WOMEN’S PLACE IS IN THE STRUGGLE

‘It’s wummin’s stuff’ - an oft-repeated phrase which usually comes with an embarrassed shrug and in reference to both periods and politics. In socialist politics, every issue we take up is wummin’s stuff. There are the obvious ones, like the campaign against violence against women, with as many as one in three women experiencing violence at the hands of a male partner or ex-partner at some point in her life.
And then there are the more general demands, such as those to alleviate poverty, which affects women disproportionately because we’re still paid less than men yet bear the burden of responsibility for feeding and clothing the weans. Sexism permeates every layer of capitalism, the system we live under which deems corporate profits to be more important than people’s lives. Sexism is about subjugating women, declaring us less important, less worthy, less equal than men. But, while men are better off than women both economically and culturally under capitalism, this system also limits men’s choices, hammering them into the stereotype of macho provider. Sexism hampers all our possibilities, and men and women should fight together, as equals, to overturn it. But realistically, for that to happen, we need to make space for women to express themselves, and we need to find ways to help women make a stand.
In this week’s Voice, Roz Paterson gives her views on how we in the SSP can empower women in our struggle to make a better world, and we highlight just a few of the issues, previously regarded as the wummin’s stuff, which should be at the very heart of our campaigning.

by Roz Paterson

At a recent meeting of the SSP National Council, the agenda was nearly derailed by a complaint about 50:50. Because of this policy, claimed the delegate, his branch had been disenfranchised as there were no women willing to take up the second available NC place and a man was prevented from doing so.
A lot of people agreed with him and no-one quite said, ‘It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you!’ - but they might as well have.
But many others thought, well, why were there no women willing to take up that NC place? Are there no women in that part of the world? Or has there been a failure to encourage women to join the party and not only join, but actively participate?
If drawing women into politics had easy solutions, it would have been done decades ago, as the female vote is so crucial in elections due to its being less party loyal than the male one. Yet without a healthy quota of women members and activists, how can we claim to be a truly representative political body?
How can we truly claim to understand the issues of exploitation of women, of poverty (which is visited disproportionately on women), of childcare and discrimination and sexual violence if our female members are few and far between?
So what do we do?
Perhaps we should start by considering what puts women off.
A study by the Fawcett society found that women are repelled by the ‘playground culture’ of politics. These women respondents were talking about the bear pit that is the House of Commons, where elderly public schoolboys bray ‘shame’ throughout each other’s speeches and then all go for gin and tonics together in some wood-panelled, smoky old boys’ club on The Strand.
Westminster - and Holyrood - politics are seen as nasty, spiteful and self-defeating. MPs and MSPs are so busy point-scoring and lying and quoting from tedious, biased reports that nothing gets done and that offends those most practical members of the species - women.
SSP meetings are a thousand times more comradely and welcoming than Parliament but they can be as frustrating, particularly if point-scoring and long-winded speechifying is allowed to take precedence over pragmatism and contributions, however undisciplined and unversed in the language of Marx, from new members or ones who rarely come forward.
Women are also discouraged from participating in politics by the ‘Three C’s’ - childcare, cash and confidence.
Very few of our meetings cater for women who have to take care of children. Crèches are an obvious solution, but unless they are staffed by trained professionals, it’s not the most comfortable option if your children are infants.
And in any case, most political meetings happen at night, which rules primary carers out.
Cash, in the context of the Fawcett study, referred to women actually standing for political posts as this meant leaving jobs, or devoting time to canvassing which could be spent working. Women earn so much less than men that these things matter in triplicate.
Confidence is not as self-explanatory as it appears. Yes, women tend to be in the minority in political meetings, so speaking up does require a bit of self-confidence and women, particularly women in low-paid jobs, who maybe miss out socially due to child or parent care, and who have been the victims perhaps of casual discrimination and sexism throughout their lives, may not have natural confidence in abundance.
But on top of that, women expect to be discriminated against in politics.
They expect men to be treated more favourably when it comes to the selection of candidates, men to get more votes during an election itself, and women to be the targets when the press turns nasty.
All of which makes the challenge of encouraging women to participate seem insurmountable. Surely it isn’t. After all, research has shown that, though it may often be men who get an industrial dispute started, it tends to be women who keep it going. Think of the Miners’ Wives. Furthermore, it is women who are joining trade unions in far greater numbers now than men.
