Feminist Review: Issue No. 33 (Feminist Review Journal)

Feminist Review

CONTENTS

Restructuring the ‘Woman Question’: Perestroika and Prostitution Elizabeth Waters

1

Contemporary Indian Feminism Radha Kumar

21

‘A bit on the side’?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa Jo BeallShireen Hassim and Alison Todes

33

‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up Alison Light

66

Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression Claudine Mitchell

84

Reviews Sara Dunn on The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since 109 the 1960s Melba Wilson on Talking Back: Thinking Feminist—Thinking Black

112

Joan Scanlon on Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence

115

Beverley Skeggs on Within School Walls: The Role of Discipline, Sexuality and the Curriculum

117

Jenny Morris on With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by Women with Disabilities

119

Christine Griffin on The Making of Masculinities: The New 123 Men’s Studies, Changing Men: New Directions in Research on

iii

Men and Masculinity and Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics Sophie Watson on The Sexual Contract

127

Noticeboard

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RESTRUCTURING THE ‘WOMAN QUESTION’: Perestroika and Prostitution Elizabeth Waters

A Soviet historian writing in 1979 could confidently declare that the USSR was the first country in the world to have eradicated prostitution. ‘The experience of the USSR has proved that prostitution is explained by social reasons and exists only where there is private property’ (Chirkov, 1979:214). The link between private property and prostitution had first been made by nineteenth-century socialists who argued that once economic exploitation and oppression were eliminated, relations between men and women would be transformed and sex cease to be a commodity. The Bolsheviks who came to power in Russia in October 1917 initially believed that their victory put this bright future on the immediate agenda, but the social upheavals of revolution and civil war brought instead a lowering of living standards and the return of prostitution. Paradise was postponed. In the meantime revolutionaries saw it as their duty to provide sheltered workshops and hostels for women forced by circumstances to sell themselves. A decade later with Stalin at the helm, paradise was introduced by fiat: ‘recalcitrant prostitutes’ were sent to terms in special camps or on the construction sites of the first five-year plans; by the mid thirties the Soviet government insisted that prostitution had been ‘liquidated’ and that its re-emergence in the USSR was a theoretical impossibility since the social and economic relations which gave rise to it had been buried for ever. Propaganda compared the unhappy women of the west, frequently driven by economic need onto the streets, with Soviet women who enjoyed every right and equality. Silence on the subject of Soviet prostitution continued for half a century, to be broken only at the beginning of 1986, less than a year after Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Initial references to the subject were indirect and veiled, but as the policy of glasnost’, openness, became more firmly established, a steady stream of articles appeared in the press

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admitting that prostitutes still existed in the Soviet Union and were by no means an isolated phenomenon. But whereas at the time of the revolution prostitution was regarded as a social evil rooted in capitalist inequalities and insecurities for which the prostitutes themselves bore no responsibility, it was now interpreted as a result of moral failings for which the women must take the main share of the blame. Accordingly, lawyers, security chiefs, government officials, as well as journalists argued in the press for the criminalization of prostitution; consistent with the view that it was a theoretical impossibility, prostitution had until this time gone unmentioned in the legal code. In mid 1987 prostitution was made an administrative offence. Perestroika has not in this case lived up to its liberal image. In a society with little experience of political debate and democratic process there is a temptation to cut corners, and the Soviet government has chosen to tackle a number of social problems with coercive methods that seem to offer rapid results. In a society that is undergoing rapid change there is a tendency to place a high premium on the family, and at the present time the prostitute has become one of the scapegoats for the failure of reality to measure up to ideals. At times of rapid social change, however, questions of personal life are often fiercely contested, with defence of tradition countered by demands for change and freedom. In the Soviet Union the counter-demands have as yet made little headway. The assumption that it is women who should shoulder the major responsibility for childcare and that for them waged work is not and cannot be as central as for men is still largely unchallenged. ‘Openness’ has been selective in its choice of suitable subjects for treatment. The Soviet government has adopted a flexible approach both to matters of ideology and administration and is prepared to adapt or discard slogans and policies that no longer seem appropriate, however central they have been in the past to the socialist canon. Of private enterprise and unemployment there has been much talk; of ‘female emancipation’, very little. The ‘woman question’ does not figure in the government’s list of political priorities. Women’s secondary position in the labour force, their lack of skills and low wages, and their social subordination in the family and public life are not recognized as urgent issues. As the recent discussion on prostitution in the Soviet press demonstrates, a feminist voice has yet to make itself heard.

Feminist Review No 33, Autumn 1989

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The press was one of the first beneficiaries of the Gorbachev reforms. Relaxation in censorship removed restrictions that had until then prevented discussion on a whole range of issues, from traffic accidents to Stalinism. It did not take Soviet journalists long to discover that all manner of social problems such as drug and child abuse, previously recognized only as afflictions of capitalist society, existed in their own backyard. The economic problems facing the country have also been discussed with new frankness, the corruption that became widespread during the Brezhnev period coming in for particular scrutiny: readers were told how fortunes had been made through illegal dealings in goods and services, how high-ranking party and government officials embezzled state funds and built themselves palaces of amazing opulence, how black marketeers speculated in foreign currency. These sensational stories all connected the country’s social and economic ills with a moral malaise, a slippage of principles, a collapse of the ethical code. Teenage promiscuity was another case in point. Journalists puzzled over what drove schoolgirls who were progressing well with their studies and came from average families, to spend their leisure cruising bars and restaurants in search of sexual adventure. What had caused their ‘fall’ and why did they seem so unconcerned and unrepentant about their behaviour (Konovalov, 1986:2–3)? The influential literary weekly, Literaturnaya gazeta, described a group of young women who were regular customers at a typical city bar—Lyal’ka, a sixteen-year-old, a hairdressing student at technical school; Katerina, six months her junior; and Vera, a medical student—and suggested that they came in search of human contact. Soviet cities, it is true, provide little in the way of popular entertainment and there are few places for young people, who usually live with their parents, to meet and spend time. Since the seventies, bars and restaurants have become the focus of a tiny though distinct subculture. The high cost of belonging—a single evening can easily swallow a week’s wages—has served to raise the desirability of these locations yet keep them off bounds to all except the most enterprising. Lyal’ka and her friends, Literaturnaya gazeta implied, are able to afford this lifestyle because in return for drinks and other presents they make themselves sexually available to male customers. In this day and age terms like ‘to be picked up’…are part of their everyday vocabulary. As if the subject under discussion was not a living person but a thing to be hired out on a temporary basis (Zenova, 1985).

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Before long it was admitted in the press that some young women crossed the grey area between promiscuity and prostitution (though to begin with journalists studiously avoided the term prostitution, employing instead a variety of euphemisms). In July 1986 the Belorussian daily paper, Sovetskaya Belorussiya, told the story of Nina G., a resident of Minsk, the republic’s capital city, who on the death of her mother was left in sole possession of a flat and proceeded to use it as a ‘den of vice’. Her ‘girls’ frequented the bar of the Yubileinyi, an Intourist hotel catering for foreigners, and brought the men they met there back to the flat for the evening and sometimes the night. The hostess not only provided accommodation for the girls, she also disposed of their earnings. Possession of foreign currency is against the law, a situation that has led inevitably, as tourism and business links have developed, to the emergence of a flourishing black market, and it was for infringement of currency regulations that Nina G. found herself in court. Her ‘girls’, as the journalist calls them, were present at the trial only as witnesses, since their activities were not, he notes with regret, defined by the legal code as criminal (Pal’chevskii, 1986). The following month the Latvian young communist newspaper, Sovetskaya Molodezh’ told a similar story of young women who frequent the bars and restaurants of Riga in order to seek out foreign tourists and foreign sailors (Riga ia a major port) and who exchange their earnings on the black market. This article was again based on information made public as a result of a court trial of illegal traders, a trial that had placed a number of speculators behind bars, while leaving the ‘restaurant girls’ at liberty. The author, a high-ranking Latvian official, made quite clear that the discrepancy in the treatment of these two groups was intolerable. ‘At the heart of the problem’, he declared, ‘is the absence of a law that provides for the curtailment of [the women’s] activities.’ He avoided calling the women prostitutes, but he did remark that the militia used the term ‘Women of Loose Morals’, WLM for short, and that there existed another designation dating back to antiquity (Konovalov, 1986:4–5). During 1987 the press interest in prostitution continued to grow. Further articles appeared in a range of central and regional newspapers. Euphemisms such as ‘women of loose morals’ were still useful as elegant variation, but the word ‘prostitute’ soon became acceptable in print and ceased to surprise or shock. One member of the militia, it was revealed, had been using the term for fifteen years, in the privacy of his files. Major Adzhiyev, operations chief of the 69th Precinct of the Moscow City Police, centred on Komsomol Square, a traditional haunt

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of the criminal underworld on account of its three major railway stations, had built up his own special collection of records on 3,500 women whom he had identified, under the heading ‘special remarks’, as prostitutes. The Major’s files included information on women with names like ‘The Stump’ and ‘Ninka The Slasher’, women whose criminal connections were with petty thieves rather than foreign currency speculators. Some had once worked in the city’s upmarket central hotels, moving to Komsomol Square when they could no longer cope with tough competition, others were local girls who had never aspired to the bright lights; a third group were bomzhi (Soviet slang for persons of no permanent address), for whom the station was home, who sold themselves for a meal or a glass of cheap wine. None of these women dressed in the latest fashion, nor did they mix with foreigners. The journalist reported ‘[v]acant looks, unwashed, swollen faces, dishevelled hair’ and noted that alcohol abuse and ill-health were the exception rather than the rule (Kislinskaya, 1987). Soviet prostitution, in other words, is homogeneous neither in its mode of operation nor in its social significance, the Intourist hotel and the railway station representing the two poles of the spectrum. A survey of over 500 prostitutes, carried out in the mid eighties in the republic of Georgia, and recently published in an academic journal, Sotsialisticheskie issledovaniya, confirmed this complex picture. Some of the women were from peasant families, others had working-class backgrounds; some had minimal education, others were university graduates; some had their own homes, others were of no fixed address; some met their clients at hotels and restaurants, others frequented the railway stations and the street (Gabiani and Manuil’ski, 1987:61). Exploring this diversity has not, though, been a priority of the press coverage, and journalists have concerned themselves for the most part with the élite of the profession, in particular the foreign-currency prostitutes. There are a number of reasons for this narrow focus. Firstly, the topic of foreign-currency prostitution is newsworthy, promising revelations of sex and crime against a backdrop of the high-life in the cities. (Headlines such as ‘Confessions of a night butterfly’ show how quickly Soviet journalists have been learning from the western tabloids.) Secondly, the ending of the taboo on the discussion of prostitution coincided with the government’s crack-down on corruption. As a result, the prostitute became established as a symbol of the ‘golden world’ of dubious pleasures and unearned income, with a permanent place in the

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rogues’ gallery of ‘unlabouring’ types whose economic and ideological sins were, allegedly, responsible for the country’s present plight. Finally, while media coverage of economic corruption has provided the context for a censorious and repressive approach to the problem, no discussion from a feminist perspective has been forthcoming. Bars and restaurants in the Soviet Union are places of glamour, and most glamorous of all are those catering for foreigners, some of them located in the hotels in which the tourists and business people stay. Entry to such places is restricted not only by the high prices they charge but by the porters who stand on duty to check hotel passes, and the militia and security officers on hand to preserve law and order. Journalists have long been aware that hotel defences are not impregnable, that despite the danger involved in gaining access, there existed a small group willing to take the risk: the black marketeers (fartsovshchiki in Soviet slang), whose purpose was to buy jeans and foreign currency, and the women whose purpose was to sell sex. But until now the journalists were not allowed to observe closely or to report on life behind the hotel doors. There was great pleasure to be had therefore in exercising the newly won freedom to ‘lift the veil’—there has been a strong element of voyeurism in press accounts—especially since journalists could at the same time derive moral satisfaction from the thought that with their disclosures they were striking a blow for perestroika. I’m talking about the Dragomys hotel complex, not far from Sochi [a resort on the Black Sea]. I observed young women gathering before the door to the elevator that takes passengers to the night club…Their clothes were not bought in Soviet shops, I can tell you… And it wasn’t just the clothes, it was the whole look of these people…everything about them gave them an air of exclusiveness… (Pravov, 1987). Another article in the young communist paper, Komsomol’ skaya pravda, entitled ‘Lady with the Tip’ (the Russian is Dama s podachkoi, a play on the title of a famous short story by Anton Chekhov, ‘Lady with the Lap-dog’, Dama s sobachkoi) goes to even greater trouble to set the scene for its readers. The restaurant closed. The customers left. In a few minutes time the quick tread of the waiters will die away and the teasing-bright light in the huge hall will dim.

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There are two exits from the restaurant. One leads out onto a wide boulevard in the centre of Minsk, already deserted and whipped by a biting autumn wind. The other into a cosy Intourist hotel, straight into the foreign currency bar. A fashionably dressed young woman passes through the half-open door. Coquettish fair fringe; large grey eyes, skilfully painted; jacket decorated with an unimaginable number of pockets, zips, buttons. In a word, stylish and, lets be objective, rather striking. She settles comfortably into a deep armchair near the entrance to the late-night bar and reaches in her bag for a packet of American cigarettes. But she doesn’t hurry to light up. She yawns with fatigue, raising a hand to cover her mouth (Myasyakov and Yakubovich, 1986). The press coverage of Soviet prostitution allows readers to enjoy vicariously a lifestyle from which ordinarily they have been excluded, inviting them to mix with foreigners, to linger in the warmth of an intimate interior or to step out onto a sun-drenched beach at some special holiday resort. The young women of dubious morals, previously only glimpsed as they disappeared through the hotel doors, now parade at close quarters. One wears a ‘denim jacket, stone-washed to “fashionable” perfection, a short woollen skirt jutting out below, legs in tight black knitted leggings’ (Sharov, 1987a). Another is equipped with a ‘thick layer of powder and blusher, incredibly black shadows around the eyes, applied one has to say, with a certain skill’. A third impressed the correspondent of a weekly paper, Nedelya, with ‘her slim figure and big beautiful eyes. And her perfume, which makes the head spin slightly, excites the senses and draws you to her’ (Svetlanov, 1987:22). The women are marked out from the crowd by the exotic foreignsounding names they have chosen for themselves: Elena insists on being called ‘Laura’, Ekaterina prefers to be known as ‘Consuella’, another has adopted the nickname ‘Josephina’. They are also set apart by their wealth. ‘Consuella’ owns quantities of foreign clothes, Eleonora’s cosmetics’ bag contains a small fortune (Mel’nik, 1987), and ‘Laura’ who once earned 100 roubles a month as a village shop assistant has managed to save 19,000 roubles in the space of five months (Vital’ev, 1987:4). For all that the press dwells on this glittering lifestyle and its not inconsiderable profits, sight is never lost of the fact that they have been gained dishonestly. Prostitutes, it has been pointed out repeatedly, shirk honest toil; they abandon regular state employment or take on a light-

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weight job just for the record, even then frequently paying someone else to do it for them. ‘Their name is parasite’ was the uncompromising title chosen by the Ukrainian daily newspaper, Pravda Ukrainy, for one of its articles on prostitution (Sharov, 1987b). The web of illegal activities into which prostitutes are drawn is documented fully: the women, it is revealed, often bribe porters for entry to hotels, and waiters for seats at restaurant tables alongside foreigners; they sometimes have arrangements with taxi-drivers who chauffeur them from hotel to hotel in search of clients and with doctors who provide medical check-ups and, if necessary, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases on a private basis, without the red-tape and moralizing of the state clinics; almost always they have dealings with the fartsovshchiki and foreigncurrency speculators, who help them dispose of their earnings, which are mostly in money but also in kind——packets of biscuits, cans of sausages, cigarettes, clothes and the like. The prostitute, the press argues, is both symptom and, in a small way also, cause of the social and economic problems confronting Soviet society. In the late sixties the Soviet economy experienced a downturn as growth rates fell and supplies of essential goods failed to keep pace with the growing expectations of an increasingly urbanized population. The response to a system that delivered too little too late or not at all was the rise of a so-called ‘second economy’ that sought to make up for the inadequacies of state industry through officially approved injections of private enterprise such as the collective farm markets, and also through illegal business activities of every shape and size. This system worked up to a point. It was always possible to get hold of what you wanted in the Soviet Union, from a pair of Italian shoes to a dental diploma, provided you had persistence, connections and cash. The phenomenal profits earned by those who supplied illegal goods and services made a mockery of the government’s socialist ideology, and moreover were symptomatic of the weakness rather than the strength of the economy. For both these reasons Gorbachev launched a much-publicized campaign to clamp down on corruption and bring to book all those who had enriched themselves at the public’s expense. Top-ranking officials were arrested and tried in a blaze of publicity. The smaller fry, individuals whose profit ran into thousands rather than millions, whose field of action was the local grocery store rather than a government ministry, has also had its names and deeds writ large. Precisely because the small-scale offenders are more ordinary, their motivation and the scale of their crimes easier to grasp, they have often provided more telling targets for public outrage.

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The bikini advertisement reads: Ministry of Health Warning

The foreign-currency prostitutes were allocated a disproportionately high press profile in the campaign against the ‘second economy’, partly because their trade takes them to the main streets and central hotels, making them one of its most visible sectors, and partly because decades of propaganda about the evils and decadence of the capitalist west has left a legacy of distrust of foreigners and all who have unofficial contact with them. Levelled against prostitutes, the charge of corruption is doubly effective, because the accused can be represented as guilty not only of illegal economic activity that has damaged the material well-being of the country, but of behaviour that contravenes society’s moral code and undermines the spiritual health of the nation. The ‘restaurant girls’ may present an attractive face to the world, may dress with sophistication and style, but according to Sovetskaya Rossiya ‘if you look closely, you notice how dull and indifferent their eyes are, either slumbering or lusterless’ (Kurov, 1987). Nedelya published the ‘Confession’ of a girl who earns her living by ‘casting’ (by promising sex and then abandoning her clients after they have paid her but before she has delivered her side of the bargain) and noted how at nineteen she was thoroughly bored with life: she loved no one, strove towards no

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goal, admitted to no beliefs other than money and God. ‘Look what lack of spirituality leads to’, the journalist remarks. He stands back more in shocked bewilderment than in judgement, his moralistic commentary minimal, his sympathy evident. ‘[H]ow I pity this young girl, this prodigal soul’, he exclaims in his final paragraph (Svetlanov, 1987:22). But such sentiments are rare. Much more typical is the stern approach taken by Sovetskaya Kirgiziya: Some people feel sympathy for prostitutes, these ‘frivolous girls who have sunk to that kind of life’. But after all, [they]…have chosen to walk the streets not out of hunger or because they are homeless or unemployed. Chosen is exactly what they have done —leaving behind families that are economically secure, giving up their jobs’ (Yurlov, 1987). For the most part, the press takes the view that the prostitutes choose their lifestyle and do not have it forced upon them by circumstances. It sees them as weak-willed, unable to resist the lure of the bars and restaurants, self-centred, caring inordinately for fine clothes and cosmetics, thinking only of themselves and their material comfort. The casual manner which prostitutes adopt towards their trade, their refusal for the most part to act ashamed and repentant, adds insult to injury: She touted her wares as if they were some rare commodity. Disgusting! Moreover, she spoke about it quite openly, without any embarrassment, even with some kind of bravado. She was not afraid (Sharov, 1987a). Prostitutes are accused of having neither proper shame, nor human feelings: one of them cannot remember when her father died, another has deserted her children. In the eyes of Sovetskaya Belorussiya they have forgotten that their destiny in life is ‘to be loved by someone, to be a wife, a mother’ and have thereby forfeited the right to be seen as ‘real women’ (Pal’chevskii, 1986). In contrast to the west where the problem of prostitution has been redefined as a matter of town-planning and public health, current discussion in the Soviet Union is being conducted in a language brimful of moral fervour and righteousness. The titles chosen to head articles on prostitution are instructive—‘The Fall’ (Sovetskaya Belorussiya, 16.5. 87), ‘The Quagmire’. (Sovetskaya Latviya, 13.11.87), ‘The Plague of Love’ (Krokodil, 1987; 4), this last a phrase borrowed from Sasha

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Chernyi, an early twentieth-century poet. Journalists have dwelt on the degradation and the filth of prostitution, they have described it as a ‘disease’, an infection which ‘spreads and ravishes the body and the soul’ (Yurlov, 1987). Readers have vied with journalists in their search for the graphic phrase. Prostitutes, according to one letter received by Pravda Ukrainy, ‘hide in the crevices like cockroaches’; another reader characterized them as ‘dregs, defiling the earth for which millions of Soviet people gave their lives’ (Sharov, 1987b). Metaphors of disease and pollution have taken on a new dimension in the light of the recent media discussion of the AIDS virus. Prostitutes have been mentioned as a high-risk group along with drug addicts and homosexuals (Ignatenko, 1987). According to the central government newspaper, Izvestiya, however, the Soviet Union has firmer social and moral principles than the USA and for this reason the disease is not likely to become such a problem (Pokrovskii, 1987). The implication here is that prostitution should be regarded as an un-Soviet activity, and elsewhere the point has been made explicitly. Sovetskaya Belorussiya reported how Soviet prostitutes had featured in a western pornographic magazine as ‘Russian slave girls’—posing for the camera chained to a bed. It was difficult to imagine a more serious slander upon the Soviet system, the paper commented; prostitution, it concluded, was tantamount to treachery (Pal’chevskii, 1986). The Georgian newspaper, Zarya vostoka, expressed the same view (Inoveli, 1987). Prostitution, unlike treachery, is not a criminal offence in the Soviet Union and this has been the cause of much concern. Prostitution should be a criminal offence…this ugly phenomenon cannot remain outside the law in our country (Kislinskaya, 1987). Until the Criminal Code includes a statute providing for the punishment of prostitutes, the situation will be a difficult one (Yurlov, 1987). Of course, the law against prostitutes should be made harsher (Sharov, 1987b). Just as alcohol abuse has been tackled by introducing price increases on wine and spirits, tougher licensing laws and disciplinary measures against those who drink on the job, so legal penalties are proposed as the most effective method of struggling against prostitution. Administrative measures have been introduced in the past, but according to Lt. Col. Ye. Chaikovskii, of the Moscow criminal investigation department, never with sufficient bite. He complained to

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the correspondent of Sovetskaya Rossiya that the legal changes introduced in the mid sixties were hemmed in by too many qualifications to be of use. Detailed documentation of a case had to be provided before the woman in question could be brought to book and she could be deprived of a city residence permit only after three arrests in the space of a single year (Kislinskaya, 1987). This picture of a militia defenceless against the ‘ladies of the night’ is seriously misleading. The means of controlling prostitution, even if legally ill-defined, were available and on occasion used. In 1980 when Moscow was preparing to host the Olympic Games, several dozen prostitutes were banished from the city along with other ‘undesirable elements’. This episode is now well-known because it has provided the subject matter for a play by Aleksandr Galin, Stars in the Morning Sky (Galin, 1989), one of the triumphs of the 1987 Leningrad theatre season, so successful that it moved subsequently to Moscow’s prestigious Sovremennik Theatre. If many prostitutes went freely about their business, it was more likely to have been because the authorities chose to let them, than because they were powerless to act. For the most part the militia and the security forces were prepared to ignore prostitution, just as they turned a blind eye to so many of the illegal operations of the ‘second economy’. No doubt some of their representatives were able, like the Intourist waiters and porters, to draw personal profit from the trade. Glasnost’ has uncovered so much bribery and corruption in all parts of the apparatus that it is hard to believe the law enforcement agencies were untouched. For the future though the militia’s preference appears to be a change in the law—at any rate a number of its members have added their voices to the call for tougher policing. Whether or not media pressure influenced government thinking is unclear, but in mid 1987 prostitution became an administrative offence, punishable in the first instance by a fine of 100 roubles and for a second offence committed within a twelve-month period, by a 200rouble fine (Konovalov, 1987:1). Some have found this measure unsatisfactory, believing the fines to be set too low to act as a deterrent, others have argued that nothing less than criminalization will do. In the early 1920s the possibility of making prostitution a criminal offence was raised and rejected. Alexandra Kollontai argued that prostitution differed from lawful marriage only in that the woman sold herself to many men on a temporary basis rather than to one man on a permanent basis (Holt, 1977:261) Bolsheviks pointed out that to punish the prostitute and not her client was discriminatory and hypocritical.

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What could I do? It’s not against the law

Accordingly, the legal code set long prison sentences for brothel owners and procurers, but no penalties for women engaging in prostitution. The formula, ‘struggle against prostitution not prostitutes’, was thought to encapsulate the Marxist approach to the problem. In the discussion that has taken place over the last couple of years this formula has been largely absent. Apart from a few academic lawyers who have argued that criminalization would be ineffective and ideologically unacceptable (Gal’perin, 1987; Karpets, 1987), there has been general agreement on the need for harsher measures against the prostitutes themselves. It has even been suggested that the movement of women who are suspected of prostitution or who might be suspected of prostitution should be restricted. According to V.S.Osinskii, the general director of the Crimean Government Tourist Association, the present allocation of package holidays for the coastal resorts within his jurisdiction has allowed a group of obviously ‘accidental’ women to congregate and ‘mix’ with the holidaying foreigners. Allocation should be regulated, he says, and preference given to married couples (Mel’nik, 1987). In other words, in the interests of the struggle against prostitution, the vacation opportunities of single women should be curtailed. A lawyer writing in the Estonian daily newspaper, Sovetskaya

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Estoniya, went further and argued that, in the interests of the good name of the female sex, women should not appear in public places after dark unless accompanied by a man—otherwise apparently they run the risk of being taken for prostitutes: I respect the emancipation of women, but one perhaps ought to think of restoring the old rule banning women from restaurants in the evening unless accompanied by men. The woman who hangs outside a restaurant waiting to be let in, who sits at a table without a man, a glass of cognac in her hand, does not give others any reason to have a very flattering opinion of her (Yanovich, 1987). If present attitudes and policies on prostitution have not been measured against the history of the post-revolutionary period, comparison has been made between the prostitutes who walk the streets of the Soviet Union today and those featured in the classics of Russian nineteenthand early twentieth-century literature: Contemporary prostitution—in contrast to the pre-revolutionary type——really has no social roots. But this living vice manages without them, existing on moral roots such as dissoluteness, lack of spirituality, greed. Greed is the main driving force of contemporary prostitution. Greed and not need at all… The modern ‘Lauras’ are more revolting and amoral than their predecessors from the literary works of Kuprin and Tolstoy (Vital’ev, 1987:5). In other words, legal action against prostitution is justified in the present situation because women are no longer forced into prostitution by economic hardship. This argument is, perhaps, at first glance surprising. After all, perestroika has challenged the cosy Brezhnevite notion that the Soviet welfare net is perfect, that the USSR in contrast to western nations has no pockets of poverty and distress. Moreover, the press coverage of contemporary prostitution presents evidence which would support an economic interpretation of its roots. The Georgian survey found that a large number of prostitutes had children to support, over half were divorced and most found difficulty making ends meet, spending the money they received from clients on such necessities as food (Gabiani and Manuil’ski, 1987:63). The ‘butterfly of the night’ who ‘confessed’ to Sovetskaya Rossiya explained that she was short of money—she was

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divorced with a young daughter—and by prostitution could ‘earn far more than from her half-pay at the laboratory’ (Kurov, 1987). The large numbers of single mothers engaged in prostitution have been mentioned in other press articles, but the financial hardships of singleparenthood are not suggested as factors that contribute in any way to their choice of occupation—the head of Kiev’s criminal investigation department preferred to explain the lapses of single mothers as a result of their craving for male companionship (Sharov, 1987a). Some of Pravda Ukrainy’s readers have apparently also ruled out the economic motive——far from proposing that social benefits to single mothers be increased to improve their financial situation, they have demanded that payments to women who engage in prostitution should be stopped as punishment for immorality (Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 1987:15). While the trade paper, Sovetskaya torgovlya, noted that approximately 20 per cent of the foreign-currency prostitutes known to the militia in the ports of Krasnodar district were employed in retail or catering (workers in the service sector have always been poorly paid and during the Brezhnev era regularly sought extra income, usually by selling short or under-the-counter), it was not their low wages but the health risk posed by their daily contact with thousands of people that was of concern (Konovalov, 1987:4). Though major economic and political reforms have been introduced over the past few years and though the shortcomings of the Soviet system have been analysed with unprecedented frankness, the status of women has hardly changed and the inequalities they experience at work, in the family and in public life have received little attention from the Party or the press. The absence of an institutional framework through which women could channel their grievances and make their demands must provide a partial explanation. In the early thirties the Party announced that the ‘woman question’, along with problems such as prostitution, had been solved, that women were sufficiently equal to fend for themselves without special organizations. Apart from a Moscow-based Soviet Women’s Committee and a network of local women’s councils, neither of which have political clout, none exists today. Yet issues such as conservationism have been championed in the media and taken up by the government over the past couple of years despite there being no large-scale official organizations devoted to their cause. The press in particular has been instrumental in introducing new topics for debate, so the failure of any journalist or prominent public figure to identify with the defence of women’s interests is significant. Most reforming editors, journalists and public figures are male (the

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sociologist and economist, Tat’yana Zaslavskaya, is the exception), but this in itself does not provide sufficient explanation for media indifference, since the ‘woman question’ in Russia has in the past frequently been championed by men. Women’s rights have not so far emerged as a major issue because no one ascribes special importance to them, neither the Communist Party, nor the general public, nor the Soviet intelligentsia. The answer to this seeming paradox—that a country subscribing to Marxism, an ideology that recognizes equality between the sexes as one of its goals, should have remained largely unaffected by the feminist movement of the last twenty years—is to be found in the specificity of the Soviet Union’s historical development. The Russian Revolution took place in a society that was overwhelmingly rural, whose peasant population lived according to a patriarchal code, in a society that lacked a middle class and accordingly was only beginning to develop the mediating political institutions and pressure groups that have been characteristic of modern western democracies. In these countries the emergence of an ideology of domesticity, simultaneously confining women and yet valorizing their experience, created the conditions out of which a mass-scale feminist movement was to emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Russia, this process of change had by the outbreak of the First World War touched only a small proportion of the population, and in the post-revolutionary period, the Bolshevik emphasis on production and the public arena held it in check. During the 1930s ‘the family’ was made much of in Soviet propaganda, but the drafting of millions of women into waged work and the extreme economic hardships of the time were unfavourable to the transformation of slogan into reality. Not until the fifties and sixties did the domestic ideal begin to come into its own. Khrushchev promised to take into consideration the needs of consumers and in the late sixties and seventies these promises were increasingly honoured. Families moved from communal to self-contained flats, purchased televisions, refrigerators and motor cars, and spent their leisure hours together. The domestic ideal was beginning to take root, at a time when public rituals and political slogans were beginning to pall. The ‘woman question’, firmly associated in the Soviet mind with the barricades of the revolution and the tractor girls of the first five-year plans, was viewed as an old-fashioned anachronism, belonging to a stage in the development of society that was now history. Focus shifted from ‘women’ to ‘the family’. Woman’s place in the workforce was of less interest than her status as marriage partner, homemaker and mother.

