Resolution
of women in Latin America – 13th World Congress 1991
Starting
with a critical look at the XI World Congress resolution, “The socialist
revolution and the struggle for women’s liberation”, this resolution aims to be
a guide to action for our organizations in their central task of organizing a
women’s liberation movement — alongside the masses of Latin American women,
other feminist sectors and other revolutionary organizations — that can take
its place and play a decisive role in the revolutionary process and in building
a socialist society.
1. The Latin
American peoples are subjected to imperialist domination, with the
corresponding poverty and distorted development of our societies. But the
relationship with imperialism is changing, continually creating more social,
economic and political contradictions leading to the emergence of new movements
and a rise in the consciousness and strength of the masses — among them women —
about their capacity to change things.
The last 30
years have seen deep and sudden changes in our countries, changes that have
transformed the face of the sub-continent and the life of its peoples, in
particular those of women:
• massive
migration to the cities has resulted from the structural crisis in agriculture
and the uneven industrial development;
• semi-proletarian
masses have emerged in the big cities as another group of the dispossessed;
• the model
of capitalist accumulation based on import substitution has changed to that of
secondary export and modernization;
• the debt
crisis;
• the
erosion of the populist state;
•
imperialism has implemented a strategy of low-intensity conflict — controlled
transition from military dictatorships to “democratic” civilian governments
combined with repression;
• later, the
invasion of Grenada and Panama and the growing use of US military bases
directly on Latin American territory, often with the excuse of the “war against
drugs”.
All of this
has meant growing impoverishment, increasing violence and the exacerbation of
social differences and contradictions.
At the same
time, the triumph of two revolutions, in Cuba and Nicaragua, despite the
problems they are experiencing, represent a possibility for change in the eyes
of the masses in the sub-continent.
It is in
this context, that of the 1980s, that Latin American women have entered onto
the political scene of the sub-continent.
2. In the
context of the economic crisis the responsibility for family spending and
domestic work, socially assigned to women, has increasingly become more
difficult. Hyper-inflation means housewives in the cities having to go from
market to market searching for the lowest prices, eating less so that their
children can have a little more and facing the anguish of simply not having
anything to give their family at mealtimes. In the countryside, domestic work
is increased by the work involved in caring for animals and preparing products
to sell.
The lack of
basic public services in the Latin American countryside means that domestic
labour has to be carried out in brutal conditions. It means covering huge
distances to find water or wood, and chronic and endemic suffering from curable
diseases, especially for children. In the poor urban neighbourhoods women carry
out their domestic work very often without water or electricity, in
insalubrious conditions, without enough schools for their children, without
medical facilities. Women’s workload is multiplied by these conditions.
3. The
growing pauperization of the masses has forced women to seek an income so that
the family can survive.
In the
majority of Latin American countries, from 1950-1980 the percentage of women in
the workforce went up. In addition, in the majority of cases where we have
data, between 1975 and 1984 women’s participation in the workforce increased in
relation to the total active population.
4. The
possibilities of peasant women finding paid employment have decreased, forcing
women to become unwaged tenant farmers, day-workers or tenants at the same time
as taking on the tasks in the home.
5. In some
cases, for example Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay, women have gone into industry in
significant numbers. But, even in these cases, women generally go into
all-female departments where they suffer discrimination in work conditions,
wages and promotion opportunities, while at the same time continuing to do
“women’s work” in the home (double work day).
With the
sole exception of Brazil, women who enter the workforce swell the ranks of the
active population mainly in the service and informal sectors. For most of them
this means more work, but not a proletarianization in the exact sense of the
word. These changes are very evident in many large cities, where in recent
years the numbers of itinerant salespeople, beggars and prostitutes have
increased. With a dearth of stable salaried jobs, women have gone into the
streets to earn their living any way they can.
6. With the
economic and political crisis, the Latin American bourgeoisies and their
governments are continually trying to create new bases of consensus to maintain
their domination over society. Insofar as women have increasingly entered
public life over the last few years, although the majority still find
themselves locked away in the home, the bourgeois governments try to legitimize
themselves in women’s eyes, negotiating with the organized women’s movements
and presenting themselves as champions of women’s democratic and civil rights.
This has meant an ideological offensive from many governments and bourgeois
forces towards women in general, demonstrated by their electoral discourse and
in the appointment of women to state posts.
7. In some
countries, like Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay, the ruling bourgeois
parties have encouraged the creation of institutions and organisms whose
objective is to develop programmes specifically directed at women as the
oppressed sex. The majority are devoted to research, propaganda and proposing
legal reforms, without having any executive powers as such.
8. Most
countries adhere to the United Nations Convention on the elimination of all
forms of discrimination against women. This has been followed by the express
recognition at a constitutional level of equal civic rights for men and women.
In addition,
many governments have introduced legal changes on their own initiative
concerning to formal equality and social rights, such as divorce.
The
modernizing offensive of many states is reflected in the labour field, where
they evoke “egalitarianism” with the aim of making it easier to exploit women
even more, and thus helping to legitimize their economic policies.
