The Feminist Challenge to Traditional Political Organising
By Penny Duggan
This extract from a longer article written in 1997 by Penelope Duggan, a longstanding activist and leader of the Fourth International and editor of their journal, International Viewpoint, remains astonishingly relevant today.
The full piece contains an interesting theoretical discussion of the role of women in the Marxist tradition, and the development of women's collective consciousness in particular, and is well worth reading. The focus of this excerpt, however, is on the impediments to women becoming and remaining active in revolutionary socialist organisations and potential solutions.
Duggan begins by drawing out the connections between the social and economic oppressions women face and how they are often sidelined within left organisations theoretically committed to radical equality between the sexes.
She argues that often even experienced women activists that have led mass movements fighting for women's rights have been “seen and treated as just specialists of women's work”, whereas male activists’ experience is seen as relevant and preparing them for leadership roles.
She points out that “The sexual division of labour is reflected in our organizations, with women tending to take on more administrative and technical tasks”. A less obvious variation is the subtle redefinition of roles as more “political” or “administrative” depending on whether a man or a woman is doing it. As Duggan puts it, “everything we touch turns to something much less important than it used to be when a man was doing it.”
Expanding on this, she sketches a variety of annoying experiences that will be familiar to most women who have been involved in any kind of organisation. That feeling when you make a point in a meeting and no one picks up on it but then later a man says the same thing and suddenly it’s the best idea ever. Or when a man dismisses what you have said as ill-informed, rather than simply saying he disagrees with you. Or how discussions can be conducted with an air of absolute certainty on all sides rather than acknowledging, as women are more likely to do, that we don’t have all the answers and that’s why we’re discussing it in the first place.
Duggan also challenges left organisations to take sexual violence and harassment within their own organisations seriously “not because we're going to be able to solve the problem of oppression within our organization, but because we have to have that as a minimum for collective functioning”. “How could our women comrades participate in an organization where there are not sanctions against such behaviour?” she asks - “When women say that there has been a case of sexist harassment, then we take her word for it.”
Ways of addressing the barriers to women’s participation include childcare, of course, but Duggan stresses that many of these barriers are ideological and so apply to all women. Part of the solution, then, is “to do what may seem to be artificial things, because the ‘natural’ is the exclusion of women: not to hear women's voices, not to give the space to women to express themselves.” This means developing a more collective, democratic approach to internal organisation that facilitates maximum engagement. Women-only meetings can be useful but so-called “women’s issues” must also be central for the organisation as a whole to avoid being peripheralised.
Given it was written nearly 25 years ago, there are inevitably some gaps from a current perspective. There is no discussion of trans issues and although it’s recognised near the beginning of the excerpt that many different forms of oppression exist and that not all women are equally oppressed, the specifics of how the interaction of different forms of oppression affects left organising are not discussed in detail.
Many of the insights into the impact of women’s oppression on left organising are clearly relevant to other oppressed groups, however, as is the overarching argument, that “If we go with the flow, if we go with what's natural, then we're going to continue reproducing what is such a heavy burden on us: the ideology and the division of labour that exist in society as a whole.” Therefore, it is up to left organisations to consciously develop “counter-tendencies, counterweights to the prevailing division of labour and power relationships.”
Diana O’Dwyer
...[O]ne of the problems that we face as political activists is that the very idea of politics and political parties of all types is something from which many people feel alienated. Our particular concern is in terms of left or revolutionary organizations, which are the subject of the harshest criticism from activists in the social movements because it's precisely to those parties that they look to find support and allies in their different struggles.
...There is one...criticism to which I'm going to pay the most attention: that we should do away with this sort of organization because it's simply masculine and has nothing to do with half of the population.
…..
