Feminism

Frauen bei linken, internationalen Vernetzungstreffen am VolksstimmeFest im Wiener Prater, Jesuitenwiese.

Von Hilde Grammel (11.7.2007)

Die (englischsprachige) Einleitung von Hilde Grammel im Arbeitskreis Feminismus auf der inernationalen EL-Sommeruni in Gosau, Oberösterreich – For many centuries, feminists have been claiming, that beyond all the class difference, there is a difference between men and women. All the conscious, the thinking and feeling women have never failed to notice this difference and, what is more, to fight against it. For women to be really free not only the system of capitalism has to be overcome, but also the one of patriarchy. This is the name of an intricate system of male privileges, domination, control and power over women’s lives. It finds its expression in a gender-specific division of labour, an appropriation of private property and the wealth created in a society and around the globe in the hands of men.

Even today, at the beginning of the third millennium harsh facts remain: Among the poor of the world 70% are women, while women perform two thirds of all labour necessary for society to function. Women only earn 10% of all incomes worldwide and own less than 1% of all property. On a global level, the differences between men’s and women’s wages are 20% and the average global quota of women in parliament lies at 14%. Two thirds of all illiterates are women.

However, these numbers only describe the material side of women’s existences. On a personal level, these conditions are accompanied by violence against women in all the shapes it can take. And on the ideological level, a system of misogyny devalues women, their lives and experiences. Patriarchy has polarized the characteristics attributed to the two sexes. In bourgeois societies, the division of labour required a domesticated woman, who was soft and submissive, who subordinated her life to that of her husband and made him fit for the struggle outside the home. A man, on the other hand, had to be strong and in control. Men had the right to decide what to do with their property and later with their incomes. As philosophers and writers they had the time and resources to lay down their thoughts which always included their thoughts on the opposite sex in thousands of treatises and books explaining the world to themselves and each other.

Of course, all this is fiction which we as women were made to believe. Still it cannot be denied that what is human was split into two, what handicapped the male in the pursuit of his business and what he subordinated so that he could make use of it, was split off, shoved aside and attributed to women. And more than that, it was rated second-class.

In recent years a shift has taken place also in the left movements concerning its classical political subject. Gradually the insight is dawning that in its majority the working class today no longer consists of white, male industrial workers with full-time jobs. From a global perspective, the majority of the working class are women, who are not white, do not live in the Northern hemisphere and work in unprotected jobs, because they are not even allowed to organize in trade unions. This does not say anything about the work women have always been doing which was not recognized as work by traditional left politics, because it was not embedded in the classical antagonism between capitalist and industrial worker.

Let me return to the outset of bourgeois society, the beginning of the industrial mode of production, of the establishment of bourgeois democracy and the nation state.

In the French Revolution a promise of liberty and equality was given to everybody, no matter what sex, yet, this promise has not been fulfilled as far as women are concerned. Up to the present day, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which was adopted by the National Assembly in 1789 represents a point of reference also for women who have never stopped to demand being allowed to join the ranks of those who possessed unalienable rights. For giving grounds to these claims, women first had to prove that they were human beings in the full sense of the word. Only that proof could lend any legitimacy to their demands. This is one reason why feminist theoreticians have needed so many words for saying that women are neither slaves nor puppets nor an error of nature. Another reason for these still ongoing professions of women that they are human after all is that women ourselves have had to construct our own identities. The great number of works on feminist theory was a means of communication among women to arrive at an understanding about what we are or are not. Of course this construction of identity could not and did not take place beyond the disputes between the self and the other. Identity is always a relation in that the self and the other do not exist independently of each other. For women this implies that the construction of their identities does not take place outside the encyclopaedia containing the patriarchal images of women. The changing depreciating images patriarchal society had invented for women had to be unmasked as such and repudiated to arrive at a new image, which was one of self-identification. Thus the rejection of the rejection of female humanity is the origin of the new image. To arrive at this new image patriarchal myths about the nature of women had and have to be done away with to allow women a free and unhindered view of themselves as being equally human. This also means the recognition that even if natural inequalities and differences exist between the sexes, no claims whatsoever for social dominance of one sex over the other can be derived.