And across the world, more times than not it is women at the forefront of community, grassroots campaigns, be they environmental or anti-poverty or anti-war or anti-exploitation.
So what are we doing wrong? One answer maybe lies in what some people are doing right.
Scottish Socialist Youth (SSY) organises autonomously, holds its own meetings, sets its own agendas and runs its own campaigns. This approach has led to a vibrant and hugely active body of people whose energy and talents feed into the wider party. Without SSY, would the SSP be so in touch with youth issues and have so many young, politicised, active members?
Perhaps we should take our cue from them and organise autonomously too. The SSP Women’s Network holds meetings, many well-attended and interesting and (some!) very joyful occasions.
Women-only meetings may seem like a hark back to the consciousness-raising days of the 1970s but that may be no bad thing. In such an environment, with no chest-beating alpha male in sight, women who have never spoken up about their own experiences of poverty and marginalisation often find their voice.
Others who truly prefer to listen don’t need to worry about being hectored into saying something.
These meetings create the space for issues that impact on women more than they do on men, ensuring that considerations of equality or respect aren’t just tacked onto the end of policies that already exist.
Also, whether it’s nature or nurture, women do tend to move forward more consensually, which augurs well for SSP women in that pushing ahead with plans rather than just talking about them is a real possibility.
Women-only meetings in no way detract from mixed meetings. In practice, women who got active initially through the Women’s Network would almost certainly also take part, at some stage, in the work of the party as a whole. The whole idea of networks is to reach out as well as draw in.
Daytime meetings would certainly enable many women with family responsibilities to take a more active role in the party, and it also cuts out the problem of having to get home alone in the dark.
Another possibility is twinning or mentoring, where women with different experiences and political backgrounds (including no political background at all), pair up and either meet regularly or email each other, to discuss socialist politics and their take on it.
As fewer women attend meetings than men, women are underrepresented in such fields as branch organisers too.
Again, confidence plays a part here, and the fact that branch organisers are often elected to the position then left to get on with it.
Branch organisers need guidance and training. Perhaps we could put together a resource pack for branch organisers, plus contact numbers of people who would help out, or be there to talk through problems.
Encouraging women into the workings of the party means offering support and comradeship. That’s something we should offer all members, regardless of their sex, and it would pay dividends.
You see? Gender equality really is good for you!

Women and justice

by Carolyn Leckie

It’s difficult to find anyone in the justice system, civil service or government who’ll defend either the number of women in prison, or the sending of the vast majority of them there in the first place.
Despite successive ministers and prison chiefs saying they’ll bring the numbers down, district magistrates, sheriffs and judges keep packing them in.
The number of women in jail in Scotland has gone up a third since 2002. There are now 365. The year before it was 318. Nearly all will be vulnerable, drug-addicted and victims of violence and crime themselves.
Alternatives to custody, like the progressive 218 centre in Glasgow, only scrape the surface. The rest of Scotland has no provision of alternatives at all.
Behind the stats, there is deep-rooted misogyny at work throughout the system and from the beginning of these women’s stories. The majority have a history of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. They’ve been punched and pimped by men.
When they commit a crime, get the fine and do the time, they’re more likely to get jailed, get jailed for longer and suffer loss of privileges when they’re locked up. This despite the well-known fact that women are less likely to commit crimes in the first place.
Our society believes that ‘bad girls’ deserve greater punishment than bad boys and the system makes sure they get it.
The Cornton Vale Visiting Committee has done work that shows when women in jail are cheeky to prison officers or fight or do very trivial things that primary school children would get away with, very quickly they lose their tellies, leisure time and other privileges.
They do things like this less often than men in jail but they’re punished faster, harder and for longer for the same misdemeanours.
Pregnant and sick women are taken to hospital in double handcuffs. This year a woman spoke out that she was double hand-cuffed throughout her labour! The idea that a woman is a risk during painful labour is farcical. This wholly unethical practice should never happen. There is now a ‘review’ of the procedure.
It’s time to stop the platitudes and set free all the women who present no danger to society. It’s time to put money into providing 24-hour support instead of 24-hour incarceration. Open the gates.

