During the 1945 general election the Labour Party produced a poster which undoubtedly helped to grease its path to power, It was a cartoon of a demobbed soldier and his young wife banging on the counter of the Tory peace stores.
Under the counter were hidden the 'fruits of victory' —bags labelled "jobs', "proper medical attention", good homes", "decent schools' -all marked 'reserved for the rich and privileged'.
Thirty years later, few members of the working class would doubt the accuracy of that last statement, or the failure of successive Labour Governments to rectify the situation.
The so-called welfare state -which, together with the commitment to full employment and the promise to keep fascism at bay, was the means by which the post-war governments staved off revolution in Western Europe —is presently tumbling all around us.
Coupled with the crisis of social experditurewhich has stripped hundreds of millions of pounds off the budgets for education, health, housing and social services- - is the crisis of the family itself. High divorce rates and the recent 'discovery" of battered wives and babies are merely the outward symptoms of the instability of one of capitalism's most important props When William Beveridge came to draft the progra mme for the welfare state in 1942, he stressed the importance of the family as an economic and social unit in capitalist society: 'In any measure of social policy in which regard is had to the facts, the great majority of married women must be regarded as occupied on work which is vital though unpaid, without which their husbands could not do their paid work, and without which the nation could not continue...' That unpaid work -the reproduction of labour power and the production and rearing of the next generation of wage labourers- is the cornerstone of women's exploitation and oppression within capitalist society.
Women's supposedly secondary role in the labour market itself means that they are forced to work for wages which are on average barely half those paid to men. And their job opportunities, both on the shopfloor and in the white collar sectors, are almost exc lusively restricted to the most menial tasks.
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Photo: CHRIS DAVIES (Report The labour movement has done little to challenge this situation. On such a basic issue as equal pay — which the TUC decided to fight for nearly a hundred years agol!) - most male trade unionists have failed to lift a finger in support of the struggles of women workers to achieve even the limited benefits of the 1970 Equal Pay Act.
When 400 women production workers at Salford Electrical Instruments in Heywood, Lancashire, came out on a 10-week equal pay strike this summer, they were forced to go back with virtually nothing gained because the men were perfectly happy to cross the official picket line.
Yet until the labour movement begins to take up the question of the oppression of women, and stops regarding this as an issue solely for the parliamentary arena, then the struggle for equality will be completely hopeless There is no way women can begin to break out of the traps capitalism has set for them at home and at work until the labour movement takes a knife to the bonds which tie women to their family duties.
This means fighting for such demands as maternity benefits, adequate nursery provision, and freely available abortion and contraception. It also means challenging the chauvinism of many male workers -at work at home, and in the unions. And all this must be seen as an integral part of the struggle for equal pay and opportunity.
These are the aims of the Working Women's Charter Campaign, which is proving to be a vital means of demonstrating the inextricable links between women's economic and social position in capitalist society, and of organising the solidarity which is frequently essenbial when women go into struggle.
On the next three pages, Red Weekly examines some of these links and describes the development of the campaign.
capitalist order. EVERY DAY NOW the newspapers carry sordid details of yet another case of child-battering or wife-beating. Yet the 'great men' of Britain -like Sir Keith Joseph-combine their plans for 'national unity" with desperate calls to uphold the family.
İn using the family in their war cries, these staunch defenders of the status quo attest to the fact that the family is still a crucial prop in the It is quite easy to see how the why these household chores should
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LOWE DOI MAN BOT Kids, kitchen, work Kids, kitchen, work