Women and revolution
By Lisa Frankland and Emma Murphy
In Australia today women are told (and many believe) that we have achieved full equality. Oh yeah? Why, then, are women still paid an average of 67% of the male wage, and why are our looks considered more important than our abilities?
This isn't inevitable, and it won't last forever. At a recent Resistance branch meeting in Melbourne, Branny Schembri, Tash Izatt and Tania Jorquera spoke about the role women have played in three major socialist revolutions this century.
The Russian, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions all made enormous gains for women, despite the fact that their conditions of life before the revolutions were so backward and oppressive.
The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once said: "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it".
In Russia, it was women marching in the streets to demand an end to food shortages and the return of their husbands from the war which sparked the revolution that started in February 1917!
In the 1950s in Cuba, women joined the struggle against the dictator Batista, organising demonstrations, working in the underground movement and hiding revolutionaries in their houses. Women became guerilla fighters — there was even a women combatants' platoon — and played a crucial role in the victory of the revolution in 1959.
The Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 was the youngest and most female revolution in history. Women played leading roles within the guerilla army and made up 30% of the militia.
While before the revolution Nicaragua was a very male-dominated and sexist society, these traditional attitudes were dealt a blow by the participation of women in the struggle. Men learned through visible practice, not through theory, that women were equal in every aspect of the struggle.
What were the gains they made?
In Russia, between 1917 and 1927 (before the revolution was destroyed by Stalin's bureaucratic rule), the situation for women was freer than in any other country in the world. The newly formed socialist government passed laws giving women legal equality with men for the first time.
Marriage became a simple registration, based on mutual consent. The concept of illegitimacy was abolished. Free, legal abortion was made every woman's right. Before the revolution, homophobia prevailed legally and socially; after the revolution, all anti-homosexual laws were eliminated.
Free, compulsory education to the age of 16 was established for all children of both sexes. Equal pay for equal work was introduced (which we didn't get in Australia until 1972!), and there was free medical and health care. Women in Russia won the vote through their actions in 1917, three years before it was granted in Britain and the United States.
In Cuba, women were given equal access to work and education, and laws were passed that required men to share in housework and raising children. Both Cuba and Nicaragua called for an end to sexist images of women in the media, beauty contests were abolished, and women's bodies were not used to sell anything.
In Nicaragua there was a mass literacy campaign which particularly benefited women, who went on to make up 40.5% of the work force within a few years. The "law of nurture" was introduced, which stated that men had equal responsibility for their children and had to contribute equally to the provision of food, shelter, education and clothing.
All three of the revolutionary governments took conscious steps towards ending women's oppression — by making housework (which was previously "women's work"), a social responsibility; giving women control over their bodies by legalising and providing free and safe abortion; and by ensuring equal access to work and education.
In Australia, abortion is still illegal, and while many women have paid jobs, it's still silently expected that we will do most of the housework when we get home. Could you imagine the Howard government ever publicly stating that males must perform 50% of the housework?
To fight sexism, we must take on the whole social and economic system that creates it. As feminists and socialists, we have a lot to learn from those who came before us and from what they fought for and how. As the popular revolutionary slogan puts it: "No socialism without women's liberation, no women's liberation without socialism."