Feminism (19 page)

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an astonished public could look upon the radiant faces of these young women, who with their sweet child-like smiles, were on their way to a place with no return, without hope . . . The people said to themselves, ‘we are back in the epoch of the early Christians’.

After the 1905 Revolution, many women became involved in a struggle to win the right to vote in elections to the Duma, though historians have argued that this mass movement of women was soon split between those primarily concerned with class struggle, and the so-called ‘bourgeois’ feminists who were more interested in

‘gender oppression’. A Working Women’s Mutual Assistance Association was set up in 1907 (men were allowed to join); it tried to reach out to working-class women, and encourage them to join trade unions and the Social Democratic Party.

Feminists across th

At an International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Stuttgart in 1907, Clara Zetkin put forward a resolution urging socialists to fight for universal suffrage, which she saw as a step towards ending class struggle. She remarked that, for working
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women, the right to vote is

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a weapon in the battle which they must wage for humanity to overcome exploitation and class rule. It allows them a greater participation in the struggle for the conquest of political power on the part of the proletariat with the aim of going beyond the capitalist order and building the socialist order, the only one that allows for a radical solution to the women’s question.

Activists organized meetings, and tried to encourage working-class women to participate in conferences and actions. On 19 March 1911, the first international women’s day had been held in Germany, with thousands of women joining in meetings and marches; in 1913, it was celebrated in Russia as well.

It is sometimes claimed that it was a 1917 women’s day demonstration in St Petersburg – they were demanding ‘bread and 133

peace’ – that touched off the Revolution. But some Russian feminists argue that the Bolshevik Revolution was little direct help to women; that too many men, and some women, insisted that women’s interests were identical with men’s, and the two must not be separated. After the Revolution, women had better access to education, and were expected to work at full-time jobs. Though cafeterias, laundries, and day care centres were opened in the cities, women still seem to have been expected to take on a heavy double burden. In the 1920s, Alexandra Kollontai emerged as one of the most thoughtful, eloquent, and lastingly interesting writers on women’s issues.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, some women, at least, were glad to retreat back into the home; and, though women may have lost out during the transition to capitalism, some have welcomed the chance to become full-time mothers and housewives.

Feminists have recently begun to recognize and explore the
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problems facing those women from the poorer and less developed
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parts of the world who travel to the affluent Western countries to work. Women from Mexico and Latin America move to the United States; women from Russia and Eastern Europe look for jobs in Western Europe and in Britain. Algerians and Moroccans go to France; others travel from Sri Lanka. South East Asian girls often seek work in the Middle East – Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. Some are legal immigrants; those who are not are particularly vulnerable. Many women work as au pairs, maids, nannies, cleaners, do unskilled jobs in old people’s homes and hospitals, or take low-waged work in restaurants; but many others, inevitably, drift into prostitution or are trapped in brothels. Filipina women have often been recruited as ‘mail-order’ brides, usually for men in the United States or Japan.

Some Western women, having fought for women’s right to take jobs outside the home, and struggled to achieve their own ‘liberation’

from domestic drudgery, look for not-too-expensive help with 134

Alexandra Kollontai

In 1909 the Russian Alexandra Kollontai published a book
called
The Social Basis of the Woman Question
, arguing that
feminism was not just a matter of political rights, or rights to
education and equal pay; the real problem was the way the
family was organized and imagined. In 1920 she published

Towards a History of the Working Women’s Movement in

Russia
, which insisted that women must fight on two fronts.

They should reject the growing number of Westernized middle-class women’s organizations, which either concentrated
on legal equality and the franchise, or saw feminism as a
matter of ‘free love’. Equally, they must resist the Russian
Feminists across th

labour movement and the social democrats, who ignored
women’s specific problems and oppressions, dismissing
feminism as inherently ‘bourgeois’ because it advanced
women’s interests only within an inherently unjust capitalist
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society.

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Primarily a theorist, Kollontai sometimes responded with
real feeling to individuals: for example, to a woman who was
desperately unhappy with a husband who drank heavily and
forbade her to work. And in one oddly touching Utopian essay,
she imagines life as it might be in 1970: a festival on what
had once been Christmas Day, as a commune celebrates the
fulfilling life they have managed to create together.

domestic work. For some foreign women – the lucky ones –

migration is a way of improving their lives. But more often, migrant workers – often unqualified, sometimes barely speaking the language of their new home – get poorly paid, insecure jobs, that 135

leave them isolated and unprotected in all kinds of ways. They often have no idea of what their rights might be – or how to demand them if they do. They rarely have any kind of support network, though in America some campaigning groups have sprung up to their defence.

Their very existence poses Western feminists with a painful paradox; they challenge us to look more closely at how we may be conniving in the oppression of other women.

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Afterword

So what is the future, or even,
is
there a future, for feminism? Is it, at least in the affluent West, needed any longer? In 1992 the American Susan Faludi argued cogently, and in chilling detail, that feminists have been experiencing what she terms a ‘backlash’, with women who had undoubtedly benefited from the movement – as well as men, who had perhaps also benefited, though they rarely acknowledged the fact – anxiously remarking that it had all gone too far. As Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley suggested in their third collection of essays,
Who’s Afraid of Feminism? Seeing Through the
Backlash
, feminism makes many people uncomfortable, in part because the ‘whole subject of who women are and what they want challenges our division between public and private life’.

