Smothering lies

By Rosemary Gillespie

There is a renewed campaign to tie women down to the home. This operation is designed to bury women under an increasing load of household labour, child-care and other demands imposed on women against their will.

The Dove soap ads, saying that mothers are unsung heroes, and soap operas that portray women as happy domestic slaves are part of the softening-up process. This flattery has no more substance than the "sweet nothings" that a veteran womaniser whispers in the ear of his latest target in order to secure her cooperation. It is nothing more than a smokescreen for a strategy designed to perpetuate the slave status of women in the household.

Capitalism is institutionalised parasitism. Women are doubly oppressed, both as paid workers and as domestic slaves who carry the primary burden of child-rearing. In 1915 James Connolly wrote, "The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave". What has changed?

A 1987 survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that in all types of households, whether they be nuclear families or non-family communal households, women do the lion's share of the domestic work. Globally, women as a class perform two-thirds of the world's labour and earn only one-tenth of the world's income. At the household level, men continue to be parasitic on women, just as the capitalist continues to be parasitic on the worker. Women are slowly chewed up by this double parasitism, until they are finally thrown on the trash heap of old age.

People of working age who are not actively serving this parasitic system, sole mothers and unemployed people, are spat out of the system as "rejects". They become the target of vicious attacks in the media. Condemned to poverty and humiliation, nobody listens to them, they become non-persons. Most people are led to believe that it is they who are the parasite.

For the sole mother, the suffering and humiliation of poverty is compounded by the agony of seeing her children go hungry, going without, growing up poor — and very angry.

Little has changed, except the language. As George Orwell predicted, this is the era of doublespeak. A bombing raid which murders innocent civilians in Hanoi or Baghdad is called an "air mission". Bashing innocent women in the home, even wife murder, is called "a domestic". Domestic slavery is called "home-making". Hard-working men and women who cannot find a job because the economy has gone into reverse are called "bludgers". Exploitation, oppression and brutality are everywhere covered with the smokescreen of smothering lies.

We are at a turning point. The cracks in the capitalist system are turning into gaping chasms. Hence the increasing attacks on unemployed people and attempts, under various guises, to force, con or induce women to stay at home, to be docile domestic slaves.

From GLW issue 12