THE WAR AGASINT WOMEN

PASSAGES FROM “THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN” AUTHOR: MARILYN FRENCH

 

 

 

 

 

The war may have began about ten thousand years ago, but not until about the fourth millennium BCE did men begin to build what became patriarchy – male supremacy backed by force – probably first in the Middle East. Men began to assert themselves as ‘bigmen’, appropriating the labor and resources of others.

 

For women, it has been downhill ever since. Women were probably the first slaves and while elite women had considerable power in early states, they were subjected to men of their class.

Women not only did not ‘progress’ but have been increasingly disempowered, degraded and subjugated. This tendency accelerated over the last four centuries, when men, mainly in the West, exploded in a frenzy of domination, trying to expand and tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature – people of color and women.

 

European men… motivated by curiosity mixed with greed for wealth and fame, generated some of the most tragic chapters in human history. By force and subversion, Europeans exploited Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the South Pacific and the Americas, killing, enslaving, or subjugating their people and appropriating their resources.

 

…a faceless mass of dispossessed people, the majority were women and children!

Those who benefited from capitalist industrialization became a new elite, a fluid, dynamic class. Individuals might rise or fall in wealth and power; what was constant was that the elite was composed almost entirely of white males. The women attached to them may have benefited from their wealth, but did not share their power.

 

By the nineteenth century… almost all women were subjugated to men. By then, unremitting male effort over centuries had succeeded in thrusting women’s position to its nadir; women possessed almost no human rights – to a political voice, to inherit, to own property, to do business on their own. They laced rights over their own bodies.

 

But subjugation generates resentment and the last two centuries have been dominated by revolutions. Workers and women’s rights movements inundated Europe and the United States like a tidal wave in the nineteenth and really twentieth centuries, inspiring nationalist rebellions in Asia and Africa in the mid twentieth.

 

By the time Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking, few socialists cared about the problem women bear alone – responsibility for childrearing and maintaining the family while working to support their families – alone or with a husband’s help.

 

Economic hardship and lack of political voice drove women to rise up in the nineteenth century, middle class women through feminism, working-class women through labor agitation rooted in anarchist, socialist or communist principles. Since for a woman even to speak in public violated gender rules, these women were making a feminist statement even if the disavowed feminism.

 

Socialist stated removed legal discriminations against women but made no effort to teach men they must share the responsibility for taking care of themselves and their homes or raising the next generation. Fascist governments tried to solve the ‘women’ problem by re-imposing extreme male controls on women and constricting them within the domestic realm. Capitalist governments and male-dominated labor unions colluded in keeping women in the lowest-paid, most marginal work. Everywhere, women were denied the right to work for decent pay on grounds that men supported them. Since not all men did, women and their children were thrust into even deeper impoverishment. And men who did support women treated them like property.

 

Smaller and more fragmented than workers’ movements, feminism was even more threatening. It distressed all men, not just the elite, by creating discord at home and unlike workers’ protests, by challenging men where they are most vulnerable, in the self-definition. In this century, feminism has achieved striking success in gaining women access to education, political rights and jobs and in eliminating laws enforcing a double standard, mainly in industrialized and socialist states.

 

I define as ‘feminist’ any attempt to improve the lot of any group of women through female solidarity and a female perspective. Considering the power and solidarity of the forces arrayed against them, feminists’ success in improving women’s lot in so brief a time is dazzling.