Re: AUT: Re: Selma James Name Change

[johngray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Forrest T Hylton <fthst+@xxxxxxxx> wrote :

>If you are right, then I am wrong: I thought they married in the
>late fifties/early sixties...does anyone who knows care to settle
>this?

Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote :

> Forrest: I thought Selma and CLR married in late sixties? When keeping
> your name was a  live issue?  Maybe I'm wrong about the timing, though,
> in which case sorry for the retroactive "pc."

They married in 1956.

Kent Worcester's biography of James states :
"The relationship with Selma was not without its difficulties.
Although they never obtained a formal divorce, C.L.R and Selma began
a painful process of separation by the mid-1960's. For over a decade
they had a productive but stressful marriage, which almost certainly
lacked the emotional intensity of James's relationship with Constance
Webb [his second wife]. As Selma was almost thirty years younger than
her husband, it was in certain respects an unequal partnership, and
she chaffed at being relegated to the role of "leaders wife" in a
small organization" [CLR James A Political Biography. SUNY 1996]

(Incidentally the fact that Selma James was an American citizen and
that they married and then lived in the UK where they were active
politically may well have had some bearing on her decisions about
these matters).

Without wishing to unduly nit-pick I think its also slightly
anachronistic to date the feminist movement and its influence to the
late sixties - the groups which were the seeds of it certainly formed
then but the movement AS a movement arose in the early seventies, and
my recollection is that that is the period in which the question of
naming began to have  a wider currency than the small proto-feminist,
political and bohemian currents within which it had been an issue for
some women for decades before this. Certainly any question of  'party
lines' over feminist issues doesn't predate the seventies.

I  agree with what Katha has said about Wages for Housework.
I'd add that  in my opinion  it was an entirely unsuccessful example
of single issue frontism because - setting aside entirely the
question of whether such frontism has any place in the armoury of
those currents wishing to get rid of the exploitation, oppression and
alienation which characterise this society - it was expressed in a
political style entirely antithetical to most of the rest of the
womens movement, as well as having no resonance among the working
class women it was  targetted at, for the reasons Katha gives.

The attraction of Wages for Housework for some male leftists is no
great mystery. For them it  is a way of "expressing" the "woman
question" which satisfactorily reduces it to styles of political
rhetoric, and to forms of  economism, which don't challenge the
leftist hierarchy of struggles, and which fit in with a general
political project of organising and/or educating the working class
via. manipulative transitional demands.

dave
 of not for John Gray Website


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