BY KATELYN MOUNTFORD
In the last 25 years, capitalism's neo-liberal offensive has extended like a gag around the women of the world. It has stripped and privatised public services, pushing the duty of care back onto the family unit and, by extension, women. It has casualised the workforce and destroyed trade unions, leaving many unemployed or underemployed, and many more working in worse conditions for lower pay.
Underpinning capitalism's clawing back of the gains for women and working people, gains that were made by the mass movements in the 1960s, and '70s (public child-care provision, award wages and benefits, affirmative action, and so on), is a sustained ideological campaign to erode the ideas and expectations of equality and fairness that were created by those social movements, including feminism.
The term "backlash" was first used in reference to the women's liberation movement by Susan Faludi in her 1991 book of that title. It refers to an historically recurring ideological and propagandistic reaction against waves of mobilisation and politicisation among women. She showed that, in the advanced capitalist countries since the late 19th century, each increase in feminist struggle was met with, and quelled by, an ideological campaign aimed at demobilising the movement and paving the way for its gains to be reversed.
The backlash that has followed the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and '70s is the most concerted yet. It is based on two pillars, reflecting the two main gains of the second wave.
First is the notion that women's paid work is secondary to their role as child-rearers and home-makers. This justifies and extends women's concentration in casual waged work with little or no protection. The second is the idea that motherhood is natural and sacred, and therefore that women's reproductive lives should be regulated by the state and the church.
These ideas are becoming more vitriolic every year, a result of both the lack of resistance from a demobilised women's liberation movement and the escalating attacks by a system based on extracting more and more profits from ordinary people's labour. To deepen that oppression capitalism must ensure, as much as possible, widespread public acceptance of this oppression as somehow natural or inevitable.
The main idea dished up daily by the backlash claims that the different roles played by men and women in society, and the different values and rights accorded to men and women as a result of these roles, are based on fundamental biological differences. Thus, sexism, which is really just "differences", will always exist.
In the 19th century, the biological determinism argument was used to justify women's confinement to the home with claims that men and women had different bodily temperaments women preferred and needed a warmer environment, so it was better for them to stay in the house. Today, the biological fact that women give birth is used to assert that women have an innately motherly, nurturing quality and should, therefore, have children and do the child-care. And they don't need to be paid for it, because it's in their nature!
Today, biological determinism must take into account the shifts in social attitudes that were generated by the women's liberation movement. So, the arguments become more "scientifically" sophisticated.
One example recently on the best-sellers' list Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps by Allan and Barbara Pease attempts to explain a number of "universal truths" such as "why men are interested in sex, but women want love", or why men happen to be dominant in the most highly paid jobs, by pointing to supposedly different cognitive processes. All the historical evidence about the consequences of women's more limited access to education, legal rights, etc. is dismissed:
"Since the 1960s a number of pressure groups have tried to persuade us to buck our biological legacy. But the question needs to be asked: If women and men are identical as these groups claim, how could men ever have achieved such total dominance over the world". The logical extension of this claim is that women were never oppressed or stopped from doing anything which they wanted (such as work): it's just that they never wanted to do these things.
Another recent example of biological determinism on the bestsellers list is The Surrendered Wife by Laura Doyle. According to Doyle, relationships have suffered since the second wave of feminism because women became acquainted with the idea of being "in control" through their mass access to the work force. They translated this into personal relationships and became "controlling" and destructive.
The solution, Doyle says, is to acknowledge inherent differences and therefore accept different relationship roles for men and women. "In marriage as in ballroom dancing", she muses, "one must lead and the other must follow".
Doyle argues that to have happy relationships, women must learn to relinquish control and surrender. So, she encourages women to stay with verbally abusive partners, claiming that the abuse will stop when the women stop trying to control their partner. Thousands of women across the United States, Britain and Australia are now attending "surrendered circles" meetings every week, established around Doyle's ideas.
