tantly tempted and persuaded to see this as a personal neurosis. Through discussing problems with other women we can discover for the first time that they are common problems; can move from IsolatIon to collective consciousness, collective analysis and action. The family, the kind of unit it is within capitalist society, the socialisation of women, their subordination, are put into question in a new way. Our internalised vision of the world and our place in it is exploded.
This is the background of the formation of current women's liberation groups. The emphasis small groups facilitates maximum necessary precondition of the growth of solidarity and identity. Most revolutionary groups have forgotten that the process of becom ing a revolutionary involves self-criticism and self-conscious development. Women's Liberation has rediscovered this simple truth, and is breaking down the distinction made between changing oneself and changing society.
This in itself represents a great threat to male domination. have been well trained to be vessels of expressive receptivity; unlike the male we have not been taught to repress our emotional concernes burying them beneath working relationships and rationalised order. By redirecting our emotionality, our perceptions, we can locate the structures of cultural and psychological social repression. We do not believe that our dominated consciousness can by itself fulfil our theoretical needs the specific position of women as a group with a specific oppression. When white leftists had to grin and bear their exclusion from Black Power they were able to avoid this problem: The racial oppression of Blacks was collapsed into an-already comprehended-class exploitation. But this evasion is not possible in the case of women—on the most simple level, not all working class women work outside the home: only some women are exploited, all are oppressed. So that the problem of a theoretical understanding of oppression, raised by the National Liberation movements and the Blacks, but often ignored in favour of analyses of imperialism and exploitation, once again appears, but in a very direct and inescapable fashion, with regard to the position of women.
But to concentrate totally on this important absence of theory in an intellectual way, to see the development of the movement in terms of a chronological "theory first, practice later", as sometimes suggested, is sterile. Women's liberation is a political movement which insists on a connection between theory and practice. The way in which we have discovered our theoretical needs has been precisely through our practical activity; furthermore the keys to the specific nature of womens oppression are to be found in every woman's life-in an analysis of the lived reality of capitalism. Of necessity we must operate at a personal level-in order to establish and work towards a new collective analysis of women. the Boss. In this context the manual's subsequent gentle warning against 'perhaps presenting a false exterior' can only be taken as a joke. False to what?-the ideal secretary has no interior, i.e. no feelings.
It is difficult for a secretary to have a rational goal; for her there is no finished product. The men we work for have deals to put through, accounts to finalised, letters to write, reports, applications, decisions to be passed on....Our routine work, however, has no such structure, and, like Sisyphus's labour, it can never be completed. And since there is usually no possibility of promotion the only goal we can have is to be more efficient secretaries. The ways in which we try to personalize our work are indicative of the destructive and alie nating nature of secretarial jobs. I think most secretaries try to structure their work by reifying time; by allotting a certain amount of time to each task-e.g.doing six letters br lunchtime: making lists of things to do and trying to cross off everything by the time you go home The secretary is, however, different from other mechanical labou rers who are forced into machine like roles by their jobs. The diffe rence is her relationship to her boss. This is not despite the mystifica
•..Happily Ever After This paper has been written by three women each with two kids. We talked and wrote together as a group. We are oppressed and have been from the moment we were born. Our families have squashed us into roles bacause our mothers wanted daughters in their own image, and our fathers wanted daughters like their submissive wives. We each had a girlhood instead of a childhood and are only now beginning to be conscious of what that means in terms of what we are now. Now we feel we are martyrs. Martyrdom that has, over the years of being housewives and mothers, become almost enjoyable. The family exists on martyrdom. This is gradually getting less but only since we have glimpsed how we live from outside. We have found it extremely dificult to look at ourselves-as through a window-and most of all it has been a sheer impossibility to imagine ourselves being involved in change any sort. Our window on the world is looked through with our hands in the sink and we've begun to hate that sink and all it implies so begins our consciousness. We need to work, work is a dignity, or should be, we know that most work is not, but at least at worst, it involves you with other people, ideas and a struggle. The oppression every woman suffers is deeply in her, she has first to realise this and then to fight it—with other women helping. Men will not generally help with this, they need passive ignorant decorative women. We are, therefore, talking about all those women who first and foremost housewives.
The "family', as it is experienced is the woman and the children in the fat or the room and the comes and goes. The space that the family occupies is essential to its own image of itself, its own way of living itself, its self-expression. The woman who goes out to work goes out of her family if only for that period of time: however drab the work routine, children are temporarily forgotten, housework ignored. In the home the woman is in the family, and the two are disturbingly synonomous. Housework cannot be separated from children, nor the children from the four walls, the food you cook, the shopping you do, the clothes you wear. How you, the house, the children, look that every pop-psychologist's "mum" lives in a "Woman's Own" dreamhouse, where the material solution to any problem is immediately on monde it is that in our sousety being e mother is being a housewife: security of the family is the stability of the walls-the image of the family home is the image of the family, but not in any simple way. The folk-lore has many permutations-from happy secure family in new semi, to poor but happy slum of the uvenile to the *broken home" of the delinquent" who comes from both.
