Jim Heartfield wrote:
>In message <v04210100b5e4154c9b46@[140.254.114.95]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
> >Typical faces of industrial workers changed from female & colored to
> >male & white to female & colored. The prevalence of the nuclear
> >family idealized by conservatives now -- male breadwinner, female
> >housewife, & biological children -- was merely a blip in history that
> >coincided with the post-WW2 economic boom (say, from the Korean War
> >to the Vietnam War & oil shock).
>
>Certainly the evidence in the UK appears to be that the family wage has
>been abolished, and the nuclear family itself is difficult to sustain in
>its absence. Having more or less campaigned for the abolition of the
>family for twenty years I ought to be celebrating, but the conditions
>under which families are under attack - which is to say the triumph of
>capitalism over organised labour - don't lend themselves to a positive
>outcome.
>
>In the first instance, women have been drawn into the labour market in
>equal numbers but on unequal terms (predominantly on part time pay). At
>the same time men have systematically lost high-paying jobs. High
>divorce rates indicate that marriage for life is pretty unsustainable
>when, as the pundits boast 'there is no job for life'. Not that there is
>necessarily anything wrong with a high divorce rate - except that single
>mothers are more often impoverished and unemployed.
Especially given that the virtual end of the family wage for many
male workers was soon followed by the attacks on social programs for
single mothers, there is no reason to simply celebrate our
contemporary family conditions. Writers such as Stephanie Coontz,
Judith Stacey, etc., however, caution against nostalgia for the
mid-twentieth-century heyday of the proverbial nuclear family
(enabled by the _exceptional_ material & ideological conditions of
the post-WW2 economic boom, the Cold War, & social democratic
preemptive strike against socialism). Coontz, for instance, writes
in "Working-Class Families, 1870-1890," _American Families: A
Multicultural Reader_, NY: Routledge, 1999:
***** Adopting domesticity [for the working-class] was in some
ways, then, a defensive maneuver with long-run disadvantages [Yoshie:
notice Coontz's subtle formulation here]. It was a response partly
to the deterioration of working conditions for women, partly to the
threat of industrialization to skilled craftsmen, and partly to the
failure of middle-class women to address the special needs of women
workers. As [Martha] May [in "Bread Before Roses: American
Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage," in Ruth Milkman, ed.
_Women, Work and Protest_, Boston, 1985] points out, 'the family-wage
ultimately...worked against the interests of working-class men, women
and families, by accepting and deepening a sexual double standard in
the labor market.' The double standard allowed the state to
forestall union demands by granting charity to women without
'providers' and employers in order to hold down women's wages on the
grounds that they worked for 'pin money.' It also gave some women an
incentive to act as strikebreakers or non-union workers. Finally,
the double standard closed off opportunities to explore alternative
family and gender roles within the industrial working-class that
might have strengthened working-class solidarity [a line of thinking
suggested earlier by Alexandra Kollontai]. Indeed, by the early
twentieth century,
Middle-class social reformers and activists came to embrace the
family wage as a means of restoring social stability, while some
employers recognized its possibilities as a means to control and
divide labor. At the same time, within the ranks of organized labor,
the family wage increasingly became a defense of gender privilege.
Defense of gender privilege, in turn, was closely connected to a
craft exclusiveness that hampered male organizing as well as female
[just as white privilege was]. [36]
[36] May, 'Bread Before Roses,' pp. 7, 8; Elizabeth Jameson,
'Imperfect Unions: Class and Gender in Cripple Creek, 1894-1904,' in
Cantor and Laurie, _Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker_; Andrew Dawson,
'The parameters of Class Consciousness: The Social Outlook of the
Skilled Worker, 1890-1920,' in Hoerder, _American Labor and
Immigration History_. *****
Organized labor to a certain extent has already learned this
historical lesson -- hence its advocacy of the "living wage," not
"family wage," I believe. Also, from another direction, "civil
unions," "gay marriages," and finally in the Netherlands the right of
non-heterosexuals to enjoy the full benefits of marriages are
changing the meanings of the word "family" a great deal to the
chagrin of die-hard conservatives:
***** New York Times 13 September 2000
"Dutch Legislators Approve Full Marriage Rights for Gays"
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE HAGUE, Sept. 12 - Lawmakers in the Netherlands, long among the
gay-rights vanguard, approved a bill today to convert the country's
registered same-sex partnerships into full-fledged marriages,
complete with divorce guidelines and wider adoption rights for gays.
Supporters say the legislation will give Dutch gays rights beyond
those offered in any other country.
Lawmakers thumped their desks in approval when the bill passed by a
vote of 109 to 33, and some of the scores of witnesses in the packed
public gallery applauded and embraced.
Parliament had discussed the bill last week. Only a few small
Christian parties had voiced opposition, although there was an
emotional and often heated three-day debate. The bill gained speedy
approval today....
...Two years ago, the Netherlands enacted a law allowing same-sex
couples to register as partners and to claim pensions, social
security and inheritances. But the new legislation goes further,
creating full equality, the measure's supporters said.
Same-sex couples will be able to marry at city hall and to adopt
Dutch children. They will be able to divorce through the court
system, like heterosexual couples.
Boris Dittrich, a member of the centrist Democrats 66 party and a
proponent of the plan, said the law "acknowledges that a person's sex
is not of importance for marriage."... *****
We may appropriate what Marx said in _The Class Struggles in France,
1848-1850_ for a Marxist-Feminist perspective on the present
conditions of working-class families:
***** With the exception of only a few chapters, every more
important part of the annals of the revolution from 1848 to 1849
carries the heading: _Defeat of the revolution!_
What succumbed in these defeats was not a revolution. It was the
pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social
relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class
antagonisms -- persons, illusions, conceptions, projects from which
the revolutionary party before the February Revolution was not free,
from which it could be freed not by the _victory of February_, but
only by a series of _defeats_. *****
It is up to the working class & socialist intellectuals to learn from
defeats of the family wage & social democracy in general and free
ourselves from illusions and traditional appendages. Only by doing
so can we move forward.
Yoshie
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