International Womens Day 1983 the Common
emerged from the handful feminists from the Soviet Union, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland who were able come to the conference of the European Socialist Feminist Forum in Gothenburg. Sweden in November. While feminism nowhere a strong and vibrant movement, a feminist challenge both to stalinism and to the reform movement is developing, fragmented, full of contradictions and difficulties and with limited links to working class women. Nevertheless it is ireespective of the silence in the westem media and the left press. It is clear that economic reforms are, at best, double edged; that an autonomous feminist movement will have to build an altemative concep tion of women's liberation from that forced down on women through the state and party. These raise central questions for westem feminists, in particular in the analysis of the state, civil society and the family. What was striking in the European conference was how this implicit questioning of a socialist feminist 'orthodoxy' paralleled some of the is-
SUPPLEMENT EN VY of sues raised by black women in their
critique of 'white' feminism in the West. The theme of this year's Conference was *Global Restructuring and Women's Labour'. One single is framework can't adequately encom
pass what is happening to women workers in the East and West, or the North and South. But certain common themes are clear. Across Europe feminisation of the labour force has not altered the sexual division of there, labour; it appeared to be developing
alongside increasing income dis parities between women and between the level of women's unemployment and men's. In the USSR, where female sectors of the economy are being targetted for market reform, it seems that given the chance, enterprises would try to avoid flexible/ unstable socialist labour, that is women's labour. Al-
though it is in the mines and the steel industry in the USSR and Hungary that the first wave of closures are due, the high level of bureaucratisation put women's work particularly under threat. In one Hungarian uranium
March 8 is International Women's Day, and in 1990 unites new struggles of women in Eastern Euope with their sisters in the west and in the "third world'. Socialist Outlook presents a special supplement with articles on women in Ireland, on the fight for an internationalist, socialist feminism, and women's struggle for rights as the EC debates its "Social Charter' Page 13
"Of all European countries, from Ireland to the Urals, it is Hungarian women who are most likely to say that a mother's place is in the home. Years of low status, poorly paid jobs, of high levels of shift work and night work have taken their toll" Page 14
mine for example, half the workers were women office staff, and it is they who face unemployment. The situation is contradictory; bureaucrats in the ministries - and yet these were women's jobs; and the safer types of women's jobs at that. These cuts need to be put in context40% of women factory workers in Poland, for example, are working in unsafe and unhygienie circumstances.
Although an ideological offensive against the employment of women (especially mothers) is underway across Eastern Europe, it is meeting a mixed, if not positive response from women themselves. Of all European countries, from Ireland to the Urals, it is Hungarian women who are most likely to say that a mother's place is in the home. Years of low status, poorly paid jobs, of high levels of shift work and night work have taken
It should not really be surprising that women want time for themselves, for their children and indeed for meaningful personal relationships. Queueing, the lack of household appliances, and men's attitudes, make women's working hours long and hard: whereas the average US married woman spends 8.5 hours on work, household chores and childcare a day, in the USSR it is 11.5 hours, and in Czechoslovakia 13.2. At the same time, of course, women need their own incomes more than ever.
The issue of working hours is seen to affect women across Europe. It is worth noting however that in East Germany, the slogan was forward to the 40 hour week, while in Sweden
SUPPLEMENT the debate is around the 6 hour day. Women lost that struggle; the trade unions went for longer holidays instead; in Norway, parliament is considering a 6 hour day for working mothers alone, but as the Soviet women pointed out at the conference, that type of demand could easily backfire. They were taking issue with a new proposal giving women the right to part time work. They were adamant that if formulated in this way, it would only serve to bolster industrial patriarchy; they wanted each family to choose how many hours each partner should work outside the home. They acknowledged that it might not affect the outcome since the family is a patriarchal institution, but above all they wanted the state off their backs.
They also opposed the way the state's new interest in the women question was formulated within the traditional "protective" ideology; underlying it was the view that women were the problem (even though rape is known to be on the increase) because they didn't care adequately for their children. In contrast the Soviet feminists are looking for a doublesided emancipation; for men, as they put it, to become as multi-functional as women. A similar refusal to accept male definitions of the issue is evident in Norway: a royal commission is looking at men's role in society!
When the Soviet and Polish women talked of the dire state of the health service; of women preferring back street abortions to those in the public sector; of a lack of tampons or even sanitary towels, the need for economic reform - on women's terms
- seems unquestionable. In a
situation where there is no
choice of doctor, nor account-
ability or redress, it is perhaps
not so surprising that the East
European feminists fell that
privatisation of the health ser-
vice or at least the development
of medical co-ops, which charge
for services offered a chance of
improving standards.
Soviet health service reforms are providing some consumer choice and from now on doc-
tors will be paid according to
Show many patients they attract. Such "choices' are of course tendentious, as the Swedish women made clear. In Sweden there are moves to break the state's virtual monopoly of childcare. Under the banner of *choice' individual subsidies are being mooted which will foster private childminding in place of the almost universal public system.
In Poland and Hungary childcare has been privatised largely under the cover of paid maternity leave. Childcare provision at the enterprise elsewhere in Eastem Europe is unlikely to survive local self management, unless women achieve a great deal more say in economic policy.
In Poland only three percent of children under 3 are in childcare; the proportion has been falling since 1981 when paid matemity leave was introduced. However, its value has been systematically croded and it is means-tested. As a result only single parents are are effectively eligible; childeare has been privatised not to tothers, who can't afford to give up work, пог necessarily to grandmothers, who also need employment but to retired and redundant or low waged men, or to informal childcare at ratios not even acceptable in Britain today. In East Germany, however, the municipality provides a comprehensive system of local child-care, which seems relatively secure.
