Why do we still need feminism?

Pam Currie Posted by on May 6, 2008. Filed under Equality,Opinion,Women. Posted with the tags:
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Didn’t that belong to the 70s, the 80s – dungarees, Greenham Common and Women’s Lib?

And why should socialists be feminists?

Clearly things have changed – women have fought and won battles for the vote, for the removal of the ‘marriage bar’ in teaching and the civil service, for equal pay and against sexual harassment. As women we take our place in the world in a way that was denied to our mothers and grandmothers, but we still take that place in a man’s world, and on terms defined by men.

Enter any secondary school and you will find girls hating their bodies, because they don’t look like men want them to look – and boys discussing which girl is a slag after Saturday night, or beating up their classmate because he commits that ultimate sin, ‘acting like a girl’. Go to a college and count the numbers of women training in engineering apprenticeships (less than 3%) or young men doing childcare (less than 1%).

Open a woman’s pay packet – and then look again after she has kids. Women who work part time earn 38% less than full time men – add the cost of childcare into the mix, and the saying that women are ‘one man away from poverty’ is as true today as it ever was.

Our generation aren’t 1950s housewives- we do housework and childcare on top of full time work, or live on the breadline because combining kids with a job that pays a living wage proves impossible.
Women may have more opportunities than ever before, but capitalism and patriarchy still remind us of our place – as ‘Play Bunnies’, bitches, whores and witches. Scotland’s rape conviction rate stands at 3.9% – that’s less than four men convicted for every 100 rapes that are even reported – a statistic that hasn’t changed in a generation.

Male perpetrators of violence against women aren’t lone monsters, lurking in dark alleyways: 1 in 5 women in Scotland have reported being assaulted by their partner, and more than 60% of those who approached Women’s Aid last year had to be turned away because of lack of space, the result of chronic underfunding of vital services and a failure to build affordable public housing.

But in Scotland, in 2008, it seems being female and poor is a crime – there’s been a 90% increase in the number of women prisoners in Scotland in the last 10 years, women who have defaulted on fines, shoplifted or sold their bodies because of decades of poverty & abuse.

We need to change society – but socialism on men’s terms is not enough. We need a society in which women and men can stand together as equals, in which men’s violence against women is eliminated, and in which all human beings can reach their full potential.