[page 18]
Submitted by the Revolutionary Marxist Group (Irish Section of the Fourth International)
The opening meeting of a campaign for free legal contraception drew an attendance of 500-600 in Dublin on Wednesday November 12th. Called by Irish Women United, an autonmous group of radical women, the success of the meeting demonstrated the large degree of committed support for radical change in the laws relating to contraception, Its importance is increased by the context of chaos and confusion within all the three major political parties on the question.
This state of confusion reached a high point of political farce last year when the Taoiseach and other members of his Cabinet voted against a goverment-sponsored family Pianning Bill Since then, a situation of legal anomaly has existed, and now the political parties face the problem of a private member's Bill on contraception, which is due to be introduced in the Senate very shortly.
### UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Despite the fact that some 90,000 women use some form of contraceptive (mostly the pill); despite the fact that there are six privately run Family Planning Clinics, several laws prohibit the sale, import, advertising or recommending of contraceptives. At the same time. however, a ruling of the Supreme Court in 1972 declares that the legal situation is unconstitutional, and that married couples have a constitutional right to the availability of contraceptives.
When in 1974, Mary Robinson, a lieberal Senator, introduced a Bill to liberalise the legal situation, the leader of the Senate attempted to prevent any discussion of the Bill taking place. Discussion did take place, but no vote was taken, because the Minister for Justice intervened to announce that he would be introducing a Government Bill RESTRICTIVE The Government's Family traceptives available only under limited, restrictive conditions, and provided for stiff penalties-including jail sentences-for offences such as selling contraceptives to un married people. It was a Bill, as the fort"which proposed to create as many new categories of criminals as it did freedoms.
the Bill provoked volent responses a debate: This Bill is an attack on It means to smash the family to its very foundations.
(Prime Minister) voting against his Government's Bill.
SUPPORT Planning Bill proposed to make connightly paper Hibernia", commented, Despite its restrictive provisions, from the Right. Oliver J. Flanagan, T. D. (Member of Parliament), states in the family. It is an attack on society.
" It was defeated by 75 votes to 47, with the Taoiseach With a recent opinion poll showErship. ing 68% of married women of childSTOP SISTERS WE DEMAND OPEN VISITS JAIL FREE ASSOCIATION AND ACCESS TO The Irish Wornen's Collective have organised a number of actions to support frish women bearing age supporting the sale of contraceptives through chemists, the reintroduction of Senator Robinson's Bill poses problems for the major parties, which are divided on the question. Brendan Corish (Christian first Socialist second"), leader of the Labour Party, faces a particularly tricky situation. As Minister for Health, he js designated by the Bill as the controller of licenses for the sale of contraceptives. He is also leader of a party pledged by Conference resolution "to introduce a free family planning scheme as part of the public health service." But his senior partner in the Coalition Government, Mr. Cosgrave, 1s firmly opposed to any form of contraception. Such are the strains within the Labour Party that one party branch has taken the unprecedented step of seeking legal advice on the ruling out of motions of the Party Conference (Nov 21-23) dealing with Coalition and contraception by the party leadeFLY TO THE
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So sensitive is the issue, with the Roman Catholic Hierarchy weighing in with a hard-line anti-contraception position, that the more reformist and conservative women's organisations have tended to avoid it like the plague. Thus the radical women's tendency, Irish Women United (IWU) has taken the lead in initiating a Formed as a tiny grouping in the spring of this year, IWU has gained considerable public attention and involved relatively large numbers of women (and some men) in its activities. It originated whe, in April, the Revolutionary Marxist Group (irish Section of the Fourth International) circulated a proposal to all the women's organisations to come to a meeting to discuss a Charter of women's rights.
