WSCF Asia Stance on Women: Some Comments

WSCF ASIA STANCE ON WOMEN: SOME COMMENTS

Gabriele Dietrich

I have been asked to comment on the WSCF Asia’s stance on women which is roughly formulated in the following: “In Asia the women’s issue, even when taken as a distinct problem, should be situated within the larger issue of the need for liberation of the whole society” and “the approach should be integral, both men and women working together for the liberation of women and the whole society.” One underlying assumption is that in the West women’s liberation is liberal and bourgeois and this has negatively affected Asia.

IMPLICATIONS. I would like to probe a bit into the implications of this integral approach and to put it into a historical as well as an international perspective.

1. Does women’s liberation divide the working class? One of the implications to me seems to be: Since in most of the Asian countries the vast majority of the population is poor due to exploitation, the general problem of poverty and exploitation has a priority over the problem of exploitation of women. To have a few middle class women championing women’s liberation has no doubt a good deal of absurdity in this situation. Besides, women’s liberation will divide the working class. Yet, if we forget about such middle class women for a moment and look at the working class, rural as well as urban, it becomes blatantly clear that the women of the exploited classes are more exploited than their men. This can be measured by simple standards like wages, literacy rate, even health and mortality rate, leave alone political participation. Women are sexually exploited at their place of work; they are not only beaten up by goondas but also raped, and often enough they are beaten by their husbands. And to have the burden of the double role, i.e. work outside the house and childbearing, childbearing plus household chores- all taken for granted. In other words, the working class is already divided.

In the words of Engels and Bebel, the socialist wri-

ters who analysed the problem quite deeply: women were the first slaves in history and in the family the man took the role of the bourgeois and the woman that of the proletariate. So it is the specific oppression of women that divides the working class. Women’s liberation in fighting this specific oppression can help unite the working class again. The working class will be stronger once women are drawn into the struggle but this is only possible if marital exploitation is completely overcome and forms of organisation are found which help to fight sexual exploitation in the work sphere and in the political sphere.

2. Men and women fighting together. If Engels and Bebel were right in describing women as the first slaves and in seeing women in the position of the proletariat, we can see that it is quite a difficult assumption to expect the slave masters and exploiters to fight side by side with their slaves for their liberation. Of course the solution will be that we can shed exploitation in the family relationships by joining hands in fighting against land -lords and capitalist entrepreneurs. This is the traditional stand of the socialist and communist movement. But we can see the results are quite ambiguous. While there is no doubt that in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, and in People’s China or Liberated Vietnam, women have achieved many things which they would not be able to achieve under capitalism, the problem of the double role is often still there, even with women in power in women’s liberation movements. So there is an unresolved hang-over of women’s liberation in the socialist movement of which we need to be aware. We may blame the imperfect forms of socialism which developed in these countries also for the inefficiency with respect to women’s position. But what makes us think we will be able to avoid these mistakes? What are our strategies to avoid such mistakes?

3. Cultural values referring to women. A certain effort seems to be made to establish a specifically Asian stance on the woman’s question. But then the question must be raised as to what constitutes this “Asian-ness” as distinct from other cultural horizons? It would be too simple an assumption that the integral approach as such: women’s liberation as part of total liberation of a society and women and men together fighting for women’s liberation in the framework of the larger liberation- would already be a new contribution. Apart from some extremist feminist movements, all women’s liberation tries to be

part of society at large. The question is only how this liberation is envisaged. Even if in the US, women can nowadays be bomber pilots, they see this as an integral part of the concept of freedom which they have tried to bomb into people’s minds, and which the government promotes by guaranteeing the Shah of Iran every possible support while the people of Iran are at the threshold of revolution. And we should not forget that even in the US nowadays there is a quite strong socialist wing of women’s liberation. What I mean to say is that liberation of the large society is too vague a term. It has to be concretised politically. But we will have to reckon with the fact that political concretisation will divide the women’s movement as well as the churches. Even if we say we want socialism, this is far from enough because there is no bourgeois party in this country (India) which would not have monopolised this term. We have to become concrete by concrete involvement in the mainstream of the revolutionary movement if we are serious.

As indicated before, one can see the “Asian-ness” of the WSCF Asia stance, not so much in the integral approach as such, but, as strange as this may sound, in a peculiar strength of the women’s position. It is this very strength by which they so easily afford the integral approach and need not lapse into feminism only which at the same time goes together with specific severe forms of oppression.

This peculiar position of women, while expressed in the media of culture and religion, has much to do with the mode of production. In most Asian countries the mode of production is a form of backward capitalism but at the same time there are remnants of feudal culture and of tribal culture. In most tribal societies women enjoy relative freedom. This accounts for the strength of the position of women in societies where tribal influence is still strong. Even under feudalism, whole women were under patriarchal subjugation, they were also under protection and they could occasionally rise to amazing positions of power. The question arises: how this cultural heritage which is pre-capitalist can be integrated into the anti-capitalist struggle. If the Asian people succeed in this, they will certainly have made an important specific contribution to the women’s question.

HISTORICAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Liberal and Socialist Traditions. Women’s liberation as an organised movement has received a voice only since capitalism came into being. Earlier, women’s unpreparedness to conform flared up mostly

in religious forms. A whole literature sprang up to unearth the suppressed history of women’s protest It has been discovered that the witches, tens of thousands of them burned in medieval Europe, were women who broke the shackles of feudal Catholic oppression, and later in many religious sects, women made good in a religious way for what they could not achieve in worldly influence.

