COMING EVENTS
EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON WIFE BATTERING
Proposed for April 1978 in Amsterdam, this conference is being organized by the Dutch group Blijf van m'n Lijf (See ISIS Bulletin on Crimes Against Women for a report from this group). A planning meeting is proposed for April 1977 in Amsterdam. The coordinator for The Netherlands is Jose van lersel, 25 Prins Hendrikkade, Amsterdam. In view of this meeting, ISIS is collecting resources on battered women, and our next bulletin will concentrate on this theme. Any contributions welcome.
SEX ROLE STEREOTYPING
July 13-15, 1977. An international conference on sex-role stereotyping is being organized by the British Psychological Society (Welsh Branch), to be held in Cardiff, Wales. Contact Oonagh Hartnett or Gill Boden, Dept. of Applied Psychology, UWIST, Llwyn y grant Road, Cardiff, Wales CF3 7UX, United Kingdom.
WHICH WAY FOR THE CHARTER CAMPAIGN?
May 21 and 22, 1977. The Working Women's Charter Campaign of the United Kingdom will be holding their national conference in London. Contact WWCC, la Camberwell Grove, London, SE 5.
INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST SOCIALIST CONFERENCE
May 28-29-30, 1977 in Paris, France (contact A Women's Place, 42 Earlham St., London W.C. 2, U.K.) Call to an international meeting of women: *
In Copenhagen
The women working at a big porcelain company have just won their struggle for an improvement in their working conditions and an increase in salary. In an attempt to get solidarity for their strike from the heads of the labour movement outside, they managed to get financial assistance by selling them several thousand paper plates which they had decorated with the emblem of the company. A demonstration in solidarity at the beginning of August brought out more than 10.000 people.
In London
In a widescreen-wiper factory, Trico, the women workers fought for several months for implementation of the law for equal pay. They were supported by many sections and branches of the trade unions, by the women's movement and by groups of the Working Women's Charter Campaign, who helped in the picket lines outside the factory.
They won their case. .
In Madrid
The women at the Induyco textile factory go every day to their bosses and to the police to get reinstatement of the women who have been laid off, to get recognition for their delegates and to get the right to have general assemblies. Every day they go in groups of 50 in front of other companies in Madrid in order to popularize their struggle.
In Italy
The autonomous women's movement has managed to set up "consultori" - consultation centres which give out information to all the women of a particular area about contraception and abortion. Now they are demanding the right to self-management and control over these centres.
In Rome, 10,000 women took to the streets' to demonstrate against rape.
In Spain
The women's movement is demanding amnesty for crimes "specific to women", and is protesting against imprisonment for adultery.
In Great Britain
The struggle against credit cuts which affect social services like hospitals, day-care centres, schools, concerns most of all women who are the ones affected by all these cuts. It is women who are made to wait several weeks or even months! before being given a hospital bed in order to have an abortion, thus driving
them to turn to expensive private clinics, or "backstreeters" for the least privileged. They are the ones who have to figure out what to do when school classes are cut because the State refuses to employ sufficient numbers of teachers. It is they who must look after old people when hospitals or old people's homes are closed for lack of funds. They too have to find solutions for looking after the children when there are no day-care facilities. In the area of health especially, women workers are engaged in a battle to get the unions to fight, and in several towns committees have been set up to get subsidies for child-care centres and to oppose their closure.
Everywhere in Italy, Germany, England or France the fight for free abortion on demand continues and develops!
So, in the whole of Europe, on new ground with new kinds of struggles, women are mobilizing themselves in factories, organizing themselves in the community, demonstrating in the street, to show their outrage against the attacks that they undergo every day, and to publicly affirm their determination to change a world that denies them their place.
As women active in the autonomous women's movement, or participating in such struggles in our own countries, we see the difficulty that lies in ensuring that those mass struggles do not remain isolated from the rest of the working class movement, and of establishing a link between these struggles and the groups of women, both on a national as well as an international level. This is why we feel there is a need to get together with women from the different European countries, women who are perhaps engaged in different political struggles but who nonetheless do not see women's struggle separate from the class struggle or .the construction of an autonomous women's movement. We thus propose a first step towards ,this at an
INTERNATIONAL MEETING IN PARIS
28th, 29th, 30th May - 1977
Many women from European movements have been wondering the same thing and have decided to bring collective replies and to organise international solidarity actions.
This meeting will give an opportunity to all those who have been involved in these struggles to speak for themselves and to recount their experiences. We .suggest that amongst other things, discussion groups are formed in order that all women present may express themselves and have a concrete discussion about the relationship between the movement, women's struggles and the class struggle.