CHARTER CONFERENCE At the Charter Conference in June, which had a very good attendance of about 100, some eight groupings were represented. These were, in fact, the miniscule fragments into which the radical and socialist elements of the women's liberation movement had split. The only socialist organisation that had any intervention within the women's movement was the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG)" In contrast to the economist and workerist tendencies of the Left, the RMG has always insisted on the importance of the struggles for democratic demands that challenge the confessional nature of the 26-County Southern State and the need for an autonomous womens movement. Such struggles, condemned ty the rest of the left as "bourgeois, are seen by the RMG as being very much a part of the permanent revolution dynamic in Ireland. So that, even at the time of the lowest ebb in the women's movement as a whole, they have maintained a high level of propaganda on the question of -women's oppression.
IRISH WOMEN UNITED At the Charter Conference, Irish Women United was inaugurated as a broad, loosely-knit group. In tact, even before the conference IWU had been involved in an action of some importance for the Left. When they had attempted to speak at the Stalinist-controlled May Day Rally, as representatives of the autonomous women's movement, they were physically attacked by members of the Communist Party, Socialist Party and Official Sinn Fein, acting as stewards, and one woman was hospitalised.
Since then, IWU has has an energetic programme of activity and discussion. Fortnightly general meetings rapidly became weekly, and some 12 sub-committees now also operating regularly. They carried out small actions, with pickets on questions such as contraception, rape discrimination against women in state welfare benefits, and organised a meeting on Women's Right to Join ception to launch a governmentTaoiseach (Prime Minister) was speaking, brought them onto the reception. The response to this publicity and flood of mail from attendance at the Contraception Rally on Wednesday Nov 12th in Liberty Hall (headquarters of the Irish Transport & General Workers Inion (ITGWU).
CRITICAL SUPPORT The rally was addressed by Senator Mary Robinson, towards whose "private member's" Family Planning Bill IWU have adopted a Trade Unions, in support of women strikers at a Dublin publishing office As intervention by IWU at a responsoted book on women in International Women's Year, at which the of charge.
front pages of the daily newspapers, as did a similar intervention when the Minister for Justice was speaking at a women all over the country, and contributed to the relatively enormous choose. choose. position of critical support. In addition to a number of loopholes, which leave many questions to the discretion of the government of the day. IWU are critical of the provision in the Bill for the distribution of contraceptives through pharmacies. Insisting upon the importance of advice and information, their demand is for state-financed family planning clinics. They demand also that all forms of contraception and advice, fitting, etc., should be provided free A member of the Chilean community in Ireland also spoke, outlining her experience as a political militant of developments on the woman question under Popular Unity Anne Speed, a member of the Executive of the Dublin District Council of the ITGWU and a militant of the RMG, spoke on behalf of Irish Women United, and on the central issue of a women's right to Further actions and meetings will be taking place in the next few weeks. On the evidence of the rally, the momentum is building up for a broad and militant campaign of women for their democratic right to
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For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears. Women in apartheid South Af rica. by Hilda Bernstein, International Defence and Aid Fund, 50p. **** When a book states in its carly pages that some of the arguments against apartheid are that 'it aggravates and creates illegitimacy, bigamy, and prostitution; homosexuality and drunkeness..." one is immediately thrown on guard, for such statements demand that the book be thrown into the bin without further ado!
Save for two or three chapters about the working and living conditions and struggles in South Africa, we are convinced that the book does indeed belong in the bin.
Bernstein's arguemtos fall into three areas of confusion: apartheid, the family and "the struggle for national liberation". "In the special language of apartheid, she writes. "blacks are not human beings. They are labour units who are productive or non-productive'. One does not have to be particularly astute to notice that, let alone this "special language", exactly the same can be said about workers in any capitalist society. Throughout her book, Bernstein fails to relate 'apartheid" with capitalist exploitation with dangerous results: since in South Af rica, the small white working class is totally sold out to the capitalist class, the black working class is the only revolutionary class, and the only class in whose interest it is to smash the racist state. But in order to do so, it must necessarily challenge the entire capitalist system, for in no other way can it smash racism. By failing to recognise this, Bernstein raises purely moral obicctions against the racist regime and implies that capitalism with a better face must be on the agenda for the South African blacks.
