author thinks are crying out to be discussed are not those which particular readers want to see aired, and there occurs a sort of non-meeting of the minds between people who may agree on more things than they disagrce about. I suspect that this is at least part of the trouble between Barbara Brown and Alix Holt on the one hand, and me on the other.
I undertook to examine, primarily in Czechoslovak conditions, the only existing model we have of a society which proclaimed its intention of emancipating women according to the original Marxist prescription: the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, followed by full legal rights, economic emancipation of women through employment outside the home, and the taking over of housework and the care of children by the state. I have examined what did happen in the daily lives of women in post-war East European countries when an attempt was made to put a consistent body of ideas about the liberation of women into practice in a changed social order' (British introduction). Or as I wrote in the American introduction, *1 have tried... to record objectively what happened in a particular part of the world at a particular time when certain ideas were applied under certain conditions, and to attempt to explain why certain things happened as they did..
I thought I had some special qualifications for this: first-hand experience and material systematically collected over a long period. I did not undertake to examine what should have been, or what might have been if Stalinism had not occurred. Czechoslovakia might have remained a bourgeois republic, and I might not have written a book.
The Criticism The main criticism directed against the book by Alix Holt and Barbara Brown is that I do not examine the effort to emancipate women within the change"
I realise that I have a soft-sell way of writing. In general I like to present facts and I believe that many readers like to draw the conclusions rather than have them hammered home. I started the book in Czechoslovakia in 1972 and finished it in Vienna in 1973, after being asked to leave rather quickly by the Czechoslovak authorities (probably not because l thought their kind of socialism inevitable). It may be that under the impact of this experience some things seemed more obvious to me than they are, and I have not been explicit enough for some readers. Nevertheless.
The Political Situation I make clear at the beginning that not only the Soviet model of emancipation but the Soviet model of socialism was brought to Eastern Europe by the Red Army, which remained on the soil of these countries, except in the case of Czechoslovakia. I point out (p.74) that this model "precludes all but officially sanctioned experiments, organisations, debutes, and frames of reference'.
I have tried to reproduce the atmosphere in which hopes were followed by disillusionment in the 25 years following the war, by showing how it looked to people living through that time. I reported the level of thinking which I found in the 1950s and 1960s (not the thoughts Western feminists and/or socialists of the 1970s would have had). I wanted to show gradually where this thinking led, rather than stop every second paragraph and point out the errors from our point of view. I explained why the debate on women 'never got down to basic principles' (p.135). I tried to show how it happened — tried to make it believable - that many people, including today's leading dissenters, thought it possible after Stalin's death in 1953 to make the situation work. While at any given moment there is only one 'correct" view, the view handed down by the party (p.74), there are people in Eastern Europe with various points of view and their points of view change, they push within the bureaucratic framework, changes occur which affect people's lives. We outside are aware of what is going on only when something dramatic happens, but this drama is the end result of a dialectic process. Former high party officials and other influential members of the Communist establishment do not become spokesmen for democratic socialism and leaders of Charter 77 overnight. If they are decent people now, what were they doing up there in the 1950s and early 1960s? How did they change? *The effort to reconcile idealistic aims with the harsh measures of socialist rule and centralised decision making provide the major conflict of the post-war period and are the background of this book.* (p.73) *Khrushchev's famous speech... in which he revealed some of the excesses of Stalinism, was presented to the Czechoslovaks in a very diluted form, but this was enough to spark off a wave of agonising reappraisal in which every individual began to re-evaluate his own experiences and to consider everything he had heard, seen or been told in a new light..." (p.98)
"Accumulated grievances built up into explosions... East Berlin... Poznan... Poland... Hungarian Events... "Prague Spring" of 1968* (p.76)
Why Study Eastern Europe?
I refer to the Eastern European countries as socialist because for better or worse they represent socialism in their own official eyes, in the eyes of a certain number of their citizens (varying with conditions), and in the eyes of a large part of the world. If there is or has been something socialist about these societies, how much socialism entitles them to be called socialist? If there was and is nothing socialist about these socicties, and "any project to liberate women was doomed to failure', then why are we studying the position of women in Eastern Europe? We know in advance that it's a flop. The only lesson is that dictatorship is bad.
Of course the situation is a good deal more complex, and Alix Holt and Barbara Brown do not think it all so simple either. Later in their review they reply to two other reviewers of my book, pointing out that in spite of everything women do have jobs and certain rights and options which they do not have in equal measure everywhere else in the world.
