Social solution to a social problem
Social solution to a social problem
By Sue Bolton
Economic independence and equality are preconditions for the true liberation of women. While Australian governments feign support for these rights, the capitalist system they protect still withholds them from most women.
Women in Australia have yet to win the right to full-time employment and equal pay. Women workers earn on average 67% the wages of men, and are the majority of part-time, casual and low-paid workers.
Affirmative-action programs, with legally enforced quotas, are still essential to redress the effects of decades of systematic discrimination in hiring, training and promotion.
However, women will not be able to enjoy genuine economic equality as long as we are forced to bear the main burden of domestic work. According to a 1992 study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, women spent on average 34 hours a week doing $139.4 billion worth of unpaid household work, twice the amount of time men spent on average on this work. Even women with jobs spent an average of 29 hours a week on unpaid domestic work.
The solution to this, we are told, lies in individual women negotiating with the men in their households to take a bigger share of the work.
But this is a socially created problem and demands a social solution. Domestic slavery won't end without the socialisation of domestic services through easily accessible, low-cost, high-quality public laundries, cafeterias and restaurants, house-cleaning services organised on an industrial basis and so on.
Capitalism's attempt to partially socialise this work — for example, in the rise of fast food chains — is distorted by the profit motive, but it does prove that it's possible.
The raising, welfare and education of children should also be recognised as the responsibility of society, rather than solely the burden of individual parents. Quality child-care services are essential to enable women to participate equally in the work force. Yet existing public child-care services, already a long way from what is needed, are facing funding cuts and are being forced to raise charges, cut staff and reduce their facilities.
In a cynical attempt to justify more attacks on social rights, John Howard has declared that the "family is the best welfare system". This "back-to-the-family" message is reinforced by a barrage of propaganda from pop psychologists, religious fundamentalists and "back-to-nature" fanatics.
This reactionary message also plays on the reality that the family is the only institution to which most people can turn for the satisfaction of some basic human needs, including love and companionship in a society marked by alienation and despair.
But that's only one side of the story. Under capitalism, the family remains the primary means of transmitting private property and perpetuating class divisions from one generation to the next.
Each family is supposed to be responsible for the economic needs of its members; there is no concept that society as a whole should provide all of its members with a secure and comfortable standard of living.
The family system also imposes a social division of labour based on the subjugation of women and their economic dependence on an individual man. Upon this foundation, a pervasive sexist ideology portrays women as physically and mentally inferior, and biologically unfit for roles other than procreation and domestic labour. The low status of women fosters anti-woman violence, including rape and domestic violence.
In the face of the social conservatism being whipped up by the ruling class, some who once fought for social solutions to women's oppression have lowered their sights and are now looking for individual solutions. But that's futile — unless you are rich.
The struggle for women's liberation poses the challenge of a radical reorganisation of society from its smallest repressive unit — the family — to its largest — the state. Such fundamental change cannot take place under capitalism. At the same time, without the conscious and equal participation of women, the working class will not be able to defeat capitalism and build a socialist future.
[Sue Bolton is a member of the national committee of the Democratic Socialist Party.]