She correctly identifies that the 'apartheid economy" depends on the use of a cheap migrant labour force, that black women play a minimal role in this as a direct labour force, and that the burden of rearing children (ic. the next generation of workers) is forced onto the backs of women in the reserves. But Bernstein's objections are that this causes illegitimacy and provides fertile ground for faithlessness" and that because the men are forced to sell their labour as migrant workers, it "makes a mockery of family life For many", she tells us, a family unit is never formed. The result is social chaos. For Bernstein, women's liberation no doubt means the restoration of the family unit!
The most valuable part of the book deals with the struggles of women but even here, she uses these examples simply to boost the image of the African National Congress (ANC). This body did little to actually support or build the struggles, but instead tail-ended most of them and used all its opportunism to take the credit for them. An example that she quotes was the June 1959 nots led by women against the appalling living conditions in Durban*** * * where both men and women were brutally attacked by police and many were jailed as a result. It was not until September of that year that the ANC came to the sup port of these struggles by calling a special conference to 'thank the women!' Bernstein's avid support for this movement (the ANC) is clearly reflected when she talks about the 'struggle for national libcration", a phrase which Implies that South Africa is a colony that must struggle for at least political independence. Since the vast majority of the African population is proletarianised, the slogan for national liberation" is about as meaningful there as such a slogan would appear to the British working class!
For black African women in South Aftica, the struggle against their oppression involves immediately a struggle against the rac ist state that bases itself upon the exploitation of the black working class in the interest of both the South African and the international bourgeoisic. Their struggle involves a fight against the backwardness amongst black men whom they must educate and win over before they can lead southern Africa to socialist revolution. Though much belated, a serious analysis of the oppression of black women in South Africa is urgently needed, Hilda Bernstein's book will be of little help for this task.
Julius Karanja Alertel of Women Inan Engish Vilag Fenwomen Mary Chamberlain #lustrated * ** Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain, Virago Press, 1975. * ** Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain is published by Virago Press, a new feminist publishing house. Chamberlain's study aims to redress the balance of rural studies by giving us a social and oral history of the isolated Fen village of Gislea through the cyes of women. The recollections of the women span a century and we see clearly how superficial the changes have been in the life of the women.
Gislea, with a population of 1400, is a remote village 30 miles north of Cambridge. There are few employment opportunities open to women, except for some work in the local factories and traditional land work. The land was once owned by a weal thy family but now it is divided into a num* * * * ber of small holdings.
The village is really isolated as there are few roads and the railways were closed in the 1950s. Buses run once a day to Cambridge and weekly to the local market town. The houses in Gistes dispel the myth of beautiful country cottages. There, the houses are dilapidated, frequently lack indoor sanitation and the thatched roofs have often been replaced with corrugated iron.
The women are born, live and die in an area which 'seems in a state of permanent decline and decay. Chamberlain mentions that the village is as isolated as it always was, despite TV and all the technological advances. But the decline of transport and work is recreating the old isolation. Only this time television creates an illusion of twentieth century, of progress, change, and communication, anaesthetising the problems of a rural community in decline. But little has changed basically- only details, not fundamentals'.(p.23)
Despite the welfare state and several Labour Governments one condition of life for the people, particularly the women, has not improved. It is still a life of hardship and grinding poverty After a brief factual introduction Chamberlain divides the life of the women into nine major aspects and in each chapter the women describe their life as it was at the turn of the century and how it is today.
The quality of the chapters is uneven, and I liked best the chapters on girlhood, marriage and work. Sybil Hayhoe, 86, was in service at the Vicarage sixty years ago.'seven days a week. And 1 was carning 5s. when I got married. We got up at 6.30 and had to clean the dining room, light a fire in winter, one in the kitchen, then clean the hall and have the breakfast ready about half-past eight...And that was a lot of scrubbing in the old houses. Oh dear! You know, brick floors. You'd have to scrub them and make them look ever so clean... We was always at work."
