By Zoe Kenny

Forty years after the second wave of the women’s liberation movement began there has been a major slide in consciousness about women’s rights and the continuing need for women to struggle for them. Since the demise of the movement in the late 70s women have been the target of a sustained ideological campaign, or a ‘backlash’ as that has been aimed at weakening feminist consciousness.

The most important aspect of the backlash message is that on the one hand women have broken down all the old barriers and therefore don’t need to worry about old-fashioned feminist ideas. Liberal feminists point to individual examples of women who have ‘broken through’ the glass ceiling thus proving that any woman can make it in a man’s world if they have the talent and determination. However, the weakness of the liberal perspective is that it doesn’t recognize the structural limitations imposed on women under capitalism, rather focusing on the piecemeal approach of gradual reform. While they may admit that the majority of women are still concentrated in lower-paid jobs and bearing the double-burden of paid work and housework, these isolated ‘issues’ simply become more grist for further campaigns for reform, they  don’t recognize that these conditions are fundamental to capitalism and therefore cannot offer a way forward.

The other major element of the backlash message is that the women’s liberation movement has left women holding a poisoned chalice – now that women have all the freedom and equality they could possibly want they either don’t know what to do with it resulting in confusion and depression, or they went too far following their dreams of a fulfilling career and missed the boat on the ultimate prize – motherhood and marriage. Thus more and more women are realizing that you can’t be a ‘superwoman’ and have everything and logically the extraneous part of a woman’s life is her broader social role and is the first to get sacrificed. There is a constant supply of books and magazines discussing why women are ‘opting out’ of the ‘rat-race’ in order to find true fulfillment in their roles as mothers and housewives.

Of course the media never venture to question why it is that women do find it difficult to juggle motherhood and a career, for example lack of affordable, quality child-care, paid maternity and paternity leave etc, etc, simply shunting the responsibility of working out the balance onto individual women. Furthermore, the bigger question of why so many people, male or female, hate or simply tolerate their paid work is ignored, trying to answer that question might call into question the nature of system and the meaningless and lack of control that most people find in their paid work. And while Susan Faludi originally identified the key elements of the backlash message in the early 90s, an article in the US Socialist Worker critiqued the results of a survey that had come up with the exact same backlash conclusions – in October last year! In reviewing the results of the survey entitled ‘The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness’ self-help guru Marcus Buckingham claimed that “though women now have the liberty to choose whichever life they’d like, many are struggling in their pursuit of a happy life”. But as the author of the article notes “maybe the declining numbers of women who consider themselves happy … represents women who are unhappy not because these victories were won in the past, but because they are being pushed back in the present” for example by “the fraying of the social security net, the turbo-charged misogyny of pop culture” etc.

However the predictability of the bourgeois media in pushing the same old line for more than two decades also gives us a clear indication of the arguments that we need to take up, through our internal education and also through our publications and in any campaigns that we may get involved with. Firstly, the most important task is to convince a new generation that women are still the oppressed sex. Secondly, to convince women that the only way they really can ‘have it all’ is to get rid of capitalism, the ultimate barrier to women’s liberation while at the same time struggling for reforms, and against attacks on women’s rights, in the here and now.

In order to understand women’s oppression we need to look at the big picture and uncover the long view of women’s history, only then will we be able to see that seemingly disconnected fragments connect into an ancient storyline that has been replaying itself over and over again for thousands of years.

If we want to understand the issue of women’s oppression we need to start with the family. Today the image of the happy (and in Australia nauseatingly white) nuclear family is absolutely everywhere we look. It goes without saying that when a politician announces a new policy it’s pitched as being in the interests of ‘working class families’ or ‘Australian families’. The image of the family is used to sell everything from cars to Weet Bix, which apparently has been “building Australian families for more than 50 years”. In fact you could say we are living in a culture that seemingly idolizes and adulates the family, perhaps we will be seen by future anthropologists as the ‘family cult’ culture.