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In the 1970s the Soviet government, concerned about the decline in the birthrate, particularly in the European areas of the Soviet Union, introduced a series of pro-natalist measures, including more generous maternity leave and benefits. However, the labour shortage robbed these policies of their effectiveness. Industry and agriculture still needed women in full-time work. Women, too, resisted the call to spend more time at home, afraid of being bored and anxious to contribute to the family income. Pro-natalist policies in the nineties may well have more impact. The greater availability of consumer goods and the introduction of residential-based community projects could make home a more attractive place for a woman to be, particularly if her female friends and neighbours have also left the workforce; promised increases in wages for skilled workers and professionals may also encourage some families to live on a single wage. Most importantly the economic context is set to change. In the 1970s and 1980s, industry and agriculture, inefficient and unmechanized, were reliant on the country’s vast labour resources. The economic reforms of perestroika aim both to improve productivity and introduce sophisticated technology, thus reducing labour requirements. In fact, recognition of the inevitability of unemployment has become commonplace, and it can be assumed that women will be seen as more expendable than men. The economic as well as the ideological imperatives that previously ensured women their place within the labour force are now much weaker. Certainly the concept of separate spheres has won some influential advocates. Gorbachev himself has talked about returning women to their purely womanly mission of housework, childcare and homemaking (Gorbachev, 1987:116). Viktor Likhanov, the head of the recently established V.I. Lenin Children’s Fund, has expressed the view in Pravda that past belief in the benefits of socialized childcare was a ‘delusion’; the task must now be, he suggests, to return children to the mother (Likhanov, 1987; see also Tol’ts, 1987). At the same time, the restructuring of Soviet society is undermining the social values on which notions of ‘purely womanly’ roles are based. Personal initiative is being encouraged, individualism is no longer considered a bourgeois vice, but rather a precious quality that society must foster. This and the new rhetoric of pluralism encourages the view that women ought not to have to live according to a single measure. Maya Pankratova, a well-known sociologist, writing in Moscow News, one of the flagships of perestroika, has already argued this case:

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The main thing is to provide the opportunity for some to make a career and for others to concentrate on the family. This way it will be easier for the first to go to the top, while the others will not have to make believe they are interested in work (Pankratova, 1988). Her article pays its respects to the conventional framework of current discussion on the family, noting the high divorce rate and the ‘alarmingly’ low birthrate. Nevertheless, Pankratova envisages greater differentiation in the lives of Soviet women, and the emergence of a minority with access to interesting, well-paid and influential jobs. What she does not dwell upon is the opposition that such women will inevitably have to confront as they struggle to ‘go to the top’ in a society that is overwhelmingly male-dominated in its structures and patriarchal in its instincts. Indeed, over the past few months, signs of frustration and discontent have increasingly begun to surface. Women in professional groups are setting up their own informal pressure organizations; the male monopoly of diplomacy and politics has been questioned and so too the assumptions that men are unsuited for housework and childcare. As this new critique of the Soviet social fabric deepens, the press coverage of prostitution will surely be transformed. Notes Elizabeth Waters has spent a number of years living and working in the Soviet Union. She now teaches Russian and Soviet history at the Australian National University. Her research on sexual politics in postrevolutionary Russia, Women in a Bolshevik World, is shortly to be published by Macmillan. She is currently working on Soviet poster art and the campaign for the new lifestyles in the 1920s and 1930s. I am grateful to Mary Buckley, Garrick Dombrovski and Nick Lampert for their comments on an earlier version of this article. Many thanks to Laura Berstein, Zhanna Dolgopolova, Daphne Skillen and Kevin Windle for their references to the Soviet press coverage of prostitution.

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References CHIRKOV, P.M. (1979) Reshenie zhenskogo voprosa (1917–1937gg.) Moscow. CURRENT DIGEST OF THE SOVIET PRESS No. 42 (1987) pp. 12–15, ‘Soviet Prostitution: A Candid Look’. GABIANI, A.A. and MANUIL’SKI, M.A. (1987) ‘Tsena “lyubvi”. Obsledovanie prostitutok v Gruziii’ Sotsialisticheskie issledovaniya No. 6, pp. 61–8. GALIN, A. (1989) Stars in the Morning Sky in GLENNY (1989). GAL’PERIN, I. (1987) ‘Krainyaya neobkhodimost’ Literaturnaya gazeta 13 May 1987. GLENNY, M. (1989) (editor) Stars in the Morning Sky London: Nick Hern Books. GORBACHEV, M. (1987) Perestroika. New Thoughts for Our Country and the World New York: Harper & Row. GUTSEVICH, F. (1987) ‘Tryasinya’ Sovetskaya Latviya 16 May 1987. HOLT, A. (1977) Alexandra Kollontai. Selected Writings London: Allison & Busby. IGNATENKO, M. (1987) ‘Spid: ugroza veka’ Sel’skaya zhizn’ 21 May 1987. INOVELI, I. (1987) ‘Tyazhkoe bremya legkogo povedeniya’ Zarya vostoka 25 September 1987. ISMAILOVA, N. (1987) ‘Zvezdy na utrennem nebe’ Izvestiya 14 August 1987. KARPETS, I. (1987) ‘Znat chtoby borot’sya’ Argumenty i fakty No. 5. KISLINSKAYA, L. (1987) ‘“Legkoe povedenie” na vesakh pravosudiya’ Sovetskaya Rossiya 12 March 1987. KONOVALOV, V. (1986a) ‘Does Prostitution Exist in the Soviet Union?’ Radio Liberty No. 374, 1 October 1987. KONOVALOV, V. (1986b) ‘Prostitution Made an Administrative Offense’ Radio Liberty No. 311, 12 August 1987. KROKODIL (1987) No. 20 pp. 4–5, ‘Lekarstvo ot “Chumy lyubvi”: sushchestvuet li ono?’ KUROV, G. (1987) ‘Ispoved’ “nochnoi babochkoi”’ Sovetskaya Rossiya 19 March 1987. LIKHANOV, A. (1987) ‘Obernut’sya k detstvu’ Pravda 13 August 1987. MEL’NIK, A. (1987) ‘Eleonora khochet poznakomit’sya’ Pravda Ukrainy 18 October 1987. MYASYAKOV, D. and YAKUBOVICH, P. (1986) ‘Dama s podachkoi’ Komsomol’ skaya pravda 9 October 1986. OSINSKII, I. and POPOV, YU. (1987) ‘Grekhopadenie’ Sovetskaya Belorussiya 13 November 1987. PAL’CHEVSKII, A. (1986) ‘Bar’er nesovmestimosti’ Sovetskaya Belorussiya 18 July 1986.

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PANKRATOVA, M. (1988) ‘The Angry Woman Wants Change’ Moscow News 19 June 1988. POKROVSKII, V.I. (1987) ‘Spid bez sensatsii’ Izvestiya 16 June 1987. PRAVOV, A. (1987) ‘Plyazhnye devochki’ Komsomol’ skaya pravda 19 September 1987. SHAROV, V. (1987a) ‘Ulybka Dzhozefiny’ Pravda Ukrainy 29 March 1987. SHAROV, V. (1987b) ‘Imya im—parazity’ Pravda Ukrainy 15 May 1987. SVETLANOV, V. (1987) ‘Bez linii zhizni’ Nedelya No. 21, p. 19. TOL’TS, M. (1987) ‘Sem’ya’ Pravda 20 March 1987. VITAL’EV, V. (1987) ‘“Chuma lyubvi”. Blesk i nishcheta sovremennykh kurtizanok’ Krokodil No. 9, pp. 4–5. YANOVICH, K. (1987) ‘Pochem lyubov’?’ Sovetskaya Estoniya 16 October 1987. YURLOV, V. (1987) ‘“Putany” iz “Kirgizstana”’ Sovetskaya Kirgiziya 16 May 1987. ZENOVA, N. (1985) ‘Devochki v bare’ Literaturnaya gazeta No. 47.

CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FEMINISM Radha Kumar

The Women’s Liberation movement in India today is so diverse that it cannot be properly described in a brief article, so the focus here shall be on its main currents and the course they have taken over the last ten years, with occasional digressions into their history. In many ways the development of feminism in India is similar to that in Western Europe or the United States: like them, India too saw a feminist movement in the early twentieth century; like them, again, the movement gradually died away after the winning of certain demands, until, recently, a new feminist movement developed out of contemporary radical movements. The sixties and early seventies saw the development of a whole spate of radical movements in India, from student uprisings, workers’ agitations and peasant insurgencies to tribal, anticaste and consumer action movements. These spanned a political spectrum from Gandhiansocialist (that is, nonviolent protest, based on explicitly moral values, over specific working or living conditions) to the far left, in particular, the Maoists. The Gandhian-socialists initiated several of the first women’s movements in post-Independence India (e.g. an antialcohol agitation in north India, a consumer action and anticorruption agitation in western India, and a women’s trade union, also in western India). Interestingly, however, neither they, nor others, looked upon these movements as feminist, nor did they advance any theories of women’s oppression. These were advanced first by two women’s groups which were formed in 1975, both of which grew out of the Maoist far left. The Progressive Organization of Women in Hyderabad offered an Engelian analysis of women’s subordination, and the League of Women Soldiers for Equality, in Aurangabad linked feminism and anticasteism, saying that religious texts were used to subordinate both women and the lower castes. Although the imposition of a State of Emergency on India in 1975 led to a break in most agitational activities, there was, in many

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ways, an intensification of theoretical discussion. In 1977, when the Emergency was lifted, several women’s groups had developed out of these discussions which were able to come ‘overground’, and several new groups were also formed. Most of these groups were based in the major cities, such as Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Pune, Patna and Ahmedabad. Though there was no particular uniformity between them, their members were largely drawn from the urban educated middle class, and this was an important reason for their feeling that their own needs were minor, and different from the needs of the large, and poor, majority of Indian women. These women’s groups comprised women from different sections of the far left, and there was, at this time, considerable debate on the class basis of women’s oppression, the road to women’s liberation, and the role that they themselves could play in this. Historically, the experience of the Maoist insurgency of the late sixties and its repression and disintegration in the early seventies, had led many to believe that a revolutionary transformation of society could only come into being if different oppressed groups, such as tribals, subordinate castes and women, first organized and represented themselves, and then coalesced to fight their common enemies. The question facing the women’s groups, therefore, was of how women could organize and represent themselves. The general feeling was that the primary role of middleclass groups such as their own was to generate a consciousness of women’s oppression not only among women but among workers, tribals and others. Broadly speaking, two different views were expressed right from the beginning and continue to be representative even now: one, that socialist feminists should join trade unions and revolutionary mass organizations, while continuing to be members of autonomous women’s groups. The former were seen as activist forums and the latter as forums for the development of socialist-feminist theory. The second view was a sort of spontanist argument, namely that once a feminist movement began, it would naturally spread and grow in multiple ways. The two positions were neither as abstract nor as crude as they sound. By and large, those holding the first had been, or were, active in radical and far left, organizations. They felt that these organizations contained space for the raising of feminist demands. The others had not been, or were not then, involved in such organizations. They felt that negotiating within

Feminist Review No 33, Autumn 1989

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them would yield small gains compared to those won by an independent women’s movement which, through its very existence, would force political organizations to take note of it. In the event, most of the women’s groups were sufficiently open to allow both views to coexist within them. They developed links with far left, working-class, tribal and anticaste organizations, campaigned around specific issues, and debated and disseminated theories of women’s oppression. In the early years, however, campaigns were relatively sporadic, and minor compared to the pace of theoretical activity. Most of the groups remained fairly loose until the beginning of the eighties—so few even named themselves that at the first socialistfeminist conference in Bombay in 1978, their main identification was regional—as the ‘Bombay group’, the ‘Delhi group’, and so on. By 1979–80, women’s groups and campaigns had started all over India, and ranged from protesting dowry murders and police rape to unionizing women workers, domestics and slum-dwellers. The campaigns against dowry murders and police rape were in fact what ‘launched’ the women’s movement, for it was these that caught the attention of the press and became public issues. The campaign against dowry murders started in Delhi in 1979, and was the first time that dowry deaths, hitherto regarded as suicide, were called murders. (Dowry deaths refer to the deaths of young brides who were being harassed by their in-laws for more dowry, perhaps better known as ‘bride-burning’.) It was also the first time that the private sphere of the family was invaded, and held to be a major site for the oppression of women. The public/private dichotomy was broken by groups of women demonstrating outside the houses and offices of those who were responsible for dowry deaths within their families, and demanding the intervention of both state and civil society. Interestingly, feminists were joined by local residents from their first demonstration, and within some months of the campaign groups of residents and professionals also began, independently, to make similar protests. Though this temporarily boosted the morale of the spontanists, visions of a snowballing movement were first disturbed by the discovery that many of these other groups came from the right-wing Hindu chauvinist stream of the social reform movement, (who opposed dowry murder but not necessarily the institution of dowry itself, and none of whom opposed arranged marriages or advocated divorce for the unhappily married, or economic independence for women); and then shattered by the near impossibility of ensuring that dowry murders were punished. Attempts

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at boycotting or ostracising culprits never became powerful enough to affect them in any significant way; attempts to secure convictions largely failed. Police inefficiency combined with a certain degree of corruption, the difficulty of procuring evidence, pressure on the courts which made proceedings very slow, all conspired to this end. They continue to do so in most campaigns to improve the administration of the law in India. In 1980 an open letter by four senior lawyers against a judgement in a case of rape by the police (who constitute a large proportion of rapists in India), sparked off a campaign by feminist groups, which initially centred on this particular incident, but in its course took up other, similar incidents. In fact, most feminist campaigns have tended to develop this way, around a series of individual people, or events. Brief though the campaign was, lasting only the course of 1980, it marked new developments in the women’s movement, which would affect it fundamentally. First of all, it raised the question of representation in a different—and, for many, more painful way: who were we to protest against this incident until we had met the woman who was raped and found out whether she wanted a protest or not? Supposing the protest brought upon her, again, the stigma of being a ‘dishonoured’ woman? Shamingly, this question was asked only after the campaign had begun, though fortunately, it was found that no damage had been done. Secondly, feminists had by this time gained considerable confidence and in the campaign against rape they attempted, for the first time, to coordinate activities and demands across the left and between several cities. First in Bombay, and then elsewhere, they formed issue-based joint action committees, which were coalitions of leftist women’s and student groups. In most places however these represented a formal and limited kind of joint action, which was rarely maintained throughout a campaign. Within a couple of months of the campaign the issue of police rape was taken up by the major national parties, in an attempt to cash in on what was becoming a very visible movement, and simultaneously to outdo one another. Working with the entrenched and hierarchical organizations of the orthodox left, and finding their own voices increasingly drowned by the cacophony of competing centre and right parties, Indian feminists discovered the ironic process whereby an agitation gained numerical strength by being joined by political blocs, but at the same time found itself constrained, intellectually, morally and strategically, by them.

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By the early eighties, therefore, the women’s movement had grown in such a way that autonomous feminist groups were only one of its several currents. Though the centre and right parties soon dropped off, the socialist and communist parties were becoming increasingly active, as were the older, hitherto quiescent, women’s organizations. At the same time an interest in women began to be shown by diverse radical movements. The socialists had actually formed a women’s organization in 1977, which was affiliated to the newly formed and elected Janata Party, but between 1978 and 1980 their activities were fairly low-key and they were for that period marginalized by the feminists. The Communist Party of India had had a women’s front from the late fifties, which had dwindled into inactivity. It was galvanized only in 1980–81, when the Party saw that women could again become an important constituency. The Communist Party of India-Marxist also noted the potential of the women’s movement at this juncture, and formed two women’s organizations in 1981, one of which was affiliated to their trade union. Some of their rank-and-file members, however, had been active in a women’s anti-price-rise agitation in Bombay in the mid seventies. The first attempt to organize women’s trade unions had been made in 1972, when the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a kind of Gandhian socialist union of women vendors, was formed in Ahmedabad. By the late seventies SEWA had expanded, and to the union were added several craft co-operatives in and around Ahmedabad. In the eighties they had branches all over the country. Partly because the feminist movement was dominated by the far left, which characterized SEWA as reformist, and partly because SEWA itself had reservations about the feminists, it was not a part of the feminist movement of the late seventies or early eighties. Working-class women’s organizations which were set up in the late seventies or early eighties tended to be different from SEWA. They were not formed of women engaged in any one particular kind of work, and grew out of campaigns for an improvement in the conditions of living, whereas SEWA started with a campaign for an improvement in working conditions. Yet they, too, maintained a distance from the feminists, partly because they felt class issues were not adequately addressed by the latter, and partly because most of their leaders were members of one or another communist current. They did not wish to expose their constituencies to the struggle for power which was being waged in the feminist movement.

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Perhaps it was for these reasons that the efforts to reach out made by feminist groups in the eighties took the form of neighbourhood rather than workplace politics, with groups of women working in urban slum areas and mobilizing women in campaigns for better water facilities, drainage, and so on. Interest in feminist ideas was meanwhile growing in the radical socialist student movement, which had spearheaded a consumer cum antistate agitation in Gujarat in the mid seventies, and had waged a campaign for land redistribution in one district of Bihar in the late seventies. Though their mentor, Jai Prakash Marayan, had discussed the need to change gender-relations in the mid seventies, it was only several years later that this question began to be raised within the movement, and that too largely in Bihar. From 1979–80, they began to organize women’s shibirs (camps) in Bodhgaya district, a method of consciousness-raising which had earlier been used by the Maoists, and which grew in the eighties to be widely used by various rural women’s organizations. At around the same time as feminist issues and campaigns began to be more widely taken up in these ways, the feminists began to move away from their earlier methods of agitation, such as demonstrations, public campaigns, street theatre, etc. These had limited meaning unless they were accompanied by attempts to develop their own structures to aid and support individual women. Women’s centres were formed in several cities, which provided a mixture of legal aid, health care and counselling. One or two of them also tried to provide employment but, lacking sufficient resources, these foundered. The attempts to set up new structures of support eventually degenerated into ‘case-work’—due to the enormous problems women face in this country. These centres initially represented an effort to put feminist concepts of sisterhood into practice, as well as to redefine these concepts through basing them on traditionally accepted structures of friendship between women. Of the first three women’s centres to be set up, for example, two used the Hindi terms for ‘girlfriend’ or ‘playmate’: Salehi and Saheli. Thus a whole new set of personal relationships developed in the feminist movement, of friendships which cut across class and cultural barriers. To some extent, these friendships remained unequal, for the middleclass women were more dutiful, and the poor women more grateful. Even so, this signified the growth of a new sense of individuality within the movement, qualifying stereotypes of the battered wife, the rape or dowry victim, the woman worker, the student, housewife or professional woman.

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The attempt to reappropriate traditionally accepted and restricted women’s spaces grew in the eighties, through attempts to reinterpret myths, epics and folktales; to critique mainstream religious and cultural texts or practices and search for alternative texts or practices; and to discover historical or particular methods of women’s resistance in India. At its inception the feminist movement had detailed the traditional forms of women’s subordination in India, from birth to puberty, marriage, maternity and work, and had searched for traditional comments on women’s suffering, placing these in an orthodox socialistfeminist framework. Now, however, the emphasis changed to traditional sources of women’s strength rather than their suffering. For some this consisted of identifying images of women warriors, to be used as a battle cry for latter-day women; for others, of defining the ways in which ordinary, or unexceptional, women used the spaces that were traditionally accorded them to negotiate with their husbands, families, communities, and so on. Within this a third tendency developed, of celebrating courage, gaeity, inventiveness or strength in Indian women. The shibir or camp was, in certain areas, transformed in to the mela or festival and to discussions of rape, wife-beating or unequal wages were added sessions of singing, dancing and making merry. The search for historical examples of women’s resistance led feminists to scrutinize the distant and immediate past, to look at the role women played in general movements for social transformation, and to reclaim some of the women’s movements which predated the contemporary feminist one. Two movements were of especial importance in this context: the landless labourers’ movement in Telengana (in Andhra Pradesh), which had undergone several phases from the late forties on; and the forest protection movement of the seventies, in the north-Indian hill areas of Garhwal, popularly known as the Chipko movement. The Telengana movement had been unusual in its time for the attention it paid to such ‘women’s problems’ as wifebeating. It remained paternalist in its refusal to allow any but the most exceptional women to join in the underground guerrilla movement led by communists in the late forties and early fifties, and by Maoists in the late sixties and early seventies. It was the Maoist women who, in the late seventies, began to study the part played by women in the Telengana movement. The relationships which developed through their forays into the oral history of the movement eventually led to the creation of organizations of women landless labourers all over Telengana. As they have developed these organizations, they have fused far-left and reformist views. They participate in struggles against

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landlords and the state, but they also form co-operative societies through which they get certain benefits from the state. The Chipko movement was initiated by a couple of Gandhian men, but it was carried forward largely by women, whose economic roles were very important in North Indian hill areas. Large numbers of men had migrated to the plains in search of wage-work, and women’s household work was more dependent on the forest as a resource for domestic fuel, gathering food, etc. Despite this, there was no discussion at the time of Chipko as a women’s movement. It was only in the eighties that, through the feminists, it began to be celebrated as a mass women’s movement, and theories of women’s special relation to their environment were advanced. With the introduction of feminist ideas into the Chipko movement, an antialcohol agitation began. This followed the pattern of the Shahada movement in Western India during the early 1970s. (The Shahada movement was a tribal landless labourers’ movement against the outrageous practices of local landlords, most of whom were non-tribal and treated the tribals as subhuman. Here too, the development of a ‘women’s consciousness’ had led to an antialcohol agitation.) By this stage then, the Indian feminist movement was a multiplicity of organizations and activities. In spreading it had undergone a process of fragmentation which is common enough to all movements but which affected the feminists in a particular way. As a credo, most of us believed that feminism was based on the need for personal solidarity. Its fragmentation as a movement thus symbolized to many the breakdown of sisterhood. This led many feminists to question the very basis of feminism. Whereas earlier a certain commonality of women’s experience was stressed, as a point at which political differences could be transcended, it was now felt that differences could not be subsumed in this way, and that the quest for unity was not only futile but also counterproductive, for it allowed all sorts of evils to be glossed over. This affected the movement in various ways. It paved the way for an open display of sectarianship, which was initiated largely by the partypolitical women’s organizations, who took to print in order to express their differences from each other. While the left concentrated on attacking autonomous feminist groups through their papers, pamphlets and other publications, the socialists concentrated on battling the left for representation as the ‘leaders’ of the women’s movement, through leaflets, press conferences, and the like. More subtle and more scrupulous than them, autonomous feminist groups did not attack other women’s organizations in public, but most of them began to devote

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considerable energy to establishing separate identities from each other. Specific organizations were now held to represent different strands of feminism. Unfortunately, the outcome of this development was such that organizational needs began to be privileged over the needs of the movement, and the identity of an organization was judged as much in terms of its clout as its ideas. Both cynicism and bureaucratism entered the movement. It began to be assumed that self-interest was the order of the day, and the only difference was between those who operated on individual self-interest and those who were concerned with organizational self-interest. An ugly divide now developed within the feminist movement, with one side feeling that the emphasis on organizational identity reflected a growth of Stalinism posing as collectivity, and the other side feeling that individualism was merely a mask for egotism. This was further compounded by a problem which is common to many developing countries, of aid for ‘developmental activities’ being poured into social movements, creating competition, schisms and bitterness. The bureaucratism which generally complements the development of organizational identities was seen at its worst in joint-action forums. Struggles over analyses, demands and strategies were relinquished on the assumption that the ‘others’ were closed to all argument, so that attempting any would be a waste of time. Yet there were redoubled struggles over the division of spoils, such as alloting areas of campaigning, time and space for speeches, over which banners were to be carried, and in what order organizations would march. Even worse, a kind of division of labour now developed in these forums, in which areas of interest were distributed between organizations without any attempt to achieve, or even discuss, commonality of interests. As a result of this, autonomous feminist groups lost much of the space which they had previously occupied on the premise that they were different from party-political women’s organizations. Moreover, their shift away from agitational activities in the early eighties not only left an empty space for party-political women’s organizations to move into, but also led to a significant loss of presence through the media. At the same time, the kind of individual support work that women’s centres did involved them with people’s lives in a way that was more intimate, and therefore more threatening than their earlier agitations. Unsurprisingly, this provoked a considerable degree of both public and private hostility, and feminists began to face attacks from irate families, in person and through the police and the courts. Instead of leading to a wave of sympathy for the feminists, these attacks were accompanied by

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a public, and increasingly sophisticated, critique of feminism. These arguments against feminism were remarkably similar to those advanced against social reformers in the nineteenth century: that they were westernized, upper class and urbanized, and therefore ignorant of, and unsympathetic to, traditional ‘Indian’ society. A small fringe took this argument further, saying that the crass ‘modern’ views of the feminists were drawn from capitalist society and were thus incapable of appreciating the nobility of traditional philosophies, especially Hindu. Ironically, these views were expressed at the same time as feminists were exploring traditional contexts in search of an ‘Indian’ feminism; and at the same time as episodes of child sacrifice, witch-hunting and forcible widow immolation were being brought to public view. Meanwhile, women’s issues had become so widely recognized that the centre and right parties also formed women’s fronts, and special attention began to be paid to women in most general movements of the eighties, though this was more noticeable in peasant movements than in workers’ ones. Perhaps in reaction to this, counter movements against feminist or women’s rights ideas began to be initiated by sections of traditionalist society, and after the mid eighties feminists have faced defeats such as they had not previously encountered. Among the most formidable onslaughts on feminism has been that launched by Indian communalists. Communalism (that is, tension and violence between communities based on religion) has long existed in India, but most observers believe that it has considerably increased since the 1960s. In the worsening communal situation of the 1980s, women’s rights have begun to be placed in the context of communal identity, as they were under British rule, and attempts to better the conditions of any one community are being treated as attempts to impose alien norms and interfere with communal autonomy. From the days of the British secularism was interpreted in India as the state’s recognition and codification of different religion-based personal laws, but these had not, by and large, been used to take away rights conferred under other laws. This, however, did happen in the mid eighties, when, under pressure from Muslim religious leaders, the government passed a law which deprived divorced—and destitute—Muslim women of the right to maintenance by their husbands. The campaign against this Bill showed how much the women’s movement had internalized prevalent notions of secularism, as well as how much the feminist movement has been marginalized by party-political women’s organizations. It was spearheaded by the CPI-M who organized a ‘left and democratic’ Muslim opposition to the Bill, instead of allying with the feminists, who

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tried rather weakly to raise the demand for a uniform civil code. The feminists themselves were uncertain of how to proceed, for the occasion was used by Hindu communalists to attack the Muslims for being backward and barbaric, and they were afraid that on the one hand they would be seen as playing the communalist game, and on the other, for the majority of them were Hindu by birth, that their few Muslim members would be singled out for recrimination. The socialist women were utterly confounded by the fact that one of the main organizers of support for the Bill was a member of their party, whom they could not muffle, let alone get expelled. This was to happen again, in the campaign against widow immolation. A few years later, the conflict between communalism and feminism has again cropped up, but this time as a problem of the majority rather than minority community. Though incidents of widow immolation popularly known as sati, have occurred periodically since Independence, the death of a young woman in Rajasthan in 1987 sparked off a furore across the country, with raging arguments over whether sati was suicide or murder, whether it should be punished and if so who should be punished, whether it was a ‘Hindu’ practice and if so was it intrinsic or extrinsic, ad infinitum. That the problem was one of the majority community’s had an important influence on the campaign, for feminists did not hold back for fear of being used by communalists. In the event, feminists were successful in getting a Bill passed against sati, but ineffectual in getting all their suggestions incorporated into the Bill, so that the first person punished under it was the woman victim, for she was held to be attempting suicide. The campaign reflected in myriad ways the malaise which had crept over the feminist movement, for again there was a limited and formal kind of discussion, with little or no discussion of the issues involved, and thus the campaign itself had practically no effect, and the organizers of the incident were unpunished. This was strange, for there were in fact arguments being offered by women who had studied sati, and who were connected to the feminist movement. Yet their knowledge seemed at a remove from the activists, and there is in fact now, paradoxically, a situation in which there has been an enormous increase in women’s studies in India, much of which is conducted by feminists, but which seems less and less to inform feminist practice. Given the kind of opposition that is now mounting against feminism, this situation urgently needs changing and one can only hope that change is coming, as it often does, in puzzling and indirect ways.

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Given the kind of opposition which is now mounting against feminism, this situation seems incredibly depressing, but it may be that we are now in a moment of transition, when disintegration appears more evident than new developments. Some kind of ‘women’s consciousness’ has clearly spread enormously over the last ten years in India, especially in rural areas. The women’s liberation conference in Patna in early 1988 was attended by over a thousand women, and several thousand women from surrounding villages were at the rally which closed the conference. The attendance of these women reflected the growing strength of the Indian People’s Front and the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini in Eastern India. The former is a relatively new organization, a kind of coalition of different Maoist tendencies which have come together on a broad and democratic platform, and who have shown considerable interest in women. The latter has been described above. Moreover, the links between feminism and environmental, ecological, health, radical science, anticommunal and anticaste movements appear to be multiplying and strengthening all over the country, and perhaps in the next few years we will see new theoretical developments within the movement, as well as new forms of action. Notes Radha Kumar lives in New Delhi, India. This article is an extract from a book she is writing about the history of movements for women’s rights and feminism in India from the early nineteenth century until today. It will be published by Kali. A shorter version of this article has also been published in Seminar, March 1989.