Janet Hornigold, 23, works on a farm today. I get 14 a week... But it's hard work, very hard work. And a seven-day week. My day (is) usually eight to about five-forty-five. And an hour for lunuh."
The women are discontented but see no alternative to their life as it is. Their horizons are no wider than they were at the turn of the century.
The final impression of the book is of a discreet series of interviews backed up by some evocative photographs from the turn of the century and modern ones taken by Angela Phillips. There is no attempt to draw together all the information. Wa are not clear how all the beliefs, are related, although a feminist analysis is implicit. I think it would have been useful to have presented the views of one or more women on all topics, rather than different women on different topics. Chamberlain's method gives us variety but tends to be confining.
More broadly, Chamberlain's study is weak in that it lacks any analysis of why Gislea is still so isolated, and the effect of this isolation on the behavior and attitudes
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* * * * ******* of the women.
Despite these criticisms, Fenwomen is contributes to one of the important tasks of the women's movement that of writ ing women back into history. Chamberlain's history does help women develop a sense of their own importance and relevance in society.
Phyllis Duniface All Work and No Pay, edited by Suzie The Power of Women Collective believe that women are performing produc tive labour when they do housework, and that the capitalist class make a profit from their labour just as they do from factory workers. Accordingly, they ad+ vance the demand for "wages due to housewives Wages for Housework. The basis for this demand was laid by Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.
There, they argued that since women all over the world shared the common burden of domestic labour, the issue of wages for housework should become the major ground of struggle for women. This argument is further developed in All Work and No Pay, which is edited by two members of the Power of Women Collective. It is a collection of writings and speeches of women from many different countries and situations.
All the struggles of women which are familiar to us of nurses, claimants, factory workers, black women, lesbians, miners wives, women in Northern Ireland and "third world women -are viewed through the perspective of wages for housework. The descriptions by women of their own situation portray vividly many aspects of our op pression -especially where we bear a double load by working outside the home as well.
In many ways, this is a powerful and valuable addition to the literature of women's liberation. In particular, 1 was impressed by the way it tries to integrate the struggle of lesbians so often ignored or relegated to a few token phrases — with the fight for the liberation of all women.
There is also present throughout the book an awareness of the close relationship between the oppression of women and the operation of the Welfare State which is particularly relevant to our fight against the present cutbacks in social spending. But by the last article -which calls for a General Strike for Wages for Housework-I was becoming a little weary of the constant resteration of the demand as a panacea for all the probiems of women under capitalism and Imperialism. Can it be true that this one demand can unite all women?
In the first place, the Power of Women Collective have never answered the criticsms levelled at their analysis by many Marxists who challenge the assumption that domestic labour is productive. As Wally Secombe says, "The housewife, in Marxist * * * * * * terms, is unexploited because surplus value is not extracted from her labour. To say this is not, as James and Dalla Costa imply, to be soft on women's oppression. The housewife is intensely oppressed within the nuclear family under capitalism, but she is not exploited.
Such a weak theoretical basis for their analysis forces the Power of Women to rely heavily on empirical evidence and emotional argument to substantiate their case. Thus a brief examination of the role of the unions in women's struggles leads Selma James to the conclusion that racism and sexism are in the nature of the trade union movement. Similarly, an examination of the way the NHS treats women both as workers and patients leads another contributor to call tor the destruction of the NHS.
The Power of Women Collective thus reject the strategy adopted by socialist feminists in the Women's Movement of working within the organisations of the labour movement to win men and women to the struggle for women's liberation. The editors of All Work. And No Pay consider that the struggle of women against their wagclessness will of itself make it possible for men to press their demands.....a kind of revolution led by women setting an example. "They (men) lose a servant but gain the power to refuse their own servitude. Yet in demanding wages for housework they are in effect only reinforcing the servitude of women by accepting their traditional role as bearers and rearers of children in the isolation of the home.
