Articles & theory
Socialist Worker no. 522 | September 2010
Are we equal?
Over the past century, women fought and won huge advances in society, but are we equal now? Women’s bodies continue to be objectified and there is still a wide gap in incomes. Here, Judith Orr looks at the evolution of sexism and what is required to fight it.
Women have it all, or so we are told. The battle for equality has been won and when women’s bodies are used to sell things, or a lap dancing club opens on the corner of your street, don’t fret, that’s not sexism, it’s just ironic.
What’s it like in this wonderful world where we have won equality?
Yes, we can run companies, head schools, sit as judges or members of parliament—jobs that were, until only a couple of generations ago, barred to women by law or custom.
We can have children when and if we choose, and being unmarried is no longer seen as a curse. Our lives have been completely transformed from a time when women had to fight even to get the right to vote.
All these are important gains.
But the reality is only very few women run companies, sit as judges and members of parliament. In Canada, the 2008 general election brought the proportion of women in the House of Commons to a mere 22 per cent.
Instead, more women are fighting to get off the “sticky floor” of low pay than are bumping up against the “glass ceiling” of corporate promotion.
In Canada, the average pay gap between men and women is approximately 20 per cent, one of the highest gender gaps among 30 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The average pay gap between men and women who have attended university is 18.4 per cent, up from 12.2 per cent in 1991.
So don’t believe the hype, despite all the many gains we have won, women still face discrimination in every part of their lives.
So there is nothing ironic about today’s sexism—whether it’s beauty pageants for toddlers, pole dancing being sold a healthy exercise or the relentless barrage of images of women as sex objects.
We are facing plain old-fashioned sexism but now it has an added twist—it is being sold to us as empowering, as liberating. Writer Ariel Levy called this new sexism “raunch culture”, and others describe it as the “pornification of popular culture”.
How has this happened?
The struggles of the 1960s won many gains but capitalism wasn’t overthrown. And capitalism has an amazing ability to absorb even fundamental challenges to the way it works.
So women did win, among many other gains, acceptance of their right to assert themselves in their sexual lives, to make their own choices. Today the “new” sexism reflects and has absorbed the history and language of those struggles for women to be more than mere objects for the enjoyment of others, apparently all the better to continue that very process.
So if we object to strip clubs and porn we are told we are prudes, that we should be comfortable with our sexuality. As if being comfortable with women taking off their clothes for money could in any way be a measure of being liberated.
This is sexual liberation as seen through the prism of a system driven solely by profit. Our bodies are treated as nothing more than commodities. It’s degrading; we might as well be put on a shelf with a price tag.
Karl Marx talked about how capitalism turns intrinsic parts of our humanity, for example the ability to labour, into something alien, something that must be bought and sold, and in the end comes to control us.
This even happens to something as private and personal to us as our sexuality. It can be distorted and shaped by the values of the society in which we live—so in capitalism we see sexual liberation turned in to its opposite.
Why does this happen?
Some people argue that women are treated differently because of basic biological differences, which define us and can’t be challenged.
Everyone will have heard the classic justifications for women not being capable of certain jobs: women are not hard-wired for science; they don’t have the competitive drive for business.
Instead, they are naturally good with child rearing and homemaking, while men’s biology leads them to be the hunters, the breadwinners.
Indeed, some feminists subscribe to a version of these determinist views, regularly paraded as science. One feminist business journalist explained the financial crisis in terms of male testosterone writing: “there was not the cooperative thinking there would be in a female environment, there would have been a natural tendency for a woman to say, ‘Let’s take the longer-term view.’” Women have a “caring mindset, a nurturing mindset”.
It is true more women should be represented in all jobs and institutions. But not because their biology automatically makes them more progressive, or more fair. Plenty of women who have made it to the top show this to be a myth; war-mongers Condoleeza Rice and Margaret Thatcher come to mind.
When in power, women, just like men, act according to their class instincts not their hormones.
Socialists reject determinist explanations. We know that even today, in a world where anyone who challenges gender stereotypes is treated as an aberration, women can be scientists and men can be great with children.
Of course we are all different, but we have to examine the impact of the socialization we experience from the moment we are born. Depending on your gender, certain behaviours, attributes and values are rewarded and encouraged while others punished.
Think about what the possibilities would be for all of us to be able to express ourselves and live our lives if we did not have the huge crushing weight of expectations and society’s structures to squeeze us into boxes marked pink fairy princess or power ranger.
The roots to women’s oppression and gender roles do not lie in our biology. In fact, for most of human history women were not oppressed or treated as second-class citizens.
Class society
Women’s oppression originated in a moment in history when for the first time defined classes arose in settled communities.
Ownership and passing on of private property became a feature of these new class societies and so monogamy, to ensure true “inheritors” to wealth, and the establishment of the family as an institution became critical.
Of course thousands of years later the family is very different but it has proved to be an extraordinarily resilient structure. It is still the way that the majority of us are brought up and for many it is a happy nurturing experience, but it is important also to see the wider role it plays.
Living in the nuclear family can atomize people, encourage them to see their problems as being rooted under their own roof and not in wider society. For the rich, women are trophy wives, their role is to provide an “heir and spare”. For the rest of us, the family is the place where the next generation of workers is brought up and looked after at minimal expense to the state.
The family is eulogized everywhere. Marriage magazines are big business and a newborn baby is the accessory of choice for celebrities.
There is a desire to perpetuate the idea that women’s real role is still the home and hearth, even though this is in direct contradiction to the reality of women’s lives today. Women are almost 50 per cent of the workforce and the majority of adult women work outside the home.
This reality, while it does mean that women suffer a double burden, means women are now a permanent part of the working class. For socialists, class is not just another form of discrimination, we see the working class as a unique social force in society with the potential power to challenge the priorities of the bosses, bankers and politicians.
This means women are not just victims but can be class fighters. We don’t look to others to bring us liberation, this is about how we can emancipate ourselves.
We may experience oppression most profoundly as individuals, but we are best placed to challenge it as part of a collective and through the process of struggles, great and small. Through struggle people’s ideas about how the world works get challenged.
So we must fight every manifestation of oppression, whether it’s sexist posters or unequal pay, but to permanently eradicate inequality we will have to uproot the whole rotten system that created the oppression in the first place and replace it with a very different society, a socialist society with women’s liberation at its heart.
