The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Not all feminists are impressed, however, with women’s undoubted success in penetrating the structures of the male world of power. Suspicious of the ease with which masculine systems absorb women without changing their own essential nature, separatists have argued that ‘the Master’s tools will never dismande the Master’s house,’ in the words of the black American poet Audre Lorde. The growing conviction that men and women have not merely distinct but opposed political needs and imperatives has fuelled the formation of women-only parties and groups, to lobby or fight for woman-identified issues. In the decades since the 1960s’ rebirth of modern feminism, these have included some radical new approaches to age-old but unidentified social problems (unidentified often because women’s problems) like Women’s Aid Refuges and Rape Crisis Centres. Conservation and ‘Green’ issues are also high on very many women’s agenda for political action, as historian Amaury de Riencourt notes: ‘Having fouled his planetary nest, Western man now has to contend with the aroused spirit of Mother Earth – generator, like the multi-faceted goddess Kali, not only of civilized stability, but occasionally of revolutionary anger.’16 The sense of ‘Women for Life on Earth’ is the moving spirit of what has become the world’s most enduring peace camp, the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common in the South of England. Despite continual harassment from the US army occupiers of the nuclear missile base, the British courts, the local police, random gangs of violent men, and the seamy underbelly of the British tabloid press, the Women’s Camp has continued since 1981 as a living embodiment of the song of the women’s peace movement:

  Oh sisters, come you, sing for all you’re worth,

  Arms are made for linking,

  Sisters, we’re asking for the earth.

  For the earth has still to be won. The removal of most of the more blatant of the injustices against women has served to concentrate attention on those that remain. After the euphoria of the first handful of spectacular triumphs, late twentieth-century feminism had to come to terms with the fact that, with every battle won, the enemy regroups elsewhere; new oppressions emerge, which like their predecessors are only symptoms and expressions of more fundamental inequalities whose roots are hard enough to identify, let alone remove. With a sense of history sharpened by repeated disappointment, women are coming to see the essentially repetitive nature of their struggle; to understand, too, that the circumstances under which they win rights and freedoms in themselves can undermine those very rights and freedoms so painfully won.

  For women make progress in times of social change, when older, established power blocks shift and crack, allowing women (and others previously excluded) to penetrate structures where before they were denied. Women’s advance in the public sphere, or in the world of work, is connected therefore with times of upheaval: frontier women fight and shoot, immigrant women work in business, run for office in the city or the trades union. The post-1960s phase of the fight for emancipation is the twin sister of the world recession that has pushed up women’s participation in the workforce (in Britain, by as much as forty-seven per cent) just as the Great War did, when women in their millions abandoned the feather duster for the lathe and vowed never to go back into ‘domestic service’ again.

  They did, of course. Domestic service was soon given another name, and a whole generation of budding engineers and skilled workers, the riveting Rosies of two world wars, found themselves back in the home. For no matter how vital it is at the time for women to work, to drive cars, to have crèches and nursery schools for their babies, these signs of emancipation are seen as a response to crisis, and are fatally undermined by this. The atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction and fear, though caused by the larger crisis, becomes associated with the fact that women now have jobs or are no longer in the home as a warm and welcoming presence. Identified then with the bad feelings of change, women come to be seen as the cause of the badness. And not only to men – to women too, these strains and dissatisfactions, and being made to take responsibility for being the cause of them, often seems too high a price to pay for their new freedoms.

  The root causes of dissatisfaction with women’s progress towards freedom have in fact proved quite constant over many hundreds of years:

  – women working while men are unemployed (‘taking men’s jobs’)

  – women getting out of the isolation of the home and developing solidarity with other women in factories or other groups

  – women getting cash of their own and the independence that confers

  – women getting public rights instead of their previous domestic privileges

  – women learning ‘masculine’ skills (to ride, to shoot, to run a business), so demystifying masculine competence, and challenging the implicit masculine right to lead

  – the absence of the ‘angel at the hearth’: domestic management suffers when women do other things.

  Marry these stresses to the underlying and very human impulse of nostalgia for a return to the way it used to be – ‘when we all get back to normal, it will all be all right again’ . . . ‘when this lousy war is over . . .’ – then it is easy to see why the gains that women make they do not hold. There is always, often almost unseen, a creeping patriarchal clawback. ‘We discovered to our astonishment that when you got the vote you were not thereby made a full citizen. It was a horrible discovery,’ mourned one former suffragette, fifty years after that battle had been thought won.17

  It was also a discovery that has had to be made again and again. Women have had to learn, often painfully and always with reluctance, that their freedom will not simply come of its own accord. In the nineteenth century, high expectations were pinned on the vote, on education, on women’s access to the professions. In the European revolutionary struggle, Clara Zetkin, founder of the International Socialist Women’s Congress in 1907, was instrumental in all these, and internationally distinguished for the brilliance of her critical analysis and the breadth of her understanding.