There is little to be said about housework on its own. An endless routine, it creates its own high moments of achievement and satisfaction so as to evade not monotonythe feature of many jobs-but futility. The bolt you tighten on the factory floor vanishes to be replaced by another: but the clean kitchen floor is tomorrow's dirty floor and the clean floor of the day after that. The appropriate symbol for housework (and for housework alone) is not the interminable conveyor-belt but a compulsive circle like a pet mouse in its cage spinning round on its exercise wheel, unable to get off. Into this one inserts one's own saving peaks: "Happiness is the bathroom scrubbed down". But even glorious end of today's chores is not even an anti-climax as there is no real climax-there is nothing to fill the "joyful moment". But the routine is never quite routine, so the vacuum in one's mind is never vacuous enough to be filled. "Housework is a worm eating away at one's ideas" Like a fever dream it goes on and on, until you desperately hope that it can all be achieved at one blow. You lay the breakfast the night before, you have even been known to light the gas under the kettle for tomorrow's tea, wishing that by breakfast time everything could be over with by a.m., the children washed teeth-cleaned and ready for bed: tucked-up, the end.
And yet there is nothing tangible to force you to do it. A job is compul* sory: either you go or you don't have a job. Housework's pressures are more invidious-neighbours criticise and compare; grandmothers hand on standards: within you and without you is your mother's voice, criticising and directing. Their over-riding criterion is cleanliness: a dirty house is a disintegrating person. The compulsion to housework, then, is not economic or legal: it is moral and personal. And the housewife sees it in moral and personal terms. Hence her description of this structure of her oppression assumes querulous and complaining tones, the tones of a private neurosis to express a social * fact-the imposed isolation of her work. For 'emancipated" women or 'revolutionary' men to attack the complaint and ignore the whole socialising force which produces it simple reinforces the position Like every other form of social activity, every other aspect of social relationships, housework cannot pinned down to a neat descriptive formula. The more we examine it, the more aspects it reveals, and the more we become aware of its contradictions and paradoxes. Isolated the only adult in a private house, the housewife is yet crowded, by the emo tional and physical demands of her family, by the unseen pressures of society. But although isolated the housewife is never alone-her domain is the kitchen, the most communal room, and even the possibility of sleeping alone is denied her. To have the right to sleep alone is essential. People in permanent relationships do not do this A woman needs time alone-after a dav of being a public servant to the rest of the family, of giving out all the time, of being open to all demands, and in ordinary families the only time of the day this feeling of aloneness is possible is during the few moments before she goes to sleep after getting in to bed. To then have to touch, caress, console yet another person is too much. The hatred of the man and sex begins-it is the beginning of such sayings as "Oh God, he wants his rights again" or the husband saying "you can't have a headache every night". So that eventually, she has no identity, no specificity, no privacy-she IS defined by the demands of others. The only escape is the day-dream, turning-in-on-oneself is the only wav out. It is a journey from a body which is always being touched-the mother must always allow herself to be open to physical contact-to an area which cannot be touched, to an area of total privacy, where one's mind and body is one's own again. Ironically, housework is often seen as being self-determined labour-"your time is own". In fact, in order to "keep up"
"a good housewife", in order to be one has to work to a pre-determined routine. The "freedom" of the house wife is in fact the denial of her right to a job Even the division work/place of work, leisure/home does not apply to the housewife her workplace is also the place of leisure and further it is her work which provides the basis of other people's leisure.
The "rationalisation" of housework is held out as a future prospectbetter technical equipment means less work. But even if this different equipment were made easily available to all classes, the situation of the housewife would be essentially unchanged, and problems would remain. Indeed some would be exacerbated. The only social world most housewives have is the shop: ping centre-hence their "irrational" tendency to shop every day rather than once a week. Deprived of this they would lose one way of keeping up their morale. Being literally house-bound, afraid of leaving the house and being seen is a typical woman's syndrome. Developments in technology on their own cannot change women's position in the home. We must be quite clear about this Unless we can discuss through the mplications of the role of the housewife the institution of the housewife, if you like, and work out the reasons why this institution survives so tenaciously, we will be unable to combat the various levels of oppres Moreover, it is not enough simply to command women out to work-particularly since we all know that means that women usually end up with two jobsone monotonous, the other futile.
Peckham Rye Women's Liberation
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COOKING * CLEANING * WORRY IRONING • BUDGET • PARTIES SHOPPING DEADLINE
HAIRDRESSER CAR POOL Does Tension Upset Your System?
PUNISH * NOISE MENDING * Pt CHILDREN STIR TEMPER TEMP