re: Gender and Class

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, I know whatcher mean, Tom.
I still have the poster I made calling people to support a women's
studies program at Cap College in Vancouver back in the early 70s.
And as I wrote before, there are enough red organizations that
have enjoined "feminst" or "women's liberation/rights/etc." to their
programmes or organizational publications (egs. in USA: from the
Committees of Correspondence, the Freedom Socialist Party to "Against
the Current", and many others) that Nancy's question seems simply
provocative.
(Nothing wrong wit dat, huh?).
Nancy:
There's no question that some comrades needed/need consciousness raising
(remember CR? I have an original mimeograph, oops --no! It's a
fotocopy!). And there have certainly been a great host of admirable
women who were marxists.  (I won't even begin to start a list because
then we'll all be doing that for awhile and chastizing each other for
forgetting about so-and=so, non, mi compas?).
Don't get me wrong, Nancy, I believe people should be on their toes
about equal opportunity AND equal distribution and say in production and
policy.
Until the rev is accomplished, we should respect people who make sure
we're ALL in on it.  And we have a heritage of oppressionS to slough
off.  Who knows better than the oppressed?

As for the family, you have perused Engels' FPPS?
August Bebel's Women and Socialism ? :
"sex slavery will not be abolished by civic equality" ...

About the concept of "motherhood"?  Intrinsic to "family"?
Are there not class contradictions in "the angel of the hearth, haven in
a hostile world" for women who have to spend time cleaning up after
others' families while their own remain at home without them, yet
depending on her very absence for life? (Introduces another aspect of
domestic labour, but paid!)
Working class mothers forced to labour would love to stay home and take
care of the kids while bourgeois moms feel trapped in the motherhood
role forced upon them.
The notion of the "double burden", production + reproduction
responsibilities, seems more of a working class woman's problem than
those upper class ladies.

DO you think there still might be a rift between socialist feminists
(target: capitalism) and radical feminists (target: patriarchy) ?  Or is
your project along the
lines of
some sort of synthesis?  (You should hear me say that.  I love
sybilance... when I'm  happy.)

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