Our assessment of the politics of this collective cannot remain simply at the level of criticisms of their theory and practice. The fact that this tendency has emerged inside the women's movement internationally is a result of the historical weakness of the labour movement-its failure to recognise and help to combat the specitic oppression of Selma James is absolutely correct in rejecting the crude Marxist analysis which situates working class politics at the point of production alone. In categorising housework as productive labour she is attempting to replace the factory as the centre of struggle by the home and the family All Work and No Pay demonstrates clearly to us the need for an analysis which will integrate the fight for women's liberation with the struggle to the working class. This analysis is still only partially developed; but it has already given rise to movement such as the Working Women's Charter Campaign and informed the decision of the National Abortion Camapign to take the politics of abortion into the heart of the labour movement, It is these struggles that will contribute to our freedom from domestic and wage-slavery not wages for housework.
Karen Margolis ***** *********** Women in the Spanish Revolution by Liz Willis (Solidarity Pamphlet 10.48)
** ******* * * * * * **** ** This pamphlet is in many ways a useful addition to the literature now appearing on Spain and Portugal, It deals with the peniod of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War 1932-38. The information is has collated on the condition of women in Spain and their treatment in the revolutionary period will be of great use to British revolutionarics.
The revolutionary process that has been taking place in Portugal and dramatic rise in workers' struggles in Spain make it vital that we reassess the events of the thirties. This particularly so because many of the political ideas that led to defeat then, are making a reappearance. In particular, the Spanish Communist Party has ressurrected the notion of the Popular Front - a governmental alliance with progressive sections of the ruling class. Liz Willis pamphlet is more than a digest of statistics. It also addresses itself to the political issues of the period.
There are problems however. The pamphlet uses 'libertarian" sources for its fact. Now in the author's own admission, many of these sources are tainted with wishtul thinking. Liz Willis has the rare honesty to criticise her cothinkers. She admits that the anarchist collectives (Solidarity is an anarchist group) were deformed by sexual prejudices. In fact, as she points out in many of the agricultural collectives, women did not even achieve equal pay, let alone any of the more advanced demands necessary in a revolutionary situation. However, very little discussion is given to the attitudes and practices of the other working class organisations the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the POUM. For this reason, a somewhat one-sided picture is presented.
But the most glaring deficiencies of the pamphlet are in its political analyses. The record of anarchism in the Spanish revolttion was the final proof of its worthlessness. Not only did the Spanish anarchists quite happily accept the popular front, but we were even treated to the amazing spectacle of an anarchist Minister of Justice!
The anarchist leaders (don't laugh) were successful in hoodwinking their base until the damage was done, until the Stalinists had gathered forces to crush the revolutionary upsurge. The heroic fight put up by the rank and file anarchists (together with the centrist POUM and Spain's few Trotskyists) against the Stalinist troops in Barcelona May 1937 only underlines the cowardice, stupadity and treachery of Garcia Oliver & Co.
As Liz Willis herself concedes "the revolution was lost a considerable time before the ware was lost'. The only conclusion she can draw from this however is that glossing over real differences for fear of dividing the movement means that the tougher dominant ideology triumphs by default.
In short, she continues the lame and witless apologetics practiced by the anarchists in the thirities on which Trotsky commented as follows: 'After all we could have taken power in July 1936.. After all we could have taken power in May 1937... The anarchists begged Negrin-Stalin to recognise and reward their treachery to the revolution. A revolting pictare".
Liz Willis should surcly ask what sort of revolution it is that eschews even the power to defend itself. -Janice Mills
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* **** * Forgetting's No Excuse by Mary Stott, Virago Quartet Books, London, £l.75 ***** Mary Stott was born in 1907 into a family of journalists a career which she took up herself at an carly age, finally to become Women's Editor of the Guardian until 1971.
Her life in the journalist profession was not made casy by the fact that she was a woman;
and her successs was only ensured by accepting her role as a woman's writer. For many years a campaigner in the women's liberation movement, she was also a founding member of the Women in Media group-mainly composed of dynamic liberal women journalists.
