Overthrowing the Lady Inside Me

Women in Struggle (Part II)

By Hazel Daren

The Struggle, October-November 1977

This is part two of Hazel Daren's speech given on the occasion of the launching of the New York City Chapter of Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE). The first part was published in the July-August, 1977 issue. The Struggle again extends a greeting of solidarity to the women of Union WAGE and to all working and poor women in their effort to organize themselves into formations like Union WAGE capable of uniting the struggles of women with the struggles of all working class and oppressed people to eliminate poverty and build a decent society free of oppression and exploitation.

“God Almighty made the women, and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”

Mother Jones said that, as I mentioned last week. And the ladies made by Rockefeller and his gang have been trained to perform certain roles in this society—to function as we discussed at length last week as supposedly passive or neutral communicators of the facts and values of the dominant class. But nothing is neutral in class-conflicted society. The ladies are invented to depoliticize; to conservatize; to distort reality on behalf of those who rule.

It is becoming harder and harder for Rockefeller and his gang to hide reality. The socio-economic realities cut through the ruler's suit of lies and they, like the emperor, are recognized as naked by more and more of the masses. So, Rockefeller made the ladies to hide the other things he and his gang have made—the misery and exploitation, the needless poverty, the inhuman oppression. The ladies must contribute greatly to changing that around. As women we must no longer passively interpret reality—the point is to change it!

Women are in struggle in the offices where we work under more and more oppressive assembly-line conditions, typically lacking the benefits of unionization that women are now organizing to win. Women are in struggle in communities and neighborhoods across this deteriorating nation, fighting for decent education, housing and health care, standing up against the brutality of the police and their agencies which protect the real criminals, Rockefeller and his gang of thieves, the class of people who make and always have made millions off of needless poverty.

Women are in struggle in the fields and the homes of the wealthy where we've worked as farm-workers and domestic workers for generations for less than even the minimum wage let along a living wage. Women are in struggle in the factories and industries that have traditionally employed only men to achieve equal pay and equal rights and to force the unions to fight for our demands as well as the militant demands of all workers.

Women are in struggle against the various welfare and public assistance agencies where we are daily abused and degraded; denied benefits we're legally entitled to and prosecuted as so-called welfare cheats if we find some means to supplement a welfare check which leaves us and our families barely above the official poverty level.

Women are, struggling to build the organizations necessary to win the fight for a decent life for all poor and working people—political unions such as the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council, the Lake County Coalition for Survival; mutual benefits associations like the Eastern Service Workers Association, California Homemakers Association and mass organizations that unite all working, poor and progressive women.

Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE) was organized to give women a collective voice in the struggle of poor and working people to unite, by uniting unionized women, unorganized women and women fighting for economic recognition.

Unrecognized Masses Not Integrated Into the Economic Mainstream

The political character and form of struggle that any oppressed and exploited grouping assumes derives from our social, economic, and political role in society. The struggle of women is a major part of the struggle of the unorganized, the unrecognized, the poorest oppressed strata of the international economy, the strata who have received none of the gains and advantages made available only to a few under capitalist industrialization, who have not even received the crumbs of the capitalist pie. It is by their brutal exploitation and oppression that the capitalist profit structure has been maintained. Women are part of this broad oppressed mass which has been by and large denied access as workers to the production process.

The current economic system of the U.S., a dying system, a system which even by its own former criterion (namely, the capacity to bring about continuous progress) is apparently failing, has never been able to provide a decent standard of living for the toiling mass of humanity. During periods of economic boom the industrialized, unionized, skilled sector of the workforce has prospered and achieved a decent and rising standard of living. This sector of the working class here in the U.S. numbering at most 20-25% was able to buy into the American Dream, providing a base for the collaborationist trade union leaders whose political perspective has been to prop-up big business so organized labor can continue to get its piece of the pie.

The basis for this prosperity has of course been imperialist looting abroad and the maintenance at a bare subsistence standard of living of a large mass of unemployed, marginally employed, super-exploited impoverished workers at home—a reserve workforce numbering approximately 50,000,000 nationally.

This mass, domestically and internationally, has never bought into the American Dream. Through national liberation struggles and socialist transformations abroad beginning in 1917 in the Soviet Union, millions of oppressed poor and working masses have systematically rejected the American Dream, which has been systematically used by the capitalists and their agents abroad as a false hope to keep the poor and oppressed in line. These brave working and oppressed people have begun to reorganize their economies to include the entire population, men and women alike, in the process of production with all people employed in useful work. The aim of and basis of these economies liberated from U.S. imperialism and capitalist economic and social relations, is not profit but rather the upgrading of the standard of living of the population as a whole.

