Terry Conway

2007 is 37 years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act. While Women working full time still earn 17 per cent less than men, women working part time still earn 45 per cent less than men in the private sector. The situation for black women is also appalling – 44 per cent less per hour than a white male.

2007 is 40 years after the major reform of abortion law in 1967, which at the time gave women in Britain some of the most extensive rights to control our fertility any where in the world. Defending this against various attempts to restrict it through parliamentary amendment as well as fighting to extend the 1967 Act was a major mobilising focus for women and men in the labour movement in the 1970s and 1980’s.

The National Abortion campaign, at the centre of those key campaigns, ceased to exist in 2003. Abortion Rights, which emerged from the merger of NAC and the lobbying Abortion Law Reform Association, has not yet been tested in having to organise mass mobilisations to defend our rights

Childcare continues to act as a major barrier to women’s full participation in social and political life.

The Day Care Trust in a report in November 2006 showed that:

there is one place for every three children under 8, up from one place for every nine children under 8 in 1997.
Use of childcare is rising for all groups, but is rising more slowly for under-represented groups such as lone parents, certain black and minority ethnic groups and low-income families. Families of disabled children frequently report a lack of childcare in their area.
Parents in England continue to pay through the nose for childcare - meeting 75% of all costs in 2004/05. In countries with publicly-funded childcare, such as Denmark, parents pay as little as 30% of the costs.

After some bitter battles by feminists, the left did take on board the need to organise crèches to facilitate participation in conferences. Today, other than at events organised by trade unions, this is the exception rather than the rule

While there are more resources available for women and children faced with violence than there were forty years ago, the

There are more women active in bourgeois politics than there were forty years ago. In the 1970’s women MPs made up 4.3 per cent of the British parliament – today it is one in five.

The first conference of the women’s liberation movement in Britain was held at Ruskin college, Oxford, in 1971. Over the next two decades, the self-organisation of women spread into areas that we didn’t expect

Forms of organisation in many trade unions had existed for some time previously, but were reinvigorated by the new movement. But it was the organisation of Women against Pit Closures which saw women organised not as workers themselves but as a support for male workers that had the biggest impact on working class women.

The peace movement took on new life and militancy with the women’s’ peace camp at Greenham Common in opposition to Trident mark 1 – politicising a generation of activists as we need to see again in response to today’s threat of Trident 2.

But like the rest of the workers’ movement, the women’s liberation movement was thrown onto the defensive by the rise of Thatcherism and has struggled to recover from the defeats that both the Tories and the growing strength of neo-liberalism in the labour movement inflicted.

But a new wave of feminism has been growing in strength over recent years, animated around blogs and particularly strong amongst younger women including many students. This new wave has often focused on issues around violence and sexuality ––but then these are issues where we probably made the least gains in the 1970’s and 1980s. For second wave feminists like myself, it is a hugely positive development and gives us a new opportunity to consolidate some of our previous gains and win some new ones.

So it is welcome that two and a half years after the launch of Respect and after a number of rather acerbic internal debates around the right of self-organisation inside the organisation that Respect is organising a women’s conference to mark International Women’s Day 2007.

While the conference is not women-only, the publicity says it is “aimed” at women. There is indeed a place for mixed conferences discussing questions of women’s oppression. Men on the left

Topics which seem likely to of interest to feminists of all generations include “Raunch culture and sexual exploitation”, [1], Muslim women and politics and “Is fat a feminist issue?” This range of subjects certainly implies that the SWP intends to mobilise activists in the student movement to some extent.

Raising the question “should we defend a woman’s right to choose” could be somewhat provocative depending on how it is posed (it’s a bit unfortunate that less than a month before the conference no detailed agenda is available on the website).

After all Respect has a position of supporting abortion rights, passed after an acrimonious debate both on and off the conference floor at conference 2005. And there is a real danger of stereotyping Muslim women by assuming that they might have a problem with the issue – or of letting men from their communities speak for them.

But if the idea is to strengthen all of our ability to coherently take up the arguments of the anti-abortionists, wherever they come from, then it’s a positive development.

Overall, I for one am sorry I’m out of the country and so won’t be able to make it.

NOTES

[1] See the round table debate on Ariel Levy’s book “Female Chauvinist Pigs” at www.thefword.org.uk.