Mary Stott's political convictions and her ideas on women's liberation are representa ive of a number of women in the liberation movement and are well expounded in her autobtography Forgerting's No Excuse. To understand these ideas, it is important to look at the context in which they were developed.
The central years of Mary Stott's experience were those of the Second World War, and the cconomic boom which followed it.
Expansion of production meant that many more women were drawn into the labour force, and some of the worse aspects of their oppression relieved through the institution of such things as the health service and contraception -taking on some of the tasks women previously had to carry. This period saw a certain liberalisation and led to a radicalisation amongst women. But these develop ments also reinforced illusions that, with change, bourgeois democracy might be able to produce the goods'. It was this ideology, which dominated much of the women's liberation movement, and to this ideology that Mary Stott adheres.
She realises some of the contradictions of the competitiveness, inequality and inationality of capitalist society. Differentiating between the haves" and have nots", she aligns herself with the latter, and expresses the need for change. She also recogrises that part of any campaign for an 'egalitarian society necessitates the liberating of women.
But the method of change she advocates is a gradual process of reform within the system; a reform which does not reject the concept of private properti ownership. She is - pacitist, and as such rejects the notion of violent revolution. She realises that any fundamental challenge to the existing order could inevitably produce a violent anti-reaetion and consequently her reform' is placed firmly within the existing capitalist: framework. Her dilemma is how best to combine idealism and common sense to the private profit motive.
This strategy leads her to a series of contradictions. Capitalism is founded on private property relations. It is from this basis (that some should "have and some should have not) that all the injustices of the system. which Mary Stott polemicises against, Now. The exploitation of workers is essential to maintain the wealth of the ruling class who have", and it is this exploitation which op presses those who have not, both men * * * * * and women in the working class.
Mary Stott is sensititive to the more superficial problems women face in a sexist soceity. But she is unable to understand society in class terms, but simply on the basis of "privileged and unprivileged. She is unable to comprehend many of the problems faced by working class women, or that their problems might be different from hers.
According to her analysis, women will be liberated when they have obtained equal pay, job opportunity and the relieving of the burden of house-work through the technological evolution of labour-saving devices, and child-care facilities. This, she says, can be legislated through Parliament, backed up by an anti-sexist education throughout society. But housework is not a direct part of capitalist production. There is no profitability in domestic labour, and capitalism therefore has no interest in raising productivity in the home, except by exploiting its potential on the consumer market.
Of course, it is very important for women to campaign for equal rights as part of the overal campaign against their oppression. But to limit the struggle for women's liberation to the above is to accept women's right to be equally as oppressed as men. It also negates any understanding that, in order to reinforce capitalist ideology, the ruling class uses national chauvinism, racism and sexism to divide and confuse the working class. Although anti-sex discrimination laws may well pass through Parliament they will only be fully realisable in a period when capitalism is being fundamentally challenged. when the working class and oppressed masses. are posing their control of society.
### FORGETTINGS NOT
The antobiograply of MARY STOTT journalist, campaigner and feminist Because she accepts private property relations, the framework of capitalism. Mary Stott also accepts the concept of the nuclear family. To her the family provides security and dependence'. But to accept the family is to accept the servitude of women. The family unit fragments the working class, retains the concept of private property within the class, procreates the existing labour force, and reproduces the future labour force all at the expense of the woman who maintains the family, in order to further the exploitation of the masses in the interest of the ruling class. It is not until we have eradicnted the constriction of the nuclear family and instituted the socsalisation of domestic labour under the cont* rol of the working class will we be able to talk realistically about the freedom of women to determine their own fertility and life.
Again, this can only occur when capitalism is fundamentally challenged.