‘A BIT ON THE SIDE’?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa Jo Beall, Shireen Hassim and Alison Todes

Introduction The transformation of South Africa from an apartheid order to socialism or at least a more equitable system than the present one, has become a crucial area of debate. Academics and activists alike are engaged in a creative dialogue to formulate policies to effect the transition to a ‘postapartheid’ state and to adopt forms of organization and strategy consistent with and complementary to such policy. Until recently, however, a consideration of gender has been lacking in this exciting debate.1 This is not simply the result of a dominant androcentric discourse, but must also be attributed to gaps and shortcomings in the analysis of women’s oppression in South Africa. We argue that the way in which political organizations have conceptualized women’s oppression and their role in struggle has limitations. This has implications for the way in which women participate in struggle, for the way in which women’s interests and needs are addressed in the course of struggle, and for development policy in a ‘post-apartheid’ future. This paper is a constructive critique of the ‘woman question’ position, which has been adopted by the progressive movement in SA. This position is broadly based on the classical socialist position on women’s oppression, namely that women’s oppression will be eliminated in the course of the transition to socialism. In strategic terms, this involves women’s concerns being subordinated to, rather than included as part of, struggles to achieve socialism in SA. Where the emphasis is on national liberation, women’s struggles are likewise subsumed. We offer, as an alternative, a socialist-feminist position which sees women’s struggles as a legitimate and integral part of broader struggles, which tranform not only the form and content of those struggles, but also the type of development policy which flows from them.

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The debate around women’s oppression in South Africa has become artificially and unnecessarily polarized between those who see the emancipation of women as being secondary to and contingent upon national liberation, and those who separate women’s emancipation from broader concerns. The latter position manifests itself in two different ways. Radical feminists argue that the primary source of women’s oppression lies in patriarchy, defined as a universal system of male dominance. Male dominance extends not only to the public spheres of politics and the economy but also to control over women’s reproductive function and their sexuality. The political programme of radical feminists is informed by the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Issues associated with women’s reproductive freedom such as rape, sexual harassment, battery and abortion constitute the basis of their political practice. Central to this practice is the building of exclusively female organization. This autonomy for radical feminists means creating ‘safe’ spaces for women, from which men and masculinist political practices are excluded. In South Africa, this position has been reflected in organizations which have grown in isolation from the national liberation struggle. Secondly, the argument has been put forward that women’s organizations should be autonomous from the national liberation movement in the same way as trade unions. The reasons advanced revolve around issues of accountability and democratic practices, as well as problems of domination by petty bourgeois/male interests. It is also argued that women’s demands will never be met within the national liberation movement (and the trade unions for that matter) without a sufficiently strong women’s movement. Such movement can only be achieved by women organizing independently in order to avoid their political practice and their political concerns being subsumed under national political demands. Whilst we agree in principle that ultimately such independence is both desirable and necessary, our research in Durban townships suggests that this form of organization is not feasible at present, due to practical political and ideological considerations which we will discuss below. Furthermore, we do not believe that gender and class can be treated as equivalent analytical categories. We use the argument that class relations are exploitative (in the Marxian sense) whilst gender relations (like race relations) are both oppressive and contingent upon class position in the form they take.

Feminist Review No 33, Autumn 1989

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This has implications for political practice. Outside of the isolating context of the household, women, unlike workers, do not have a particular place within which they can be organized as women. Neither do they have the same weapon at their disposal as workers, namely the collective withdrawal of their labour. As a result, an autonomous women’s movement modelled on an autonomous workers’ movement is not practicable. This is not to say, however, that we agree with the dominant position in South Africa which sees women’s struggles as necessarily subsumed under national struggles. This position sees ‘Western bourgeois feminism’ as being largely irrelevant to the lives of black women in South Africa. It defines the apartheid order as being the prime enemy and its abolition as the major political task. This position argues that women are drawn into organization on the basis of their opposition to racism in its various forms. Hence they are seen to have ‘communal’ interests with men. Fighting ‘women’s issues’ is denounced as divisive. This position has (broadly) been held by national liberation movements from Angola to Mozambique within the southern African region. For the ANC, according to Frene Ginwala: In South Africa, the prime issue is apartheid and national liberation. So to argue that African women should concentrate on and form an isolated feminist movement, focusing on issues of women in their narrowest sense, implies African women must fight so that they can be equally oppressed with African men. (Ginwala, 1986:10) Similarly in Mozambique, Samora Machel argued: There are those who see emancipation as mechanical equality between men and women. This vulgar concept is often seen among us. Here emancipation means that women and men do exactly the same tasks, mechanically dividing the household duties. ‘If I wash the dishes today, you must wash them tomorrow, whether or not you are busy or have the time.’ If there are still no women truck drivers or tractor drivers in FRELIMO, we must have some right away regardless of the objective and subjective conditions. As we can see from the example of the capitalist countries, this mechanically conceived emancipation leads to complaints and attitudes which utterly distort the meaning of women’s emancipation. An emancipated woman is one who

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drinks, smokes, wears trousers, and mini skirts, who indulges in sexual promiscuity, who refuses to have children. (Machel, 1974, quoted in Kimble and Unterhalter, 1982:13) There are more major problems in these formulations of women’s oppression with regard to their definition and use of the concept ‘feminism’ and to the narrow limits placed on organizational priorities. The latter, of course, is in part a result of material constraints within which such movements operate. In South Africa this would include the repressive nature of state response to organizations whilst in Mozambique it would apply to the social and economic inheritance of Portuguese colonialism. However, we believe that this should not result in a fossilization of strategies. There is a major problem with the way in which ‘feminism’ has been defined and used by national liberation movements in southern Africa as it is seen as homogeneous and thus the complexity of the feminist discourse has been lost. The tendency within national liberation movements to equate feminism with western bourgeois feminism results in a dismissal of the insights of feminism as being irrelevant to Third World women. For example, an official ANC publication argued that ‘We must start now (if we have not started) to free ourselves from “male chauvinism” and its counterpart “feminism”’ (Ginwala, 1986: 10). This has resulted in a failure to engage with socialist feminism and has stultified the debate around women’s oppression in South Africa. Furthermore, within the national liberation movement it is contended that women involved in Third World struggles are mobilized around issues of national oppression, or around racist practices which affect both men and women (Kimble and Unterhalter, 1982). Hilda Bernstein also points out that ‘the thing about South African women is that they learn about their feminism through their involvement in politics’ (quoted in Ireen Dubel, 1987:5). However, while they may have political interests in common with men, South African women, like South African men, do not fight these shared struggles as natural subjects, but as gendered beings. We use this term specifically to underscore the fact that the social construction of gender is an element of social location and is likely to influence social identity and political action. The gendered nature of struggle is evident both in the issues men and women choose to engage in, as well as in the way in which they fight these issues. In the Durban townships during the State of Emergency, for example, women were drawn into conflict because they were mothers and because the conflict had moved to their terrain.

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Women saw the defence of their homes and children as their responsibility. In the course of the conflict women moved beyond their ‘traditional’ roles in society and the household and confronted their status within and in relation to dominant political organization. We therefore suggest that there is in reality a middle ground between the presently polarized positions, a ground on which gendered struggles are being fought. We also suggest that the middle ground exists implicitly in the analysis of ANC spokeswomen, but it is obscured by their overriding emphasis on the mobilization of women for national struggles (Dubel, 1987:7; Ginwala, 1986:10; and Kimble and Unterhalter, 1982:33). We argue that gender struggles are important in determining the nature and implementation of policy. Moreover we seek to demonstrate that gender-neutral policy is a myth. Gender struggles, which we define as attempts either to change or maintain gender relations, exist and must be recognized. In arguing for a middle ground we are asserting the importance of feminism and particularly socialist feminism as a political discourse and practice which has the potential to rescue women’s struggles from being ‘a bit on the side’ to making them struggles which can substantively alter the nature of national and class struggles and so transform gender relations. The middle ground Judy Kimble and Elaine Unterhalter (1982) make the point that there has been mutual criticism between what can broadly be labelled western feminism and the ‘woman question’ in national liberation movements. They argue: Women of the ex-colonial world have seen much of the substance of (Western feminists’) struggles as irrelevant to them. Women struggling to liberate themselves from the burden of oppression by imperialism—a burden which manifests itself in extreme ways through poverty, disease and genocide—appear to find little point of comparison between their own goals and the goals of Western women (1982:12). Despite this, they correctly argue that there will be specific differences between struggles ‘as identified by the participants themselves’ and urge western feminists not to ‘ignore, condemn or exaggerate those differences’. We would go further to say that women in national

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liberation struggles should not fall into the trap of artifically positing a polarization between feminism (currently dismissed as an exclusively western phenomenon) and the struggles of women in national liberation movements. To do this is to accept static categories, to ignore the development of both historical materialist and feminist ideas as historical processes, and to create an unnecessary dichotomy between theory and practice. Socialist feminism, while not having the rich intellectual and political history of Marxism, is the hybrid product of growing experience in women’s struggles and research, both in the west and in the Third World. It represents a consensus that women’s struggles against both capitalism and sexism cannot be separated from issues of class, race and imperialism. The class reductionist or economistic analysis of orthodox Marxism is unacceptable. Socialist feminism, as it has been conceived in the west, is not applicable in its entirety to the Third World. For example, the insistence upon an autonomous women’s movement does not necessarily have resonance in the Third World. Women in the third world, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are exploited internationally, nationally and personally as women and it is very difficult for us to separate the international oppression, national and personal oppression…. For women in the West, because maybe they are not exploited internationally because they live in the West…concentrate on the personal and the sexual. They separate it from the political. So the main difference is that we politicised feminists of the third world, we make feminism a political issue (el Sa’adawi, 1986). Black feminists have asserted that socialist feminism in the past has paid insufficient attention to the question of racism (for example Bhavnani and Coulson, 1986; Bourne, 1983; Carby, 1982; Hooks, 1986; and Thornton Dill, 1983). Nevertheless socialist-feminist discourse in the west has been informed and altered itself, by the examples and challenges of women in the Third World. Therefore it should not be posed in constant contradistinction to Third World women’s struggles. The influence of women’s struggles in the Third World has been particularly creative in this process. Based on combined insights of both Third World and western feminists, a socialist feminism pertinent to South Africa can be achieved. We agree with Kimble and Unterhalter (1982) that the organizational context is of prime importance and that in

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South Africa the struggle for national liberation determines that context. Calls for the absolute autonomy of women’s organizations in South Africa are meaningless. The majority of South African women see struggles as being fought on behalf of ‘their whole people’. As such, women’s organization divorced from other forms of political organization is inconceivable. However, this precludes neither the influence of feminism on these struggles (historically and currently) nor the articulation of women’s needs as part of the struggle to transform social relations. Jayawardena, in her consideration of feminist and nationalist struggles in the Third World, argues that: Feminism was not imposed on the Third World by the West, but rather that historical circumstances produced important material and ideological changes that affected women, even though the impact of imperialism and Western thought was admittedly among the significant elements in these historical circumstances…. In a way, the fact that movements for emancipation and feminism flourished in several non-European countries…has been ‘hidden from history’ (1986:2–3). We can also see this in South Africa at specific points in the history of resistance. The impact of colonialism, the mining revolution, struggles around Union and, most particularly, resistance to the 1913 Land Act, led to the formation of the ANC and the Bantu Women’s League (BWL). Like the ANC, the leadership of the BWL was dominated by petty bourgeois elements. This is reflected in their identification with the British suffrage movement and in their calls for ‘votes for women’ as part of their anti-pass campaign (Wells, 1983). As with the ANC, women’s organizations did not remain locked in bourgeois or legalistic demands. During the course of the twentieth century, as the size and composition of their membership changed, they were propelled into participation in worker and popular struggles and to demands for national liberation, epitomized by them as campaigns of the 1950s. The feminist content of these struggles (in other words the gendered nature of these struggles and the gender struggles that accompanied them), has not been taken up by political organizations, nor has the importance of women’s organization for articulating women’s demands been recognized. The pass campaigns of the 1950s are particularly illustrative of the gendered way in which national struggles were fought. These struggles

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appeared to have a genderless content. In other words, women and men fought the imposition of passes together, on the basis of their dehumanizing character. However, the women’s anti-pass campaign reflected a struggle against both economic marginalization as well as against more personal assaults on women as mothers and wives and on their sexuality. While these struggles were not articulated in feminist terms, they reflected the material basis of women’s oppression and exploitation under apartheid. In the writing of this history, the mobilization of women in their capacities as wives and mothers has been emphasized, while the material basis of their demands is obscured (Walker, 1985)2. Uncritical acceptance of the notion of ‘the family’ is problematic. The anti-pass campaigns were, of course concerned with the destruction of the family. This, however, was not a concern for the destruction of a nuclear or even extended family, but for the destruction of extended family relationships within the context of a community (Dubel, 1987:39). It is worth emphasizing that the defence of the family, apart from its moral and emotional aspects, also had a strong economic dimension. The substance of women’s demands, i.e. their right to work in the cities and/ or their access to their husbands’ earnings has not been adequately theorized and built upon in practice. The failure to confront the gendered content of these campaigns and the gender struggles within them arises partially from the fact that these struggles have been located within the ‘woman question’ tradition. This sees women’s liberation as dependent upon socialist transformation. In the struggle towards this end women’s participation is acknowledged as important but their concerns have to be subordinated to national issues. In seeking to legitimize women’s struggles and to put women’s demands on the agenda of the national liberation movement, those adopting a ‘woman question’ position have emphasized the strategic value of women’s involvement. Whilst we would agree that the organization of women is a strategic necessity, there has been a tendency for women in national liberation struggles to become ‘just another sector’ to be mobilized. There are two ways of conceptualizing and building upon the strategic importance of women to struggle: that which was developed by Vladimir Lenin and that developed by Clara Zetkin. According to Lenin: We derive our organisational ideas from our ideological conceptions. We want no separate organisations of communist women! She who is a Communist belongs as a member to the

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party, just as he who is a Communist. They have the same rights and duties. There can be no difference of opinion on that score. However, we must not shut our eyes to the facts. The party must have organs—working groups, commissions, committees, sections of whatever else they may be called—with the specific purpose of rousing the broad masses of women, bringing them into contact with the Party and keeping them under its influence. This naturally requires that we carry on systematic work among the women. We must teach the awakened women, win them over for the proletarian class struggle under the leadership of the Communist Party, and equip them for it…. We must have our own groups to work among them, special methods of agitation, and special forms of organisation. This is not bourgeois ‘feminism’; it is a practical revolutionary expedience (Tucker, 1975:695). Zetkin, on the other hand, argues that: When the party reaches out to women, it must treat them as political beings. In the short as well as the long run, the socialist revolution needs women’s creative participation at least as much as working-class women need full liberation…the involvment of the great mass of proletarian women in the emancipatory struggle of the proletariat is one of the pre-conditions for the victory of the socialist idea, for the construction of a socialist society (Zetkin, ‘Nur mit der proletarischen Fraw wird der Sozialismus siegenl’, quoted in Vogel, 1983:113). What emerges from the formulations of Lenin, arising out of his recognition of the strategic implications of organizing women, is that a one-way relationship between the party and women’s organization is envisaged (i.e. a top-down relationship). Zetkin, on the other hand, demonstrates a subtle but important difference in emphasis in that she sees a two-way relationship between ‘the great mass of proletarian women’ and the party. In practice, Zetkin’s emphasis on dialectical process has not been picked up. As a result, the material foundation of women’s oppression and the mechanisms by which women’s needs arising out of this can be met, have been ignored. The emphasis on the strategic importance of women’s organization for the national struggle leads to a rejection of autonomous women’s organization. Thus Zetkin’s insistence that ‘the fight for changes in the relations between women

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and men [should be seen] as a task for the present, not for some indefinite socialist future’ (Vogel, 1983:133) is lost. As Vogel points out: A socialist movement that uncritically supports existing forms of working-class family life, or only perfunctorily addresses the problem of female subordination, risks alienating more than half its activists and allies. Conversely, popular movements that vigorously confront male chauvinism and oppose women’s oppression have the potential to lay the groundwork for a future society in which the real social equality of women and men can be built (1983:171). It is often implied that this is a preoccupation of socialist feminists in the west and that it is not a concern of women’s struggles in the Third World. In southern African revolutions, the organization of women has been seen in Leninist terms as being of strategic importance for the success of the revolution, particularly given the guerrilla form that those struggles have taken. (Machel, 1973) In this regard, Mozambique has generally been heralded as having developed the most progressive stance on the involvement of women; indeed, the active engagement of women in Mozambique politics in the independence period has been noteworthy. However, the work of Signe Arnfred (1986) has shown that it is not sufficient to simply acknowledge that women are oppressed and exploited as women. She argues that the recognition of gender struggles is a fundamental revolutionary task. This is not merely a semantic problem or a preoccupation of western feminism, but has implications for both the nature of women’s participation in national liberation struggles and also for the reconstruction phase. Recent analyses of the problems of reconstruction in Mozambique have shown the effects of a top-down relationship with respect to women’s organization. Arnfred has shown that in the liberated zones of Mozambique, women gained ground because ‘their independence of patriarchal authority was needed for the tasks of war’. However, she points to the historical limitations of ‘the learnings of the armed struggle’ (1986:1). Because they were not analysed in feminist terms, it was not possible to build on these gains. In another context, it has been pointed out that: The mobilisation of women during the struggle that is necessary to gain national liberation is usually annulled after this has been achieved, and the number of women who continue to participate

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in political power, in theorisation and in decision-making, is very small. One reason for this is the fact that although women participated in struggles in large numbers, they left the development of theory and of strategy to the male experts (Maria Mies, 1982:9, our emphasis). It is the very importance of theorizing political struggles in gender terms which makes it necessary to take issue with the ‘woman question’ position. In doing so we are not advocating women’s organization in a way that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the national liberation struggle. However, we are arguing for sufficient autonomy to allow women to develop their own political programmes and to play a meaningful role in the broader movement. We would argue further that their democratic participation in the broader movement should serve to transform the national liberation struggle itself. Whilst the ‘woman question’ position points to the coherence of women’s demands and those of the national struggle, what it ignores is the gendered content of these demands. For example, the preface to the Policy Document of the United Women’s Organization (UWO) of the Western Cape states that: We feel that oppression in South Africa cannot be wholly removed without removing the oppression of women. Only in the wider setting of fundamental rights for all can we hope to achieve our own important goals. We cannot abstract ourselves from political issues, for they are our daily life, the roof over the heads of our families, the food in the stomachs of our children. Our place must be as part of the struggle for fundamental rights (Adopted as policy at the First UWO Conference on 5 April 1981 and amended at the Second UWO Conference on 4 April 1982). It is precisely because women bear the prime responsibility for managing the household that issues like prices, housing and General Sales Tax (GST) are as important to women as wages. The ‘woman question’ position fails to ask why it is that these are women’s demands and how these are related to women’s oppression. It is precisely in the linking of women’s struggles to the source of their oppression that feminist content can be injected. We can learn the dangers of a lack of awareness of gender struggle as a means for changing gender relations from the Mozambican experience. Whilst FRELIMO called for socialist gender relations, neither it nor the

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organization of Mozambican Women (OMM) acknowledged the necessity of gender struggles to achieve this. In Arnfred’s terms, the concept of gender struggle has not been an ‘operational concept’ in FRELIMO’s political analysis (1986:23). The implications of this for socialist development policy will be spelt out in the last section of the paper. In the following section we attempt to draw out the implications for organizations’ struggles for social change. Women and political organization in Durban After the 1973 strikes in Durban and the student uprisings throughout the country in 1976, there was a renewed emphasis on mass mobilization in South Africa. This was strengthened by the growth of community and youth organizations in African, Indian and coloured working-class areas. In Durban, in addition to the issues shared at national level (such as school and consumer boycotts), local campaigns were fought around rent increases and hikes in transport costs. In the African townships, organizations such as the Joint Rent Action Committee (JORAC) mobilized people against incorporation into the KwaZulu bantustan. Many of these struggles were sparked off by real declines in living standards (Sutcliffe, 1986), which affected women especially and in a particular way. This was epitomized by the slogan ‘asinamali’ (we have no money). Because women are responsible for the management of the household, struggles against rises in the cost of living had a real appeal for them. It is significant too, that they identified the root of their problems as lying in state policy. As such, the struggles involved confronting not only the Port Natal Administration Board (the institution responsible for the running of the ‘Natal townships’ at that time), but also Inkatha and the central state. Inkatha’s attempts to control the Natal townships by incorporating them into KwaZulu became a key area of conflict (involving women on both sides of the political fence). In 1983, women from Lamontville, organized by JORAC, confronted the central state directly by travelling to Cape Town to put forward their demands to Parliament. These actions are significant in our attempt to understand women’s struggles in terms broader than those offered by the ‘woman question’ position. Clearly women were involved in issues of national significance and their struggles had strategic importance. However, their demands were also gendered ones, relating to their productive and reproductive roles. This aspect of their struggle tended to be obscured in

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subsequent political developments. Although women participated in these struggles and were dominant in the management of some of the campaigns, political leadership ultimately fell into the hands of men. Increasingly, mass meetings became the key means of reaching the people and consolidating the campaigns. At this level, women were severely handicapped. Women lacked the confidence and the skills to address large gatherings. An important contribution of feminism has been to show how women’s socialization renders them ill-prepared for high-profile roles in political (and other) organizations. Whilst they participated confidently in the day-to-day activities of community organizations, they were significantly absent from the platform at mass meetings. This was further compounded by the inability of many women to speak English with the degree of fluency required for public meetings conducted in English. These structural constraints on women’s participation have not always been recognized by popular organizations despite their attempts to extend popular democracy. By contrast, the Natal Organisation of Women’s (NOW) branch structure and the practice of translating back and forth from Zulu to English in general meetings has facilitated women’s participation. Following the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in August 1983, the major focus of popular organization became the campaign against the tri-cameral parliament. The new constitution aimed at a limited incorporation of Indians and coloureds into the structures of government. The campaign to win ‘the hearts and minds’ of the Indians became Natal-based, mainly because it was the home of the majority of Indians in South Africa. The anti-election campaign of 1984 revitalized the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and pushed it to prominence within the UDF in Natal. As a result of their increasing strength, the NIC and other UDF leaders suffered great harassment at the hands of the state. Following a successful application against their detention orders, six of the UDF leaders occupied the British Consulate in Durban, which achieved great publicity both locally and internationally, and drew attention away from the opening of the new tri-cameral parliament. In 1984 twelve UDF leaders were arrested and subsequently placed on trial for treason. The trial lasted for over a year before all were acquitted. An inevitable consequence of this was that the energies and resouces of the UDF and its affiliates were diverted into high-publicity political strategies. (This served to draw attention away from political issues founded on material needs and as such, close to the hearts of women.) In retrospect, it seems that the material demands expressed in

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the campaigns in the townships in the early 1980s were lost. This had a specific effect on women, particularly in Natal, which requires explanation. At the end of 1983, as the culmination of years of hard work and debate, women in the region formed NOW. It was formed at the height of mass mobilization politics and in the context of growing state repression. This particular context had repercussions both for the organization of women within NOW and for its relationship with the UDF. Within the organization itself, women were encouraged to rally around broad political campaigns rather than around those that would build on women’s material demands. Furthermore, suggestions brought by women in NOW to the UDF to take up issues such as GST hikes, could not be tackled because of the pressures on the leadership due to the treason trial. In addition to this there were more general problems associated with organizing women politically, such as their isolation in the home or in domestic service, and the burdens on women’s time created by their responsibilities for housework and childcare (usually in addition to wage labour). All this prevented NOW from developing and consolidating a strong base among women in the townships. Despite these problems associated with formal women’s organization, women continued to organize in the townships. In addition to state repression, the UDF and its affiliates in townships faced opposition from Inkatha, which saw in the UDF a direct threat to its attempts to establish its hegemony in Natal. Consequently, struggles at the local level centred on battles between Inkatha and the UDF. The central terrains in this battle were education. In particular Inkatha’s opposition to the use of the boycott tactic in KwaZulu schools, local government, and the proposed incorporation of certain townships into KwaZulu. The increasing spiral of violence surrounding these issues culminated in the conflagration of August 1985 and the subsequent extension of the state of emergency to Natal. Ironically, this brought the struggle more directly back to women’s terrain. In 1986, we with others examined the role of women in struggle in the Durban townships in the period August 1985 to August 1986 (Beall et al., 1987). We suggested that women had become crucially involved in struggle, particularly in those townships falling outside of KwaZulu. In the process they gained strength and confidence. We argued further that they had become so centrally involved because the struggle had moved on to women’s terrain, namely the defence of children and home. It is worth retracing the lines of this argument at some length.

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The violence in Durban was sparked off by the death of Victoria Mxenge. That this should have led to such widespread reaction is significant for an understanding of the role of women in struggle. Victoria was perceived as important because she was the widow of murdered lawyer-activist Griffiths Mxenge and a defence lawyer in the Natal treason trial which was in process at the time of her death. She was also an executive member of the NOW and was on the regional executive of the UDF itself. As a result, she acquired symbolic status in the area as ‘mother of the nation’. We argued that ‘it was this peculiar knot of gender construction which explains the extent of reaction to her murder’ (Beall et al., 1987). Moreover, it is ironic that it was her stepping out of her traditional role as a woman which made Victoria such a high-profile figure. This irony is reflected in a similar but less defined way in the lives of township women who have become involved in struggle. For previously unpoliticized women their children’s battle over education was one impetus for their involvement in struggle. There were schools boycotts motivated by dissatisfaction with KwaZulu education (for example, the campaign for free school books) as well as boycotts commemorating Victoria Mxenge’s death and those in response to national trends. This led not only to repression but to a dislocation in family life. According to a teacher at a high school in KwaMashu: When the state of emergency was declared, those very people [pupils/ activists] had to go into hiding and they didn’t appear at school much… they couldn’t be found at their homes and it was discovered that they were just moving around, you know, from home to home, and not being found in one particular place (Interview with S, 9.12.86). This was exacerbated by the movement of troops into the townships and the appearance of vigilante groups which became the basis for the increasingly direct involvement of women in township struggles against Inkatha and the state’s security forces. This involvement was not uniform but took different forms depending on the conditions in the various townships. Nevertheless, women’s involvement was rooted in common conceptions of women’s roles and attributes. This has been recognized in assessing women’s strategic importance in such struggles but we believe it is important to go beyond this. While many of

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women’s roles were defined in ‘traditional’ ways, in the process of struggle women moved beyond these narrow definitions. In townships where the conflict centred on the presence of troops in the schools, women (as mothers and teachers) were drawn in as mediators. At Lamontville High School, for example, there was an unprovoked teargassing and sjamboking of pupils by the security forces. Women teachers put themselves in the front line. As one teacher related the incident: A white policeman approached. I then shouted to him ‘look what you people have done’. He replied ‘if you cannot take care of your children we will do the job for you…’. When we reached the gate the policeman who was with me was joined by another white policeman. They yelled to the Port Natal black policemen that they must go back and hit some children who were running away…. I then opened my arms and physically forced these policemen to go back. There were about 15 of them. I was so angry I told them they could shoot me or leave as I wanted them to do…. After that…they instructed all the police to withdraw (Black Sash Affidavit M, 6.9.85). The decision that women teachers should intervene was not merely an emotional response based on women’s ‘maternal instinct’ but was also, as revealed by another teacher interviewed, a conscious tactic. The teachers decided to confront the security forces with the women in front and the men behind. ‘It was felt they would not shoot if we did this… this works if women are in front. We believe it works’ (Interview with N, 12.11.86). It is the very immunity offered to women by customary definitions of femininity and womanhood which was exploited and which enabled women to play such a prominent role. At the same time, their actual involvement has laid the basis for a transformation in these traditional definitions. Women responded in a similar way in Chesterville where, in addition to security force harassment, attacks occurred on homes of UDF members at the hands of vigilantes. When the attacks on UDF members began, many men and boys were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding, in genuine fear for their lives (a position which women did not share, in part because of their immunity from direct physical violence). In this situation, women faced a number of pressures because of their role as homemakers. These pressures included constant visits from police or the South African Defence Force (SADF) looking for the

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women’s husbands and children, visits in which they were frequently physically and verbally abused. Women also spent long periods alone at home while the rest of the family were in hiding, subject to visits, threatening telephone calls and in constant fear of attack. Others had to house an ever-growing number of refugees. What must be emphasized is that these pressures were in addition to women’s already overburdened tasks of maintaining the household. From our interviews it seems that in the economic recession women are very often the sole breadwinners in a household, either because they are single or widowed or because their husbands and children are unemployed. This, combined with political pressures, leads to a politicization of women’s domestic role. A woman from Chesterville township said: Those in the community with houses near the A-Team3 have become refugees in the township and they are occupying the homes of others. That makes women rise up as when people have left their homes there are sometimes 30 people who are sleeping in one three-bedroomed house. Many are out of employment and have nothing to eat…that is why the mothers have decided to form the women’s group in Chesterville, to fight these things (Interview with R, 21.11.86). Women in Chesterville organized themselves in order to protect their children and their homes from attacks by vigilantes. They held all-night vigils and for a while they were able to stave off the violence. In so doing, they drew not only on their own immunity but also on the greater immunity experienced by white woman on the basis of their race. The Black Sash women joined the township women in these vigils, identifying with their concerns as mothers thus demonstrating the potential for solidarity (not sisterhood) amongst women of different backgrounds on the basis of their gender and a shared political commitment. The terms of such solidarity have to be determined on the ground, by the women involved, especially given the race and class differences of the women and the spatial separation this entails. A Black Sash woman, for example, said she was consumed with guilt that she could escape the horrors of Chesterville by retreating into the comfort and safety of the white suburb in which she lived (interview with W, 15.11.86). As we argued in the earlier paper, this points to a potentially radical, perhaps revolutionary, meaning of motherhood. It is worth restating this at some length:

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The movement of troops into the townships and the activities of the vigilantes touched women in a particular way. The site of struggle shifted to the home and the community, into a sphere in which women have particular responsibility and which they felt particularly obliged to defend. Clearly these perceptions are socially constructed: the home is traditionally regarded as the women’s domain, and the care of children is ‘women’s work’. The women we interviewed saw these roles in communal, rather than individual terms. Biological parenthood is not the only kind of parenthood in the townships. Women feel a social obligation as mothers to all children in the neighbourhood. This may in part be explained by material conditions in the townships, where women who work entrust their children to the care of relatives and neighbours. This sense of communal responsibility provided an imperative for women’s active involvement (Beall et al., 1987). Thus women’s terrain was extended beyond the isolation of individual households into the neighbourhood and community. We have dealt thus far with the involvement of women in their capacity as mothers and mediators, and have shown the link between this and the struggles of the youth. Clearly this does not apply to all women: there is a generational difference in the way in which and the extent to which women are involved in struggle. This is not exclusive to South Africa. A study done amongst Catholic women in Northern Ireland also demonstrated a greater propensity for mothers and older women to support political campaigns and to become involved in them along with, or on behalf of, their children (Fairweather et al., 1984). While our interviews pointed to the extension of the nurturant and mediating roles of older women in their participation in struggles, the position of younger women is less clear. We know, for example that in the youth and student organizations young girls are constrained both because of their greater responsibility for household labour than their brothers (and parental fear for their safety), and because of the attitude of their male comrades. It was said of the Student Representative Council at one of the KwaMashu schools: Meetings are called by the SRC and only the boys are invited to those meetings. When you question why the girls are not there, the boys will say it’s because the girls can’t keep important information to themselves…. Even if they fight it in the classroom, they still have to go home and do the household chores that are

