"WOMEN are conservative with a small "c" and Caring with a big one, declared the Daily Mirror last Friday when it attempted in its first two pages to woo its women readers from Thatcher's clutches, While Labour and Tory leaders pitch-their appeal women in teims of defending the family and reinforcing women's role within it, the women's liberation movement begins at the opposite pole:
How women's choices and opportunities, and develop new kinds of relations people based DEINECA mutual respect and genuine emotional lies.
But this goal can never be achieved is long as women's primary role in society is seen in relation to the family.
This view of womeo tied to the family is not confined to the capitalist countries. When the constitution the Soviet Union was revised in 1977, the which is meant equal rights women amended propose the gradual shortening of the work-day for women with small children.
The Soviet leaders explained that this new provision was to improve the position women as workers, mothers. childraisers, and housewives"
It is a far cry policies of those who led the revolution in Russia in 1917. In ract, the programme adopted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union two years later provides us with a valuable starting point to frame the policies needed to counter women's oppression and plot the course to our liberation.
It stated: "The party's task at the present moment is primarily work in the realm of ideas and education so as to destroy utterly all traces of the former inequality or prejudices, particularly antong backward strata of the proletariat and peasantry.
confining itself formal equality of women, the party strives to liberate them from the material burdens ot obsolete household work by by communal houses, public cating pinces, central laundries, ALESLES etc.
Dismantling women's role in the family would be at the centre of the tasks of a workers"
government, and sing the array of duties which women presently carry out in the home.
Large-scale material sources would be devoted to elung up: 24-hour child care centres: oWCost, aen-ouane restaurants; collective laundry faciltiest and bouse cleaning services organised on an industrinl basis.
population size and maintain women's place in the family by exercising control over worten's fertility.
Asserting women's right to choose whether or when to bear children means provision of contraceptives and abortion, and an end to forced But if women are to make a genuinely tree motherhood, then pressures that presently define the fulfilment women's only role will have to be countered with an extensive education and programme.
All the ways in which society now shapes women's role such as the pin-ups in the media and advertising which pro the to Women as Sc objects;
for mom tain schools domestic tasks low paid jobs outlawed by government. So would Forms of discrimination against women at work and in social and political life.
In reinforcing the family, the stare presenty dictates forms of sexual relationships and that allowable. A workers ment would do no such thing. It would encourage people decide their own sexuality, and campaign to end the prejudices against bomosexual relatonships.
Changing women's situation at work, where they are now almost entirely confined low-paid, to requires positive discrimination in favour of women advancing in male dominated jobs, backed affirmative COUCHE and schemes, of Financial Independence for women would be guaranteed by making jobs available for all and full maintenance the state of those who are not in paid employment.
Today, choose how they will lead their own lives when they violence from men, whether in the home, the street, fundamental ahout a socialist society and the achieveil.
For the large majonty of people now, politics begins and ends with the ballot box. But the overturning of and the establishment socialism depends mobilisation and self-organisation of all the exploited and uppressed.
That is why the women's to movement, women's caucuses in the trade unions, the rape crisis centres, and the refuges for battered women are such important steps women's liberation.
Lt 15 the organisation women on the housing estates, in workplaces, organisations of society that will expose and confront by all means necessary the even the pettiest of restraints
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Al the present time, governments seck to regulate