Role of the women's movement
We consider that a women's movement that openly challenges women's oppression has a strategic role to play in the revolutionary struggle itself, in the fight to build a new and better society, because women as a sex are oppressed. This doesn't mean that all women are equally oppressed. Your class, your age, your race, and which country or continent you're from affect the way that this oppression is experienced…
Article originally published in Rupture magazine, issue 6 which you can purchase here:
People are people, with all the facets of their identity. They're women, they're workers, they're from a Third-World country, or not, or they're an immigrant worker in an imperialist country, or not. There is no way that a movement can say, We're going to fight to liberate that bit of you, but that aspect is going to have to wait. That's just not a realistic proposal to make to anybody about how you're going to help them change the situation that they're in. The fight against women's oppression has to be a fight for today, in the same way that the fight against racism is a fight for today, the fight against imperialism is a fight for today, and the fight against class exploitation is a fight for today. On the other hand, neither can you say you are a combination of this and that specific identity, so you are different from the person next to you who is a different combination, and therefore you can't join together because you only share one facet of your identity.
Why is it so difficult for revolutionary parties to recruit and integrate women?
...If we say that revolutionary parties are fighting for the interests of all the exploited and the oppressed, we would expect to see the exploited and the oppressed, if anything, over-represented in their ranks. Women for example have a particular interest in this fight, so that's where we should be.
The first thing we have to be clear on is the general dynamic in this society, which is a dynamic of exclusion of women from the political process. The political process is something that takes place in the public arena, outside the home, and the sexual division of labour in society makes the home and the family women's concerns and work and politics men's affairs. This is something that continues to exist even where [a] majority of women work, are educated and have equal political rights.
““The sexual division of labour is reflected in our organizations, with women tending to take on more administrative and technical tasks.””
...This general process of political exclusion is reinforced because politics was traditionally organized in the place where class consciousness was seen to develop... Politics was organized through the workplace and the relationship between the workplace and the outside, so women were not involved in that. In terms of women's involvement in revolutionary politics we should also take into account the time needed to study in order to become a revolutionary militant. It's necessary to make a conscious effort to understand in a systematic way. This is something that's difficult for women, not just because of exclusion from the formal education system but because women, either for reasons of family responsibility or for other, more internalized psychological reasons, often individually give less time to study. They feel that they should be doing something rather than taking the time to study.
...A second question is the general dynamic of reproducing the dominant ideology and the sexual division of labour. The sexual division of labour is reflected in our organizations, with women tending to take on more administrative and technical tasks. It is relatively easy to say: this is absolutely unacceptable, the women comrades are doing all the typing, so we should make an effort and women should be given political responsibilities. But you should also see what happens when women are given political responsibilities. All of a sudden the post of (let's say) trade-union organizer, which when it was a post held by a male comrade required analyzing what was going on in the working class, in the trade-union movement, elaborating political perspectives - a very important political role - is no longer that when it becomes a role held by a woman. All at once the important thing is to make sure that this woman has sent out the letters that call people to the meetings and that the documents have all been reproduced in advance so people will have them, and that everything is well-organized.
Both the women and the men tend to have that conception of what is the important part of any particular responsibility, depending on whether it's undertaken by a man or a woman - obviously for different reasons. Why do women internalize that aspect? Because it's safer. You know that you can send out the letters on time and do the photocopying. It's a much more difficult thing to write an analysis of what's going on in the working-class movement in your country and therefore how you should propose that the trade unions recompose and fuse. It is surprising how many men do really think that they're capable of doing that…
There's also the political process among women and the way in which that is devalued. It is astonishing that leaders of women's movement work who have led mass movements fighting for women's rights, mass movements that have been able to create alliances with the trade union movement, with political parties, with a whole range of people; leaders of women's work who are engaged in educational work where they explain and make a critical balance sheet of Marx and Engels and place them in their context and explain historical materialism, what it really means and how you can use it to understand women's oppression, are consistently seen and treated as just specialists of women's work. You may understand historical materialism sufficiently to be able to make a critical balance sheet of how Engels applied it to the family, but nonetheless you're just a specialist of women's work. No one suggests that these skills could be applied to any other sector.
On the other hand, the young male comrade who has just been a leader of a student struggle and has shown his capacities to be a leader of the mass movement, is a leader; now he's stopped being a student he must immediately be put somewhere else so that he can lead some other area of work and use those leadership capacities he developed in two or three years of student politics...
““There’s a Greek legend about a certain King Midas: everything he touched turned to gold. Sometimes women think that it’s the reverse for us: everything we touch turns to something much less important than it used to be when a man was doing it.”