These groups would be organized around two themes which are now the centre of the women's movement::
- women's work: employment, unemployment and housework
- abortion: contraception, sexuality, family.
We could touch such questions as:
- the concrete action/struggle of women in these problems; kinds of organization, kind of action; to what extent these women's struggles while showing the possibility of new relationships (both individual and collective), enrich the idea of democracy; how do they help in the struggle against power in all its forms?
- responses brought by the organizations of the labour movement (trade unions, left-wing and extreme left-wing parties and organisms) to the demands of women; type of support for their struggle. Experiences : of women within the labour movement; involvement of women in trade unions.
- role and place of women in the capitalist system. Attacks of the bourgeoisie, reaction of the bourgeois parties and bourgeois women's associations to feminist struggles.
- kinds of international solidarity for women's struggles to which this meeting could lead towards in realistic terms.
Women from Italy, Germany, Switzerland France and Great Britain, during a meeting on 12th December 1976 in Paris to discuss this international meeting.
Discussion on the International Women's Meeting in Paris - May 1977
During the planning meetings differences arose about the nature of the international meeting of women to be held in Paris in May 1977. WIRES carried the following
discussion by one of the British participants the planning meeting as well as the statement by the Dutch feminist/socialist movement (first printed in Merseyside Newsletter, U.K.).
I heard about a planning meeting for a European Feminist/Socialist conference and thought I'd like to get involved, as I have friends in the women's movement in several European countries. It would be good . to meet women from all over Europe to discuss the problems women have in trying to integrate feminism and socialism, practically and theoretically. We met in London at the end of November, a self-selected group from Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Spain.
The conference plan had been inaugurated by the French women. We started off with a big mistake - putting the organization first and the content second. So we spent the day working out locations and arrangements, with a reasonable measure of agreement, though it was soon clear that we were papering over a lot. The conference would be in Amsterdam and the Dutch women would do the main organizational work.
But the French women wanted the conference to have a definite theme "women's struggle in the class struggle" (they later agreed to modify the " i n" to "and"). This was not surprising, since they came from the "class struggle" tendency in the French movement and called all other French feminists bourgeois. The conference was to centre its discussions on employed women, and to work towards a general outline
statement for European women's movements at the end.
The Dutch women, the Spanish women, and some of us from Britain felt that such a conference would be a disaster, on two main grounds. Firstly, the relationship between feminism and socialism cannot be reduced simply to one between women's struggle and class struggle, and that to do so would simply drive many feminist socialists away, apart from being the same old straitjacket we'd thrown off with the old left. Secondly, to issue guideline statements was impossible from an initial conference, and probably not a good way of relating to the international women's movement anyway.
We argued and argued for hours, and to me it did seem a worthwhile argument. By 6 o'clock, when the Dutch women had to leave, it seemed as if an uneasy compromise might be possible, as the French women and their supporters, the Germans and some of the British reluctantly accepted a different title: "The position of women and the contemporary capitalist situation", but really, the question of the central theme being women in employment, and of the guidelines was not settled.
A further planning meeting was arranged for Paris, early in December, but the Dutch women, after thinking it over at home, decided that the differences remained too great. They wrote a letter explaining what they felt, and to me it seems such an important contribution to the discussion of socialism and feminism that it is worth summarizing here.
The Dutch Womens Statement
The Dutch movement developed at the end of the 1960s with a mixed group called the Dolle Minas. At a time of radical upheaval and dissatisfaction, many women from different classes joined it, but it became dominated by men and women from left groups who were more articulate and who were sure the way forward was to develop a detailed political programme. On the contrary, the attempt to do this created many divisions and the organization broke up. Most women either joined the Communist Party or went into consciousness raising groups, and it was from these that a new feminist socialism began to emerge. "Our experiences with Dolle Mina have been very important to us. From the first mistakes we learned at least a few tilings; First, there is nothing so disrupting as a force from above imposing an artificial unity on women at
this phase of the women's movement, instead of finding it where it already exists; second, when organizing women we have to start from their experience of the totality of their lives as women and not only from what has already been acknowledged by the leftist movement as 'politically relevant' ".
The new movement started from the experiences of oppression of its members as women. As these seemed to centre around what in the straight left is called personal life, it became necessary to redefine the meaning of the word political. Classical Marxist theory is too narrow; it is simply not enough to add feminism on; conceptions of politics, of class position, class lusciousness and class struggle all have to be redefined i f women's actual experience of oppression is the starting point. Of course that starting point is not by itself enough, but that doesn't mean that one can't work with feminists who adopt various separatist or even reformist positions.
