The fight for a working class women’s movement

We publish here three documents produced by Workers Power during our involvement in the National Working Women’s Charter Campaign.

The Campaign’s Third Conference which took place on 17th June 1978 marked the final extinction of whatever potential the campaign once possessed as a fighting women’s organisation based in the Trade Unions. ‘Why the Charter has collapsed’ was produced and circulated in the campaign in February 1978 by our comrades in response to the collapse of many Charter groups, the virtual boycott of the Charter of the I-CL. The document deals with the history of the national campaign starting in 1976 with a conference of 300 delegates, including a small but significant number of TU women, and goes on to document how the political strategy adopted by the IMG, the largest left group in the Charter, led the campaign into a crisis. The IMG’s conception of building a ‘broad class struggle alliance’ led them consistently to oppose any amendment of the Charter programme in case it would offend ‘sympathetic’ trade union leaders who they were trying to woo to the campaign. For the same reasons they took no part in attempting to build Charter fractions in the unions which would have immediately had to fight those same self-same bureaucrats. At the same time they were unwilling to take any step which might upset their socialist feminist allies who, while they remained in the campaign, were consistently hostile to an orientation towards working class women.

‘Why the Charter has collapsed’ proposed a different strategy involving the adoption of a fighting programme for the Charter that could link the present struggles for abortion rights, equal pay, the right to work, etc. to the struggle for workers’ control, for political equality, to the struggle for socialism and women’s liberation. A programme providing clear direction in struggle, Charter fractions in the unions and a national newspaper coordinating such a campaign could, we argued, have offered the possibility of actively intervening in the struggles of women trade unionists, drawing the activists into the ranks of the campaign. The strategy adopted only disillusioned the modest numbers who attended Charter groups and conferences. We invited the I-CL, who are formally committed to building a working class women’s movement around a fighting programme, to join with us to fight for this orientation against the IMG. But the I-CL refused, preferring to leave without a fight and without any alternative operative strategy for building such a movement themselves.

It was in this situation that we put forward to the June Conference the action programme and commentary which seeks to put into context and explain the demands of the programme which we present here. Previously at the 1977 conference, when the possibility existed of building the Charter as a campaign involving individual women’s movement and Trade Union activists, and with a serious potential of forming Charter groups in the unions, Workers Power had put forward an amended Charter which could have been the basis for united action between organisations — political groups and trade unions which differed widely on other questions. However this unity did not emerge because both the affiliated unions and the major affiliated political group (the IMG) put little or nothing into the campaign. The recent conference called to try and ‘revive’ the campaign met facing a situation where much of these possibilities had been lost.

The conference represented a meeting of activists of the campaign, most of whom regarded themselves as revolutionary socialists and as such we argued in a leaflet to the conference the choice was, ‘either to adopt a distinctive and effective strategy to fight for in the women’s and Trade Union movement, or to break up into the various campaigns of these movements.’ It was in this context that we put forward a programme which we believe addressed the central questions that such a movement must face. What strategy and tactics meet the present offensive? What is the role of working class women in the struggle for women’s liberation? What can women expect from the left Trade Union leaders? The conference in which the IMG held the majority of delegates rejected such an approach, arguing that such a ‘full socialist programme’ was for revolutionaries, whilst they were in favour of building the broadest possible movement, winning ‘as many friends as possible’ in the Trade Union movement. The IMG strategy, opportunist to the core, aims to launch a broad women’s paper, not of course counterposed to any of the existing campaigns, focussing on the Trade Unions — an approach which clearly came across as leaving questions of women’s liberation to the women’s movement, while concentrating on economic issues affecting women in the unions. It was on the basis of these adopted policies that Workers Power withdrew from the Charter Campaign at the conference.

Whilst a united front between revolutionaries and militant women trade unionists whose political allegiance is still given to the Labour Party can be formed on a single issue or on a limited series of issues — a grouping of would-be revolutionaries has no business hiding behind a reformist platform. Ridiculousness is added to opportunism when that platform has no supporters except themselves. The June Conference presented the ludicrous spectacle, hitherto reserved for the SWP economists, of IMG members pretending to be pure and simple trade unionists — uttering such gems as that ‘consciousness comes from action’ and asking theoretically ‘how can I take this programme into my trade union branch?’ Whilst the Charter represented in however limited a way a united front with reformist women trade unionists it had some value. Even then it was the duty of revolutionaries to keep its platform, and policy sharply oriented to the key struggles of the day — raising demands which met the pressing needs of women and which put the bureaucrats to the test before their mobilised members. This we attempted to do at the national conferences in 1976 and 1977 — at the trade union day school in November 1977 and through the pages of Women’s Fight. The IMG strategy progressively sapped the potential for united action within the framework of the campaign. The June Conference was therefore little more than a belated post-mortem. The Socialist Challenge headline ‘Breathing Back Life into the Patient’ contains an unconscious irony coming from the chief agent of the Charter Campaign’s demise.

The ‘realistic’ intervention of the I-CL continued their policy of giving ‘left’ cover to the IMG. From November onwards ‘realism’ showed the Charter to be already dead and any attempt to rebuild it or to fight the IMG fruitless — better to keep silent and hope the IMG or the SWP would launch another women’s campaign to act as a flaccid left critic within — a milieu they seem to have found in the SWP journal Women’s Voice.

Both the IMG and the I-CL accuse us of sectarianism. Not so. We will fight alongside women in struggle be they reformist or centrist — be it on a single issue or in groupings within the unions on limited or inadequate programmes. But we will not ‘sink our differences’ with Reformism and Centrism because we know these present a disastrous strategy or no strategy at all for working class women. We will, as we did at the last conference of the WWCC, propagandise for our programme as a whole, as a coherent strategy for the struggle for women’s liberation and socialism. We will demand of groups like the IMG and the I-CL what their programme amounts to. But we do not stop there — we are not abstract propagandists or sterile sectarians. We know our programme to be an operative one and we will fight for its demands and conceptions in every struggle as they apply to that struggle. We call on all those who agree with this perspective to join us in the fight to build a revolutionary communist current in the women’s and trade union movement.

The Working Women’s Charter Campaign collapses

The Working Women’s Charter Campaign has collapsed. There are only two or three geographical groups still in existence, Women’s Fight is no longer being produced, and the Secretariat, owing to the de facto withdrawal of most of its members, has stopped meeting. What has happened in the WWCC since its inception in 1974 that has led to this collapse?