But while it can seem as if everybody who is anybody is living within the cosy confines of the family the facts are seriously out of kilter with the image. For example currently about a quarter of all households are composed of one person and this proportion is expected to increase to one third by 2026. Furthermore the “proportion of total households comprising families with children has steadily decreased over the last 20 years”. Furthermore behind the airbrushed perfection of the ads and comforting conservative rhetoric of today’s politicians, lies the reality of nuclear family as often being a private hell rather than comforting haven, for example in 2002 46% of all marriages ended in divorce, domestic violence is  the most likely cause of preventable death for women under 45 and there were 55,000 cases of child abuse and neglect recorded in 2008.

So why aren’t the images and policy changing to fit the reality? The reason is that preserving the functioning and ideology of the family structure is absolutely fundamental to the functioning of capitalism. Primarily the family, or in other words women’s subordination within the family, serves as the cheapest possible means for reproducing the next generation of workers. As former Prime Minister John Howard unashamedly pronounced in 1999 “The stable, functioning family still represents the best social welfare system that any community has devised and certainly the least expensive”. Women’s free labour within the home saves the capitalist class billions in child-care, care of the elderly and disabled, as well as the huge load of cooking and cleaning that women do on top of any paid work they may have. In 1990 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that women’s unpaid work in the home was worth the equivalent of 60% of the GDP. Furthermore women act as a convenient labour pool that can be called on to enter the work force in large numbers during economic booms and herded back into the home during recessions. The most pertinent example of this process was during the World War Two war effort in the US when millions of women took over jobs held previously by men in heavy industry, only to be sacked at the war’s end to make way for the returning soldiers.

Furthermore by reinforcing the notion that a woman’s place is in the home and it is seen as acceptable that women are concentrated in the lowest-paid jobs, that women are still paid less for doing the same or similar job  thus allowing a greater intensity of exploitation of women’s labour. However women’s subordinate position within the labour market also acts as a downward pressure on all wages, thus serving a dual purpose for the capitalists. Importantly the family is also the first site of ideological conditioning where children learn that the world is a sexist place; ie father is the head of the family; a hierarchical place, father first, mother second, then either the eldest sibling or the first son then the female siblings in order of age, a competitive place; each child in the family must compete for attention and affection and to gain the ‘approval’ of the parents and a ruthlessly individualistic world; each family must face the world and compete to survive, there being few remnants of support from extended families and the welfare state left to fall back on in hard times. Of course the family also allows all families, although most importantly the super-rich families of the capitalist ruling class, to pass on their obscene wealth gained by exploiting masses of workers to their few offspring without having to contend with the needs of society.

The nuclear family structure is so important to the functioning of capitalism that the ruling class and their ideological defenders pretend that this particular way of organizing society is not simply one of many possibilities but is rather a natural, inviolable and timeless formation.

In fact the naturalness of the family is presumed to extend into the farthest reaches of human history. Most people would probably believe that prehistoric people’s organization is that the relations between the sexes were composed of the same dynamics as today: the dominant male went out each day as the breadwinner (or meat-getter in this case) and the passive, dependent female stayed home looking after the young and gathering a few handfuls of nuts, berries and herbs to supplement the man’s more significant contribution. 

However the reality was so radically different to this contrived image that it would seem unbelievable to most people today, that is if they had a chance to learn about it. The subversive truth is that for the vast majority of human history including the whole history of the pre-Sapien hominid species, women were the pillar of their societies and men played an important but subsidiary role.

Evelyn Reed, who was a Marxist feminist and anthropologist as well as a member of the US Socialist Workers Party from the 40s to the 70s, demonstrated how the materialist and evolutionary wing of anthropology that was dominant in the nineteenth century was rejected by a new generation of anthropologists in the twentieth century who adhered to various new schools of thought, for example the “diffusionists”, the “functionalists” and the “structuralists”. Reed argues that these anthropologists reduced the discipline into simply a “descriptive” exercise “rejecting any unified concept of man’s historical progress and largely limiting themselves to studying the cultures and customs of separate groups of primitive peoples … their main is to establish that a variety or diversity of cultures has always existed … but such an elementary observation does not preclude the more advanced scientific need for establishing the stages of social development that mankind has traversed in the course of its long and complex evolution” thus they end up concluding that historical development is “merely a ‘planless hodge-podge’, a ‘chaotic jumble’”. One of the key outcomes of this changing of the anthropological guard was to mystify the laws of human development and also to deny “the earliest and longest period of human history, the period of the matriarchal system of social organization” however “it is precisely this period which gives us the essential information for understanding the problems connected with women and the family”.