There is ambiguity in all our attitudes, which mirrors the ambiguity of the situation. We want to know how come centralised, autocratic societies voluntarily give women legal rights, jobs, education, nurseries, abortions, and loudly proclaimed women's equality. Were there some socialist principles and humanitarianism behind it, or was it simply in order better to use women as cogs in the production process? Why, having got that far, were these societies unable and unwilling to relieve women's household and child-care burdens?
If in trying to answer these questions I attempt to examine this kind of society on the basis of its own claims, does this mean that I accept their problems 'as the inevitable result of socialist change? On the contrary, I assume that people view the Soviet model critically and do not want to fall into the same errors:
*Even if we reject the Soviet model, followed since the Second World War in six other East European countries, or at least view it realistically and critically, the experience gained when a comprehensive programme for women's equality was made part of the overall objective of governments for the first time in history does not lose any of its importance for us.
*Certainly we may argue that the disappointments were not inevitable, that they were partly the product of a particular historical situation, that they could have been avoided "if only", and that we in attempting to create a new social order would be less dogmatic, less bureaucratic, more democratic, and so obviously would not make the same mistakes... The experience of others is valuable just because it takes place on a concrete building site and not in a castle of the mind. We don't have to duplicate it, but it heips us to approach our own options more intelligently.' (British introduction)
The Economic Situation According to Alix Holt and Barbara Brown, I *favour an explanation that sees both economic and psychological obstacles to women's social
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advancement*. I write that 'the economic patterns are against them', it is implicit in my material that the very forces of production determine the dual role of women, I do 'note some effects of economic policy', and yet 1 "accept the logic of this kind of economic rationality without question'.
At the same time, the entire description of the effects of economic policy on Czechoslovak women given by Holt and Brown in their review is drawn from my book, except for the last sentences which seem to be from a personal communication from me to Alix Holt.
As 1 thumb through my book I find not some effects of economic policy, but one economic disaster after another, together with the complaints that 'poured forth'. Not even the toughest dogmatist in Prague accepted these as 'inevitable results of socialist change'! They were (and are always described as mistakes and distortions of socialism (blamed on someone who is no longer around, of course). As 1 point out, economic failings in 1961 and 1962 revealed such far-reaching and unexpected weaknesses in the whole system of planning and management that the entire plan was scrapped' (p.109).
I could not really provide an analysis of the centralised and bureaucratic practices which inspired the economic reform of 1966 and ultimately led to the 'Prague Spring' reform movement of 1968. I refer readers to a book by an expert in a note on p.227. The economic reform of 1966 was finally launched in its original form during the short-lived Prague Spring' which ended with the Soviet invasion in the summer of 1968. But that is not what is important from our point of view. It was ironically the possibility of a decentralised economy, with more individual responsibility and therefore more employment and (pp. 122-132)! In other words, an understanding of the need for correcting the abuses of a bureaucratically managed economy may go hand in hand with sympathy for women, but not necessarily with an understanding of sex-roles — a major point of my book.
First Reason One basic reason the "Marxist model" could not produce liberation in my opinion — and Alix Holt and Barbara Brown do not mention this although I devotea whole chapter to it and refer to it repeatedly — lies in the original theory.
Engels believed he had demonstrated that an original state of matriarchy which prevailed everywhere in prehistoric times was overthrown by men when the development of private property impelled them to ensure the identity of their heirs by institutionalising the monogamous family. From this he concluded - and the whole communist movement long believed — that once private property was overthrown there would no longer be any real conflict of interest between men and women. I discuss at length why anthropologists no longer accept Engels theory, and Rosalind Davies discussed the flaws in the argument in issue No. 1 of the Newsletter on Women in Eastern Europe' (available from Barbara Holland, CREES, University of Birmingham - please send sac).
As 1 point out, the Stalinist regime made dogma of the matriarchy theory and it passed into the compulsory corpus of belief of the Eastern European countries, where it remains today (references on request) to throttle all creative discussion on women's problems. If women's inequality is entirely due to private property, just abolish private property. There is no need to examine people's prejudices. (This approach has proved a great convenience to male socialists everywhere.) *If patriarchal beliefs then continue to lie just below the surface in men and women, these are likely to determine the kind of equality that is set as the goal" (p.42). The admission that women's troubles may have some other root cause would require an examination of some of Marx and Engels ideas, and doubts cast on one part of a doctrine may lead to reassessment of others'. This is impermissible in all existing socialist Second Reason This limitation of investigation and discussion is the reason I give that sex-roles were left unchallenged, not just 'the absence of vocational training'- We can speculate that if "Leninist norms' had prevailed in the Soviet Union, some of the original tenets of Marxism would eventually have been subjected to scrutiny. Perhaps a more complete theory to explain women's oppression would have emerged and it would be unnecessary to examine the second part of my explanation for the gap between professed intentions to achieve women's equality and the performance. But we are not playing the "if only' game, we are trying to find out what we can learn from existing circumstances.
