[Socialism Today, No 26, March 1998, p. 26-30]
On 8 March 1857, in New York, the first mass demonstration of women workers took place in revolt against abysmal pay and working conditions, a date which has been commemorated since as International Women’s Day. Over 140 years on, real economic and social advances have been made by women. But, on a global scale, there is still a long way to go.
This text is extracted from a fuller statement to commemorate International Women’s Day 1998, issued by the Committee for a Workers‘ International (CWI). For details af how to order CWT publications, see after p. 32.
A majority of the world’s women still live and toil in countries that, in spite of wresting formal independence from the colonial oppressor, are dominated by imperialism and its multinational giants, The 48 least developed countries of the world are twice as poor as they were just 20 years ago, with grinding poverty and debt aggravated in the more recent period by the dictates of the International Monetary Fund’s ‚Structural Adjustment‘ austerity programmes.
Women in the ‚Third World‘ carry out the overwhelming majority of tasks in the countryside. They see the very earth, rivers and forests on which they depend wrecked and polluted by multinational companies, intent on making the maximum profit from their operations. Those activists who speak out and campaign for even the most basic democratic and trade union rights, including many dedicated and self-sacrificing women, fight an uphill battle. Many face imprisonment without trial, sexual torture and even summary execution.
Nevertheless, from Bolivia to Britain, India to Italy, women have been to the fore in organising, linking up and campaigning to protect such workers. As a result of their pressure, an international conference held in 1996 of representatives from 124 countries adopted a charter of rights for home-workers and an agreement on minimum wages and conditions. But, just like the international ‚agreement‘ made in 1951 on equal pay for work of equal value, without struggle, it runs the risk of remaining a dead letter. No real reforms are won without a fight – of both men and women workers.
As the world teeters on the brink of a new economic crisis brought on by the meltdown in Asia, it is clear that nothing will improve for working class women unless they continue to fight. In the course of the past 140 years there have been many examples to follow. Even before the turn of the century, women were pioneers in organising trade unions and leading strikes. They have taken their place in the front ranks in movements to change society, to rid it of fascism and of war.
In Russia, it was women textile workers, striking on International Women’s Day 1917, who set off a movement which brought down the Czarist regime. The struggle they started against food shortages and mass slaughter in the trenches, paved the way for the Bolshevik Party to lead the only successful socialist revolution in history just eight months later in October. The immediate introduction of the eight-hour day, civil marriage and divorce, legalised abortion and a massive programme for communal child care, cooking and washing, all promised to transform the lives of women. Later, the reverses suffered by women under the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalin were enormous and in themselves were an indication of how far short of socialism society remained. In the Soviet Union and in most of the state-owned planned economies that developed elsewhere, around 95% of women participated in the workforce. But their health and fertility were badly affected by conditions of work and by ‚family planning‘ through multiple abortions, in the almost total absence of contraceptive devices. Lip-service was paid to equality in the home.
Nowadays in these countries, it is women (apart from the handful of very rich) who are at the sharp end of the reintroduction of capitalism with all its ugliest attributes – mass unemployment, abolition of state provisions, a mushrooming in pornography, violence and prostitution, with hardly a help-line or a refuge to turn to. Female earnings have dropped on average from around 70% of male earnings to 40%. The memory of the gains of the revolution is all but wiped out.
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In many countries where capitalism developed a strong working class, the struggles of women, together with the organised labour movement, meant big strides forward. They gained not only the right to vote but an end to night-work and child labour, shorter working hours, much improved wage rates, and health and safety legislation. Bit by bit, governments were forced to use public funds to make education and welfare provisions which went a long way to ease the numerous burdens traditionally laid on the shoulders of working class women, enabling them to work outside the home and giving them a new confidence.
But even in the so-called advanced capitalist countries in the late 1990s no fewer than 100 million people are presently unemployed – a majority of them women. It is women who bear the brunt of the massive cut-backs in public spending taking place in Europe and elsewhere. It is their jobs in education, health and welfare that are the first to go and it is they who are expected to make good the lost ’services‘ to the elderly, the sick and the young.
Women are also often first in the firing line in private industry – thrown out of work, given reduced hours, put onto casual or totally ‚flexible‘ working contracts. One-third of working women in Europe are in part-time jobs – not from choice but through lack of child care provision that would enable them to work full-time. For similar reasons, millions of women are doing dangerous and abysmally paid work at home on sub-contract to some of the best-known world monopolies. In Europe there are now eight million ‚teleworkers‘ – predominantly women. In India 93% of working women are in the euphemistically called ‚informal‘ sector. World-wide 200 million women are employed by sub-contractors, with no protection by law for accident, sickness or disablement.
Women make up 70% of the world’s poor and more than 60% (600 million) of the world’s illiterate. Although they do not constitute half of the world’s official workforce, it has been estimated that they do two-thirds of the world’s work and receive one tenth of the world’s income. (In Africa they do 80% of the work, and receive less than 1% of the income!) An international trade union study calculates that if the ‚household tasks‘ done by women – cleaning, cooking, washing, child care etc. – were considered as productive activity, the total production or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world would be valued 24-30% higher.
