Howard uses 'the family' to attack women's rights
By Pip Hinman
During the federal election campaign, John Howard declared that helping the family was one of the Coalition's key tasks. He said that the family was society's "key welfare unit". While this is hardly a revelation — for women in particular — its main purpose was to underscore a conservative ideological message about women's roles in the family.
Why do the conservatives push for women to see their primary role within the family? And why is this reactionary? Isn't it the case that many women, if they had the choice, would stay at home and raise the kids rather than take on the exhausting "super mum" mantle and work outside the home as well?
It's a fair guess that, given the option, a majority of women wouldn't choose to put themselves under enormous pressure to hold down a job (mostly not of their choosing) as well as do most of the household chores. Who would?
The current expansion in the work force is due to the rise in female casual and part-time work, that is, in jobs which are not high paying, not subject to awards and generally not unionised. Due to the shortage of professional jobs, and the difficulties women still face in leaping the boundaries of institutionalised sexism, the choices available to women are relatively narrow.
Howard and company say they support more women reaching the top positions in business and government. But this is not affirmative action. This is jobs for the girls, and a few selected girls at that.
Affirmative action is about providing opportunities for all women to play a greater role in society. To do this would require that the state take on much of women's workload in the home. Without free, accessible and quality child-care, how can women ever hope to be able to play a greater role in society? Without equal pay for equal work, and equal education opportunities, how can women break the gender stereotype that capitalism foists onto them?
Yet this is exactly the opposite of what the Coalition has in mind. The planned cuts of $8 billion in welfare, aged care, education, health and other social services will have the greatest negative impact on women, not only because of the tens of thousands of jobs that will be shed, but also because these services will now be privatised within the family.
Benefits for capital
The family is still the main institution in which the social tasks associated with raising of the next generation are privatised, largely under the care of women. The Coalition has to be confident that its ideological campaign will influence women if the family is to take on the extra strain without causing too much social dislocation.
Yet the true role of the family remains hidden by prejudice and mystification. It is still the main mechanism through which the ruling class abrogates responsibility for the economic well-being of the next generation of workers. It has been estimated that by carrying out unpaid labour in the home, women save the state the equivalent of 65% of GDP!
The family system also enforces a social division of labour in which women are defined by their child-bearing role and assigned tasks associated with this and the care of other family members. Apart from privatising social responsibilities which the state is far better equipped to provide, this set-up also institutionalises the unequal distribution of income, status and wealth.
Thus the family institution rests on and reinforces a social division of labour involving the domestic subjugation and economic dependence of women.
The family is also a repressive and conservatising institution. It inculcates all the social values and behavioural norms that individuals must acquire in order to survive in class society. It moulds the behaviour of children from infancy to adolescence: it trains and polices them, teaching submission to established authority.
It distorts all human relationships by imposing on them the framework of economic compulsion, personal dependence and sexual repression.
This is not to say that families do not fulfil many of people's most basic material and emotional needs; they do, but at a price — especially for women.
The effects on women have been well documented: domestic violence is on the rise; one in four women is sexually assaulted by the time she's 18 years old; the number of women in NSW murdered by their husbands has increased by 18% since 1968; women do 67.2% of the work in the world, but possess only 9.4% of the income.
It's little wonder that the traditional family unit is under stress, given the competing demands of family and work on women. Even modified family units such as single parent families and same-sex parent families face pressures as they are forced to fulfil the same economic and social role as the traditional nuclear family.
This underscores that fact that the ideological push for women to find their "natural" and ultimate fulfilment within the family more reflects the needs of capitalism than any biological or cultural reality.
If quality child-care were free, communal eating houses provided cheap and nutritious meals and other domestic chores were paid for by the state, life for women would be paradise! But this sort of arrangement would mean that a proportion of the profits currently pocketed by the ruling class would have to be spent on providing such services.
Backlash
The indispensable role of women in the family and the dilemma that the growing employment of women creates for the ruling class become clearer in times of economic hardship.
Since the end of the long postwar economic boom in the 1970s, many of the social reforms won by social movements during the previous boom period have been gradually rolled back. Women's new, democratic rights which became symbolised by the changes in law, in particular the anti-discrimination and equal pay legislation, have had little effect on the wages gap between men and women.
Worldwide, at the end of the long boom capital had to start restructuring economies in order to increase its rate of profit in a slowing world economy. Apart from driving down wages, a part of this restructuring has been devoted to reinforcing the myth that women, because of their primary role in the family, should be happy to have any kind of job and accept second rate pay.
The ideological campaign which has accompanied the dismantling of the welfare state is not directed just against women; it is affecting the working class as a whole. We're being told that because times are getting tougher we all have to tighten our belts and work harder for less. However, the backlash being directed specifically at women and racial minorities is more direct and insidious.
This ideological push finds fertile ground in the 1990s. The campaign to take back many of the democratic rights won by the movements of the 1970s and '80s was begun under a federal Labor government. Now, under the more conservative Coalition, it has ample room to grow.
Symptomatic of this era are the growing numbers of former feminists who have reconsidered their views. From Helen Garner (The First Stone) to Bettina Arndt of the Sydney Morning Herald, not a day goes by, it seems, that new "evidence" isn't presented about women's rights having gone too far.
This campaign is designed to divide and rule: it tries to make out that women, or blacks, have it better than others; that affirmative action is discriminatory; and that women and oppressed minorities already have their legal rights encoded and therefore do not need "special" privileges. The campaign against women's rights is designed to get working men and women arguing about how their shrinking share of the pie is divided up.
The is the Coalition's main strategy. Unless women and men unite in action coalitions to fight this, we run the risk of losing many of our hard-won social and democratic rights, and the lives of the majority of women will become increasingly miserable.