1) The Origin of Male Supremacy: Historically, the origin of the consolidation of male supremacy is found in the rise of private property and class society.
Prior to class society, which is based on private property, men and women shared equally in social production, although there was some sexual division of labor, and everyone shared the fruits of their labor. In most societies, women were in charge of the preparation of food and clothing, and of gathering fruits, vegetables and roots, the most important and steady supply of food to the gens. On the other hand, men primarily hunted, fished, and went to war.
As time passed, food-gathering developed into farming and was carried on mostly by the women. Similarly, hunting progressed into the domestication of herds and became the responsibility of the men. In agricultural societies, as hunting declined, men replaced women in the fields.
It was primarily the development of herding that transformed this primitive communism, based on poverty, because it enabled the production of a material surplus over the needs of the community. The beginnings of private property arose because herds required minimal supervision and provided abundant supplies of meat and milk, leading to the first accumulation of wealth. Since men were in charge of tending the herds, this surplus, over time, came to fall to them as a form of private property. This marked the rise of class society and the beginning of women’s oppression.
No longer was property held in common by the group. To insure that this private property would be passed to the man’s children, mother-right (the tracing of lineage through the mother) was overthrown, and father-right established. Furthermore, the institution of monogamy (at least for women) was imposed to insure clear hereditary. 1ines. Communal forms for housework, production and chi1d-rearing disappeared, and the single family unit emerged as the economic unit of the society, with the basic responsibility for maintaining its members.
“Women’s work,” no longer part of the larger social production’, was transformed into private service to the individual family. Excluded from social production, women became domestic slaves, economically dependent on men. Thus the rise of private property and class society laid the material foundations for the inequality and special oppression of women.
2) Exploitation of Working Class Women Under Capitalism: Under capitalism, the basis for the oppression of women is still their status as domestic slaves. For working class women this is a relationship of exploitation as well, given their role in producing, reproducing, and maintaining the commodity labor power. As a consequence of this role, working class women are super-exploited when they sell their labor power and take part in social production.
Proletarian women are responsible for bearing and raising children as well as maintaining men as laborers in the sphere of social production. This work constitutes a service to the bourgeoisie, for which the man’s wages are supposed to be a compensation. Thus women cannot be considered oppressed and exploited as a separate class; they are primarily exploited by the capitalist class directly through the family, and they are super-exploited at the workplace because of their role in the family.
Consequently, the notion put forth by some petit-bourgeois forces, that women’s labor within the home is unpaid, is incorrect. This theory assumes women’s labor within the home is the production of human use-values, rather than the creation of a full-fledged commodity with an exchange value, labor-power. This exchange value is the wage for which the man sells his labor power, a wage intended to pay for the work of both the woman and man. Furthermore, the demand for wages for housework only serves to rivet the women to the role of domestic slavery.
Under capitalism, women for the first time (since early communal societies) have been brought into social production in large numbers. What this change has meant is that women are doubly-exploited, both as domestic slaves and as wage slaves. At the workplace, women are discriminated against through marked lower wages than men in comparable jobs, a lack of childcare and maternity leave, aid inadequate training. They are channeled into low-paying, low-status, low-seniority menial jobs. This keeps women in an unstable relationship to the means of production, which serves the capitalists’ desire to use them as a reserve army of labor to depress the wages of the working class as a whole.
The Role of the Family Under Capitalism: The bourgeois monogomous family model serves the capitalist class as a means for controlling its wealth. In the proletarian family, it serves the capitalists by keeping workers in isolated economic units. With several people dependent on one income, workers are more hesitant to risk their jobs in fighting for better wages and conditions.
The family structure keeps women oppressed as domestic slaves and as marginal participants in social production. As a result, their lives are often kept isolated, with their social and political involvement limited. Both the patriarchal family structure and the male and female roles within it are confining to the growth of both partners. St is not unusual to find that during a struggle, whether in the community or workplace, one partner may hold back the other’s participation. Whether it is a woman resenting her husband’s union work, or a man refusing to allow his wife to attend meetings or unwillingness to do childcare, the struggle is weakened.
Not all women fit into these bourgeois family models. Around 40% of working women are heads of households; many working women are either single or gay. This brings the additional hardship of trying to make a living at a wage considered to be “the family’s second income.”
Chi1dren: It is important to realize that the bourgeoisie also oppresses working class children. They are subjected to anti-working class education, TV violence and propaganda, police repression, racism and sex-role stereotyping. In the family hierarchy and the society at large, children are treated as the private property and responsibility of their parents, with few rights of their own. Most of the time the responsibility for childcare falls on the shoulders of the mother, who may be additionally burdened by housework and a job.
Sexism: Women’s oppression is not only reflected in their family roles and at the workplace. The ideology of male supremacy, male chauvinism, promoted by the capitalists to maintain the imperialist system, is pervasive of all aspects of daily life. For example, women’s bodies are used to sell an infinite range of products. As a result of this degradation and sexual objectification, women are the frequent targets of verbal and psychological abuse, as well as serious physical violence such as rape, assault and wife beatings. When women fight back to defend themselves, they are generally prosecuted for it.
Sexist ideology is used by the bourgeoisie to reinforce male supremacy. It keeps the class divided by giving working class men someone to feel superior to, and holds working class women as isolated, divided and passive.
3) Basis for Liberation: The fundamental basis for women’s emancipation is 1 – full and equal participation in social production; 2–socialization of housework and childcare to the greatest possible extent; and 3–ideological struggle against male chauvinism.