The Working Women’s Charter was drawn up by the London Trades Council (now defunct) by a group of CP activists, with the specific intention of taking a series of united immediate women’s demands into the trade union movement. The emphasis was primarily on adoption by national trade unions, to push these unions into doing something for women. But a number of women, active both in the women’s movement and the Trade Union movement, saw the Charter as a potential force linking women’s oppression in the home with her oppression in the workplace. They recognised the necessity for a campaign to build support for the demands of the Charter at a local level. The International Marxist Group were prominent in pushing this approach. Thus the Working Women’s Charter Campaign was born and local geographical groups formed.

At this point the CP and the national unions realised that the WWCC represented a potential for organising a fight in an organised way at a rank and file level and disassociated themselves from the campaign.

The Charter Campaign until the adoption of a national structure and newspaper in 1976 was extremely amorphous, lacking the ability to tackle the very real problems facing women through attacks on living standards, abortion rights, unemployment, or to organise working class women to take up these issues. The differences in political outlook of those active in the campaign, the problems of organising, were clouded over by the lowest common denominator approach symbolised by the Charter itself. As the situation changed this document was becoming more and more inadequate even as a list of immediate reforms. It did not take up women’s most pressing needs — ‘A Woman’s Right to Work’ was not included, nor a demand for free abortion on demand, the sex discrimination legislation was overlooked, cuts in social expenditure were ignored, and most importantly, so was the necessity of building women’s caucuses in the unions.

Thus at the first National Conference held in 1976, attended by over 300 delegates, there was a very firm commitment to tackle these problems and re-orient the Campaign to take into account the changing political situation. The IMG, the largest political grouping in the Campaign, did not disagree with the principle of amending the Charter — far from it. They participated in drawing up a new Charter which was passed at the 1976 Conference and so became ‘policy’ of the Campaign. But this could not become the new Working Women’s Charter there and then. No, it had to be discussed ‘by the labour movement’ first and a new Conference held before that could happen.

Why did the IMG place this seemingly contradictory position before the Campaign? The answer is simple. The IMG could agree with the amendments ‘in principle’, but when it came to fighting for these principles in the working class that was another matter. They proposed instead a campaign to woo the leaders of those same unions who had already rejected the Campaign around the Charter into the Campaign. The IMG believed, wrongly as events have shown, that by further discussion — discussion not a struggle — those leaders would see the error of their ways.

This approach is disastrous. The trade union bureaucracy is a privileged broker between capital and labour, constantly subordinating working class interests to maintain the status quo within which they operate. An integral part of this status quo is the oppression of women — reflected in the indifference and hostility they face in the TUs. The bureaucrats can be no reliable support for working class women fighting for their rights — indeed they are their principle enemy within the working class. This ‘general truth’ is intensified and sharpened at a time of economic and political crisis. The TUC is willing to stab any section of workers in the back to preserve the anti-working class Labour Government. The Trade Union lefts, who talk about women’s rights, will only act under pressure of independent rank and file mobilisation and their inability in the final analysis to break with Labourism makes them treacherous allies. The key lesson is to warn women that they, with help from rank and file male trade unionists, must take control of their own struggles. And in 1977 this was borne out by the attitude of the AUEW (who have adopted the Charter) bureaucracy’s attitude towards the Trico strike — refusing to provide creche facilities for the women strikers, limiting the role of the women in the strike to a passive one, not fighting to bring the male workers in the factory out on strike and not calling for solidarity strike action. And it was the NUPE officials who sabotaged the occupation of the Weir Maternity hospital in South London, APEX officials and the TUC who sold out Grunwick.

The IMG’s adaptation to reformism in the Trade Union movement is exemplified by their conception of the ‘Women’s Rights Rally’ called and mainly organised by the Working Women’s Charter Campaign. The IMG saw the Rally as an assessment of the Government’s legislation in a totally passive way — 2,000 people meeting together on as broad a level as possible to recognise that the government’s legislation is inadequate. The necessity for choosing key questions and hammering out tactics to warn of the pitfalls and mobilise working women to go beyond the legislation was rejected by the IMG. They wanted to draw together reformists, TU bureaucrats, labour lefts etc in the ‘broadest possible way’. This could only be done under the conception of a broad-based ‘rally’. All this was done under the cover of the ‘united front’. However, a united front is effective on the condition that it involves action by the reformist leaders’ mass organisations. The IMG’s role for the Charter Campaign was to focus on building ‘women’s rights committees’ to look at the legislation. These committees had no particular campaigning function or relation to the WWCC or working class rank and file committees. It need hardly surprise us that only one was built and that it didn’t survive for very long.

Since the WWCC Conference in 1976 only two more national unions have affiliated to the Campaign — NATFHE and COHSE — under pressure from their members. For a national union, adoption and even affiliation to the WWC meant that they had done their bit for women’s rights.

But despite this major setback in not amending the Charter, the WWCC began to produce a national newspaper which, even though it appeared irregularly, did provide a national orientation for the Campaign. The elected secretariat was able to some degree coordinate activity and provide leadership and guidance around the policy of the WWCC. This proved important during the Trico strike where the Charter made the most gains in doing solidarity work, publicising the fight, fighting the TU bureaucracy and raising issues with some of the women.

The importance of the Working Women’s Charter Campaign was its potential in building the basis of a movement of working class women. At a time when the working class fight against the attacks of capitalism was being sabotaged at every point, when the women’s movement was in the main increasingly turning its back on the working class, the WWCC represented activists who were prepared to fight in an organised way against the particular oppression of working class women under capitalism and the specific attacks on women.

But a movement based on working class women cannot be built on good intentions alone. We need firstly a fighting programme that addresses women’s particular problems and needs, linking it to the question of the possibility of working class power. This programme will have to be flexible to key into the changing situation and to guide the activists prepared to fight around its demands. Secondly is the necessity to organise women in the workplace as the leading activists around the programme. This is not because they are more or less oppressed, but because they also have the potential to organise together inside the workplace and in their unions, and because they have a higher level of class consciousness than the ‘isolated housewife’.

Therefore what was central in the WWCC was to build groups of Charter supporters in the unions and workplaces linking up with the groups based in the community. Inextricably related to this was the need to amend the inadequate Charter into a programme for women and to focus the campaign nationally with an elected leadership and organising newspaper.