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especially set aside for girls. In fact, girls are often complaining about it, you know, that they have to study just as much as the boys but the boys get very few chores to do around the home. I mean, girls will sometimes end up even ironing the boys’ shirts for school (Interview with S, 9.12.86). While we found it comparatively easy to understand the role of older women in township struggles, it was more difficult to ascertain the role of young working women. Caine and Jaffee (1986) have suggested in their survey of the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) region, that women were politicized on the factory floor and that they brought this politicization into the townships. Perhaps for reasons of regional differentiation, we have not found similar patterns in Durban townships. This may in part be explained by the fact that in the Durban region, an extraordinarily high proportion of African women are employed in domestic service (70 per cent in domestic service compared to 42 per cent in the ‘service sector’ nationally in 1980; Meer, 1983). Moreover, of the approximately 8 per cent of African women who are employed in manufacturing in the Durban-Pinetown industrial complex some 53 per cent in the 21–30 age group and in declining proportions thereafter (Meer, 1983). It would seem, therefore, that women’s experience of trade union organization has not been as significant a politicizing force as in the townships of the PWV area. It is clear then, that the major site for organizing African women in Durban at present is in the townships in general and in ‘the family’ in particular. This in itself raises important questions for socialist feminists given the conventional socialist demand for the abolition of the family. Western socialist feminists have seen the family as a repressive apparatus of capital and the state. However, as women in the Third World have consistently argued and as Hazel Carby (1982) pointed out with reference to the black family in the United States, the family can also function as a site of resistance, for example during periods of slavery, colonialism and under authoritarian regimes. Depending on the context and political discourse within which the family is located, it can have a progressive or conservative effect. As the National Family Programme (Financial Mail, 1986) suggests, the state is well aware of this and is attempting to constitute the family as a foundation for social control. In Beall et al., (1987), we discussed at some length Inkatha’s constitution of the family in a conservative discourse. We argued that the role of Inkatha women as mothers was predominantly one of disciplining their children but from a position

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subordinate to the men within the household. We further argued that patterns of domination within the ‘traditional family’ provided a model for the legitimation of Inkatha’s hierarchical structure and authoritarianism. Within this rigid structure, the Inkatha Women’s Brigade (IWB) plays a subordinate role in both public life and in decision-making, rather like the role of women within the conservative family. This relationship between the IWB and Inkatha itself caricatures the top-down approach to organizing women. For example, when in 1979 the Women’s Brigade came under the ‘direction and control of His Excellency the President of Inkatha’, this was not questioned by the executive committee of the Women’s Brigade but was warmly supported (Resolution of Women’s Brigade, 1979). This narrow conservatism has denied women the space to redefine their roles personally and to determine the nature and extent of their involvement in politics. A conservative but active definition of women’s roles in society can be used to channel their political energies away from progressive and feminist directions (Wieringa, 1985). Because women’s roles within the household are the very roles by which they accord themselves value, it is relatively easy to organize women around these issues or activities. This is most frequently done within a conservative discourse. Progressive and feminist women’s organizations have often failed to recognize the value women place on their roles as wives, mothers and homemakers and have thus lost opportunities for engaging with popular consciousness in a critical and creative way. In contrast to Inkatha and its Women’s Brigade, the relationship between the UDF and NOW is less hierarchical and less structured. Despite tensions between women’s issues and the national question in the UDF, greater democracy has ‘created spaces for women to formulate local responses to issues and to direct strategy’ (Beall et al., 1987). An important difference between the relationship of women’s organization to the UDF and the IWB to Inkatha is precisely this greater autonomy in the choice of issues to be fought and the manner in which they are fought. Whilst they have not overtly taken up their oppression as women, there is a greater potential for the transformation of women’s roles within the UDF. Because the UDF is not dependent on the manipulation of family structures to legitimate its control, these structures and the roles of women within them remain open to redefinition. South African women sometimes choose to remain single because of the implications marriage has for household labour, access to and

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control over income as well as personal and political freedom. This has implications for the way in which women get involved in organization. June Nala points to the effects of these factors in trade union organization: The sense of responsibility of women to the family often contributed to their strength. Most of the women were single mothers without any income…. Since it was their only source of income, the need to improve it increased their determination to fight for better wages and working conditions (1986:10). Thus, while remaining single imposes economic hardships on women, it does allow them the space to take greater control of their lives and their involvement in political and economic struggles. The UDF has not intervened in the process, leaving space for gender struggles. It is important that these gender struggles be accepted and reinforced as part of the revolutionary process. Even if gender struggles are not recognized at the organizational level, women engaged in struggle are aware of the contradictory nature of ‘the family’ and are in effect attempting to redefine its form. Vogel suggests with reference to the family under capitalist social relations in the west: On the one hand, family life in capitalistic society is generally characterized by male supremacy and women’s oppression, producing tensions and conflict that may further fragment an already divided working class. On the other hand, families constitute important supportive institutions within working-class communities, offering meaning and warmth to their members, and potentially providing a base for opposition or attempts by the capitalist class to enforce or extend its economic, political, or ideological domination. In other words, the family is neither wholly a pillar of defense and solidarity for the working class, as some socialists would have it, nor an institution so torn by internal struggle and male domination that it must be abolished, as some socialist feminists might argue (1983:171). It is important that this is borne in mind in redefining social relations in a future South Africa for three reasons: firstly so that ‘ideal’ social institutions such as the male-headed, nuclear family are not imposed, either at the ideological or organizational level; secondly so that

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progressive forms of social organization as they arise out of resistance are not lost; and thirdly so that women’s demands (which are often the real demands of ‘their whole people’) are not forgotten. What we have tried to show from this micro-study is that women do get involved in struggle, but in a gendered way. The needs that they articulate and the demands that they put forward frequently reflect the material needs of the oppressed people in general. Women’s struggles rarely detract from national struggles (Jayawardena, 1986). On the contrary, the danger is that if movements fail to take cognisance of the gendered nature of women’s involvement in struggles and of their demands, feminist issues get left by the wayside. Women gain strength through struggle, but do not use it for themselves. In a number of postrevolutionary countries, while women have been crucially involved in struggle, their visions of gender equality are not realized either at political or economic level. We suggest that there are three reasons for this: firstly, that women’s struggles are not articulated and incorporated in a way which empowers women; secondly, as organization becomes more formalized and centralized, the two-way process between women organizing on the ground and the level of political decision-making becomes distorted; thirdly, states have tended to tackle gender oppression primarily at the legal and ideological level, ignoring basic material demands. They have not realized the extent to which genderrelations are influenced by economic development policy. It is this consideration which forms the bulk of the final section of the paper. The myth of gender-neutral policy We argued in our introduction that there has been an unnecessary polarization between feminism and the ‘woman question’ position. This has resulted, in most socialist countries, in women’s concerns being seen as a separate issue, somehow independent of development policy. In South Africa, the concept of ‘triple oppression’ represents an attempt to overcome this conceptual problem. The clearest conceptualization of the experiential unity of race, class and gender oppression at the theoretical level has been demonstrated by Deborah Gaitskell et al. (1983). Our research has confirmed this reality. We acknowledge that this integration is easier to achieve with the advantage of hindsight, but nevertheless argue that it is an important task when looking towards the future. A major obstacle to this task, however, is the tendency at the level of formal politics and policy to separate and prioritize the three

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aspects of women’s oppression. The following formulation illustrates our contention: Our women have never accepted the conception of legalistic and social reforms and demands. In our society women have never made a call for the recognition of their rights as women, but always put the aspirations of the whole African and other oppressed people of our country first (Mavis Nhlapo, ANC Women’s Secretariat, quoted in Kimble and Unterhalter, 1982: 13). Ironically, this formulation is not dissimilar to that of bourgeois feminism in that it separates women’s concerns from their material base in society. This position is also similar to that held by a number of liberation movements and post-revolutionary governments which adhere to the ‘woman question’ position. The bourgeois feminist notion that discrimination against women and their lack of involvement in the public sphere is the source of oppression is not unlike the way in which women’s issues are dealt with in countries undergoing a socialist transition. Here, the emphasis is on the participation of women in the ‘revolutionary tasks’ and on the removal of ‘incorrect attitudes’ through education and legal reforms. Thus, women’s issues are largely treated at the ideological level, ignoring their relationship to the material base. In consequence, gender is treated as ‘a bit on the side’, outside of the main thrust of development policy. Our aim in this section of the paper is to argue that gender should be seen as integral to social organization and policy considerations and to demonstrate how this might be achieved, i.e., by taking into account gender relations within the household. Our argument stems from the view that women’s specific oppression is materially based, that is, that it arises in part from their responsibility for necessary labour (or that part of it which concerns the reproduction of labour power, and reproduction in the sense of daily maintenance— i.e., that which is normally termed domestic labour) and from the relations of production of necessary labour. Hence, apart from their oppression as workers (where women are incorporated into the labour force), they face the burden of work in the ‘private’ sphere, and the isolation and invisibility associated with such work. Any development policy will necessarily have an influence on necessary labour within the household—on its amount, the way it is performed, and who performs it.

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In socialist countries, however, while there is a recognition of the problem of domestic labour and the fact that it affects women’s involvement in production, and in public life, the tendency has been to attempt to treat the issue of gender (or more often, the issue of women) primarily at the level of attitudes and legal changes. Women’s position is often seen as the result of ‘backward’ attitudes, of ‘mysticism’ and ‘obscurantism’ (Organization of Angolan Women, 1984). This ignores the extent to which ‘attitudes’ are informed by material practice and, moreover, the extent to which these practices are informed by policy. Hence, while countries such as Cuba and Nicaragua have attempted to introduce such ‘progressive’ policies as family codes in which men are legally required to take responsibility for their share of housework, these policies have failed to alter gender relations within the household (or even more narrowly, the burden of housework) since the type of economic policy pursued made this impossible. In choosing development paths, countries in the transition to socialism make their decisions on the basis of a number of factors and material conditions which are not of their choosing. Hence, countries like China and the Soviet Union had to engage in primitive accumulation in order to develop the productive forces sufficiently to provide the material base for socialism. Many smaller countries following a socialist development path are forced to remain integrated in the international economy in a disadvantaged position. Moreover, most socialist countries have had to face external threats, which has forced them into choosing guns above butter. These factors have forced a development path on to many countries in the transition to socialism, which puts growth above redistribution, more specifically, above redistributive policy which benefits women. This is not to suggest that growth and redistribution are necessarily mutually exclusive. Where redistributive policy is an integral part of development strategy (rather than merely aid or ‘handouts’). It can be used to broaden a country’s economic base as well as to develop its human resources. In the earlier phases of transition, some countries have attempted to follow more redistributive policies. In Cuba, for example, by drawing on existing reserves such as nationalized land and capital, redistribution via the formula ‘to each according to his (sic) need’ was made possible. This had positive effects for women in that, in a genuine attempt to address their needs, the burden on women as managers of the household was also alleviated. Consumption soared as a result of attempts to lower the cost of living, for example through lowering rents and electricity charges. At the same time, the burden of household labour was

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alleviated through improvements to housing, for example the replacement of dirt floors with cement, by providing latrines, water and electricity, and by the collectivization of some domestic tasks such as childcare and laundry work (Nazzari, 1983:251). Economic crises caused by external factors as well as internal problems, however, led to ‘an increased awareness of general inefficiency and low productivity’ (Nazzari, 1983:253). In the dramatic economic adjustments which the shift away from moral incentives entailed, women’s position declined markedly. The new policy emphasized productivity rises, achieved partially through the diminution of the social wage. This had gendered effects. Given the persistence of nuclear and extended family relations, the shift in emphasis from the social wage to the maxim ‘to each according to his (sic) work’ had an impact on gender relations within the household. Rather than accepting the social wage as given, women were now forced to provide for the household either by extracting income from their husbands, and/or by entering into wage labour. This latter consequence was partially the intended effect of policy. In order to encourage women to enter into wage labour, the state attempted to intervene in household relations by introducing legal reforms. This is the context of the much heralded 1975 Family Code. However, household relations themselves reflected the new policy. Women were integrated into production on an unequal basis (with lower skills, in less responsible positions and therefore at lower pay). Factories were required to give women paid maternity leave for a certain period of time. The cost of this was to be borne by the factory itself. This made managers wary of employing women, particularly in more highly skilled and highly paid positions. As under capitalism, women were seen as unreliable workers since they would be absent more often than men due to their responsibility for sick children, etc. These problems enforced the sexual division of labour in which women were relegated to the less skilled and most poorly remunerated positions (no doubt attitudes did play a part here too). Since women earned less than their husbands, their ability to effect the provisions of the Family Code such as shared responsibility for housework, was reduced, i.e., their incomes affected the gender relations within the household. This raises the implications of a productionist bias in policy for gender relations, insofar as it involves a trade off of present for future consumption. In any society, however, a surplus has to be produced and expanded if one is not to socialize poverty. The issue, therefore, is the way

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in which different kinds of labour are valued and rewarded. As Vogel points out: In a society not characterized by class exploitation….according to Marx, surplus labour is identified by the nature of its contribution to social reproduction, not by the fact that it is privately appropriated…. For Marx, necessary labor in such a society seems to be simply that labor ‘whose product is directly consumed individually by the producers and their families’. The labor that contributes to the reproduction of labor power is not in antagonistic contradiction, furthermore, with the production of a surplus (1983:172). During a transitionary phase, therefore, the attempt to achieve a ‘progressive reduction of the disproportionate burden on women of domestic labor’ (Vogel, 1983:173) through policy which does not preferentially remunerate visible labour in production is important. In South Africa, various authors have argued for a redistributive policy in the transition period (Freund, 1986; Saert, 1986; Black and Stanwix, 1986). This would benefit the economy by extending the internal market and would be of advantage to the working class by extending the social wage. It is clear that a radical redistributive policy has considerable potential to benefit women since it can not only increase the social wage but also reduce domestic labour. For socialist feminists, the content of the policy and how it is implemented are important. There are a number of aspects to this. Broadly, we need to trace through the effects of policy on the burden of domestic labour and on gender relations within the household. If a redistribution policy means an increase in the social wage, then precisely what constitutes the social wage becomes important. For example, a national health service with an emphasis on preventative medicine would directly reduce women’s domestic responsibilities in the area of childcare and care of the aged. Similarly, the provision of reticulated water and electricity has considerable potential for reducing women’s domestic burden, particularly in rural areas and informal settlements. Decisions about prioritizing services should occur at two levels. At one level for example, we need to work out which services have the most impact on reducing domestic labour. At another level (and more importantly) it is crucial to secure women’s participation in deciding what services are important to them. This has implications for

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organization and for the way in which decisions are made and implemented, as we tried to underscore in the second section of our paper. It also has implications for processes and structures of decisionmaking in any future society. The Mozambican and Nicaraguan experiences suggest, for example, that women are more likely to be represented at highly localized levels of decision-making; particularly working-class women who are more constrained by demands on their time and mobility and by their more limited skills in relation to those demanded by public political life. We have discussed similar constraints on women in South Africa above. A further issue is the impact of policy on gender relations within the household. In order to transform women’s position within society, it is important to increase women’s bargaining power within the household. This appears to hinge on the visibility and recognition of women’s labour, the control over the products of their labour and over household resources (it is here that legal reform becomes critical) and on their access to income relative to other members of the household (husbands and children). These complexities have been simplified in the emphasis on women’s entrance into production and public life. In societies undergoing socialist transition, this is often seen to be overcome by women’s participation in the collectivization process. This does not, however, directly confront the problem of domestic labour and reproduction. In effect, it increases women’s load by adding to their domestic burden by the imperative to participate in co-operative production. While the increased burden on women due to entry into production is recognized, the potential this has for also empowering women in gender struggles is avoided. The paradoxical effect of this is that it empowers men in their struggle to maintain unequal relations within the household and, concomitantly, within society. This is most clearly illustrated in the following example from Mozambique, where the OMM urges women to: ‘speak with kind words’ to their husbands so as not to raise the ire of men who already find OMM threatening. Rather, they are encouraged to demonstrate their ability to do what men can do, in addition to their household work, by getting up earlier and going to bed later (Urdang, 1985:367). Shirley Conran of Superwoman fame would have no problem with this!

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This is a particular problem for women in rural areas where the emphasis on integrating women into production ignores the fact that they are already producers, even if their labour is invisible. In a number of socialist countries rural production takes the form of family farms or communal farms where the unit of production is still the household, for example China. Here, women’s labour remains invisible despite their integration into production. Moreover, since remuneration is still based on the labour of household units rather than that of individual producers within the household, women’s bargaining power within the household is not improved (Croll, 1983). For example, more investment will continue to be made in male children than female because of their greater earning capacity. One example of how gender relations within the household have been tackled within the context of collectivization is that of the green-zone co-operatives around Maputo in Mozambique. Here women work in collective production, take part in the decision-making process and control the products of their labour. While participation in production does increase their workload, this burden is partially offset by their greater economic independence. Because they also control the products of their labour, women are empowered. This enables them to confront gender relations within the household from a more confident and economically independent base. This does not occur without struggle, as Arnfred points out: talks with the cooperative…confirm that this rarely happens without fights and conflicts with the husband…. Gender relations have changed, but the battle has not yet been entirely won. In many cases, according to the women, the husbands only have accepted the cooperative membership of the wives as they have seen material gains from it…and even then peace at home is only upheld by the women accepting a double workload (1986:21). It is at this point that legal reforms become important in providing the support for women in their struggles. On its own, however, it cannot change relations either in the household or in society generally, The irony is that legal reform on its own mainly benefits women who are already advantaged either economically or through education and political power. In South Africa the fact that urbanization and industrialization are more advanced than elsewhere requires a careful consideration of these issues in an urban context. This is a particular challenge for people

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advocating policy favouring redistribution in the process of transition. Some pointers for future research and policy can be drawn from our study. As in the rural areas, the effect of policy has to be seen through the prism of household relations. With reference to wage labour for example, the Congress of South African Trade Union’s (COSATU) call for a living wage is more appropriate than calls that have been made at other times and in other places for a family wage since it entails a recognition that women are also breadwinners. Furthermore, current struggles against the state’s policies of privatization are certainly progressive for women. While the individual wage confers on the household the responsibility to provide their own social services, it not only burdens women in terms of extending household labour, but it also weakens women’s position in the household since their income-earning capacity is often lower than male members given the sexual division of labour. In female-headed households as well, whilst women might not have to battle over the distribution of income and resources within the household, they are still in the worst-paid jobs and are the first to be retrenched as a result of their subordinate position in the labour force. Attempts to alter the sexual division of labour in the South African context, therefore, are critical policy imperatives. Another area in which current state policy may be retrogressive for women is in its emphasis on small business and the informal sector as sources of employment. The informal sector in South Africa is dominated by women and therefore policies to promote it would appear to benefit women. However, often these activities take place within the household and as is the case with the family farm, women may suffer: their labour increases yet remains invisible and therefore unrecognized, and whilst their income-earning capacity is enhanced, they do not necessarily control this income. We are not suggesting that the informal sector should be abolished, as it does provide a source of employment for women and may provide them with a measure of independence and a means of survival. However, development policy that is founded on burgeoning ‘small family businesses’ tends to lock women into surbordinate positions within the household and within the economy at large. We are suggesting, then, that policy should move away from viewing the household as the unit of production and reproduction, rather, individuals should be seen as producers and society should take responsibility for reproduction. While the latter may not be possible in the short term, a redistributive policy, properly constructed, can go some way to providing the conditions within which it can occur.

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For these issues to be addressed seriously, the validity of gender struggle has to be acknowledged and the development of political will among women has to be allowed to flourish, particularly on their own terrain. This is essential given that decisions will have to be made concerning the extent to which resources can be allocated away from production and towards a social wage. This struggle is ongoing. Here we can learn from the experiences of working-class struggles in Britain where women benefited from the material gains afforded by the welfare state. The resources and services upon which women have come to depend have been systematically eroded by the onslaught of Thatcherism. Equally in the transition to socialism, women can never become complacent, particularly in times of economic crisis or stringency or when choices have to be made over the allocation of resources. It is important to reiterate that gender struggle does not only involve women fighting to change their conditions and the conditions of their class, but also men’s struggle to retain their power. The myth of gender-neutral policy, therefore, has to be challenged. This can only be done if women develop an awareness of both their powerlessness and their political power. Socialist feminism, as a political discourse and practice, provides the surest guarantee that this can be achieved. Notes Jo Beall is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She was teaching in the Department of African Studies, University of Natal. Shireen Hassim lectures in the Department of Economic History, University of Natal. Alison Todes lectures in the Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Natal. She has done work with the Built Environment Support Group. This article was first published in Transformation, No. 5, 1987, Natal, South Africa. 1 In contrast to other conferences on the question of a post-apartheid future, Amsterdam noted that ‘gender issues should be seen as an integral part of the process of transformation’ (SAERT, 1986). 2 We are indebted to Michelle Friedman for the development of these ideas. 3 The A-Team is the vigilante group operating in Chesterville.

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References ARNFRED, S. (1986) ‘On Politics and Gender Struggle in Mozambique’. Paper presented to the Conference of the Review of African Political Economy Liverpool. BEALL, J., FRIEDMAN, M., HASSIM, S., POSEL, R., STIEBEL, L. and TODES, A. (1987) ‘African Women in the Durban Struggle, 1985–86: Towards a Transformation of Roles’ South African Review, No. 4. BENERIA, L. (1981) ‘Conceptualizing the Labour Force: The Underestimation of Women’s Economic Activities’ Journal of Development Studies No. 17, p. 3. BHAVNANI, K. and COULSON, M. (1986) ‘Transforming SocialistFeminism: The Challenge of Racism’ Feminist Review, No. 23, pp. 81– 108. BLACK, A. and STANWIX, J. (1986) ‘Manufacturing Development and the Economic Crisis: Restructuring in the Eighties’ Social Dynamics, No. 13. BOURNE, J. (1983) ‘Towards an Anti-Racist Feminism’ Race and Class, No. XXV. CAINE, C. and JAFFEE, G. (1986) ‘The Incorporation of African Women into the Industrial Workforce: Its Implications for the Women’s Question in South Africa’. Paper presented to the Conference on the Southern African Economy after Apartheid, Centre for African Studies, University of York. CARBY, H.V. (1982) ‘White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’ in CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982). CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982) editor The Empire Strikes Back London: Hutchinson. CROLL, E.J. (1983) Chinese Women Since Mao London: Zed Press. DEPARTMENT OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING (1985) Proposed National Family Programme, Pretoria. DUBEL, I. (1987) ‘South African Women’s Studies. An Overview of Future Research Priorities’. Paper presented to the Workshop on Development Alternatives in Southern Africa. Uppsala. EL SA’ADAWI, N. (1986) Promised the Earth. Video of the UN Decade of Women, London: Diverse Productions. ENGELS, F. (1972) The Origins of the Family. Private Property and the State London: Lawrence & Wishart. FAIRWEATHER, E., McDONOUGH, R. and McFAYDEAN, M. (1984) Northern Ireland: The Women’s War London: Pluto Press. FREUND, B. (1986) ‘South African Business Ideology: The Crisis and Problems of Redistribution’. Paper presented to the Conference on the Southern African Economy after Apartheid, Centre for African Studies, University of York.

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GAITSKELL, D., KIMBLE, J., MACONACHIE, M. and UNTERHALTER, E. (1983) ‘Class, Race and Gender: Domestic Workers in Southern Africa’, Review of African Political Economy Nos 27– 28, pp. 86–108. GINWALA, F. (1986) ‘ANC Women: Their Strength in the Struggle’, Work in Progress No. 45, pp. 10–11. HOOKS, B. (1986) ‘Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women’, Feminist Review No. 23, pp. 125–38. JAGGER, A.M. (1983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature Sussex: Harvester JAYAWARDENA, K. (1986) Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries London: Zed Press. KIMBLE, J. and UNTERHALTER, E. (1982) ‘“We Opened the Road for You, You Must Now Go Forward”, ANC Women’s Struggles, 1912– 1982’, Feminist Review No. l2, pp. 11–35. MACHEL, S. (1973) ‘The Liberation of Women is a Fundamental Necessity of the Revolution’, Opening Speech at the First Conference of Mozambican Women, 4th March 1973. MEER, F. (1983) ‘Black Women in Employment in the Greater Durban Metropolitan Area. A Preliminary Descriptive Study’, unpublished draft. MIES, M. (1982) editor Fighting on Two Fronts: Women’s Struggles and Research Institute of Social Studies: The Hague. MUNSLOW, B. (1986) editor Africa: Problems in the Transition to Socialism London: Zed Press. NALA, J. (1986) ‘Active, Loyal—But Banned from Leadership’, Third World Women’s News 1 (1), pp. 10–11. NAZZARI, M. (1983) ‘The “Woman Question” in Cuba: An Analysis of Material Constraints on its Solution’ Signs 9(2) pp. 246–63. ONG, B.N. (1986) ‘Women and the Transition to Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa’ in MUNSLOW (1986). ORGANIZATION OF ANGOLAN WOMEN (1984) Angolan Women Building the Future: From National Liberation to Women’s Emancipation London: Zed RESOLUTIONS OF THE THIRD CONFERENCE OF THE INKATHA WOMEN’S BRIGADE 15–17 December 1979. SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMIC RESEARCH AND TRAINING PROJECT (SAERT), (1986) A Report of the Workshop on Research Priorities for Socio-Economic Planning in Post-Apartheid South Africa Amsterdam 10–13 December 1986. SAUL, J. (1985) editor A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique New York: Monthly Review Press. SAUL, J. (1986) ‘Class, Race and the Future of Socialism in South Africa’. Paper presented to the Conference on the Southern African Economy after Apartheid, Centre for Southern African Studies, University of York.

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SUTCLIFFE, M. (1986) ‘The Crisis in South Africa. Material Conditions and Reformist Response.’ Paper presented to the Workshop on Macroeconomic Policy and Poverty in South Africa, University of Cape Town 29–30 August. THORNTON DILL, B. (1983) ‘Race, Class and Gender: Prospects for an AllInclusive Sisterhood’ Feminist Studies 9 (1), pp. 131–50. TUCKER, R. (1975) editor The Lenin Anthology New York: W.W.Norton & Co. URDANG, S. (1985) ‘The Last Transition? Women and Development’ in SAUL VAN DER VLEIT, V. (1984) ‘Staying Single: A Strategy for Survival’ Carnegie Conference paper 116, UCT, 13–19 April 1984. VOGEL, L. (1983) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory London: Pluto Press. WALKER, C. (1982) Women and Resistance in South Africa London: Onyx. WIERINGA, S. (1985) ‘The Perfumed Nightmare: Some Notes on the Indonesian Women’s Movement’, Institute of Social Studies Sub-Series on Women’s History and Development, Working Paper 4 The Hague.

‘YOUNG BESS’: Historical Novels and Growing Up Alison Light

The Place of Reading ‘What will you do when England is invaded?’ he asked her. ‘Will you raise a regiment and ride at the head of it? Will you be Colonel Eliza or Captain Bess?’ All her egoism was agog. What would she be? At twelve years old anything was possible. And so he seemed to think as he scanned her, and the wind flicked the wisp of hair into her eyes and made her blink. ‘How can I tell what you’ll be? You may become anything. Elizabeth the Enigma….’ (Irwin, 1944:20) What visions of grandeur did these words conjur up for me, an eager grammar-school swot, in the early 1960s? I was introduced to Margaret Irwin’s trilogy about Queen Elizabeth I by my mother on one of our many trips to the Carnegie Public Library in Fratton Road, Portsmouth: Young Bess (1944), Elizabeth Captive Princess (1948) and Elizabeth and The Prince of Spain (1953), all chart the fortunes of the Tudor monarch from girlhood to her coronation as England’s Virgin Queen. These opening lines can still thrill me, though I’m less excited by the prospect of leading a regiment. No one in my family was a royalist—my mother and grandmother were outspoken antimonarchists—‘about time they pensioned off Mr and Mrs Windsor’ was their usual attitude. Yet perhaps the fact that my middle name is Elizabeth, my birthday shared with the Queen Mother, and I too was about twelve years old when I first encountered Young Bess, made me more susceptible. This imaginary exchange between the princess and Admiral Thomas Seymour on the flagship of her father’s navy, as they watch the French

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fleet approaching in the Solent, was itself not a million miles from home: my uncles had been sailors, my father worked in the dockyard, and Portsmouth, as anyone who has ever walked along the seafront at Southsea knows, is a bulwark of a city. From the ramparts of the Round Tower in Portsea to the line of hill-top forts which look down over it (‘Palmerston’s Follies’ erected during anti-French hysteria in the 1850s), it is a place which testifies to the aggressive insularity of the English. In 1944 ‘Young Bess’s’ ardent determination to protect wartime England and ‘the long line of emerald downs’ no doubt had its own peculiar resonances; but it had reverberations too for a child who had grown up in a blitzed town, playing on bombsites, and listening time and again to tales from relatives of the Second World War, of entire families wiped out in a single raid, of miraculous and courageous escapes. Perhaps we were no more steeped in history than anybody else, but in Portsmouth the idea of a national past was peculiarly linked to the local and to the communal. Meeting my first boyfriend in the Duke of Buckingham opposite the place where Charles Villiers had been murdered, and just down the road from where the gloomy bust of his friend, Charles I, was set into the wall at Sallyport, I felt drawn to the side of the cavaliers. They had early on provided me with the best clothes for dressing-up games and with my first unforgettable historical novel, also a local one: Captain Marryat’s The Children of The New Forest.1 There was, it seemed by definition, no romance in Puritanism. Yet how do I reconcile the idea that historical novels fed a conservative vision with the knowledge that I was writing in those same years school projects on revolutions (American, French and Russian)? And how did such desires flourish in a neighbourhood where everyone like my own family was Labour? Returning as a postgraduate student to the historical novels of my growing up is to attempt to untie several Gordian knots, all of which cluster round the politics of reading. What could the appeal of reading such novels be? The interweaving of different identifications which stories summon up could certainly be easily cut through with a simple accusation: weren’t they merely reactionary fictions, the light reading of discontented and aspiring poor whites, deferentially accepting a nationalistic history which would buttress up their prejudices and keep them in their place?