Such backward ideas get a hearing among women because the backlash is bulldozing what remains of the feminist legacy by seizing on the frustration and disappointment felt by women, who remain shackled and unfulfilled despite the women's liberation movement. The backlash takes this dissatisfaction and turns it back onto women themselves.
The reason you are unhappy, the backlash proclaims, is because your expectations are unrealistic. Of course you are unhappy with your job you expected equal pay; that's ridiculous! You expected to be able to have a career and children; how utopian and selfish.
Inequality is not the problem, according to the backlash. It's that women assumed equality. And the fault for these false hopes rests squarely with feminism. The solution, then, is not to fight another losing battle, but to lower your expectations to bring them into line with "biological and social reality".
One of the primary effects of the backlash is to accost women on an individual level and to infect them with fear and guilt. The effect is to politically debilitate women, making them less able and willing to organise and mobilise to defend and expand the gains of the second wave. Myths are rife in the mainstream media and popular culture about the naturalness of marriage and childbearing for women, and they are increasingly being made into policy by governments.
As the backlash convinces a new generation of women that marriage and motherhood are their primary goals in life, the state and corporations can begin to shed the costs of child-care, paid maternity leave, support for single mothers and so on.
The existence of an infertility epidemic is one of the most common backlash myths. It's just been repackaged by Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her latest book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (published in Australia under the title, Baby Hunger). This book, like many before it, claims that an "epidemic of childlessness" has beset women in
western society.
In fact, Hewlett is referring to a very specific category of women those with an independent income, or "high achieving' women as Hewlett calls them. According to Hewlett, women who "prioritise work" find their chances to have children declining with each passing year, until 30 creeps up on them and they find themselves barren and baby-less. This is unintentional, she says, and causes widespread distress and depression among women.
Hewlett's evidence is very thin (a sample of 1647 "high-achieving" women supplemented by anecdotes from nine of her friends). A more scientific survey would have found that most western societies are facing a sharply declining birth rate, but one not caused by, or limited to, women with an independent income.
Infertility is not sneaking up on women. By and large, women are choosing to either have fewer children, have children later or not have children at all.
Furthermore, the scientific evidence shows that if any group is facing an "infertility epidemic", it is males. Men's sperm count in Western countries is now typically one-third of what it was in the 1930s. Yet where's the hysteria about it? Where is the gaggle of best-selling specialists preaching to young men about how to increase their sperm count? Where are the government-funded religious groups pressuring men to view each sperm as a potential and sacred human being?
Even if the declining population rate is due in part to some women deciding not to have children, the government's response to the case of Jennifer Morgan last year is telling. Morgan launched (and eventually won) a legal challenge to her inability to access IVF programs because she is a lesbian (single women are also barred from fertility treatment programs). John Howard's response, with the backing of the churches, was to argue that every child deserved a mother and a father.
The backlash ideologues lament the "fertility crisis", but they simultaneously seek to prevent fertility among anyone choosing to live outside the nuclear family form.
As a consequence of the guilt induced by the backlash arguments pumped out by the mainstream media, women question their expectations that they have a right not to be abused and to leave violent or unhappy marriages, that they have a right to equal pay for equal work, and funded child-care services, that they have a right to choose abortion, and to live a fully independent life or in a non-nuclear family.
Australian surveys of attitudes among young women in particular, indicate that such expectations have not yet been substantially eroded. However, as the chasm between expectations and reality w
idens, the contradiction experienced by women is having damaging effects on their self-confidence, sense of purpose and mental health.
Many feminists, capitulating to the backlash, now declare that liberation is an individual matter. Women can achieve everything they wish if they just work hard enough. The laws and prejudices against women running for parliament, or getting a business degree and working her way into top management positions have gone. Women are doing it all the time. After all, "girls can do anything" and, as the new runaway best-seller Girlosophy puts it, they should do whatever they want without worrying about what other people think.