Reed draws on the findings of a range of leading nineteenth and twentieth century anthropologists to describe the basic make-up of social life that existed for the vast majority of human history. Far from mirroring the patriarchal nuclear family of today, the basic unit of society was the maternal clan. In the maternal clan all the adults were considered to be the fathers and mothers of all the children, paternal descent was a non-issue. As a result the only sure parental link was through the mother or “mother right”. According to Reed “the clan community was communistic; a sisterhood of women and a brotherhood of men. The keystone of that social structure was equality in all spheres of life, economic, social and sexual”. Women, far from being degraded and subservient were “held in the highest esteem for their combined functions of producer-procreatix”.

In order to understand the way that humans organized themselves prior to the nuclear family, we need to look at the animal world. Far from being helpless and dependent the female species of the mammal was the main provider and protector of her young. The male species was required for mating but afterwards the female would retreat in isolation to give birth and from thereon took responsibility for them. Female mammals also banded together with other females and their young to create maternal broods. The males were incidental to this organization.

Unlike, females the competitive nature of the males breeding habits, which led them to fight one another ferociously in order to access the female (a destructive trait that would even occur outside of the mating season), is a social handicap. Males were “separatistic, individualistic and unable to band together in mutually cooperative groups”. Males were allowed to coexist with a female brood, such as in a lion brood, but only singly as continuous fighting between males would be too disruptive. This type of organization was the precursor to the first human society, as Reed notes “out of the maternal brood in the animal world, there arose the maternal clan system or ‘matriarchy’ in the ancient human world”.

In fact it was women’s superior capacity for cooperation which provided an example for men to follow, thus allowing them to overcome the tendency towards combativeness and also learn to cooperate, which allowed a qualitative leap forward in the effectiveness of hunting. Furthermore, while the popular image is of the ‘caveman’ breadwinner bringing back the mainstay of the clans food, in fact, again, the meat that men provided was actually a secondary source of food for the clan – women’s seemingly peripheral ‘gathering’ activities in fact supplied the clan with the most stable and ample food supplies.

Reed describes how women’s diverse productive activities were the precursor to many industries in later history and today. Women’s gathering of and knowledge of plants for food and healing was thus the precursor to agriculture and medicine, taming of wild animals was the precursor to livestock-raising and as the clan’s productive activities became more sophisticated, women were also the first to produce leather, produce pottery and many types of handicrafts which all laid the basis for far greater achievements in the future. As Reed notes “it was not the men hunters but the women producers, proto-scientists, nurses, teachers and transmitters of social, cultural and technical heritage who did the most important work in the first division of labour”.

So how did women descend from their esteemed position within society into their later degraded position? Ironically, it was the invaluable pioneering work that women did in establishing new productive activities that would actually contribute to their downfall. The transition from the pre-class maternal clan to patriarchal class society was a process that occurred over several thousand years and has been described by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It was a process that was tied in with the development of the productive forces and an increasingly complex society. Engels notes that the “first great division of labour” occurred when “pastoral tribes separated themselves” from the rest of the subsistence-tribes.

These pastoral tribes were able to produce “milk, milk products and meat in greater abundance than the others, but also skins, wool, goat’s hair, and spun and woven fabrics”, the greater productivity of these tribes allowed for the first examples of commodity exchange for example for weapons or tools that other clans produced. The need to provide year-long supplies of grain for the cattle herds thus became the impetus for the creation of the first human settlements. Initially both the cultivated land and herds were considered communal property, whereby the whole community would share equally in the work and produce, however over time the communities began to be separated into extended families, each with their own separate plot of land and cattle.

Thus exchange of cattle, which “assumed the function of money”  took not through the tribal chiefs but through individuals and the first private property came into existence. Importantly the exchange of the cattle was undertaken by men, thus the first step towards the downfall of women took place as men became the first traders and the first controllers of private property. As Engels notes “the very cause that had formerly made the woman supreme in the house, namely, her being confined to domestic work, now assured supremacy in the house for the man: the women’s housework lost its significance compared with the man’s work in obtaining a livelihood; the latter was everything, the former an insignificant contribution”. Engels continues “his achievement of actual supremacy in the house threw down the last barrier to the man’s autocracy … which was  … confirmed and perpetuated by the overthrow of mother right, the introduction of father right and the gradual transition … to monogamy”.

