Women, Resistance and Revolution (33 page)

Ultimately, we live in a kind of international caste system with the white western ruling-class male at the top and the non-white female of the colonized world at the bottom.

Mary Kelly, National Liberation Movements and Women’s Liberation, in Shrew, Women’s Liberation Workshop, December 1970

My mother, whose feet, daily and nightly, pedal, pedal, for our never-tiring hunger, I am even woken by those never tiring feet pedalling by night and the Singer which my mother pedals, pedals for our hunger, night and day.… And the bed of planks on its legs of kerosene drums, a bed with elephantiasis, my grandmother’s bed with its goatskin and its dried banana leaves and its rags, a bed with nostalgia as a mattress and above it a bowl full of oil, a candle-end with a dancing flame and on the bowl, in golden letters, the word
MERCY
! A disgrace Paille Street.

Aimé Césaire, Return to my Native Land (Martinique)

The mothers of the Mulattoes were in the slave-gangs, they had half-brothers there, and however much the Mulattoe himself might despise this half of his origin, he was at home among the slaves and, in addition to his wealth and education, could have an influence among them which a white man could never have. Furthermore apart from physical terror, the slaves were to be kept in subjection by associating inferiority and degradation with the most obvious distinguishing mark of the slave – the black skin.

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (West Indies)

Where are you now, O Shango?

Two-headed, powerful

Man and woman, hermaphrodite

Holding your quivering thunderbolts

With quiet savage malice;

Africa, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil,

Slavery of mind is unabolished.

Always wanting to punish, never to love.

Abioseh Nicol, African Easter (Sierra Leone)

Certain similarities exist between the colonization of the underdeveloped country and female oppression within capitalism. There is the economic dependence, the cultural take-over, the identification of dignity with resemblance to the oppressor. There is also the trap which consists in making a cult of a particular form of primitiveness designed and constructed from the romantic conceit of the oppressor. The ‘noble savage’ and the ‘earth-mother’ become impotent self-binding symbols of the qualities the white man in capitalism has destroyed for himself. Nostalgia lingers delicately round an advanced technology. Paternalism has many forms, but the line is essentially the same. The slave-owner is the affectionate father until the slaves rebel. The victim of colonization is allowed to develop, but according to a particular pattern of underdevelopment. The master urges equality and then bites back his words with the lash. The colonized, like Caliban, find themselves trained for dependence, then finally rejected as equals:

You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse.
¹

From this first curse with the master’s language comes the movement for liberation. There is a delicious relief in the first act of ingratitude.

Here the analogy between sexual and racial imperialism stops, partly because the colonizer’s women have themselves enjoyed the spoils of imperial domination. Sometimes they have been its most vehement and cruel defenders. Because their own superiority was
insecure they have turned on the native women with a bitterness in which sexual and racial jealousy combine. When colonization included slavery as in the West Indies this was particularly intense. The wives of the slave-owners dwelt upon the obvious preference their men showed for the black bodies of their female slaves. The men returned to the black women who had suckled them for orgasm. The appearance of mulatto children, taught to despise their own mothers, was the ironic testament of the white woman’s rivals. Occasionally, when her man was away she would break out into acts of terrible vengeance upon the slave.

In industry in the towns a complicated series of racial and sexual hierarchies develops along with the formation of a working class. Esther Boserup comments:

It is normal in European-owned industrial establishments in developing countries to find a division of labour along both the race and sex dimension, with European men at the top of the hierarchy, in the most responsible jobs with the highest incomes, and indigenous African or Asian women at the bottom doing the least responsible and lowest paid.
²

In white-collar jobs – clerical and supervisory – Chinese or Indian men are found along with European women: here the ranking of race and sex is less determined. But within the indigenous elite even the small minority of privileged women tend to work as nurses or teachers, which are extensions of the family role. Their privileged occupations are thus structurally distinct from the men’s. Women moreover form a relatively small percentage of the elite group in all developing countries in terms of educational and job opportunity.

Imperialism has served to generalize discontent. Dissatisfactions have ceased to be particular and local; they have become national. The national liberation movements act as the focus for these. Demands like monogamy, birth control, education, the right to organize, borrowed from western capitalism, combine with the desire for economic security, right to the land, control of the markets, expulsion of the foreigners, which come from the direct experience of the wretched of the earth. When a section of the urban intelligentsia breaks with their class to argue for social revolution this combination finds a theoretical shape. Feminism has followed this process, though it has only been a faint echo of the male-dominated movements.