There are serious shortcomings to the "girls can do anything" mantra. Most women, in the First World but most especially in the Third World, can't simply do anything they want. Even in Western countries, where women's lot is far better than in poor countries, few women are able to
complete a business degree, let alone reach the top of the corporate ladder. One in four women will still be paying off her HECS debt at the age of 60 (compared with one in 25 men), and while women have won the formal right to work, that doesn't
automatically come with equal pay and opportunities in the workforce. In fact, the gender pay gap has been increasing since
the mid-1990s.
Abortion access is increasingly restricted, and one in three women in Australia will have been forced into a sexual situation against their will by the time they are 16. Many more will experience rape during their lifetime. To argue that individual women can overcome all of this if they just try hard enough ignores the structural nature of sexism in capitalist society.
Furthermore, it actually strengthens the backlash because it implies that those women who do not surmount the sexist barriers to self-determination have failed as individuals it is their fault.
Since women's access to education, jobs, child-care, abortion, etc., is increasingly determined by their access to money (that is, their class position), working-class women are bearing the brunt of the backlash.
A minority of women have the personal resources to start a business or run for parliament, but for the majority, there is no time, space or money to do this.
Government cuts to health services and aged care means taking care of elderly and sick family members. Today, 76% of those who care for people with a mental illness and 72% of those who care for people aged over 75 are women, and most receive no government assistance. The Howard government's cuts to child-care funding contributed to a fee increase of 56% between 1991 and 2000, forcing many women out of the full-time workforce.
Women in the top 5% of income earners are affected much less by these attacks than women on average pay. They can afford a nanny, or a private nursing home for elderly relatives, or private health insurance, leaving them more time and energy to pursue individual solutions to sexism.
A tiny minority of women may break free of the general pattern and be able to make many choices about the direction of their lives. But this does not challenge the existence of sexism in society as a whole, nor does it weaken the current backlash against women as a whole.
The only way to seriously challenge and beat back the backlash is by challenging women's oppression itself. This means understanding where women's oppression came from and how it operates, and recognising that, while campaigning for and winning legal and social reforms is crucial to improve the immediate conditions of women's lives, getting rid of sexism completely requires getting rid of the class structures in society the system that gave rise to women's oppression and cannot survive without it.
If the history of the backlash demonstrates anything, it is that reforms won at one time are never secure; they are snatched away by capitalism at the first opportunity because capitalism simply cannot work without sexism. Just funding the global unpaid domestic labour of women, for example, would cost around US$11 trillion per year, an amount that a profit-based
system cannot afford to pay.
The challenge for feminists in this time of backlash is to find the ways to rebuild a mass women's liberation movement which is an indispensable part of a mass revolutionary movement. In the process of doing this collectively, we will be able to chip away parts of the backlash every day by challenging its ideas and fighting for a society which does not require women's exploitation to survive.
In the here and now, this means explaining and criticising every instance of sexism, and presenting an alternative: the idea of the revolutionary woman as opposed to the surrendered wife. It means learning about and from the history of revolutionary and feminist movements, and contemporary feminist struggles in all parts of the world.
One thing we can be sure of is that history is on the side of liberation. Periods of backlash have always been overcome by even bigger freedom movements, and the deepening social and ecological crises being generated by international capitalism have created the conditions for peoples' resistance.
There have been major mobilisations against neo-liberalism in many Third World countries in the last few years, and even in the rich, relatively comfortable First World, we are seeing the emergence of a new preparedness to protest against the global system of greed, war and inequality.
It is not possible to liberate women without a socialist revolution, but for any woman today, participating in movements for social change is the closest thing to liberation we've got because it offers us the chance to do everything that the backlash tells us not to. It enables a woman to scream political slogans into a megaphone when the backlash tells her she should be seen but not heard. It helps her to understand sexism and challenge it alongside others, when the backlash tells her it's all in her head or there's nothing she can do about it. And it encourages her to convince other people to raise their voices against sexism too. That is why, in the midst of a backlash, more than ever, a woman's place is in the struggle.
[Katelyn Mountford is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 18, 2002.
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