In the 20th century, ‘first-wave’ feminists had demanded civil and political equality. In the 1970s, ‘second-wave’ feminism concentrated on, and gave great prominence to, sexual and family rights for women. It is these demands, now, that have become the main target of reaction. ‘The personal is the political’ was a popular 1970s slogan that some contemporary feminists seem to want to reverse. The political is reduced to the
merely
personal, to questions of sexuality and family life – which, of course, also have political implications which still, and urgently, need to be considered..

Natasha Walter, in
The New Feminism
(1998), while admitting that 137

women are ‘still poorer and less powerful than men’, argues that the task for contemporary feminism is to ‘attack the material basis of economic and social and political inequality’. An important point –

but she remains extremely vague about precisely what that attack would imply. In one interview, she remarked, as if she had come up with a new idea instead of one that had been around for decades, that ‘we want to work with men to change society and not against men’: ‘After all, especially if things are to change in the domestic arena, that’s about men taking on a fair share of domestic work as about women moving more and more out of the home.’ Or again,

‘we must join hands with one another and with men to create a more equal society’.

But if at one moment she criticizes the older movement for being too personal, a few pages later Walter remarks that it was too political – or, even worse, that its members were ‘humourless or dowdy or celibate’. (That is certainly not the way I remember it.) She goes on to describe Margaret Thatcher as ‘the great unsung
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heroine of British feminism’, who normalized female success. But
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Thatcher had no interest whatsoever in women’s concerns, and was notoriously unsupportive of other women politicians.

Germaine Greer’s
The Whole Woman
(1999) was written partly in angry and effective response to Natasha Walter’s book and its

‘unenlightened complacency’. Walter, Greer argues, assumes that feminism is all about ‘money, sex and fashion’. Though, she adds: it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly. When the lifestyle feminists had gone just far enough, giving them the right to ‘have it all’, i.e. money, it would have been inexcusable to remain silent.

People are undoubtedly alarmed by the
threat
of personal change, as much as by change itself. So some cling, nostalgically, to an imaginary golden age of fixed gender identities, the dream of a 138

relationship between a man and a woman, that, whatever its inequities, was comfortably predictable. On the other hand, others insist – in Naomi Wolf ’s vivid phrase – that there has been a

‘genderquake’, with more women than ever in powerful positions.

Women, Wolf argues in
Fire with Fire
(1983), must give up what she styles ‘victim’ feminism, stop complaining, and embrace ‘power’

feminism. But, as Lynne Segal remarks, movingly, at the end of her 1999
Why Feminism?
, the movement’s most radical goal has yet to be realized :

a world which is a better place not just for some women, but for all women. In what I still call a socialist feminist vision, that would be a far better world for boys and men, as well.

The long, and at times radically innovative, history of feminism is all too easily forgotten. When ‘second-wave’ feminism emerged in the late 1960s, it seemed, at the time at least, unexpected,
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surprising, exciting. One big difference during the years since then
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has been the way Western women have become much more aware
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of other feminisms – not just in Europe, but across the world – that, hopefully, may challenge our cherished ideas and certainties, and undermine any complacency that we may have developed.

That wider awareness is due to a number of factors. Technical advances are certainly important: the fact, for example, that feminists in different countries can now communicate quickly and effectively, share experiences and information with large numbers of people, through the Internet. Academic feminism has played an important role in this. A great many universities, certainly in most Western countries, now run courses on women’s studies, and specifically on feminism. Academic research has given us extremely valuable insights into women’s lives at other times and in other cultures; inviting us to think about differences, as well as about common causes. Academic theses, scholarly articles and texts, as well as conferences, have all helped disseminate important information about feminism across the world.

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But there is perhaps a loss involved, which is not often addressed or even acknowledged. I often recall, affectionately, the remark by Rebecca West that I quoted at the opening of this book: I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

All previous feminisms have had an air of excitement, of transgression, or of risk about them: sometimes the excitement of the pioneer, sometimes of the outsider challenging convention.

More recently, perhaps, there has been, in addition, the excitement of rediscovering our past, but also – and therefore – of
re-inventing
something. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, women’s liberation
was
exciting. We felt that we were ‘making it new’, that we were exploring both past and present, committing ourselves to something that was new and radical and adventurous. But the girls I talked to recently have never had any comparable experience.

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They seem uninterested in feminism, partly because they see it
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simply as an academic subject – something fed to them, which they need not discover for themselves – and it is therefore respectably dull. (Except, of course, for the high-flyers who themselves aspire to academic jobs.) Feminism has, as it were, been spoon-fed to this younger generation of women, so, perhaps naturally and even healthily, they have a sneaking yearning to be politically ‘incorrect’.

Rejecting academic feminism, at least, seems one way of moving forward. Re-inventing feminism in terms of their own experience may, in the long run, prove another.

But the other difficulty – and it seems to me a crucial one – is that academic feminism has developed a language that makes sense only to a closed circle of initiates. Too many women feel shut out, alienated. This is not only true of feminism, of course; this morning as I was writing this, I opened the newspaper to find an exhilarating attack by the journalist Robert Fisk on what he calls the