As society’s productive forces continued to increase in complexity and diversity (including the smelting of metal ore and the weaving loom), the “second great division of labour” occurred as “handicrafts separated from agriculture” spurring on the production of commodities and trade. As a result the more powerful tribes had an increased need for human labour power, spurring on wars for capturing slaves and property, thus slavery “which had been a sporadic factor in the preceding stage, now became an essential part of the social system”. Within the new society, people were now divided into slaves and freemen, and increasingly rich and poor. As the wealth of some families increased there arose the need to securely pass on the property; thus women’s sexual activity needed to be controlled in order to insure that her offspring were those of the property-owner and his wealth could rightfully be passed on, this being the impetus towards monogamy, although in the first instance a wealthy man had no need to restrict himself to one wife. Just as human beings were treated as commodities in slavery, women also became a item of value, with their reproductive systems being the means for a wealthy man to pass on his wealth.

Arising out of this situation, men began to compete for women, and the wealthiest men began to accumulate women as a symbol of their wealth, this trend reaching its apex in the Asiatic palaces and harems. Reed points out that as women were considered to be property in the same way as any other property their physical characteristics became an object of scrutiny and a way of assessing the worth of the specimen therefore “the natural beauty and health of women was then at a premium in the same way and for the same reasons that the natural health of cattle was at a premium”. Furthermore as society became increasingly stratified, there also arose the need to defend the wealth of some sections of society against the increasingly numerous slaves and poor, therefore the need for a state and an ideological apparatus, in other words a religious order to justify the inequality as being divinely created.    

As Reed notes “Women’s position in society, therefore has been shaped and re-shaped by changing historical conditions. The drastic transformation that overturned matriarchal communism brought about the downfall of the female sex. It was with the rise of patriarchal class society that the biological makeup of women became the ideological pretext for justifying and continuing the dispossession of women from social and cultural life and keeping them in a servile status”.

A very important aspect of women’s history to understand is the era of witch hunts in early modern Europe. During a period of more than three hundred years, from the late 14th century to the mid-seventeenth century, there were several waves of witch-hunts, resulting in the arrest, torture, prosecution and often execution of an alleged witch. The numbers of people convicted for witchcraft varies, however it is believed that there were at least 100,000 trials during that period, many of those trials resulting in execution, more than 75% of those accused and convicted were women. While there are many theories as to what drove this ‘crazes’ as they have been called, there is little debate about the fundamentally misogynistic character of the witch-hunts.

The most convincing arguments about the underlying reasons for the witch-crazes was a sort of final clearing out of remnants of traditional, female-centred culture, which was associated with a range of ‘paganistic’ rituals, traditional knowledge of herbs and natural remedies, sex and child-bearing out of wedlock etc, in order to entrench the Christian-Catholic backed patriarchal era. It hardly seems a coincidence that the group most vulnerable to accusations of witch-craft were women who were living in a manner more independent of patriarchal norms. According to Brian P Levack, author of The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, “The limited data we have regarding the age of witches … shows a solid majority were older than 50 … the reason for this strong correlation seems clear, these women, particularly older women who had never given birth and now were beyond giving birth, comprised the female group most difficult to assimilate, to comprehend, within the regulative late medieval social matrix, organized, as it was, around the family unit”.

The first wave of the women’s liberation movement began in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1848 an important women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls New York where women gathered to create their declaration of independence and “launch a conscious, organized movement of women against their oppression” with the ultimate goal of attaining equal rights for men, to be able to vote, to access full educational opportunities and to control property. In her 1976 speech to the US SWPs national convention Mary-Alice Waters noted that “For the first time since the dawn of civilization, not only did the masses of women begin to become conscious of their oppression, but more importantly began to see a way to end that oppression”.

The year 1848 was also significant in that it was also the year of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, as Waters points out “both the proletarian socialist movement and the feminist movement came onto the historical stage with the rise of industrial capitalism. Both were generated by the changes that capitalism brought in the social relations of production and reproduction, the twin pillars of human societies”.