”
Many women have noticed this, for example: you're in a discussion, and you say something - you give an opinion or you make a proposal - and the discussion goes on, and then somebody else makes more or less the same proposal, gives the same opinion. From that moment on, all we hear is everybody saying: Oh yes, he was right, he was right, I agree with him. Of course, you never said it. There's a Greek legend about a certain King Midas: everything he touched turned to gold. Sometimes women think that it's the reverse for us: everything we touch turns to something much less important than it used to be when a man was doing it.
Another problem that exists in left organizations is at the level of the individual relationships between men and women comrades. Because there is an unequal power relationship in what sometimes we call the real world, and because we are affected by the society that we're in, that unequal power relationship exists also within our organizations, and at the level of individual relations between one male comrade and one female comrade. I'm not talking about acts of violence which can happen, but just the way that people relate to each other in a normal way: the assumptions with which a woman goes into a political discussion and a man goes into a political discussion; the way in which what might be exactly the same behaviour takes on a totally different meaning when it's between two men or between a man and a woman.
When you have one of those passionate political discussions that we all love so much and everybody gets excited and raises their voice, it's one thing when it's between two men. But it is another thing when it's between a man and a woman, because it takes on an aspect of power and authoritarianism, which isn't meant but is there because of what we've all internalized from the society that we live in. And it can seem totally unbearable to be the object of that. There is the other alternative, which is that women in order to survive learn to give as good as we get. I can shout and bang my fist on the table too. But it's not a very pleasant way to have to discuss.
It's astonishing to what extent this can even be true of young comrades - I'm no longer very young and I do have a certain amount of experience - with their, I'm sure quite unconscious, arrogance. A few years ago at a youth camp, I did a report on the origins of women's oppression, in which I put forward the opinion that men derive certain privileges from women's oppression. A young comrade with a particular point of view came up to me and said, "You said that men have these privileges, well, I think you expressed yourself badly." I replied, "Well no, that's what I meant to say. I meant to say men have privileges, because that's what I think." And he said, "But you're wrong. You haven't understood." So I said, "Excuse me, but I have been discussing these questions for twenty years. You may disagree, but it's not [that] I haven't understood." This unconscious arrogance came from somebody who must have been practically young enough to be my son. I heard: ‘You expressed yourself badly’, and then, ‘You haven't understood about women's oppression’: rather than, "I disagree", which is what he really meant.
Another problem that we face in left organizations is the difficulties that men have in looking at women as political individuals. For example, if there's a very lively discussion about something in a meeting, when you leave the room normally everybody continues the discussion. But it is extraordinary: at least 50 percent of the time, if as we go out of the meeting a male comrade speaks to a female comrade, the discussion will almost immediately turn to something quite different, not political, something more personal. They'll either begin to tell you about the latest exploits of their children or their new job. But to continue to treat you, once you're outside the meeting, as a political being is quite rare...When people want to know, ‘Oh, you didn't speak in the meeting, what do you think?’ the question is very rarely addressed to a woman comrade.
Changing the power relations
So the question is now, ‘What do we do about it?’ First, this is not going to be some sort of natural process. The fact that we discuss the problems of women's oppression and how to fight for women's liberation does not mean that we can easily and naturally solve all these problems.As Mandel said, living in bourgeois society cannot be a school for how to be a proletarian revolutionary, that is to absorb and assimilate into our own consciousness a different way of behaving. We need counter-tendencies, counterweights to the prevailing division of labour and power relationships.
...We can have some general ideas. The first one is that we should have organized feminist work.
““The more we fall into that ‘natural’ way of acting, the less our organizations will be attractive to women, and we won’t have the conditions for changing our organizations because we won’t be attracting and recruiting women...””
...We also have to have consistent education on these questions, and it should always be part of the education that we give in our organizations. In particular we have to pay attention to the demands of women comrades for organized education. That has to be seen as a party task, because of the internalized feeling that so many women have that we should be always doing something practical. Women are less ready to say, ‘No, I am going to take the time to do it for myself.’ So we have to organize it.
We also have to pay great attention to our organizations' image and profile. What symbols do we use? Who are our spokespersons? Who do we send to meet other organizations? ... It can seem that it's most natural to put male comrades forward as spokespersons and representatives. But the more we fall into that "natural" way of acting, the less our organizations will be attractive to women, and we won't have the conditions for changing our organizations because we won't be attracting and recruiting women.