While socialism is a precondition from women's liberation, it does not guarantee it, nor does it mean that the class struggle is the primary area for women to work, for the centre of oppression for most women is not ill the area of capitalist relationships. As long as women are physically oppressed, as long as they need their husband's permission to leave the house, as long as they can be battered or raped, as long as they are conditioned to take care of other people without expecting care in return, women are helpless. The control over our own bodies, our emotions and relations are a precondition to any kind of political struggle, no matter whether it leads directly
to an overthrow of capitalism, or only indirectly via women getting stronger and more independent.
The Dutch feminist socialist movement has found a real level of unity using this approach from experience which an abstract search for programmatic clarity, the method of the old left, would undermine. This doesn't mean there is no discussion, far from it. Dutch sisters feel confident of their position as socialists and feel they do not need other people's approval. So, while they would like better relations with the organized left, that depends on the left's being able to come to terms with the sexism it incorporates, a job that's hardly been begun yet. "We've been too long in a situation where solidarity with what was called 'th class struggle' was a one-way traffic to bother too much at this moment..."
In this way the Dutch feminist-socialist women who came to the London meeting defend their view that an open discussion is the only way that European feminist socialists can get together at present, and that it would be disastrous to aim to have some strategy for the "European movement". The issue is much bigger than that of a conference. It's fairly obvious from this that I agree with them wholeheartedly. What do other sisters think?
Carol Riddell
INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST-SOCIALIST WORKSHOP
June 3-4-5, 1977 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Starting point: working with women on the basis of "no feminism without socialism, no socialism without feminism". Every women who is at least interested in this point is very welcome. Planning small workshop around 6 or 7 themes during the weekend. "Where do we stand with respect to the feminist-socialistic theory and practice" seems almost a necessity. Please let us know if you can write a paper on the above theme or any others.
Other suggested themes:
1. Feminist-socialists and the left-wing movements in
our countries
2. Feminist-socialists and left-wing political parties and
trade unions
3. Housework
4. Organizing women
5. Women and Crisis
6. Foreign women living in our countries out of pure
economic necessity.
The language used will be English; provide translations
if possible. We hope all papers will be ready
during the month of May.
Contact: Olga Kloet, Govert Flinckstraat 350',
Amsterdam
Tel.: Amsterdam 728003
EUROPEAN FEMINIST PRESS MEETING
Proposed for September 1977
A European meeting of the feminist press took place on Saturday 12th March 1977 in Paris.
This meeting was organized in Paris by four French publications: Histoires d'Elles, (proposed weekly), information des Femmes (monthly 5.000 circulation) dealing with women's and feminist problems, women's initiatives and the movement; news etc.; Les Nouvelles Feministes (irregular, 1.000 circulation) liaison bulletin of the group League for Women's Rights'"; Sorcieres (five numbers a year), a review on specific themes.
Others who were not involved in the organization: Les Petroleuses which no longer appears; Le Quotidien des Femmes (very irregular - 60.000 circulation); Femmes en Lutte (irregular monthly 5.000 circulation) liaison bulletin of revolutionary women, class struggle tendency.
L'Information des Femmes apologises for the absence in the organization of foreign journals such as Effe or Emma, it being materially impossible to send out more invitations.
Each journal/newspaper presented its activities, its aims and resources. The discussion centred on very concrete practical problems, but there was no real debate between the newspapers and the other women who attended (about 500).
One of the main problems discussed was that of professional journalism as opposed to militant journalism. The question of the relationship between the newspapers and the women's movement was brought up but discussed only superficially.
Amongst the newspapers, the following resolutions
were proposed:
- a monthly letter from each country giving the news
- mutual exchange of lists of existing journals/newspapers
and possible distribution points for other
countries
- proposition for another European meeting in September
1977.
Foreign newspapers present on the 12th March:
Germany: EMMA
Britain: SPARE RIB & SAPPHO
Belgium: CAHIERS DU GRIF & BECASSINE EN
LUTTE
Spain: DONES DE LA MAR & VINDICACION
FEMINISTA
Italy: EFFE & RADIO DONNA
Holland: OPZY
(This notice was sent by L'information des Femmes).
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY
Against Rape and Institutional Violence
The political nature of rape and violence as instruments of oppression of women has been clearly shown in recent rape cases in Rome, Italy. Thousands of Italian women have joined together in solidarity with rape victims and in denouncing rape and institutional violence as crimes against all women. The feminist movement in Italy requests the international solidarity of all women in this.