Capitalism uprooted the traditional rural lifestyle and brought millions into urban centres, thus swelling the ranks of the working class. In relation to women there were two major contradictory trends; on the one hand the wives and daughters of the increasingly wealthy and powerful industrialists were increasingly less likely to be working in the family business, relegated instead to the position of women of leisure, on the other hand in the new factories the same male industrialists favoured employing women and children whose labour power was purchased more cheaply and this in turn was used as a tool to weaken the men’s trade guilds.

The bourgeoisie women, who faced the stark contradiction of on the one hand having plentiful time and money and on the other hand not being allowed to involve themselves in any productive activities. As Waters notes these women “saw the hypocrisy of the refusal of the men of their class to extend to them the rights proclaimed by the bourgeois democratic revolution” and began to organise to demand that the legal concept of ‘person’ be extended to them also. In the course of their struggle, which extended into the beginning of the 20th century, the first wave succeeded in forcing the opening of colleges and universities to women, the right of women to control their own wages or property and the right to vote. Furthermore they set an example of how to struggle for future generations of women.

The successes of the first wave inspired some leaders to prematurely conclude that women were no longer oppressed. However as Susan Faludi notes in her book Backlash, “Each revolution promises to be ‘the revolution’ that will free her from the orbit, that will grant her, finally, a full measure of human justice and dignity. But, each time … she is turned back … just short of the finish line”.

In the 1940s women also experienced a brief window of increased social status, at least in the US, largely based on the wartime efforts. Millions of women entered the work force and at least two million were able to gain highly-paid jobs in heavy industry. During this time the government started to provide more services for women such as day care and even household assistance, women also began to organize more consistently for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and Congress passed 33 bills that served to advance women’s rights. However the honeymoon was short-lived, based as it was on the needs of industry, and at the end of the war millions of women were fired from their jobs to make way for the returned soldiers. Discriminative laws against hiring married women and imposing salary caps were passed and the wheels on the propaganda machine began to speed up selling the joys of the new, improved 1950s home and idea that women’s fulfillment would come through being a mother and housewife..

However as Faludi points out, women were not necessarily returning to the home, as women were still entering the work force in record numbers but rather that “the reality of the nine-to-five working woman … heightened cultural fantasies of the compliant homebody and playmate”. The effect of the discriminatory policies and reactionary cultural landscape simply ensured that while women did work that they stayed in traditionally female-dominated, low-paid work. For example, while 3.25 million women moved voluntarily or otherwise out of industrial jobs, 2.75 million women entered clerical and administrative positions. As Faludi notes “The 50s backlash, in short, didn’t transform women into full-time ‘happy housewives’, it just demoted them to poorly paid secretaries”.

The next wave of the women’s liberation movement arose primarily out of the broader radicalization of the 60s. RSP member Helen Jarvis  wrote  an article in Direct Action which described how a protests in the US against the Miss America Pageant had sparked off the movement in Australia. Jarvis described how feminists in the US crowned a live sheep Miss America and “paraded it on the liberated area of the boardwalk to parody the way the contestants (all women) are appraised and judged like animals at a county fair” and held placards reading ‘I am a Woman, Not a Toy, Pet or Mascot’ and ‘Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction’.

Jarvis wrote how the daring images had been “mind-blowing to us young radical student activists women” and that although they had partaken in some protests against discrimination that they “had never stopped to theorise about sexual oppression, so caught up were we in the heady days of sexual liberation and political protest against racism and the imperialist war against Vietnam” and furthermore that the idea of forming a “movement to advance our cause seemed at first to be self-indulgent and distracting from ‘more important’ causes we had to fight”.  Nevertheless the first women’s liberation contingent in Australia appeared at a Sydney protest against the Vietnam War in December 15, 1969.

While the first wave of the women’s liberation movement had focused on the most basic and fundamental demands – to be treated equally before the law – the second wave focused on winning demands based most specifically on women’s issues, most importantly the right to control their own bodies and fertility by legalizing abortion along with other issues specifically related to gender-discrimination in the workplace such as fighting for equal opportunity policies including the need for positive discrimination. In the US the movement had a centerpiece in terms of fighting for the ERA – a struggle that is still to be won.  Jarvis writes that the three key demands at the time were “equal pay for equal work”, “free 24-hour child care” and “free abortion on demand”. Furthermore the “movement campaigned for rape crisis centres, women’s refuges, women’s health care centres, abortion clinics, childcare clinics”.