9. It is at
the level of their economic programmes that governmental policies are
increasingly affecting women’s lives.
In many
countries the state has implemented programmes that tend to legitimize and
institutionalize the informal labour market: training and loans so that women
can earn additional income without leaving the home. This disguises
unemployment, saves the bosses paying workers and makes it more difficult for
workers to organize.
Some
governments have introduced temporary employment programmes originally directed
at men. But it has been women who have filled them, without any job security
and receiving “emergency” wages.
Alongside
their modernization programmes, some governments have set up plans “to combat
extreme poverty” using voluntary female labour power to carry out public works.
10. In many
countries, the state has carried out an aggressive population-control policy,
using the indiscriminate distribution of contraception and forced
sterilization. This policy is often directly tied to its dealings with
international financing agencies and requests for foreign credit. The lack of
left alternatives defending women’s right to decide on having children makes it
that much easier to apply this policy whose goal is to lower the birthrate and
convince the population that its poverty is because “we are too many”.
11. Some
governments have established specialized police centres for dealing with
battered and raped women. The aim is not only to try and put over the image
that they are champions of women’s well-being, but also —and especially — to
broaden and legitimize their repressive apparatus.
12. The
weight of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America is enormous — politically,
socially and culturally. But during the last 20 years the church in Latin
America has been thrown into crisis. This is shown by the existence of various
currents within it, including that aligned with the Vatican and its theological
and political orientation, and the current known as liberation theology, with
its many tendencies.
The
hierarchy linked to the Vatican in general supports measures tending to
maintain the current ruling system, and thus has a very conservative position
in relation to women — for example opposing legal changes on divorce,
contraception and abortion. In various ways it promotes a policy of
strengthening the existing family system and the submissive role of women
within it.
The current
identified with liberation theology is in general linked to the process of
self-organization of the poor masses. As a general rule, a very high proportion
of the members of the Church base communities and bible study groups are women.
Because of this some priests are more sensitive to the specific oppression they
suffer and the need to take political action around it. But their political
vision is limited by the contradiction between their adherence to a traditional
moral view from which they do not distance themselves and women’s concrete and
changing needs, especially concerning sexuality, motherhood and fertility
control. There have been few theological contributions from women’s point of
view and its relation to the overall road to liberation envisaged by this
current.
In the last
few years there has also been an increase in the activity of different
protestant groups in Latin America. There are liberation theology currents
among them which have had an important feminist theoretical production,
particularly in academic spheres. However, most of them are evangelical sects
characterized by an extremely conservative social and political outlook, which
is particularly reactionary in relation to women.
13. All
these changes in society have had profound effects on family life for the whole
of the Latin American masses. There are strong pressures towards the
disintegration of the family, with no material possibility of adopting the
bourgeois family model in practice.
In the countryside,
millions of families still make up productive units, generally with a rigid
distribution of roles according to sex, placing women on the lowest rungs of
the power hierarchy when it comes to decision-making, both formally and in
practice. But women are nevertheless part of the productive community, although
this is relatively isolated from the rest of the world.
At the same time, 26 million indigenous
Americans, mainly concentrated in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala and Mexico,
maintain their own customs, traditions and ways of communally taking
responsibility for productive work to different degrees. The pressures on these
nationalities to abandon their culture are enormous, but they are resisting
“Latinization”.
However, the
structural crisis of agriculture and a relative capitalization of the
countryside exercise a strong pressure towards the disintegration of the
peasant family as a self-sufficient unit of production, without this meaning
its transformation simply into a unit of consumption.
With the
concentration of the population in the Latin American cities and the
strengthening of capitalist relations of production, within the big and small
bourgeoisie and sections of the industrial proletariat a bourgeois family has
formed. However the big majority of the emigrados do not form part of the
working class properly speaking: quite simply, underdeveloped capitalism has no
other use for its labour force than as a gigantic reserve army of labour.
But even in
those families where one or more members manages to get a paid job (as a manual
or white-collar worker), it is rare that the wage is enough for each worker to
maintain their own nuclear family, even though they are obliged to face the
labour market as individuals.
In other
cases the pressures are such that the family simply disperses, giving rise to
the mass phenomenon of abandoned children. In addition, women are increasingly
becoming heads of household.
Alongside
this, the crisis generates tensions at a social level, leading not only to an increase
in the number of assaults and rapes but also to more and more violence within
the family.
14. At the
end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the first organizations of women
as such appeared on the basis of an initial identification between women in the
same immediate community who shared immediate problems and common concerns.
This led to traditions of:
• women
organizing in support of workers’ struggles since the last century.
• women’s
struggles for the right to work, particularly in “women’s” industries which
have produced thousands of experienced cadres for the workers’ movement in
general.
• local
mothers’ clubs to deal with specific community problems.
There is
also a certain tradition of women organizing around their demands as a sex.