Women everywhere experience discrimination of some kind during their lives. In some countries, because of poverty and prejudice, females are so undervalued that they are selectively aborted, killed in infancy or deliberately undernourished. Because of this, it is estimated, there are at least 60 million women ‚missing‘ from the world.
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, champion of workers‘ democracy against the totalitarianism of Stalin, always maintained that genuine progress in society (and towards socialism in an economy where capitalism had been eliminated) could be accurately gauged by the situation of women – the tangible improvements in their lives or otherwise. Only when they are totally freed from their ‚double burden‘, he insisted, and enabled to participate on an equal basis with men in education, work, trade unions and politics, science, art and culture, would it be possible to say that humanity was truly freed from all the hallmarks of capitalist oppression. By this measure, the facts about women’s position on a global scale show how far there is still to go.
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It is the division of society into classes and nation states and the domination of the world’s economy by about 350 private corporations that lie behind the suffering of most of the world’s population. But it could be eliminated by a different organisation of things. The United Nations estimates that just 1% of the world’s income could eradicate poverty.
For lack of resources to provide adequate health education and care, 600,000 women a year die from complications with pregnancy and childbirth. For each one of them, thirty more are injured, infected or disabled for life. At the very least, 75,000 women are known to die each year for trying to abort themselves and at least as many again from botched illegal operations.
Women are 80% of the world’s refugees who live without personal possessions in temporary accommodation – sometimes even detention camps. Women also constitute a large proportion of migrant workers – from Sri Lanka twice as many as men, from Indonesia three times. Most end up virtually enslaved by employers who keep their passports or ‚protect‘ them from deportation.
A majority of women in the world experience sexual harassment at work to one degree or another, ranging from unwanted attention by male workers to the use by bosses of demands for sexual ‚favours‘ as a means of humiliation and subjection. Successful cases have been brought by women and their unions against employers in a number of countries. There is a much greater awareness of how widespread the problem is although there is a long way to go in some countries where no law exists under which to sue!
The same applies to the crime of domestic violence. Through various campaigns, the extent of domestic violence has been exposed: one quarter at least of all women suffer assaults in the home. In the USA one woman is beaten every 18 minutes – women in all countries and from all classes can suffer domestic violence. It is a horrific expression of the way society’s mores are developed to maintain the status quo. Ideologies and religions that emphasise the domination of the male in the family are a tool for the maintenance of ‚discipline‘ and respect for authority on behalf of the rulers. The provision of refuges and, indeed, the availability of decent housing for all, are vital for women (and children) suffering such abuse. But it begs the question of where, in a society geared to profit, will money be found to finance such public investment? Even in ‚advanced‘ Austria, where campaigns have succeeded in getting established 16 secure hostels for ‚battered women‘, the EU recommended level would mean at least another 44 being provided.
One fifth of the world’s women head single-parent families. Women constitute around 90% of all lone parents bringing up children. Even in industrialised countries lone parents make up a large proportion of those who fall below the poverty line – their lot only worsened by their meagre allowances being stolen from them. Yet, across Europe, from Sweden to Portugal, Greece to Italy and France, it is erstwhile workers‘ parties, once champions, at least in words, of women’s rights and socialism, who in government are now robbing the poor to pay the rich – just as the traditional bosses‘ parties did before them. In Britain, ‚New Labour‘ is punishing single mothers as if they were naughty children (and children as if they were all potential criminals!).
In contrast, the sections of the Committee for a Workers‘ International (CWI) have been to the fore in campaigns against domestic violence, sexual harassment and discrimination, as well as struggles on numerous other issues that affect women workers. The CWI champions the demands for real jobs for all, equal pay for work of equal value, a 35-hour week for full-time workers and a decent basic minimum wage for all. It stands against cuts in welfare spending and for a massive programme for building schools, hospitals and homes for all. It fights for an end to racism, fascism and all forms of repression. It also inscribes on its banner demands that would give the working woman a genuine ‚right to choose‘ throughout her life: for the universal provision of free education and health facilities for all; for maternity and child benefit to cover the real costs of bearing and bringing up children; for free child care; for adequate, low rent accommodation; and for free contraception and abortion for all those who require it.
All this means conducting a relentless campaign also against all reactionary propaganda which reinforces the constraints imposed on women in capitalist society. The CWI fights world-wide for the socialist organisation of society as the only way to release sufficient resources to fulfil all the basic needs of working class people. The capitalist system not only fails to provide the bare necessities for a decent life for workers of both sexes, it reduces them to cogs in a wheel, often without respect even for themselves.
Only through the establishment of property held in common and society run on democratic and co-operative principles will working people – men and women – reach the full potential of their talents and abilities. Only then will personal relations be totally free. Only then can the horrors of capitalism – war, poverty and oppression – be replaced with harmonious and peaceful development on an unprecedented scale.
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