No Woman, No
Revolution, Part 10
SACP on Women’s Day, 2012
Jenny Schreiner is a member of the SACP 13th
Congress Central Committee. The attached and linked document was written by her
for publication in the Umsebenzi Online that came out on 8 August 2012, on the
eve of National Women’s Day.
Schreiner says, before aptly quoting Lenin:
“The rights protected in the [South African] Constitution are rights
that all women can claim, but they are not yet rights that all women,
particularly working class women, are living. The equality in law and rights
does not automatically translate into equality in access to jobs, resources,
and protection.”
Summing up the situation of women in South Africa and the
way forward, Schreiner says:
“The material base of women's emancipation has to be in the integration
of women into the economy without gender discrimination, the equalising of the
gender division of labour within the household and addressing social and
political gender equity.”
Schreiner says:
“...the struggle for women's emancipation is a struggle within a struggle
and one that touches both the personal and the political.”
This is discussed in terms of working women’s possibilities
or lack thereof, where:
“Work and activity outside the home is premised on an inequality
between men and women defined by their household or domestic responsibilities.”
Schreiner then refers to Alexandra Kollontai, whose writing
we have already studied in this course. Schreiner writes in a passage that
helps us considerably in terms of the way that our course is problematised:
“Alexandra Kollontai identified that the social basis of women's
oppression lies in class relations and private ownership of the means of
production and appropriation. She discussed whether there was a basis for a
cross-class women's movement. She argued that working class women will more
easily identify in struggle alongside their working class menfolk than to side
with bourgeois women against men.
“This is an important issue for the Party to engage with, particularly
in the context of the Progressive Women's Movement.
“It should be clear that the hegemony of the working class and its
organisation in all sites of struggle is weakened if working class women are
excluded from that organisation.
“However it is equally important for working class women to assert
working class leadership of the progressive women's forces in society and form
allies amongst the multi-class strata in the liberation movement. The
experience of relative discrimination by women across classes provides a unique
opportunity for women of the middle classes to be mobilised in support of
working class women's interests, and thereby become aware of working class
issues.”
Schreiner lays out all the possible permutations, except
one. Working class women can organise in
concert with working class men. They can also organise across class lines to
create class alliance with middle-class women.
The third possibility, the one that Schreiner rightly or
wrongly omits, is the organisation of working women as such.
The three possibilities are not mutually exclusive. It is
not unreasonable to go for all three kinds of organisation.
It is reasonable to omit the possibility of a working
women’s movement, that is a dedicated working-class women’s movement, if it is
regarded as a practical impossibility. This is something to discuss.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Schreiner, Umsebenzi Online, Impact on Women, 2012.
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