Feminist Review No 33, Autumn 1989

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On the face of it, indeed, many of these stories have little to recommend them to latter-day feminists. They are drenched in many of the elements dear to the Tory imagination: high-class intrigues in the courts and the salons, sumptuous and enviable displays of wealth, gorgeously clad females captivating the strongest and proudest of males: an appeal to old-fashioned grandeur, whether of Tudor England, Bath Spa, or the American South, and luxuriating in myths of ancestry and traditions. History as in the novels of a Georgette Heyer or a Daphne du Maurier (neither of whom, from either political instinct or inverted snobbery were on my mother’s library list), is a kind of costume drama or pageant of Merrie England, a vision of a lost past in contrast to a lack-lustre present which in turn can mobilize the most conservative views of social and national decline. That, however, isn’t the whole story. The attention to subjectivity which forms part of an analysis of the political meanings of any novel cannot be so readily contained within ideological boxes. Like many novels of the 1940s Margaret Irwin’s do speak to contemporary invasion fears and unabashedly promote a staunch patriotism. But it matters too that it is a female protagonist, and a minor at that, someone weak and young, who symbolizes England’s fortunes, and that the place of such novels lies well outside of approved reading and the culturally accredited notions of ‘literature’ which I, like everyone else, learnt at school. In a passionate and immediate sense these novels were a popular history. Where did my knowledge of unofficial history come from if not from historical novels, film and TV? Glenda Jackson as ‘Elizabeth R’, The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth, Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, as well as innumerable BBC children’s serials on Sunday teatime, were a staple fare. Put these against the history I was ‘doing’ at school, a history which was remarkably impersonal. Typically our topics —like the American War of Independence—were passionless, about remote causes and dates, legislation and policy. English history in the schoolroom was suitably bloodless, so that my keeping of a copy of Charles I’s execution warrant, after a family visit to Carisbrooke Castle, felt ghoulish and excessive—not something to bring into class. Had I read Northanger Abbey I would, I’m sure, have concurred with Catherine Morland, Jane Austen’s romantic young woman, who in the grips of Gothic fiction (chapter XIV) is left cold by ‘history, real solemn history’:

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I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very tiresome. Like Catherine Morland, I was ‘in training for a heroine’ and historical novels gave me a history I could appreciate.2 The focus within them is ultimately upon individuals, but especially upon femininities, upon women’s lives and loves, their families and their feelings. What the novels manage is to give the concerns of the so-called private sphere the status and interest of history, like one never-ending family saga, which indeed has become a modern view of royalty. For many people then, the historical novel is history, a history which is above all peopled, a history of the everyday, but an everyday, which unlike ‘social’ history, could also include feelings and desires: history, thoughts and all. This history could excite the twelve-year-old as well as the old-age pensioner, nor did it deal in abstract and monolithic determinations—the State, the Church, the bourgeoisie. The people in Irwin’s novels are the subjects, if not always the agents of history. For those who are normally left out of history altogether such an emphasis is very welcome. Novels like Irwin’s were perhaps the ideal diet for the grammarschool appetite. Very closely researched and full of carefully chosen detail, there are careful descriptions of architecture, of fashions, changes in warfare and domestic interiors, as well as quite rigorous accounts of foreign policy, State squabbles and so on: they are usually lengthy novels and by no means always ‘easy reading’. Part of their appeal was perhaps autodidactic and educative. They concern themselves with varying degrees of explicitness with the actual question of historiography, and many display some of the seriousness of the historian: Jean Plaidy’s novels are typical in being all prefaced by a decent list of sources, and Irwin’s Young Bess thanks ‘Lady Helen Seymour’ on the frontispiece for helping her with family papers and documents. Some, like Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard become historical works in their own right. Historical novels bring with them an air of learning which has more weight and cachet than mere romances: they are genuinely informative. Reading historical novels made a bond with my mother and aunts precisely at a time when I was leaving them behind. Grammar-school homework set me apart from both my parents; it led me to ‘think too much’; historical novels on the other hand were domestically unproblematic and scholastically ambivalent. As a schoolgirl answering

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questions on the moral character of Macbeth, I had long known how to categorize literature, and must have sensed that historical novels fell into the good bad group. In the eyes of my teachers, snobs to a woman, any library book was better than watching ‘tele’ and these stories provided a much needed halfway house. My own reading up until the age of eighteen continued to include both classics and comics: to dismiss popular fiction, now as then, would have been in some intimate and intolerable way to dismiss my own home, especially since in our family, reading was my mother’s province. I still have some of her copies and writing about them as an academic is both a measure of our closeness, and of the distance between us. My choice of reading in the late 1960s, though I didn’t know it, made me part of a distinctively feminine world; historical fiction has been one of the major forms of women’s reading and writing in the second half of the twentieth century.3 Many of these writers, like Irwin, seem to have begun writing during the twenties and thirties. Where they appear to differ from some of the most popular Victorian or Edwardian historical romancers (Baroness D’Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) leaps to mind) is in giving femininity, which usually has a walk-on part in the official history of our times, the lead role in the national drama. Taken together with the historical films of the period—Katherine Hepburn as Mary Queen of Scots, for example—as well as the less historical and more fanciful Gainsborough melodramas, the romance of history seems to have had a special significance for women readers during and immediately after the war.4 Nevertheless, many of these authors have remained bestsellers and library favourites: fifty years after a list of ‘what England is reading now’ placed Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind and Margaret Irwin’s The Stranger Prince at the top (Caffrey, 1978:113), both novels are still on W.H.Smith’s most prominent shelves. In this piece I want to look more closely at some of the contradictory components of the ‘English femininity’ I was offered in the fiction which I read, and at the interplay of different kinds of identification which the novels encourage: appeals made to social status, national pride and sexual longing which interlock and even dissolve into each other in an uneasy and sometimes volatile mixture. I want to do so, not in order finally to relegate them as morally or politically reprehensible, but to suggest that it is inside these often ill-matched and uncomfortable identities that we all live and read books. And that it is from the lack of their neat fit that we can find the spaces in which to make our politics,

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by understanding rather than by rejecting the places from which they so awkwardly grow. In training for a heroine If, on the most obvious level, my adolescent imaginings about ‘Young Bess’ were fantasies of power, my choice was certainly not a modest one. Most of my heroines, if they were not simply fictional (like Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennett) were famous women, from Joan of Arc to Marie Curie, who had all, in some senses, been top of the class. These figures haunted my imagination and it was frequently the mistresses who were my companions in fantasy: Nell Gwynn, the Duchess of Portsmouth, upstarts all, who managed to combine sexual adventures with social climbing. As someone caught between home and school, girlhood and womanhood, working-class traditions and an uncertain future, historical novels tapped in me a pool of longings. Like Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’, the success of the heroines was by no means wholly laudable, and my own identifications far from innocent. I too wanted to be an achiever. Self-determination, autonomy, the will to survive through marriages, pregnancies and hardships, these novels brought together many of the consoling virtues of working-class life and the makings of a Tory feminism in which women always do it alone. It is as a unique individual, apart from the hoi polloi that you become a heroine. Perhaps the attraction of the Tudor period—so often the setting for these novels—is exactly the number of women in it, a veritable plethora of queens, what with Henry’s six, and the presences at one time of Mary Tudor (‘Bloody Mary’), her half sister, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s cousins, Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots. Often in competition with each other, this excess of femininities nevertheless does function as a kind of choice for readers. All these women did actually wield power and the historical importance of their private lives is therefore unquestionable. Advancement, achievement, public power and private satisfaction: these are women who have it all, the prototypes, perhaps, of the 1980s Women of Substance. Their power as literary transformations of feminine possibilities might best emerge when they are set against the prescriptive limitations of the female role taken as a desirable norm by many in the post-war period. The suburban housewife, gazing out across Acacia Drive, the secretary in her dingy digs, the shopkeeper’s wife, the library assistant, might have found historical novels a far less tame and dutiful source for images of

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self when contrasted with the repressive pontifications emanating from official or public discussions of respectable femininity. We need to read a novel like Young Bess alongside and against the moral and moralizing messages of films like Mrs Miniver or Brief Encounter, against the subordinating representations of women offered by esteemed male writers—the lurking misogyny of an Evelyn Waugh or a George Orwell, and against the sad closures of contemporary realist novels written by other female novelists: ‘It is all my world…! To make a really spongy sponge-cake my whole ambition!’ When she reached home, she would despise herself and idly wondered if any others were playing the same game. (Taylor, 1951:50) The knowing but resigned tone of Elizabeth Taylor’s provincial housewives in the 1950s typically expresses a relegation of women to domesticity and inertia which echoes repeatedly down the corridors of the realist novel from the 1920s to the present day. Laura Temple, the restless wife of E.M.Delafield’s ironic The Way Things Are, consigns herself to respectability with these chilling sentiments that must have spoken—and still speak—for many: Only by envisaging and accepting her own limitations, could she endure the limitations of her surroundings. (Delafield, 1988:336) From the hilarious but equally circumscribed celibacy of a Barbara Pym heroine, to the cool and sardonic self-immolation of Anita Brookner’s, or the witty martyrdom of Margaret Drabble’s, the twentieth-century woman’s novelist has frequently viewed the constraints of marriage and motherhood with a self-deprecating and ultimately self-defeating worldly wisdom. After suffocating beneath their antiromantic insistence upon the immovable obstacles of everyday life, the weight of the moral or personal failure of individual women to avoid the prisons of their sex, historical novels come as a breath of fresh air, with their fantasies of emancipation and of a life untethered. Compare the statement of Delafield’s heroine, tied to the life of her caste: The children, her marriage vow, the house, the ordering of the meals, the servants, the making of a laundry list every Monday—

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in a word, the things of respectability—kept one respectable (Delafield, 1988:336); to the declaration of autonomy which Helen Waddell gives to the fourteenth-century Heloise in 1933, a Heloise who feels that she would be lowered by marriage to Peter Abelard. She wants: no bond but your love only. I am not ashamed to be called your harlot. I would be ashamed to be called your wife. (Crosland, 1981:159) It is in this context of cross-reading, that we might begin to talk about the expressive scope of historical novels, their keeping open the potential for wayward subjectivities outside of the norms on offer—or differently shaped within them. At best, they speak to the hope which many readers must have shared, that life might have more to offer the woman of the mid twentieth century than the conventional expectations of marriage and motherhood. The shamelessness of historical novels is surprising; even du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek (1942), which ends with the bleakest advocacy of the heroine’s return to her boring husband after an illicit affair with a foreign pirate, provoked the Sunday Times critic into a halfjoking nervous admonition against her ‘questionable behaviour’. He was surely sensitive to the fact that it is the escape, rather than the return, which these novels warm to. For whilst it is the private sphere of marriage and relationships which dominates, in the context of the fourteenth or the fifteenth century, these take place with a frequency and a carelessness as to make contemporary bourgeois beliefs in loyalty and monogamy ideal only by their absence. Marriage is often depicted as inadequate and oppressive, the realm of violence (including wife-beating and wife-murder), and of bad or nonexistent sex. These novels (like 1980s soap operas) are about broken families, ‘broken homes’, disrupted, unhappy partnerships, and absent, often impotent (as well as boorish and ignorant) men. Margaret Irwin’s description of the young Elizabeth’s upbringing emphasizes this disorder: Family life was a difficult affair with a father who had repudiated two of his six wives, beheaded two others and bastardized both his daughters. (Irwin, 1944:8)

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Hardly the nuclear family. Similarly, motherhood is far from idealized. Childbirth and childdeath happen with almost heartless frequency and arouse very few passages of sentimental reflection. Katherine Swynford is left to give birth in horrifying circumstances, surrounded by disease and rebellion, alone in a deserted house. Her child grows up to hate her, though they are eventually reconciled in the closing scene of the six hundred pages. Family relations, including ‘the maternal instinct’ are shown to be less than loving and reliable. Equally importantly, these mothers move on to their next lover, or their next adventure: childbirth is not ultimately a confinement. Most of the women have several marriages, several lovers, do not get tied down by motherhood, are socially mobile, make the best of absent men and wartime, and even get the top jobs! In a fourteenth-century context there is no question of their being stigmatized as ‘career women’ either. They can have full public and full private lives. Certainly the past is sexier, however much desire heaves within rather than actually bursts the seams of the heroine’s bodices. Kathleen Windsor’s Forever Amber, whose heroine survives plague and fire and several lovers in the steamy atmosphere of the Restoration, was the first book I read for its erotic content, guiltily sneaking it from my mother’s shelf. Sexual desire, on the part of women, is not taboo, nor does its fulfilment lead automatically to incarceration within the home or the family. Being a queen or a wench means side-stepping the rules of respectable behaviour: She laid a hand, which had begun to tremble, on his shoulder. She moved closer to him. Her body was crying out for him. She wished in that moment that she were not the Queen surrounded by courtiers. She longed to be alone with him, to say: ‘I love you. We will marry one day, but for the moment we may be lovers….’ She turned away, dizzy with desire. (Plaidy, 1967:278) Mary Stuart, in Plaidy’s novel of 1955 does—a few pages later—throw herself into Darnley’s arms and command him to be her lover. As it turns out, Darnley is more than willing but there is no question here of self-denial for the sake of being a good woman. Whilst it is almost entirely heterosexual—with the key exception of Mary Renault’s sequence of novels about Ancient Greece—it is still a far more plural and perverse model of desire than one would associate with the years of Dr Spock and Readers Digest. Irwin’s trilogy begins

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with Elizabeth I’s alleged love affair with her uncle: she is twelve years old. Catherine Howard in Plaidy’s The Sixth Wife (1953) is twelve when she has her first lover, whilst Anya Seton’s Katherine (1954) is fifteen when she is forced into sexual experience. Indeed most of the queens and princesses have lovers, are married and divorced often before the age of twenty-five. This is certainly not the ideal bourgeois pattern. When the absence in the 1940s of magazines for young women is taken into account, the appeal of these novels is even more understandable. And it is striking that the notion of adolescent sexuality is rarely seen as the object of outrage and disgust as it is elsewhere in post-war discussions which take ‘youth’ as one of its central anxieties. Instead it is as the place of ‘about to be’—inchoate with sexual as well as social promise—that Irwin, like many authors, takes girlhood as her starting point. When Tom Seymour in that opening scene is inspecting the scrawny, undeveloped Elizabeth, it is for signs of sexual as well as intellectual maturity. He asks, ‘Will you be beautiful? Will you be plain?’. To which Bess (whom the reader knows to turn out a white-faced, carrot-haired queen) replies adamantly, ‘I will be beautiful, I will!’ At twelve, the state of your face is as important as the state of the nation and becoming accustomed to male scrutiny can be deeply traumatizing. Here it is legitimized by Elizabeth’s royality, but more satisfying in Irwin’s account, erotic interest is both excited and fulfilled with impunity. Seymour all but becomes her lover, and Elizabeth gets only pleasure from it. What would be fraught with fear and guilt in actuality, is made painless in fiction. The reversal of roles which these powerful women embody—their ‘masculine’ licence and independence—calls into question many of the values usually attached to the sexual division both of labour and of love. The dilemma, for example, between selfless public duty and hampering private pleasure which we are used to as an heroic choice in which the male decides to love ’em and leave ’em, is thrown out of kilter. The usual dismissal of love and sexuality as lesser, more trivial pursuits is problematic given that these novels uphold a view of femininity as being naturally more caring and emotionally more alert. What frequently happens instead is a momentary tremor when the inadequacy of cultural assumptions about gender is revealed. Such troublings may be brief but they are often explicit. Consider the force of a passage like this where Philip of Spain is trying to persuade the young Elizabeth to a night of passion with marriage looming on the horizon:

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‘Can you never leave politics and become human?… I must have you in the end, ——but why not now, this night? We shall never be younger. What are you? Not woman only. Not man —’ ‘God forbid! Do you make me out an hermaphrodite?’ ‘God forbid again. Yet there is something in you that is of either sex, and of something beyond sex, ——a goddess maybe—but not holy.’ ‘No. I am that Other Woman that husbands love to worship in secret. A wedding ring is a yoke ring.’ ‘Not if it were with you.’ ‘But I might find it so.’ (Irwin, 1953:198) Fighting talk in 1953. Elizabeth is able to reject the wedding ring without incurring the usual loss of status that contemporary bourgeois heroines in realist novels might undergo. She refuses also simply to become a mistress in the acceptable competitive alternative to being a wife. If she is the Other Woman, then her sexual charms are not at the beck and call of her powerful lover. It is she, in this scene, who calls the tune. Irwin leaves the tension between public power and private desire inevitably unresolved: impossibly, Elizabeth is neither unfeminine nor destined for motherhood and wifedom. She is a masterless woman whom we are asked to respect and admire. The historical representation of Elizabeth which Irwin offers does circle around mid-twentieth-century, rather than sixteenth-century feminine dilemmas, even though she is drawing upon the anxieties within Renaissance treatment of the Virgin Queen and the rhetorical play Elizabeth herself made with her anomalous position.5 What is unexpected, however, is the vehemence and self-consciousness with which many fictions discuss the limitations of normative views of women. Admittedly Elizabeth, in Irwin’s account, doesn’t transcend the options (she goes without sex in order to avoid pregnancy) but she does suggest that they are pretty paltry. Her regal autonomy is seen as powerfully celebratory in the final volume in 1953. Her choice of spinsterdom (not usually a radical choice) appears to leave her with the best of all possible worlds. Irwin must, of course, end with the coronation, thus avoiding the potential problems of actually being a virgin queen. The transposition into a historical past is necessarily double-edged. On the one hand, contemporary mores can be differently placed and explored: these heroines are able to take up what would usually be seen as the masculine reins of public power and sexual autonomy; on the

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other hand, precisely because they are not ‘ordinary’ women, and this is not realism, such figures are self-proclaimed as ‘escapist’: as romantic fantasies, they are compensating registers of profound discontent, whilst remaining mediated and distorted expressions of it. They are not feminist novels, though there is a proto-feminist feel to some of the passages. It is typical, however, that the historical transformation of the contemporary feminine choices is imagined upwards (as it were) into the aristocratic or royal setting—these are rags-to-riches novels in many cases. The expansive and dynamic existences of a Young Bess or a Mary Stuart are a magical compromise with the anguish of a feminine subjectivity; they cannot literally be contemporary models, which is at once their attraction and their fault. National fictions The class politics of many of these novels are often difficult to tease out. Even if we wanted to, they cannot merely be read off from content, not least because many of the settings deliberately pre-date modern class references or terminology and are thereby mystified. Katherine Swynford, in Seton’s novel, for example, is the daughter of a herald—— calling her ‘petit-bourgeois’ seems limp, to say the least. More importantly, however, what it means to be working or middle class are not themselves historical constants, any more than are political ideologies or expressions of nationalistic sentiment: the conservatism of the 1930s is as different from the 1950s as from our own. It is clear, though, that the royal and aristocratic milieux can serve the most depressing and deferential kinds of Tory atavism. What is more disturbing is that this can be evoked in the same novels whose depiction of feminine struggle is in many ways progressive. Daphne du Maurier’s saga, The King’s General (1946), for example, is a bitter but moving account of one woman’s experience of the English civil war. Her heroine, Honor Harris, is a royalist who is violently crippled in the first chapter, but whose disability does not prevent her from being a resourceful and desirable heroine. It is possible to read in her image an intensified and displaced version of the experience of being a helpless civilian, of being a woman on the Home Front, which must have struck many chords. Suffering appalling losses and physical deprivations, the break-up of her home and her family, and the continuous absence of the man she loves, Honor Harris manages, despite her sense of uselessness and her growing depression, to cope and to survive. Even so, her retrospective account bears a distinctly

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political message, since she blames the dashing of all her dreams and hopes on the philistine and plebian New Model Army who have destroyed the old order and set up a brutal, totalitarian state. Du Maurier’s account has actually much in common with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, also published just after the war, apparently sharing his fears that Britain might come under ‘enemy occupation’, not from foreign tyranny, but from the working class as the levelling effects of increased social democracy made the post-war world their oyster. Du Maurier’s description of the ‘grey world’ of the Puritans is fuelled by a Tory revulsion at egalitarianism: And what a world! Long faces and worsted garments, bad harvests and sinking trade, everywhere men poorer than they were before, and the people miserable. The happy aftermath of war…. Manners are rough, courtesy a forgotten quality. We are each of us suspicious of our neighbour. Oh, brave new world! (Du Maurier, 1974:12) Not surprisingly, when the roundheads arrive, they all look the same (and remarkably like Nazis with their cropped hair and brownshirts), and speak like Cockney barrow-boys. By the same token we might find a different kind of modern conservatism in the 1987 winner of the Georgette Heyer Award, I Am England by Patricia Wright. It is subtitled an epic ‘of the life, the drama, the passions of a great nation’ but its biography of the State is a long way from du Maurier’s high Toryism. Centring around the Weald of Kent, and stretching back into its primeval mists, it relies upon the power of notions of the land, an almost mystical vision of Englishness residing in the folk and the soil, which is closer to more fascistic strains but also, ironically, likely to appeal to an ecologically aware 1980s readership. Above all, its Elizabethan woodsmen are given us as our true fathers, forging the national destiny in their smithies, setting up local industries as forerunners of an enterprise culture with the Home Counties coming close to resembling a well-run Youth Training Programme. In spite of her royalism, Irwin’s fiction, on the other hand, may have been compatible with, and even shaped by, a Labour imagination, one which believed in social mobility and which could indeed find expression in the ethos of the grammar school, and a belief in giving people their ‘chance’. Irwin’s is an open society, an equal opportunity State whose confident and optimistic tone captures something of the

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buoyant mood in which Labour won the 1945 election. Elizabeth’s rise to fame is seen as somehow outside of and able to ignore class limitations. She is ‘some say, not a Lady at all’—a: young woman, begotten of God knows whom, of the son of a Welsh adventurer who made himself king, some say, of a strolling base-born musician, say others,…posing as,—a Virgin queen. (Irwin, 1953:240) Such an image needs to be set against those in common circulation in the 1950s which celebrated the young Elizabeth II and her coronation, the coming of a new Elizabethan age. As the archetypal young mother, her sexuality was all but nonexistent and her gentility strictly consonant with conventional norms. The elevation to royalty, for all its Tory potential, can also be read as a means by which the assumption that all women might be longing for middle-class status can be set aside and the logic of embourgeoisement marvellously forgotten. The desire for the adventurous expansion of ambitions in these fictions does not always lead to the baby clinic or the New World cooker. And it is certainly far more exciting than passing the eleven plus. For those women whose lives had been disrupted and upset (as well as broadened) by wartime work, historical novels might have seemed more sustaining than many of the more ‘serious’ kind: in seeing women’s upward mobility as an answer to the nation’s problems, such fictions weren’t to be scoffed at, especially when the path upwards was through action and autonomy, rather than increased consumerism and home-ownership. wner ship. Being England’s queen does have other, less equivocal, meanings. However much it wrestles with contemporary class and gender limitations, Irwin’s account of Elizabeth’s growing up gives us a careful and thoroughly ideological pre-history of the English state. England also begins the trilogy as an unruly, restless being full of waging elements and desires which must learn to be controlled. Young Bess’s adolescence is especially suspenseful since upon her teenage years rests the security of England, and its futurity is bound up with hers. In Irwin’s novels the emotional crises of Elizabeth’s sexual development are also national crises; the last volume charts the exigencies of her sexual interest in the Catholic Philip of Spain, precisely because it conflicts with her need to ‘unite’ the English people under Protestantism. The secure and unquestioned position offered to readers in these novels—the safe narrative haven which can resolve all the readers’

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worries and the heroine’s fraught choices—lies in the appeal to an unexamined notion of the supremacy of the English. The making of a national identity is implicit in the strengthening of Elizabeth’s ego: her maturity is equivalent to that of the body politic as a whole. Thus in the coronation scene which closes the work, the sneers at Elizabeth’s bastardy and impudence come directly from the devious Spanish ambassador, peevishly watching from the sidelines as the new queen is cheered and balladed by ‘true hearts’ and ‘lusty throats’. Protecting the realm against heathens and Catholics, religious and political fanatics, Elizabeth’s reign is taken as the beginning of the establishment of law and order: the point at which the real England begins. Irwin relies upon a sense of Englishness which sees England as always about to be internally riven, religiously divided and threatened by foreigners from outside, and in need, therefore, of a strong leadership. It is a deferential, even fearful mentality, which had its particular forms in the late 1940s, but which has continued to find its exponents. It is one which assumes the superiority of the English as well as enumerating a catalogue of outsiders, excluded from both Englishness and democracy. Elizabeth, in this account, is the great unifier of her people and the forerunner of that toleration which comes to be seen as one of their most sterling qualities. Irwin successfully mythologizes a queen, and her government, whose brutalities included the burning of Catholics and the execution of gypsies, and whose colonial expansion contributed to the enslavement of millions. And it suggests that England is and has been one people and one history, where it has been many, different and conflicting peoples and pasts. There is little here to disturb the most conservative of historians, and much to seduce the reader, flatter her into Englishness. Reading again that ending makes me wince, but Young Bess’s story makes no sense without it. As an outsider in my family, and at school, perhaps I too was grateful to transcend growing feelings of exile and find comfort in a make-believe sense of national unity. As a child waiting for Listen With Mother on the afternoon wireless, I knew by heart that magical incantation of the shipping forecast which mapped a whole country in coastline words, like the edges of a puzzle, and I also knew that when the announcer finally got to ‘Wight’, somehow he meant me, my family and all our friends; the sea-shanties that we sang from infants’ school onwards (‘Farewell and adieu to you Spanish ladies… From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues’), and the local pubs with their sea-faring memorabilia and namesakes: the Still and West, the Lord Nelson, the Captain’s Table—it would take another essay to prise loose the powerful

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threads of a nationalism which tied my sense of self umbilically to Englishness. If historical novels excited me into adolescent sexuality, and stirred a social discontent which only leaving home would answer, then they washed over me too with a groundswell of patriotic feeling, murky waters, whose currents I have only just begun to chart. The study of popular fictions will always founder on the rock of ideological purity, clung to in political desperation. Not least because the identifications which all literary texts offer are multiple and conflictual, even irreconciliable. The problem with all novels is always the one thing which is pleasurable about them: their fictitiousness. Though they give us a semblance of reality, they draw too upon feelings, upon unspoken assumptions and unknown desires. Ultimately no one can legislate for when we wander the twilight world of reading, laying down in advance what we might wish to encounter, and which bits well simply ignore. What’s clear is that the capacity to fantasize which novels encourage, is notoriously unbiddable, and that for those of us who judge novels by their messages, moral, social or political this has always been a mixed blessing. At best popular historical novels may have helped open up a space within which different groups of women have started to perceive how marginal their needs and concerns have usually been taken to be. They offer a number of new perspectives on the past, which sit less easily alongside text-book history; the working-class sagas of a Catherine Cookson, the Jewish family sagas of a Maisie Mosco or a Clare Rayner, have enabled other voices to speak out from history, other readers to claim a past. But any attention to subjectivity in historical novels needs itself to be historical: such a reading should remind us of the different positions which can be simultaneously felt and experienced in reading, and that how we learn our sense of our selves is a differential and a differentiating process. To see yourself as Young Bess may be a radical act for the working-class refugee; it may also, and at the same time, be a reactionary one. The grammar-school girl is always top of her class at somebody else’s expense. Notes Alison Light is a member of the Feminist Review collective and teaches in the Humanities department at Brighton Polytechnic. Her study of British women’s writing and the conservative imagination, The Feminine Nation, will be published by Routledge in 1990.

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I would like to thank the staff and students on the Cultural Studies MA programme at Middlesex Polytechnic for violently arguing me into rewriting and rethinking much of this paper—I hope they will improve upon it further; Jean Radford, for refusing to be seduced by the romance of history, and Raphael Samuel for having faith in the first draft. 1 Anna Davin’s interesting account of historical fiction for children (Davin, 1976) is a rare and early attempt on the left to take such literature seriously, and one which makes a good antidote to my own piece: most of the novels I refer to would definitely fall into her category of bad history—‘a poor unbalanced diet’ which offers ‘illusions, not reality’. Carolyn Steedman, on the other hand, is drawn to reflect on why it might be precisely the most conservative of illusions which appeal to young children in school. (Steedman, 1989). 2 For another discussion of historical romance, which refers especially to Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, and to the gendering of literary and historical categories, see Robinson (1978). 3 Anyone with any doubts about this should consult Mussell (1982). 4 Sue Harper’s accounts (1983 and 1987) of Gainsborough films and their exotic and erotic pleasures are helpful. She also provides a brief sortie into a Mass Observation directive of 1943 which goes some way towards a sociology of readership. Whilst she makes the point that it was mostly ‘middle-class women in jobs’ who read ‘costume fiction’, it is beyond her brief to distinguish the different forms of such fiction (Georgette Heyer and Margaret Irwin are poles apart), and we cannot assume that a ‘middle-class’ readership in the 1940s or 1950s (and one which includes library assistants, secretaries and teachers is already a very broad class definition) does not rule out workingclass readers in later years, nor even the possibility of black readers. Public (as opposed to circulating) library borrowing and cheap paperbacks have greatly widened the market for such fiction. In any case, sociological information about readership, however illuminating, does not fully answer the question of how people read, and the place of reading in their lives. For a unique attempt to understand the different readerships and the historical meanings of one historical romance in depth, see Helen Taylor’s work on Gone With The Wind (Taylor, 1989). 5 Queen Elizabeth I’s sixteenth-century dilemmas as token woman and honorary male are discussed in Heisch (1980).

References CAFFREY, Kate (1978) 1937–1939: A Last Look Round London: Gordon & Cremonesi.