I write (p.104) that none of the carly Marxists gave any weight to the fact that socialism - a change from private to social ownership of the plants and the machinery — would not alter the reality that the working world into which women stepped from the kitchen had been arranged and structured by men for their own convenience, and that any inability to adapt to these arrangements would be regarded as a female shortcoming'. As i have shown in my book, Marxists have long believed that resolution of the conflict between labour and capital also resolves the conflict between men and women. "The idea of a conflict under socialism between men's and women's interests would have seemed absurd.' As this belief has been carefully nurtured and perpetuated, it seems perfectly natural for men to define equality (or fail to define it). Men establish the 'socialist norms, set the goals and priorities, based on a concept of equality according to which men and women are equal but different, and it is women who deviate from the standard' (p.25).
When the theory from which nothing could be added and nothing could be taken away' (p.213) clashes with reality, when women turn out to be on the wrong wave-length, when they prove to be unreliable workers*, when the birthrate drops, men attempt to solve the resulting problems at the expense of women (often with women's connivance, as everywhere). They simply redefine equality to mean making it possible for a woman to combine a job with her role as a wife and mother, while man hasonly one job — of course thereally important one.
the problems of the women of Eastern Europe, as Alix Holt and Barbara Brown seem to think. This is a misunderstanding. I offer my conclusions for us: "Theoreticians of women's liberation who need not work within any such rigidly prescribed formulas" as those enforced in Eastern Europe I believe that it is essential to change men's thinking as well as women's, to end sex-role stereotyping and the belief that the relative values men have given to the public and private sphere and to various functions within those spheres are the only possible values. I don't think this is the only" thing that stands between us and liberation, but I do believe that "even if there is a more equitable distribution of wealth, it will not be until this new consciousness dawns that real equality will be possible...
In the introduction to the British edition I have restated this to emphasise it: "A necessary emphasis on economic and political democracy as a condition for women's full liberation should not be allowed to obscure the fact that while economic power and male power may coincide, they are not the same thing. Thus a change in the economic and political system which is not at the same time predicated upon a redivision of sex roles cannot result in equality.
The Family Yes, I think it is going to take a very long time to change attitudes. I do not know how these new attitudes will change the family (or, of course, what other forces will be operating on the family at the same time), but I do not think a fundamental change in the family can come abour without them. Therefore I visualise the family as changing gradually, partly as a result of efforts to liberate women.
I don't rally behind battle cries like 'abolish the family" and socialise the family". They are vague slogans, not programmes. Who is going to abolish it? How? When? On Monday after the Revolution by decree?
If our ultimate vision is a non-atomised society, and it is mine, then I think we have to begin not by demanding that the family abolish itself, but by trying to change attitudes in and communal services for existing atomic families that will make it possible to break down the fragmented roles into which they are frozen and which are perpetuated in their children. Naturally this must include full rights and appropriate living conditions for people who opt for communal living or whose families fail We cannot provide full communal services which will make collective forms of social living possible as long as men regard services as the debt we owe our women' — a debt they have no real intention of paying. Once the care of children (for example) is recognised as being as valuable to society as building a new piece of highway, both men and women will take care of children and will not be isolated and written off whether they do it in a family, a commune, or a day-care centre. And more day-care centres The family is our slowest changing institution. There is not, as Engels believed, a form of the family to correspond to every economic formation. We know this not only from modern anthropological research on pre-literate societies but from demographic studies of our own societies. The nuclear family in England and America as a prevalent form is not industrialisation or capitalism, industrialisation process by some time. In Eastern Europe and some other countries the extended family has been common until recently and nuclear families have much closer ties with their other relatives than most of us do. The extended family is still relatively strong in Romania and the authorities are trying to preserve it. Why this diversity? We can guess The family can be used to control and manipulate people. At the same time, it is also used by its members to preserve their values against oppressive authority — for example, to keep the national language and culture alive for 150 years in Poland and 300 years in the Czech lands. The family serves in Eastern Europe today in many instances to frustrate government pressure on the individual.
What exactly is the reiationship between cultural and economic change and changes in the family? We do not really know, although we have theories, and so we do not really know how to bring about the changes we may desire. Slogans simply mask the complexity of the problem.
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My Conclusion I do not offer my conclusion as the only", or indeed as any, solution to