Women, Resistance and Revolution (40 page)

Muslim religion reinforced the subordination of women. Just as seventeenth-century puritans turned to the Bible for arguments about Adam’s rib and the inspiration of Deborah and Jael, Algerians in the 1960s quoted texts from the Koran. Though Mohammed’s teaching was relatively enlightened in the context of the seventh century – he exhorted his followers to treat their wives better than their cattle – it leaves much to be desired for women who had just emerged from fighting the French. But Hachemi Tidjani, president of an association called The Brave, was declaring in June 1964 that there had never been a prophetess – thus proving conclusively the inferiority of women and topping his argument with the fact that women’s brains were biologically below men’s.
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Most important though is the general political situation of the Algerian Revolution which meant that it was impossible to try to overcome these in a decisive manner. Ben Bella’s attempt to find a middle road to socialism, avoiding both the capitalist and communist
camps, immediately involved him in financial trading contradictions and in considerable ambiguities when he tried to carry through domestic reforms. After his fall Algeria moved farther to the right. Not only did the oppression of women continue openly and blatantly but there was barely even a rhetorical protest against it. Criticism of the regime in general became more and more difficult. Polygamy continued in the countryside and if anything was on the increase. A peasant could murder his wife in 1967 and feel quite within his rights if he claimed she was unfaithful.

Paranoia mounted against ‘Bolshevik atheism’ and ‘European and Jewish materialism’. Fanon’s books became suspect. Instead ‘revolutionary Islamic humanism’ became the lofty title for distrust of foreigners and foreign influences and an excuse for reverting to the most reactionary measures in relation to sex and the family. It became fashionable to make a distinction between ‘traditional traditionalism and colonial traditionalism’.
⁵⁰
If anything, from the women’s point of view the second was rather more favourable to liberation than the first. Women could not use the ideology of the revolution to argue their case, because unlike Marxism, Islamic nationalism is an exclusive theory which distinguishes from rather than extends towards. Boumedienne expressed clearly the difference between the future which Algerian society holds for girls and boys in a speech at a lycée prize-giving in Algiers in 1969. The girls’ role is as mothers and upholders of Islamic-Arab morality; the boys’ is to assume political responsibility for the state. The daily paper
El Moudjahid
repeats this: ‘The woman is the guardian of the traditions of the vertebral column of the family, the cell of the basis of society. And all morality or depravity in the family or in society is determined primarily by the behaviour of the woman. Her role is all-important.’
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In the countryside the women live as they have lived for centuries. The little girls go out to look after the flocks; they accept the husband their father has chosen for them. In the small towns they are similarly confined. In Algiers young women students, secretaries, professionals, enjoy a certain independence personally, but they are quite separate from most of the women. They constitute the tiny minority of women elected to the assemblies of government. But even this measure of privileged emancipation goes when they marry and have children. Apart from the urban middle-class women the only others with economic independence are women in industry.
But these are numerically insignificant and are exclusively in textiles and clothing. Domestic service or work in agriculture is much more common. There was an initial impetus to involve women in production and the need is still recognized by some of the men in the party, but this would undoubtedly shatter the hold of the men over their women, and the separate but different line of development is more popular. In tones reminiscent of Victorian England the writer of a letter to
El Moudjahid
in March 1967 asserted that ‘the man must see in his wife … a pleasant companion, one who after a long day working consoles him in his troubles and relieves his tiredness.”
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The young Algerian girl faces many contradictions. At one level there are practical restrictions: she is forced to leave school, she is watched by her brother when she is out with friends. She has to guard her virginity or be socially disgraced. But meanwhile another world communicates itself on the media. It is apparent to her that men are preoccupied with the sexual western images they condemn, and that prostitution and women abandoned by men divorcing them are increasing. She oscillates between individual submission and defiant rebellion. But there is no way out – whatever she does is completely dependent on men and determined by them.

She is not yet free, and whatever she does she continues to place herself to act, to judge in relation to man. He remains for her the measure of everything: she fears him or defies him, respects him or provokes him, she never neglects him … he never stops looking at her, she never stops seeing him, she says she’s free, she feels she is guilty.
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The cultural emergence of women is quite inseparable from the general development of Algerian society. It is impossible for women to break with their own specific colonization and oppression when the old colonizers are simply replaced by new ones.

There are, however, several factors which although inadequate as a basis of genuine emancipation may well heighten the contradiction between the attempt to bind women in Islamic-Arab tradition and the economic development of Algeria. There is the likelihood that industrialization will bring more women into the labour force in the factories; eighty per cent of the women are now literate. Both these serve to make women dissatisfied with the lives their mothers had to lead. Since 1966 family planning has started in an experimental way in the large towns. Nor are all women completely passive in accepting
their fate. The National Union of Algerian Women (U.N.F.A.) for example continues to maintain that it is necessary to struggle ‘against certain negative traditions which have no reason for existing’. These are held to be the family code and legal position of women, polygamy, divorce by male repudiation, and the right of ‘djebr’, which allows the father to marry his children as he pleases. Young girls have stumbled into consciousness despite so many obstacles and the defensive postures which are a result of the hegemony of Arab-Islamic tradition as official ideology. A girl wrote to a magazine: ‘Woman should be free. She must not imitate men stupidly. She’s equal to men and she should not lower herself depending on the attitude of her husband. She must be independent.’
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This is still a moral feminism which asserts the individual woman’s equal rights but in the Algerian context it is radical indeed. But alone it will be powerless to transform the situation of women. Algerian women await liberation. Their fate is a warning against too great a hope. The failure of the Algerian Revolution serves to bring a perspective to other revolutions in developing countries.