The 1977 conference did not do these things. The preceding year had seen the disorientation of Charter activists faced with two Charters. Many groups collapsed and work in the unions around women’s oppression dwindled. The IMG, blind to the errors of their wooing of the TU bureaucracy, dug their heels in and came out against amending the Charter at all (ever?). But now they had a new element to woo — the Socialist Feminists, who had begun to reject an orientation to working class women, especially women in the workplace, and had started to move back into the broad-based autonomous Women’s Liberation Movement. An example of this was their rejection of the demand for ‘A Woman’s Right to Work’. The IMG, terrified of splitting the autonomous WLM, were unable to publicly disagree with the Socialist Feminists. If the Charter was not amended they anticipated that the Socialist Feminists would stay inside the WWCC and the TU bureaucrats and labour lefts could still be cajoled into the Campaign. This did not happen! The Socialist Feminists left the WWCC en masse and the TU bureaucrats despite months of such wooing, have yet to be won — and so the IMG or at least most of its activists, has followed suit and dropped the WWCC.

How did the IMG justify their departure? By underplaying the Charter’s demands to an abstraction of ‘the principle which is embodied in them’, leading them to define it as ‘not a definitive programme of demands, but a banner for the fight for women’s rights, which draws behind it the widest possible forces’ and ‘instead of arguing for the need for amendment of wording we should emphasise the task of forging unity in action on specific aspects of women’s rights’. Having relegated the demands of the Charter itself to irrelevant wording, the IMG relegate the campaign to debate and discussion. ‘The existence of Charter campaigning groups and the propaganda actions of the Campaign have ensured continued debate on the Charter issues in the labour movement. The influence of these debates is already seen in a revised TUC Charter’. What these debates mean for the IMG is that ‘the Charter demands allow an audience for the initiative and arguments of the WLM far wider than anything previously existing’, and ‘has allowed women most active in the fight for the Charter to exchange their experiences and co-ordinate their activities’. For the IMG the Charter is only ‘a radical section of a much broader, less politically committed movement around the Charter demands’. Implicit in these statements is the dissolution of the Campaign itself as an active force. The IMG are totally unable to recognise the necessity for a programme to build action around or that the most conscious sections of the working class will lead that action.

At the Conference held in 1977 the IMG tried to dissolve the elected Secretariat and argued against building groups of Charter supporters in the unions, on the grounds that this would alienate existing women’s committees etc. Having attempted to dissolve the Charter into the amorphous tradition of the autonomous women’s movement the IMG have now set their sights on the Socialist Feminist current. Over the past months the IMG have virtually withdrawn from all local Charter groups, did no work to build for the Trade Union day school, have not participated in the production of Women’s Fight, only sold it under pressure from other members of the Secretariat, and have boycotted the WWCC almost totally in Socialist Challenge. The only work the IMG has done in the campaign has been carried out by individual members in Hull and Oxford.

The WWCC was left after the last conference in a very weak position indeed. Saddled with a pitiful list of inadequate demands and with no active support from the IMG, Charter activists were at a loss. Charter groups became more and more isolated and paralysed. Nevertheless, support for the WWCC at a rank and file level was still strong enough for the Trade Union school held last November to attract 80 people from different unions. Although the 1977 Conference passed a resolution committing the campaign to build fractions in the unions and the Trade Union school has shown the forces are there to do this in certain unions, this was not possible without the commitment of the secretariat to organise the work and of the political organisations involved in the Campaign to help carry it out.

The production of Women’s Fight on a regular basis demonstrated the usefulness of a campaigning newspaper. But again without the support of the largest political organisation in the Campaign the paper’s collapse was only a matter of time. In the face of these difficulties the International Communist League’s will crumbled. Thus the second largest organisation in the Campaign, rather than fight to either push the IMG towards a commitment to the Charter or expose their record and political capitulation to feminism and left reformist leaders, withdrew from Women’s Fight and the Charter Secretariat, bringing about their final collapse. The IMG bears the responsibility for the disorientation and failure of the WWCC, but the I-CL by their refusal to fight them, have turned their back on those left in and around the Charter.

The way forward

There is no denying that the WWCC in its existing form has failed. Hull Charter Group in proposing to change the structure of the Campaign towards a regional ‘democratic’ one, in the mistaken belief that the problems of the Campaign was over-centralisation and hierarchy, have grossly over-estimated the extent of support the Campaign has. The reality is that the majority of Charter groups rejected an orientation to working class women in favour of the Socialist Feminist current. The Campaign does not have the resources or committed activists to continue as before. We believe that a Conference should be organised to re-build the WWCC on a new basis. The Trade Union school demonstrated that the Charter does still have some support, but it is fragmented and isolated. This support needs to be organised primarily through the formation of Charter groups based in the workplace.

And a new fighting programme needs to be worked out at this Conference if the WWCC is to go forward. The new programme has to demonstrate the campaign’s potential for fighting for women’s needs here and now and facing the political questions of the bureaucracy of the unions, the labour government and working class power. Only in this way will it regain the forces that have been lost — on a new fighting footing.

It will mean having a national structure, a campaigning newspaper and an elected leadership. We would urge the I-CL, IMG and all ex-Charter activists and groups to support our call for a Conference on this basis, to rebuild the Working Women’s Charter Campaign.

Jill Daniels — Workers Power (Editor, Women’s Fight) (February 1978)

Women’s liberation and the working class

Workers Power’s background paper to the Working Women’s Charter Campaign Conference, June 1978.

Women’s oppression and class society

The systematic social oppression of women has its origins in a very early period of human development. Its roots lie however, not in some ‘natural’ or biological division between the sexes. There is no intrinsic connection between women as child-bearer and her unequal position relative to men. The reason for women’s age-old condemnation to child-rearing, domestic tasks, and exclusion from control of all the key areas of society lies in the period when class antagonisms based on the emergence of private property broke up the primitive community. The male-dominated class societies or patriarchies seized from women the control of their own fertility, cast onto them the whole responsibility of childrearing (up to the age of ‘manhood’) and created a family within which women’s productive labour was at the disposal of the ‘patriarchs’. These basic features of women’s oppression continued through the various modes of production — barbarism, slave-society and feudalism. Custom and later law sanctified and enforced the enslavement of women. In these societies the patriarchal family emerged as the basic production unit. In subsistence economy and petty commodity production the whole family unit organised productive labour, though in both agriculture, food processing and manufacture, women had specialised roles. The appearance of mercantile capitalism accentuated and developed this specialisation allotting to women whole areas of domestic manufacture.