Bourgeois women organized from the end of the last century around the right to
education, access to the professions and, in some cases, around the right to
vote. But in the framework of the general peaks of the class struggle there
were mass women’s organizations based in the working class which fought for
demands like the vote, land, work and education for women in the popular
layers.
15. In the
1970s and 1980s many feminist groups emerged of the type also emerging in
Europe, the USA and Canada, and influenced by them. Although in Brazil there
was the emergence of a mass feminist movement for a short period at the end of
the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, in Latin America this process was not at
all general and did not generate the building of an organically constituted
movement with a mass character
The majority
of these groups were characterized by ideological and theoretical discussion,
and concentrated their activity principally in consciousness-raising and
propaganda, introducing for the first time for many years the “woman question”
into intellectual and left circles and society as a whole.
However,
even though in some cases the work of the feminist and consciousness-raising
groups was able to stimulate a mass response, it did not result in building
general structures with a more permanent character among different layers of
women active at the time, which could have maintained the continuity of a
specific movement. The activities of feminist groups were also concentrated in
the big cities or even, in some countries, limited to the capital cities alone.
The
dedication to discussing and propagandizing around “themes” related to women’s
oppression — housework, violence, sexuality, abortion — did touch on vital
issues for all women. But because they had a fundamentally propagandist vision
and of building the movement by the multiplication of small groups this made it
difficult to establish a platform that could unite the groups, or that was
attractive and accessible to the majority of women.
The vast
majority of women were, and are, permanently organized around the question of
the survival of themselves and their families and around the question of
democracy, their situation determined by the semi-colonial character of our
countries and the resulting poverty. In addition, the middle layers have not
suffered from contradictions in a sufficiently massive way to provoke a louder
response in this sector, which is relatively big.
This
situation led to a crisis of political perspective for the “autonomous groups”,
and in many cases to their disappearance or absorption in governmental
projects.
16. But some
groups and many individual women began to create other types of instruments to
express their feminist concerns:
a) Aid
and/or educational institutions, mainly financed by international agencies.
Their central activities vary a lot. They do not always explicitly define
themselves as feminist, but they have an important weight in feminist currents
through their work, made easier by the funding they receive.
b)
Non-funded projects of support/relations to women (centres providing various
services, social activities, meetings, film clubs, local groups, or work with
peasant or indigenous women, for example).
c) Groups
publishing various journals.
d) Christian
women’s groups.
e)
Trade-union commissions or groupings.
f) Women
organized inside left political parties.
All these
expressions of feminism have prospered in the 1980s insofar as their work has
been guided by an attempt to relate to Latin American reality today and women’s
day-to-day lives.
17. The
daily life and world outlook of millions of Latin American women have been
transformed. They have been forced to emerge from the shadow of the home and
throw themselves into public life, trying to sustain their families via
activities they would never previously have contemplated.
A whole
generation of young women has been raised in conditions of crisis, in general
by mothers who have lived through these changes. For this reason, their frame
of reference in practice is not the model of a woman whose life is confined to
the four walls of the home.
At the same
time, the extension of public education and the penetration of the means of
mass communication into the countryside and the city in recent years have meant
that millions of women’s horizons have been broadened— although sometimes in a
distorted way.
18. With
their growing participation in the labour market, millions of women have been
forced to try to find a collective solution to deteriorating living standards
and democratic rights — given the impossibility of finding individual
solutions. Consequently, they are increasingly involved in political and social
movements in general, which can involve millions of women, often giving them
their first experience of struggle.
At present,
the majority of women are organized in relation to their social situation,
around their living and working conditions (family survival, conditions of
domestic and paid work), and around the most brutal political problem, the
struggle against repression, for human rights and democracy.
In the last
15 years, new movements have emerged whose base of support and activists are
almost exclusively women: the urban struggle and the fight for freedom for
political prisoners and the disappeared.
The popular
and civic urban movements fight for solutions to the problems of housing,
services and high prices suffered by millions of people who live in extremely
precarious conditions. Women, being responsible for all aspects of family care
and mostly not having paid jobs — with its corresponding absence from the home
— are both the most motivated and the most available to participate in this
type of movement, which is centred in the neighbourhoods.
On the other
hand, women are the rank-and-file driving force for the committees of relatives
of political prisoners’ and the disappeared, mainly from identification with
their role as mother and wife and their responsibility for freeing their
children, husbands and brothers from the clutches of repression.
The
development of trade union and peasant struggles has also involved many women.
In sectors where there is an almost exclusive concentration of working women,
thousands have taken to the streets for the first time.
Peasant and
indigenous women, on the other hand, often organize as women to take up
problems linked to the need for better conditions for carrying out domestic
work and for the well-being of their families, such as fighting for their own
rights to land and loans, and the need to have their own income to increase
family revenue.
19. This
entry into public life in distinct forms and at different levels creates a
contradictory dynamic at the level of women’s consciousness: the majority go
into public life as wives and mothers; a minority, but a politically
significant minority, enter as young women workers.
