The student revolt, as is well known, played a detonating role in unleashing the May 1968 general strike in France. To be sure, there was not enough time for this revolt to be transformed into a social movement on the scale of the German or American student movements during the same period.
Nevertheless, the French student rebel antiauthoritarian lion adopted the key slogans that had been raised on the Berlin and Berkeley campuses at the height of the mobilizations against the war in Vietnam. The streamlining of education to meet the needs of capitalism, the brainwashing role of the mass media, the consumer culture, waste, the hierarchical structure of society, and anti-imperialism were among the intersecting themes and jumping-off points of the student revolt in all of the countries where it developed at the end of the 1960s.
May 1968 saw the unfolding of a social crisis that challenged traditional values and bourgeois order, a crisis in which all the social movements that have developed since then are rooted. The goals of these movements, and their emphasis on the "quality of life," are a challenge to the class collaboration of the traditional organizations of the working class.
All of these movements-from those that attack the repressive function of bourgeois institutions such as the family, schools, or prisons, to the environmental and ecology movements, and including the movement and regional minorities-offer of national proof that "social integration" is a hoax in a society shaken by an unprecedented social crisis.
Of all these movements, the women's liberation movement is probably one of the most significant, owing to its function, which is not only to lift one-half of humanity out of silence and oppression, to enable women to exptess their special needs and demands, but also to bring out the full meaning of the objective of working-class unity that revolutionists fight for.
In France, however, the question of the special oppression of women did not arise. Even though a few mass meetings on this subject were held at the Sorbonne, and even if a few women's groups arose out of the ferment of May 1968, under the impact of the radicalization of American feminists, it is nevertheless apparent that such concerns remained limited to very small groups with little influence (just as small consciousness-raising groups began to emerge in Italy, Switzerland, and even Spain around that time).
But this was not on the same scale as the powerful rise in feminist consciousness as it was expressed in the Englishspeaking countries-the United States, Canada, and Great Britain-or in one of the largest student movements in Europe, the West German SDS [Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund-German Socialist Students Federation].
The Revolt of SDS Women
"We cannot individually solve the social oppression of women. Nor can we wait until the revolution has taken place, for a purely economic and political revolution does not eliminate personal kinds of repression. The socialist countries have given abundant proof of this." (Declaration of the Action Council for Women's Liberation during the conference of SDS delegates in the summer of 1968)
This was the first sign of rebellion. The women students of Berlin had reached a conclusion that many other women would subsequently reach. That is, despite the objectives put forward (rejection of authority, discipline, and the individualistic values preached by bourgeois education), and despite the determination with which the student movement initiated actions against imperialism and bourgeois order, the traditional relationships between men and women within the movement itself had not really changed.
"The separation between private and public life always relegates women to isolation, and forces them to take soleresponsibility for the conflict that ensues. Society has conditioned women from an early age to build their lives around the family, and the family, in turn, depends on relations of production that we combat."
This is what women who had begun to meet "among themselves" in the winter and spring of 1968 to think about their own situation were saying. Pointing out that their decision to concentrate by themselves on problems that were not taken seriously had, at first, elicited only gibes from their male comrades, they added:
"Now they resent us for having separated ourselves; they try to make us say that we think women do not need men in order to be liberated. This is all nonsense which we have never uttered. ... It is precisely because we think that emancipation can only occur at the level of the whole society that we are here."
Despite snubs and discouragements, their presence at this congress indicated their determination to establish the basis for a common battle, whatever the specific features of the struggle they thought they would have to carry out against the sexist reflexes characterizing relationships in the student movement.
"Only women are sufficiently motivated to open fire on patriarchal society; only they can guarantee a radical change in the organization. To accomplish this, temporary isolation is necessary."
Thus, they were cautious on the question of separation (in a document written two months later, they explained: "Our withdrawal is only temporary and is aimed at giving us the capacity to define ourselves at last, without other considerations or compromises"), but no less determined.
for example, ended with the
Their report, following threat: "Comrades, if you are not ready for this discussion, which must be thoroughgoing, we will then have to conclude that SDS is nothing but counterrevolutionary slime." And the reporter added: "The comrades I represent will know what action to take."
These lines already put the emphasis on the key elements underlying our conviction today that an independent movement is of strategic importance: the need for women to gain confidence in their ability to express themselves and to take the floor; the role of the family and the struggle that has to be carried out against the traditional separation between private and "public" life; the uncompromising battle that has to fought-including within the left be organizations-against resistance to the desire for emancipation that women are beginning to show.
What also emerges from these lines is the Marxist approach underpinning this analysis. And this is not an accident: the discussions that took place at the "Free University of Berlin"-an SDS stronghold-confused as they were, nevertheless reflected the desire of a good many activists to reavail themselves of the foundations of Marxism and Leninism.