We also have to change our inner-party functioning. We should rethink what democratic centralism means. When we talk about democratic centralism, we want on the one hand the expression of different points of view and experiences, and we want to be effective when we act. But if we want to ensure expression of points of view, then we have to ensure that women's voices, which are so often not heard, are heard. This is not a natural process. We will have to do what may seem to be artificial things, because the "natural" is the exclusion of women: not to hear women's voices, not to give the space to women to express themselves.
...
Overcoming the obstacles to women's expression and participation is an important question for democracy in our organizations; and if this requires a special measure such as having women's meetings within the organization, then we should do it. At the same time, because we also want to be politically centralized, that experience has to come back into the organization as a whole. Such questions should not only be discussed among women, nor should women decide without them. Organizations have to decide collectively how to solve the problems that have been pointed out.
One of the problems that's often raised by women is precisely the way in which discussions often take place. Often people are expected to come into a discussion with a set position; you have to go in and defend that position in a very polemical way...This means that you have to have a complete alternative in order to contribute to a discussion. It even seems as if you have to be absolutely convinced that what you're saying is right and that what everybody else is saying is wrong, and fight for it in that way...
When women begin to discuss the questions of inner-party functioning, they raise the problem of how we can work in a more collective way. This can go from very basic practical questions - such as, if everybody had the documents in advance, and everybody had a chance to read them, then you would be able to have a discussion where everybody could contribute - to styles of speaking. Women more easily talk about themselves and raise their own feelings of personal inadequacy. They are more ready to say, I'm not sure, or I don't know much about this. Anybody who has looked at the actual functioning inside an organization will see that. So it does have an effect to change the composition of, for example, leadership bodies and to have more women in them.
This is not an automatic process, because a certain amount of informal discussion - the discussions that take place after the meeting, outside in the corridors - tends still to go on among the men. But putting more women in leadership creates a pressure to change things in a way that can make the functioning more democratic and more collective. Of course this doesn't mean, and we have to be careful about this, that women are naturally better and more collective. Anybody who has been active in a women's group knows that women can also have bad ways of functioning. For one thing, many of the women who have spent some time already as political militants have had to learn to become aggressive in self-defense. So an organization cannot resolve all its problems simply by putting a lot of women in its leadership.
These problems of functioning are not just something that affects women. There is a whole problem of the relationship between those who are seen as leaders and those who are seen as rank-and-file militants, including among male comrades. Younger comrades feel this also, in the way that discussions are carried out with them. It's not just a problem for women: we very often have a problem in organizations of extending the leadership beyond the initial core…
But we're not interested in just seeing what the objective or the natural process is. We want to do something consciously to change our organizations to make them as adequate as possible. We have to extend that initial core of our leadership. We have to extend it to women, to younger generations, to immigrants, and so forth. We have to have a conscious plan for changing our leaderships, and have to have a conscious look at how we select leaders, what criteria we use. Do we use an individual star system? Does each and every individual person have to be brilliant at everything - very few people are brilliant at anything at all - or is our goal to build a collective team that within it combines all the different strengths that we have and that are necessary for the leadership of an organization?
Once we try to develop a conscious plan, the much-discussed question of quotas for women or other forms of positive action comes up. If we go with the flow, if we go with what's natural, then we're going to continue reproducing what is such a heavy burden on us: the ideology and the division of labour that exist in society as a whole....
Party responsibility for private life and individual behaviour
...We have to create the best conditions we can for comrades to carry out the tasks that we give them, and ensure that there is no discrimination on the basis of material factors when we ask comrades to take different tasks and different responsibilities. For example…[I]f an organization asks comrades to work full-time, we have to guarantee that they are able to do that without materially suffering from it.
Another question is very often raised when women discuss the obstacles to participation in an organization: organizations have to take responsibility for childcare. If comrades are asked to do party tasks, they have to be able to do so in relation to their family responsibilities. Of course, there are just as many fathers if not more in left organizations than there are mothers. But because of the way the sexual division of labour works, it's very much more frequent that women comrades when they have children begin to drop out of political activity because it is so difficult. This is something that we have to take seriously.
