It is hundred and one years since the world started observing International Women’s Day. The year long campaign that was taken up by CITU to commemorate the centenary of International Women’s Day will conclude on 8th March this year.
The 13th conference of CITU decided to focus on four major demands of working women – equal wages, eight hour work, maternity benefits and crèches, and reservation for women in the legislative bodies – during this campaign.
Thousands of working women who will gather in rallies, dharnas, processions and conventions on that day will also demand that the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace bill should be amended by incorporating the suggestions made by the trade unions and women’s organisations.
A book on the relevance of the struggle for 8 hours work in today’s context when the hard won rights of the working class are being attacked by the employers and the governments will also be released on the occasion.
This is an occasion to examine the progress in achieving the demands raised by working women more than a hundred years ago. There is no doubt that there is some improvement in the conditions of women. World wide more women are educated today; more women are working outside their homes; they are working in more varying fields today; a few are heading governments and big corporations. Through their sheer grit and hard work, women fought against all odds and have established that they are as capable as men, sometimes even more.
But when we look at the demands raised by working women today, it is evident that for large number of working women, an overwhelming majority of them, the conditions are not much different from what they were more than a century ago, the idea of observing a day all over the world on the demands of women was put forward. In 1910, the second International Conference of Socialist Women, at the initiative of Clara Zetkin, gave the call to observe a day each year all over the word focusing on the demands of women. The Conference demanded maternity benefits for working women and opposed night shifts for them; it demanded voting rights for women.
The main demands in the struggle of the women was raised by garment workers of New York on 8th March 1857, from which the International Women’s Day drew its existence, were equal rights for women and reduced working hours.
Nearly one and a half century later, the demands being raised by working women, in large parts of the world, are more or less the same.
The following description of the conditions of women workers in the New York garment factories in the 19th century graphically illustrates the similarities between their conditions and those of the present day women workers in the Special Economic Zones - ‘The workers, as young as 15 years, had to work without adequate light in the deafening sound of the machinery with cotton dust in the air all around. Fire accidents took place frequently killing many and maiming even more.
The women workers were fined for virtually anything – talking, laughing, singing etc; or if there were machine oil stains on the fabric; if the stitches were too large or too small. They were forced to work overtime but were not paid anything for the extra hours. As the women had to leave the building to use the bathroom, the managements used to lock the exit doors and keep the key with the foremen, to prevent the ‘interruption of work’.
While the right to vote for women has been achieved in almost all the countries, women’s presence in the legislative bodies continues to be very low, including in our country.
The Women’s Reservation bill is yet to be passed in the Lok Sabha, despite all the major political parties outwardly expressing their support.
Women’s struggles for their equal rights, the wide support to the call to observe International Women’s Day, the establishment of socialism in Russia and in several other countries where women were granted equal rights, forced many governments in the world as well as the United Nations to pay attention to the issue of gender equality.
The four world conferences of women, the UN resolutions, the observance of, first the International Year of Women in 1975 and then a UN decade for women from 1976 – 1985 – all helped in drawing the attention of the governments and the people to the issue of women’s rights. The pressure from the women’s movements and trade union struggles compelled the governments to take some actions to improve the conditions of women and facilitate their participation in the democratic process.
Today, it is generally accepted that there should be no discrimination based on gender. In most of the countries in the world, women are legally granted equal rights. However, in practice, all over the world, including in the advanced capitalist countries, women continue to be discriminated in various aspects of their daily lives, including at the workplace.
It will not be possible to effectively fight this continuing discrimination and oppression of women, unless the real reasons for their inferior status are understood properly.
It is generally asserted – either out of ignorance or out of dishonesty – that the relations between men and women, between the rich and the poor have always been the unequal and will continue to be so. Such assertions have been proved to be utterly false, superficial and contrary to the truth in every respect.’