Industrial capitalism profoundly revolutionised the nature of human production and therefore the form of women’s oppression. The family ceased to be the basic unit of production — being replaced by the capitalist factory and farm. The dynamic socialised production of capitalism broke up, with blind ruthlessness, the old form of the family. The skills gained in household work and in domestic manufacture, the super-exploitation and flexibility made possible by their oppression, made women an ideal major component of the workforce in emergent capitalism.

For the new proletariat, the family was restricted to the function of reproducing the workforce and reproducing labour power. Within this family, where husband, wife and even the children from an early age were wage labourers, and where ‘property’ was restricted to the basic necessities for subsistence, important differences emerged with the family of the bourgeoisie, based as it was on the control of women’s fertility necessary for the preservation of property rights. The proletarian household had a more ‘communal’ appearance. However, under this appearance of equality existed continuing factors of inequality — the insecurity and lower income of the woman proletarian, her intermittant condemnation to childbearing and child-rearing and the burden of domestic toil. Thus the proletarian household was and is partly a negation, partly an expression of the bourgeois family. That in the last analysis it is the bourgeois aspect which predominates is due materially to domestic slavery and ideologically to the fact that the ruling ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. Under Imperialism, where a substantial upper stratum of the proletariat requires the income and security of a ‘comfortable petit-bourgeoisie’, the features of the bourgeois family are greatly strengthened. This link with the bourgeoisie is weakened by women’s presence in production, and by every reform tending towards socialising child-rearing and domestic toil, but it can never be finally severed under capitalism. However, capitalism’s need to use women as part of the proletariat — as ‘free labour’ — undermined the basis for systematic legal inequality, which had existed whilst the family was the productive unit. Thus during the great bourgeois revolutions which broke the economic and political fetters of capitalist production, and which proclaimed the ‘Rights of Man’ saw also the proclamation, at least as a democratic ideal, of the Equality of Women. The continuance of legal restrictions on women, their right to own and dispose of private property, their right to vote, hold state office, to marry, to divorce, to gain admission to education and the professions, to freely utilise all those methods available for control of their own fertility — were and are in clear contradiction to the proclaimed ideals of bourgeois democracy. The claiming of these ‘equal rights’ was, and is, the basis of the bourgeois women’s movement. However, the bourgeoisie, once it had used democratic ideology to lead other classes in society against the feudal aristocracy and thereby achieved its own emancipation, turned to bolster its position as ruling class. It thus attempted to deny to subordinate classes, particularly the working class, the use of democratic liberties which might assist the latter in its struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.

Thus from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards the working class became the spearhead for all democratic struggles. This was no less true of the struggle for women’s rights. Whilst a minority of bourgeois women and larger numbers of women from the lower middle class organised to claim equal rights only the working class unequivocally embodied in its demands these basic democratic rights. The onset of the Imperialist phase of capitalism, with its tendency to militarism, Bonapartism and fascism, accentuated the role of the bourgeoisie as the enemy of women’s rights. Conversely it underlined the fact that the only class whose objective interests commit it directly to the maintenance and extension of women’s rights and whose class organisations possess the fighting strength to achieve this is the working class. Therefore we fight for each and every one of these basic democratic rights seeking to draw into this struggle the class organisations of the proletariat, utilising all the tactics of the class struggle and mass action.

Capitalism’s systematic oppression

However the emancipation of women cannot be achieved simply by the granting of equal rights. The roots of women’s oppression under capitalism do not lie, as the bourgeois feminists claim, in political inequality. There is a basic contradiction between the formal democratic equality of women and the systematic social inequality to which the nature of capitalism condemns women. The social root of this oppression lies as we have seen in the condemnation of women to domestic slavery within the family. Women are condemned to the roles of child-rearer and principal performers of the labour necessary to reproduce labour power — cleaning, washing, cooking, shopping, care of the aged and in short, housework. Capitalism excludes this work from the system of productive labour. It is unable to permanently and systematically socialise it because a) its performance can never be made into productive labour ie a source of surplus value, and therefore would have to be paid out of a tax on surplus value and b) because capitalism is a crisis-ridden system and cannot permanently retain in production all those capable of work — and women make up a (concealed) part of the reserve army of labour — the unemployed — and this drain on surplus value would be crippling.

Women perform these tasks, within the framework of the family, for a subsistence received from the male proletarians’ wage. As capitalism provides no adequate security outside the family, this institution appears a fortress in a world whose fundamental feature is insecurity. Capitalism’s inability to socialise child-rearing and domestic labour commits it to presenting this specific historic form of the relationship between human beings enshrining the oppression and exploitation of women as the Natural Order of Things. The sexuality and labour of women is presented as naturally at the disposal of men. From this flows the hypocritical dual standard of Morality under capitalism — women’s sexuality becomes not free expression of their personality but an object of men’s pleasure. This involves a consistent psychological and physical degradation of women and an attempt via the church, education, culture, advertising etc to convince men that their superiority is inevitable and natural and to convince women that they must submit to this. This results in the sexual stereotypes and the branding of sexual and social behaviour outside of these as abnormal, unnatural etc. It is the basis of the oppression of men and women gays and of the grotesque psychological traumas associated with the contradiction between the stereotypes and the reality of human relationships — from this flows the physical violence, rape, assault etc to which women are subjected.

Women are either excluded from social life, locked away in the domestic household, or where they are involved in social labour, they are directed into areas of work closely allied to the domestic economy and its skills. Thus ‘women’s work’ is predominantly in the fields of retail distribution, clothing, catering, care of the ill and the aged, cleaning etc. Where women work alongside men in factories and offices, they tend to be restricted to the unskilled, semi-skilled and low paid sectors. Their education and training is designed to reinforce and prolong this ‘specialisation’. Above all the family is presented as the centre, the first responsibility of women, to which wage work is subordinated. In the isolation of the private household, women become the victim and the agent of dominant ideology of capitalist society. This is the source of women’s tendency to conservatism, to their domination by the reactionary ideology of the church and the state.

Women’s liberation and socialism

For women to achieve full political and economic equality with men, the full socialisation of child-rearing and domestic toil and the equal involvement of women in social production is necessary. This is inseparable from the overthrow of private ownership in the means of production. Then and only then, will it be possible, on the basis of planned economy to systematically eradicate all the aspects of women’s oppression — legal, economic and political. To initiate this process, the seizure of state power by the working class armed and organised into workers councils and the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters is necessary. Tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat related integrally to the expropriation of the capitalists are the socialisation of domestic labour, the drawing of women into production and the involvement of women in political life at all levels. The revolutionary communist party, the trade unions and a mass working class women’s movement must play the central role in rallying and educating women for these tasks, and in struggling against the backwardness of male workers. The liberation of women will not be finally achieved until the last vestiges, the last elements of ‘superiority’ or submission disappear in men and women alike — it is a task which will not be achieved ‘at a single stroke’ but will continue until the state and class disappear with Socialism and Communism.