  Yet like a great many others both before and since, Zetkin sincerely believed that women’s full participation in the labour force, and full legal equality, would automatically lead to their political and social emancipation. In addition, the extreme bitterness of this particular conflict, in which Zetkin’s friend and colleague Rosa Luxemburg was, like Hypatia, seized by opponents, beaten and killed, drove women’s special interests to the wall. Neither Zetkin nor Luxemburg trusted Marx to revolutionize the future for women with the ardour he applied to the revolution for men; and after a few half-hearted changes like the extension of abortion and divorce, the Russian woman found herself worse off than ever. Now she was to be an economic tool of the regime, as well as a sexual object for her man, compelled to work all day and carry the entire burden of childcare and domestic work in her ‘leisure’ hours at night.

  The result was inevitable. At the turn of the century, the average life span of the Russian woman was two years less than that of the average man, despite women’s biological tendency to greater longevity. By the early 1960s, women’s life span was eight years less than their males.18 Yet the Party line retained this manifestly unjust division of labour, by embracing the most archaic notion of sex roles that the new patriarchs could devise:

  A boy must be prepared for service in the Red Army while he is still at school. He receives special physical and purely military training for a stern soldier’s life . . . What of the girl? She is essentially a mother. School must give the girl special knowledge of human anatomy, physiology, psychology, pedagogy and hygiene.19

  This crippling sex segregation continues to be found in the deep structures of every society, because it continues to flourish in the deepest recesses of the human mind. For women, the life choices (which by and large are made for them by their societies) come down to one of two evils – either the overloaded worker/wife/mother with her double burden, or the under-occupied housewife/drone with her half-life of deprivation and despair. In truth there is little to choose between them. Of the two, th
e role of full-time home-maker may seem to be preferable in terms of offering individual women marginally more control over their own lives than industrial organization, and a less onerous lot than that of the wage slave. This is an illusion, for the house-worker has little or no control over a job that eats away at all her waking hours, and whose chief characteristic is that it is ‘never done’.

  And during the course of the crowded century and more that has elapsed since Charlotte Perkins Gilman crisply pointed out that ‘a house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband’ women’s work of domestic labour has shown no sign of diminishing. ‘Hoovers’, washing machines, fridges, dishwashers, food processors and microwave ovens have poured from the laboratories and factories in a continuous stream since the mid-nineteenth century – gas ranges came from Britain in 1841, electricity in 1881, and the first hoover was patented in 1908 – without making any impact on the number of hours women spent in cooking, cleaning, and caring for a family. Time saved on one chore was simply taken up by another as domestic work itself became more sophisticated and demanding, and women had to work harder to meet the higher expectations of improved service that the brave new technology had created.

  On the theoretical side, suggestions to reduce or redefine housework met with a similar lack of success. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, recognizing that social inequality begins in the home, proposed the abolition of housework. The labour of cooking, cleaning and childcare should be communal, she argued, and performed by both men and women like any other kind of job, leaving the home as a place of private rest and recreation. The male sex, however, showed no enthusiasm for ending the division between men’s work and women’s work, and confined their efforts to inventing more and more domestic machinery whose only certain benefit, due to the extra work they entail, is to their manufacturer.

  The proliferation of machines for housework has also helped to make it the solitary, mechanical and marginalized activity it has become in the second half of the twentieth century. This in turn makes it irredeemably low-status work, in the eyes of those who do it no less than those who benefit from it (‘I’m only a housewife’ has become a classic self-deprecation of the post-1960s). Undervalued, unseen (except by advertisers), alienated and despised, the ‘housewife’ is no more than an unwaged household slave, frequently reliant, as the West’s soaring incidence of female alcoholism and tranquillizer consumption indicate, on drugs to keep herself going.

  The so-called ‘working woman’, as if what the ‘housewife’ does is not work, performs all this unpaid labour on top of her occupational labour for which, at best, she will only be getting three-quarters of what her male equivalent is paid. Equal pay legislation in many parts of the world has produced only a minimal impact on this most entrenched and immovable of injustices. Women constitute one-third of the world’s formal labour force. For this they receive only ten per cent of the world’s income, and own less than one per cent of the world’s property.20 Further, within the world of work, women are systematically held in low grades and denied access to promotion, or to the kind of work which brings status and reward. In many societies, the fact that women perform certain occupations is enough to ensure their designation as ‘woman’s work’, in itself a guarantee that this work remains a low-paid ghetto activity. Through the ensuing combination of all these factors, women are then excluded from the crucial resources that would enable them to better their circumstances, and to wield more power within their family and community.