Another root of the western feminist movement lies in the 1968 students’ movement. Its protagonists claimed that they did not want any equality for themselves in a society which was still characterized by injustice. They demanded freedom and understood it as freedom from domination, as equality, as inter-subjectivity, as participatory democracy. The female protagonists of the students’ movement were angry about the inequalities they experienced on the level of everyday political work and in their private lives: men spoke more, what they said was heard – mostly by other men, and women’s private obligations were different from those of their male comrades. They did not just want participation in an unjustly structured patriarchal society, yet demanded a new and better society of liberated men and women. Feminists of those days did not accept that there should be an antagonistic relationship between freedom and equality. Rather, their ideal of equality contained equally valued individual differences and a plurality of ways to live, amounted to an ideal of equality of differences.

The 1960s: A new beginning

The women’s movement of the 1960s was sparked off by the publication of three books which are considered feminist classics today, by Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique of the year 1963, by Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics published in 1969 and by Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution, published in 1970.

Friedan attacked the popular notion that women during this time could only find fulfillment through childbearing and homemaking. By this programme they were kept from growing to their full human capacities, she claimed. The housewife in her suburban home is like a prisoner who is buried alive. In the face of their slow deaths, women have to begin to take their lives seriously.

Millett on the other hand focused on the frequently neglected political aspect of sex. She discussed the role that patriarchy plays in sexual relations and exposed the sexism and heterosexism inherent in works of male writers.

Firestone perceived that gender inequality originated in the patriarchy forced on women through their biology: the physical, social and psychological disadvantages imposed by pregnancy, childbirth, and subsequent child-rearing. She stated that women must seize the means of reproduction.

Altogether these three works represent a radical opposition to the few and limited options open to women in the 1960s in the western world.

The 1970s: Body-politics and self-experience

The 1970s were marked by campaigns for abortion rights in almost all the western countries. The right to self-determination of women over their bodies had to be fought for in hard struggles which ended in a reform of the laws criminalizing abortion, shelters for battered women being established, rape and other forms of sexual violence against girls and women being criminalized and heterosexuality being criticized. Women met in so-called self-experience-groups which helped them overcome their self-hatred and their hatred of other women. Women’s bookshops and publishing houses were founded and women’s seminars were organized to promote intellectual communication among women.

The 1970s changed women in many ways. At the end of the decade the women of the movement knew more about their bodies, had liberated themselves from patriarchal norms, they were eager to learn about herstories and the experiences of other women. Many of them lived in lesbian relationships and had started to reserve their emotions for other women. At the same time this focus on their lives did not lead them to withdraw their attention from the outside world but cultivated forms of protest and resistance.

The 1980s: the ecological decade

Many women became active in ecological grassroots movements fighting the use of nuclear power for civilian and military purposes, the new reproduction technologies, the arms race. They demanded disarmament and criticized the patriarchal exploitation of nature claiming that men waged endless wars against women and nature. Of course, this was not unproblematic, because this view reasserted the patriarchal ascription that there existed an alliance between nature and women and thus represented a reproduction of an old patriarchal myth.

In her book The Mother Machine, Gena Corea attacked the new technologies directed against the biological autonomy of women, unmasking them as means of patriarchal control of women’s abilities to give birth and of motherhood. Cloning, she says, is the manifestation of the patriarch’s desire to give birth to himself.

Bio-politics became a field of interest, bodies, lives, population, individual and collective reproduction were uncovered as being subjected to a powerful administrative machinery at work around the entire globe.

The 1990s: equal representation, anti-racism and internationalism

The quota was discovered as a means to guarantee the representation of women in the institutions of political and public life and some progress was made with regard to that question. In a number of international conferences hosted by the United Nations, women’s rights were discussed and agreed upon. Violence against women was acknowledged as a violation of human rights in the Vienna Conference of 1993 and the reproductive rights of women were laid down in an action programme at the World Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.

At the same time, women of colour, for instance, Audre Lorde and bell hooks, held a mirror up to what they regarded as white, middle-class feminism. bell hooks demanded that all relations of power had to be included in feminist analysis and that women should not only concern themselves with male dominance. The claim that sex and gender relations are at the core of all power relations was regarded as itself being an expression of power. Only an analysis of society which acknowledges that the forms of suppression are intertwined could claim to adequately describe the complexity of female experience.