However while the movement was able to affect a huge leap in consciousness about women’s oppression, it was short-lived, retreating along with the rest of the social movements with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Furthermore ideological debates fragmented the movement and governments began a systematic program of cooption. For example in Australia the Whitlam Labor government set up women’s departments and commissions, allowing a layer of the leadership in the movement to gain disproportionately even while the main demands of the movement had not been achieved.

However while governments were forced to pour funds into women’s services and peak bodies creating a sense that significant progress had been achieved, the demobilization of the movement ultimately left future generations of women vulnerable to the whims of government budgetary decisions. As the backlash against women’s rights and feminism began to take hold in the 80s, funds previously allocated to women’s services could easily be re-allocated and the “femocrats” who had managed to make a career for themselves  on the ruins of the movement were also vulnerable, relying as they did on the established institutions of the capitalist state rather than strength of grassroots organizations.

In the US a new political movement arose, the New Right which was heavily influenced and led by Christian fundamentalists. These mysognist crusaders had a central mission which was to dismantle the gains of the women’s liberation movement and in the words of one preacher and member of the Heritage Foundation to “turn the clock back to 1954”, in other words to re-establish the sanctity of the nuclear family and firmly assert the proper place for women, as subservient domestic servants and mothers. One of their main targets was to roll back women’s access to abortion with the ultimate goal of outlawing it. They soon learned that they would get a bigger audience if they defined themselves positively and so renamed themselves the pro-life/pro-family movement. One of their most notorious tactics has been to organize attacks on abortion clinics, including murdering doctors and security guards. While the US has been the site of most of these attacks, which have killed eight people and included numerous bombings and arson attacks, Australia has not been exempt from this and in 2001 Steven Rogers a security guard at a clinic in Melbourne was murdered by Peter James Knight who is described on Wikipedia as a “pro-life activist”!

In her article in Direct Action Helen Jarvis noted that many of the demands that the women’s liberation movement in the 70’s and 80’s have not been met today or are being rolled back. Jarvis quoted from Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick who concluded after a 6-month investigation that “there is still systematic sex discrimination” against women and that women are still earning on average 17.5% less than men. Furthermore women are still concentrated in part-time and casual employment with 70% off all part-time jobs being held by women. The systemic disadvantages that women already face in the work force will only be exacerbated by the Global Financial Crisis.

Furthermore while 80% of the public supports a woman’s right to abortion, only Victoria and the ACT have so far taken abortion of the criminal code and only South Australia supplies free, bulk-billed abortion. While a level of complacency has grown around this uneasy compromise, where women’s right to abortion in most states and territories has been based upon common law rulings rather than statutory law, the recent case in Queensland of a young couple being charged with procuring an “overseas” abortion drug with the woman facing up to seven years in jail and her partner three years, highlights the need for a renewed campaign to fully legalise abortion in every state and territory. The right to control her own fertility is the most fundamental bedrock of women’s liberation.

On a related issue, the possibility of women to choose home birthing is likely to become an impossibility very soon due to the fact that midwives conducting home births will not be able to secure medical indemnity insurance, unlike all other medical professionals. According to the HomeBirth Australia website “Australia is out of step with other nations such as Canada, UK, New Zealand and The Netherlands, which offer public funded homebirth”. This is not a question of women and babies health and safety, but rather another example of women being denied the right to control their lives and bodies.

Finally I want to have a bit of a rant about women’s portrayals in the mass media. Today’s society is heavily media-saturated, far more so than in the 70s. Young people today predominantly spend their free time engaging with the media in the form of the internet, and here, as well as every other place the image of women as objects to be scrutinized are absolutely ubiquitous.