Now in 1971 in France the daughters of Algerian immigrants protest, not like Nefissa against foreign colonialism, but as women who do not want to share the bed of a man they don’t desire. Their weapon is the time-honoured one of women in similar circumstances – suicide. We can retreat even as we advance. In isolation we can destroy one another.

Patronage takes several shapes. Sometimes it is the assumption that everyone must naturally want to be what you are or what you hope to be. Sometimes it is quite the opposite, the assumption that other human beings are a different order of creature from yourself and therefore would never share your aspirations. The disinherited are sensitive about such attitudes. As a woman I am aware of patronage. As a white middle-class woman from one of the metropolitan countries I am also deeply implicated in the arrogance of the possessors. As a Marxist and as a feminist I cherish the elements in bourgeois humanism which Marx incorporated and transformed in his thinking. I do not want the revolutionary movement to push them aside. But at the same time I am conscious of the difficulty which western Marxists have in distinguishing between our own cultural heritage of assumed superiority and the importance of insisting that communism
is the kingdom of freedom not necessity. Because so far all revolutionary movements have had to settle for something less, because they have to solve such material and fundamental problems and because the experience of the Soviet Union provides no clear alternative, it is often difficult to maintain the tension between solidarity and honesty. I
am
doubtful of asceticism, I
am
puzzled about the exact experience of polygamy, I
am
confused about the relevance of fashion, clothes and make-up. I
don’t
know what it is like to be Vietnamese, or Cuban, or Algerian. I have many ignorances and much hesitancy, which can’t be cleared just by thinking about them. We will learn more from what we do. The emergence of women’s consciousness, very recently, for example, in such diverse colonial situations as Mozambique, Palestine and Northern Ireland, will help further to define the nature of oppression and the possibility of liberation.

In all the discussions about the nature of the revolutions in the twentieth century, there have been relatively few attempts to describe the experience of women. The generation which became active in left politics in the sixties inherited silence and ambiguity. A legacy of cold war propaganda about the family, pressure from an expanding market for the beauty industry and consumer durables, stifled any questioning of the woman’s role in advanced capitalism. Meanwhile the Soviet Union, so long important as the model of a revolutionary alternative, had retreated from the creative experiments of the twenties. The tragic and faltering earlier attempts, specifically to connect female aspirations with revolution, and the uncertainty and tension these produced, have been obscured by their own failure and by the failure of the working class in western capitalism yet to create socialism. The return to our past through the women’s liberation movement is at once circular and proximate. Circular, because the movement which has developed recently has consisted mainly of women in a much more advantageous position than the women who stormed bakers’ shops in the nineteenth century or joined national liberation movements in the twentieth. Proximate, because the consciousness of people in the most diverse circumstances of resistance is capable of curiously intimate encounters.

The liberation of women has never fully been realized, and the revolution within the revolution remains unresolved. The connection between feminism, the assertion of the claims of women as a group, and revolutionary socialism is still awkward. Their synthesis cannot
merely be intellectual, but will come out of the ideas we make practical, dissolving, preserving and exploding our present conceptions of both.

This is a book in which feminism and Marxism come home to roost. They cohabit in the same space somewhat uneasily. Each sits snorting at the other and using words which are strange and foreign to the other. Each is huffy and jealous about its own autonomy. They are at once incompatible and in real need of one another. As a feminist and a Marxist I carry their contradictions within me and it is tempting to opt for one or the other in an effort to produce a tidy resolution of the commotion generated by the antagonism between them. But to do that would mean evading the social reality which gives rise to the antagonism. It would mean relying on pre-packaged formulas which come slickly off the tongue and then melt as soon as they are exposed to the light of day.

Marxism was developed as a means of understanding the way in which capitalist society functioned and how it could thus be changed. However, it retained a certain ambiguity about the liberation of women. Capitalism has itself got older and more sophisticated in its operation, while, at the same time, the political organization of all people throughout the world who have been excluded from the privileges of capitalism has greatly enlarged and extended what we can do. Marxism has to grow towards and through these developments before it can adequately explain modern capitalism. Marxists have in general assumed that the overthrow of capitalist society will necessitate a fundamental transformation in the organization and control of production and the social relations which come from the capitalist mode of production. Women’s liberation implies that if the revolutionary movement is to involve women, not as supporters or attendants only, but as equals, then the scope of production must be seen in a wider sense and cover also the production undertaken by women in the family and the production of self through sexuality. That is, in fact, a reassertion of Marx’s concern to study how human beings reproduce their lives in a total way. It is also a crucial part of any strategy to be employed against advanced capitalism.

Many women in women’s liberation are not revolutionaries. But the demands they make for their own improvement require such a fundamental change in society that they are completely inconceivable without revolution. An understanding is coming out of women’s
liberation of the way in which the present organization of the family holds women down, together with the recognition of the need to alter dramatically the system by which work is divided between the sexes. Such a change immediately raises the need to transform the whole cultural conditioning of women and, hence, of men, as well as the upbringing of children, the shape of the places we live in, the legal structure of our society, our sexuality and the very nature of work for the accumulation of private profit rather than for the benefit of human beings in general. This is an emerging idea and the means by which it will be realized and the shape it will assume are still not worked out. But the crucial feature of this new feminism as an organizing idea is that these changes will not follow a socialist revolution automatically but will have to be made explicit in a distinct movement now, as a precondition of revolution, not as its aftermath. This is obviously different from the emphases of the orthodox Marxist tradition. The fact that no socialist revolution has occurred in the countries of advanced capitalism inevitably leaves us only with an imponderable dilemma. Similarly the general problems of all societies in which there have been revolutions have become so completely intertwined with the specific problems of women that it is difficult to disentangle cause from effect.