Leaving
their homes and neighbourhoods, they come up against the government, the
employers, the trade-union bureaucracy, the para-military groups and the local
bosses in the countryside and the city. In sum, they do exactly what prevailing
values say a woman should not do.
The central
contradiction which millions of Latin American women confront is the need to fulfil
the traditional role of women in the family, in the home, and in domestic work
in its fullest sense, and the impossibility of so doing given general living
conditions without breaking with this tradition. The existence of this
contradiction is the objective basis for the perspective of building a mass
women’s liberation movement in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Conditions
are being created at a mass level which open up the possibilities for an
increase in women’s consciousness of their oppression as women. When they take
to the streets, motivated by both necessity and solidarity, this brings them up
against obstacles for realizing their objectives. If they realize them, if they
succeed, they have to change their behaviour, their conception of themselves,
their conditions of struggle. To establish new conditions of solidarity, and
thus improve the conditions of struggle, they have to confront their own
oppression as a sex. There will be no positive solution to this contradiction
without breaking with the social, political and personal conditions that create
and maintain the traditional model of women — as mother, wife and housewife —
on the basis of the political struggle of the masses, of which women are in the
front ranks and the leadership.
This contradiction
is sharpened by:
• Today the
mass of women have access to the means of mass communication and, despite its
deficiencies, millions of women also have access to formal education. By both
these means, they are aware of the enormous possibilities offered by today’s
world for individual development at the same time as the models which are
presented for women — both traditional and “modern”. This new knowledge, and
the models themselves, are in open conflict with the reality of their lives.
• For the first
time; millions of women have access to contraception, which makes it possible
to envisage controlling their own bodies, and to make choices concerning
maternity and sexuality no longer determined by procreation, despite all the
risks implicit given that they have this access because of a policy of
controlling births that is dangerous in its motivation, and undemocratic in its
application.
• The
establishment of governmental programmes on sexist violence, at the same time
as being a way of broadening and even legitimizing the repressive apparatus of
the state, also legitimize the social character of sexist violence, the
testimonies exposing the brutality and high number of cases which exist.
• Bourgeois
propaganda around women’s equality — albeit to back up a birth-control policy,
to win votes, to legitimize a regime in the eyes of the international community
— introduce at a mass level as never before, and in some cases for the first
time, the idea that women and men have equal rights before the law and in
society. At the same time, within the independent mass organizations which
struggle against state policy and the bourgeoisie, and particularly those
raising the banner of the struggle for real democracy, women encounter
discrimination and marginalization in most cases both from the rank-and-file
and from the leaderships.
20. But
recognizing these contradictions and overcoming them through a conscious
struggle for liberation is not automatic. It depends on many factors in the
social struggle, on the degree of organization among women and of the class
struggle in general: the general relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie
and the workers; the capacity of the bourgeoisie and its state to propose
demobilizing and self-legitimizing policies to women; the development, strength
and relations of the revolutionary and reformist organizations with the women’s
movements that emerge and their positions on the question of women. All these
factors influence the development of a sector of the women’s movement capable
of linking up in practice the project of building a mass movement with a
feminist character and the more general starting points of radicalization and
mobilization of women. However the existence of this contradiction is the
objective basis for the advances of the last few years towards building a
political women’s liberation movement in our continent.
21. In
general, the central dynamic of the situation today in Latin America points to
this contradiction being resolved favourably. Women are participating as never
before in political and social struggles; they are organizing increasingly as
women by social sector; there exists a growing and renewing feminist fringe or
pole of the women’s movement; and non-bourgeois political organizations are
increasingly under pressure to confront their traditional anti-women’s
liberation positions. Taking into account the advances and setbacks in each
country in terms of its specific situation, the general dynamic is towards the
formation of mass women’s movements with the emergence of a large number of
groups of different types which , as part of their platform of struggle and
basis of unity, increasingly tend to raise gender demands in combination with
demands relating to survival and democracy.
22. In the
course of the struggle for their immediate demands, the mass of women
continually confront obstacles flowing from their specific oppression: they are
restricted by “not having permission” to go out of their houses to activities,
having nowhere to leave their children, feeling guilty for “abandoning” them,
being insulted by men in meetings of the movement; their organizations are
weakened by the competition among women and the lack of self-confidence and
training of their members. All these obstacles are worse inside mixed
organizations of women and men. Also they are even more despised and humiliated
by the authorities than men, and they raped by the police and military. These
obstacles have to be overcome in order to go forward. Sometimes they constitute
such an insuperable obstacle that there is a regression in the struggle. But at
other times they lead to attempts to propose practical solutions in the form of
collective demands.
In these
cases the natural leaders of many women’s movements, and often the organized women’s
groups themselves, search for elements which explain the existence and the
dynamic of the obstacles in order to be able to overcome them. Moving closer to
more feminist sectors in general gives them the possibility of understanding
and building the necessary instruments of struggle and organization to confront
their contradictions as women. At the same time, many feminist groups have been
participating in the popular organizations. On the other hand, in the last ten
years a significant number of feminist activists have emerged within the
political parties who have succeeded in maintaining a much more organic
presence in the women’s movement, over and above their struggle to change the
mentalities of these parties on gender oppression.