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CROSLAND, Margaret (1981) Beyond the Lighthouse: English Women Novelists in the Twentieth Century London: Constable. DAVIN, Anna (1976) ‘Historical Novels for Children’ History Workshop Journal No. 1, pp. 154–65. DELAFIELD, E.M. (1988) The Way Things Are London: Virago; first published 1927, London: Hutchinson. DU MAURIER, Daphne (1974) The King’s General London: Pan books; first published 1946, London: Gollancz. GLEDHILL, Christine (1987) editor Home Is Where The Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama And The Woman’s Film London: BFI Publications. HARPER, Sue (1983) ‘History With Frills: The “Costume” Novel in World War Two’, Red Letters, No. 14, pp. 14–22. HARPER, Sue ‘Historical Pleasures: Gainsborough Costume Melodrama’, in GLEDHILL (1987). HEISCH, Alison (1980) ‘Queen Elizabeth I and the persistence of Patriarchy’, Feminist Review No. 4, pp. 45–55. IRWIN, Margaret (1944) Young Bess London: Chatto & Windus. IRWlN, Margaret (1948) Elizabeth, Captive Princess London: Chatto & Windus. IRWIN, Margaret (1953) Elizabeth and The Prince of Spain London: Chatto & Windus. MUSSELL, Kate (1982) editor Twentieth Century Romance and Gothic Writers London: Macmillan. PLAIDY, Jean (l967) Royal Road to Fotheringay Pan books; first published 1955, London: Robert Hale. ROBINSON, Lillian S. (1978) Sex, Class and Culture New York: Methuen. SAMUEL, Raphael (1989) editor Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity London: Routledge. STEEDMAN, Carolyn (1989) ‘True Romances’ in SAMUEL (1989). TAYLOR, Elizabeth (1951) A Game of Hide and Seek London: Peter Davies. TAYLOR, Helen (1989) Scarlett’s Women: Gone With The Wind and its Female Fans London: Virago.

MADELEINE PELLETIER (1874– 1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression Claudine Mitchell

In April 1939 a woman physician, aged sixty-four, was arrested in France for practising abortion, and sentenced to prison. A few lines appeared in small print in the socialist press: For the Doctoresse Pelletier The pioneer propagandist of our ideas, a founder member of Social War, is still incarcerated, a victim without a defendant. (File Pelletier) In the oppressive climate of 1939 no one seems to have bothered to take any action, and Pelletier died in prison, eight months later, on 29 December 1939. Thus ended her forty years of militancy in the French feminist and socialist movements. Pelletier was one of the most significant feminist thinkers in France before de Beauvoir. She broke with nineteenth-century feminism to develop a cultural theory of sexual difference. To articulate the case for sexual equality, nineteenth-century feminists had extolled the social value of women’s traditional roles and celebrated feminine virtues against masculine vices. This was the wrong track, Pelletier thought, since it confined women to their traditional roles by rooting femininity in biology. If, on the contrary, it could be proved that femininity and masculinity were the products of culture, then feminism could make advances by attacking cultural phenomena. At the turn of the century Pelletier set out to investigate the social forms which constructed and maintained sexual difference, thus laying the foundations for a wealth of future work in sociology. Pelletier has never been given credit for this work, either by post-war feminists or by the American historians who have recently rediscovered her, only to perceive her as an ‘extraordinary failure’. The purpose of this study is to retrieve the feminist framework Pelletier created.

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It is first necessary to give some account of the historical circumstances in which and in response to which Pelletier’s thinking developed. In order to survive intellectually, she had to move in and out of existing political structures, using them, challenging them, questioning their boundaries. Her feminist theories were closely bound up with her political activism in the socialist movement; her theory of sexual oppression emerged from the criticism she made of the political system and of the ineffectiveness of the feminist movement in influencing political machinery. Her writings of the 1920s and 1930s, for example, focused on the politics of the family—an emphasis which emerged from reflexions on the Russian Revolution. Pelletier wrote extensively. For forty years she contributed articles to the feminist press; between 1908 and 1919 she ran her own paper, La Suffragiste, composed of short articles designed mostly to recruit and encourage feminist militancy. Before 1911, Pelletier wrote continuously for the socialist press, the two major papers being Guerre Sociale and L’Humanité; in the 1920s, she wrote mostly for the anarchist press, less frequently for the feminist papers La Fronde and La Voix des Femmes,

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and occasionally for medical journals. The bulk of her theoretical writings were published as pamphlets. I have traced thirty essays, each dealing with specific issues: religion, morality, war, education, sexuality, the family, women’s rights to employment or women’s political rights. They share one theme in common: oppression, class and sexual oppression. The argument is always concise; rigorous at times, didactic or experimental at others. They are combative works which acquire their full meaning only in the political context which generated them. Until 1919, Pelletier’s pamphlets were published mostly through the feminist organization she directed (La Suffragiste) and, after the war, mostly by anarchist and left-wing organizations. She wanted her articles to be republished in book form; her first series of essays on sexual oppression was reprinted in 1908 as Women in Struggle for their Rights and others in 1911 as The Sexual Emancipation of Women. In the changed political climate of the 1930s, and as a result of her work on abortion, she had difficulty finding a publisher; her later essays on sexuality were not finally published until 1935, under the title Rational Sexuality. Pelletier was also the author of three novels, one autobiographical; another science fiction; and three short plays. She saw all of these as means to propagate her views amongst a wider audience. In the 1970s, with the emergence of a strong abortionist movement in France, her essay The Right to Abortion was reprinted together with three other essays (Maignien, 1978:123–40). There is nothing else of Pelletier’s writings in print today. Pelletier’s theory of sexual oppression The right to abortion

The repression of abortion in France was an interwar phenomenon. Until 1914 abortions were frequent and virtually unpunished, though outlawed by Article 317 of the Penal Code. There was even a campaign in favour of abortion: Pelletier herself contributed evidence to a medical commission set up in 1911 to seek legalized abortion. Movements for free abortion throughout this period had clear political colours; their foremost advocates were left-wing working-class intellectuals. From 1911, for example, the Neo-Malthusian Workers Federation organized co-operatives where their members, mostly trade unionists and anarchists, could learn about contraceptive methods and buy

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contraceptive devices. Pelletier was one of their frequent speakers, and in 1913 they republished, as a pamphlet, her essay The Right to Abortion. A classic statement on the subject, it went through several reprints in the 1920s and again in 1935. The issue at stake in Pelletier’s publication is women’s right not to bear children. Abortion is envisaged as a method of birth control, a last resort for unwanted pregnancy at a time when contraceptive methods were unreliable and insufficiently available amongst the working class. Abortion is presented as a sad experience, but nevertheless as an improvement on the drama of unwanted pregnancies recurrent in the nineteenth century. Here, Pelletier has in mind the tragedies of suicide, infanticides, the fate of maids or daughters who were thrown out in the street, and women who had to turn to prostitution for survival. Pelletier’s work developed socio-economic pro-abortion arguments which were already well known to the intellectual working class. Birth control, she maintained, was part of the requirement of living in a modern capitalist state. If, for the petite bourgeoisie, birth control was a means of acquiring good housing and providing their children with good education, for the working class it was a means of surviving with dignity. The patriotic argument of the Natalists—that France’s vitality depended on a high birthrate—was presented by Pelletier as a class position—one that represented the interests of the wealthy, who used the working class as a pool of labour to bolster the economy. Pelletier also directed attention to the way abortion was already practised within the working class. She spoke from direct observation of northern industrial France, where abortion was carried out by unqualified women who had acquired basic knowledge of the operation, but had no sense of hygiene. Working-class women learned to operate on themselves using domestic utensils, and by douching with soapy water; in some cases, they aborted several times a year. In these conditions, abortion was highly dangerous; women risked permanent injuries and often fatal infections. Pelletier argued that it was repressive law that made abortion dangerous. If practised before the third month of pregnancy under proper medical care, abortion was a simple technical operation. But she also raised another argument, unfamiliar in 1911; the question of women’s rights over their own bodies. She argued that, since the pregnant woman was one person not two, no one had the right to oblige her to continue carrying in her womb a fertilized ovum she did not want. To deny her this right was to deny her the status of a person. To solve the question of the civil status of the foetus, Pelletier reminded her

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readers that the existence of the individual in law was from the moment of natural birth. At the moment of natural birth the child was an individual who had a right to protection, and infanticide was a crime. But the state did not have to legislate on the status of foetus, for it was part of the mother’s body. Pelletier thus posited the right of a woman over her own body to be an absolute right. Against the communists, she maintained that the freedom of the individual was absolute: that the state should serve the individual, not vice versa (Pelletier, 1919). And in The Right to Abortion she tackled the further issue of women’s right to sexual pleasure. Contrary to dominant views, the sexual act, she said, had to be conceptualized as separate from the reproductive function. The aim of the sexual act was not conception but pleasure. Man’s right to sexual pleasure was recognized; there was no just grounds to deny it to women. Indeed, for Pelletier, such denial indicated a general form of oppression of women through sexuality. Women’s sexuality, she suggested was regimented and organized in matrimony and its counterpart, prostitution. It was a question of human right to separate the sexual act from maternity by the proper use of contraceptive methods, including abortion. Even if the salary of a woman allows her to bring up one or two children on her own, maternity, if it is not to be a servitude, must not be imposed on her. It must be left to each woman to decide if and when she wants to be a mother. (Maignien, 1978:127) Members of her audience, particularly in the 1930s, thought she was advocating sexual freedom for its own sake. Pelletier’s perspective was different. She wanted an end to a social order which placed sexuality at the core of women’s subjection. Pelletier on sexual difference

Pelletier’s argument on abortion stood as the symbol of a larger crusade on behalf of women. But her work in other areas is of equal significance to her feminist framework. Crucially, she introduced to feminist thought new ways of thinking about sexual difference. Pelletier argued that sexual difference was the product of culture, and that all forms of social relations were determined by it. The acquisition of gender identity, she argued, was the result of socio-conditioning, a complex experience that could not be reduced to biology:

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It is from their parents and the entire social milieu that children receive their psychological gender. (Pelletier, 1908a: 2) In opposition to the nineteenth-century notion of femininity and masculinity as consisting in a set of fixed attributes inherited at birth and determining the persona, Pelletier proposed the notion of ‘psychological gender’. She saw gender identity as constructed through psychological processes, and set out to demonstrate her case in her essay of 1908 The Sociological Factors of Feminine Psychology (Pelletier, 1908a: ch. 7). Here she drew attention to the unequal treatment which girls and boys received from their parents, to the devaluation of the mother, and to discrepancies between the intellectual and sexual education of young men and women. She also focused attention on language as the transmitter of ideological assumptions about femininity and masculinity and their respective value. The nineteenthcentury feminists had spoken of ‘a hierarchy of the sexes’. Pelletier added the notion of ‘norm’: society made man the norm to which the entire social order was related. If this important work has been overlooked, then this is almost certainly in part because of the style in which it was written. Pelletier’s method consisted of calling attention to the ordinary events of people’s daily life, giving examples common enough for her readers to carry out an analysis of their own experiences. Thus the first section of her essay, examines the psychological processes which make girls internalize a sense of inferiority, passivity and subservience. Rather than theorizing, Pelletier draws attention to the series of prohibitions which punctuate a girl’s existence, and the linguistic formulae in which they are articulated. She points out that a girl’s body is the subject of constant restrictions which sap her energy and paralyse her willpower. She emphasizes that the sole explanation given to girls as to why they should restrict their physical activities is a purely formulaic one: ‘Little girls don’t do that’. Girls who persist in their behaviour, she suggests, are dubbed ‘garçon manqué’ (‘failed boy’—the French idiom is more telling than its English equivalent, ‘tomboy’). Such formulations convey a fixed notion of femininity; and failure to conform to that notion carries moral sanctions. Pelletier’s work on sexual difference also deals with issues of class. She uses the example of working-class girls being made to serve their brothers to demonstrate the inculcation of female subordination in working-class families. Meanwhile, middle-class girls were encouraged to focus on the presentation of self—on dress, cleanliness, demeanour,

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manners. This led to subservience of another kind: the female body was made an object of servitude, the female psyche subjected to men’s evaluation. Sexual difference was internalized, Pelletier thought, through domestic uses of language, in which repeated reference was made to sexual difference and women’s inferiority. She cites the example of parents quarrelling, and children witnessing their mothers being devalued with such phrases as ‘You speak like a woman’, or ‘You don’t earn money’, or ‘You with your small wage’. In such idioms, children could already perceive money as a symbol of masculine power. Pelletier’s essay The Sociological Factors of Feminine Psychology’ also contained a critique of girls’ education (Pelletier, 1908a). Like many nineteenth-century feminists, Pelletier argued that the so-called difference in intelligence between men and women was purely the result of education. Since the beginning of state secondary education for women in the 1880s, feminists had denounced the curriculum discrepancies which existed between boys’ and girls’ schools. What worried Pelletier was not so much content, as teaching methods. For her, the aim of secondary education was to develop intelligence and give respect for learning by stimulating genuine inquiry. She took as a crucial example the way philosophy was taught. Instead of philosophy, girls were taught ‘morality’. Rigid dogmas were inculcated which narrowed their outlook and stultified their intelligence. Part of these moral dogmas led women to seek achievement not in great deeds, but in the small actions of daily life. Pelletier also drew attention to the way everything in women’s secondary education was subordinated to the idea of matrimony as the goal of a woman’s life. In the last section of ‘The Sociological Factors of Feminine Psychology’, she denounced the refusal to give to young women any proper form of sexual education. Instead girls were isolated from experience by prohibitions and surveillance, in a system which produced fear of the unexplained, of men, of their ‘rights’ and of sexuality. In her later work—her essay, The Feminist Education of Women, published in 1914—Pelletier began to propose ways of preventing the female body being constructed as the locus of women’s subjection. Examining childhood games as well as the intellectual and sexual education of the child and teenager, she proposed a method of education that might construct the female psyche positively. ‘Positive education’ meant for Pelletier, the acquisition of what was necessary to take active

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part in the public sphere: assertiveness, intelligence, willpower, stamina, ambition, energy. Sexuality

Alongside her work on the notion of ‘psychological gender’, Pelletier’s other major contribution to feminist thinking was her analysis of the agencies which regimented sexuality and made it the locus of woman’s oppression. She posited the sexual act to be ‘a physiological function’, ‘a natural law’, ‘an instinct’. This enabled her to claim that sexuality was as legitimate an object of scientific study as any other natural law, at a time when the discussion of sexuality was viewed as immoral. It also enabled her to break away from the moral, legal and religious language that had predominated amongst nineteenthcentury feminists. Pelletier considered that all the forms of affectivity or subjectivity that were attached to sexuality were a product of culture; indeed she believed that the very idea of sexuality as the centre of human life was a cultural construct (Pelletier, 1930–3:8; 1926a: 13). Thus, unlike many intellectuals of the period, Pelletier, at least in her published work, was not interested in the subconscious. Her field of investigation was, to use her own words, the interaction between the sociological and the psychological. Her argument began instead with a reflection on moral language. In her 1911 essay, ‘One Moral for the Two Sexes’ (Pelletier, 1911: ch. 1, pp. 1–11; 1935: ch. 5), she invited her readers to ponder the meaning of the term ‘honest’ when applied to women, as in the expressions ‘honnête fille’ or ‘honnête femme’. The term, she said, did not refer to general codes of conduct, but to a very specific sphere: sexuality. An ‘honest’ woman was one who was a virgin until she was married, and remained ‘faithful’ after marriage. The notion of ‘honesty’, though formulated as a moral principle, legitimated forms of surveillance, suggested Pelletier, which regimented women’s lives. The pressure of moral principles, as well as the exercise of parental and fraternal authority, meant that women’s every action was strictly controlled. Married women, for example, were called upon by their husbands to give account of how they spent time in their home. Even spinsters, Pelletier argued, were subject to the tyrannical absurdity of men’s law. Though the virginity of the ageing spinster was no longer of any value, she remained subject to sanctions if she attempted to move freely in public spaces. Pelletier further exposed the irrationality surrounding sex itself. One case she cited was the attitude to women’s sexual initiation, the subject

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of an article Pelletier wrote entitled ‘Devirginization’ (Pelletier, 1935: 10–14). Since the breaking of the hymen was painful, and since the first experience of sexual intercourse could be traumatic for a woman unprepared for it (as they still frequently were), it would be rational, Pelletier suggested, to prepare women intellectually for ‘deflowering’— and, to prevent the pain by prescribing ointment or even asking doctors to cut the hymen painlessly. As Pelletier pointed out, virgin brides already had recourse to deceits such as using rabbits’ blood or red ink to simulate blood, or making the date of their wedding coincide with that of their menstrual cycle. Did this not indicate, Pelletier asked, that the hymen membrane had become the very symbol of women’s oppression? Pelletier also considered the law to be an agency of the sexual oppression of women. A case she cited was the law on adultery which had engaged the energy of nineteenth-century feminists. While men did not feel compelled to respect marital fidelity, and while wives were called upon to forgive adultery, women’s adultery was condemned as a crime (Pelletier, 1912a). The law was presented as a means to protect illegitimate children; Pelletier, by contrast, argued that the law was men’s way of securing their paternal rights: The moral discredit which falls on the seduced woman is in fact a form of material depreciation; the loss of her virginity makes of her a thing that is no longer new…a damaged product that is more difficult to sell. Paternal pride is no more than a sense of ownership. Man, the sovereign master of his wife, retains sole right to give her children; another man’s child would be tantamount to theft of his own property. (Pelletier, 1935:27, 29) To demonstrate that the sexual act had been culturally constructed as men’s appropriation of the woman’s body, Pelletier also called attention to linguistic attitudes to sex. In legal terms, the sexual act in matrimony was conceived as ‘man’s right’ and ‘woman’s duty’. In colloquial usage too, man’s participation in the sexual act was (and indeed still is) depicted in the active transitive form, ‘l’homme baise’ (the man fucks), while women’s participation was presented in the passive form: ‘la femme est baisée’. (There was further ambiguity in this use of the passive form, since to be baisé also means to be conned.) Pelletier pointed out the double-bind for women: while slang depicted women’s

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sexuality as something appropriated by man, the polite form depicted it as a gift to men from women. Alongside morality, the law, and the common language of sexuality, Pelletier had a further target: the family. In ‘Feminism and the Family’ (c. 1910), she presented the family as the institution which made of woman’s sexuality a state of dependency and subordination. She argued that in matrimony, as in prostitution, women’s bodies were exchanged for money, the symbol or the key to man’s power (Pelletier, 1911:6–9; 1935: ch. 7, 89; 1928; various undated leaflets). Pelletier defined the family as the agency of woman’s servitude. It was within the family that woman’s consciousness was constructed as subservient. It was also through their confinement in the institution of the family that women were prevented from intervening in the public sphere. The family was governed by authoritarian principles which oppressed both women and children. Cohabitation always implied woman’s literal servitude, since they had to serve their husbands. Maternity too, Pelletier argued, enslaved women in menial domestic tasks—with the exception of women in the wealthy classes, who exploited other women as domestic servants. These bourgeois women did however suffer another kind of servitude: moral servitude. Their role was to please, and their anxious desire to retain their husbands’ affection was, suggested Pelletier, another form of subjection. Thus morality, the law and the family were analysed by Pelletier as the cultural agencies which made women’s sexuality the locus of their oppression. In her work on those agencies, she outlined a field of enquiry, formulated important concepts and produced a methodology for a study of sexual oppression. Her manipulation of language to expose sexual oppression was perhaps the most innovative of her feminist strategies. To attack deep-rooted beliefs, Pelletier used short, polemical sentences designed to shatter the reader’s emotional attachment to particular ideologies. She never prepared her readers or attempted to convince them of her viewpoint; she started with an attack in the form of a paradox, a baffling statement, or a distinctly workingclass sarcasm. She only used short sentences to present her controversial views in the form of statements of facts. Pelletier destroyed cultural stereotypes with formulations that were equally stark and truncated. Her staccato texts were punctuated by sentences that sounded like slogans: ‘Maternal love is a luxury’ ‘Woman is a machine to fabricate the male’

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‘The natalists believe in a barbarian form of birth control— war’ This, then, is the feminist framework into which Pelletier’s argument for the ‘right to abortion’ must ultimately be integrated. Feminism and party politics What then of Pelletier’s socialism? In little over a decade she moved from the optimistic quasi-religious faith in socialism which had animated the left in the mid nineteenth century to the uncertainties more characteristic of our own era. The process was accelerated for her by the problematic position of feminists in the French socialist movement as well as the general bewilderment caused by the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Pelletier first entered the political arena in 1906. Born into a poor and uneducated working-class family, she left home, prepared for her baccalaureate and entered the Faculty of Medicine, where she graduated in 1899. Though the faculty had been open to women since the 1870s, the proportion of working-class students was infinitesimal. Pelletier first decided to dedicate herself to the bettering of the conditions of the deprived by working for the Assistance Publique and was the first woman doctor in this institution. She next selected work with the mentally ill, but a clause in the conditions of eligibility for examination ——examinees were required to have voting rights and to have undertaken military service—eliminated all women. The Feminist paper La Fronde helped her to stage-manage an impressive campaign to open the Faculty of Psychiatric Medicine to women and she won her case in 1906. Between 1906 and 1913 Pelletier operated within recognized political bodies, in which she rose to positions of relative significance. She was the leader of the Parisian-based feminist group, Solidarity, and was a member of the French Socialist Party. During this period she took active part in nine National Congresses of the Party and two International Congresses, was a socialist candidate in the legislative elections of 1910 and 1912, and was nominated to the Executive of the Party in 1910. At this time, Pelletier saw the French feminist movement as lacking any political force. It was, she observed, a plurality of competing groups each organized around a personality or a handful of narrow objectives without any significant following. She also realized that her workingclass background and her politics would make it difficult for her to get

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on with the bourgeois and Catholic women who far outnumbered the socialist feminists (Pelletier, 1908b; c. 1919:8–47; 1933:90–189). Nevertheless, Pelletier believed a French feminist movement could be organized, beyond political allegiances, around three areas: around reforms of the law which legitimized sexual subordination; around access for women to all forms of employment and public service; and thirdly, around the recognition of women’s political rights (Pelletier, 1908a: 41–50). To achieve these goals feminists should infiltrate official political parties, establish themselves in positions of power and influence party policy (Pelletier, 1908a: ch. 3, republished in Maignien, 1978:145–56). When Pelletier entered the French Socialist Party her ambition was to win votes for women. By 1913 she had already lost faith that such goals could be realized in the prevailing circumstances (Pelletier, 1912b). I have tried to bring feminism to the proletariat, I have utterly failed… (Pelletier to Arria Ly, 6 October 1911). The working class will be the last to accept it, they will come to it when we have our political rights, not before. (22 August 1911) Pelletier’s activism as a leader of Solidarity was condemned by the French feminist body represented at the 1908 June Congress of Women’s Civil and Political Rights. The issue at stake was street action. The period 1904–1908 was a rare period of pre-war French feminist history when a few women, notably Pelletier, considered appropriating some of the British suffragettes’ tactics to pressurize the government. The events were few and unspectacular (Hause and Kenny, 1984:48– 50, 78–81, 102–05). In June 1906 Pelletier threw suffragists’ hand bills on deputies’ heads from the gallery of the National Assembly, and during the elections of June 1908 she threw a small stone at the window of the polling station. The members of Solidarity objected that she might hurt someone. The event was viewed by the press as appalling violence, and the government took steps to ensure the women could not be turned into heroic martyrs. When, in June 1908, two marches were organized, Pelletier and a few colleagues found it difficult to persuade a hundred or so women to go on to the streets, with visiting British suffragettes. Those who did follow suggested that they should make amends for their involvement in political action by publicly proclaiming their belief in women’s traditional role (Pelletier, c. 1919:20–8; 1933:106–10).

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Pelletier’s experience as leader of Solidarity led her to the conclusion that the problems which paralysed the French feminist movement were not separate from the question of women’s oppression. She observed that women seemed unable to pursue any course of action which did not conform to existing codes of femininity. The narrow intellectual education women received, she said, left them ill-equipped to theorize their positions. These, Pelletier thought, were some of the reasons which made women unable to act efficiently in the political sphere (Pelletier, 1908a: ch. 2). Her experience in the Socialist Party led her to similar conclusions — though she did succeed in making the Socialist National Congress of 1906 pass a motion on women’s suffrage. The deputies were to introduce the issue to Parliament the following year; in the end, however, the motion was to no effect. It took the deputies three months to nominate a subcommittee which happened to include no feminist sympathizers and which, in the event, never met (Sowerwine, 1982:110– 28). In 1907 Pelletier made the National Congress vote on the same resolution, which again was not carried. French women had to wait until 1945 to be granted their political rights. The bad faith of socialist politicians in respect of women’s suffrage was symptomatic of the general attitude of the French socialists to

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feminism. Though the Workers’ Party had officially passed a resolution in support of suffragism at the Congress of 1879, the general opinion was that feminism was a bourgeois diversion. At the 1907 National Congress, Pelletier’s suffragism was thus opposed by a Madame Gauthiot on the grounds that it was ‘one of these numerous diversions’ (Sowerwine, 1982:116). The dominant doctrine was that women’s liberation would be achieved only through trade-unionist struggle and the revolution. Thus, after the 1906 National Congress, Pelletier concluded that the French Socialist Party tolerated feminism only as long as it could serve the Party. Feminists and trade unionists were also in regular conflict over the issue of women’s employment. When, in 1914, Pelletier wrote articles arguing for women to take up jobs vacant on the labour market, her trade unionist colleagues accused her of ‘patriotic collaboration with the bourgeoisie’ (Pelletier, c. 1919:20–8; 1933:106–10). Feminism and socialism

In the first decade of the century the question which preoccupied socialist women was whether or not they should ally themselves with feminists, whom they mistrusted as ‘bourgeois’. The issue was raised at the first congress of socialist women held in Stuttgart in 1907, under the presidency of Clara Zetkin. It was decided that there should be a complete separation from bourgeois feminists. Pelletier was the only person to oppose this decision, arguing that it was necessary to have a feminist movement sufficiently autonomous from the Party to concentrate on the issue of women’s rights. In her article ‘The question of Women’s Vote’ which was an answer to the International Congress, she stated: If a woman has, like a man, the right to be a socialist, she cannot, without betraying her own cause, sacrifice feminism to a masculine political party, whatever it be… Feminism is logically neither bourgeois or socialist for it is not a class party but a sex party. (Pelletier, 1908b: 15) In this article, Pelletier developed the argument that class oppression and women’s oppression were of a different kind. The main problem for women was that, bound to their oppressors within the family, they could not develop the group identity which was necessary for revolt.

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The combative position of Pelletier on the more revolutionary left wing of the Party was another hindrance to her furthering the cause of feminism. In 1907 she dissociated herself from the left-wing section of Guesdes on the question of the trade unions which they wanted to control, accusing them of integrating the working class within the capitalist state rather than preparing them for the revolution. She became a leading figure of the Insurrectionist group created by Gustave Hervé who was, she thought for a time, a genuine revolutionary force (Pelletier, 1910). However, the Insurrectionists were antiparliamentarian, and Pelletier’s commitment to antiparliamentarism was used by socialist politicians to weaken her suffragist arguments. It was a feminist issue which brought her collaboration with the Insurrectionists to an abrupt end in 1910. The antisuffragists had always used the argument that women in France did not have to do military service, unlike men. It had therefore become a feminist strategy to ask for a form of military service for women, and Pelletier wrote to that effect in La Suffragiste. Thereupon Hervé, of the antimilitarist Insurrectionists, insisted that Pelletier retract her argument in Social War. She refused and resigned. The conflicts between feminism and socialism and the political tensions within the French Socialist Party ultimately defeated Pelletier. Yet she was not convinced that the root of the problem was a question of doctrine. What she noted in her unpublished memoirs was the opposition to her as a woman. When she had joined anarchist groups in the 1890s she had felt ostracized as a woman because she did not want to follow the codes of sexual behaviour which the left regarded as those of the liberated. Later, she felt equally ostracized in the Socialist Party as a single woman claiming independent ideas and seeking a position of relative power. The conflicts between feminism and socialism were, Pelletier concluded, instances of a more general phenomenon of sexual oppression. Thus, in 1908, she described the problematic position of feminists in the Socialist Party as a problem of incommunicability between two radically different systems of thought: The poor faint voice of women’s claims. They listened to it with a distracted ear because no one understood what women said. They spoke an unknown and bizarre language which came from very far away: the voice of the other sex (Pelletier, 1908a: 34). The language of the dominant culture presented as natural the fact of women’s surbordination to men. It could not assimilate the language of

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the feminists, since they challenged the institutions and systems of beliefs which made sexual oppression the very structure of the social order. For Pelletier this was also a problem of psychology: of men’s incapacity to think of women as autonomous beings and women’s incapacity to think of themselves other than in a relationship of dependency to men. Feminism, concluded Pelletier, had to work upon what she called ‘mentalities’: people’s sense of identity, the agencies which moulded gender and class identity, and the cultural processes which perpetuated them. Feminism had to become a cultural struggle. Pelletier and communism

In 1920, the French Communist Party allied itself to Moscow; Pelletier became a member. Yet with the end of Lenin’s government, she became disillusioned with the ideal of revolution. Revolution killed and oppressed like war, and inevitably ended up in dictatorship. She also came to doubt whether it was possible to mobilize the proletariat for revolution; for culture, she wrote, was controlled by the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois leaders of the working class would always use the proletariat to maintain their privileges. Pelletier also rejected the idea of progress through reform, as proposed by the moderates; she saw it as producing an endless swing between conservative and progressive governments. Reforms, she argued, depended on imposing socialist views on those who were against them, and the bourgeoisie would always ensure that social reforms did not last for ever (Pelletier, 1926a). Social progress, she concluded, depended on a constant cultural struggle that would bring about a democratic state willing to suppress social inequalities by transforming the agencies which perpetuated class and sexual oppression (Pelletier, 1931:23). The politics of the family

In her essay ‘Feminism and the Family’ of 1911 Pelletier put to feminists a categorical and embarrassing question: could sexual equality ever be achieved without a fundamental re-ordering of society? Could women become autonomous beings without financial independence from men? Was it possible to reconcile maternity and women’s employment? At the time of Pelletier’s essay, socialist feminists such as Hubertine Auclert were arguing that feminism would succeed in tranforming the nuclear family into an egalitarian unit, with men and

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women sharing domestic and parental duties. Maternity would be regarded as a highly valued social function and mothers would receive a state salary. There would be a modification of the marital law and matriarchy would be established. Pelletier spoke from a different position. With her direct experience of the conditions of existence of working-class people, Pelletier’s socialism involved a commitment to the abolition of private property, to the collectivization of the means of production and the reorganization of the economy at state level. But more than that, Pelletier did not subscribe to the dominant conviction in the French Socialist Party that women’s emancipation would come out of trade unionism or the revolution. She was not satisfied either with her Marxist colleagues’ attempt to explain psychology only in terms of the material conditions of existence (Pelletier, 1931:12). She believed that there was a sex and class ‘mentality’ which was transmitted in culture, most particularly within the family. She brought to bear on French Marxism a conviction, developed through her involvement in nineteenth-century anarchist circles, that to obtain a truly egalitarian society the family had to be abolished. Pelletier’s perspective was a feminist one: since the nuclear family institutionalized the sexual oppression of women, the only way to achieve sexual equality was through its disintegration. The upbringing of children and domestic labour would be taken over from individual women and assumed by the collectivity. In the wake of the Russian Revolution it was hardly possible for French socialists to discuss these issues in the abstract, and Pelletier restated her position in a schematic article of 1926, Capitalism and Communism, where she assessed the merits and failure of Bolshevist Russia. One had to recognize, Pelletier wrote, that the first experience of communism had caused much unhappiness and that the Bolsheviks had in many ways failed communism. The Bolsheviks had had to resort to dictatorship in order to survive; yet there had been no real need for the authoritarian economic programme they implemented. By restricting individual liberties, economic dictatorship had stifled individual initiative and become self-destructive. Bureaucracy had got out of hand, and the soviet ceased to function as the government of the proletariat. By putting the majority at the mercy of a few, Pelletier concluded, Bolshevism had paved the way for personal dictatorship and corruption. Yet, Pelletier went on to argue, the Bolsheviks had accomplished enough social reforms for it to be impossible to use the Russian Revolution as an argument against socialism. In particular, the Russians had made great progress towards sexual equality:

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The Bolshevist code, which frees women from all the fetters of matrimony, has realized all the ideas which have been discussed in various groups for over a century and are still considered a utopia here. It is truly deplorable that millions of people had to be massacred to achieve this. (Pelletier, 1926a: 7–9) After she visited Russia in 1921 as a delegate to the International Conference, Pelletier reported signs of relative sexual equality. Women moved freely in public spaces; most of them preferred freedom of movement to fashionable looks—which indicated to her that they no longer lived for men alone; women were in employment throughout the Soviet administration, and former peasants and working-class girls occupied fairly senior posts. There were women in the army, and the risky and responsible job of propaganda in the army was entrusted to women. The Women’s Section of the Communist Party was given prestigious status and was very active. An effective propaganda network ensured that even women in the remotest villages were kept informed of ideas and developments. These were the positive signs. Yet the Women’s Section of the Party had been politically marginalized. Its work was confined to traditional roles—education and social welfare. Women were noticeably absent from key adminstrative and political functions. Nevertheless, concluded Pelletier, if in practice sexual equality had not yet been achieved, the Russians had taken the measures which could make it possible. The reform of the legal system had inscribed equality into Soviet law; and true equality, argued Pelletier, would gradually be achieved through the suppression of matrimony and the entry of all women into production (Pelletier, 1922: pp. 144–8, 216–21). During her stay in Moscow Pelletier met Alexandra Kollantai, and she concluded that their positions on the family had enough in common for her to present her views as close to those of Bolshevist feminism (Pelletier, 1922:143). For her, Bolshevist feminism meant the abolition of the family, legalized abortion, the collective upbringing of children and collective housekeeping. Pelletier continued to advocate this kind of feminism even after 1931, when she had stated that the Bolsheviks had failed in their sexual ideals as they had in many others (Pelletier, 1931:16). Bolshevist feminism had become for her a way of upholding a belief in socialism. As a result, her position in the French Left became insecure; for French socialists dreaded the idea of the destruction of the family. Her position in the French Communist Party, as in the

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Madeleine Pelletier circa 1910

feminist movement, remained one of painful isolation because of her views on the family. Arguments for the transformation of the family

In what sense, then, did Pelletier see the family as detrimental to social progress? First, it was, she argued, through the agency of the family that people were placed in fixed social positions. The family regimented life-cycles according to rigid patterns from which individuals had little chance of escape. According to Pelletier, the family was essentially a financial institution of the bourgeois order, and

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it was to safeguard their privileges that the bourgeoisie celebrated the family and denounced its disintegration as the greatest of upheavals. Pelletier’s position on sexuality also permitted her to argue logically for the suppression of matrimony. If, as she believed, the sexual act did not automatically give one person property rights over another, then sex was a matter of private concern on which the state had no right to legislate. Though the family was an oppressive agency, Pelletier went on to argue, it did protect its members. It offered assistance to the sick and the elderly, and, for the present, was indispensible to children. But was it not unjust, Pelletier asked, to sacrifice half of the present generation to the next generation? The state had already begun to take charge of the care of the sick and elderly and of a portion of children’s education. The evolution of society, she concluded, was towards a greater role for the state in these areas (Pelletier, n.d.a). Pelletier’s writings on the family anticipated by ten years her encounter with Kollontai, whose Communism and the Family she had read in 1920. The Russian experience helped Pelletier concretize her ideas about collective housekeeping and the collective upbringing of children. During her stay in Russia, Pelletier visited institutions for abandoned children, and was impressed by the adult education system developed at Sorlov University (Pelletier, 1922: ch. 2). In 1926 she published a series of three articles on education in Russia, which praised the Russian system for its attempt to develop individuals who had a clear consciousness of their role in society. Thus, for example, education in the Soviet Union did not consist of passive listening; instead children studied themes which made them actively explore the various orders of knowledge and their relation to contemporary society. Children were regarded as members of society whose present task happened to be to acquire an education. The way schools were organized developed their sense of responsibility and gave them a sense of identity in society (Pelletier, 1926b). Thus, in her pamphlet The Educator State of 1931, Pelletier argued that the French state institution for abandoned children should experiment with such progressive pedagogical methods and provide models for the collective upbringing of children. And in another pamphlet of the 1930s, Love and Maternity, she argued for the ‘de-individualization of childcare’. According to Pelletier, the progress of medicine, hygiene and child psychology ensured that the young child’s basic needs were satisfied. Amongst the reforms she advocated was the replacement of breast-feeding by the use of pasteurized milk, and throwaway nappies—practical campaigns

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designed to ease the burden of working-class women. She also turned her attention to the question of nurseries. The women of the bourgeoisie she argued, had long ago discharged the burden of childcare on to other women; the women of the working class, concluded Pelletier, would come to understand that such institutions were equally to their advantage. Pelletier believed, like Kollantai, that the affective energy invested in the family could be redirected towards the community. Individual identities however were not to be submerged within the state (Pelletier 1919; 1926:143). People, she thought, might come to live in communes where the state was not to regiment sexual relationships (Pelletier, c. 1933a). Conclusions To write about Pelletier is to wrestle with history. De Beauvoir, who reinvented in 1949 the concept of woman as ‘the other’ did not acknowledge Pelletier’s first formulation. In the History of French Feminism, published in 1977, Albistur and Armogathe had only eight words for Pelletier. Their readers learn only that she travelled to Russia and reported that sexual equality had not been achieved (1977:574). Pelletier’s activism between 1906 and 1912 has been recorded in the 1980s by four American historians. They all conclude that she failed completely in her endeavour. Marilyn Boxer, while claiming for Pelletier a place in ‘the sisterhood of great socialist women’, concludes an article subtitled ‘the extraordinary failure of Madeleine Pelletier’ with the following lines: She failed on all counts… Pelletier found herself caught in a double, double bind: between reform and revolution, between feminism and socialism…unable to reconcile the conflict, unwilling to forsake feminism in socialism or socialism in feminism, Pelletier finally withdrew from party politics. In the last decades of her life she turned on the one hand to fictional worlds where total resolution was possible and, on the other, to the reality of women’s lives, where the radical act of abortion could solve immediate problems. (1981:65, 67) Whether Pelletier’s belief in socialism is only ‘a fictional world’ is a legitimate question, but an inadequate assessment of her work. Historians like Boxer have failed to understand that their intellectual

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categories—‘suffragism’, ‘women in socialism’ are too narrow to grasp the work of the French socialist feminists. They have failed to see that Pelletier challenged the dichotomy socialism/feminism as a manifestation of sexual oppression. The interesting aspect of Pelletier’s work is not the ineffectiveness of her attempt to influence the machinery of politics, but the analysis she made of it and the ideas she articulated to overcome the problem. She decided that feminism had to be a cultural struggle carried out in the order of language. That decision might be viewed as a retreat to a supposedly cosier world of intellectual speculation; but surely it was more than this? Though her antifamily position was Pelletier’s distinctive mark, she stated in 1931 that it would be wrong to abolish the family in the present patriarchal society, for this would be done at the expense of women. If the upbringing of children were to cease to be individual women’s responsibility, the State had to assume the entire upbringing of children at the same time. But it was very doubtful, she wrote, that collective education could ever be realized. The ideology of parental love was too strong for parents ever to agree to hand their children over to the state; besides it was unlikely that any state could ever finance such a project (Pelletier, 1931:18–19). Pelletier believed that the evolution of society towards sexual equality was an irreversible process. The gradual involvement of women in production, the political rights which women were bound to be granted sooner or later, the relative sexual emancipation of the postwar period would progressively alter women’s consciousness and make the agencies of women’s oppression disintegrate. It was the task of feminists to keep that process alive. They had to think ahead, to ensure that all women, and in particular the more oppressed women of the working class, benefited from it. Pelletier wanted her writings to act as a stimulus for feminist thinking. The introduction she wrote to The Feminist Education of Women is indicative, I think, of the perspective she had on her entire work. She explained that her book was not prescriptive; it did not offer a series of recipes to be followed to the letter. She wanted it to be a focus of discussion and reflection. Individual mothers, she hoped, might take up one aspect or the other, modifying it to suit their own situation and adding to it ideas she had not foreseen. Should a rich feminist decide to give some money to the cause of feminist education, added Pelletier, it would be more useful for her to use the money to propagate the idea of feminist education rather than set up a school according to Pelletier’s pedagogical principles.

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Even within a capitalist regime her ideas had, she thought, some measure of applicability. For instance, she forecast that shortages of domestic labour would accelerate the technologization of housework. It was the task of feminists to ensure that this be done to the advantage of working-class women. The capitalists, who wanted to keep control of women’s labour, would be interested in the nursery system. The feminists had to think out the practical means of freeing women from their everyday servitude. Secondly, Pelletier thought of socialism as a dynamic process. In 1931 she stated that the establishment of a social democracy was not an historical impossibility. Whether it came or not, it was the task of feminist socialists to devise methods that would prevent the family and the education system from continuing to mould class and gender identities by positioning the working class and women as inferior. Thirdly, Pelletier believed her writing to be an active form of socialist militancy which could act on the present political situation. She saw her role in the socialist movement as that of ‘propagandist’. She often worked with a left-wing organization which called itself ‘the Group of Propaganda by the Brochure’, and the Socialist Party did accredit her with that status when they wrote: ‘Pelletier, the old propagandist of our ideas’. I have argued that Pelletier came to see socialism as a constant struggle in the order of culture. The unifying principle of her publications is their common strategy: to undermine capitalism by identifying and unmasking the ideologies which she saw as fundamental to its perpetuation. Religion, morality, patriotism, the education system, the family are presented by her as the agencies of class and sexual oppression. In that perspective, Pelletier’s ‘antistyle’, and the violence of her writings, can be seen as functional. Pelletier’s tactics consisted in attacking dominant ideologies in specific areas, focusing on crucial examples whose examination could challenge the entire structure of capitalist patriarchy. Note Claudine Mitchell wrote a doctoral dissertation on Art and Politics and teaches at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield where in 1984 she created a course, ‘Women and Art’. She would like to thank Simone Blanc and the librarians of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand and Erica Carter for their assistance.

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References CORRESPONDENCE Pelletier, Madeleine to Arria Ly, 56 letters 1908–1934 Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. ——Pelletier to Hélène Gousset and Hélène Brion, 19 letters 1912–1939 Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand, Paris. FILE PELLETIER Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, 79 rue Nationale, Paris. PELLETIER, Madeleine (1908a) Women in Struggle for their Rights Paris: Giard. ——(1908b) ‘Question of Women’s Suffrage’ La Revue Socialiste Paris. ——(1910) ‘Guedism or Herveism La Suffragiste No. 17, June 1910, pp. 1–4. ——(1911a) ‘Abortion and Depopulation’ La Suffragiste No. 20, May 1911, pp. 13–15. ——(1911b) The Sexual Emancipation of Women Paris: Giard. ——(1912a) ‘The Half Emancipated’ La Suffragiste No. 24, January 1912, pp. 1–3. ——(1912b) ‘Feminism and the Working Class’ La Suffragiste No. 30, July 1912, pp. 1–4. ——(1913) The Right to Abortion Paris: Du Malthusien. 1911 version reprinted in MAIGNIEN (1978). ——(1914) The Feminist Education of Women Paris: Giard, republished in MAIGNIEN (1978:63–115). ——(1919) Individualism Paris: Giard. (c. 1919) The Diary of a Feminist unpublished MS. ——(1922) My Adventurous Journey in Communist Russia Paris: Giard, 218 pp. ——(1926a) Capitalism and Communism Ermont: Le Vegetalien. ——(1926b) ‘Education in Russia’ La Fronde, 2–4 June. ——(1928) ‘Prostitution’ Revue de L’Anarchie No. 20, November 1928, republished in 1935; ch. 7. ——(1931) The Educator State Paris: Voix des Femmes. ——(1932) The New Life Paris: Figuiere. ——(c. 1933a) Celibacy Superior State Paris: Brochure Mensuelle, republished in 1935; ch. 1X. ——(c. 1933b) Women’s Right to Work Paris: Brochure Mensuelle, republished in MAIGNIEN (1978:159–76). ——(1933) The Virgin Woman Paris: Bresle. ——(c. 1930–3) ‘Love and Maternity’ Brochure Mensuelle, No. 71, Paris. ——(1935) Rational Sexuality Paris: Sphinx. UNDATED (n.d.a) ‘Feminism and the Family’ Paris, (16 pp.) republished in 1911; ch. II. ——(n.d.b) ‘The Disintegration of the Family’ Paris, (after 1926).Secondary Sources ALBISTUR, Maité and ARMOGATHE, Daniel (1977) Histoire du Féminisme Français Paris: Des Femmes.

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BOXER, Marilyn (1981) ‘When Radical and Socialist Feminism Were Joined. The Extraordinary Failure of Madeleine Pelletier’ in SLAUGHTER and KERN (1981). MAIGNIEN, Claude (1978) editor Madeleine Pelletier Paris: Syros. HAUSE, Steven and KENNY, Anne (1984) Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic Princeton: Princeton University Press. SLAUGHTER, Jane and KERN, Robert (1981) editors European Women on the Left Westport, CT: Greenwood. SOWERWINE, Charles (1982) Sisters or Citizens Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s Sheila Rowbotham Pandora: London 1989, £12.95 Hbk. ISBN 0 04 440365 3 To reflect upon, let alone describe, ‘feminism in action since the 1960s’ is certainly a monumental task. (I was amazed to hear, at the event held to launch the book, that Sheila Rowbotham had actually doubled her task by allowing the book a ten-year gestation period!) Most of the ‘action’, however, does take place in the seventies, and as Rowbotham says in the introduction, is ‘an account of ideas and assumptions’ rather than a history of the movement. Any feminist retrospective will have to negotiate the treacherous path between the assertion of the validity of an individual’s personal experience, and its inevitable usurpation of the experience of others, and Rowbotham’s book does not quite achieve the balance she hopes for in the introduction. It is exciting to chronicle the Women’s Liberation movement using ‘leaflets, magazines, letters and internal papers, snatches of poetry and memories of conversation’, rather than the ‘official testimony’ of books, but the immediacy one would expect to result from this kind of research is strangely elusive. The present wave of retrospective anthologies (such as Very Heaven, and ’68, ’78, ’88) gets around the subjectivity problem by using a diversity of contributors; different women reflect over the past twenty years, using either universal benchmarks (conferences, demonstrations) or personal ones to chart their own progress. The strength of these books is their subjectivity. But an overview by a single author is bound to be more self-conscious about its subjectivity, and perhaps that is why Sheila Rowbotham herself is so absent from the pages of her book. This

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is a shame, as the most engaging passages are often the ones where her ‘own voice’ surfaces, for example when she is writing of the contradictions of motherhood, or the naïvety of early attempts at starting mass campaigns around the issue of nursery provision. More often than not I found myself thinking ‘Well OK but what was it actually like?’ The muted narrative voice can lull the reader into forgetting this is only one view amongst many. There is some sense of sanitizing the enormous conflicts which have gone on inside the women’s movement (‘leading to large schisms’, as Rowbothamsays, ‘only in the late 1970s’) as ifthey and the resulting schisms wereslightly unseemly. Rowbothammaintains that the fact that ‘a singlewomen’s liberation movement nolonger exists is not a cause for nostalgia’, but I cannot help but detectsome residual yearning for a cohesive, all-embracing feminist politics.For example, when describing various attempts to juggle with mother-hood as symbol, Rowbothamremarks: ‘Not surprisingly, there isno unified strategy… As thewomen’s movement has becomemore fragmented it has been hardereven to consider how the differentforms of activity and inquiry mightinterrelate.’ Surely one of the greatachievements of feminism has beenits very ability to take on ‘differentforms of activity and enquiry’, toembrace a huge diversity of bothsubject and approach, and to pull thewhole caboodle into the ‘political’arena. Hence the enormous andproductive influence of feminism oncontemporary critiques of popularculture as well as on critiques of thefamily and the workplace. As a source for tracing the history of contemporary positions the book is indispensable, and the sheer volume of material cited is testimony to some fantastically dedicated research (the time for which, the author says, in a nice irony, was only made possible by the demise of the GLC and her consequent redundancy). The book also provides a fascinating yardstick for change; I found myself remembering why I first started to call myself a feminist, which issues were the ‘hot’ ones for me then and how those priorities have or haven’t changed. Being reminded of those basics is one of the invaluable functions of the book, and I also enjoyed getting a sense of the original connections between what have come to be regarded as very disparate issues—why emphasis was first placed on reproductive technologies for example, or on pornography.

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The gargantuan research effort is sometimes a little undigested and can make for some pretty turgid reading, and the language never really resolves the tension between socio-theory and direct experience, thus mirroring the tensions——thoughtfully explored in the text—— inherent in the ‘personal is political’ slogan. I wanted to know in more depth about how experiences emerged as concepts, and how some of them turned into fixed demands; this detail wouldn’t necessarily be anecdotal, but would contain more about the messiness of the whole political process, and the pain and relief of compromise. One aspect of the context of The Past is Before Us which emerged very clearly at the launch of the book was a slightly defensive posture in terms of age, with Shelia Row-botham saying, seemingly only halfjoking, that she wondered if feminists in their twenties would be ‘irritated by all these feminists in their forties whingeing on’. There does seem to be some feeling that ‘younger feminists’ are all bored to death with the politics and impatient to just get on with things. Certainly there are some women who feel circumscribed by feminism, who feel that the feminist past is ‘after’ them, so to speak, and endeavouring to impose oppressive standards on their lives; but this feeling is not confined to younger feminists, and is not shared by many of them, for whom an existing ideological framework with which to tackle painful, difficult experience is a godsend. Like many other ‘younger feminists’ (assuming being under thirty qualifies me!) I am fascinated by the history of feminist ideas, that history as lived by women—how could I not be, since it is the framework for my own ideas about myself and my environment? I do wonder if the arbitrary division of young and old is more a response to previously unheard voices (some young, some not) challenging orthodoxies with new experiences and different priorities. After all, as Rowbotham herself says, ‘movements do move’; and so they should. Sara Dunn

References MAITLAND, Sara (1989) editor Very Heaven London: Virago. SEBESTYEN, Amanda (1989) editor ’68, ’78, ’88 London: Prism.

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Talking Back: Thinking Feminist—Thinking Black bell hooks Sheba: London, 1989, £5.95 Pbk ISBN 0 9071 79401 Increasingly there is discussion and articles are written about postfeminism. One could be forgiven (almost) for thinking that the feminist movement was nothing but a flash-in-the-panflavour-of-the-month episode in the world view of things. There are certainly many amongst those of us who call ourselves Black feminists, myself included, who have, at times, in the latter half of the eighties, felt powerless to effect the kinds of change we thought would flow from our heightened consciousness and active politicization which occurred as a result of feminism, and the Black feminist movement in particular, during the seventies and early eighties. Still, we continue to give our heart and soul to that movement, and more importantly, try to forge the realities of our lives within it. Nevertheless, we are alarmed by the creeping reaction that the postfeminists describe—the idea (which doggedly persists) that feminists are one-dimensional, lesbian manhaters; that little has changed despite years of vocalizing and resistance. For Black women, the argument goes that we have allowed ourselves the self-indulgence of playing the white woman’s game for too long, that it’s not paid off in terms of generalized acceptance among Black people, especially younger Black women (though I think the positive influence of Black feminists on younger Black women will become increasingly quantifiable), and it’s now time to get back to the basics of fighting racism as our primary motivating force. These criticisms are especially hard to take given the reality of the divide which we all know still exists between Black and white feminists; between those with a radical versus a nonradical perspective (as viewed in the British context); between Black women who describe them-selves as feminists and those who don’t; and even, dare I say it, between Black feminists, as we struggle to make our personal our political. Bell hooks serves up a number of home truths in this latest book which speak to some of those concerns in an honest and not too convoluted a manner. I was surprised by it. On the one hand, it is a political treatise of the Black feminist movement as it grapples with the contradictions of class,

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gender and sexual relations; on the other, it is a deeply intimate account of personal and political maturation within that framework. There has long been a school of thought among some Black feminists in Britain that the tendency to prioritize the outwardly political over the inwardly personal results in a distorted whole. This view holds that we cannot deny or suppress that part of us which contributes to our definition of self as Black women because it’s ‘too personal’, and gets in the way of broader political issues. In Talking Back bell hooks helps to legitimize that view as a concept to be acted upon. In doing so, however, she crucially speaks to the idea that emphasis on the personal or identity alone is not enough, in and of itself, to denote political consciousness. In her discussion on identity politics as it relates to ‘separatist, individualistic and inward-looking notions’, she rightly points out that ‘simply describing one’s experience of exploitation or oppression is not to become politicized’. What feminist politicization instead requires is linking efforts to socially construct self and identity in an oppositional framework that resists domination. The point about the intimacy of the book, however, what bell hooks calls ‘going deep’, is that it demonstrates an understanding and acceptance of the need to ‘be open about personal stuff’, which she says has only recently worked its way fully into her writing. For that I am grateful, because it opens up a new realm for open consideration by Black feminists. The essay, ‘Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education’ is an outcome of this process. In it, she discusses her need and conscious efforts to maintain connections with family and community across class boundaries, as a Black woman, a product of academia, from a working-class, Southern background who has ‘crossed over’. (More than a few of us have grappled with that one.) Equally, the essay on violence, in which she talks of personally coming to terms with being hit by someone she loved made me think about violence against women in a’ different way. In particular, there is merit in her call for a widened feminist discussion on violence against women to include a recognition of the ways in which women use abusive force against children. This could, she feels, aid our understanding of why children who were hit growing up are often hit as adults or hit others. It is hard to argue, too, with her critique of Spike Lee’s film, She’s Gotta Have It. She makes the point that despite its efforts to portray a radical new image of Black female sexuality, and the positive portrayal

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of the ‘power struggles, contradictions, the craziness of the black malefemale relationships’, it is, she notes, ‘ultimately a patriarchal tale …in which woman does not emerge triumphant, fulfilled’. There is so much here——education, as the ‘practice of freedom’, providing the tools to question and deal critically with the politics of domination; the discussion on homophobia in Black communities—in which she makes the point that homophobic attitudes can be altered or changed in environments (like Black communities) where they have not become rigidly institutionalized; and that it is important for feminists to look at the nature of homophobia and challenge it in constructive ways; and finally, on the need for feminist theorists to liberate as opposed to mystify through their use of language. That is why it was disappointing at the end of this book, to see bell hooks declare that she does not call herself a Black feminist. Rather, she prefers that women think less in terms of feminism as an identity and more in terms of ‘advocating feminism’. That we ‘move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical social models of social change that emphasise collective as well as individual change’. The determined struggle of Black feminists in Britain to organize autonomously was, in my opinion, exactly the kind of radical social model which she describes. The naming process which we undertook to call ourselves Black feminists was in itself a collective affirmation of the need to construct a feminism that spoke to gender, class and race, growing out of our experiences and because of our connections to our Black communities and cultures. Bell hooks makes the point that the feminist movement in the States was one which automatically excluded a great many people. And she points to its symbolic gestures at the beginning of the movement— braburning, protesting the Miss America Pageant—as examples of its flawed class analysis. But she asks the question: ‘What if our symbolic gestures were women at a factory protesting against working conditions? This would have a far more radical impact on our consciousness than the image of people burning a bra.’ I couldn’t agree more. That is why Black feminists in Britain identified with and supported the women workers during the Grunwick strike of 1977; why we fought against sin bins and disruptive units for Black children and why we successfully fought to end virginity tests for Asian women at British ports of entry.

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We are in our communities and of our communities; and just as those communities must come to terms with their hostility towards Black women and men who are lesbian or gay, so must it accept its sisters who are feminist, who are saying, you must realize the sexism which exists and work to eradicate it, as you work to eradicate racism and class division. The value we place on naming ourselves demands nothing less. Melba Wilson

Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence Julia Swindells Polity: Oxford 1986 £7.95 Pbk, 0 7456 0072 7 £25.00 Hbk, 0 7456 0071 9 Julia Swindells book at once debunks the myth of feminism as humourless and academic writing as forbiddingly ‘difficult’. Even the cover functions as a visual pun; the middle-class woman who reads face to face with the working-class woman who is read about, bringing the two together, equally stylized in the male representation. This points to one of the book’s central arguments, the relation of ‘literariness’ to the moral in the construction of subjectivities. Although Swindells is reluctant to define ‘the literary’, it connotes in general terms those symbolization processes which, in the nineteenth century, get enshrined in the novel as the genre most widely read and canonized in the production business of high culture. Thus in Swindells account of the correspondence between Mary Smith and Jane Carlyle, two women whose different position in relation to the ‘literary’ and to class is similarly marked, there is involved (for all the women concerned) a process of negotiating predetermined categories of ‘appropriate’ writing. It is no accident that I begin with an illustration from the second half of the book, where the shift occurs from canonical fiction to the writings of working women autobiographers. It is part of the logic of the book that its preliminary arguments about the class relations of writing should begin to tell at this later stage. In Dickens ’Little Dorrit one version of a Victorian maidservant is represented, but the relation between domestic service and writing is far more acutely and painfully realized in the account of a working woman autobiographer such as Elizabeth Ham. In George Eliot’s Adam Bede one version of a working

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woman’s experience of oppression is represented through Hetty Sorrel’s abandonment ‘not only by upper-class gent but also by author, to a miserable pregnancy, a lonely childbirth and transportation’. Yet it is Ellen Weeton’s Journal of a Governess, and the experience of both being a battered wife and writing about it, which shows up the literary aspect. For Swindells is consistently scrupulous in resisting the temptation to sentimentalize the working women’s accounts of their lives. She makes it emphatically clear that she is not setting out to find authentic versions of working women’s experience, eschewing such questions as: ‘Will the real (THE REAL) Nelly Weeton now stand forth?’. She argues that these autobiographical writings are themselves constrained by literary conventions, not least in that these women look to literature to provide a morally tenable position from which to write and to live. The most striking reason for this is that the dominant values which transform their lives into acceptable experience in writing are those which maintain (and indeed service) a culture which creates a hierarchy of texts according to who is doing the writing—their class, their gender. The concluding chapter of the book exposes the role of editors and commentators in the power relations of the literary production process, and Swindells here makes herself accountable as a feminist and working woman to the female subjects of the historical texts she has discussed. J.J.Bagley assists Edward Hall in his chivalric rescue of Ellen Weeton— his ‘sleeping princess’——no longer a drudge, a battered wife, but a fairy-tale heroine. Elizabeth Ham’s editor ‘liberates’ her text—and, by implication, her readers—from 80,000 words of ‘inconsequential gossip’. This raises the question of for whom they were producing their female subjects—for it is surely no vain speculation on Swindell’s part that some of those massive excisions would have been of interest to women. It would be a great pity if this book were read only by those with a ‘professional’ interest in Victorian writing, for, as its author justly claims, ‘its primary concerns relate to women now, to our experiences and our perceptions of the world’. We still, in a sense, look back through a fog of stereotypical notions about Victorianism, and live with the legacy of gender attitudes and practices which were formed in that period. It is in the nineteenth-century realist novel, which has become established as the apotheosis of a fundamentally liberal humanist genre, and more especially in the writings of working women autobiographers which have been classified as low-status texts, that Swindells locates the most visible manifestations of the class and gender relations of writing.

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Much of this book is concerned with the way in which ‘the art thing’, and the assumptions and restrictions it involves, reflects and endorses the socio-sexual division of labour. But its argument does not end there: ‘What is important now, for feminists and socialists, is not only an exposure of these veiled assumptions, but an understanding of how sexual ideology and the sexual division of labour have structured, in the past, and continue to structure, the ways in which people write and are read.’ Joan Scanlon

Within School Walls: The Role of Discipline, Sexuality and the Curriculum AnnMarie Wolpe Routledge: London, 1988, £9.95 Pbk ISBN 415 008360 In 1984 Wood commented that the whole sexy atmosphere of the period of his research led him to reflect on the absence of any real work on sex as it manifests itself in schools. In this book AnnMarie Wolpe aims to show how disciplinary control and sexuality are central features of school organization, school experience and gender formation. The book is based on an ethnographic longitudinal study of the pupils and staff of one class, using methods of observation and interviews from 1972–4, 1976 and 1980. It explores how both femininity and masculinity are constructed through schooling by relating structural analysis of the labour market, the family and the popularization of ideologies with observational accounts of what actually happens in the classroom. The book aims to reposition the account of girls in terms of activity rather than passivity and, as such, contributes to research which emphasizes that females are not victims of male dominance. Wolpe argues that the popularization of feminist-interactionist accounts has led to the stereotyping that such analysis is at pains to dismiss. This challenge to patriarchal explanations whilst being an obvious strength of the book also results in certain weaknesses. In the first section, Wolpe argues that the structure of disciplinary controls needs to be established before the pedagogic processes of the school, including gender differentiation, may be realized. Drawing from the work of Foucault, Wolpe distinguishes between disciplinary measures, the moral code of the school and the structure of knowledge within the school. These procedures, she argues, are gender-blind. In the

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book discipline is articulated as a discourse and an organizing principle, but in fact it tends to read as an open ideological category into which any power struggles and forms of control are inserted, without an analysis of how the subtleties of their operation are imbued with assumptions about gender, race and class. Similarly, Wolpe claims that teachers were liked and able to maintain control of their pupils through their ‘personalities’ without reference to gender (p. 86, p. 142). Moreover, how race comes to inform definitions of and opposition to control is not explored. This is certainly somewhat different from the recent studies which see race and/or gender as categories for explicitly setting the boundaries for appropriate behaviour (for instance, McRobbie, 1978; Walkerdine, 1981; Wright, 1987; Frazer, 1988). Rather, Wolpe argues, it is notions of appropriate behaviour that contain gender. This semantic dilemma can be seen in the section on how teachers use sexual strategies as a means of control and how pupils rehearse sexual strategies as a means for testing out their sexuality and resisting control by the teachers. How can notions of gender be separated from strategies of discipline and control? This particular section is excellent for exposing the irony between official sex education which is located in health regulation, and the way sexuality is ubiquitous in classroom interaction. Through this Wolpe provides a much needed analysis of how control is achieved through gendered negotiations. The section on the curriculum challenges the suggestions made by Willis that working-class boys choose to opt out of schooling through their identification with the hardness of manual labour. Rather, Wolpe suggests a process of negative default whereby it is the absence of knowledge about alternatives to their own positioning, as a result of their cultural heritage, that leads working-class pupils to reject school culture. This, however, fails to explain the differences between the black working-class pupils of this study and those identified by Fuller (1980) and Riley (1981) who succeed through schooling. The study is important for putting on to the agenda areas that need further serious attention, such as: the use of sexual power in the classroom by both staff and pupils; masculinity in the form of noncelebration; the links between masculinity, performance and control; the inverted relationship between commitment to schooling and the emergent sexual awareness of girls; the lack of knowledge of both girls and boys as to future prospects after school; the fact that boys only pursue feminine subjects when their masculinity is secure; the future economic familial responsibility that informs boys’ perceptions.

