ng class because the present and future generations of workers are cared for out of workers 'wages and by women's double burden of waged work and home responsibilities. Women experience inequality with their husbands in the family, and at work they suffer both sexual oppression and exploitation as workers. Men suffer exploitation, but not sexual inequality.
The gender roles associated with the capitalist family - strong, aggressive male and nurturing, passive female - pervade all of society through the education system, the mass media, entertainment and so on. No individual can escape them, even if they do not live in the so-called nuclear family, whether they marry and have children or not. It is the inequality between men and women, the contradiction between the ideal life of happiness and bliss the family seems to hold out and the reality of long hours of work, the struggle to make ends meet, the constraints on social life because of the lack of decent child care facilities and so on which make the family a site of frustration and oppression. The use of women's bodies as sex objects reinforces old ideas of women's responsibility to satisfy men's needs. And it is not just men who view women this way. All studies of attitudes show how women internalise this view of their role, causing feelings of guilt and inadequacy if they do not come up to their husbands 'demands.
Throughout the history of class society, women have suffered violence at the hands of men. Capitalism completely re-ordered women and men's lives, but it maintained women's oppression as well as class oppression. While the family is separate from production, it is not unaffected by changes in the workplace. That is why the changes this century have given rise to contradictions which affect women's lives in the family. The rise of the women's liberation movement in the sixties was underpinned by the increasing numbers of women in waged work, giving rise to the demand for control over our sexuality, improved contraception and abortion rights. This made it possible for sexual activity to be separated from marriage and procreation. In spite of the ideology of family life, in most industrialised countries today, only about one third of households consist of a man and woman with their children. Attitudes to motherhood have changed dramatically. In the eighties fewer than half the women surveyed in Australia thought motherhood was a career. The number of children born outside marriage was up to 18 per cent by 1997. The number of people living alone in 1986-87 was 20 per cent of households. It is the continuing contradiction between the promise of these developments and the reality of life under capitalism and women's continuing oppression which gave rise to concerns first about violence against women generally and then about domestic violence and rape in marriage.
Early writings which influenced the modem wave of feminism did not deal with violence against women in any systematic way. But Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex argued that virtually all sexual relations between men and women constituted violence. A woman's first sexual encounter is В«an act of violence which changes a girl into a womanВ». She uses all the language of unequal relationships: the woman is В«takenВ», she is В«invadedВ», she В«yieldsВ» to men's sexual advances. Susan Brownmiller was influential in promoting this kind of analysis with her book Against Our Will published in 1975. For de Beauvoir В«this has always been a man's world.В» And В«The female ... is the prey of the speciesВ». Brownmiller argued that rape В«is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. В»This theme has become prominent, at times blurring all sexism into the category of violence. It is the case that the everyday sexism of the wolf whistle, anti-women jokes, put-downs, etc create the environment in which violence from a minor nature to forcible rape and battering can occur. But to blur all these situations into one is to ignore the specificity of each and to lessen our understanding of the social relations between the sexes which lead to violence against women.
Brownmiller's book, apart from its serious theoretical problems, has a weakness which has become increasingly apparent: its concentration on В«stranger danger В», rape as a violent attack by strangers. It is now recognised that most violence against women occurs within the walls of the family home. Today, with so much emphasis on sexual violence, especially in the family, it is hard to imagine that only fifteen to twenty years ago, even feminists were reluctant to discuss the issue and accepted ideas that are now recognised as part of the ideology which minimises women's access to support and defence against violence. Brownmiller state...
