Some of them explicitly understood the important role it would play in establishing ideologies and social behaviour that would be the bulwark of their exploitative system. Caroline Chisholm was quite explicit about it when she began her campaign to establish the working class family in Australia in 1847:
Chisholm played a much more significant role than any working class man in pushing women and men into the constraints of the nuclear family. Leading feminists at the turn of the twentieth century В«eulogised motherhoodВ». Feminist writers themselves such as Marilyn Lake have documented how in fact, working class men resisted attempts to force them to live the settled life of monogamous marriage.
It is still the case today that some middle class women play a more important role in perpetuating women's oppression than most men. Women who lead the Right to Life, campaign against women's right to abortion. In the late nineties it was middle class women such as Leslie Cannold and Drusilla Modjewska who led a campaign attacking pro-choice activists for not considering the В«moralВ» dilemmas involved in abortion, implying they were wrong to support free safe abortion on demand, but should support state controls over women's right to choose. Pru Goward, appointed as Sex Discrimination Commissioner in mid-2001, well known friend and supporter of John Howard, influential newspaper columnist, and defender of big business, can hardly be expected to fight for the rights and conditions that working class women need to combat their oppression. Jocelyn Newman, Amanda Vanstone and Bronwyn Bishop preside over areas such as social services, the legal system and aged care that affect women's lives. These women and others like them such as Labor Party women parliamentarians who have supported economic rationalist policies, have vastly more power over policies affecting women, than any working class man. Bettina Arndt is well known for her attacks on single mothers and support for the gender stereotypes, receiving wide publicity in the media.
It can be shown that the sexism that permeates all of our lives creates direct benefits to the capitalist class. They get cheaper labour to help prop up profits than they would otherwise get, by paying women less and subjecting them to generally worse conditions than if women's rights were recognised. Even ruling class women benefit from the oppression of working class women as they too live off profits and employ cheap labour to do their housework and child care. The family frees them of responsibility to pay for the hours of work needed to rear children ready to be a compliant workforce in the factories and offices which generate the profits on which these ruling class women live.
However, there is another very important advantage which flows from the sexism engendered by the family and inequalities at work. That is the deep divisions it causes among workers. For workers to improve their conditions, to win reforms, they need collective organisation and struggle. Sexism (along with racism and homophobia) makes it more difficult to build such struggles than it would otherwise be. If men think women belong at home, they miss an opportunity to involve women in the struggle where they are needed. If they are so used to telling sexist jokes and denigrating women they make women feel unwelcome at a strike meeting, on a picket or at a demonstration, they harm no one but themselves and the women they offend. Because they make it much easier for their bosses to win. If women feel less confident of their rights they are less likely to join a union, or to join a picket. It does not benefit working class men to have women workers, who could be fighters in the unions, unorganised and under confident. It benefits their bosses. p> So there are massive and obvious reasons why sexist ideas are regenerated and propagated, no matter what reforms women may win. Those who own and control the wealth of society also control the dominant ideas.
But if sexism is not in working class men's interests, why do they accept sexist ideas? The vast majority of us have little or no control over the work we do, over what is produced, over who will be able to buy what we produce, or how our workplace is organised. This lack of control over a central part of our lives lays the basis for the idea that our bosses are born to rule, or at the very least, that we are powerless to do anything about their authority over us. And in the everyday run of events this is to all intents and purposes true. The only way we can challenge their rule is by banding together with others, a point we will end with below.
Once the central idea justifying the exploitation by a minority of the majority is established, rejecting any of the ideas that go along with that is very difficult. The idea that women are weaker physically, that they are natural...
