US model for Women's Lib?

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxx>]

U.S. NO MODEL OF
WOMEN'S LIBERATION

By Sue Davis

It's a country in which four women are killed every day by
their husbands or boyfriends. Spousal killings make up 12
percent of the society's total murders. Nine out of 10
murdered women are killed by men. Four out of five of them
are murdered at home. And 50 percent of those women are
murdered by a male partner.

Afghanistan? No, the United States. These statistics are
published in the 1993 "WAC Stats: The Facts about Women."

The lie that the U.S. war against Afghanistan is being
fought to free the super-oppressed women there is
propaganda. Bush and Company are cynically pointing to
women's oppression in an attempt to whip up widespread
support for their terror bombing and mass destruction.

Any war forces incredible hardships on women and children.
If Bush really cared about Afghan women, he'd call off the
bombing and send material aid to the 5.3 million people in
the region whom, the BBC reported on Nov. 6, will need food,
shelter and clothing to make it through the winter.

The U.S. helped usher the Taliban into power in the first
place. It was a counter-revolutionary force the CIA helped
arm and train to overthrow a secular revolution that gave
women newfound freedoms in Afghan society.

Certainly the severe restrictions imposed on Afghan women by
the Taliban were an extreme example of women being treated
as private property. But women are viewed as private
property in all existing class-divided societies.

And women right here in the U.S. are sorely in need of
genuine social and economic liberation.

Women viewed as
private property

What explains the significantly higher rate of women killed
by male partners?

Noted 19th-century social historian and Karl Marx's
collaborator, Frederick Engels, writing in "The Origin of
the Family, Private Property, and the State," provides ample
anthropological evidence that violence against women--indeed
all the oppression women face--stems from their being viewed
as men's private property.

Engels shows that women's status as men's property has not
always existed. There was equality between men and women
during the long epoch of early human history in which
societies were communal and people labored in cooperation in
order to survive. These social systems were not ruled by
men, as today's class-riven societies are. The sexes lived
in equality and blood descent was traced through women, who
enjoyed great respect for their role in society.

But human cooperative labor became more efficient and a
surplus developed due to the domestication of animals and
the growth of agriculture. This surplus accumulated in the
areas of labor that were a predominantly male sphere. As
men's economic role became greater than women's, men began
to subjugate women in what Engels called "the historic
defeat of the female sex."

The only way to end women's oppression and domestic violence
is to end all forms of large-scale private ownership. It is
the dog-eat-dog impetus for even greater profits that drives
the capitalist economic system to expand its grip on the
peoples and markets of the world. And that's why the women
and men of Afghanistan, the Middle East and Central Asia are
targets of the Pentagon. Ending private property would
eliminate the impetus to wage imperialist war.

But it will take a mighty social revolution to win that
ultimate peace in society that will find its reflection in
all interpersonal relationships--including those between men
and women.

- END -
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Macdonald Stainsby
Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion.
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