No Turning Back — writings from the Womens Liberation Movement 1975-80, Women's Press, 1981, £4.95
No Turning Back is confidently described as a 'major event'. In fact, it is a document of the declining fortunes of the women's liberation movement.
The book is the third in a series which together paint a fairly accurate picture of the debates, divisions and activities of the women's movement in the last ten years. The [illegible], however, are more [illegible] from the [illegible] Women's Liberation, [illegible] structures and in political demands.
The period covered in No Turning Back was an important one. 1975 supposedly saw the full implementation of the Equal Pay Act. The TUC, which had refused to have any mention of contraception and abortion in its charter for working women in 1975, by 1979 was forced to call a mass demonstration to defeat the third of a succession of anti-abortion bills. The last five years have seen more and more unions adopting policy on questions like abortion, sexual harassment and positive action. Sexism and male chauvinism are now words which most people understand, and the whole of issue of violence against women was brought to national prominence in the latter part of 1980.
The period was, however, also marked by the split in the women's liberation movement at what turned out to be its final conference in 1978 which was wracked by seemingly irreconcilable difference. What was the reason for this and what was the nature of these differences? No Turning Back reflects some of the debates but it does not paint the entire picture.
The main debate running throughout the book is the old, old one of whether the sphere of domestic activity — that is of women's role within the family, of the production of ideology and so on — is a sphere of political activity, and, if so, where is this activity directed, what demands does it encompass, who is it a struggle with? For example there are at least five articles taking up the question of patriarchy, questioning whether it is possible for women to form an alliance with working class men in order to fight their oppression, Two arguments are put forward on this score which are equally problematic.
In her essay, Anne Phillips explains the ideas (though does not endorse them) of Christine Delphy who argues that there is a 'family mode of production' within which married women carry out a series of domestic services with pay for men. She claims that it is not capital which benefits from women's provision of these services but men, and that therefore men have an interest in maintaining women's oppression.
In other words there are two modes of production and reproduction which have existed alongside each other for centuries and a change in one will not necessarily mean a change in the other; they are two entirely separate realms of struggle. But what is the motor force of this mode of production — how will it be destroyed apart from by destroying men? How is it possible to have a fixed structure of patriarchy which has not changed? The only answer to this is of course that the material basis of such a mode of reproduction is women's biology. This is a very pessimistic outlook.
In Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander's article there is a more subtle definition of patriarchy [illegible] that it is in a socialist feminist framework. They argue that the 'concept of patriarchy points to a strategy which will eliminate not men, but masculinity and transform psycho-social relations.' In other words patriarchy is not a mode of production but a system of ideas, of ideology. Again, the problem is that this ideology of masculinity seems to exist in isolation from society and to have an independent existence as a system from the mode of production.
The argument continues that there must be a separate sphere of feminist activity autonomous from the class struggle. It reduces the struggle to a struggle to change men's ideas, The struggle to change the consciousness of working class men is of course very important, but surely the stuggles of the women's movement directed toward an alliance with the labour movement in action is the most effective way of achieveing this.
There is a third line of argument not unrelated to the above put forward by Zoe Fairbairns which sees the struggle in the 'domestic sphere' as being centred around the struggle for a living income in their own right for women or men who care for dependents at home'. This is not, the author takes care to mention, the same as wages for housework since it would be a benefit system for women who chose to claim. She argues that housework cannot be abolished in the near future — that the tasks are ones which someone has to do and if some women want to do housework they should get paid for it.
But the real problem with housework is [illegible] the argument. That housework [illegible] may be a long term goal but there must be some relation between our long term goal and what we do now. The main issue is that women are being made unemployed and forced into exclusive domestic work. The Tories in the present context would be rather encouraged by the demand for some kind of payment for these tasks since that would make it easier to keep women unemployed and cut back on the welfare state.
What none of these arguments understand is that the family under capitalism has specific features which we can and must take advantage of. It contains within it a contradiction which is too big for it to survive: it creates the conditions for women to be involved in social production and this conflicts with the longstanding division of labour and with the need of capitalism to maintain the family. This contradiction has not existed so acutely [illegible] the possibility of getting rid of women's oppression.
The domestic sphere is a sphere of political struggle. [illegible] women's right to work must become a crucial one in our current strategy because [illegible] coming into play in the most acute form.
Unfortunately none of the essays in No Turning Back point a direction for the women's movement. In fact the two essays on the abortion struggle express a very one-sided picture of the achievements of the women's movement in this period by downplaying the importance of the alliance achieved with the labour movement. In an essay entitled 'I call myself a radical feminist', Gail Chester laments that the women's movement has now become so broad that groups 'such as the Working Womens Charter and NAC claim the right to be included under the affiliating banner of the 'women's movement'.
We should on the contrary welcome the fact that so many women from so many different spheres are sympathetic to the ideas of women's liberation and are, on occasion, prepared actively to organise around them. Surely this is the type of women's movement we need in this country: a mass movement full of debate and discussion not a small movement based on narrowly-defined 'pure' political goals.