This was true for the SDS women as well. Their concern with meeting the needs of working mothers, first and foremost, as well as their fruitless attempt to extend to the working class the experience of community-organized child-care centers set up by a wing of the Berlin student movement, stemmed from a class viewpoint in analyzing the situation of the most oppressed women. The subsequent
MES
Women's contingent in 1973 May Day demonstration in
Göskin Sipahioglu/L'Express
Paris.
Nevertheless, the themes that had caused the first outbreaks of revolt among the women in the American student movement were identical to those of their European sisters-a refusal to continue being "second-class citizens," suited for typing leaflets and distributing them, a desire to finally speak in their own name, and so on.
As in Germany, the movement at the outset was peripheral to the working class, and mere numerical growth on its part could not suffice to break the sexist straitjacket in which the organizations of the workers movement were confined. But the ideas of the women's movement soon pene trated into every pore of society, giving rise to women's groups in the trade unions, offices, and plants, as well as the first organizations of Black, Chicana, and Puerto Rican women. It was after the economic recession of 1974-75, in particular, that the most exploited and oppressed women began to radicalize and organize among themselves on such a scale that their weight began to be felt in the workers movement.
The Fight for Equal Pay in Britain
One of the first women's groups in England was formed in the spring of 1968 to support the struggle of the wives of the Hull fishermen. After several boats had disappeared a few months earlier, these women were fighting to improve working and safety conditions for the men who went to sea. In face of the hostility and contempt with which the press treated these angry women, the group decided to ibandonment of all Marxist positions by a arge part of the movement can be ex- ›lained only by a series of combined facors.
In a country whose traditional organizaions are dominated by the overriding nfluence of a fairly right-wing Social Jemocracy, and where the protest movenent at the end of the 1960s did not rucceed in establishing a credible revoluionary pole for the working masses, it is ardly surprising that a growing number if women's groups formed during these ast few years should have cut themselves off from the working class, refusing to take nitiatives that could have widened their ield of activity and impact on large secions of proletarian women.
The influence of separatist theories, and he strength of the radical-feminist current n Germany, must be seen in direct relaionship to the resistance with which the Jureaucratic leaderships of the workers novement met feminist demands, and to he effects of social peace in Germany. But o this must also be added the indifference, not to mention the hostility, that feminists encountered within the student movement und all of the far-left organizations, both vith respect to the questions they raised on the theoretical plane (concerning an inalysis of the special oppression of vomen in the capitalist system, for instance) and to their determination to take heir struggles into their own hands.
Aggressiveness of the First American Feminist Groups
At the very moment that German vomen students were beginning to come to rrips with their oppression-whether in theoretical study circles or through concrete actions such as the child-care movement-small feminist groups were beginning to emerge all over the United States. Some of them employed dramatic methods of action to proclaim their rebellion against society (such as the "burial of femininity" in Washington during an antiwar demonstration in the autumn of 1967, or the attempt to prevent the holding of the Miss America contest the following year).
But for the most part, the American movement functioned and developed in a semi-underground way, through small "consciousness-raising" groups in which women gained confidence in themselves, discussing the new and controversial ideas that were beginning to emerge. This all but invisible movement revealed its following two years later, with the August 26, 1970, women's strike. After a week of activities in most cities, marked by demonstrations, occupations of municipal offices to demand funds for child care, and collective actions in which women smashed cups on the street as a sign of rebellion against employers who treat their secretaries like maids-of-all-work, 35,000 persons marched down Fifth Avenue in New York to shouts of "Free abortion! Twenty-four-hour childcare centers! Equal educational and job opportunities!"
This was the height of the dramatic phase of the American women's liberation movement. For their part, the movement's initial documents, and the feminist press that was growing at a dizzying rate, displayed a different approach than that of the German students, most of whom had come under the influence of Marxism.
carry out a long-term battle to win respect
In May 1968, women workers at Ford struck for equal wages with those of men. In this strike—out of which grew a tradeunion organization for equal rights and pay-the National Joint Action Campaign for Women's Equal Rights was to play a decisive role in raising the consciousness of many British feminists. The Joint Action Campaign made it possible to raise the question of sex discrimination publicly for the first time.
To be sure, the campaign groups had only a limited impact in their effort to mobilize student women, as well as women of privileged strata who were beginning to question their place in society, to the side of working women. The desire for control expressed by the trade-union bureaucracy soon limited the activity of these groups and their capacity for initiative.
As a result, feminists developed a strong distrust of the bureaucrats' authoritarianism. But their concern not to place themselves outside the needs of the masses of women-expressed, for instance, in the demand for equal pay raised by the women workers at Ford—was to determine the character of the burgeoning women's movement in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, this movement-made up for the most part of women of privileged social origins, students, intellectuals, and, to a lesser degree, white-collar workers— succeeded more rapidly than others in initiating campaigns relevant to workingclass women (equal pay, equal rights, beaten women) that often found real support within the workers movement.