  Yet the fact that women in Western industrialized societies are now doing well enough in the occupational world to want to do better, in itself argues considerable progress. In the past, exclusion of women from top jobs was never a problem; now, the bands of aware and angry women gathering in the corridors of power are not simply griping about the barriers obstructing them, but setting about the task of breaking them down. From the 1970s, however, it began to emerge more and more clearly that gains like this had by and large been won by and for women of the white middle classes. Even when white feminists had attempted to relate to the needs of women of colour, their overtures often struck black women as inappropriate, patronizing and racist. To the blacks, attuned as they were to all the fine nuances of oppression, there was an uneasy whiff of old-style colonization about the whites’ attempts to enrol black women in the liberation movements. Explaining ‘What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib’ in 1971, Toni Morrison wrote, ‘Too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enrol blacks and have ended up by rolling them. They don’t want to be used again to help somebody gain power – a power that is carefully kept out of their hands.’21

  For some black women activists, feminism was a sideshow, a distraction from the real battle, the real enemy: racism. Others, like Bell Hooks, argued for an understanding that would encompass the interlocking of the various different forms of oppression; those all cast alike as worms beneath the white male supremacy should use their strength to strike together against the common enemy, not to turn against each other. What the black women are saying is very clear: that although all women share a common oppression as women, not all women are equally oppressed. And it is difficult, if not impossible, for an outsider to grasp the complex web of allegiances and associations that can bind a woman to a man, or a way of life, that clearly relegates her to an inferior place. Among the native American women of the Lakota, or Sioux, submission to the bloka (maleness, male dominance) of this warrior society is part of its most ancient tradition. To strike out for the more assertive behaviour of American women towards men would mean Lakota women rejecting the ‘native’ half of their selves in favour of ‘American’, to the prejudice of their personal integrity.

  Where racism crosses sexism, the experience of the individual woman victim has always been of this kind of fragmentation. In the South of America, a gentleman would always stand for a lady – but it was a well-known fact that a nigger couldn’t be a lady (every Southern gentleman had a library of books by other scientific gentlemen proving that as one of the ‘higher animal species’ she wasn’t even a fully human woman) – so if you were black and a woman, you stopped being half of yourself when you had to stand to give up your seat to a white gentleman. For one woman, it was eventually too much. Rosa Parks has passed into history as the black woman who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, at the order of a white man. Her action inspired a widespread black boycott of the buses throughout the South of America, and so the civil rights movement was born. ‘A miracle has taken place,’ said Martin Luther King, blessing the birth of the overthrow of the psychological slavery that had replaced almost unnoticed the physical chains of legalized subordination.

  It is, however, a classic tenet of racism that ethnic groups, problematized by their adopted nations, would be ‘better off in their own country’. The recent experience of many women in their own countries suggests that freedom may be coming – but ‘not here, not yet, and not for us’, in the Iranian women’s phrase. There the enforced Westernization of the late Shah gave way to the fundamentalist fanaticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini without a momentary interruption in the tyranny of men over women. A Western observer summed up the contradictions inflicted on Iranian women from both sides of the religious and political spectrum:

  In 1978–9, educated women donned the chador as a protest against the Shah, while Ayatollah Khomeini denounced the Shah’s attitude to women . . . ‘The Shah declared that women should only be objects of sexual attraction. It is this concept which leads women to prostitution and reduces them to the status of sexual objects.’

  Today, women who expose too much hair can be sent to camps for ‘corrective moral re-education’. The veil is seen as the symbol of independence from the Western values that the Shah used merely to consolidate his family’s power. Failure to observe correct wearing of ‘hejab’ (correct religious dress) is counter-revolutionary.22

  This attack on the ‘romanticization of Islam’
, though made by a Western male, is abundantly supported by the testimony of Iranian women themselves. Writer Mashid Amir Shahi has publicly attacked Khomeini’s decree that women are ‘unequal, and biologically, naturally and intellectually inferior to men’. What this has meant in practice was illustrated by an anonymous speaker at a London conference:

  Wedding day, well, is compulsory. Political women are tortured and raped before execution. Especially young women. They rape nine-year-old women in the prison because it is against God if they execute a virgin woman. Women are attacked in various horrific ways, such as acid being thrown in their faces, their hair being burnt if it is not covered. It means that just to be a woman in Iran is a political crime.23

  Plus ça change . . . In the course of history, to be a woman had been a sin against nature and a crime against God. Now it has become an ideological deviance into the bargain. Under this system, the woman who dared to question the ideology by which she was judged would find herself among the ‘daughters of the Devil’ whom the men of God, or the God of men, had determined to destroy. For the woman who argued, questioned, challenged, was not a woman. Woman was designed by nature to please and complement man, to love and serve her lord and master. After all, what else are women for?

  In this baseline demand lurks the eternal myth of womanhood, and the eternal unsatisfied fantasy of the self-deluded male. To them, the answer was simple – women were for men, and should be grateful. Nowhere has this egregious exaction been more visibly expressed, nor more extensively fostered, than in the world’s dream factory of the twentieth century, the Hollywood film industry. Hollywood’s idiosyncratic vice and overriding obsession, the sexualizing of the female, in fact is wholly characteristic of all the other mass media, and indeed the secret of their commercial success. But although advertising has now taken over as the prime site of sexual stereotyping in the Western industrialized societies, Hollywood led the way. Whatever ideas the inhabitants of the post-war world nurse about male and female, love and work, they will have derived a high proportion of them from the dream-world of Hollywood fiction.