All this has
begun to generate a social and political decomposition of the feminist pole in
the women’s movement. Undoubtedly many active women still mistrust feminism.
But many others are beginning to identify with it as such, identifying with
feminist ideas and recognizing their usefulness for understanding and changing
their reality. On the other hand, the traditional feminist sectors can no
longer deny the “feminist legitimacy” of women who combine their activity in
the women’s movement with party activity, as they tended to do in the past.
Empirical
proof of this decomposition can be seen in the increasing attendance by women
from the popular sectors in the Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanas y de
Caribe (Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meetings) from 1981 to 1990. It
has been this combined dynamic of contradictions in women’s struggles in the
popular sectors for class demands and the interaction with feminist layers of
the women’s movement — including more and more who are primarily mobilized
around class demands or as party militants — which has made it possible in many
sectors to put forward gender demands in the programmes of struggle and as the
basis for the mass mobilizations of women in the last few years.
23. The
forms of coordination between the different sectors of the women’s movement
vary a lot in their objectives, scope and duration.
Sometimes permanent coordinations exist,
fundamentally to provide a space for political discussion, contact and mutual
support rather than around actions or campaigns, although these can result from
the same coordinations.
Other forms
of coordination, which at times combine clearly feminist forces with both
political parties and the broader women’s movement, have emerged in the context
of particular national political situations.
A series of
working networks have also been formed both at national and sub-continental
level around the campaigns or ongoing activities of their members. In many
countries, contacts between feminist groups have been limited to local, regional
or national conferences, sometimes resulting in information networks between
groups being established without the existence of any common political
platform.
The majority
of women who are involved in permanent coordinations tend to be so on the basis
of their social situation.
Although at
the beginning of the 1980s the initiative for events around March 8 or November
25 or other general activities was taken by layers linked to the small feminist
groups, the social composition of these activities and the initiatives for them
are much more frequently start from women linked to the popular and trade-union
sectors of the movement.
On the level
of the sub-continent, there have been various contacts and opportunities for
discussion, basically in the Encuentros of Latin American and Caribbean
feminists and the three conferences of the Continental Women’s Front Against
Intervention. There has also been a multiplication of international meetings
and events which play the same role. It is in this type of event that the
Cubans and Nicaraguans have had growing contact with the Latin American
feminist pole.
24. The
general dynamic of women’s lives today is: a) that more women than ever before
are entering social and political struggle; and b), that they find themselves
objectively in contradiction with their oppression. But in making the big jump
from transforming these conditions into a political movement of women for their
liberation, there are a series of political problems that have to be analysed
and overcome:
a) The
diverse demands of women in struggle
Women’s
initial demands usually have a specific local focus, which makes it difficult
to unify their struggles. This lack of unity and, for the same reason, contact
with many more women, not only creates difficulties for winning the immediate
struggle but impedes their thinking about their oppression as a social
question.
However,
although there are immediate demands that unite the women of a whole sector,
this does not mean that a general political movement takes shape which sees
itself as a women’s movement. Obviously, the unity of women organized as such,
even by sector, has a big multiplying effect in other sectors. But, insofar as
the movement is not politically extended to unify women from different sectors,
there is a big danger that even stronger sectors can see their gains pushed
back.
Finally,
where the different popular organizations advance gender demands these are also
very different and difficult to unite in struggle. And it is in struggle and
through progress around their concrete rights that women will appreciate the
usefulness of organizing for their demands as a gender.
b)
Clientelism and self-helpism: two dangers in building the movement
Women,
particularly in the neighbourhoods and peasant communities of Latin America,
have two ways of surviving: by making demands on external agencies or trying to
find a solution through their own resources.
Placing
demands on the state in relation to social and political problems has the enormous
advantage of putting the responsibility where it should be, on society as a
whole and its institutions, and more easily gives mass action a political
character. Successful struggles and mobilizations advances both their overall
consciousness and their strength and confidence in themselves.
Practice has
taught us, however, that reliance on the state is not without its dangers. On
the one hand there could be a clientelist dynamic and, on the other, in
partially winning certain demands women can become absorbed into administrative
tasks of providing services.
The other
form of self-organization for assuring survival, that of
self-solution/self-administration, has the advantage that it is a process of
cooperative self-organization which presents immediate solutions to urgent
problems and gives greater value to domestic labour, creating the seeds for its
socialization.
But it also
has two real dangers: the legitimization of the established role of women as
those responsible for domestic tasks and family well-being, and apolitical
self-helpism.
c) The
difficulties for the political participation of women workers
It is clear
that there is no automatic correlation between the mass entry of women into the
labour market and their involvement in political and/or trade-union struggle as
workers:
• They
basically work in “feminine” industries and sectors, such as services and in
the informal sector in general. As in the rest of the world, their jobs are
often similar to the work they do in the home, or require great meticulousness.