The peculiarities of the workers movement from an organizational standpoint— the relative independence of the unions organized by branch of industry or workplace, the proliferation of union structures-are no minor aspect of the fact that the women's movement has succeeded in winning the support of one or another branch during the holding of congresses.
The political situation and the rise of struggles in Britain after 1968 also explains the greater centrality of the women's movement with respect to the working class. But the role that strikes by working women played at the outset, and the capacity of revolutionists to become involved in the initial discussions of the movement and an integral part of its first campaigns, also determined the development of the women's movement in Britain.
A Movement in the Process of Becoming
These three examples make it easier to understand why the women's liberation movement in France took more than two years after May 1968 to begin to get organized.
The fact that the social crisis is becoming generalized on a world scale tends to give a universal character to the objective factors on which the radicalization of women in the era of late capitalism is based. The growing percentage of working women, the raising of the educational level, the development of contraceptive abortion techniques, the everand increasing automation in the area of household work, are among the factors that to one degree or another make women aware of the contradictions inherent in the profit system, of the gap that exists between the potential for social development and the daily reality in which they are trapped.
But while in terms of figures and statistics the objective situation appeared quite similar in most of the advanced capitalist countries at the end of the 1960s, the rise in consciousness among women in those countries nevertheless proceeded at a different rate.
In France, the elements that acted as a brake on the emergence of the feminist movement are to be sought both in the brevity of the student upsurge referred to earlier, and in the influence of the Catholic Church in the area of mores, personal relationships (with women seen first and foremost in their roles of wives and mothers), the existence of laws limiting access to contraception, and in the control of the working class by a Stalinist bureaucracy repeating word for word the ruling ideology with respect to the family and the role of women in society.
These different factors, although in varying ways, are equally valid for explaining the analogous discrepancieseven greater ones-that have been observed in Italy and Spain (in Portugal and in Greece, the radicalization is just beginning to make itself felt).
Even if we leave out of account for the moment the smaller proportion of working women and those who have access to higher education, relative to the other advanced capitalist countries, women students in the countries of Southern Europe face two major obstacles in becoming conscious of their oppression. First, the omnipotence of the Catholic church in civil matters, based on the decades of Francoist or Salazarist dictatorship or the particularly backward doctrines of the Orthodox church. And second, the total lack of questioning of the concept of women's "inferiority" by working women's organizations.
This is in spite of the fact that-as in Germany or the U.S.—their privileged situation made a number of contradictions related to the gap between their level of education and their professional future more evident.
Ten years after May 1968, the ideological impact of the first liberation movements, magnified by the acceleration of the economic and social crisis, has had its effectthe radicalization of women has ceased to be a phenomenon external to the working class. From the first small groups of students and intellectual women, genuine lents and intellectual wwhose strength novements nave emerger and impact on the workers movement derive directly from the sharpness of the class struggle.
More and more often, women are taking the step of meeting among themselves in the mixed organizations of the workers movement in which they are active, in order to discuss their special problems and establish a relationship of forces enabling them to get their point of view across. More and more frequently, they are sending delegates to local or national coordinating bodies where discussions take place around the central campaigns to be carried
Of course, the women's movement is still far from homogeneous, and those currents that defend a class point of view within it are still far from seeing their ideas win out. The policy of the trade-union bureaucracy, alternating between demagogic statements and steps aimed at limiting women's freedom of expression, has managed to discourage more than a few activists, and the ideas of the radical-feminist current, which give greater priority to the battle of the sexes than to the class struggle, have won adherents, even among a few fringes of working women.
But the women's movement is a fact. It is a movement in the process of becoming. And one of the key factors in its development will be the capacity of revolutionists to influence it, to see to it that an uncompromising struggle to defend the special needs of the masses of women is intrinsically tied to the class line that strengthens the unity and independence of the working class.
Hunger Strikers Protest
Death Sentences for Kurds
In an attempt to save the lives of 165 Kurdish nationalists sentenced to death in Iraq, a group of Kurds are conducting a hunger strike in Sergelstorg, the central square of Stockholm.
In its May 31 issue, the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter reported:
"There are now at least 2,000 political prisoners in various jails in Iraq. According to many reports, these prisoners are being subjected to barbarous forms of torture. Last fall, 1,500 families of partisans-women, children, and old people-were arrested and sent to prisons in southern Iraq."
In addition to calling for the lifting of the death sentences, the hunger strikers are demanding that the Iraqi regime cease its aggressive war against the Kurdish people, release the Kurdish political prisoners, and permit an international commission of inquiry to investigate the treatment of the Kurds.