Re: Re: Women & Industrialization (was Re: capitalist patriarchy)

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

Thanks, Yoshie, for your posts, including this one:

Gene Coyle

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Jim Heartfield wrote:
>
> >In message <v04210100b5e4154c9b46@[140.254.114.95]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
> ><furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx> writes
> > >Typical faces of industrial workers changed from female & colored to
> > >male & white to female & colored.  The prevalence of the nuclear
> > >family idealized by conservatives now -- male breadwinner, female
> > >housewife, & biological children -- was merely a blip in history that
> > >coincided with the post-WW2 economic boom (say, from the Korean War
> > >to the Vietnam War & oil shock).
> >
> >Certainly the evidence in the UK appears to be that the family wage has
> >been abolished, and the nuclear family itself is difficult to sustain in
> >its absence. Having more or less campaigned for the abolition of the
> >family for twenty years I ought to be celebrating, but the conditions
> >under which families are under attack - which is to say the triumph of
> >capitalism over organised labour - don't lend themselves to a positive
> >outcome.
> >
> >In the first instance, women have been drawn into the labour market in
> >equal numbers but on unequal terms (predominantly on part time pay). At
> >the same time men have systematically lost high-paying jobs. High
> >divorce rates indicate that marriage for life is pretty unsustainable
> >when, as the pundits boast 'there is no job for life'. Not that there is
> >necessarily anything wrong with a high divorce rate - except that single
> >mothers are more often impoverished and unemployed.
>
> Especially given that the virtual end of the family wage for many
> male workers was soon followed by the attacks on social programs for
> single mothers, there is no reason to simply celebrate our
> contemporary family conditions.  Writers such as Stephanie Coontz,
> Judith Stacey, etc., however, caution against nostalgia for the
> mid-twentieth-century heyday of the proverbial nuclear family
> (enabled by the _exceptional_ material & ideological conditions of
> the post-WW2 economic boom, the Cold War, & social democratic
> preemptive strike against socialism).  Coontz, for instance, writes
> in "Working-Class Families, 1870-1890," _American Families: A
> Multicultural Reader_, NY: Routledge, 1999:
>
> *****   Adopting domesticity [for the working-class] was in some
> ways, then, a defensive maneuver with long-run disadvantages [Yoshie:
> notice Coontz's subtle formulation here].  It was a response partly
> to the deterioration of working conditions for women, partly to the
> threat of industrialization to skilled craftsmen, and partly to the
> failure of middle-class women to address the special needs of women
> workers.  As [Martha] May [in "Bread Before Roses: American
> Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage," in Ruth Milkman, ed.
> _Women, Work and Protest_, Boston, 1985] points out, 'the family-wage
> ultimately...worked against the interests of working-class men, women
> and families, by accepting and deepening a sexual double standard in
> the labor market.'  The double standard allowed the state to
> forestall union demands by granting charity to women without
> 'providers' and employers in order to hold down women's wages on the
> grounds that they worked for 'pin money.'  It also gave some women an
> incentive to act as strikebreakers or non-union workers.  Finally,
> the double standard closed off opportunities to explore alternative
> family and gender roles within the industrial working-class that
> might have strengthened working-class solidarity [a line of thinking
> suggested earlier by Alexandra Kollontai].  Indeed, by the early
> twentieth century,
>
> Middle-class social reformers and activists came to embrace the
> family wage as a means of restoring social stability, while some
> employers recognized its possibilities as a means to control and
> divide labor.  At the same time, within the ranks of organized labor,
> the family wage increasingly became a defense of gender privilege.
> Defense of gender privilege, in turn, was closely connected to a
> craft exclusiveness that hampered male organizing as well as female
> [just as white privilege was]. [36]
>
> [36]  May, 'Bread Before Roses,' pp. 7, 8; Elizabeth Jameson,
> 'Imperfect Unions: Class and Gender in Cripple Creek, 1894-1904,' in
> Cantor and Laurie, _Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker_; Andrew Dawson,
> 'The parameters of Class Consciousness: The Social Outlook of the
> Skilled Worker, 1890-1920,' in Hoerder, _American Labor and
> Immigration History_.   *****
>
> Organized labor to a certain extent has already learned this
> historical lesson -- hence its advocacy of the "living wage," not
> "family wage," I believe.  Also, from another direction, "civil
> unions," "gay marriages," and finally in the Netherlands the right of
> non-heterosexuals to enjoy the full benefits of marriages are
> changing the meanings of the word "family" a great deal to the
> chagrin of die-hard conservatives:
>
> *****   New York Times  13 September 2000
>
> "Dutch Legislators Approve Full Marriage Rights for Gays"
>
> By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
>
> THE HAGUE, Sept. 12 - Lawmakers in the Netherlands, long among the
> gay-rights vanguard, approved a bill today to convert the country's
> registered same-sex partnerships into full-fledged marriages,
> complete with divorce guidelines and wider adoption rights for gays.
>
> Supporters say the legislation will give Dutch gays rights beyond
> those offered in any other country.
>
> Lawmakers thumped their desks in approval when the bill passed by a
> vote of 109 to 33, and some of the scores of witnesses in the packed
> public gallery applauded and embraced.
>
> Parliament had discussed the bill last week. Only a few small
> Christian parties had voiced opposition, although there was an
> emotional and often heated three-day debate. The bill gained speedy
> approval today....
>
> ...Two years ago, the Netherlands enacted a law allowing same-sex
> couples to register as partners and to claim pensions, social
> security and inheritances. But the new legislation goes further,
> creating full equality, the measure's supporters said.
>
> Same-sex couples will be able to marry at city hall and to adopt
> Dutch children. They will be able to divorce through the court
> system, like heterosexual couples.
>
> Boris Dittrich, a member of the centrist Democrats 66 party and a
> proponent of the plan, said the law "acknowledges that a person's sex
> is not of importance for marriage."...   *****
>
> We may appropriate what Marx said in _The Class Struggles in France,
> 1848-1850_ for a Marxist-Feminist perspective on the present
> conditions of working-class families:
>
> *****   With the exception of only a few chapters, every more
> important part of the annals of the revolution from 1848 to 1849
> carries the heading: _Defeat of the revolution!_
>
> What succumbed in these defeats was not a revolution.  It was the
> pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social
> relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class
> antagonisms -- persons, illusions, conceptions, projects from which
> the revolutionary party before the February Revolution was not free,
> from which it could be freed not by the _victory of February_, but
> only by a series of _defeats_.   *****
>
> It is up to the working class & socialist intellectuals to learn from
> defeats of the family wage & social democracy in general and free
> ourselves from illusions and traditional appendages.  Only by doing
> so can we move forward.
>
> Yoshie