Two points should be made about this. The first is that very often when we discuss the position of women and the obstacles to their participation, childcare becomes the major question that is discussed. But it is not having children that makes women oppressed or makes difficulties for women participating in political organizations. There is a general dynamic that applies to all women whether or not they have children that tends to exclude them…
Second, we need to ask: Are we putting our comrades in a privileged situation compared to other women with whom they are active in the mass movements? Do we fight for collective childcare organized in the case of meetings of the mass movements, or do we simply deal with our own comrades? Are we substituting for what should be state or local government or something provision? The question of childcare is not something that we can simply resolve for our own comrades within our own situation without looking at it also in relation to what we do to help all women who have the problem of childcare responsibilities.
...All these things will of course depend on what our organizations are able to do. They depend on the size and resources of our organizations.
““Left organizations also have a responsibility for their members’ behaviour, because organizations will be ineffective if our comrades’ behaviour is in contradiction with what we say we stand for.””
Left organizations also have a responsibility for their members' behaviour, because organizations will be ineffective if our comrades' behaviour is in contradiction with what we say we stand for. We cannot allow comrades to have behaviour that puts the organization in danger in any irresponsible way.
...Our programme commits us to fighting all forms of women's oppression. Therefore we have to say that sexist behaviour is in contradiction with that programme...we have to take sanctions against sexual violence and sexist harassment, not because we're going to be able to solve the problem of oppression within our organization, but because we have to have that as a minimum for collective functioning in our organization. How could our women comrades participate in an organization where there are not sanctions against such behaviour?
...Violence and sexual violence are clear: it's clear when a case of violence has taken place, and there have to be sanctions for that. The question of what constitutes sexist harassment is more difficult to determine. It's more difficult for women to raise, and it may be more difficult for other people to understand. But the point of view that we have developed in terms of, for example, the workplace is that when women say that there has been a case of sexist harassment, then we take her word for it, because she's the one who is suffering and who feels her ability to function is harmed. I don't think that there can be a different criterion inside left parties.
If we want to have democratic parties, if we want to have politically effective parties where women participate, then we have to ensure that women can act politically in confidence and work with male comrades without feeling that they are going to be treated in a sexist way that makes them feel uncomfortable, excluded, or devalued.
In at least one left organization that I know of, there have been cases of extreme sexual harassment: women comrades felt that they were obliged to have sexual relations with certain of the male leaders, because these male leaders used their authority in a way that made it impossible to refuse, without there necessarily being an actual violent act. When this was finally raised in this particular organization, the men concerned either resigned or were in fact expelled. But the women comrades still didn't feel that enough had been done. The attitude taken was that this was an individual problem of some men who were perhaps drunk at the time. The women didn't feel that the organization had recognized that there was such a situation of inequality, of unequal power, in the organization, that had made it possible for this to happen and had made it so difficult for the women comrades to raise it. There was no collective responsibility taken by the organization that said: We allowed a situation to exist in this organization that meant that male comrades felt that they could use their authority as leaders in this way.
We have a collective responsibility to take sanctions; at the same time there is an individual responsibility as well, to understand what your behaviour is and how it affects others...We do suffer from our conditioning, all of us, and male comrades have a special responsibility because of their position of power in relation to women, which can be reflected in their individual behaviour.
In our fight for a new and better society, where the whole relationship between the two genders are revolutionized, it's going to be difficult and probably painful. It's certainly going to require a big effort. Certainly no one is protected from being sexist, having (to put it mildly) inappropriate, not to say incorrect behaviour, by joining a revolutionary organization that has the fight for women's liberation in its programme. But no one ever said that making a revolution was going to be easy, so that shouldn't be any surprise.
...In general, those segments of the left that have made a contribution on this question have been able to because we have been permeable to what is going on outside. This is a class society, with a sexist ideology, but there have also been big struggles, there's been the development of the women's movement, and the left has also - unevenly - been affected by that. The real world outside has helped us to change, and we were able to take that experience and to synthesize it and develop our programme.
That's really the concluding point that I want to make: unless we are open to learning from the struggles and from the movements that develop around us, we will not move forward. We will stay stuck somewhere, and we won't be able to do what is the job of revolutionaries, which is to intervene to take the general struggles and the general movements forwards.