This fundamental change is only possible under the dictatorship of the proletariat, with social ownership of the means of production. Private household work will become a public Industry, and childcare the society’s responsibility. Men and women will share this social production equally. The economic dependencies and oppressive aspects of the family will dissolve, leaving the way free for healthy, equal, loving relationships.
4) Struggle for Liberation: Women are a powerful reserve of the proletariat in its revolutionary struggle to seize state power. Already women have demonstrated themselves to be some of the bravest class fighters in workplace struggles and strikes, and community struggles around schools, police repression, housing, childcare, health care, and rape. There will be no revolution without their direct leadership, participation and support. Thus, no communist party can be stood on its feet without large-scale recruitment of women cadre and their promotion into leadership.
In the course of the revolutionary struggle, Marxist-Leninists have a number of important tasks regarding women, in order to involve more women and unite the working class. Proletarian women’s issues must be raised and supported, concrete steps must be taken to free women from housework and childcare in order to become more deeply involved in the struggle, and male chauvinism must be vigorously combatted.
In pursuit of these goals, communists must raise democratic demands for the complete equality of women, including support for legal reforms. While working consistently for these democratic rights for women, Marxist-Leninists must help demonstrate that they can never be more than partial reforms. Other women’s struggles such as those around childcare, health care, abortion, and rape need active support, it is important to remember, however, because of women’s historical exclusion from production, struggles’ around workplace and job discrimination are key for the proletariat.
It is also necessary for communists to actively encourage working-class men and women to equally share the tasks of housework and childcare. Organizations, both mass and communist, need to take collective responsibility for childcare to allow parents to be fully involved in all activities. This kind of sharing will allow more women to become active in the revolutionary process, and provide a means of combatting male chauvinism and male supremacy in the present–not in some distant socialist future.
In fact, special attention must be given to the role of the family. Communists must strive to involve the family as a whole in political struggle, to strengthen the fighting bond between women, men, and children, as well as to struggle against the forms of male supremacy within.
Too often the children of movement workers are neglected in the midst of jobs, meetings, and political struggles. Some grow up feeling hostile to the revolutionary movement. Children are our future; they need our time and attention to grow and develop into conscious people. They need help in counteracting the bourgeois ideology that is fed to them constantly from school, TV and their peers. Therefore, communists need to take organizational responsibility for the care and development of children, it also should be realized that children have a lot to give to adults, that childcare is not a “burden” or just “baby-sitting.” It is an active process of inter-relating like any other political work. Children must be seen as future fighters, who are now capable of taking responsibilities and of exercising a proletarian outlook.
Another important task for communists is to carry on uncompromising struggle against male chauvinism. All attitudes and habits which follow from the ideology of male supremacy must be vigorously struggled against, especially within communist organizations. Women must be seen as leaders, not just on the question of the liberation of women, but in all areas of communist work. Communists, whether men or women, represent the interests of the working class as a whole, and not any particular sector of it. The interests of women do not come before the interests of the class, but are integrally bound up with them. Communists do not counterpose to male chauvinism the ideology of bourgeois feminism, but the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, which can provide the only revolutionary solution to the special oppression of women. The way to unite the working class on this question is to win working class men to champion the cause of women’s liberation and work together with women to eliminate their special oppression and inequality.
5) The Mass Women’s Movement: The Marxist-Leninist movement has made a number of left-opportunist errors in relation to the mass women’s movement. As a result, the level of integration of the communist movement and the Women’s movement is relatively few. Too often, communists have castigated the women’s movement as hopelessly petit-bourgeois and retrograde, and have proceeded to ensure that it remain backward by refusing to give this mass movement any Marxist-Leninist leadership.
An important task for communists in the mass women’s movement is to bring a working class perspective to it, to broaden its united front character to include large numbers of working class women, and to promote these women into leadership. This work is an integral part of the essential task of fusing the communist movement with the working class movement.
Within the mass women’s organizations, communists must bring out the issues which focus on the exploitation and oppression of proletarian women, especially those who are involved in social production. Women workers in social production are the most revolutionary strata of the women’s movement, and communist work must be concentrated among this strata.
In turn, communists must bring up the issues of women’s special oppression in all other political work and strive to build support among the masses of people for the full emancipation of women. The liberation of women is not just the concern of women themselves; the emancipation of women is an integral part of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and its allies.
6) Mass Organizations and The Party: In the struggle for the liberation of women, there is a concrete and pressing need for mass women’s organizations. All classes and strata of women, with the exception of the bourgeois class, must be actively involved in a broad united front focusing on women’s oppression. In mass women’s organizations, women can gather strength from each other, develop leadership, and ensure that the broad masses of people are educated about women’s oppression and are involved in their emancipation.
At the same time, the liberation of women cannot be seen in separation from the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Without leadership from the vanguard of the proletariat, its communist party, the women’s movement will develop spontaneously in the direction of maintaining the rule of the bourgeoisie. Marxist-Leninists must tie these mass women’s organizations to the communist movement and ensure that once the Party is formed, it is in a position to give leadership to these organizations in their mass revolutionary struggle.
While mass women’s organizations are valuable reserves of the proletariat, no separate women’s caucuses within a Marxist-Leninist Party or Organization are permissible or necessary. In upholding the stand, viewpoint and method of the proletariat, both communist women and men are equally capable and equally responsible in carrying out the struggle for women’s liberation.