A stalled revolution

Sunday February 3, 2008
The Morning Star (Book review)

LOUISE NOUSRATPOUR learns how a class-conscious campaign for equal rights for women could be born out of the Stop the War Coalition.

In her book Material Girls, Lindsey German argues that the women's liberation is a "revolution stalled," because it has come up against the limits of class society.

"Neoliberal globalisation has highlighted the limits of liberation within a society based on class exploitation and private property," she writes.

Women can advance as long as their rights do not threaten profits or the status quo. Any demands for equal pay or full-time free childcare, for instance, will be vigorously resisted.

Despite working in unprecedented numbers and joining unions at a faster rate than ever, women still earn just 82 per cent of men's wages and they are woefully underrepresented in top jobs, as MPs and in union leadership roles.

Fewer than 20 per cent of MPs are women and only 15 of the 62 TUC affiliated unions have female general secretaries or chairs.

According to the UN Development Fund for Women, the value of women's unpaid work stands at £6 trillion a year - almost 50 per cent of world GDP.

This virtual slavery is translated into super profits for big business, while leaving many women destitute and with little or no prospect of a career or a decent pension.

German points to a number of reasons why the vibrant and militant women's liberation movement of the last century has stalled or even regressed in the past decades.

Ironically, the arrival of Britain's first female leader Margaret Thatcher is where it all went wrong.

Her merciless attacks on the working class, through anti-union legislation and cuts to pay and social services, had a devastating impact on women's conditions and the progressive wing of the equal rights movement.

In the 1980s and '90s, many bourgeois feminists concluded that equality has more or less been achieved. The emphasis was on the individual woman's responsibility to overcome sexist barriers and prove that she can be every bit as tough as men.

German reserves her harshest criticism for this breed of feminism, which, she says, has "hit a dead end" because of failure to address class issues and confront "the basis of the exploitative system of capital."

The model "liberated" woman is the careerist who juggles work and home while looking pretty and sexy for her man.

Fashion, beauty products and cosmetic surgery have become lucrative industries that prey on the anxieties of women and, increasingly, men, to look the part. Young people are bombarded with sexual images in the media and see prostitution glamorised in TV series such as the Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

And there is no pressure on those who have "made it" to use their influence to defend their downtrodden sisters. "Every woman for herself" is the message.

"Most working-class women are discovering that they get no special favours from this new breed of women," German observes.

In a chapter on war and liberation, she talks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how this has impacted on Muslim women in the West. She even tackles the controversial issue of the hijab.

Here, she offers hope that a new and class-conscious campaign for equal rights could be born out of the Stop the War Coalition, which has so many women activists in leadership roles and as speakers and organisers.

"Only now, against a background of growing movements against the ravages of neoliberalism and war, are the ideas of women's liberation beginning to reconnect with questions about class and how a genuinely equal society can be created," German says.