AS MARXISTS, we say that we live in a class society. We don't mean by this that some people have different life-styles from others, live in different areas or have snobbish attitudes and different accents. Class is the material reality on which our society and all others in the world today are based.
The vast majority of people--women as well as men--work to produce profits for the few, whether they assemble cars or televisions in a factory, type figures into a word processor or check out groceries at Sainsbury's. Or else they sweep streets, dig coal or scrub floors for the 'public sector' so that the system can keep going, with the rich making as much profit as possible and the needs of the poor supplied at the lowest possible cost. This is the working class, and without its labour the lights would go out, food and water would be cut off, communications would break down and society would cease to function.
At the top, a tiny minority of people own most of the wealth and exercise most of the control. They decide when factories will close, when prices will go up, when capital will be moved around so as to browbeat governments into doing what they want. Some belong to families who have held wealth and power for generations, others insist that they have 'worked their way up' and are 'still very working class'. But they are all part of the ruling class, and their wealth gives them power. Governments must look after their interests, and keep everyone else quiet enough for the system of power and profits to go on working.
In between, there are the middle classes--small employers, management and the upper layer of professional people. Most small employers and managers identify with the ruling class, because a society based on profits suits their own interests best. Some professionals--doctors, lawyers and the upper levels of the teaching profession--are the managers of society's services, and think much the same, though sometimes government policies such as cuts in their own professional areas may rouse their opposition.
Most professional workers, however, school teachers, nurses, civil service and council clerks, and most social workers, are simply doing routine jobs with no element of control or decision-making. They are really part of the white-collar working class, along with office workers, draughtsmen and technicians. In the last few decades large numbers of them have joined trade unions because their interests and their need to organise are very similar to those of manual workers.
The point about women is that they are part of all these classes, even though they are second-class members of them. There are rich and powerful women, women workers carrying society on their backs, and women at all levels in between. Can women unite for their own equality and liberation, or does the division of society into classes prevent them?
Up to a point, women do have a common interest in equal rights and can unite to fight for those rights. The gains that were made by the women's emancipation movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries applied to all women, such as the right to own money and property, the right to have custody of their own children, and the right to an education. A hundred and fifty years ago, when married women could own nothing, whether wages or landed estates, when mothers had no legal right to keep their children, whether little lords and ladies or half-starved infants of the slums, and when even the daughters of the rich had little education other than learning to read and write in their own homes, women of all classes needed to fight for these basic rights.
But the effect of the struggle for equal rights was to leave women more divided, even though the legal rights were a gain and the struggle for them a necessary one.
In 1831, married women could own no property . In 1981, the wife of a Tory cabinet minister was able to purchase in her own name a six-bedroomed house in Somerset with extensive grounds, while in the same year in the same county a woman living in a caravan with her disabled husband was refused a council tenancy because neither of them had a regular job. (Source: Labour Research Department pamphlet, Unfair Shares, 1981)
In 1832, virtually the only women employed outside their homes were factory workers, domestic servants and governesses. In 1982, there were women on the boards of giant companies such as GEC and the Midland Bank, and awards such as 'Business Woman of the Year' went to women running catering and clothing firms--in industries that are traditional exploiters of low-paid women--and to one woman who took over her husband's precast concrete firm and made more profits than he ever did. Yet the vast majority of women are still confined to poorly-paid, low status jobs.
In 1839, a woman could not go to university, practise as a lawyer or enter parliament. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher--university educated, a successful tax lawyer, and independently wealthy as well as the wife of a very rich man--became prime minister. The contrast between Thatcher and a politically ambitious woman of 1839, Caroline Norton, is instructive. Caroline Norton pursued her ambition by becoming a political hostess and close friend of a male politician, Lord Melbourne. As a result, her husband dragged her through a notorious divorce case, and when he was granted a separation he refused her access to her children--even when one of them was dying. Though Caroline's politics were every bit as reactionary as Thatcher's (each would recognise the other's 'Victorian Values' very well), Caroline became a campaigner for women's rights. Thatcher does not campaign for women's rights because she does not need to: the struggles of earlier generations of women have put her where she is.
Equality with men is not enough, because men are themselves not equal. As long as we live in a class society, some women will be able to use their improved position to exploit and oppress others, and they will do so without sisterly qualms or scruples. There are still comparatively few women politicians, employers and managers, but is more of them what we need? Do women employed by GEC benefit because there is a woman (Sara Morrison, prominent member of the Tory Party) on the board of directors? The answer has to be no--the aim of the company is to make profits, and that means keeping down the wages of women factory workers and closing factories when it suits GEC's plans for profit.
Would other women benefit if half the Tory cabinet were women? Or if all of them were? The performance of the 'hang 'em and flog 'em brigade' at Tory women's conferences is enough to suggest that they would not--Tory women are actually more reactionary than Tory men. Any Tory government would come to power on the employers' terms, and carry out policies ruinous to working-class women.
Women in top jobs also exploit other women directly as cleaners, housekeepers and nannies to take over the burden of housework and family duties, which for most working women means a double shift of drudgery. Nanny agencies openly admit that they recruit young women looking for a short-term career between leaving school and getting married, and the wages these women earn are certainly not in proportion to the increased earning and career opportunities they provide for their employers. The more wealth and power high-paid women enjoy, the less they need to challenge the conventional roles of men and women in the family--all is taken care of by the discreet, and invariably female, modern domestic servant.
Middle-class women, the women in between, can identify with ruling class women, demanding equal access to top jobs and business opportunities; or with working-class women, fighting for equal pay. better social services, or the right to organise. Very large numbers of lower-grade professional workers, especially, are women: they hold two-thirds of all posts in education, health and welfare although these services are mostly managed by men. Their jobs often bring them into close contact with working-class women and children.
Since the mid-1960s, middle-class women have been the main organising force behind the women's liberation movement, and they have moved left or right according to the situation. Up to the mid-1970s, when many women workers were getting organised and fighting for equal pay, most of the women's liberation movement saw working-class struggle as important and gave it support. We have seen something of this again during the miners' strike of 1984-5. But between these years, middle-class women mostly became preoccupied with other strategies, such as separatism, pacifism, and equal opportunities to move up the career ladder.
Why does class struggle matter for women's liberation? The answer can be put in many different ways, but two things need to be said straight away. The first is that as long as we have a class society, all women cannot be equally liberated by having equality with men. It is one thing to be the equal of a cabinet minister, a cabinet minister or a Whitehall mandarin; it is quite another to be the equal of a miner, a bus driver or an out-of-work labourer. If this is all that women's liberation means, then you can't expect working-class women to be particularly interested in it.
The second thing is that only class struggle holds out any hope of getting rid of this system of inequality that we live in now. Class struggle is not just the gut reaction of downtrodden men and women to the nastiness of the ruling class. It is not, as many pacifist women claim, just another form of destructiveness and aggression. It is also the way forward to a better world.
Marx said that socialism is 'the self-emancipation of the working class'. Women, too, can liberate themselves by being part of that struggle. The self-emancipation of women cannot be by a struggle of women 'as women', across all classes, because such a struggle would liberate some a lot more than others. Only by joining forces with the working class can we ever win liberation for all women.