But this means neither accepting oppression and exploitation in the interim, nor women waiting until the male working class liberates them by abolishing capitalism. Women, not struggling for their liberation, are not merely absent from the class struggle — they are a powerful factor fighting on the side of the bourgeoisie; at the most elementary level, in every strike, in elections etc, women unconscious of their own oppression are a force for inertia at best and for open reaction at worst. (eg the press-sponsored ‘Cowley wives’ — the reactionary mobilisation of women in Chile etc.) Working class women are central to the struggle for the emancipation of both women and the working class — they are the most oppressed section of their sex and their class. Amongst women they have the most radical direct interest in the overthrow of the roots of their oppression in capitalism — they cannot be for long diverted into restricting themselves to equal rights, opportunities or utopian schemes for sexual or psychological liberation. In the working class, they have no aristocratic craft privileges, no comfortable skilled status and high wages to reconcile them to capitalism — yet this intense experience of oppression is not enough to locate working class women as the spearhead of the struggle. The working class is the first exploited class capable of ending all exploitation not only or not even because it is the most oppressed and exploited, but because capitalism itself organises it at the centre of socialised producing enabling it to become conscious of itself as a class, to organise against and overthrow the capitalists and reorganise production. Women form a part of the working class with precisely this potential. Though capitalism has never been able to draw all proletarian women into production, though it has been able to use women as a reserve army of labour, to be thrust back into the home in times of capitalist recession and crisis, women do form a vital component of the workforce and it is this section, partially released from the stultifying effects of domestic isolation who can act as the vanguard of all proletarian women. First, therefore, we turn to those sections of women organised in the trade unions.

The women’s movement and working class women

But a programme is nothing if it is not the rallying point for a movement — a strategy nothing without an army. It is essential to build around such a programme a Mass Working Class Women’s Movement. How does such a movement relate to the Women’s and Trade Union Movements of today? The women’s movement of the 70s contains a whole spectrum of tendencies. Socially its strongest roots are amongst the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia. As a result both bourgeois Feminism and revolutionary communism are in a tiny minority within it.

There are two major tendencies in the Women’s Movement in Britain today. Radical (or revolutionary) Feminism is explicitly anti-marxist in that it rejects the class struggle replacing it with a struggle by all women against patriarchy. Socialist-Feminism whilst it recognises the necessity for socialism to liberate women makes a number of fundamental mistakes. Firstly it accepts the integrity of the ‘women’s movement’, i.e. of an all class alliance involving bourgeois and petit-bourgeois feminists. In fact the former are enemies and the latter unstable allies of working class women. Secondly, it is unwilling to orient centrally to working class women in general and to organised women in particular — mistaking this orientation for Economism; thirdly it insists on the political autonomy of this all-class movement, ie of its independence from the marxist class programme as embodied in a revolutionary party. Within Socialist Feminism there are therefore strong exclusionist tendencies with regard to the left groups. These tendencies are fuelled and exacerbated by the appalling record of some of these left groups — sexist attitudes, real economism etc — features which characterised the SWR and IS (now SWP). The IMG (British section of the USFI) on the other hand has abandoned the Marxist position on women’s liberation in the direction of espousing the ‘political and organisational autonomy of the Women’s Liberation Movement’ — the abandonment of both the Marxist programme — justified on the excuse that the WLM is a ‘social’ rather than a ‘political’ movement — and an abandonment of proletarian orientation to women to an auxiliary role within it.

The attempt to either preserve the ‘Women’s Movement’ as a whole as an ally of the working class or to develop socialist feminism as a ‘class struggle’ leadership of the Women’s Movement is doomed to failure. Women are not as the IMG claim, an ally of the working class. Half the working class are women. Women are not a separate class like the peasantry, whose attachment to private property but hostility to feudal landowners makes them a potential ally, but not a part of the working class. Women — no less than men — are divided into classes and whilst working class women will support democratic rights fought for by bourgeois women (provided they do not conflict with the immediate or strategic goals of the working class) they will not join in one movement with these ‘enemy sisters’. Women from the petit-bourgeoisie or the petit-bourgeoisified intelligentsia are a different matter — these must be won to the programme of linked emancipation of the working class and of women, to orientate and involve in working class organisation — parties and unions and to build a mass working class women’s organisation. If feminism however socialist, whilst it clings to the perspective of a non-class women’s movement, is incapable of mobilising working class women, so is the perspective of ‘women’s trade unionism’ or of a movement built on economic militancy alone, such as the SWP envisages. Trade unions are essential defence organisations for the working class under capitalism but divorced from politically class conscious leadership, they tend to restrict themselves to the more easily organised workers and these tend to be skilled or semi-skilled male workers. Moreover under Imperialism a powerful and reactionary bureaucracy has established control of the unions, severely limiting and trying to extinguish democracy within their ranks. This bureaucracy has settled its social question via high salaries, permanency of office and integration to the lower levels of the capitalist state. Hostile to the overthrow of capitalism they are also hostile to the emancipation of women. All this makes the unions organisations which in their structure and in the attitudes of their officials and their members, mirror many of the sexist attitudes of male chauvinist bourgeois society. Mere involvement of women in trade union struggle or in the hidebound bureaucratic structures of the unions are incapable of substantially altering this situation.

If women are to join and play an active role in the trade unions to be fully involved in the struggle for their immediate demands and final emancipation, and those of the working class as a whole, it is necessary to adopt a fighting strategy and specific forms of organisation to overcome the bureaucrats and transform the backward attitudes of male workers. Women in the trade unions must have the right to caucus separately at every level — not in order to split men and women workers but in order to work out their demands, plan their interventions in meetings, choose and prepare candidates for positions in the unions. This right to caucus must exist without detriment to women’s full rights as trade unionists — too often women’s sections or women’s conferences including the Women’s TUC have been used to isolate women, used as an excuse to abrogate their rights. Women’s caucuses, the Women’s TUC (which must be won from the bureaucrats’ stranglehold, democratised by making its voting basis a lay delegates one) must have the right to present and prioritise their motions and resolutions to the appropriate TU body on which they should have an allocated representative, without prejudice to women standing for other posts.

