Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "The Emancipation of Women." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 38-47). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: This is an excerpt from a larger work, a Political Resolution originally
presented at the 1965 convention of the Socialist Workers Party by what
was then the Seattle branch of the SWP. When the branch broke away
to form the Freedom Socialist Party, the resolution constituted the
programmatic foundation of the new party. The complete resolution,
Crisis and Leadership, is being re-issued by Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2014. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The defiance of one woman, Rosa Parks, sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and inaugurated a new era in American politics. It was no accident that a Black woman worker played this role.Two hundred years of history and two revolutions conditioned and tempered her for leadership of the Third American Revolution. The mass movement for civil rights in Mississippi is becoming more consciously revolutionary every day, and the leaders of this movement are predominately women.
They have the support of an important section of southern white women, even though this support is characteristically quiet and even secret. For many decades, hundreds of southern white women have worked clandestinely on the “Problem” in the crevices of the police state, and on behalf of their Black sisters in bondage. (See the works of Lillian Smith, particularly Killers of the Dream.) They had come to realize the unmentionable fact that southern white males were the lordly beneficiaries of a two-edged oppression: they robbed the Black woman of any acknowledged paternity for her child, and they hypocritically degraded the white woman into a truly segregated, dependent, chattel status. The myth of “sacred” white womanhood is one of the focal points of the ideology of white supremacy and ties the struggle for the emancipation of women directly to the Black liberation struggle.
This heritage of the economics of color slavery was restored to the South after the Ku Klux Klan destroyed the Reconstruction and established the police state, sharecropping and the chivalric code to insure segregation. But the revival of female lineage in the Black community ironically conferred a real benefit upon the Black woman, for the matriarchal conditions that emerged molded her into a figure of independence, self-reliance, responsibility and resourcefulness. Always engaged in social production, she was integral to the economy, to the community and to the family.
Accordingly, as a worker, a Black person, and a woman, she represented the three strands of American repressive culture; every prejudice focused on her and she felt deeply the three-fold nature of the fight for freedom. She was destined objectively for her function today as the vanguard of political consciousness, spirit and vitality; in Mississippi she runs for Congress, organizes farm labor unions and schools, confronts— and confounds—the Black men of her own movement with her initiative and firm resistance to all their attempts to subordinate and subdue her. For every Gloria Richardson who retires into domesticity, scores of Black women leaders are becoming professionals for the movement.*
They face thorny problems. Indeed, they face a double problem, for the nature of both the “race question” and the “woman question” is analogous. Each has a dual nature: exploitation on the job connects them each to the class struggle, while generalized political, legal and cultural oppression against them as a special “inferior” group confer an independent character to their struggle.
All dark-skinned people are victims of color prejudice. Similarly, what Lenin called “an entire sex,” regardless of class distinction and regardless of whether they are wage-earners, is the victim of social prejudice. Women’s “inferiority” derives from the condition of the majority of women, who are excluded by economics and tradition from participating in public social production and are confined to private domestic labor, leading lives of personal service to isolated families.
A man engages in social production, and thereby serves society; a woman essentially serves her man. Since the majority of women are peripheral to public industry and objectively dependent, all women are stereotyped as secondary. All come to represent an undifferentiated domestic function as a sex.
While the ruling class imposes a generally parasitic existence upon its wives, the wives and families of the working man are absolutely essential to the preservation of the capitalist system. The wife delivers and nurtures children, the future labor power of society, and her labor helps reproduce the daily labor power of her husband; yet both these functions are carried out with the smallest possible cost to the capitalist, who has providently arranged for the worker to bear economic responsibility for his family. A wife assures his domestic needs in the cheapest manner. Accordingly, the family as the economic unit of society constitutes a permanent source of proletarian conservatism and the basis for capitalist superexploitation. Lord Delaware, requesting women for the American colonies, happily looked forward to “honest laborers burthened with children.”
Wage slavery is the basic means of exploitation under capitalism, but it is also the foundation of “equality” in this society. In a market economy, human equality is established through the exchange of commodities by their owners, and however depressed the wages and conditions of the proletarian, he still appears in the marketplace as the owner and seller of that most precious of all commodities—laborpower. Through ownership of this commodity and through its exchange for wages, the mark of socially necessary human labor-power under capitalism, he not only asserts his social relationship and equality with others, he also establishes his political and economic strength—his ability to bargain and change the conditions of his life.
The housewife, however, does not appear in the marketplace as a seller of commodities, and however necessary her domestic labor may be to the maintenance of the family, she does not sell her labor power. In a society whose distinctive feature is the social character of labor and the wage system, the labor of women is private, personal and unpaid—hence, slave labor. Where a man sells his labor-power for a limited time, the wife sells all of herself to him. The formerly social and public productive labor of women has been reduced by bourgeois monogamy to the degradation of slave labor, dignified only by its modern-dress label—Occupation Housewife. Housework is simply secondary to “the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra.” (Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.)
But man is fundamentally a producing and a creative animal; dependency and parasitism, even more than slavery, are degenerative to the mind and body. The rebellion against this condition therefore transcends all classes of society.
While upon the woman of the working class the cross of capitalist society rests heaviest in all ways, not one of her sisters in all the upper ranks but bears some share of the burden, or, to be plainer, of the smudge—and what is more to the point, they are aware of it. Accordingly, the invocation of the “Rights of Woman” not only rouses the spirit of the heaviest sufferers under capitalist society, and thereby adds swing to the blows of the male militants in their efforts to overthrow the existing order, it also lames the adversary by raising sympathizers in his own camp, and inciting sedition among his own retinue. —Daniel DeLeon, Preface to August Bebel’s Woman Under Socialism (1883) Moreover, the capitalist system itself creates the conditions for the emancipation of women.
However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and the relations between the sexes. —Karl Marx, Capital (1867)
It is therefore “plain,” writes Engels, “that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry.” However, the modern family is still “founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife” and within the family, the man “is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat.” The process of achieving “higher” relations is made demonstrably tortuous by the psychology of superiority induced in men as a concomitant of their privileged “bourgeois” status.
The Black movement for emancipation, like the labor movement before it, is running up against obstacles imposed by these ancient prejudices. The doctrine and practice of male supremacy has a long history of corrosive effect on the solidarity, momentum and morale of the movement.
Racial emancipation often becomes associated with a fetish of male supremacy—“Be a Man!” The secondary role played by Black men for so long in society, the economy and the family is frequently over-compensated for as they press for civil rights.
Women are an available outlet for their self-assertion, and there ensues either a paterfamilias despotism, as endorsed by the Muslims, or a more subtle and sophisticated assumption of male supremacy derived from campus sociology, orthodox Freudianism, and general practice. The male leadership is frequently insensitive to the drive of Black women for acknowledged equality within the movement, for their right to do the work they are qualified and ready to do.
An added complication ensues when the intersection of chronic male chauvinism with the relatively advanced interraciality of the movement leads to the Black women identifying the chauvinism of the men with the relatively advanced sexual code characteristic of many of the young white women working in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). The frank rejection of middleclass puritanism by these northern women represents a partial break with the feminine mystique. They want to live as entire human beings, on all levels of life, acting directly on society as men do. Yet they are not prepared to contend for equality with men, for such a stance means a fight. Like most U.S. women, they are conditioned to be “feminine,” i.e., softer and nobler creatures by virtue of their non-competitiveness. The potentially disastrous corollary of this submissiveness is their indisposition to support the Black women who are contending and competing because their leadership role is jeopardized by the regressive ideology of the men. The Black women find themselves isolated and defensively tend to adopt an objectively retrogressive moral code which deepens the gulf between the women still further.
The solution lies in the very process of working together, which offers promise of their ultimate convergence and alliance on the basis of their mutual oppression by men and by society. In order to endure and develop, the Black liberation movement, North and South, is going to have to rise to heights unachieved by any existing labor or political organization: it is going to have to come to grips with the woman question.
White women will have to develop consciousness and militancy on this question, and learn to bolster the course of Black women towards equality and leadership. Black women will have to see through the hypocrisy of the white middleclass norms of family stability and propriety. Black and white men will have to learn to subordinate subjective prejudices to a program and practice that incorporates appreciation of the woman question as an objective social issue that cannot be separated from civil rights. Equality and emancipation are indivisible.
The woman question will then be elevated from the back room into a proudly raised public issue of the liberation movement. Black and white women, exerting their strength through solidarity, will soon persuade Black and white men to cease and desist from the habits and outlook of the slaveholder and the movement will soar to new levels.
The murkiness of the subject of women’s oppression is due to unconsciousness or denial of it among the majority of women. But as women begin to move in instinctive defense of civil rights, they will discern the similarity between the two struggles; the Black struggle becomes the training ground for the movement of women’s emancipation, and each strengthens the other.
The overpowering social and cultural influence of the southern system upon the rest of the country has produced a twin oppression in every walk of life: race and sex discrimination go hand in hand, and one cannot survive without the other.
Concomitantly, the militancy of an ideologically emancipated woman can have far-reaching effects in any sphere where she finds herself; this is particularly true in the labor movement.
The isolated home cannot possibly organize the woman at the point of her production; instead, it disorganizes and alienates her. Entry into public production transfers her from outer space into a socialized arena of struggle for both the class and her sex.
The logic of feminism is to expand inexorably into generalized radicalism, and women become doubly mistrusted and disliked by the labor bureaucracy, which prefers to leave workers unorganized and wages unequalized rather than absorb new women militants into the union and into the leadership. The woman question runs like a red thread through the problems of organizing the unorganized, industrial unionism in the North and South, the gap between skilled and unskilled labor, unemployment and marginal employment, and the determination of union policy, especially in strikes. (The movie Salt of the Earth vividly depicted the decisive importance of respecting and utilizing the advanced militancy of women.)
As the ratio of blue to white-collar workers continues its reversal, women workers are becoming predominantly whitecollar, and the labor force of key industries is becoming increasingly white-collar. Yet because these new jobs are filled mostly by women, they remain outside union jurisdiction, and the organized sections of American labor dwindle. The current impasse of the telephone union, among others, is a result of the tradition of second-class economic and leadership status for women even when they form the bulk of the ranks. This paternalism is duplicated in virtually every existing union— garment, auto and aircraft, printing trades, electric, laundry clerks, building service, etc. Even waitresses and stenographers are usually represented by male officials.
To make matters worse, the failure of the labor movement to recognize the special problems and talents of the woman worker, to build a woman leadership, and to overcome its historic drag in this field, tends to be more or less duplicated in the mass movements of the present day, jeopardizing their future, as illustrated in the civil rights organizations. But as Black insurgency in the South intensifies militancy in the northern civil rights and labor movements, the advanced nature of the drive for sex equality in Mississippi and Alabama will spread to the women in the labor movement and in political organizations elsewhere, spurring them to greater efforts and their organizations to higher development.
The intimate connection between the woman question and the future of American labor—a connection today provided not only through women in industry but through women in the Black struggle—must not be underestimated
* In the period since this was written, Black women have been consciously forced out of positions of leadership in the liberation movement. This represents a retreat for the movement. There is little that is revolutionary in the fight against “emasculation” and for male supremacy. Such a struggle can only represent the interests of a nascent Black bourgeoisie, trying to incorporate itself into the existing social order—at the expense of the great mass of Black Americans, male and female.