Women, Resistance and Revolution (18 page)

Other women have found the attempt to struggle on several fronts too exhausting. Rather than face the often crippling and painful agonies of fighting not only the enemy without but the enemy within, they have chosen to deny their own oppression as women. As individuals their talents have earned them men’s respect for their service to revolutionary movements. But they have contributed nothing to the theory or practice of revolutionary feminism, and they have not been able to move women in large numbers to take up the revolutionary struggle, because they were distrustful of those women favoured and praised by revolutionary men who still despised women as a group.

If the contradiction is painful it is an essential one to maintain both within the labour movement and in the revolutionary movement, for the exclusion of the broad mass of women means inevitable failure. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, known as the ‘Rebel Girl’, who organized with the Wobblies, Industrial Workers of the World, describes this very well in the context of a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. Italian, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian women played an active part. They picketed in freezing weather, pregnant women
and others with babies in their arms marching with their placards for ‘Bread and Roses’. But despite their enthusiasm they came up against the feeling of the men that their place was at home:

We had special meetings for the women.… The women worked in the mills for lower pay and in addition had all the housework and care of the children. The old world attitude of men as ‘the lord and master’ was strong at the end of the day’s work … or now of strike duty … the man went home and sat at ease while his wife did all the work, preparing the meal, cleaning the house, etc. There was considerable male opposition to women going to meetings and marching on the picket line. We resolutely set out to combat these notions. The women wanted to picket. We knew that to leave them at home alone, isolated from the strike activity, a prey to worry, affected by the complaints of trades people, landlords, priests and ministers was dangerous to the strike.

If women’s involvement is to become real rather than pious exhortation, the specific problems and experiences of working-class as well as middle-class women and of women engaged in revolutionary struggle have to be studied and understood. If this is to be done with honesty it means learning from the women themselves. All too often the words ‘worker’ or ‘revolutionary’ are used in the sense of
male
worker or
male
revolutionary. Now while women shared some of the experiences of their men, they also found themselves in new situations which were peculiar to women. The sameness and the separateness are so integrally bound together that sometimes they were scarcely aware of the conflict which was going on. Women found themselves, like men, in Europe and in America, confronting the new forms of alienation and exploitation produced by the factory and large-scale machinery. They reacted like men with a hatred of the factories, ‘Bastilles’, and with a persistent hankering after the old days of domestic work and peasant economy, which seemed in retrospect golden. In the 1830s girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, fresh from the countryside, paraded boldly through the streets singing:

Oh isn’t it a pity that such a pretty girl as I

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die.

Oh I cannot be a slave

For I’m so fond of liberty

That I cannot be a slave.
¹⁶

The early nineteenth-century English folk song nostalgically takes up the same theme:

Where are the girls? I’ll tell you plain,

The girls have gone to weave by steam,

And if you’d find ’em you must rise at dawn

And trudge to the factory in the early morn.

The women responded like the men not only with moral protest but with strikes and the organization of unions. In the early nineteenth century these sprang up and collapsed only to start again a few years later. The economic organization of the family was based on the woman’s labour as much as the man’s; sometimes, with unemployment, it was the women’s and children’s earnings alone which saw a family through. At the same time as the French women were involved in associations and schemes for federation, Englishwomen were forming their own friendly societies and associations, like the Female Gardeners and Ancient Virgins, or the Female Political Union, or taking part in the attempt at a union of the whole working class in the short-lived and ill-fated Grand National Consolidated Union. Nor did they play a passive part. The paper
The Union
(1842–3) gives an account of the women’s part in the strikes of that year in Lancashire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire:

It is a singular fact that women were in many instances the directors of the strike – women held their meetings, sent their delegates and drew up their terms – and women accompanied the turnouts in immense numbers, in all their marchings and counter-marchings throughout the manufacturing districts.… At Halifax these women headed the mob, on some occasions seizing the soldiers’ bayonets and turning them aside with the words ‘We want not bayonets but bread.’
¹⁷

Women were beginning to be involved in activity which demanded a sustained organizing effort and in which they discovered their own powers, an essential political experience for the oppressed. They started now to keep collective accounts. They were no longer organizing only the household. This large-scale organization at the place of work, at the point of production, was a new way of fighting. It had implications far beyond the bread riot. Women learned to put their own case. In America in 1841 the Lowell factory girls started to produce
a paper called the
Factory Girls’ Album
in which they complained of long hours, low pay, speed up and store order wage payments (truck). From this the Female Labour Reform Association was formed. While the effort to keep these early trade unions together was often beyond both male and female workers, they formed an essential stage towards the much more solid defensive structures which workers created at the end of the century.

Though sharing the class exploitation of men and, like them, concentrated together in the new factories, there were nonetheless elements in the women’s position which made them less able to organize. Reproduction, the long periods spent in child-bearing which interrupted the work routine, and female orientation within the family combined with middle-class propaganda about thrift, patience and individual self-help, to deflect the proletarianization of the working-class woman. The particular relationship of the woman to reproduction and consumption within the family mediated her relationship to commodity production. Women continued to work in the home, maintaining the needs of the family, but work for wages became predominantly an activity which was external to family production. The wife’s work outside the home was thus an economic supplement to the family income. Women retained certain features of a pre-capitalist labour force. They never learned fully the rules of the new economic game. The corollary of this was a readiness to accept low pay. Indeed they were often employed when it was convenient to use cheap unskilled labour rather than machines, when employers wanted to dilute the labour force, or when new machines meant a process had been simplified and devalued. The general inferiority of women was thus inseparable from their weak bargaining position at work, and from the social definition of ‘women’s work’ as work which was badly paid and unskilled.