Union meetings in worktime on full pay is a demand which is not only vital to women given their family commitments but will immeasurably strengthen union democracy and strength for male workers also. To achieve these aims unofficial caucuses must be built to fight for them. These women must work in the closest collaboration with any rank and file anti-bureaucratic opposition in the union. It is the duty of the latter to assist women to win the right to caucus, to support women workers’ demands on pay, conditions etc. On the question of conditions, rank and file and women’s caucuses must fight to commit the union to free creche facilities under shop steward and users control, to positive discrimination in favour of women in all apprenticeships, training schemes under trade union control.

For the rebirth of a mass working class women’s movement

There is, in fact, a tradition of organisation of working class women independent of the bourgeois women’s movement which has been obscured by the degeneration of the Social Democratic and ‘Communist Parties’ into reformism. Before World War One, the Social Democratic women’s movement, influenced by the pioneer socialist work of Engels and Bebel and led by figures like Clara Zetkin, stood on the left wing of Social Democracy, and played an important role in opposing the war whilst bourgeois feminists almost to a woman became rabid chauvinists. The same current later contributed to the founding of the Communist International and Communist Women’s Movement. After the departure of the revolutionary working class women, the reformist Social Democratic women’s movement withered into a pale copy of the Liberal Women’s Rights Movement.

The Russian Revolution, and the workers’ state which it created, immediately granted women all the political rights so long promised, and so often withheld, by bourgeois society: freedom of divorce, abortion etc. It also systematically, within the objective limits of civil war, famine and economic devastation, set about releasing women from domestic slavery. Its gains here were necessary limited, but still placed it ahead of any capitalist state in the world. The triumph of Stalinist reaction put this process of liberation into reverse — the family was actively restored to its central function of reproducing labour power and surrounded by a ‘socialist’ halo. Restrictions on abortion were re-introduced, the role of motherhood glorified and gays persecuted. The world influence of Stalinism within the workers’ movement helped to blight and destroy the Communist Women’s Movement, founded in the early 20s, so that by the Second World War, hardly a trace of it survived.

The revolutionary party

It is to this tradition of the German and Russian revolutionary working class women’s movements that we look — not because we can slavishly copy all their positions and actions, but because they present an invaluable experience of working class women’s leadership in the struggle for the emancipation of all women. It is also necessary to reassert the marxist positions developed in those movements against the capitulation of social democracy and Stalinism to bourgeois positions on women. We fight today for the rebuilding of such a mass movement of working class women.

This mass working class women’s movement must be rooted in the unions, in the workplace, but its fighting strategy must by no means be restricted to economic issues or to the sectional interests of ‘working women’ alone. Its programme must be one of struggle against all aspects of the oppression of women under capitalism — against all attacks on abortion and contraception rights, against the physical violence suffered by women, battery and rape, against all the effects on women of a capitalism in crisis — rising prices, rents, the closure of hospitals and nurseries etc. A working class women’s movement would give a lead in these struggles. Such a movement would be involved to the hilt in all the mass working class organisations — Labour Party, Trade Unions etc.

Within this movement revolutionary communists should fight for their programme and for leadership against the reformists, feminists and centrists. But the movement should be organisationally independent, having its own democratically elected leadership. Revolutionary communists have nothing to fear from such democracy. To the reformists and centrists and ‘Socialist Feminists’ we say, ‘Join us in the struggle for a working class women’s movement — let us put the correctness of our politics to the test in action, in the struggles of, and alongside, working class women.’ To women from today’s ‘Women’s Movement’ we say, ‘You will find no tendency more intransigently dedicated to the struggle for women’s freedom. We will not yield an inch to economism, to male chauvinism in the unions but, we insist, only the mass forces of working class women provide a basis for winning the final and complete liberation of women.’

For marxists a coherent strategy for the seizure of power by the working class — a programme — is inseparable from organised militants fighting for that programme and applying it tactically — a party. The question of women’s liberation is itself an integral part of that programme and women communists an integral part of the party — both in its leadership and rank and file cadre. Such a party must fight sexism in its own ranks, amongst militant workers and in the working class at large. To do this it must take special measures to strengthen and support women within the party and the class. The right to caucus, the provision of creche facilities etc are vital to this end. Whilst these rights must be guaranteed, we reject absolutely the view that the democratic-centralist party is inimical to the full participation of women, that women must organise separately and exclusively ‘their struggle’ because they alone have subjective experience of their oppression. Whilst the latter is a vital component of working out strategy and tactics, women’s oppression and its relationship to class society was not discovered by subjective experience alone (any more than was working class exploitation). It was, is, and will be analysed by scientific work for which the party as a whole is the necessary vehicle.

Since correctness, both in the struggle for women’s liberation and for socialism, is verifiable only in practice, the practice of organised masses, party struggle, is vital. Thus, in a mass working class women’s movement parties should openly struggle, subjecting themselves of course to the norms of democracy. Those groups who, on the pretext of non-sectarianism or respect for the autonomy of the Women’s Liberation Movement, disguise their members as ‘individuals’, arouse only suspicion and mistrust. Therefore, we state openly and clearly our positions as a group, deceiving no one. We fight for:

A working class women’s movement and for a revolutionary communist tendency in the women’s movement.
An action programme for women

For a working class women’s movement

The root of women’s oppression under capitalism is her condemnation to the role of unpaid domestic labourer and childbearer within the family — a unit isolated from social production, but which performs a vital function for capitalism, that of maintaining and reproducing the present and future workforce. As capitalism provides no adequate security outside the family, this institution appears a fortress in an insecure world. In the isolation of the private household, women become the victim and the agent of the dominant ideology of capitalist society. This is the source of women’s tendency to conservatism, by their domination by the reactionary ideology of the Church and the State. The oppression and exploitation of women is thus enshrined as the natural order of things with women’s sexuality and labour presented as naturally at the disposal of men.

Capitalism uses women as a secondary element within social production. Turning her child bearing and rearing role against her, capitalism condemns the majority of women to low paid, highly insecure jobs. Women form a concealed part of the reserve army of labour — the unemployed. They are encouraged to enter production as cheap and easily manipulated labour in times of boom, of labour shortage and driven back into the home in times of crisis. Within production they are systematically super-exploited, and largely restricted to ‘women’s jobs’ — i.e. jobs connected in some way with the caring and servicing tasks of the household. On the basis of the privileged position of the male worker in the home and in production and on the basis of women’s isolation within the home and use as cheap labour arises a division within the working class that is constantly exploited by the bosses.