While the right to abortion has been one of the first gains from the Romanian revolution, in Poland the church is actively pushing for restrictions on abortion provision. Women in factories argue that any referendum on abortion should be for women of childbearing age alone. Solidamose is equivocal. But the Polish women told US how they had organised demonstration in support of the US women's abortion struggle; the Solidarose paper would not touch it, and the only support they had from SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 22, March 1990
men was from Troskyists. At the same time, it is clearly appalling that abor- tion is the only effective of means contraception available; otherwise for those without hard curren- cy, there is only one phar- macy in Warsaw providing contraceptives. At the previous year's conference, the Forum had discussed the problems of women attempting to enter and transform the struc- fures of power, specifically whether the experience of quotas was helpful. The problem became clearer as the East European women made us aware of the in- corporation of women's or- ganisation by the state and the distortion of idea of women's liberation by statist ideology. The dead weight of the women's official move- ment was still taking its toll on feminism in the USSR. has It still a virtual monopoly on contacts with the West, so that it isn't just male chauvinism in the media that have kept us in the dark about the develop- ment of feminist thinking. So far, the space for feminists in the East to con- tact cach other has been severely limited. They knew through their limited contacts in the West that there were feminists elsewhere in the USSR and in the Easter bloc, but they don't yet have any organisation- al form of their own. The official its definition movement and "women's liberation' is a distinct bar- rier. Yet even in Norway, where 30% of the cabinet are women and where every part of the political system, even conservative parties has a 40% quota and where women are said to be 40% of of board members of private firms, male domination is still rife. Though the small Worker's Com- munist Party has 50% quotas for all groups, and a woman leader, she in- sists that the party still has to work on unconscious male domination within the party, to enable it to lead the struggle of the working class as a whole, rather than simply half of it. Struggles of class and sex need to be brought together, but on women's terms. The limitation of quotas as a sub- stitute for politics is clear from recent SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 22, March 1990
SUPPLEMENT SAVE YOUR HEALTH IRVICE
Soviet experience. As a result of the abolition of quotas for organisations (of which Soviet Women's Committee is one), the proportion of women elected to the Congress of Deputies fell last year from 30% to 15%. In practice this is no retreat for women, since there was never any effective articulation of women's demands. At the same time obstacles are being placed on feminists attempting to involve working class women. One of women's factory council, who were
Tin contact with the feminists in Moscow, sought to nominate a feminist journalist as their representative and were barred from doing so. In Moscow 6% of the candidates for the Congress of Deputies were women, but not one was elected. began an important dialogue. The Soviet sisters began to understand that the "socialism' they had experienced and rejected bore no resemblance to the socialism we were after. They began by wanting to replace a class analysis with a face. humanistic analysis, but in the end we were all much clearer about the need feminist analysis: for a socialism 'with a female face that could in their words 'emancipate socialism from hierarchy, uniformity and inhuman personal relationships*.
We reminded of the need to take care with westem feminist orthodoxy - to recognise for example that paid work is not of itself liberating, rather that it is our best pos- sible means to libera- tion. And to recognise that although the state can provision, and can en- SAVE SUre than voluntary/co-opera- tive reproduction, it can also make provision part of an overall oppression. Across Europe HEALTH came to understand that on top of the class diver- gences, and linked to them, are differences of SERVN a race and ethnicity be tween women. raised the question for * the conference of how we react to fundamen- talism, catholic church, the Russian orthodox church or the Mosque. It is clear that the level of debate on the situation of black and migrant women enormously with the different ex- periences and cultures of the feminist movement across Europe. As a step to developing a truly internationalist socialist feminism, the Conference decided to hold the next Forum on "Feminism and Citizenship'. It is like- ly that this will be in Ljubliana in November 1990. Inevitably a socialist movement that is independent of any political party and yet is explicitly political lacks the funding for a mass conference of women from across Europe. Women were able to come, in twos and threes, from 22 different countries to the Gothenberg con- ference. And though the range of rep- resentation was necessarily limited, we were able to move towards defin- ing at least the ingredients for an in- temationalist feminist socialism and understanding better the tasks we For further information on the European Forum of both a class analysis and a Feminists contact: Claire Crocker, Garden Flat 7, Acol Road London NW6. The Forum publication Entering the Structures: Changing the Structures is available from her, price £1.50
also were "the proportion of women our socialist elected to the Congress of Deputies fell last year from 30% to 15%. In practice this is no retreat for support collective women, since greater equality there was never any effective of systems articulation of collective women's demands" we This whether of the varied feminist Socialist Page 15
The fight for women's rights in
*In Britain, women today account for 44 percent of the workforce, with that figure predicted to be over 50 percent by the end of the century. There is similar picture Rights of Man. across Europe" French Page 16
SUPPLEMENT There has been a recent revival of interest in Mary Wolstoncroft, an early feminist and author of the Rights of Women - a feminist response to Tom Paine's The
This interest is in part due to
Revolution bi-centenial celebrations which engendered a wide ranging discussion in both liberal and socialist circles about rights, reform and revolution. In France there has been a specific feminist form that this discussion has taken - termed a "discourse on equality" - in which bourgeois and reformist feminists have debated the extent to which equality between the sexes has been achieved, and, more concretely, the impact of 1992, the Social Charter and quotas on women's employment.
It is important to look at the Single European Act and the Social Charter through the perspective their impact on working women. The general