In March, the Italian women mobilized in solidarity with one of the many victims of rape in Italy, Claudia Caputi. On 30 August 1976 Claudia, 17 years old, was raped on the outskirts of Rome by 16 boys, one of whom had befriended her previously. Claudia had come to Rome some months earlier from a provincial town, seeking employment which she found keeping house for a man in a popular neighbourhood of Rome. She reported the rape to the police and seven of the boys were brought to trial In late March 1977. During this period, Claudia was threatened with reprisals and death by friends and relatives of the accused. Although Claudia identified in the courtroom one of those who had threatened her no action was taken against him, nor were any measures taken to protect Claudia.
On Wednesday 30 March 1977, Claudia was again the victim of a brutal act of violence. On that evening she was found on the outskirts of town slashed up over her entire body with a razor and she was brought to a hospital in Rome in a state of shock. (As of the middle of April, she is still hospitalized). On Saturday morning, less than three days after this horrible act of violence, the Public Prosecutor Paolino Dell'Anno notified Claudia in the hospital that she was being put under investigation for "simulation"
of this violence and for self-infliction of the wounds. While all the facts surrounding this second violence are not yet clear, the results of the medical examination show that it is absolutely impossible that the wounds were self-inflicted.
FEMINIST SOLIDARITY
Thousands of Italian women reacted immediately against this new aggression against Claudia by the public prosecutor demonstrating their solidarity with Claudia and denouncing the physical and institutional violence against women. From the very beginning, Italian feminists have been supporting Claudia through the ordeal women are subjected to in a rape trial. Defended by a feminist lawyer, Claudia courageously demanded open hearings so that the violence against women could be denounced publicly.
The day after Claudia was slashed up with a razor, twenty thousand women took to the streets. United in this march were the various feminist collectives and UDI (Union of Italian Women), the large national organization of communist women.
COUNTEROFFENSIVE
When the hearings resumed on 4 April, Claudia's lawyer, requested that the Public Prosecutor Dell'Anno be replaced because his attitude throughout the trial demonstrated his complicity with the cultural and ideological values of violence and oppression shown by the accused rapists. When the public prosecutor refused to step down, Claudia's lawyer and the feminists present left the courtroom in protest and joined the thousands of women demonstrating in front of the courthouse.
The feminist collectives and the communist women's organization UDI have formed a college of women lawyers for the defense of Claudia, which includes a socialist member of parliament. In parliament communist and socialist members of parliament have has asked the Minister of Justice to take disciplinary action against the public prosecutor for his overhasty action against Claudia, for showing favouritism to the rapists and for prejudicing the case by trying to throw discredit on the victim of the brutal
violence.
International solidarity with Claudia and the Italian women was demonstrated by telegrams and letters which arrived fromall over Europe.
At this crucial moment in the campaign there were maneuvers to create confusion and disunity among women in their solidarity with Claudia and to discredit the campaign in the eyes of the public through allegations linking the victim to prostitution. These maneuvers have failed. In the meantime, the trial of the boys who raped Claudia last August has concluded with the conviction of all seven rapists.
FUTURE STRATEGY
The Italian feminists are now working on future strategy for their campaign against violence. Some of the issues under discussion are:
- The place and effectiveness of mass demonstrations.
- While feminists will continue to support rape victims and mobilize concrete solidarity for them, there is some question about making any particular victim a symbol or cause celebre.
- An effective political strategy - especially in view of the fact that almost 20 rape cases are scheduled to appear in court in the next month in Rome.
One concrete step in a political strategy has already been taken. A collective has been formed with representatives from about 10 different feminist collectives in Rome which will work on legal and political measures together with feminist lawyer. The first action will be to try to make it legally possible for women to take group actions in rape cases on the basis that rape is a crime against all women.
The Italian Women's Movement would like to request your help. Could you please send information and materials about political, legal and other actions taken by women and feminist groups against rape and violence and in support of rape victims in your countries? Materials in any language would be very helpful (Among us, we can read English. French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Scandinavian languages). If possible, please send two copies, one for a permanent collection and one for circulation. ISIS will take the responsibility to make a complete listing of all materials received and send a copy to each of you. We will also keep you informed about the developments in the Italian campaign against violence. The international support and solidarity for Claudia and the whole campaign so far has been tremendous!
Sisterhood is Powerful and International Sisterhood is even more Powerful!