Only socialism, where the productive forces are democratically planned, can organise collective responsibility for the domestic labour performed privately by women under capitalism. Only the socialisation of privatised domestic work and childrearing will release women from their centuries’ old oppression and thereby lay the basis for them to achieve full equality with men. The utopian demand for wages for housework only serves to reinforce women’s oppression in the family and hinder the struggle for women’s emancipation.

Expanding capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, anxious to exploit women’s labour, was prepared (under pressure from women and the workers movement) to expand welfare and social services in order to enable women to take their place in the labour force. That period is now over. A new period of crisis and instability has opened for world capitalism. Everywhere the employing class is devising and forcing through new measures to increase the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism, on a world scale, has dramatically increased the ranks of the unemployed, cut back on social and welfare spending, fostered divisions in the ranks of the workers movement in order to solve its crisis.

It is women workers who are being forced to bear the brunt of these attacks. Faced with shrinking markets and order books the employers are driving women out of the workforce. Women are losing their jobs twice as fast as men. In order to direct public expenditure to more profitable sources the employers have systematically attacked social and welfare spending. Public spending cuts not only threaten the jobs of women workers they also force onto women the burden of caring for the sick, the old, and the young.

In order to solve their crisis the employers are seeking to drive women back into the home. The glorification of the family, of motherhood, myths such as ‘A Woman’s Place is in the home’ and ‘Women only work for pin money’ are the ideological tools used to help achieve this. They have the added advantage for the employers in that they serve to fragment and divide the workers movement, often setting male labour against female labour in the face of unemployment and uncertainty.

Spearheaded by the Catholic Church the ideological offensive against women’s rights and equality has sharpened dramatically during the last years of capitalist stagnation and crisis. A woman’s right to control her own fertility — only very partially protected by existing legislation and provided for by a woefully inadequate health service — is under attack. Such attacks can only increase unless the reactionary offensive is defeated.

Women have fought back against these attacks. The Trico strike for equal pay, the leading role played by women in struggles against hospital closures show this to be the case. They have struck, occupied, marched to defend their jobs and social service provisions. This militancy gives the lie to the claim that women are ‘naturally’ passive or indifferent to trade union and political struggle.

But the Trade Unions’ record of support for these struggles is lamentable. Here, as in the general class struggle, the trade union official bureaucracy, has made its peace with capitalism. The Trade Union leaders have refused to put the weight of the Trade Union movement behind struggles to protect women’s jobs and rights. The Trade Union bureaucracy remains the entrenched enemy of the liberation of women within the labour movement.

But not only the official labour movement has failed women. Trade union branches, shop stewards committees still remain largely inaccessible to women workers. The demand for ‘women out first’ often raised in the face of threatened redundancy shows that the workers movement has not yet organised to prevent the employers solving their crisis by driving women back into the home.

But there is no solution for women in turning their backs on the workers movement. While women workers bear the brunt of the attack, unemployment, wage controls, declining social and welfare services are not simply women’s problems. It is not only women workers who have seen their jobs and living standards cut by a treacherous Trade Union bureaucracy.

The rebirth of a broad movement of women struggling against their oppression, which dates from the late 60s, was a tremendous step after decades of demoralisation and apathy. At the same time there appeared a new combativeness among working class women who started to join Trade Unions in larger and larger numbers. But the dominant ideologies within the women’s movement has been Feminism and Reformist or Centrist socialism. But the strategy of feminism has been to gloss over the class differences amongst women in favour of building an ‘all class’ women’s movement. This has resulted in the feminist movement restricting itself to utopian schemes for sexual or psychological liberation, fighting for single issue reforms, turning its back on the struggles of working class women and the working class in general. Working class women are central to the emancipation of both women and the working class — they are the most oppressed section of their sex and their class. They alone have a radical interest in the overthrow of the roots of their oppression in capitalism.

We must build a working class based women’s movement. Such a movement must base itself on those women best organised at work and in the unions to lead a struggle, drawing in housewives to rank and file labour movement bodies, by building estate based women’s committees of action around amenities, prices, rents and support for local Trade Union struggles, winning industrial support for women’s battles in the factories and offices and on the estates to lay the foundation for a fighting women’s movement. That women’s movement must ensure 1) that the workers movement takes up and fights for women’s demands; 2) that women gain the confidence to take the lead in struggles and to build unity in action with working class men; 3) that it fights alongside all those in the workers movement who are struggling to overthrow capitalist exploitation and oppression — to take the unions out of the hands of the Trade Union bureaucracy.

Such a Working Women’s Movement must have a clear programme:

Open the unions to women workers

The Trade Unions have not ensured the full participation of women workers in their organisations. Many women see Trade Unions as the exclusive domain of the male ‘breadwinners’. This idea is reinforced by male Trade Unionists hostility to women workers. This has led to some women scabbing on many strikes and men scabbing on women’s struggles as at Trico. For women with domestic commitments, union meetings held outside work time with no creche facilities are impossible to attend. Therefore we must fight for:

Union meetings in work time and on full pay.
For the right of women to caucus in the unions.
For democratic women’s sections in the unions ensured of full rights to put resolutions guaranteed of full discussion in branches, districts and conferences.
Positive discrimination in favour of women as shop stewards and union representatives.
Full Trade Union membership rights for unemployed women and housewives.
Trade Union organisation of homeworkers.
For the right of gays to caucus in the unions.
Creche facilities for pickets provided by the union.

Fight unemployment

The employers have launched an attack on women workers. As workers who are not well organised or supported by male workers they are extremely vulnerable to redundancy. Part-time workers (the majority of them women) and ‘twilight shift’ workers are usually the first workers to be threatened, and often employed in creasing numbers to replace well-organised full-time workers.

The fight against redundancy is a fight to challenge the employers right to deploy labour and organise production as they choose. It necessitates the struggle to secure workers control of hiring and firing, of the speed and pace of work, of the length of the working day. We must fight for:

A woman’s right to work — for clear opposition to capitalism’s attempt to solve their crisis by pushing women back into the home.

Against all women out first ‘solutions’

It is especially important that these two demands are campaigned for at a rank and file level where demands for women out first are often voiced.

Against all redundancies — cut the hours and not the jobs

Work sharing under trade union control with no loss of earnings. For immediate ban on all overtime, for a 35-hour week with no loss of pay to force the employers to take on more labour.

Open the books — direct action to abolish business secrecy.

Direct action to stop closures — occupation to seize all factories and plant in firms declaring redundancies. Occupation to demand nationalisation under workers’ control of all firms announcing sackings.

