This week, the Socialist Alliance launched its Gender Agenda: A Charter for Women's Rights. The charter aims to put women's experiences, needs and aspirations up front in the political discussion and activity of the Australian left. It reflects and, we hope, will strengthen the many struggles that women are involved in for a different sort of society — an anti-sexist society based on freedom, equality and justice for all.
The overwhelming majority of women — working-class women — are doing it very tough in neo-liberal Australia.
In the Howard government's war on workers, women — whether as the lowest paid and least secure wage workers or the majority of welfare recipients — are growing poorer, in both absolute and relative terms.
In the economic rationalists' war on public ownership and services, women's access to child-care, health care and social services is declining.
In the racist state's war on civil rights, scarved women, Middle-Eastern women and indigenous women are under siege.
In the social conservatives' war on choice, women's "primary" role as mothers, wives and "home-makers" (domestic slaves) is being reasserted, even while declining real wages leave most women no choice but to take waged work so their families can survive.
In the corporate war on women's self-esteem (and their pockets), advertising, "journalism" and television shows about women's "need" for more cosmetics, diets and plastic surgery to "improve" their appearance have reached plague proportions.
Even whether or not to have children is less and less a real choice for most women. On the one hand, the "cult of domesticity" and the idea that no woman is complete unless she has had a child are being dusted off in government policy and propaganda. On the other hand, public spending cuts, increasing housing costs, HECS debts, and so on, combined with insecure employment, paltry maternity leave and unaffordable child-care, makes the decision to leave waged work in order to have a child increasingly difficult for working-class women.
The Socialist Alliance's Gender Agenda presents some of the solutions to these and many other issues confronting women in Australia today. The demands we raise to meet women's needs are not just a "wish list" — they are both realistic and realisable. A society which was truly democratic and based on meeting human needs, not feeding corporate greed, could achieve not just equality for women, but much more for humanity as a whole.
For the majority of women, gender equality within a rotten system — that is, equal exploitation, equal suffering, equal alienation — would not bring much improvement in their lives. Only in a society without oppression of any kind can all women be really free. Such a society can be created if the skills, energy, creativity and vision of the mass of ordinary women and men are brought together in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism. Women's demands and campaigns to win real, not just formal, equality with men in every sphere will be an indispensable part of that struggle.
The Gender Agenda aims to help strengthen that struggle. It is a "work in progress" for the alliance, a catalyst for more and wider discussion and activity aimed at constructing the path forward towards women's and humanity's liberation.
We would welcome any comments on the charter that you would like to make, and offers to distribute it in your local area. Email <ne@socialist-alliance.org>, phone (02) 9690 2508, or write to PO Box A2323, Sydney South 1235.
Lisa Macdonald
& Louise Walker
[The authors are national co-conveners of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
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