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attempt by anyone on the British left to place the struggle of women in the context of the working-class struggle. In this book, after a very cursory aceount of 17th and 18th century ideas on the position of women, she surveys the specifically British historical experience of the entry of women into large-scale production and the effect this had on the carly trade unions and the various political organizations of the working-class. Thus her book opens essentially with the carly decades of the 19th century and draws to a close towards the end of the 1930's.
Initially, workers' organizations were for the most part divided along sexual lines - a fact due as much to the fragmented structures of the carly trade union movement and men's unwillingness to take up women workers' demands. as to the prevailing sexual morality of the times. But the fact that women organized signalled a new era of female independence brought about by the industrial revolution. New ideas on marriage and sexuality started circulating among both the the enlightened intelligentsia and the working-class. Political and theoretical discussion that connected female emancipation and socialist aims began to appear in the literature produced by various radical and socialist circles, albeit in a scattered, unsystematic and often contradictory way. But although the economic transformation brought to women the independence of wage labour and the experience of organized revolt, it also brought untold hardship and misery to mothers and young children. Towards the second part of the 19th century, there was increasing intervention by the bourgeois state in regulating industry's demand for female labour, in order to safeguard precisely the general capitalist need for a relatively healthy and stable labour force. But female labour was kept both cheap and expendable, dependent on the fluctuations of capitalist demand (serving an analogous function, as an industrial army, to that of Irish labour over the past century and immigrant labour in general in the post-war period).
Sheila Rowbotham's evocation of the Suffragette movement helps miss the struggle for the vote as a typical reformist experience. It is quite clear that this movement was nor to the issue of the vote, and that it provided an opportunity to put forward and organize around a whole series of issues related to women's oppression under capitalism. However, a systematic interrelation between the struggle for women's equality and socialism was not forthcoming, either at a theoretical or organizational level, and the location of this failure is, no doubt, to be found in the absence of revolutionary traditions in the British working-class, and the failure of marxism to gain any mass implantation in this country.
The First World War clearly marked a break in many ways for the Britto counter the the widely-held views. on the revolutionary left, which disneither confined to the bourgeoisie. ically supporting the war effort, and the latter taking an internationalist position and subsequently joining the newly-formed C.P. Secondly there was the trend to dissolve separate unions for men and women. Thirdly there was a general breakdown in the sexual division of labour, due to the absence of men. This resulted in an unprecedented upsurge of confidence among women. Fourthly, there was a partial - though temporary - attempt to release women from some of their committments in the home, through the opening of creches and public canteens: i.e, the first appearence in an embryonic form of the future welfare state. Further, the success of the workers' revolution in Russia signalled new possibilities for the working class and new methods of struggle. It is only against this general background of women's confidence and militancy that one can understand the tenor of reaction after the successful (for the bourgeoisie) conclusion to the war, as well as the specificity of bourgeois tacties vis-a-vis women. After the war, women were pushed out of production en masse, in order to accommodate men returning from the front: this development corresponded both to the bourgeoisie's basic conception of social organization in 'normal times' (women at home, men at work), and to its fear of tens of thousands of unemployed soldiers roaming through London and the provinces. In return women were granted the vote. When mass unemployment really hit the
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working-class in the 20's, it was particularly hard on women as it cut down even further the few jobs available to them.
And yet there was little unity in action of unemployed men and women. Later, in the 30's, the struggle for women's emancipation was dominated by the questions of birth control and the welfare state, and by the Labour Party's parliamentary strategy.
Those who have read with great interest ede Rowbotham's *Women, Resistance and Revolution* will find this book rather disappointing. Firstly, because her project of writing the history of women's struggles has no clear and explicit theoretical foundation, so that history appears as a collage of events and impressions. Secondly. because she tries to write about history ignoring political differences and positions, whereas itis essential to spell out the distinctions between struggles organized respectively through T.U?'s and through political parties, struggles led by 2nd and 3rd International forces etc. Without these theoretical and political co-ordinates, her historical approach remains firIn a period of extensive social crisis we: expect to find not only confusion and conflict over a whole range of social relationships, but also a growing polarisation between traditional and reactionary forces defending the existing society, and those progressive and revolutionary forces struggling, in varying degrees, to challenge that society. The women's liberation and the gay liberation movements have been significant indicators of the crisis in sexual relations, the family, bourgeois morality and authority, arising in the context of late capitalist societies. The reactionary response has emerged more clearly recently; Midge Decter is one of its spokeswomen.
Her arguments against women's liberation are arguments on behalf of that small section of relately priviledged, well-educated and articulate women (of whom she is one) who have found in the conditions of post-war capitalism more room for self-development and achievement than was available to their mothers and grandmothers. Whatever the "forthright", "humane" and 'unorthmly within the non-marxist, popular tradition of British historiography, (whose most eminent exponent is Edward Thompson). However, there is that the latter is a militant and her work is very much bound experience in the WLM. This much higher in her case, and the more disappointing.
traditional landscape of British scribed in the dynamic of the from History.
MIDGE DECTER'S DEFENCE OF THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN IN CAPITALIST SOCIETIES odox' gloss (by which the cover uf approach) this book argues in favour and in justification of the existing order of society, and of the existing Midge Decter agrees that women face a new predicament in society today, but that women's liberation has lied about the nature of that predicament (p.52); Midge Decter will tell us the a fundamental difference between Thompson and Rowbotham, in up with her political activity and makes the reader's expectations the deficiencies of the book all Today, amidst an unprecedented crisis of world capitalism, as we are witnessing the beginnings of a radical transformation of the class politics, with a head-on collision between the two classes inpresent struggles, it is hardly inspiring (to say the least) to be told merely that the action of people who are opposed to both patriarchy and wage labour will therefore be crucial.' For what is in fact the crucial is to determine which actions have the potential of bringing down the bourgeois order and to organize for these. This demands far more rigorous political discussion than is deemed necessary by 'Hidden Michele Lee the book characterises Midge Decter's position of women within that order.