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Finally, identification of the appropriation of schooling by both girls and boys for ‘having a laugh’ suggests a characteristic of working-class culture, black and white, female and male, which operates right across different facets of social life. Beverley Skeggs

References DEEM, R. (1980) editor Schooling for Women’s Work London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. FRAZER, E. (1988) ‘Teenage Girls Talking About Class’ Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 343–58. FULLER, M. (1980) ‘Black Girls in a London Comprehensive School’ in DEEM (1980). McROBBIE, A. (1978) ‘Working-Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity’ in WOMEN’S STUDIES GROUP (1978), pp. 96–109. RILEY, K. (1981) ‘Black Girls Speak for Themselves’ Multiracial Education Vol. 10, No. 10, pp. 3–12. WALKERDINE, V. (1981) ‘Sex, Power and Pedagogy’ Screen Education No. 38, Spring, pp. 14–26. WEINER, G. and ARNOT, M. (1987) editors Gender Under Scrutiny: New Inquiries in Education London: Hutchinson. WOMEN’S STUDIES GROUP (1978) editors Women Take Issue London: Hutchinson. WRIGHT, C. (1987) ‘Relations Between Teachers and Afro-Caribbean Pupils: observing multiracial classrooms’ in WEINER and ARNOT (1987) pp. 173–87.

With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by Women With Disabilities Edited by Marsha Saxton and Florence Howe; British edition with a preface by Merry Cross Virago: London, 1988, £4.95 Pbk ISBN 0860681661 Literature can empower individuals and groups. There is now clearly a women’s literature which celebrates women’s creativity and lives, and fights against women’s oppression. In doing so, it has an enduring impact on the culture which it seeks to change. With Wings, an anthology of American women’s writings, is a celebration of the literature of disabled women. It shouts out our talents,

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our concerns, with some wonderful pieces of work. In doing so, it claims both a place within the general culture and attempts to change that culture. The anthology is divided into three sections of poems and prose. The first, ‘Living in these bodies, these minds’, gives voice to the physical realities of disability and illness. The introduction quotes Virginia Woolf: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed…. it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. To be disabled is not by any means necessarily to be ill, but the point is that the invisibility of both disability and illness in our literature means an enormous part of human experience is missing. Nancy Mairs’s poem ‘Diminishment’ makes visible this central and universal concern: My body is going away. It fades to the transparency of rubbed amber held against the sun. It shrinks. It grows quiet. Small, quiet, it is a cold and heavy smoothed stone. Who will have it when it lies pale and polished as a clean bone? The second part, ‘Seeking help and love’, explores the impact of disability on our relationships with others. The pieces cover childhood relationships, adolescence and early adulthood and conclude with work on adult relationships and mother-hood, including reflections on growing older and facing death. The final section is called Transcendence’ and includes a wonderful piece of writing by Alice Walker, exploring her child-hood experience of disability and disfigurement, culminating in her account of her three-year-old

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daughter’s first realization that there is something wrong with her mother’s eye: ‘One day when I am putting Rebecca down for her nap, she suddenly focuses on my eye. Something inside me cringes, gets ready to try to protect myself. All children are cruel about physical differences, I know from experience, and that they don’t always mean to be is another matter. I assume Rebecca will be the same. ‘But no-o-o. She studies my face intently as we stand, her inside and me outside her crib. She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands. Then, looking every bit as serious and lawyerlike as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention: “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” (As in, “don’t be alarmed, or do anything crazy.”) And then, gently, but with great interest: “Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?” ‘For the most part, the pain left then.’ There are three facets to this book. It has a political character in that the contributions bear witness to the social, economic and political oppression experienced by disabled women. Secondly, the contributions have a literary merit which can be recognized regardless of their context. And finally, it is about women’s lives. When I go into my local feminist bookshop, therefore, will I find it in three places—in the biography, literature and ‘disability’ sections? (Just as, for example, Rosemary Manning’s autobiography is in both the biography section and the writings by lesbians section?) No, the book is isolated, segregated, as we are. Kept in its proper place, at the back of the shop, on a shelf whose title, Books by and about women with disabilities, takes up more space than the books on it do. I’ve asked why they don’t put biographies of Rosa Luxembourg, or May Sarton’s After the Stroke, on that shelf, as well as 011 the biographies shelf, but the message doesn’t seem to have been understood. To be fair, this bookshop is only doing what the rest of British society does. Significantly, while the American edition of With Wings has five entries in the Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data, including American literature——women authors; and American literature, 20th century—the British edition has but two entries in the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data, namely ‘Physically Handicapped women’ and under the editors’ names. In British society, if we are disabled then we are segregated into a special category all of our own. The other side of this coin is where the disability of a woman like Rosa Luxembourg is made invisible. Our social definitions of disability do not sit easy with the strength and

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historical importance of such a woman. As the editors of this book point out, how many of us realize that Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Tubman, Dorothea Lange, Sarah Bernhardt all had some disability or chronic illness? Where, in the huge volume of feminist writing over the course of the last twenty years, is the experience of disabled women? It isn’t that we are not there, or that we do not have the capacity to do political writing, write poems, novels, short stories, biographies and autobiographies. Why has Virago, as the biggest feminist publisher, not sought out writing by disabled women in this country, rather than just taken up the opportunity of publishing this American book? A particularly important part of our segregation is the lack of positive images. One of the purposes of this book was not just to celebrate the creative abilities of disabled women, but also to ‘enhance the selfesteem of disabled women and girls by presenting positive role models of the disabled woman as literary artist, communicator and leader of her own movement’. The association in literature—from fairy stories to P.D.James—of disability with everything that is bad, evil and ugly is such an important part of dominant ideology’s insistence that to be physically imperfect is to be an outsider. Feminism in this country has challenged sexist notions of physical attractiveness but has paid no more than lip service to the extension of this challenge to the social definitions of disabled women. In With Wings our American disabled sisters demonstrate the way in which our literature and politics are not a ‘minority’ issue, but are part of the mainstream of feminist literature and politics. We need a literature that insists on the fundamental importance of our concerns as disabled women for the wider society. In finding such a voice, not only will we be empowered as a group, but feminism in particular, and our culture in general, will be the richer. Jenny Morris

Note Jenny Morris has edited a book called Able Lives—Women’s Experience of Paralysis London: Women’s Press, 1989. She thanks Lois Keith for her comments on this review.

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The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies Edited by H.Brod Allen & Unwin: Boston 1987, £30.00 Hbk ISBN 0 04 497 035 8 Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity Edited by M.Kimmel Sage: New York 1987 £14.50 Pbk, 0 8039 2997 8 £35.00 Hbk, 0 8039 2996 X Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics R.W.Connell Polity: Oxford 1987 £8.50 Pbk, 0 7456 0468 4 £27.50 Hbk, 0 7456 0467 6 I could write reams of words about these three books: or rather what they represent. All three deal in different ways with gender, men and masculinities, power and sexuality. Books by men with an explicit focus on masculinity are not new, and nor are feminist speculations on the relation of men to the Women’s Liberation movement (WLM). A recent burst of publications, especially in North America, have placed a particular emphasis on ‘the new men’s studies’ (TNMS), with implications both within and outside academia. Of the three texts reviewed here, Brod and Kimmel present themselves as part of TNMS; Connell, an Australian sociologist, does not, but has co-authored papers in both of the other texts. In fact Brod has chapters in Kimmel’s text, and vice versa: we seem to have a cosy little coterie here. Brod’s text includes three ‘overview’ chapters; sections on ‘history and danger’, ‘work and play’, and ‘literary passions’. Almost all of the contributors are male academics from North America. I cannot hope to do justice here to the variety of issues covered in the text as a whole, so I will concentrate on the initial ‘overview’ section, which sets out to ‘place’ this book as an advocate of what Brod calls ‘TNMS’. Much of Brod’s argument will hardly be big news to readers of Feminist Review. He points out that whilst most scholarship has been (and continues to

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be) about men and male experiences, it has actually ‘not really been about men at all’ (p. 2). That is, it has seldom been about masculinity or the construction and practice of masculine power. The origins of Brod’s ideas—as he admits—lie with the WLM and feminist research. Brod calls the contributions to his text ‘critical of masculinity and at the same time sympathetic to men’ (p. 9), and recognizes that they share some similarities and a few major disagreements. He details the theoretical/ political implications of TNMS in the 1980s, referring to feminist work, and the need to understand what Bob Connell and colleagues would call ‘the crisis in hegemonic masculinity’. Kimmel’s text does at least have the more positive title ‘Changing Men’, and it even includes contributions from women (over a third). Chapters are divided into sections on ‘reformulating a male role’; ‘men in domestic settings’ (as fathers rather than batterers); ‘men and women’; ‘sexuality’ and ‘race and gender’. This text also signals the need for ‘new directions in research on men and masculinity’. The final section makes it clear which ‘new direction’ Kimmel hopes this rethinking of masculinity will take: ‘Towards Men’s Studies’. Here too we find Brod’s chapter ‘The Case for Men’s Studies’, which also appears in his own text. Kimmel’s chapter on teaching a course on the ‘Sociology of the Male Experience’ is interesting, and does at least recognize the importance of making ‘race’, class and sexuality central to any examination of mascu linity: or rather masculinities. My heart sank however, when I read that ‘class discussions tended to overemphasize the personal at the expense of a serious intellectual grappling with theoretical issues’ (p. 288, my emphasis). If one of the founding fathers of TNMS is still operating an uncritical dualism which separates the intellectual/ theoretical from the personal, then it is highly unlikely that we are witnessing the birth of a supportive antisexist academic and political movement. I was left with the impression that Kimmel’s appreciation of feminist practice was distinctly superficial. So far, ‘TNMS’ is shaping up to be very like the old Men’s Studies: the academic malestream which bears minimal resemblance to the transformatory (and threatening) capacity of feminist/Women’s Studies. Connell’s text is rather different from the other two. Connell is not an apologist for TNMS, arguing that heterosexual men in particular must be ‘detached…from the defence of patriarchy’ (p. xiii). The book falls into four parts following an introductory section: three chapters on theories of gender; three on politics and ideology. Connell’s theoretical and political starting points are Hegel, Marx and the traditional left,

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although he moves further from these sacred touchstones than most male academics. Gender and Power sets out to provide a broad theoretical and historical overview of politics around gender, sex and sexuality in western industrialized nations. It does this clearly and in some detail, but there are some notable gaps. Connell emphasizes the importance of links between the WLM and the Gay Liberation movement, yet the specific and vital contribution of lesbians to both of these movements is somehow lost, rendered invisible between the two. Secondly, the stress on transformations in the labour market, domestic work, childcare and some forms of sexuality follows the traditional focus of the left. Feminist work around the sex industry, sexual abuse and male violence was there, but less centrally placed. I was left with no sense of how we can stop adult heterosexual men from raping, murdering, and abusing women and children in and outside of family life. Thirdly, one of the most important developments in recent years has been the strengthening of international links between women; the analysis of ‘race’ and racism alongside gender, class, age, sexuality and dis/ability; of imperialism alongside patriarchy and capitalism as vital forces in all women’s lives. Connell’s book scarcely reflects these developments, partly because it is written from the perspective of academic feminism rather than women’s liberation and more ‘activist’ struggles. Black and international feminism are still barely reflected in many Women’s Studies courses or academic feminist publications as an integral part of the contemporary WLM. For me, the tendency to discuss relationships between class and gender, feminism and Marxism, with minimal reference to ‘race’ and racism, made the book a less accurate and up-to-date overview of what is happening in contemporary gender politics. On the surface this all sounds fine, but a number of things set off political alarm bells in my mind as I was reading. Firstly, why are Brod and the boys so keen to construct something called TNMS as a parallel to Women’s Studies? And why now? Why not call it the critique of hegemonic masculinity, as Connell and his colleagues do? The answer, I fear, lies in money and power. Brod, after all, is head of a Gender Studies programme, and was a Fellow at Harvard Law School in 1987–8 doing research on men’s reproductive rights. TNMS attracts resources, teaching, publications, research funding and book contracts at a time of severe financial and political restrictions in academia. Male aca demics (and they are mainly male) are able to get jobs and publications (increasingly vital to the academic career) in the area of ‘gender’, which

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exists only because of feminists’ work, whilst the latter continue to be underfunded and unrecognized (Canaan and Griffin, 1989). TNMS is part of a contemporary crisis of hegemonic masculinity. It is not simply an unsympathetic reaction against feminist gains or visibility, and nor is it a totally supportive antisexist movement. Contributors to these texts cover a wide range of positions, often combining contradictory arguments. Yet at a structural and institutional level, the launch of TNMS, along with the ideological fuss over the need for ‘new research directions’, will surely undermine Women’s Studies and feminist research: and the WLM itself, wherever and whatever she is. However sympathetic individual men might be, once TNMS is in place as it already is in the USA, and now rapidly gaining ground in the UK, I find it difficult to be optimistic about the future in times of economic and academic constraint. And whilst Bob Connell is critical of TNMS, he has no objection to publishing his work in texts edited by its apologists, who are mainly from one of the most powerful and well-established groups in academia: white middle-class heterosexual men in relatively secure teaching posts. So I would urge all men interested in TNMS to the critique of hegemonic masculinity to identify themselves as antisexist for a start. This is assuming that they read Feminist Review of course. Then they should consider joining WODGEM, or Women Don’t Get Enough Money, a fund into which men like Brod, Kimmel and Connell could pay ‘the bit of the wages they know they wouldn’t get if they were a woman’. Contributions c/o Shocking Pink magazine, 55 Acre Lane, Brixton, London SW2. Now that’s what I call supportive, and if you believe this, you really are optimistic. Subscribe to Shocking Pink anyway, it’s a lot more informative and entertaining than reading about ‘the New Men’s Studies’. Christine Griffin

Reference CANAAN, Joyce and GRIFFIN, Christine (1989) ‘Men’s Studies: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution? Network newsletter of the British Sociological Association, to be published in HEARN, J. and MORGAN, D.H. editors Men, Mas culinity and Social Theory London: Macmillan (forthcoming).

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The Sexual Contract Carole Pateman Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1988, £8.95 Pbk, ISBN 0 7456 0432 3 £27.50 Hbk, ISBN 0 7456 0431 S Rarely these days do I find myself feeling really excited by a book from start to finish. Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking books that I have read in recent years, and well worth the effort required to absorb the complex and interesting arguments it weaves. Pateman re-examines social contract theory and texts to show how the original social contract was simultaneously a sexual contract which established modern forms of patriarchy—specifically fraternal patriarchy. Carole Pateman is in no doubt that she is telling a story, but it is a story which helps us understand the bases of modern political and civil society. In the context of current feminist debates about sexual equality and difference, the uses to which the law can be put, and the deployment of contractarian arguments, the book makes a very timely intervention. The social contract, Pateman argues, was a story of freedom while the sexual contract is a story of subjection. The original contract constitutes men’s freedom and women’s subjection. Freedom in civil society is not universal but is a masculine attribute which depends on patriarchal right. The story of the original overthrow of the father by the sons which established civil society and civil freedom in the place of the rule of the fathers has one crucial element missing: the sons reject the power of the father not only to gain liberty but also to secure women for themselves. Women in modern society are subordinated to men as men or more centrally to men as a fraternity. Contract is the means through which modern fraternal patriarchy and the notion of the individual is created. Such a framework enables Pateman to develop a refreshing analysis of thorny areas that have been troubling feminist theorists for some time. One of these is the public/private, or natural/civil dichotomy. Another and related question is the notion of the universal. As others have shown before, Pateman argues that the two spheres of civil society are simultaneously both separate and interwoven in a highly complex way. The by now well-established argument that the two terms gain their meaning from their relation to each other cannot explain why, after the original contract, the term ‘civil’ (public) shifts and is used to describe not the whole of civil society but only one part. According to Pateman the dichotomy reflects the order of difference in the natural

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condition, which is also a political difference, the difference between subjection and freedom. Women have no part in the original pact. Only men are endowed with the attributes and capacities necessary to enter into contracts. The most important of these is ownership of property in the person. This is a key part of the argument. As far as the classical theorists were concerned, in the natural condition all men are born free and equal to each other and only men are individuals. Women are not born free, lack the attributes and capacities of ‘individuals’, and are thereby not party to the original contract through which men transform their natural freedom into the security of civil freedom. They are not however abandoned to the state of nature but are incorporated through the marriage contract into a sphere that both is and is not civil society. The two spheres can only be understood in relation to one another. The meaning of the civil freedom of public life is exposed ‘only when counterposed to the natural subjection that characterizes the private realm. What it means to be an “individual”, a maker of contracts and civilly free, is revealed by the subjection of women within the private sphere’ (p. 11). Although almost all the classical theorists (with the exception of Hobbes) held that capacities and attributes were sexually differentiated, women have increasingly come to be subsumed under the apparently universal sexually neuter category of the ‘individual’. Central to the notion of contract is the idea that individuals own property in their person in the shape of their capacities or bodies. Contracts thus enable and legitimate access to someone else’s body or services. This is one of the major claims of the significance of the sexual contract for feminism. Contract is deeply patriarchal in that it reflects men’s desire to control and have access to women’s bodies, the implications of which are explored in some depth in this work, particularly in relation to the marriage, employment, prostitution and surrogacy contracts. Pateman takes issue with the assumption embodied in contract, and indeed in Marxist or feminist notions of labour power, that we can separate ourselves or our bodies from the capacities that we have or the services that we perform. The notion that we can sell off parts of our selves for support or wages, as is suggested in relation to the marriage or employment contracts denies the social relations of subordination which are inherent in the arrangement. Pateman challenges the notion of the possessive individual as the universal on which contract is based. The story of the sexual contract she argues is about (hetero)-sexual relations and women as embodied sexual beings. To argue for an egalitarian marriage contract is to avoid the issue. Women are

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incorporated into society via the marriage contract but they may enter such a contract not as equal individuals but as natural subordinates. When a man marries a woman he gains right of sexual access to her body and to her labour as a wife. The marriage contract upholds patriarchal right. The outcome of feminist reforms for equal rights within marriage and on divorce would be for ‘marriage to become a contract of sexual use [which] would mark the political defeat of women as women. When contract and the individual hold full sway under the flag of civil freedom, women are left with no alternative but to [try to] become replicas of men.’ (p. 187). The discussion of prostitution follows similar lines. Prostitution is another form of the ‘original’ sexual contract, it enables men to buy sex from women and so exercise their patriarchal right. Pateman challenges the notion that the sexual contract is an employment contract like any other. This is another illustration of what she calls the ‘political fiction’ of labour power. The capitalist cannot and does not contract to use the worker’s services or labour power. The employment contract gives the employer the right of command over the self, body and person of the worker for the period outlined in the contract. Similarly the services of the prostitute cannot be used unless she is there, property in the person cannot be separated from its owner. But there is a difference in the two contracts. The capitalist has no intrinsic interest in the body and self of the worker, whereas the men who enter the prostitution contract have only one interest: the prostitute and sexual access to her body. Substitutes for women exist in the shape of dolls, but these are advertised as lifelike (unlike the machine which is a functional replacement of the worker), a literal substitute, to give the man the sensation that he is the patriarchal master. According to Pateman the feminist argument that prostitutes are workers (selling sexual services) in exactly the same sense as other wage labourers—an argument which has left me uneasy for many years —and the contractarian defence of prostitution, both depend on the assumption that women are ‘individuals’, with full ownership of property in their persons. The implications of the arguments that have been put forward are that women enter prostitution out of economic necessity, that the conditions of work are poor, and that prostitutes lack rights. The implicit assumption is that if the barriers to full participation in the labour markets were withdrawn, so that women could choose alternative employment if they wanted to, or if prostitutes had the same rights and legal protection as other workers there would be no problem. This denies the fact that the effect of the contract is the subordination of

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the woman and her body, even for a restricted time, to a man. Would the problem be solved by the woman making a contract which gave her ‘equal’ rights or do we need to challenge the notion of contract? Similarly, surrogate motherhood sharply illustrates the contradictions surrounding women and contract, which may, Pateman sug gests, indicate a further transformation of modern patriarchy. The term ‘surrogate’ indicates that the aim of the contract is to render motherhood irrelevant and to deny that the ‘surrogate’ is a mother. A woman who becomes involved in such a contract is not being paid for (bearing) a child which would amount to babyselling—which is considered generally as unacceptable—but is being paid for entering into a contract that enables a man to make use of her services. In this instance the contract is for the use of the property a woman owns in her womb. As Pateman points out, the irony is that after a long time of women being excluded from contract, the surrogacy contract is presented as a women’s contract. Women are now seen as parties to the contract yet the contract is only possible at all because one party is a woman: ‘The contractual subjection of women is full of contradictions, paradoxes and ironies. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is yet to come. Contract is conventionally believed to have defeated the old patriarchal order, but, in eliminating the final remnants of the old world of status, contract may usher in a new form of paternal right’ (218). It is difficult to do justice to such a complex, scholarly and interesting book in a matter of paragraphs. The Sexual Contract draws on a great range of political theorists, philosophers and thinkers, as well as feminist writing of more recent years, from the USA, Britain and Australia. I can only suggest that the book must be read, not only because it is a fascinating account of modern political theory, but, and more importantly, because it has significant implications for contemporary feminist debates. In particular, The Sexual Contract offers new insights for the discussion of equality measures as the route to eradicating sexual differences versus arguments which posit sexual difference as centrally inscribed in the gender-neutral categories, concepts and language of modern society. For my own part I am left with several questions. I am happy to accept that in the contracts concerned with property in the person entered into by women it is the body of a woman that is at issue. The case also is made that women are clearly excluded from the central category of the ‘individual’ in civil society. To conclude that to accept embodied identity means abandoning the ‘masculine unitary individual to open up space for two figures; one masculine, one feminine’ seems a logical endpoint to the argument. I am just left wondering not so much

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how to avoid a biological essentialism—which is a route some feminists might suggest these arguments take us, but which I think is clearly addressed by Pateman’s thesis—but how in a society where masculinity ascribes power, an autonomous, powerful, dare I say ‘equal’, meaning of ‘women’ can be constructed. How is sexual difference to be expressed? Does the notion of something referred to as the individual necessarily have to be abandoned as irredemably a patriarchal category or can some abstract notion of the individual be found which denies neither men nor women? Do we even need such a category in our struggle against women’s subordination and are liberal claims for equality bound to be fought within their own terms and necessarily severely limited? If the social-sexual contract is a story about mastery and subordination what does it mean to freely agree and what is the alternative? In the ‘reality’ of everyday life, some gains have been made by feminists in the world of contract, just as there are contradictions, complexities, powers and resistances in modern society that are not suggested by the story of the contract. Certainly during a period in Britain when the onslaught of Thatcherism means feminist claims need to be continually reasserted, it is helpful to be reminded that our attention must turn to subordination and the contradiction of slavery which lies at the heart of civil society in the classic contract theorists’ simultaneous denial and affirmation of women’s freedom. Carole Pateman’s work for me has echoes of the early feminist writing that confidently asserted the need for women’s liberation before the hyphens changed the terms of the debates. As Pateman concludes, the story is far from finished but it certainly deserves to be widely read. Sophie Watson

NOTICEBOARD

Women Against Fundamentalism On Thursday 9 March 1989, nearly 200 women gathered at the Dominion Centre, Southall, to mark International Women’s Day and discuss the resurgence of religion across the world. At the end of the meeting, the organizers, Southall Black Sisters and Southall Labour Party Women’s Section issued the following statement: As a group of women of many religions and none, we would like to express our solidarity with Salman Rushdie. Women’s voices have been largely silenced in the debate where battle lines have been drawn between liberalism and fundamentalism. Often it’s been assumed that the views of our vocal community leaders are our views, and their demands are our demands. We reject this absolutely. We have struggled for many years in this country and across the world to express ourselves as we choose within and outside our communities. We will not be dictated to by fundamentalists. Our lives will not be defined by community leaders. We will take up our right to determine our own destinies, not limited by religion, culture or nationality. We believe that religious worship is an individual matter, and that the state should not foster one religion above any other. We call upon the government to abolish the outdated blasphemy law and to defend, without reservation, freedom of speech.

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The European Forum of Socialist Feminists The European Forum of Socialist Feminists met for its Annual Conference in Manchester on 18–20 November 1988. (For reports of the first three conferences see: Sue Lees and Mary McIntosh in Feminist Review No. 23, Melissa Benn in Feminist Review No. 26, and Frigga Haug in Feminist Review No. 31.) This year’s discussion was based, as usual, on country reports about the situation of women and women’s campaigns in European (and some other) countries, and centred round the theme of ‘Entering the Structures—Changing the Structures’. The following areas/aspects were addressed in papers and workshops: women in political parties; local government; trade unions and work; equal opportunities policies and quotas as ways of enabling women to enter structures; ‘women in (political) power’ in Norway; the maleness and whiteness which imposes additional problems for Black and ethnic minority women; the need for a reorganization of both structures of production and reproduction. A conference bulletin comprising the country reports, papers and summaries of discussions in the workshops is available: £2.50 inc p&p from Claire Crocker, Garden Flat, 7 Acol Road, London NW6 3AA. Cheques payable to European Forum of Socialist Feminists. The next Forum will be 24–26 November 1989 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The topic will be ‘Women in Changing Economies: Feminist Perspectives and Strategies’. Further information from Lilian Hultin, Jakobsdalfgatan 19, 412 68 Gothenburg, Sweden. Lesbian Photographers and Writers Lesbian Photographers and Writers are invited to submit proposals for a book about the representation of lesbianism currently being edited by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser. The book will be organized thematically around historical perspectives, archiving, stereotypes, campaign work, the family album and erotic representation. It will attempt to address issues of nation, class, race and the body across the above categories. In general, the book will have a nondocumentary emphasis and it will include the work of lesbians in the USA. Please send work with an s.a.e. to Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser, c/o 7 Wilton Way, London E8 3EE.

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Irish Women Writers The Irish World newspaper is keen to provide a forum for Irish women writers and has now allocated a weekly column for their work. Irish women who are interested in making a contribution (love stories, funny stories, personal thoughts or whatever) please send contributions (800 words) to Mary Crowe, The Fiction Desk, Irish World, 307a High Road, Willesden, London NW10 2JY. 1989–90 Directory of Alternative and Radical Publications This is now available from Alternative Press Center, PO Box 33109, Dept. D, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. Price $3. ORGANISE

ORGANISE is a group of women who are producing a handbook on political skills for women working in groups, or in the process of forming them. The handbook is aimed at working-class women, Black women, women with disabilities, lesbians—groups of women who are campaigning on specific issues, or organizing in relation to particular interests. We have produced draft training materials covering a wide range of skills and activities. Recently we have been working on units on: (1) meetings: organizing, running and/or disrupting them; (2) working with differences between women; (3) understanding power relationships: recognizing and challenging oppression in institutions; (4) recognizing, using and subverting stereotypes; (5) organizing rehearsals for action. What we want now is women to try the materials out. We’re happy to talk to you about them and/or run training sessions for you (free of charge). If you’re interested in supporting the project, or becoming involved in the work please contact Organise. You can phone us (01– 354 4576) or write to 10 Dalmeny Road, London N7. Calls for Papers Oral History Society Conference 1990: sponsored jointly by the Oral History Society and by ILEA. London, 24–25 March 1990. Papers welcome on a variety of topics and in any language. Details from Roger West, 20 Wickham Road, London SE14 1NY.

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Beyond Images: Women, Culture and the Arts: 16–21 April 1990. Dubrovnik. Details from M.Diaz-Diocaretz. Conference Director, N.Z. Voorburgwal 66, Unit 52, 1012 SC Amsterdam, Netherlands. In Our Own Voices: Feminist Forms of Literary Criticism. We are editing a collection of essays written ‘in the feminine voice’. Essays should be studies of some aspect of literature. The essays should be written in nontraditional, feminine, personal forms. In other words, write the essay about the literature that you love in the way that you would write it if you were not worrying about publishing it in PMLA. Or, if you’ve already written such a piece in the past, send it—perhaps with a narrative history of what happened to it in the publishing world. Deadline for submissions is 1 January 1990. Send manuscripts to Olivia Frey, Department of English, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, 55057. Please send three copies of the essay. Please enclose an s.a.e if you would like your essay returned.

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Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodall. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh. Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell. Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. ‘The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell. Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson.

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Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble. Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall. Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh. Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. SEXUALITY ISSUE Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906–1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and the Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro-family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie. The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton. Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles. Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield. Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and ‘The Family’, Caldwell.

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MANY VOICES, ONE CHANT: BLACK FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection.

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CULTURAL POLITICS Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films, Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn. The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh. What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist. Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. SOCIALIST-FEMINISM: OUT OF THE BLUE Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex

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Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim. Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of Deradicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir.

WOMEN, FEMINISM AND THE THIRD TERM: Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips. Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Re-reading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt and Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. FAMILY SECRETS: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & Macleod. Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. ABORTION: THE INTERNATIONAL AGENDA Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia:

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Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the realm of necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey 30 CAPITAL, GENDER AND SKILL: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Mohant Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agabi. 31 THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMINISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of ’88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. 32

‘Those Who Die for Life Cannot be Called Dead:’ Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Bruegel. The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Review Article: Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the PseudoPluralists, Gorelick.

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