Women, Resistance and Revolution (12 page)

As to the forms of such relations, in
The Origin of the Family
he felt it was only possible to see what they would not be. All that was certain was that the generations who had never known alienation or domination ‘will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual and that will be the end of it’.
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Such a generation is still unborn.

Marx and Engels left an important theoretical commitment to the liberation of woman’s potential as a human being and the connection of this to communism. Between them they added greatly to an understanding of the nature of women’s oppression in the nineteenth century, both in the anthropological and in the economic sense. However, as Juliet Mitchell points out in
Woman’s Estate
, the liberation of women has remained marginal in Marxist theory – dependent on the emancipation of the working class. There were many questions they left open and they took some ideas for granted which appear incredible now. They were of their own time. They could not envisage the extraordinary transformation of social revolution, the startling conclusions of bourgeois psychology, the new technology of contraception or a movement like women’s liberation. Many really crucial questions are unanswered. If these are to be resolved it is not by annotating their writings specifically on women but by extending Marxist theory in general as part of revolutionary feminist praxis.
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Does it follow that changes in the ownership and organization of production in fact change the social relations of production, and consequently effect a revolutionary change in women’s position? Given that women’s oppression pre-dates capitalist society, can it be assumed that a revolution which changes the economic basis of
society in a socialist direction would affect her sexual role? Is it not rather necessary for women to organize round their specific experiences as women actually in the course of revolutionary struggle against capitalism? The question remains what form should such organization take to be most effective. How far can the revolutionary argue for women’s involvement in productive work when for working-class women this is invariably the most boring and lowest paid? While Engels recognized the separate and specific oppression of women and compared women to the proletariat and man to the bourgeois, he does not work out any sense in which the description of women as a class can be related to the concept of class in Marx’s writing. Nor does he have any idea about the kind of action women can take. Similarly they both presumed women would take their part in the general struggle to change society as equivalent to the men, although their general position in society was in no sense equal. Personally they were ready to accept the activity of women in revolutionary work on a completely equal basis. Marx supported the women’s section in the International for example. He specially singled out the women in the Commune, praising their heroism. He always encouraged the intellectual development and activism of his own daughters. Engels also obviously respected and learned from the republicanism and class consciousness of Mary and Lizzie. But the more general problem remained. The subordination of women in society as a whole could be reflected in revolutionary organizations. Many revolutionary men were not able to cast off a deep contempt for women, when they became socialists. They didn’t apply their other ideas to women.

This was one of the great unresolved dilemmas and it was to be debated fiercely throughout the revolutionary movements as part of the continuing question of women’s emancipation.

CHAPTER 4

Dreams and Dilemmas

The wife who married for money compared with the prostitute is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labour and care, and is absolutely bound to her master.

Havelock Ellis

Why can’t we men and women come near each other, and help each other and not kill each other’s souls and blight each other’s lives.

… When passion enters a relationship it does spoil the holy sweetness. But perhaps those people are right who say no such thing as friendship is possible between a man and a woman, only I can’t bear to think it so.

Olive Schreiner, Letters to Havelock Ellis

History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts. It is necessary that woman learn that lesson, that she realize that her freedom will reach as far as her power to achieve her freedom reaches.

Emma Goldman, ‘Women’s Suffrage’, in Anarchism and Other Essays

Women’s liberation was a live and explosive issue in the emerging socialist movements at the end of the century. However, this was not so much because people dutifully sat down and read Marx and Engels. Most of their writing which dealt with women’s oppression was not widely available until a relatively late date. In various ways
women themselves put considerable pressure on the new movements and were able to put their case within the general arguments for socialism. Also there were other writers and thinkers who popularized the connection between women’s liberation and revolution, both in the Marxist and anarchist tradition. Undoubtedly too the organization and activity of bourgeois feminism, especially in England and America, forced socialists to consider the issues and clarify their own approach to the question.

From the start there was little uniformity. In Russia for example, where the revolutionary movement was deeply committed both to women’s emancipation and personal cultural transformation, apart from the earlier influence of George Sand on Herzen, Chernychevsky’s novel
What is to be Done?
, published in the 1860s, was the central text for a generation. It was a story of an emancipated heroine, a lofty ‘free union’ and a cooperative sewing workshop. Women like Vera Figner played an important and frequently heroic part in the general movement and a separate bourgeois feminist movement only developed long afterwards.