In the 1920s and 1930s an incipient feminism emerged in developing
countries which resembled the early ‘equal rights’ feminism of middle-class women in capitalist societies. However, the lack of a strong bourgeoisie meant that it rarely became significant. Sometimes this was imposed by the state in an attempt to westernize. In Turkey Mustafa Kemal ended the veil and banned polygamy. In other cases it came out of movements of the more privileged women and carried a note of radical humanism and faith in individual potential. The novel was always an important vehicle of propaganda. In Indonesia for example Takdir-Alis Jahbana wrote
Under Full Sail
in the 1930s. She discussed the difficulties faced by emancipated women. The heroine Tati breaks off her engagement so she can participate fully in the feminist movement. She makes a speech at a women’s congress which is typical of the ideas of this kind of feminism:

For the man she was no more than a toy, a doll pampered while it is loved but cast aside and replaced once it has lost its attraction. A slave, she has no will of her own but obeys those whose servant she is. Up to the present day our people do not regard a woman as a human being with a life of her own. She is only a part of the man’s life … and in order to prevent her becoming conscious of her humiliation, she is caged in her house until it is time for her to marry. Why send her to school if afterwards she is to be confined to the kitchen?

Later in the book she adds: ‘We must point the way in order that the new woman may be born, a freed woman who will have the courage to stand up for all she does and all she thinks.’
³

Such a woman would not think in terms of the house but of the world; she would not just marry but have a career. She would be ‘no longer the man’s slave but his equal; no longer fearing him or appealing to his feelings of pity’. This kind of moral radicalism was very important in creating a new consciousness in women but such an approach necessarily excluded all women who weren’t from rich families. Education is assumed to be available and presumably there is someone to look after the children while the emancipated woman gets on with her career.

The film
Les Ramparts d’Argile
shows the impossible struggle of a young girl in a village in North Africa. She is restless, she watches the men, she learns reading from her little brother hanging around the schoolhouse, she gazes enviously at the chic health visitor from the town. When a sit-down strike starts among the men in the village
because they question the rates allowed for their stone-cutting, and the soldiers come to prevent them being given food or drink, she hides the bucket from the well and forces the soldiers to go away because then they can’t drink either. After this she shows open rebellion to her father and the old women humiliate her, smearing blood on her face and hair, twisting and pulling her hair before they cast her out into the desert. The situation of women in such a society is completely fixed in a network of traditional social relationships which make individual resistance almost impossible for the majority of women. They can only become outcasts. The alternative has been revolts about consumption, for instance the organizing of African market women to defend their monopoly and rights. Their revolt appears legitimate because it is defending what existed before.

It is only in the abnormal circumstances of political revolt that it is possible for women to take uncustomary actions. It has been the national independence movements which have created the impetus for the active involvement of women outside the small social elite. Invariably this has been a result of initiative taken by the privileged women first. But this has meant that the political choices open to women have been determined by the nature of the movements for national independence. For example, in the course of Arab resistance to the British support for the Zionists, Arab women organized a congress in Palestine in 1929. Two hundred women delegates attended, among them the wives of prominent Arab leaders. Not only was this the first ever Women’s congress in Palestine, but all the women attended unveiled. The women’s movement was completely identified with Arab nationalism; they worked for the mitigation of political sentences, protested against the import of firearms into Palestine to be used by the Jews. After Lord Allenby’s visit to Jerusalem in 1932 the women had extended outwards and organized mass demonstrations. But with this identification came collapse. The women’s movement failed along with the general movement which tried to prevent the creation of a state of Israel. Not only were the national political objectives not achieved but Palestinian women were not able to establish any social basis for the liberation of Arab women.

In India women played a prominent role in resisting the British. Even in the mutiny of 1857–8 women of the bazaar are reported as taunting the men to rise. Rather later in the early 1900s educated women became involved in religious groups and organizations which
met as a focus for discontent and voiced forms of feminism, like the Theosophical Society founded by the woman who had organized the London matchgirls, Annie Besant. As the nationalist movement spread in the 1920s and 1930s women became active on a larger scale. Despite Gandhi’s suspicions about women participating, they demonstrated, picketed shops, were imprisoned and faced police charges with great courage. In the Punjab women workers were drawn in. A left wing within the feminist-nationalist movement was as critical of exploitation by Indians as by the British, but this was submerged in the general right-wing current of the independence struggle. ‘Emancipation’ now in India is reserved for the most privileged – and even for them the limits of what can be done are severely circumscribed.

Bourgeois nationalism has proved consistently incapable of answering the needs of the poor in the Third World. This is particularly true of the needs of poor Third World
women.
It is only when national liberation struggles have become revolutionary movements that the real problems of women’s liberation have even begun to be considered.

However, there are many complications even at this stage for women because they often face the hostility of men in the male-dominated revolutionary organization. Perhaps they accept the participation of women actually while they are fighting imperialism, but they tend to see the future society as one in which women are put back firmly in their place. Women are made to carry babies. These alien ideas of ‘emancipation’ came with the white man. They were the justification apparently of the arrogance which white women often showed to the colonized men. This presents a dilemma for those women who realize that their only hope is through the success of the revolutionary movement. It is difficult for them to know what to do. They realize that the men’s reaction is partly the age-old response of the male oppressor, but it is also something else. The white imperialists did not only colonize economically but psychologically. They usurped the men from their ‘manhood’, they took over from the colonized men control of their women.