Sheila Rowbotham's Woman's Consciousness, Man's World
Mort, Jo-Ann
Recently I found myself discussing the dawning of contemporary feminism with two young women—one a first-year student at Brandeis and another a senior in high school about to enter Brandeis. My...
...Unless society adapts itself to the dislocation of women from more traditional family and economic settings by creating alternative models of family and economy, having it all is practically impossible except for wealthier women...
...Working-class and some middle-class women work alternating day and night shifts with husbands or extended family members, or take on additional jobs to pay for child care...
...Her definition is similar to Robert Frost's, who once wrote that home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in...
...One of the crucial issues on campus was whether straight women could be feminists...
...The economic squeeze puts problems of family and work on everyone's mind, but so far, the right wing has succeeded in setting an agenda that offers no viable alternative for women...
...Friedan's feminism is a success...
...Rowbotham complains that there are very few women represented at the top of unions and that women are "not often militantly organized at the base...
...Friedan's book set off a revolution among middle class suburban women by discovering the problem that had no name, "a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States . . . . Each suburban wife struggled with it alone...
...Paying for day care would use up all or most of a mother's wages...
...The sound of silence breaking," she writes, "makes us understand what we could not hear before...
...Capitalism gobbled up women for the workforce at a moment when it was opportune for capital...
...I was drawn to a different feminism and joined a group of students clustered around the women's history program...
...But the fact that we could not hear does not prove that no pain existed...
...In a 1995 Labor Day essay in the New York Times, economist Lester Thurow wrote, "Falling real wages have put the traditional American family into play, as the one-earner middle-class family becomes extinct...
...The revolutionary must listen very carefully to the language of silence...
...If it were admitted that the family is maintained at the expense of women, capitalism would have to devise some other way of getting the work done...
...It is here that the modern day women's movement has failed...
...Some class of women has to be involved (since most men won't be, as empirical evidence tells us) with child rearing and house cleaning, even if this means rearing someone else's children...
...Frozen food is making a comeback...
...Yet, "the monogamous nuclear family has become such a preposterous ideal that it sags with the weight of its unrealized hopes . . . ." It's ironic that conservatives keep trying to hold the nuclear family together without dealing with the external issues that weigh upon it...
...Feminist theory was enmeshed in the thicket of lifestyle questions...
...The burden still falls on the woman to be primary caregiver, even if she's working full time or overtime...
...Today, the middle class may boast more women in the workforce in all sorts of jobs once thought to be "untraditional," but this shift is attributable as much to the precipitous fortyyear drop in real wages as to equality of the sexes...
...We come into women's liberation out of our specific predicament as women, not as people who necessarily are committed to the creation of socialism...
...But things are changing, especially in the United States...
...When Rowbotham came to campus, she gave a talk to a small group of professors, women's studies graduate students, and a few stray undergrads in the basement of the student activities building...
...How times have changed—from the day when the only Brandeis students who would dare to admit that they weren't socialist were those who found socialism reformist...
...What if Rowbotham's book had become the bible of modern-day feminism instead of The Feminine Mystique...
...When the ruling class grows sanctimonious about the preservation of the family," Rowbotham explains, "they mean in fact the need to preserve the division of labor which best secures profit...
...Increasingly, women climbing up the corporate ladder are frustrated by a workplace that hasn't adapted to modes of work that would allow top executives to enjoy a family life...
...Women are carrying the preposterous contradiction of love in a loveless world," Rowbotham writes...
...magazine, a topic destined to make me feel old...
...The family," Rowbotham argues, "is . . . [a] dummy ideal, the repository of ghostly substitutes, emotional fictions which dissolve into cloying sentimentality or explode into thrashing, battering, remorseless violence...
...Her more radical feminism was the feminism that didn't happen...
...service and minimum wage jobs . . ." One can easily imagine that this was written last week, not more than twenty years ago...
...Upscale women have it all by leaving their children in the care of other women, often immigrants without health benefits...
...No wonder a new generation of women is questioning the feminist revolution...
...The college was co-ed by the midseventies, even though many of us still described Sarah Lawrence as a women's college that admitted men...
...If society isn't going to re-arrange itself to enable women to work outside the home and if men aren't going to disrupt their own lifestyle, woman are going to get forced back to the homefront...