In the U.S., the mechanization of agriculture in the South after World War II and the ravaging effects of imperialism in Latin America brought millions of oppressed Black and Latin people to the cities up north. These people were, for the most part, not integrated into the less and less rapidly expanding and, finally, shrinking capitalist economy. Expansion under capitalism during this century has always depended upon bringing new areas of the globe under its sway as a source of cheap labor, raw materials and untapped markets.

There are today no new areas of the globe to tap. Imperialism has raped the entire world leaving vast sectors ravaged. As well, in South East Asia, China, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Cuba, parts of Africa and the Mid-East, the imperialists have been booted-out, weakening capitalism still further. Thus unlike earlier periods there are no new possibilities for the unintegrated to become integrated into the workforce through expansion of production, assured of jobs at decent wages. There is no longer a way out or a way up for any sector or ethnic grouping within the unintegrated mass of the poor under the current economic system. Moreover this mass is expanding as the declining economy begins to shatter the position which more privileged layers of the work force have been misled to believe they so securely attained.

Women at Home

Women have traditionally been amongst the vast mass excluded from the productive process. Our role is in the home, in the family and in the communities, and when we do work as a source of cheap, underpaid labor, we are never assured of steady employment. The labor that women carry out—the raising of children and maintenance of the home—is absolutely vital to the productive functioning of any society. Yet this vital aspect of human development is basically left as the responsibility of the individual family and typically the mother.

The raising of children, however, is not a private affair—the results of which affect or are affected by only the immediate family. The successful raising of children depends on much more than the psychological state of the mother. Indeed the psychological state of the mother depends on much more than the psychological state of her mother. It depends on women's relationship to society as a whole. The successful raising of children requires that they receive decent education, food, clothing, recreation and an opportunity when the child has grown to make a contribution to a society that's worth contributing to. Indeed it is a tribute to the courage and basic humanity of poor and working people, men as well as women, that children are as “well-raised” as they are, that there isn't even more violence, given the impoverishment and truly criminal violence of the society and culture which youth must deal with daily.

The failure of this society to treat the care of the home and family as a collective, public responsibility serves the interests of the profiteering capitalists well. Under an economic system where the accumulation of profit or capital is the goal, it is not particularly profitable to sink money into the wide-range of social services needed to furnish all families with the things necessary for a decent life. The underdeveloped public sector, the minimal and declining education and health services that are available, have either been financed through the tax system, whose loopholes for the rich and big business are notorious, or loans from the major banking interests at staggering rates of profit that the banks, as we can see from New York City's recent fiscal crisis, are determined to collect.

The justification in our culture for this anarchistic and inhuman system, which makes the lives and work of poor and working women a daily, almost unbearable struggle, is that the current system under which the work of raising children and caring for the family is carried out is natural—indeed, it's a woman's privilege to stay at home and care for the family. The work of women is glorified and mystified to justify leaving women without enough money, support or resources to carry out one of the most important social tasks in the society.

But women are tired of the so-called privilege of raising children without enough money or on inadequate welfare checks. We're tired of the so-called privilege of staying at home with the family when the plain reality is that decent jobs aren't available. And, if a woman can get a job, day-care, house-care, cafeteria and after-school facilities aren't available. We're tired of the so-called privilege of not working when it's obvious that there's an enormous amount of useful work to be done; schools, hospitals, parks and houses to be built and run; an environment to be cleaned; cities to be revitalized.

Passive Communicators of Ruling-Class Ideology

The glorification and mystification of women's social role, this effort to make us into ladies—the creation of the Rockefellers and his gang of thieves—not only disguises the dismal failure of this society to take on responsibility for the coming generation, which will require a complete reorganization of the economy, but also hides the fact that women are used to convey a culture and an ideology that serves the interests of Rockefeller and his gang. By isolating women in the home and family, we are in the best possible position to passively, unconsciously communicate the fear of authority and timidity considered as acceptable behavior for poor and working people by the ruling class.

When women remain isolated in the home, alienated from production and the functioning of society, dependent on the earnings of a man or a check from welfare, we are not being natural! We are in this position, for definite social, economic and political reasons. Let us not forget that there was a time when it was considered natural for kings to rule by divine right and for workers to agree to every wish and policy of their “natural” superiors, the bosses, and not form unions. Let me read a letter written in 1902 by the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company to one of his workers:

“My Dear Mr. Clark:

“I have your letter of the 16th instant.