• The
informal sector usually means working in isolation or in small workshops, where
there is very often a paternalist relationship with the employer or boss.
• Even in
those cases where women have entered big industry, the majority have to put up
with a double workday as well as having other restrictions in the time they can
allocate for trade-union or political participation.
• The
working woman continues to see herself primarily as a mother and/or wife and
not a worker, even when she is the family’s only breadwinner.
• Fellow
workers often apply pressure to prevent her participating actively in
trade-union life; and the trade-union leaderships are not only unconcerned by
women’s specific conditions, but frequently openly block women’s participation.
• Most women
who become trade-union activists are unmarried or childless. Because of this,
they usually identify less with the majority of women workers.
Aside from
these difficulties, in many places little attention is given by revolutionary
organizations to women’s trade-union work.
For all
these reasons, the organization of working women has not increased at the same
tempo as their incorporation into the labour market.
d) The
state’s attempts to coopt
In the case
of countries where the state has a relatively aggressive policy towards women,
the need to respond with alternative political proposals that strengthen the
mass movement is obvious. Without presenting a political alternative to state
initiatives it will be increasingly difficult to maintain class independence,
because the state will appear to be more useful than the movement in the eyes
of the masses.
e) The
predominance of sexism in the leaderships of the mass movement
Insofar as
the initial rise in consciousness of most women comes through the struggles of
the more general movements, usually led by male leaderships, the machismo of
these latter is a big obstacle to their advance. This is particularly important
in the absence of a specifically women’s political movement which raises at a
national, unified level the gender demands that women in various sectors are
beginning to put forward today. In its turn, the leaderships’ sexism is an
obstacle to building this movement.
25. Over the
last few years, the non-bourgeois mass leaderships have changed their approach
to women’s situation and their role in society and in struggles.
In many
countries the crisis of the Communist parties includes questioning the old
Stalinist conception of the women’s movement as an “auxiliary” to the mass
movement in general.
At the same
time, revolutionary organizations are discussing revolutionary strategy, a
discussion in which the role of women and the struggle against gender
oppression is also raised, at least potentially. However, in almost all cases
these leaderships reject this point as part of the strategic discussion and
strongly resist any serious consideration of the subject.
However,
within all types of left political parties there are feminist nuclei and
currents emerging which are putting forward different alternatives around the
need for women to fight for gender demands. They influence the orientation of
their parties, not only in line with their political capacity, but also in
function of the more or less democratic traditions of discussion, the social
insertion of the party and its overall political capacity to recognize and
confront the real problems of women in struggle.
26. The
discussions within the women’s movement and its feminist pole have evolved
positively, passing from the initial examination and affirmation of basic
points on oppression to defining the routes for building mass women’s movements
around their specific demands.
Elements of
broader debates on politics and society in general influence this discussion.
Thus, existing political tendencies exert a certain pressure on the discussion
on feminism:
•
Modernizing bourgeois ideology, which legitimizes competence as a social norm
and reduces democracy to the relationship between the citizen and the state, divorcing
it from social classes and problems.
• Social-democratic
positions, today accompanied by a poltiical offensive throughout the
sub-continent, which support gradualist and institutionalist tactics.
•
Imperialist propaganda which identifies market mechanisms with democracy on the
one hand, and socialism with dictatorship on the other.
•
Perestroika and the crisis in Eastern European countries, which as well as
reaffirming the false distinction market/democracy vs. socialism/dictatorship,
has brought pressure to bear on revolutionaries, thus weakening the influence
of a perspective of revolutionary rupture as a solution to the problems of the
Latin American masses.
Given these
pressures, some feminists have been incorporated into bourgeois projects, particularly
with the controlled transitions to democracy that have taken place in several
countries. Given the weakness of feminism and the anti-feminist positions of
the majority of the socialist and left oppositions, they have placed their
confidence and/or decided to work in bourgeois women’s projects in order to
“really change women’s situation” in relation to the regime. Among many of them
positions predominate based on the necessity and possibility of “democratizing
the state”, and creating “space for women” within it. Others identify with
ideas around the “feminine essence” as something morally superior to the
“masculine essence”, which is one way of denying the need to build an
autonomous mass women’s movement.
However, the
great majority of feminists are independent of the bourgeoisie and the state,
and consider themselves as being in some way on the left, with a broad range of
positions that identify with the elimination of capitalism and a socialist
perspective. In this sector, which in general takes the broad women’s movement
as its point of reference for the struggle against gender oppression, the
debate is particularly diffuse, thus making it difficult to characterize the
currents within it.
Under
discussion, among other things, are:
• The
relation between gender oppression and class exploitation/oppression.
• The
struggle for democracy and feminist demands.
• What sort
of power do women want?
• Women as
political and social subjects.
• The
validity or not of the concept of the vanguard in a strategy for change.
27.