Food for thought

by Frances Curran

There I was, munching on my toast and banana, when Westminster Education Secretary Alan Johnson pops up on the breakfast news, telling the nation how wonderful the new healthy meals in English schools will taste.
He starts bumping his gums about how Hull City Council has proved primary school kids will eat healthy meals and, over breakfast, quotes percentages about how Hull have proved you can get a high take-up of healthy school meals.
And there I was shouting at the telly: “Yeah, but tell the story, tell them the rest!”
Hull City Council introduced healthy meals in all primaries and the take-up fell. They then introduced free school meals across the city and take-up soared. End of argument. Free School Meals works. Kids eat healthy meals - d’oh! My Free Healthy School Meals Bill has huge support.
Tony Blair is always talking about helping working parents. This bill doesn’t just help our kids to be healthy; it helps parents, especially lone parents, and working mums.
Knowing your kids are getting a healthy, cooked meal at lunchtime is very reassuring. It also takes off some of the pressure to cook the main healthy meal at teatime.
Families will also get money back - it costs £24-a-month to send one child to school dinners, £48 for two children; families would be better off.
Even if you’re not sending your kids to school meals you’re still having to provide dinner money - and you don’t have any control over whether this is spent on healthy food, unhealthy food or indeed if it is spent on food at all.
The government need to tell the whole story about the success of Hull City Council’s healthy school meals project - and stop hiding the fact that it’s universal free provision of these meals which has led to that success.

Equal pay: a battle we’ve already won?

by Pam Currie

One of the less inspiring aspects of being a feminist and socialist in the 21st century is that much of our time seems to be spent fighting battles our mothers thought they had won.
The right of women to receive the same pay for the same job - or for ‘work of equal value’ - came into effect over 30 years ago, yet full time women workers across Scotland still earn only 88 per cent of men’s wages, while part time women have an average hourly rate amounting to just two-thirds of the full time male equivalent.
In 2005, a survey found that nearly a third of women didn’t believe they would ever earn the same as men.
The fight for a living minimum wage of £8 an hour would overwhelmingly benefit women workers, particularly the growing army of part time women workers in the ‘C’ jobs - cleaning, catering and caring (aye, there’s another ‘c’ word for them as well) - and those concentrated in low-paid jobs in the public sector.
Under the current system, hundreds of thousands of women workers are forced to claim tax credits and benefits to subsidise low-paying bosses - including low-paid civil servants who end up claiming the benefits they’re paid to administer.
The SSP was at the forefront of the fight to introduce a national minimum wage, and have proudly participated in struggles by low-paid nursery nurses, medical secretaries and civil servants demanding decent wages and pensions.
There was much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands in council chambers around Scotland earlier this year, when local authorities finally began to implement the 1999 Single Status Agreement which should have delivered equal pay for local authority workers - seven years on, and many women are still waiting.
In many areas, women have signed up to agreements giving them far less than their due, under hype from Councils claiming that it would cost millions, that they would have to cut services or cut the pay of male workers - all to pay women money that was theirs to start with.
As the fight for equal pay for council workers has shown, neither our bosses nor our unions are immune to the sexism pervasive in our society - all too often the pay gap is overlooked. It’s time we demanded our due.