amily in crisis?
Beth Ridgell As thousands of socialists join the mass pilgrimages back to parental homes, run up overdrafts buying presents for seldom-seen relatives, and prepare to put on paper hats and participate in the ritual dismemberment of turkeys in the Christmas holidays, VALERIE COULTAS pauses to examine the position of 'family life' at the turn of a new decade.
As I read my Dulwich Labour Party minutes, inviting me to a Christmas "family party' - part of the new ultra-respectable face of the Labour Party - watch socialists reproduce autumn babies at the rate of knots, and realise that I will, once again, retum to my family of origin for Chistmas, I cannot deny that in the Thatcher decade and at this time of year it has become harder to live outside the family and to resist the influence of family ideology.
This is something of a surprise to those of us who expected the children of 1968 to create new styles of living. But after all it is not so surprising because everyone needs close, personal long-term relationships in their lives: and many people want to have children. In our society - whatever our ideals - the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
FEATURES The traditional 'nuclear' family may be in decline, but women still wind up with the work! pressure is on us to structure those relationships through marriage, romantic love and the patriarchal, heterosexual, "nuclear" family unit.
But what is the reality of most people's family life today? Is traditional family life in decline? Is the family changing? Were we very unrealistic in our youthful idealism when we argued against marriage and for different forms of living? How should socialists and feminists approach the debate on the family today?
Late capitalism has brought with it many changes in family life. Engels a hundred years ago argued that drawing women into industrial production would undermine the economic basis of the family, because it would no longer be a site for production as it had been in feudal societies. It would also give women greater equality with men as they gained financial independence.
This general process has been confirmed as many more married women join the waged labour force. But the state, acting for the capitalist class as a whole, did not allow the working class family to disintegate in the way Engels suggested it might do. Instead the bourgeoisie used the development on the welfare state to shore up the family unit, and to institutionalise gender divisions. This ensured that female labour remained cheaper and more
flexible than male labour, continued to force women to do domestic labour in the home without payment; and deepened the process of sex segregation of the workforce. The capitalist state ensured that women were drawn into the workforce only on the capitalists* terms, so that the biggest profits could be made.
As a result of this underlying economic process, we have witnessed many social changes in women's lives. Access to higher education, to abortion and contraception, and some limited childcare provision have made it possible for many women - especially those from the middle classes - dramatically to reduce the period of their lives spent on bringing up young children and lengthen the period at work. Women's increased social and economic status has led to liberalisation of laws concerning divorce and homosexuality. and improved some of the rights of women and children in the family. Women have far more choice about how they live their lives today than even two decades ago.
The divorce rate has shot up, and studies show that the majority of petitions are filed by women, a significant number of whom cite "unacceptable behaviour of spouse' as their main reason. Increasingly young people decide to live together as a prelude or as an al temative to marriage. In Britain 20% of live
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births are now classified as illegitimate". Single-parent families are no longer the challenge to respectability they were in the early sixties. The lesbian and gay liberation movement has made it possible for some men and women to express their sexual preferences openly and bring up children on the basis of these relationships.
These changes in the way people live their lives are important. They explain why, even after a sustained campaign to re-mould public opinion against abortion rights, the right-wing are being given such a slap in the face in America right now by the hundreds of thousands of women marching to defend women's rights, following the Supreme Court ruling which attacked abortion rights.
To assess these changes effectively. however, we need to be aware both of the political framework that different governments and political parties adopt, and of the overall limits to the process of change within the family in capitalist society.
The right-wing have been very busy in America trying to regain the initiative in defence of 'focus rights" and 'fathers" rights", against homosexual rights and in defence of traditional "family life'. As the Webster anti-abortion ruling in July demonstrates, they have been able to convince leading politicians of the popularity of their case, including Reagan and Bush.
In Britain the Tory party has taken a slightly more ambivalent stand in practice, for example on abortion rights. Although the chetoric of Thatcher has been clearly profamily (Section 28 was a direct attempt to turn the clock back) many of the policies that the Tories have pursued have been explicitly pro-market and anti-welfare state and have, Page 26
FEATURES paradoxically, undermined the quality of working class family life. This has created the basis for deepening conflict within working class families.
Cuts in social security, the imposition of forced labour YTS schemes and other reducMore and more women are seeking divorce - or the right to divorce tions in wage levels especially for young workers, and now the imposition of Poll Tax on all those over 18 living in a household have forced young people into a state of greater dependence on their families, increas ing the burden on women within the family. This, coupled with low levels of child benefit and cuts in the NHS, social services and allowances for dependent elderly relatives, has made many more women critical of Thatcher's market philosophy (over 1.2 million are caring for elderly dependents in the home, over 80 percent of them receiving little
assistance from the state). This creates a radi- cal base for the socialist case if the Labour Party ever dared to make it. In Britain the right-wing fanatics are much more prominent than ever but they are still not part of the mainstream. The coming fightback in Britain over abortion will show how far they have managed to shift political thinking towards their agen- da. The limits to the changes in the family are clearly based on the fact that while capitalism can accomodate some changes, it is depend- ent on the family system and the inequality within it for the free reproduction of labour power, for which it is not prepared to pay. The in- crease in women's employ- ment has reflected these ine- qualities between male and female labour. Over the last decade the increase has been in pat-time employ- ment in the service sector, where pay is low and conditions of employ- ment poor. Women's domestic burden in- creases if they move from full-time to part- time work because men do less. Domestic labour doesn't disappear in single parent families either, and even the minority of single mothers who choose to have children alone are locked into a system which is structured so that the female sex does a disproportionate amount of reproductive work in comparison to the male sex. Many single mothers bring up their children alone SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
ecause they have no other choice, and many women experience low stand- ards of living in doing so. Lesbian mothers face a constant battle to have and keep their children and the new Embryo Rights Bill to be debated in Parliament will try and restrict their access and to the new reproductive techniques, making it difficult for women to have children on their own. What the right wing have grasped about this situation is that there is a considerable disjancture between the family life that people aspire to and the one they actually lead. Particularly at a time of austerity this makes people feel insecure. By harping back to a long-gone semi-Victorian 'golden age* (which was never golden for women they pretend that everything would sort itself out if the clock could just be tumed back. Yet the really dynamic factor in the changes that have taken place is the willingness of women to alter their lives - and their partners — if married life fails to live up to their expecta- tions. Because so many women feel they have the thin end of the wedge in marriage (and of course they do) the break-up of marriage is a common feature of the lives of many adults and children today. Statistics show that divorce rates are even higher in re marriages. Tensions and inequalities that were hidden and suppressed in previous generations have exploded into the public arena. Society is also much more aware of the emotional irresponsibility of men. know that some men beat or rape their wives, and that some men commit child sex abuse. It is now recognised that men and women may seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere when their sexual relationship goes through a bad patch. It is this situation which creates the crisis within the family, the breakdown of the publicly-accepted "norm" of marriage as till death us do part. The right wing are finding it difficult to persuade women to put back on the chains however, because they know the ten- sions and inequalities were always there in the family, and they are not going to give up their sexual freedom easily, especially when they know what they will retur to. Ironically the crisis is not only produced by the economic contradictions but also by the social and ideological contradictions of late capitalism. The high expectations women have of men, and men of women, are themsel- ves partly a creation of the capitalist media, and these high standards are often completely unfulfillable. The individualistic standards we have of romantic love and the perfect man or woman are inculcated into our heads from a young age in ever more powerful and sophisticated ways. Capitalism can take on board the 'new SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 20, Dec-Jan 1989-90
FEATURES STOP THE CLAUSE EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL FIGHT for LESBIAN & GAY RIGHTS MARCH ON LONDON 30th APRIL 1988 TUKT We now late capitalism. in the underlying values of society. society. much higher up the scale. the paramount basis for re-organising society the artificial goals of profit, that serve the in- terests of the few, you begin to see what is
TOTS I man" and the "new woman", and still reproduce a sexist product. The capitalist machine takes people's real feelings of excitement, warmth, affection, and love for one another, and tums them into selfishness, egoism, exploitation, status, and competition. It tries to create human beings with distorted judgement of products and of one another. The crisis in social relationships is endemic to
Socialist and feminist solutions seck not to cover up these tensions and conflicts but to analyse their basis - the unequal power relationships within the family and society -and to eradicate them through fundamental political changes both in the social system and
family ideology.
In complete contrast to the right wing, socialists would seck to give real equality to women by giving social recognition to the unpaid and undervalued work that women do in
Because the god of profit and privilege would no longer rule, use value would be the basis for judging people's contribution to society. This re-evaluation of everyone's skills would place emotional and domestic labour, that is currently women's sphere both inside the family and at work,
The welfare of the community would be and promoting social policy. Once you abolish
really important in society. And much of what women do is really important; in many cases it is the very basis of 'society'. Once the values of society change, men will also want to do what women do, because they will understand what they have been missing. Given developments in technology, work could be re-organised to give women and men far more leisure in which to educate themsives, discover and develop talents, new retrain and participate in areas of life previously closed to them. Alexandra Kollontai in Senwal Relations and the Class Struggle argued that socialism would 'increase humanity's potential for loving' in a wider area of human relationships. This Graeme Cookson would not mean that free love should he pursued without a sense of duty. Society must "leam to ac- cept all forms of human relationship, however un- usual they seem, provided they comply with two conditions. Provided they do not affect the physical health of the human race and provided they are not deter- mined by the economic factor. Discussing the psychological aspects of women's need for love, she argued that a woman should treat love as a step, as a way of finding her true self, and not as her whole existence. Looking at the complexity of social relationships today within the family it is clear that many women have, in practice, begun to take Kollontai's advice, but they have not been able to draw political and ideological conclusions from their own experience be- cause of the all-pervasive hold of traditional Nevertheless, the family's crisis is our op portunity to explain many of the things that are wrong with capitalism. The rapid changes in social life and the way in which women challenge male domination in their lives has in practice weakened the influence of tradi- tional family ideology, but not put any worked-out alternative ideology in its place. The right-wing are searching for fresh oppor- tunities in this situation. Socialists, too, must be alert to their opportunities to build on people's everyday experience to develop and popularise the argument for a completely dif ferent form of society. Page 27
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