Confronted with any form of oppression, the only solution is the
self-organization of the oppressed to fight it. The case of women is no
different. It is the independent self-organization of women themselves that can
impose reforms to the law and to current government economic policy, and
changes in the social and political organizations of the masses, to improve
their immediate situation and encourage and create better conditions for their
continued struggle. On the basis of self-organization, as the fundamental
foundation of their liberation movement, they can reach the numerical strength
and political development necessary for having a favourable influence on future
events, both today and after the revolution.
It is only
through a process of self-organization that women can succeed in transforming
themselves, collectively and individually, in public and private, in such a way
that the traditional role filled by women can be replaced with a new concept
and a new reality of what is woman, creating this through the struggle itself.
28. A
thoroughgoing, consistent feminist struggle is not simply to achieve formal
equality between women and men, but to completely revolutionize relations
between them, eliminating the historico-social construction of gender. This
change cannot be fully realized in the framework of class society, particularly
in the present Latin American context of exploitation and oppression in
countries that are dominated by imperialism. In this sense, it is in all
women’s interest to struggle for the overthrow of the oppressive patriarchal
capitalist system and for building a socialist, democratic and pluralist
society. Only such a revolution and a new society can lay the bases for
completely eliminating the oppression currently experienced by women.
However,
women’s oppression is not automatically eliminated either with the
anti-capitalist revolution or in post-capitalist society. For women to be able
to transform their own lives, to be revolutionary subjects in the taking of
power and the overthrow of the present bourgeois regimes, and to have the
strength to favourably influence the events in a post-revolutionary society, it
is necessary now that they build a political movement based on their demands as
a gender.
The
formation of this movement will transform them into a political subject, which
fights for its own interests; women’s objective historical interest in
eliminating patriarchal class society laying the basis for their transformation
into a revolutionary subject. This transformation could in practice go along
with the political development of the movement itself and its vanguard.
29. To build
this movement today, we have to start from the conditions, the forms of
organization and the demands that women feel to be theirs, whether they are
gender demands or not. Self-organization of women by social sector around their
most pressing demands is an essential element in strengthening women socially,
collectively and thus individually, creating greater possibilities for the
development of consciousness of gender oppression, even though this is not
automatic.
Undoubtedly,
women’s struggle for their own demands will be closely linked to the struggles
of all working people, even with the rise of their own political movement. In
building this movement general class demands will combine with gender demands
as the basis of unity. Nevertheless, this dynamic will certainly include ups
and downs in the promotion of specifically feminist demands.
A better
level of organization of the popular movement will encourage greater
recognition of women’s struggle for their own demands. This is because a better
level of coordination and unity not only means more chance of winning but also
a higher level of politicization, the establishment of a more global basis for
unity and an understanding of the need to organize in an ongoing way, not just
for tackling one problem but a whole series of problems.
In practical
terms, it also creates the possibility for a better division of labour within
organizations of struggle and for giving more attention to seriously analysing
their reality.
The coming
together of forces whose objective is extending women’s consciousness of their
specific oppression is more effective in reaching larger numbers of women.
But there is
no mechanical relationship between the general popular movement and women’s
advance. Women have to have their own political expression. And they will only
succeed if there is a conscious effort in every movement to promote the growing
discovery and politicization of gender oppression, which we can call the
feminization of the demands, organization and political dynamic of the women’s
movement.
30. In the
very process of building the movement, different problems are raised:
a) Given the
diversity of demands, which reflect not only different needs but also different
levels of consciousness, we must take every opportunity to bring together
struggles and establish a system of demands that can move towards the formation
of an increasingly clearly defined political movement.
b) Given the
dangers of clientelism and self-helpism, we have to reinforce the internal
democracy of both the mass organizations in general and the political space and
organizations for women, as well as ensuring democratic functioning in the
women’s movement as a whole. On the other hand, the political nature of women’s
demands should be emphasized — they cannot be met by charity — along with the absolute
necessity of keeping the movement independent from the bourgeoisie and the
state.
c) Despite
the difficulties faced by women workers in terms of their political and
trade-union participation, this should not lead to the conclusion that their
involvement in the women’s movement is not central. The numbers of women who
have gone into the labour market has meant that, despite all the obstacles to
their participation, more women are active in trade unions than ever before.
And when they enter into a collective process of consciousness raising and
struggle around their oppression as women as well as workers, they advance
politically more rapidly and consistently than other sectors because of their
living and working conditions and their numerical concentration — in sum, their
social situation.
d) Given the
attempts of the state to coopt the women’s movement, particularly its feminist
pole, in addition to strongly maintaining its autonomy for historical reasons
there must also be political perspectives for the type of changes considered
necessary from now on at governmental level. We should promote the following
criteria for these within the movement. Distinguishing between two things:
services that the state is obliged to provide with the greatest control on the
part of the users; and a position of accepting or promoting the state
organizing women (the example of the Women Today programme in Argentina). In
the case of legislative proposals, it is more feasible to maintain the
independence of the women’s movement in proposing or supporting this or that
draft law. But at the level of the executive (ministries for health, justice,
social or family welfare), the form of the relationship between the movement
and particular state programmes is more complicated. If we demand a programme
of maternity healthcare, for example, and win it, we cannot simply leave the
state to determine its form, content and application. But neither can the
movement take full responsibility for it. The criterion that we can adopt is
proposals for and vigilance over such programmes, but without accepting direct
responsibility for their functioning.