Mary Stott has been in a position to influence many an unsuspecting reader through her columns in the Guardian. By simply adyocating social reforms, and "do-it-yourself"
organisations, her role has been to reinforce illusions in bourgeois democracy, and the possibility of real change by reform thereby helping to perpetuate the system. the eviis of which she readily criticises.
Although she provides a certain insight into the behind-the-scene workings of the newspaper world, her book is mainly a detailed account of her life and the sectoralised one-sided view a middle class individual has of society- including how it should cor rather shouldn't be changed. I was given a free copy of the book in order to review it.
Untess you get that -not an overwhelming chance or unless you want to reach a contorted analysis of how to combine being a working woman, wife and mother and be liberated", I wouldn't rush to buy the book.
-Stephanie Ware **** *** Village Life and Labour edited by Raphael Samuel, Routledge, Keagan and Paul, 1975. ***** Village Life and Labour is the first volume in a series of cóllected papers given at Ruskin History Workshops over the past eight years. Future volumes will include papers on women's trades, and on marriage and the family. This volume comprises a general introduction to the whole series, and three papers on nineteenth century rural life and work-on harvesters, country work-girls, and a study of Headington Quarry, a village near Oxford.
The stated aim of the series is the writing of "people's history, the history of the working class rather than their organisations, and the history of those who are often excluded from historical concepts of the working class the many people who worked casually and were unorganised, including women and children. This represents a radical departure from those histories of trade unionism in which "Everything is seen from the Head Office, and histories of the working class whose conditions is invariably seen through the eyes of its contemporary rulers.
All the papers in this collection deal to some extent with the role of women at work in the countryside, and with the nature of family income. Jennie Kitteringham's paper on country work-girls provides a detailed account of the kinds of work in which women were employed, and includes a discussion of the late nineteenth-century mo ral objections to women undertaking work in agriculture: the conflict between the bourgeois ideal of Victorian womanhood (helpless and ornamental and the proletarian reality. Davis Morgan's paper on harvesters describes the work which women did at harvest time, Raphael Sameul's paper on Headington Quarry is
[page 23]
******* particularly good in showing the diverse ways in which women contributed to the family budget (and were sometimes its mainstay ) both by wage-labour and other means.
In all these papers, family income emerges as the key to cottage economy rather than the wage of the individual adult male worker. Over half the agricultural labourers in nineteenth contury census returns were not yearly hired workers with a modicum of security, but day labourers, hired by the day or the week and unemployed for long periods.
In this situation, the earnings of wives and children assumed considerable importance. Wives of agricultural labourers took in out-work as well as working on the land. They also went gleaning after harvest to keep the family in flour through the winter. At Headington Quarry many houscholds took in laundry every week. and all the female members of the family * * * * * * tural workers in the 1870s.
al workers is not touched upon, and this is an unreseurched (possibly unrescarchable)
bership, although against the wishes of its Executive.
Scriptive rather than analytical. It has a lot of detailed information about work in nineteenth century agricultural communities.
ally assumed to be an overwhelmingly male occupation.
WOMAN'S EVOLUTION•REED ******** nor are the strikes and lockouts of agriculUnionisation among women agircultursubject. Branches of the largest agricultural union, the National Agricultural Labourers Union, certainly did admit women to memGenerally, the book is much more concerned with labour than with life, and is deand about women's part in what is tradition- Helen Gurden Evelyn Reed * * * matriarchy. That is, kinship was determined on the mother's side and that women had an equal and honoured role in society. Other anthropologists-Kathlene Gough for instance have preferred the term matrilineal kinship society for such groupings. This term does have the advantage of removing the implication of women ruling primitive society in the way that property owners have ruled all subsequent socicities.
It is not worthwile to argue about terminology however. Evelyn Reed's book fully substantiates her case on this and goes on to establish equally satisfactorily that in the period of barbarism, it was women who made all the major breakthroughs in the techniques of production. Women certainly were the first farmers, the first potters, the first to manufacture clothes. It is likely, though unprovable, that women first discovered the use of fire. Recd's reassessment of an-
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