“I do not know who you are. I see that you are a religious man; but you are evidently biased in favor of the right of the working man to control a business in which he has no other interest than to secure fair wages for the work he does.

“I beg of you not to be discouraged. The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much depends.

“Do not be discouraged. Pray earnestly that right may triumph, always remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one of law and order, and not of violence and crime.”

Similar arguments were used to justify Black slavery, on the grounds that they were “naturally” inferior to white people. Indeed many racists who call themselves scientists or politicians still hold to this view.

Women are oppressed and have an enormous capacity for struggle—indeed the struggle of women is a vital component of any struggle of poor and working people to liberate themselves; a vital component of the class struggle. However, there are contradictory social forces at work that affect women and the movement of women as a collectivity. On the one hand, women are part of the most oppressed mass in society, the strata with the least material ties to and the least to gain from the current order. On the other hand, our oppression and alienated economic and social location has been glorified as means of coercing us into continuing to play a backward, lady-like conservatizing role.

Last week we spoke about the militant struggle of women against the objective social, economic and political conditions of our lives. It is helpful as well, in order to strengthen ourselves to carry on the struggle, to examine the personal subjective effects of our oppression on us, to examine the internal struggle of women and the objective basis of this struggle.

Overcoming Our Fears

When women first move into the political arena and begin to confront the conditions of our lives, we are doing more than simply making a physical move out of the confines of the house. We are moving out of our place in society our “natural role” and such a move is a liberating move which gives a new sense of worth and meaning to our lives but as well raises many feelings of fear and inadequacy. The customary domain of women is the limited world of the family and neighborhood or, periodically, a job in which we still function as passive communicators rather than as creative initiators.

When we move into politics, when we move as organizers to confront the conditions of our lives, we are certainly not ladies. Giving up our role as ladies often brings with it a fear of rejection by men and society as a whole that we will somehow be considered freaks. Well let's not kid ourselves; poor and working women receive very few of the so-called advantages of being ladies. It's a sorry exchange we make to give up our humanity, to give up the struggle on which our lives and the lives of our children depend, for a few crumbs of approval based on our remaining oppressed and alienated.

The other side of this deal, which is equally destructive, is men gaining their sense of worth and identity from relating to women as ladies rather than uniting with women as equals and as fighters in our common struggle. It is clear that the ego-satisfaction, the sense of importance that men gain from this kind of social relationship with the “ladies” doesn't cost the Rockefellers a dime. Indeed they love it, for this role is one of the social counterparts to the role of women as passive communicators. It keeps men satisfied and hiding from the reality that for working and poor men freedom and liberation lies in the sane place as it does for working and poor women fighting to change the material conditions of our lives.

In the idealized world invented by the Rockefellers, politics is traditionally the man's domain. Working and poor men, in a society that exploits and oppresses them almost every step of the way, gain a false sense of status by knowing more than women. They will often feel threatened when the women suddenly begin to know more about issues than they do, or angry when dinner's not ready on time.

Margaret Wright, a militant Black woman organizer in Los Angeles, speaks a good deal about priorities. She says when you begin organizing one of the first things you must learn is the meaning of the word priorities. Is it more important to keep a house that's always clean, or to be out fighting for people? Do our children and husbands need us more to be home with them all the time or out fighting for a decent life for them and their children?

I have often heard women who are struggling together, many fighting for change perhaps for the first time in their lives, say: “I don't like working with so many women. Whenever you get a bunch of women together they always fight about silly things.” Now it would be nothing more than head-in-the-ground liberalism to deny that women will behave in catty, petty ways—particularly towards one another. To deny the results of our social conditioning rather than understand the source of it is to throw away one of our most valuable tools in overthrowing the backward effect of society's conditioning.

Women will treat other women as if we're not worth listening to and taking seriously and learning from, and as if the only thing we're good for is gossip. This behavior indicates a disrespect for other women and oneself, and shows to what a deep degree women internalize and accept, even as we struggle to reject through our actions and organizing, the image of the ladies—the invention of the Rockefeller gang of thieves.

Thus it is not only the problems that men have when women begin to become active—when they reject the ladies—but the problems that this raises for both ourselves and other women that we must deal with. The sense of inadequacy, the lack of respect for women, the failure to take other women seriously—these problems are all grounded in the social role of women, the ideal lady that women are supposed to be and the social location of women outside the productive process.

What We Know and What We Need to Learn

An area where many, many women feel most inadequate is speaking before groups of people. I've been organizing for almost ten years now and I still have to deal with a great deal of anxiety before speaking. We feel afraid that no one will listen, that we won't say the right thing, we won't know the facts. What is the source of this fear—this feeling of inadequacy women so characteristically have about speaking out and learning the facts, learning precisely how things work—which is what it means to learn politics, for politics is the study of how society works, of how and why social forces move in the way they do.

Women's role is not as producers, as initiators, but as passive unconscious communicators. We are conditioned to raise a family by relying on our emotions, our intuitions. We are not to learn how things work—how the family works, what our role is in the family. But when we women don't know how things work, when we remain ignorant or neutral we are playing into the hands of our oppressors and the oppressors of all poor and working people. We are functioning in the interests of Rockefeller and his gang of thieves.

Last week we spoke of the capacity women have to locate ourselves and our interests collectively in the struggle of all poor and working people, to not simply concern ourselves with our own individual achievements. This valuable capacity grows in large measure from the love expressed in the labor of caring for children and family and from the enormous strength this work takes for poor and working women, given the terrible conditions under which we're forced to raise our children. But these same conditions, and the social role we are conditioned/to perform while carrying out our difficult work—the role of passive communicator—also affects our political work.

Remember, our job is to keep everything looking nice and tidy, to cover-up the real nature of this society, to hide the political facts of life from our children and teach them that if they just follow the rules and never break them everything will be okay. Only for poor and working women and their families, it never is. So even when women take up the fight and begin to organize, we have to struggle against a tendency to be concerned simply with how things look, with how the office or the organization appears, with what people will think of us, with whether or not so-and-so is doing what they're supposed to. Rather, we must learn to work with women every day who are struggling to examine what's actually going on—in other words, to function politically. What gains are we making, whose “opinion” really matters about the work we're doing, what is the location in society of those whose opinions we're concerned about? What is the social and economic basis for their reaction to our work?

Passive Communicators are Political Conservatives

The conservatizing effect of women's social role and position combined with other factors make certain masses of women ripe material for right-wing, reactionary, organizing. ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) and MAD (Mothers Alert Detroit)—both right-wing, racist groups—have many women in leadership and a large following of women. The economic basis for the right-wing, backward politics of these women is that they come from a section of the working class which has been steadily losing ground, whose gains are being eroded. The backward perspective of these women fully expresses the conservatizing effect of women's conditioning.

These women want to keep things “the same,” nice and tidy, and refuse to face the actual basis for the decaying conditions of their lives, which is not poor Black and Latin people but an economic system whose priorities must change if working people are to be guaranteed a decent life. Here we can see how the conservatizing role of women supports quite well the political goals of the working class—to divide working and poor people.

We women must learn to respect and support one another, to take one another seriously. That means more certainly than simply “being nice.” We must demand that we stop being ladies and help one another to fight the ladies within us. Women need this kind of support from other women as well as from men. This is the way we express love for one another, by supporting one another in struggle, by demanding that we grow and learn to, carry out the work that must be done if we are to build the kind of world in which we can all be free.

When we see a woman in struggle, we are seeing a woman who is following in the long tradition of women fighting for the liberation of all working and poor people. We are seeing a woman who is joining the ranks of millions upon millions of women and men who have fought and given their lives to end poverty, to overthrow the brutal clutches of U.S. imperialism and capitalist exploitation and profiteering, and who have made substantial gains in building societies free of needless poverty. Look around the room. We see here many women in struggle. Let's inspire one another, respect one another, and lead one another. Let us work in unity to transform the ladies, to defeat Rockefeller and his gang of thieves.

The organizations that we women are building—the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council, Union WAGE, California Homemakers Association—have the potential to literally change the course of history. The building of political unions of the unorganized, of the poorest strata of the population, is bringing into existence a political force in this country which will provide to organized labor the necessary alternative to both the right-wing and reformist organizing of this sector of the workforce.

The problems and difficulties we face as women in struggle can only be resolved in the process of struggle. We can't wait until we've overcome all of our fears before we stand up and speak. The struggle, the conditions of our lives, demands that we continuously push ourselves forward. By learning about the social source of our problem, we gain a valuable tool in resolving them.

I hope these talks will be of help to the brave and courageous women and men in the actual daily struggles of our lives, political struggles that are critical to us and the generations to, come.

ORGANIZE THE UNORGANIZED! WOMEN UNITE!

Hazel Daren is Political Coordinator of the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council and a leading member of the People's Party. She has written and lectured extensively on women's struggles and other political subjects.