Firstly, the notion of men being able to judge a woman’s physical beauty is as old as women’s oppression, as I pointed out earlier in the talk, women were judged on the basis of their health and beauty in exactly the same way as were cattle. However while in the early days of patriarchal class society being chosen to be a concubine would probably have been a dreaded consequence of conforming to the standards of beauty of the time, as Evelyn Reed pointed out in her essay Cosmetics, Fashions and the Exploitation of Women, with the rise of free-market capitalism there was the possibility for the first time of people overcoming their class origins, men through hard work and property acquisition and women through marrying up the social scale. Thus the basis of the beauty industry was established and since then women have been sold the idea that through improving their ‘natural assets’ they may be able to change their destiny by securing a capitalist husband. Thus women are manipulated into becoming actively involved in their own objectification, for taking responsibility for their own objectification or else face the consequences of social ostracism and risking ending up a poverty-stricken, ‘barren’ woman.  As Reed notes “cosmetics and fashions became a capitalist gold mine … businessmen in these fields had only to change the fashion often enough and invent more and newer aids to beauty to become richer and richer. That is how, under modern capitalism, the sale of women as commodities was displaced by the sale of commodities to women”.

The industries spawned by the oppression of women are absolutely integral to the capitalist world economy: the combined value of the cosmetics and toiletries industry in the EU, US, China and Japan in 2006 was 136.2 billion Euros, the global apparel industry in the same year was valued at US$1,252.8 billion. The capitalists interests in maintaining their profits from these industries is disguised by a constant brainwashing campaign to make women believe that buying these items is all about choice and expressing individuality.

Furthermore, there is the psychological effect of the mass media. A recent survey indicated that only 23% of women in Australia are happy with their bodies. The constant scrutiny of celebrity women’s bodies and the parade of photo-shopped models seriously erodes women’s confidence in themselves. I think an even more insidious aspect and one that is fundamental to the ideology of the family, is the way that media is able to twist and distort women and girls conception of who they are and their role in life, in other words to shape their dreams. This may seem to be a minor point but I noticed that in the Socialist Alliance’s 2005 Gender Agenda in the ‘imagine’ section it states “Imagine a world where girls did not merely dream of being an astronaut, a mechanic, a prime minister or a scaffolder, but said with complete confidence: ‘That is what I’m going to be when I grow up’”. However, the problem now is not so much that young women and girls are dreaming of occupations and goals which are non-traditional, but that they don’t dream of those things.

For example if you type in ‘make-up tutorial’ on YouTube, you will get 372,000 responses, the highest rating video had had more than 11 million viewings another one which was a ‘Barbie Transformation Tutorial’ had more than 2 million hits and ended by congratulating the viewer on becoming a “plastic Barbie doll”. The media is one of the major instruments for determining the dreams and aspirations and identity of women – if women don’t dream of becoming more than a heavily made up face than they are hardly likely to be able to even test the boundaries of the artificial world that has been created for them.

Furthermore, on Christmas Eve a programme shown on Christmas Eve about the search for the next ‘Victoria’s Secret Angel’, exposed the sad fact that thousands upon thousands of women in the US saw the competition as a great opportunity or even the realization of their life’s dream. The fact is that so-called supermodels are adulated, achieve financial security, social acceptance and fame all for being born looking a particular way.

But now, supposedly all women can and therefore should, strive to follow in these women’s footsteps with cosmetic surgery. Women are convinced to see their natural physical features as not only inferior but improvable, but actually as some kind of deformity. Women are encouraged to risk their lives and go into debt for procedures that will make them feel more ‘confident’. Yes they may feel more confident, if they survive or are not left with horrific scarring, because they can finally feel that they are ‘acceptable’.

Furthermore apparently getting cosmetic surgery is actually an act of liberation. An article in Women’s Weekly’s December ‘Body Issue’ interviewed several prominent women actors and media personalities about their feeling towards their physical appearance. Rebecca Gibney, compared the use of the chemical Botox by comparing it to “getting a facial”, and wouldn’t even baulk at more drastic and bizarre operations. She said: "I think even if women want to cut their face and put someone else's on, that's fine. We should stop judging each other" – could there be a more extreme expression of self-loathing? Gibney also added that women “should stop judging each other” for undertaking extreme cosmetic surgery, therefore deflecting criticism away from the beauty industry, government or the sexist system itself – no blame other women for trying to hold you back from your freedom to choose to mutilate yourself! The comments by journalist Jana Wendt that she would never use Botox because “even a cursory reading of Wikipedia” would expose some its disturbing side effects, were tacked on at the end of the article, clearly showing which view was the most ‘upbeat and newsworthy’, ie, profitable.