...Remember the quaint notions of a family wage or of women staying at home to cater to their husbands' whims, enabling them to be rested and fed before facing another work day...
...The conversation made me recall my own college days and the fierce battles over feminism we had at Sarah Lawrence College almost twenty years ago...
...One of the failures of contemporary feminism has been its inability to embrace the majority of working-class women, many of whom find arguments about culture and identity foreign to their own situation...
...It's not an accident that the new president, John Sweeney, headed up the Service Employees International Union when that union was devising the legislative strategy for the Family and Medical Leave Act and supporting "9 to 5," an untraditional union local that organizes female office workers...
...Sheila Rowbotham's feminism grew out of a radicalism informed by labor history and its reports on the lives of ordinary people...
...young women today have a sense of full personhood...
...They are providing capitalism with the human relations it cannot maintain in the world of men's work...
...But she doesn't say what kind of family...
...It's confusing, decades later—especially for a new generation of activists— to realize that NOW and its feminism wasn't left-wing at all, because today NOW appears to be a key organization on the left...
...This failure has placed feminism at a crossroads...
...But, as contemporary feminism progressed—and as economic necessity increased—women have been increasingly unavailable to do the domestic work necessary to maintain these "human relations...
...Either women are able to carry a double load or they are not...
...Raising standards from the bottom up raises all women...
...Call it whatever they like, a reborn feminist movement that finally took on the reorganization of society could find no better primer than Rowbotham's book...
...It's a feminism that's familiar to Dis102 • DISSENT Reconsiderations sent readers but never became part of mainstream political discourse...
...q 104 • DISSENT...
...Family, writes Rowbotham, "is the only place where human beings find whatever continuing love, security and comfort they know...
...The new AFLCIO leadership, by including Linda ChavezThompson—a Latina—as executive vice president, and by expanding the executive council to allow for greater diversity, is searching for ways to make women a more active part of organized labor...
...This is life for millions of women and men...
...Woman's Consciousness, Man's World by the British Marxist historian Sheila Rowbotham was one of our revered texts...
...that's no small triumph...
...But capitalism never did...
...One result of not forcing society to change has been the so-called "backlash" against feminism...
...Rowbotham's concentration on women as low-wage and contingent workers is also as critical to increasing workers' power today as it was years ago...
...She was tempered by the politics of the sixties, of the antiwar and the civil rights movements...
...Rowbotham's argument that women "need to find a new notion of womanhood which will give them as a group the dignity and solidarity essential for industrial organization," is not only important for women today, but could prove decisive for the new labor leadership and a revival of organized labor...
...But the fabric is fraying—even ripping apart—no matter how women have managed to adapt...
...Yet, in retrospect, this feminism's birth among the early constituency of NOW—uppermiddle class women—along with the emphasis that Friedan and NOW placed on women's joining society instead of changing it, have left women today with a dilemma...
...But it's not enough...
...It's so damn hard to have it all...
...It seemed like a good time to go back for another look at Sheila Rowbotham's argument...
...The assault on workers and the necessity of two wage earners put strains on the family that can be relieved only with government intervention in the form of social programs...
...The Republican assault on women through the disguise of "family values" gives the socialistfeminist debate, as represented by Rowbotham, central importance...
...Rowbotham's insistence on "new forms of organizing which connect work and home" could find a receptive audience among a new crop of union leaders...
...Rowbotham's book—which argues for a social transformation of work and family life—has only grown more timely with age...
...Today, families are in crisis, houses are dirty, and children are without care...
...More likely, it's because most women need to work for pay, whether they live alone or are part of a family...
...Women are at the bottom, the work is an extension of familial roles, hard work appears disguised and the pay is low...
...Even though women represent increasingly large numbers of the organized workforce—and are the part of the workforce most likely to gravitate to unions in organizing campaigns— the union movements in the United Kingdom and the United States have been slow to let go of masculine dominance...
...Those days are gone, no matter what a Newt Gingrich or Phyllis Schlafly says...
...Many men are suspicious of their wives achieving the status of wage-earner, because money— SPRING • 1996 • 103 Reconsiderations even a little money—means power and independence," Rowbotham writes, reminding us of the days when a woman's paycheck was looked upon with chauvinist suspicion, instead of a smile and an outstretched hand...
...She and several other women started NOW in 1965 after President Johnson reneged on a promise to ban sex discrimination as part of Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act...
...The feminism of the last few decades never reached to the working classes, let alone the working poor, where Rowbotham begins her examination...
...Her book came out in 1973, just a decade after the book that launched the modern feminist movement in America and throughout the West, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique...
...After decades of success for a certain kind of feminism, it may be that even younger women who find the notion of socialism hostile would today be open to the concepts of socialist-feminism...
...It was hard even for housewives whose husbands weren't poor to get money to fly to board meetings of NOW...
...Decades later, it's problems of economics and society that plague women and hold us back, frustrating the promise of women's liberation even among the classes of women who have made the greatest advance...
...Today, of course, a little bit of extra money can determine whether families have food or no food on the table or whether middle-class or even upper-middle-class families will be able to afford college tuition for their kids...
...The dilemmas Rowbotham poses not only weren't resolved, but have resurfaced with a vengeance in the United States in the 1990s...
...Either things get done or they don't...
...The identity thing has been resolved...
...Sweatshops and work without benefits are on the rise not only in developing countries but increasingly in the United States and the United Kingdom, especially among immigrant and undocumented women...
...Emancipatory victories brought with them the notion of women "having it all," which means a career, a family, and a sense of self...
...McDonald's is the restaurant of choice for many working mothers, and among the yuppie class, every form of food delivery and takeout service is utilized...
...It's precisely among today's middle class and working poor— where job security, child care, and decent public education are at issue—that Rowbotham's feminism could have resonance...
...Once women are removed from the family hearth, the nature of the family changes...
...Already, cultural feminism had the upper hand...
...Rowbotham, in the quest to combine the personal and the political, says that the family still "represents the only possibility of personal life...
...Her friend, who was lending her reading material from a Brandeis women's studies course, explained that she found the course interesting, even though the professor was a socialist-feminist "I'm not a socialist," she quickly confessed, making it clear that her professor was a relic from another era...
...NOW's founding principle was to bring women into "full participation in the mainstream of American society...
...A strange turnabout as I, the fortysomething socialist-feminist dressed in designer garb, sat beside these two sincere young women decked out in their grunge, while they dismissed socialist-feminism as one for the history books...
...Women's consciousness changes, as Friedan pointed out, as soon as they leave the isolation of the home...
...My cousin—the high school senior—was writing her senior thesis on the founding of Ms...
...When women joined society, as NOW suggested we do, we joined a society that wasn't built for us...
...This is particularly important for women because we come from such a long silence...
...Friedan recounts the founding of NOW, the National Organization for Women, which became the premiere feminist organization in the United States...
...Where would we be now...
...But so, too, does the economic underpinning of the family...
...They wore the same costume as I did in college, yet their flannel workshirts and jeans masked a new generation of feminists whose legacy was not my own socialist-feminism, but the very different feminism that has dominated the last several decades...
...Women must demand and fight for change if we are to enjoy the full range of possibilities promised by contemporary feminism...
...Which doesn't mean that we ditch the family...
...Indeed, Rowbotham anticipated the present-day need of working women to move beyond the wage issue and of unions to move beyond the traditional workplace-centered collective bargaining model...
...Today, it's accepted that women work outside the home—but not merely because they demand a liberated or equal identity, nor because men may agree with the new rules...
...The whole orientation of the trade unions is masculine," she writes, describing the British Trades Union Congress...
...Trying to have it all has left a generation of younger women liberated, but more than occasionally frustrated...
...but to] the political process of making an effective movement for the liberation of women—which [requires] a movement in which working-class women are in the majority...
...Rowbotham, who has continued to write about working-class and union women since this book appeared, chronicles their dilemma...
...Friedan makes no apologies SPRING • 1996 • 101 Reconsiderations (nor should she) for the dilemma of her constituents: "We, the middle class women who started [NOW], were all poor, in a sense that goes beyond dollars...
...I thought of that day after listening to my cousin and her friend dismiss socialist feminism...
...Her section on women and unions is unfortunately as prescient today as it was in 1973...
...With children needing ever-more-costly educations for ever-longer periods of time, the cost of supporting a family is rising sharply just as earnings plunge . . . . More than two million children under the age of thirteen have no adult supervision either before or after school...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
