By Zoe Horvath
[This article is a reply to Angela Matheson's "and ain't i a woman" column in the January 27 Green Left Weekly.]
Matheson's position seems to be that the leaders have been co-opted. In their heady rise to power, women in equal opportunity units and women's units have become traitors pursuing their own self-interest. They have hamstrung the women's movement which put them there.
Is it really true that women's units were set up to deflect a fundamental challenge to capitalist patriarchy posed by radical and socialist feminists? A variety of feminist trends contributed to the political pressure for changes within the bureaucracy — the radical and socialist ones were not dominant.
The main trend was a liberal one — equal rights within the system together with the politics of individual lifestyle. Faced with the failure of the favoured feminist processes to achieve real change, women turned to work in less political directions such as women's refuges and health centres. While valuable, these activities took away energy from the organisation required to achieve reforms such as equal pay and greater equality of opportunity.
If we are to seek the causes of the decline of the women's movement, we need to look at the weaknesses of that movement, together with the forces opposing it. "Femocrats" cannot really be held responsible for all our woes, or even some of them.
Of course it is true that any achievements by feminist public servants have been won through the power of the broader women's movement, of which they have only been the conduit. The current scramble by politicians to attract the women's vote is certainly a tribute to the impact of the earlier feminist movement on the minds of women everywhere. However, "femocrats" such as Jenny George and Anne Summers, while owing their positions to the women's movement, must be given some credit for effectively conveying the message to the pollies.
How are we to understand the gains and limitations of women's units inside the system: as a betrayal of self-seeking individuals or as an effect of contending forces and constraints? For those of us interested in "real change", the latter must be more useful and progressive.
In the area of equal employment opportunity, there are contending philosophies — a managerialist one and a feminist one. The managerialist position emphasises better use of skills, better customer service, general efficiency. For the managerialists, it is largely a numbers game — improving the distribution of groups such as women, Aboriginal people, people with a physical disability and from non-English speaking backgrounds through all levels of organisations and across all occupations.
Feminist practitioners emphasise the gendered nature of organisations — how the power of men over women is set in the organisational structures themselves, how the very notion of merit carries assumptions about the relative value of skills predominantly carried by men and those carried by women. But even those with a feminist agenda are forced to use the managerialist jargon of efficiency because, in the final analysis, equal employment opportunities are a managerialist initiative, a contradiction which feminist practitioners wrestle with every day.
Exactly because the role of feminists in the bureaucracy is to use whatever levers are available to them there to achieve change, it is simply unrealistic to expect them to use strategies of opposition to the system such as chaining themselves to railings. The question is, how effective or otherwise are they, given the constraints within which they work, and is such work a useful complement to the oppositional strategies of those outside? The gains such as equal pay, permanent part-time work, work-based child-care are far too valuable to be sneezed at, and those inside the bureaucracy have played their part.
Certainly, a broad range of women who have not fought for feminist goals have benefited from the struggles of their sisters both within and outside organisations. It is more among these we find those who put a women's face on male control and the managerialist numbers approach to EEO rather than real structural change in an organisation sought by feminists.
Current political agendas are directly opposed to the kinds of organisational processes necessary to improve equal employment opportunity, let alone a shift in real power. De-regulation and devolution of control of managerial decisions and the emphasis on individual competition and performance make the implementation and monitoring of progress well-nigh impossible.
Now we have buzz words like "managing diversity" and "mainstreaming" EEO. Both of these aim to do away with legal EEO obligations and the use of specialist EEO advice. Increasingly, those without a background in either the women's movement or specialist EEO work are being appointed to head specialist EEO and women's units. Their task is to push through
the right-wing agenda and undermine whatever effectiveness these agencies have. Are feminist practitioners to be held responsible for that?
But how is the predicament of feminist practitioners within the system different from, say, that of trade union officials who must work within the constraints of capitalist power? There are even greater pressures towards cooption of trade union leaders than of women within the nearly powerless women's units, but do we deny the necessity of trade unions for this reason?
And are not all changes, whether achieved from action through the system or in opposition to it, simply reforms well short of the "real change" of socialist feminist revolution?
All the advances of capitalist democracy and the welfare state, now under extreme threat, are reforms won in struggle but which can also be seen as responses of the capitalist class to divert more revolutionary impulses. Do we for this reason dismiss these gains as not amounting to "real change"? Just because all these gains, including those made within the bureaucracy by feminists, are under threat, we can appreciate their value and fight for them. This does require oppositional politics.
It is the process of the fight which educates all involved about the dynamics of the capitalist system and nature of the task ahead in achieving real change. This is the ultimate revolutionary contribution of all these struggles.