Male trade unionists had two choices. They could either try to integrate women into their unions or they could try to keep them out of skilled work. Throughout the nineteenth century male workers resisted the idea of women working, on the grounds that their place was at home and that they had no business to be taking jobs from men. But ironically capitalism was structured on the fact of women and children working. The conflict appeared in several forms. For instance, men in the traditional craft of book-binding in a dispute in 1845 in which women were being employed at a low rate,
complained: ‘Females often have not the power to plead their own cause in such matters, and being helpless in many respects whenever their wages are concerned are trodden down.’
¹⁸

It was in the older crafts, which were being mechanized in the nineteenth century, that most hostility broke out. In the printing trade in the second half of the century there was trouble in America, France and England, as men tried to secure the privileged sections of the trade for themselves – for example typesetting, although some American male trade unionists by the 1860s had seen that the exacerbation of this conflict between men and women workers ultimately benefited only the employers, and started to argue equal pay on these grounds. A similar lesson was learned by Russian metal-workers in the early 1900s. They had banned women from the union so that when there was a crisis the men were turned off and the women taken on at half pay. As a result of this experience the women were admitted with a council of their own.

The real difficulty then, as now, in convincing male trade unionists that they have a common struggle with women workers, is that as long as you look at effects rather than causes it makes sense for the men to suspect women. The general subordination of women and the role of women in the family, along with their sexual situation, meant, and means, that they are liable to play a passive reactionary role at work. However, male suspicion and hostility will serve only to reinforce the likelihood of this. It’s no good maintaining this by continuing to prevent them from participating in union activity or by maintaining discrimination in pay and other matters. The only way to get a solution is by challenging the total subordination of woman in capitalism. Her consciousness at work cannot be isolated. If attention is confined only to one area the case collapses. In this sense the woman must of necessity fight for bread and roses, because the material aspect of her exploitation is integrally related to her own consciousness of what she is. As long as this consciousness is formed in a situation where she continually drops back and lets the man lead, she will continue to do this at work and be less likely to resist her employer. As long as her position in the family does not change, her job as wife will get priority.

The thorny question of protective legislation has always highlighted the dilemma. Bourgeois feminists at the end of the century were opposed to special protections for women workers on the
grounds that these were always used to restrict women’s chance to work. Indeed, they had a good case. Earlier the Female Operatives of Todmorden had put it well when in 1833 they wrote to the
Examiner
in concern about proposals to legislate against women’s work. They pointed out that while their conditions of work were far from ideal, they were better off than domestic servants, and if they were prevented from working they had no one to support them if they weren’t married. All they could do would be to set off husband-hunting in ‘Van Dieman’s Land’ and to ‘jump ashore’ with a ‘who wants me’.
¹⁹

It is true the various legislative attempts to cut down the hours and restrict the nature of women’s work had a two-edged aspect. They were often used as justification of ‘women’s work’, and welcomed by men not simply as lessening the exploitation of women’s labour but reducing competition between men and women workers. This is clearly brought out in the statement of American cigar makers in 1879:

We cannot drive the females out of the trade but we can restrict their daily quota of labor through factory laws. No girl under eighteen should be employed more than eight hours per day, all overtime work should be prohibited, while married women should be kept out of factories at least six weeks after confinement.
²⁰

Despite this interested motivation the measures recognized the actual situation of women workers. The feminists forgot that if the women faced the danger of industrial segregation, they also carried the double role of wife and mother as well as worker. If you argued for an abstract equality, the abstract right for workers of both sexes to be equally exploited at work, without remembering that the woman worked at home as well, you in fact subjected working women to an intolerable oppression. The only way out was to connect feminist criticism of the sectional privileges of male workers with an attempt to change conditions for all workers. Thus protections won for women could be extended to include all workers and minimize the possibility of conflict between workers of different sexes.

There was need for an analysis which showed that the work situation of women could not be arbitrarily divided into work for pay outside and work for no pay inside the home. The particular areas of women’s oppression and exploitation were completely inter-connected. The
woman worker was in a position inferior to that of the man at work, although they were of the same class. Her situation in the family served to maintain this subordination. The general cultural oppression of women conditioned them to accept their economic and social position. It was a vicious circle which could only be broken by an alternative theory which took into account all aspects of women’s oppression. Such a theory could not come either from a specifically feminist consciousness, or from trade unionism; it required a way of thinking that could extend beyond the particular to a general analysis of society. From working women, in their insistence on bread and roses, in the possibility of changing society so that people not only had more to eat but encountered one another in completely new ways and developed a radically different consciousness of each other, came a glimpse of such a total alternative. It was only a glimpse. They never developed in theory the particular nature of their own situation which made such connections both necessary and apparent to them. Nor were they strong enough to create continuing forms of organization which could give this expression.