No Woman, No Revolution, Part 10
SACP on Women’s Day, 2012
Jenny Schreiner is a member
of the SACP 13th Congress Central Committee. The attached and linked
document was written by her for publication in the Umsebenzi Online that came
out on 8 August 2012, on the eve of National Women’s Day.
Schreiner says, before aptly quoting
Lenin:
“The rights
protected in the [South African] Constitution are rights that all women can
claim, but they are not yet rights that all women, particularly working class
women, are living. The equality in law and rights does not automatically
translate into equality in access to jobs, resources, and protection.”
Summing up the situation of
women in South Africa and the way forward, Schreiner says:
“The material
base of women's emancipation has to be in the integration of women into the
economy without gender discrimination, the equalising of the gender division of
labour within the household and addressing social and political gender equity.”
Schreiner says:
“...the struggle for women's emancipation is a struggle within a struggle
and one that touches both the personal and the political.”
This is discussed in terms of
working women’s possibilities or lack thereof, where:
“Work and
activity outside the home is premised on an inequality between men and women
defined by their household or domestic responsibilities.”
Schreiner then refers to
Alexandra Kollontai, whose writing we have already studied in this course.
Schreiner writes in a passage that helps us considerably in terms of the way
that our course is problematised:
“Alexandra
Kollontai identified that the social basis of women's oppression lies in class
relations and private ownership of the means of production and appropriation.
She discussed whether there was a basis for a cross-class women's movement. She
argued that working class women will more easily identify in struggle alongside
their working class menfolk than to side with bourgeois women against men.
“This is an
important issue for the Party to engage with, particularly in the context of
the Progressive Women's Movement.
“It should be
clear that the hegemony of the working class and its organisation in all sites
of struggle is weakened if working class women are excluded from that
organisation.
“However it
is equally important for working class women to assert working class leadership
of the progressive women's forces in society and form allies amongst the
multi-class strata in the liberation movement. The experience of relative
discrimination by women across classes provides a unique opportunity for women
of the middle classes to be mobilised in support of working class women's
interests, and thereby become aware of working class issues.”
Schreiner lays out all the
possible permutations, except one. Working
class women can organise in concert with working class men. They can also
organise across class lines to create class alliance with middle-class women.
The third possibility, the
one that Schreiner rightly or wrongly omits, is the organisation of working
women as such.
The three possibilities are
not mutually exclusive. It is not unreasonable to go for all three kinds of
organisation.
It is reasonable to omit the
possibility of a working women’s movement, that is a dedicated working-class
women’s movement, if it is regarded as a practical impossibility. This is
something to discuss.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Schreiner, Umsebenzi
Online, Impact on Women, 2012.