In Europe the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism coincided with the tradition from Catholic to Protestantism and in fact Protestantism can be described as the religion of the urban bourgeoisie which furnished the values underlying the spirit of Capitalism. During the same epoch agricultural society gave way. Protestantism created the “housewife” modelled after the style of the “pastor’s wife” but at the same time the industrial revolution completely destroyed the family relationship within the working class, drawing men, women and children into the labour force under most exploitative conditions so that the family as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto was unmasked as “money relations” only. Social Democracy as well as Communism ended up with a class reductionist position. The woman’s question was supposed to be solved automatically in the class struggle. Neither the legal successes of the liberal movement nor the more far-reaching opportunities for women in the Socialist countries could be experienced as a final solution. Simone de Beauvoir gave expression to the socio-psychological perspective of the problem but mainly pleaded for existentialist, individualist solutions. Similarly, the feminist movement in the US started off anew in the sixties by focusing on the socio-psychological, not on the economic side of the problem.

The socialist feminist movement got new impulses during the revolt of workers and students in France and all over Western Europe in 1968. This involvement received important impulses from China and from Vietnam where women had achieved a different position in the revolutionary struggle. But the women in the West did not have the joint and extended family to fall back on. Therefore, they had to tackle the problem in a more individualistic way or had to fall back on forms of feminist solidarity. Whether the relative intactness of large families makes a decisive difference in the Asian situation is a question to be raised.

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Since Christianity has put a lot of emphasis on the family, we have reasons to go into the question of how the promotion of the family is linked

up with the promotion of private property and the state. It is not necessary to go into very much detail on Engle’s writing of the same title as in the heading above. We can roughly summarise the thesis as follows: Ancient tribal society was rather egalitarian before private property of land or cattle existed. Sexual habits were rather promiscuous. The strict curtailing of women became necessary once a certain wealth became accumulated and inheritance required the certainty of fatherhood. So private property is at the root of patriarchate and subjugation of women. Under early agriculture women’s situation was still rather favourable since they had discovered techniques of growing crops and had invented simple crafts like pottery and weaving. But once the economy produced more surplus, control over the wealth gained much more weight than the running of the household and so women lost influence. The joint family is typical for forms of economy which we term semi-feudal and has mainly to do with accumulation of landed property.

This can also nowadays be clearly seen where landless labourers tend to live in small, split-up family units, while the landed families tend to be extended. Capitalism first broke up the families of the working class, and later also the bourgeois family, which had to do with the process of every -thing being reduced to a cash nexus and even human relations receiving a commodity character. This kind of cash nexus can nowadays be seen very clearly in arranged marriages in India where the whole bargaining process gets the character of a commodity transaction.

It is important to note that in any of the great revolutions, the traditional structure broke down completely, divorce became rampant and new forms of living together emerged. It is also important to notice that the totalitarian state, be it fascism in Germany or Stalinism in Russia, by restrictive laws as well as by incentives tried to reinforce family structures, confined women to the house and to the mother role and used the attitudes of obedience. Authoritarianism developed in the family in order to subjugate the people to the authority of the state. Since Protestantism has often fostered the same authoritarian pattern of family, this point needs thorough thinking.

The Specificity of Women’s Oppression. The main factors which account for the basic disadvantages in life from which women suffer are comparatively less body strength, vulnerability during phases of

child-bearing and, most decisively, sexual vulnerability by rape, a form of violence which cannot be reciprocated. Bodily strength is relatively irrelevant since women perform severest jobs in spite or it and technology increasingly makes the problem obsolete.

Vulnerability during child bearing is unavoidable, so everything depends on whether this is considered to be just a weakness and a handicap which bars women from other responsibilities in society or whether reproduction is seen as a service to society for which collective responsibility has to be taken and society offers special facilities for women to cope with their other tasks apart from motherhood. The churches have contributed to the romanticising of motherhood but they have done little to alleviate the burden of women.

Rape is part of oppression which is only slowly acknowledged as a problem of gigantic proportions. Normally, the churches, as the rest of society, have turned a blind eye to it. Rape very clearly has nothing to do with fulfillment of sexual rage (there is no rape among animals): It is a form of exertion of power as can be seen by goonda mass rape in our villages and it is even a means of exerting state power as can be seen by rape in police stations and torture in prisons.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

I would like to leave it for you to draw conclusions as to what this means for the WSCF Asia stance on the woman’s question. I would, however, like to name a few obvious tasks.

1) Clarity of political concept is needed. What is the liberation in the context of which women’s liberation is attempted? It is possible that the SCMs cannot arrive at a clear stand, but then they have to encourage their members to join movements and parties and not to mistake the unclear position of the SCM as a substitute or something like a “third way”.

2) If the integral approach is chosen, how does one avoid reducing all problems to that of class, thus delaying the liberation of women until after the revolution?

3) Study will be needed to understand the cultural images of women in Asia, the oppressive implications as well as the potential for liberation. Here emp-

hasis needs to be on popular culture much more than the culture of the elite as far as the liberation aspect is concerned, i.e. how their ancient sisters fared in the vedas or whether in higher Hinduism Sarawathi is the goddess of education is irrelevant for village women. But there are many forms of popular protests of which notice must be taken.

4) Study will also be needed in order to understand the family as related to the mode of production and the different forms of family in different classes. A leading question needs to break down authoritarian family structures without creating isolation and fragmentation. How also can new forms of collective living be developed which will overcome traditional family structures?

5) The above mentioned “disabilities” of women can be tackled at an educational level (dismantling the ideals of “pastor-wife”, “motherhood”, etc. and creating a more wholesome image). The problems of rape at individual, collective and state level needs to be taken as human rights issue.