Feminism and democracy

From the start, feminists of the so-called Second Women’s Movement questioned the dominant idea of politics with their slogan, “The personal is political”. They criticized that traditional politics ignored the problem of violence against women in their private homes, ignored the work of women in households and families – which was unpaid yet necessary for society to function – and they criticized that the exclusion of women from the political institutions such as parties, parliaments and governments was not worth a second thought. Violence, exploitation of women’s work and exclusion ranged on the same level of importance for feminists as, for example, foreign or fiscal policies. They regarded it as just one more symptom of male dominance in politics that questions concerning the female life context, as patriarchy defined it, were not considered worth featuring as subjects of politics.

Modern societies are split into an important, politically relevant public sphere of liberty dominated by men and a marginalized, politically irrelevant private sphere inhabited by women, Carole Pateman wrote in 1983. That was, what the feminist movement was all about, she added. The personal sphere as the sphere where all the relationships between people take place has to be revalued. An outcome of this feminist critique was the criminalization of rape within marriage, which means that a form of sexual violence committed in the personal sphere was acknowledged as a politically relevant question. Legislation was also achieved for violence against girls, for sexual harassment and for stalking. The central question in this context is who has the power to draw the line between the personal and the public and who has the power to control and protect this line.

At present we also witness an integration of feminism as institutionalized professional feminism in the political and academic fields and as lobbyism of women’s NGOs with protagonists jetting around the globe. Both forms represent a participation in patriarchal power structures. Outside institutionalized feminism there are still women activists in anti-racist and anti-fascist groups, eco-feminists, grassroots activists in international solidarity movements, in autonomous projects, anarchists, activists in the anti-globalization-movement and, of course, in left political parties. Yet they have one thing in common: They/we are all ignored by the political mainstream and its media, so that the public is not aware of us.

It seems that the progress made at establishing feminist issues inside mainstream political culture has cost a double price: the loss of the passion which characterized the first years of the movement and the loss of attraction of feminism for outsiders.

According to Sandra Harding, women in the official political arena are “outsiders within”. They are familiar with both, the spaces of power and the spaces of resistance and also with the relations existing between both of them.

In spite of the growing numbers of these outsiders within – this term applies to working-class-women in a double sense of the word – women are still under-represented in political institutions. In 2001, only 14% of the members of parliament in all the countries of the world were women. In the EU-Parliament, more than 30% of members are women. But the EU-Parliament does not have full legislative power. In the EU-Commission and also in the EU-Council – both of them are equipped with more power to decide things – the percentage of female members is relatively small. This may easily lead us to the conclusion that all those institutions in which women are represented to a high percentage do not make the important political decisions. In other words: The fewer the number of women present, the more influential the institution.

Globalization and globalised relations between the sexes

The political scientist Benjamin Barber describes neo-liberal globalization as the “Darwinist world of voracious corporations” and as a new form of imperialism, namely “commercialized imperialism”. He speaks of the “beast of prey-mentality of the new media monopolies” and of “commercialized totalitarianism”. According to Elmar Altvater’s di­agnosis, we are witnessing a subordination of the political and the social to the laws of the market. The decisions of corporations, steadily growing in size, have effects on the levels of the nation-state, whereas they cannot be influenced on these levels. Not only resources but also labour can be bought in distant parts of the world. The service sector is expanding, a process accompanied by flexibilisation and feminisation of working conditions. Ever more people work under conditions which are not regulated by labour law. They work part-time without earning enough income to make a living. In order to survive under these circumstances, people must internalize the outward regime, develop self-discipline and allow their employers to take the super-ego position in their personalities. They are asked to head to their employers’ requirements and adopt them as their own. The acceleration and efficiency with which decisions are made do not correspond to the time it would take to arrive at democratic decisions. Speed kills the chances at participation.