For workers self-defence against inevitable attack and provocation on the picket line.

Against the cuts

As unpaid domestic workers, forced to care for the sick, the elderly and young, women are being made to pay the price for the dismantling of the NHS, the closure of nurseries and schools, the cutback in the housing programme. Those social services are already woefully inadequate. We must fight the cuts while demanding a massive expansion of welfare and social service provision under Trade Union control.

Direct action to stop the cuts.
No Trade Union participation in the implementation of the cuts: no acceptance of speed-up, increased work load, no covering for unfilled vacancies.
For Trade Union industrial action in solidarity with all struggles against cuts.

Restore all cuts in social spending. For a programme of socially useful public works under Trade Union control. For that programme to ensure that women will be able to play an ever fuller role in social and political life as well as providing more jobs for women.

To ensure the provision of 24-hour nursery and creche facilities.
To ensure the provision of free laundry and canteen facilities.
Free abortion and contraception on demand and on the NHS. For the provision of adequate and sufficient day care centres to make this possible. Against enforced sterilisation.
Expansion of gynaecological provision and for the right of women to be treated by women if they wish.

Force local authorities to refuse to implement the cuts

We must campaign to force the Labour Councils to refuse to implement the cuts, to refuse to pay the crippling interest payments due to the banks and finance houses, to deliberately overspend on social and welfare provision.

Nationalise the banks and finance houses: with no compensation — cancelling the crippling debts of the local authorities immediately.

For all social spending to be protected against inflation by a sliding scale of social expenditure.

Wages and equal pay

Women earn just over half the wages of men. The ‘equality’ legislation introduced by the Labour Government has not altered that. It does not cover all-female work forces or jobs where fewer than six women are employed. Legislation cannot alter the fact that women are concentrated in unskilled, low paid work. The Labour Government has relied on anti-working class tribunals to defuse the militancy of the working class to fight for equal pay. This has failed — women have fought back and won equal pay in their militant actions. While supporting any amendment to the legislation to patch up the loopholes exploited by the bosses, the only way equal pay can be won is by action by the working class as at Trico. We fight for:

A minimum wage

Equal pay now

For the sliding scale of wages: guaranteed monthly rises equivalent to the rise in the workers cost of living index — 1% for 1%. We must fight actively to draw housewives into the calculation of all workers’ wage demands on the basis of a workers cost of living index.

Work or full pay

100% lay off pay — workers should not bear the cost of strikes.

Opposition to all forms of incomes policy: opposition to all productivity deals. For full rates for part-time workers and premium rates for ‘twilight’ workers.

For the social and political equality of women

Positive discrimination for women in all apprenticeships, training schemes, skills and trades under trade union control.

For the extension of protective legislation where appropriate to cover men. No dismissal during pregnancy. Adequate paternity leave. A minimum of 26 weeks paid pregnancy leave. The right for either parent to take a year’s paid child care leave after birth or adoption. For 12 weeks paid leave if child is still born. The right for either men or women to paid leave to care for sick dependents. Adequate child benefits non-deductible from other benefits and protected from inflation by automatic increases. All protective legislation under TU control to ensure that it is not used as grounds for discrimination. Equality of women in tenancies, mortgages, pension schemes, taxation, passports, care, control and custody over children including lesbian mothers, social security payments, insurances and supplementary benefits, hire purchase agreements. Against discrimination and victimisation on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Solidarity with all oppressed

In the struggle against their oppression women must support the battles of all oppressed and exploited against our common enemy — the capitalist class.

We must support in all ways possible those struggling for national independence against Imperialism; most immediately and sharply for us this must mean solidarity with those forces in Southern Africa and Ireland struggling to free themselves from the yoke of Imperialism, an active struggle to build meaningful links with and support for women engaged in those struggles.
Fight racism and fascism

The continuing crisis of capitalism has seen the employers play a racist card to divide the working class and blur the causes of the crisis. Black and Asian women are particularly oppressed both as women and as workers and as victims of racist and fascist attacks. We fight for the right of black and Asian women and ethnic minorities to caucus separately. We fight all forms of racist and fascist attack and oppose all forms of discrimination on the grounds of race. We oppose all forms of immigration controls — these particularly affect non-British women coming to Britain.

For a workers united front against racism and fascism.

No platform for fascists.

Drive the fascists and active racists out of the labour movement.

Against all immigration controls.

The question of government

Campaigns in particular localities, against individual employers are by themselves incapable of forcing back the attacks on working women. Reliance on the Labour Party for social reforms is inadequate as a strategy to resist the attacks.

Of necessity the massive expansion in social provision, the guarantee of women’s rights demands governmental action. Such action must mean depriving the bosses and their agents not simply of parliamentary office but of control over the economy, the bureaucracy and the army.

The Labour Government’s record is a record of administering the crisis for the employers — of forcing all workers to pay the price. An integral part of the fight to transform the unions, to build a working class women’s movement is to fight the betrayals of the Labour Party in and out of Government.

We must build a movement that can fight for and force the implementation of, our Action Programme. Only around such a programme can we mobilise the necessary forces to resist the attacks on women, to open the road to women’s emancipation. To those millions of working class women who still have illusions in the Labour Party and whom we can draw into struggle with us we must say ‘put the Labour Party to the test in struggle.’ We must build a movement which can (if the reformists were right) force the Labour Party to act and still lay the basis for the working class to implement the programme itself.

Our movement must therefore demand of the Labour Government that it immediately:

Guarantee a Woman’s Right to Work: nationalising with no compensation all firms declaring redundancies, recognising workers’ control in the plant concerned.
Stop the cuts: institute a programme of public works under TU control to ensure: i) free nursery and creche facilities (24 hour); ii) free laundry and canteen facilities; iii) free abortion and contraception on demand.
Nationalise the banks and finance houses with no compensation.
Guarantee the sliding scale of wages.
Ensure positive discrimination for women in training and education.
Repeal of all legislation discriminating against homosexuality and lesbian mothers and adoption rights.
Adequate child allowances and the extension of protective legislation.
End all legal restrictions on women’s equality.
End immigration controls.
For the full legal protection of women against rape, assault and for the election of judiciary.

Such a Government committed to the emancipation of women is inconceivable except as a government committed to breaking the power of the capitalist class — to opening the road to a workers government — only such a government could offer an alternative to women, an alternative to domestic oppression and super-exploitation in the workplace.

Tags: Gender and Sexuality