In America on the other hand the feminist movement came out of the anti-slavery campaign and two tendencies emerged. One group restricted its demand to the vote and were willing to settle for a compromise on total suffrage. But another group based in New York, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, not only refused to compromise over the franchise but connected emancipation with change in marriage, clothing, morals and the organization of labour. They produced a short-lived journal called
The Revolution
in 1868. In the same year Victoria Woodhull arrived in New York. She swiftly became a notorious figure, propagating free love, feminist Marxism (her own variety), spiritualism, and universology – the key to all knowledge. The main wing of American feminism was far more cautious and far more conservative. Its advocates were at once ignorant and contemptuous of organized labour, though later, in the 1890s, a social feminism, connected with the settlements, developed. This was concerned rather to improve the working conditions of girls and women in factories and sweat shops rather than the problem of connecting the liberation of women with the idea of revolution.

The ‘woman question’ caused some argument in the European socialist movement. In the First International the French anarchist-socialist Proudhon and his followers in the sixties were quite opposed
to Marx’s ideas. Proudhon also came into conflict with socialist feminist women in France. In Germany the followers of Lassalle argued against the semi-Marxist groups led by Bebel at a congress in Gotha in 1875. Bebel had proposed equal rights for women as part of the official party programme. But the congress rejected this on the grounds that women were not yet ready for equal rights – a familiar argument.

Bebel’s book
Woman and Socialism
, published in 1879 in Germany, although received with the utmost horror by the German bourgeoisie had an important effect. Both he and Engels also personally encouraged the growth of a separate socialist women’s movement in Germany, which published its own papers and had its own organization. However, only in 1891 did the German party officially accept women’s equal rights, and then only in a very limited legal sense. It would seem too that at a grass roots level they did not emphasize these questions very much in their propaganda. Adelheid Popp, a trade union militant in the Social Democratic Party, describes this in her autobiography:

I had no notion yet of the ‘Woman Question’. There was nothing about it in my newspaper, and I only read Social Democratic publications. I was held to be an exception, and I looked upon myself as such. I considered the Social Question, as far as I then understood it, as a man’s question, just like politics. Only I would have liked to be a man, to have a right to busy myself with politics.
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She discovered that Social Democrats supported equal rights for women but still didn’t realize that women themselves could share in the work of the party. When she read a reference to the exploitation of women workers in her party paper, she was so excited and overjoyed she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t until she went to a branch meeting where there were three hundred men and nine women from the party that she managed to speak out herself and take an active part in revolutionary politics. She was much encouraged by Bebel’s book
Woman and Socialism.

Bebel argued like the utopian socialists that the liberation of women was inseparable from the release of all human beings from ‘oppression, exploitation, want and misery in a hundred shapes.… The so-called women’s question is therefore only one side of the whole social question … only in connection with each other can the two questions reach their final solution.’
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Neither could be separated, and neither could be resolved except through the creation of a socialist society. This was partly because he believed the practical conditions for women’s liberation, communalization of housework, facilities for looking after children, were dependent on socialism; but also because the relationships of exploitation and domination connected with capitalism, and within which women were subordinated, could only be dissolved by a fundamental change in the social structure. Bebel was aware that woman’s oppression pre-dated capitalism, and that her consciousness of subordination went very deep and was expressed in areas where habit and nature were so ingrown they were almost indistinguishable. She was ‘a slave before the slave existed’. Thus like Engels he did not believe that women’s liberation could be created in a utopian way in the moment of revolution. Revolution was only the beginning. There was a long process afterwards. This did not mean, however, that he put off any movement for short-term changes, or dismissed the immediate real conflicts actually between men and women within capitalism. Beginnings don’t come from nowhere. You have to do a lot of work before you can even begin. Arguing that women were doubly exploited, he saw them fighting against capitalism and against their own oppression. Bebel follows the radical tradition which puts the oppressed firmly in charge of their own liberation. Women’s interests could no more be included with the interests of men than the workers could be included in the interests of the employers. From Mary Wollstonecraft to Flora Tristan, revolutionary women had finally looked to men to free women. But Bebel believed there was little likelihood of men as a group taking up the cause of women’s emancipation. Why should they try to end women’s dependence in the family and society, when this dependence directly benefited them?

It gratifies their vanity, feeds their pride, and suits their interests to play the part of master and lord, and in this role, they are like all rulers well nigh inaccessible to reason. This makes it all the more imperative on women to exert themselves in bringing about new conditions, which will enable them to free themselves from this degrading position. Women have as little to hope from men as the workmen from the middle classes.
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