For women, neo-liberal globalization means an increase of work in low-wage- and insecure job sectors, an increase of work in the private sector, of competition and violence. Today, textile workers from Germany are losing their jobs to women in Bangladesh, Philippine women are cleaning vegetables and kitchens in Kuwait, Brazilian prostitutes are offering their services in the red-light zones of Frankfort. For dumping-wages Polish women provide care for the elderly in Germany and women from the Caribbean islands type US-bank-transactions into the computer. This is how Christa Wichterich describes the situation world-wide. Globally speaking, the living and working conditions of women are adjusted on the lowest possible levels. This means: low wages, long working-hours, no labour law-standards, violence, no safety measures, no right to unionize, the permanent threat to lose one’s job, child labour. The situation is comparable to the 19th century early days of industrialization, before the socialist and trade unionist movements tamed their national capitalists and before two world wars. Under such circumstances the question arises if work is still a means for women’s liberation.

In the Northern hemisphere, the feminisation of working conditions goes along with part-time and hired out labour, pseudo-self-employment, menial jobs, tele-work from home, temporary jobs. Female migrant workers are the new cleaning-ladies, servants, nurses and prostitutes.

In addition to all that, almost 70% of the work done on a global level remains unpaid which includes two thirds of all the work done by women. This amounts to work which is worth 11 billion dollars a year. As in the past also the new kind of capitalism would not be able to function without the unpaid or badly-paid work by women. What we need is a political strategy relying on participation and aiming at transformation, the building of alliances and regional grassroots movements. For the women’s movement that would mean to join the ranks of anti-globalization movements and to see to it that politics does not completely abandon its task of regulation of economic developments. Because for women, globalization is just another word for a process of restructuring patriarchal rule on the global level. The question is how women can find the time and energy, under present living- and working-conditions, to participate in political decision-making processes. After all, the enemies on the other side of the line can clearly be identified as envoys of the bastions of patriarchal rule: of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization – all of them alliances of men in power. While on the other side of the line, the movement against neo-liberal globalization has taken up one of the central feminist issues, that is, the question if there can be both liberty and equality. Therefore the men meeting at Davos every year should draw women’s attention to what they are doing and not, because they are men, but because they are following the powerful patriarchal agenda of re-establishing inequality. As a starting-point women must and should recognize that the market is a place created by politics which it is therefore possible to change by political means.

The integration of the feminist question into the nation-state at a time when the nation-state is gradually being disempowered is no coincidence. This shows, once again, that as soon as women are allowed into the political or professional sphere this sphere loses importance and influence. Globalization is no subject on the community level and hardly any on the level of national legislation. There, political decision-making has to a high degree been abandoned in favour of decisions made by the executive boards of economic corporations which are beyond the spheres of democratic influence, while politics has become synonymous with and reduced to mere administration.

The level of private lives

Also on the level of private lives, patriarchy manifests itself in a new way. While the options open to women at the beginning of the 21st century seem to have increased, the traditional family is undergoing a fundamental change. Marriages lasting a lifetime and monogamous relationships are on the decline, at the same time the number of single households and households without children is steadily on the rise. At present, only one quarter of all households are traditional family units with most of them usually not characterized by egalitarian relations between the sexes. The birth rate has been on a low level for 25 years with mothers becoming ever older when they are having their first child. This is among other things indicative of the higher level of education of women.

Studies have also revealed that girls grow up with a positive image of the self before they reach adolescence. The first menstruation as well as the first sexual encounters with the opposite sex shatter this image both physically and psychically. Both, good grades at school and university degrees do not automatically mean that women can land a well-paid job or any job at all. In Germany, a little more than 60% of women earn their own incomes, but 40% of those only work part-time.

Another reason why women do not or cannot have the same chances as men in their professional lives is that housework and childcare responsibilities are still unequally distributed between the sexes. The birth of children confirms traditional role patterns, even if the woman has a job. Compatibility of parenthood and a career is still not regarded as social or male responsibility but is shifted to women as their problem to solve. Sexist images sent around the globe by uniform media and culture industries also contribute to confirming the power of patriarchy in the process of restructuring and reasserting itself.

To cope with the new situation on an individual level and to respond to it on a political level requires of women to re-establish a culture of solidarity amongst ourselves.

In 1949, four years after the defeat of National Socialism, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “for a woman there is no other alternative than to work for her own liberation”, which is true as much today as it was then.

Based on: Barbara Holland-Cunz: Die alte neue Frauenfrage. Edition Suhrkamp 2003.