13* A REVIEW OF SHEILA ROW BOTHAM'S HIDDEN FROM HISTORY": Pluto press; £3.30/£1.50/paperback.
truth (see p.52, 80, 124, etc). The truth (according to Midge Decter) is that women now have too vast a range of choices, too few restrictions surrounding them. Thus woman has the freedom (denied to most men) to take paid employment or not to do so; at the same time the status of her work in the home has increased: "housework has become a profession in disguise" (p.42),; she has more freedom to develop her sexuality ('as sexual subject par excellence' - p.83). She chooses to marry because 'marriage is an institution maintained and protected by women, for the sake and at the behest of women, and in accordance with their deepest wishes' (p.124). Advances in contraception have made maternity something which a woman ('in collaberation with her husband") chooses, and has thus aquired the qualities of an elected vocation' (p.171). The true situation of women is of an immense range of choices and possibilities which have not yet been fully grasped. Midge Decter accuses women's liberation of an angry denial' of this, even a denial of 'womanliness" itself.
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the realm of choice narrows to the freedom to 'attacks" of this kind. But we are still stead an alteration in all the present arrange- movement see: Sidney Abbott and ments of society...They do not desire pow- Barbara Love, SAPPHO WAS A RIGHI er for themselves but rather society in which ON WOMAN, Stein and Day, 1973. On the one hand she tries to ridicule women's liberation as a childish attempt to cling to a world of no responsibilities, on the other she hints of the disasters with which it threatens the human race.
FREEDOM AND CHOICE - FOR WHOM?
How real, and for how many women, are these choices about which Midge Decter writes? Only a few women are in a position to 'choose" at the lofty level of moral beliefs or personal desires, whether or not to work. Rather it is a question to be determined according to the availability of work, pressures ontthe family standard of living, the possibilities of making arrangements for children, etc. (Presumably Midge Decter also thinks that women "choose' to work twilight shifts, choose to get less pay than men, "choose' to do two jobs - the paid and the unpaid -because they have already made some prior choice to be less committed to paid employment than men?
Or, to take another of her examples: for most women the availability of contraceptives, contraceptive advice and abortion facilities, on the one hand, and secure and adequate incomes, decent houses, etc. on the other, is by no means assured. So to speak of maternity as a real area of choice is meaningless for most women in spite of the tremendous importance of the technical advances in birth control methods. As the book proceeds - quite inevitablyfor only one choice - to be housewife, wife, mother, to be dependent within the structure of the family; a 'choice which is supposed to be made palatable by the new mystique which Midge Decter has tried to weave around it. (This narrowing of choice reveals freedom for what it is in a capitalist society - the freedom" of REFORM OR REVOLUTION? workers to sell their labour power, the "additional freedom' of women to work in the private sphere of the family.)
NEW CHASTITY OR NEW SEXUALITY? Midge Decter's reactionary views are at their most explicit when she discusses sexuality: she is unable to recognise women's sexuality as an active capacity; she simply rejects clitoral orgasms and gay relationships as sexual objectification, and confines women's sexual fulfilment to the 'freedom to submit, to choose to be chosen", to be defined by the demands of her partner. According to Midge Decter women who reject or struggle against sexual subordination and women who are proud to be gay are trying to capture some childish state which she calls 'the new chastity': thus she consistently mis-reads the attempts which we are making to reHER MASTER'S VOICE define and assess female sexuality. Perhaps Midge Decter is trying to seek out an achilles heel in the women's movement? (like a psychiatrist writing to the Observer recently who appeared to believe that once he had attached the label loud-mouthed lesbians" to women's liberation, all the arguments for women's liberation were totally devalued,) the women s move. ment is less vulnerable now the period before gay liberation developed)
only just beginning to confront the tasks of developing concepts of sexuality which break with bourgeois morality and with female subordination, and have not always been effective in explaining why this is important. (2)
Midge Decter's most fundamental objection to women's liberation is that it involves a necessity to challenge the entire structure of capitalist society: The new liberators of women (in contrast to the reformers like Betty Frieden) give no evidence of a feeling of obligation to alter themselves. Their view of changing the present conditions of women involves inno one has power. (p.55)
Though Midge Decter's picture of the women's liberation movement as some tightly homogenous organisation represented by such media selected personalities as Germaine Greer is wildly inaccurate, though she doesn't try to fully grasp many of the arguments, she does recognise the crisis in social relationships which is affecting women today, and the challenge to the existing social order which women's libcration implies. Her response to this is a defence of the oppression of women, and a plea to women to be pleased with their station because in some mysteriou way that have 'chosen it. This is no m than the re-statement of an old idea. The fact that it is being restated at the present time (and not only by Midge D ter) is in part recognition of the impac that the women's liberation movement has made in western societies. But we should not be complacent about this; for these reactionary views are finding new articulators in the context of othe reactionary mobilisations in society (the SPUC anti-abortion mobilisations the festival of light, etc.) and at a time of very generalised social crisis and cla confrontation. We have to confront these ideas and use our arguments agat them to strengthen our own positions the struggle for women's liberation.
MARGARET COULS Notes: (1) For a discussion of the impact of ga liberation on the American women's (2)Kollontai begins to consider the imp tance of this in SEXUAL RELATIONS AND CLASS STRUGGLE.
A Review of The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation", by Midge Decter. Published by Wildwood House, 1973
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Sheila Rowbotham has been publishing production (women's cheap
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Woman's place is in the home.. Woman's place is in ine Posu