Study examines the roots of women’s oppression

“There is a virtual revolution going on in the minds of women. It is a harbinger of the general socialist revolution and at the same time is an indispensable ingredient for its success.

The women’s struggle is not subordinate to the class struggle. It is itself a form of class struggle. ... Marx said that every political struggle is a class struggle.”

So said Dorothy Ballan in the revolu tion ary pamphlet, “Feminism and Marxism.” Ballan, a leading member of Workers World Party, wrote the pamphlet in 1971 at the height of a burgeoning movement in the United States for women’s liberation. At the time, she said: “Many young women throughout the country are beginning to inquire into the origins of present-day social relations of women.” Ballan’s pamphlet provided an important theoretical contribution to this debate.

Here and now, in 2005, Ballan’s words continue to have important relevance to today’s struggles for women’s liberation, and the attacks we as women face.

In “Feminism and Marxism,” Ballan answered the positions put forward by some leading academic feminists who asserted that the oppression of women by men has been an eternal struggle since the dawn of time. Ballan explains that such teachings about the “innate nature” of social interactions and social conditions only helps a ruling class that wants to maintain those conditions.

Conversely, Ballan put forward the teachings of Marx and Engels, who used anthropological findings to prove that the oppression of women had not been a constant throughout time and that, in fact, the earliest recorded societies were matriarchal and highly cooperative between the sexes.

Today, when opponents of same-sex marriage deny this basic right to lesbian and gay people, they are using the same logic that Ballan answered. They think the bourgeois conception of marriage is an everlasting fact of life, thus denying social evolution and the potential for change, as well as a materialist view of marriage.

Ballan explains that marriage as we know it developed as a result of the accumulation of surplus wealth. Because women are the ones who give birth, the natural division of labor was for women to work near their children while men went out and hunted—although Ballan notes that at that time home was not the isolating place that it has become with the development of private property, but rather the center of the community. And lineage was traced through the mother.

After women learned how to domesticate and breed smaller animals, men eventually took over this area of work, applying that knowledge to the domestication of pigs, sheep and other larger animals they had hunted. With this development came an acceleration of surplus and the beginning of wealth, as well as a need to pass that wealth on to heirs. Thus was the patriarchal family born.

Ballan explained the use of the supposed “innateness” of oppression by the bourgeoisie—their assertion that something is innate is to imply that it is everlasting, unchangeable. This suggests that we shrug our shoulders and walk away, rather than fight. She said, “A more ingen ious self-serving theory for the ruling class could scarcely be devised.”

This is also the theory recently put forward by the president of Harvard Uni versity, Lawrence Summers, who completely ignored the role of the oppression of women in saying that “in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude” that make women less able to succeed in these areas.

Ballan also made an important contribution, that continues to merit discussion, on the necessary connection between the struggle for women’s liberation and the struggle against racism. She challenged white women in the women’s liberation movement who refused to recognize the added oppression that women of color face, and who engender white supremacy by assuming the right to campaign against male supremacy in communities of color.

This challenge to white women in the movement is still relevant today. For instance, in the current women’s liberation movement, the struggle continues to redefine the term “reproductive rights” to be more inclusive of the reproductive needs of all, and thus reflect the complex position of women of color. Reproductive rights as a concept must include the need for economic security, access to daycare, prenatal care, and abortion.

Ballan discusses the relation of these immediate demands to the struggle for the ultimate liberation of women through social ism. She tells us, “We must fight in every way possible to improve the conditions of the workers, knowing full well that this in no way changes the fundamental character of the capitalist exploitation of wage-labor.”

Only by doing so will the spirit of struggle be imbued in the working class, as well as the realization that concessions are not the ultimate solution. Only by doing so will the struggle for socialism be strengthened.

She also dismantles the idea that the solution to women’s oppression, as well as all oppression, lies in the re-education of the oppressor, rather than in militant struggle. Ballan shows that the hope for liberation of women and all workers lies with socialist revolution through the example of the Bolshevik Revolution, which began to dismantle the patriarchy.

And the gains made by women in Cuba since its revolution reinforce the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution today.

An article in Cuba’s daily newspaper Granma International in 2000 cites some of these gains. The article pointed out that, while across the world there is concern about the feminization of poverty, “in Cuba there has been a feminization of the technical and professional work force.”

In Cuba, women currently work and hold key positions in many sectors. The article notes: “Cuban women took full advantage of the revolutionary government’s initiatives aimed at opening the doors to improvement and reintegration into the country’s socioeconomic life in terms of education, health care, employment and projects with the goal of attaining full gender equality.”

Ballan’s book no doubt provided inspiration to young women activists at the time it was written. It endures to this day. Her words will continue to resonate until the victory of socialism over capitalism, and will then only serve as a reminder of how very great a victory we’ve won.