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EXCERPTS
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth
of International Women's Day. First agreed at a socialist women's
conference in Copenhagen in 1910, its aim was to campaign for the
rights of working women. Today, the lives of women have changed beyond
recognition compared with those of their grandmothers and great
grandmothers. But the changes in work and personal life have been
distorted by the needs of the market and have fallen far short of
women's liberation.
The experience of work has been challenging and invigorating for a
few, but for most women in the shops, offices, call centres and
factories of 21st-century Britain it has been more likely to represent
long hours, constant pressure, and growing attempts to squeeze more
productivity and profit out of them. The big increase in the numbers of
women working (more than 12 million today) has come from working
mothers. But there has been no similar change in how the family and
childcare have been organised.
So while mothers work outside the home, often full-time, they
are also often expected to shoulder the needs of shopping, feeding and
caring for their children. This is on top of sometimes long journeys to
work, and of the demands of shift work for many. Whereas the old sexist
dichotomy of the 50s was that women could either have looks or brains,
now we are expected to have both, plus cooking skills at least to the
level of Come Dine With Me, and an all-seeing eye to ensure that
children behave at all times.
Women are expected to juggle all aspects of their lives and are
blamed as individuals for any failing in their work or family life. The
only people who can begin to succeed in doing this are those who can
afford to pay others (usually women) to carry out some or all of these
tasks. So an army of working-class women cook, clean, care for
children, do ironing and washing, work in supermarkets, wait in
restaurants, perform personal services, all to ensure the easier life
of those women who "have it all". Often in the process they neglect
their own families to do so.
The way in which women's working lives are portrayed reflects
this. There is much talk of glass ceilings, but little about those
women who are falling into the basement, struggling to work and
maintain families on poverty wages. The life experiences of women (and
men) are radically different, with a small minority sharing in the
profits made by working-class men and women.
Alongside work has come increased sexualisation of society; now greeted with horror by respectable middle-class opinion, but much
encouraged by advertising, the media and the profit motive itself,
where porn and lap dancing are now big business. The other side of this
sexualisation is the continuing high levels of rape, domestic violence
and sexual abuse. We are still a very long way from women controlling
their own lives and sexuality.
This International Women's Day we should recommit to a women's
liberation which is connected to a wider movement for human
emancipation and for working people to control the wealth they produce.
That's why women and men have to fight for liberation. We won't win
without a fight, because there are many vested interests who want to
stop us. But more and more people are beginning to connect campaigning
over climate change, war and inequality with fighting for women's
liberation. That's why we are launching a manifesto for 21st-century
feminism to begin to organise for real equality.
-reprinted from the Gaurdian