At the same time as women’s right to free, safe abortion is being attacked there is undoubtedly a bourgeois media campaign to glamourise pregnancy and project it as being the ultimate status symbol and goal for younger and younger women. For more than ten years women’s magazines have overwhelmingly focused on pregnancy as the ‘hottest topic’, terms such as ‘baby bump’ and ‘yummy mummy’ are ubiquitous. Essentially the message is that pregnancy is sexy and that you should still aim to be a ‘hot babe’ even when you’re pregnant. While this may appear to be a newfound celebration of motherhood, the underlying themes and messages are not. In the 50s the image was of the contented housewife happily ensconced in her new, modern family home, today: the message – motherhood and homemaking are the source of happiness and fulfillment as a woman. Today, while the image is of the sexy, young celebrity mother who can still live her jetset lifestyle in between motherhood, the reality for the majority of women who have to deal with an increasing cost of living, huge household debt and worsening conditions in the work place is obviously completely different.

Well as women’s oppression arose with the development of the private property system, class society and  the family, the only solution to destroying the material basis of women’s oppression is to get rid of capitalism and the eventually the class system altogether. The Communist Manifesto called for the “abolition of the family” though noting that at the time “even the most radical get riled up about this shameful intention of the communists”. Certainly no socialist society would ever be able to, nor would it want to, destroy all familial relations – people will always have relationships and children – rather the essence of what Marx and Engels were proposing was to destroy the social and economic role of the family under capitalism.

That is, under socialism the nuclear family would not be forced to substitute for adequate welfare services, allowing women to be freed from their unpaid work as child-care workers, cooks, cleaners and carers. In a socialist economy, there would be no need to maintain half of society as a second-class reserve pool of labour or super-exploited strata within the working class in order to prop up capitalist profits and act as a downward pressure on all wages. When you abolish the material basis of women’s oppression then the sexist and misogynistic superstructure, aimed at shaping the identity of women and their conception of what an ‘acceptable’ social role is, i.e bound to the home rather than conceiving of playing a broader social role. In a socialist society girls really will dream of being astronauts, physicists, philosophers, artists and political leaders and they will be supported to achieve those dreams.

The need to overthrow capitalism as a precondition for women’s liberation is clear when we compare the worsening situation for women in the most advanced capitalist countries, with the gains that women have achieved in Venezuela only 12 years after the election of the Chavez government. Starting with the rewriting of the Venezuelan constitution, which is now one of the most progressive in the world in relation to women’s rights, upholding the principle of equality for all, guaranteeing the right of services and support for mother as well as recognising work in the home as economic activity. Furthermore the Chavez government has established new government ministries for women’s issues as well as Banmujer Women’s Bank of Venezuela which gives small, low-interest loans to poor women. According to president Nora Castaneda Banmujer is a “social development bank that assesses the viability of projects, and provides training in citizenship, leadership, education, education, health and self-esteem as well as personal development. We are not building a bank, we are building a different way of life”. A raft of new laws have also been created for example the 1999 Law on Violence Against Women, sexual harassment and domestic violence, the 2000 Law for the Protection of Children and the 2001 Law on Land and Agricultural Development, qualifies women as heads of households and to lead agricultural projects. Women also head up the National Assembly, Supreme Court, National Electoral Council and Human Rights Office (4 out of 5 branches of government, except the executive), 18.6% of seats in the National Assembly are women and women are also playing a leading role in local politics through the Communal Councils, which involve more than 2.2 million people. Of course, Venezuela’s revolution is following in the footsteps of the Cuban revolution where women have been at the forefront of the socialist transformation for decades.

Of course in between our situation and the socialist revolution lies a massive gulf and one that can only be overcome through a major new wave of class struggle and society-wide radicalization. Those struggles will have no hope of success if half the population is unwilling or unable to not only participate but also to lead. Therefore the role of the RSP is to maintain a high level of consciousness within our own party of women’s oppression and to seek to educate others that we come in contact with through our political work, our educational forums and our publications of our view of how to overcome women’s oppression. Furthermore we need to be able to help lead struggles for demands related to women’s liberation and inject our political perspectives into these struggles and through that convince the most progressive people we come across to join us. “Without the participation and leadership of women, there will be no socialist revolution. Without women's liberation, there will be no socialism”.