In the case
where the left controls municipalities, the objective of its programmes should
be to increase the possibilities for self-organization of the movement, as was
done with the Glass of Milk programmes in many municipalities in Peru. The
simple implementation of the programme, without women’s self-organization, will
neither guarantee its future nor strengthen the women’s movement or the long-term
objectives of the left itself.
e) Because
of the prevailing sexism in the mass movements and their leaderships,
mechanisms have to be established within them to increase women’s space and
promote discussion — not only around concrete action proposals and demands, but
also around the origins, manifestations and solutions to women’s oppression:
that is, a theoretical discussion.
31. To
enable this process to move forward, the feminist pole in the women’s
organizations and movement has to be strengthened:
a)
Strengthening the recomposition of this pole to include more women leaders of
the mass movement so that they — along with the women of the autonomous groups,
the non-governmental organizations, the political parties and the youth who
today would like to get involved in this struggle — can forge a real vanguard
of the whole women’s movement.
b)
Establishing more opportunities for political and theoretical discussion in the
vanguard through conferences, coordinations around concrete campaigns,
publications, seminars, and so on.
c) Orienting
this pole so that its priority becomes the relationship with the general
women’s movement, so that it can:
• take
advantage of each opportunity to put forward unifying gender demands;
• take
advantage of each opportunity to unify the women’s movement;
• ensure the
continuity of the movement;
• encourage
reflection and theoretical production — a collective memory for the movement;
• develop
independent alternatives to the proposals of the bourgeoisie and the state.
To do this
there has to be the development of a political alternative within the feminist
pole in alliance with other sectors which have a similar vision. If other
revolutionary currents and parties which are today absent from this political
elaboration become convinced of feminism this will also help the development of
this alternative.
If the
clearly feminist expressions of the women’s movement are weakened, in time the
organization of the mass of women will also tend to be undermined. The mass
sectoral organizations will tend to disperse or be manipulated for other ends,
which implies a political weakening which will in time lead to an organic
erosion.
32. The
reason for the existence of our organizations is to be a useful political
instrument for our peoples organizing themselves, proposing and implementing
their own projects as a nation in line with their interests, against the
interests of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. The revolution and the new
socialist society that we seek to create can only be the work of the toiling
people as a whole, and for this reason our revolutionary Marxist current has a
conception of feminism that encompasses a profound transformation, the
subversion of the existing order.
For this
reason we must be the foremost promoters of the women’s liberation movement and
of the discussion within the mass movement and the left — particularly the
revolutionary left — around the necessity of building this movement and the
ways of doing so.
33. In
nearly all our sections women’s work is being reorganized and we are
reformulating our political perspectives for building the women’s movement.
This fits
into the general framework of the need to tackle the question of building our
organizations with greater effectiveness, and is part of this task. In
particular, in relation to women’s work the reorganization must confront the
following problems:
• To a
greater or lesser degree, our sections did not understand the central dynamic
of the radicalization of the majority of women and have had to make a turn
towards the mass sectors, working on the basis of immediate demands.
• The fact
that feminism did not develop on a mass scale, the non-centralization of the
general women’s movement as a political movement and the sexist pressures of society
as a whole are strong countervailing pressures to our maintaining consistent
feminist positions.
• Today
there are many comrades, men and women, who have not been formed in our
programmatic feminist vision and this makes the elaboration of a concrete
political orientation for the movement difficult.
• All this
means that the objective difficulties which all women comrades face have been
inadequately considered by the leaderships, leaving comrades to confront them
individually.
•
Consequently, little effort is made to include in political leadership tasks.
Obviously,
the possibilities for each section resolving this situation vary with its
social insertion and accumulation of cadres and the degree of progress in
forming a leadership team.
34. Our general
objective must be to elaborate concrete political strategies and implement them
in the struggle itself. But to do this we need to:
a) educate
comrades in our feminist programmatic vision;
b) clarify
our theoretical positions in line with the central discussion in each country,
in order to intervene with the greatest clarity;
c) develop
adequate organizational forms in each case to:
• ensure
efficiency and not overload comrades doing women’s work with tasks;
• ensure
that the whole of the party, and in the first place all women comrades,
participate in elaborating the political orientation for women’s work.
d)
Counterbalance, within the limits of our possibilities, the obstacles which
confront women comrades:
• making it
easier for comrades who are mothers to participate;
• special
education measures for women comrades;
•
consciously promoting women to take on tasks, in particular seeking to
establish a proportional relationship between the number of women on the
leadership bodies and the membership, which will mean using a system of targets
or quotas in elections.