The price of progress is eternal vigilance

Interview by Louise Nousratpour
Wednesday May 05, 2010
The Morning Star

As Mary Davis's local rabbi awarded her a cookery book for excellence in Hebrew, he intoned portentiously that a Jewish woman is "a queen in her own home."

Davis flung the book on the floor, protesting: "I don't want to be a queen in my own home."

This episode led the precocious schoolgirl to question her strong religious beliefs and, eventually, the whole basis on which society was founded.

"As I broke with the stultifying traditions of orthodox Judaism, a whole new world opened up to me," Davis tells me over a proper coffee in her immaculate kitchen.

She joined the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (YCND) aged 15, selling the group's Sanity newspaper in school and challenging visiting politicians to explain why Britain needed a nuclear deterrent.

"The Soviet Union was branded the enemy when all they were doing was contributing to the construction of a better world," she remembers.

So Davis honed her debating skills in YCND, where her questioning of Britain's nukes led her to a socialist perspective.

"When my history teacher referred to 'a capitalist society,' I thought capitalism was to do with capital cities," she laughs.

When Davis popped into her local library to look up "capitalism," she came across "a huge shelf of books by one K Marx and I thought: 'I didn't know the Marx brothers wrote books!'

"But once I discovered who Karl Marx was, I devoured his work."

Davis comes from a traditional working-class Jewish family who, like most in the east London Jewish community, were staunch anti-fascists and respected communists for standing up to Mosley's Blackshirts.

"Though they were not political, they saw that communism was the only force capable of defeating fascism," she says.

Still, when Davis joined the Young Communist League she was nervous about telling her mum that she had effectively renounced Orthodox Judaism and joined the "atheists."

"But when I told her, she said: 'Good for you. The communists have always been on our side'."

Davis' father, who died when she was just five, and uncles were involved in the 43 Group, a militant Jewish ex-servicemen's anti-fascist organisation.

"They were particularly active in Ridley Road - the confrontations often got physical. Everyone in that group had fought in the second world war and knew all too well how to deal with the fascists."

Taking issue with the tactics deployed by some of the current anti-fascist groups, Davis stresses the importance of organising at local level and around issues that the BNP preys on - unemployment, poor housing, and general social degradation.

"The 1940s street battles against fascism took place within the community.

This wasn't a rent-a-mob from outside. These were people who lived and worked in the community.

"It's about building up an opposition within the community - otherwise there is the risk of antagonising and alienating people."

Davis became more active in the Communist Party throughout her student years and quickly rose through the ranks, first as secretary of Manchester University students' branch then as the borough secretary of Haringey, overseeing eight branches, before being elected on to the London District Committee (LDC) and later the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) executive.

She was one of the 22 members of the LDC who were expelled by the Euro-communists in 1985.

The architects of Euro-communism sought to accommodate capitalism by abandoning a class perspective in favour of so-called new social movements, which defined the working class as but one of many social forces alongside others such as race and gender.

Davis, whose major contribution to the movement has been her devotion to women's right issues, believes that this divisive approach put many of those who went on to form the CPB in 1988 off the women's movement.

"I can understand people being suspicious of what we called the movements for equality, because they were presented in opposition to a class perspective," she says.

"But we must address this - we can't call ourselves a revolutionary party unless we pay proper attention to issues of race and sex."

Davis believes the time is ripe for a "third-wave" women's movement - one that clarifies the relationship between class, gender and race oppression.

She argues that the second-wave women's liberation of the 1970s was "very middle class."

Davis, who retired from the TUC Women's Committee at April's annual conference in an emotional send-off after 25 years of invaluable service, describes the TUC women's conference as "the parliament for women."

But she fears that this, along with other union equality structures, are under threat as unions cut back amid the recession.

"That is why I use my phrase which everyone now laughs about - 'the price of progress is eternal vigilance'," she says.

Davis even quips that we might need "women vigilante groups in every locality" to spearhead the fightback.

"The public-sector cuts will increase feminisation of poverty," she observes.

Davis labels the Single Equality Act, passed on April 1, a "lost opportunity" for Labour to show serious commitment to closing the pay gap.

But she welcomes Labour's new prostitution legislation - also brought in on April 1 - which criminalises those who buy sex from anyone deemed to be "controlled for gain."

She considers it "a step in the right direction" towards the Nordic model of criminalising all buyers and decriminalising the prostitutes, while offering them financial and social support to break free of what some see fit to describe as an "industry."

Davis dismisses the liberal trend which seeks to legitimise prostitution as "empowering" women.

"This is a setback for our liberation," she argues, warning: "If we don't combat this now, we'll end up having to fight the old battles again.

"We must challenge the patriarchal ideology that lies behind the degrading sexualisation of women and young girls on the one hand and the oppressive religious traditions on the other," she emphasises.

Though she has decided to relinquish her positions in the CPB and trade union movement following her retirement last September as the London Metropolitan University Professor of Labour History, Davis has no intention of retiring as a campaigner.

As the author of the Charter for Women, she is keen to put into practice the demands highlighted in the document and link them to the People's Charter - perhaps as a stepping stone towards that third-wave movement.

Davis, who has authored several books including Comrade Or Brother and Women & Class, also wants to devote more time to writing.

She has a new book coming out in July, Class & Gender In British Labour History, and she is already working on another about the 1910 women chainmakers strike leader Mary Macarthur and her vital role in advancing women's status in trade unionism.

"Hopefully I can continue to make a contribution to the movement," Davis says with characteristic modesty.