The traditional view on the status of women argues that women have certain inherent and unchangeable qualities and it is these qualities that determine the social attitudes towards women. It does not take into account the fact that outside forces - forces outside women’s biological structure - the forces in the society in which we live, influence the status of women. The notion that the changes in history have no bearing on women; that women all along had and will continue to have for ever, certain ‘feminine’ qualities which determine them more than anything else, are shared by a section of the women’s movement. Ironically, the same arguments invoking the perpetual ‘feminine’ qualities of women are put forward to justify the different forms of social and legal restrictions on women by the most reactionary forces.
However, these ideas are not supported by historical facts. Studies on the role of women in different societies have established that before the society was divided into classes, women had a pre-eminent role in society. Woman was the leader and ruler in the kinship organisation and was highly respected. Women of the tribes in the pre civilisation period were not inferior to the men in physical strength or in any skills.
Another line of argument, propagated by the feminists, traces the cause for women’s oppression to men’s urge to dominate women and control them. The feminists argue that the basic division in the world is between men and women. Women’s oppression, according to them, can only be ended by the unity of all women, irrespective of the class to which they belong – i.e. women workers and women employers, women agricultural workers and women landlords must unite – against all men – the male workers and male employers and the male agricultural workers and male landlords.
Clearly this argument is flawed because the interests of the women workers and their women employers, the vast majority of women workers in the unorganised sector and those heading the big corporations, are not and cannot be the same. The interests of the women agricultural workers cannot be the same as the women landlords.
History is repleted with instances when women belonging to the ruling classes joined their men in brutally attacking the women workers when they fought for better conditions along with the male workers. Lenin, the great teacher of the working class wrote ‘There is no ‘equality’, nor can there be, of oppressed and oppressor, exploited and exploiter. There is no real freedom nor can there be, so long as women are handicapped by men’s legal privileges, so long as there is no freedom for the worker from the yoke of capital, no freedom for the labouring peasant from the yoke of the capitalist, land owner and merchant.’
On the basis of a scientific examination of the role of women in different epochs of the society, Engels established that man gained a more important status in the family than the woman only with the development of property rights and increase in wealth. In his famous book ‘The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State’, Engels narrated how women lost their equality and became victims of oppression only as a result of property and inheritance rights. Enslavement of women, historically, is the legacy of development of private property relations.
This is the basic reason for the continuing inequality of women, even in advanced capitalist countries, despite proclamations of equality, which largely remain on paper. On the occasion of ‘International Women’s Day in 1920, Lenin wrote ‘Capitalism combines formal equality with economic and consequently social inequality.
But even in the matter of formal equality (equality before the law, the ‘equality’ of the well fed and the hungry man, of the man of the property and the property less) capitalism cannot be consistent. And one of the most glaring manifestations of this inconsistency is the inequality of women and men’ It was in Soviet Russia, where socialism was established, that women were given equal status not only on paper but in practice, for the first time in the history of civilised society. With the setback to socialism in Russia and East European countries, women in these countries again lost their status. The neo liberal policies of globalisation, imposed by IMF, World Bank and WTO have further imposed huge burdens on the working class; working women have been among the worst affected by these policies. The hard won rights of the working class – eight hour work, minimum wages, social security benefits, job security etc are being attacked. So also are the hard won rights of working women like maternity benefit, crèche facilities, equal wages etc.
With the absence of a strong socialist block which compelled the employers in the capitalist countries to concede to some benefits to the workers, the employers are intensifying the exploitation of the workers to increase their profits. Inequalities within countries and among the countries have widened.
Achieving women’s equality will not be possible as long as the neo liberal policies of globalisation that perpetuate inequalities are in place. Real equality for women will be possible only when the capitalist system where exploitation and inequalities are inherent is defeated. When we observe the one hundred and one year anniversary of International Women’s Day, let us pledge to strengthen the unity of the working class – the unity of all workers, women and men, and fight to defeat this exploitative system that would pave way for the real emancipation of women.
Courtesy: www.citucentre.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment