Women’s Studies Inr. Forum. Vol. 5. No. 5. pp. 451b4662 1982. Printed in Great Britain.

0277-5395/82/050451-l2$03.C0/0 Pergamon Press Ltd.

WHY THE REVOLUTION DOESN’T SOLVE EVERYTHING: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE ECONOMICS OF ‘REAL’

SOCIALISM’

HILDA SCOTT

79 Martin Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.

SynopsisisIn this paper I shall review some of the theoretical obstacles which the classical Marxist analysis ofwomen’s subordination placed in the path of the socialist movement when it attempted to solve the question of women’s inequality in practice. I will also show how the particular path of socialist construction that the Eastern European countries chose helped to perpetuate the traditional division of roles between men and women and to create a chain reaction which appears to be impervious to the demands of ideology.

1. INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade the male-dominated organizations of the political left have for the most part ceased to ridicule women’s liberation in public, and have begun to take it seriously as a movement that has proved able to mobilize large numbers for a broad spectrum of issues. Some left organizations even recognize the justification for an autonomous women’s movement and are willing to cooperate with it. None of them, however (or none that I know of), accept the necessity of incorporating feminist demands-not as individual issues but as prerequisites for a transformed society-into their political programmes. These men still firmly believe that, when you get down to it, ‘women’s problems’ can be reduced to class issues, and that socialism will solve all basic conflicts. Now that we are up to our ears in the consequences of Reagan&n-Thatcherism, women are under intensified pressure to ‘forget the secondary matters so we can get back to fundamentals.‘2

Yet concrete evidence exists in the Eastern European countries of ‘real’ socialism to illustrate how, when ‘women’s issues’ are postponed until after the solution of supposedly

’ An earlier version of this paper, entitled ‘Gender inequality in theory and practice: the case of Eastern Europe’, was given at a seminar on ‘Women and socialist development’ at the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex University, in November 1979. Portions were presented at a seminar at the Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in October 1978, and at a conference on ‘Stalinism and de-Stalinixation’ at the University of Amsterdam, in May 1979.

’ Lynne Segal predicts in ‘A local experience’ (Rowbotham, Sheila, Segal, Lynne and Wainwright, Hilary. 1979. Beyond the Fragments. Merlin Press, London.) ‘As the [British] CP and other left groups begin to scent the long- awaited revival of industrial militancy, feminists in the party will be told not to obstruct the “turn to class”’ (p. 183). In a discussion bulletin on socialist-feminism published by Solidarity, a U.S. socialist-feminist network, in the spring of 1981, Marlene Fried and Carolyn Magid write, ‘Right now we see many segments of the left-both social democratic and sectarian-retreating towards further economism. These tendencies have never supported a full feminist program; feminism has not been an integral part of their vision of socialism’ (p. 1).

451

452 HILDA SCOTT

more urgent and basic economic problems, processes are set in motion that have their own logic and preclude the realization of proclaimed goals of gender equality. It supports those who argue that real backing for ‘women’s issues’ involves basic assumptions about the way society should be changed, on which policy must be adopted before economic goals can even be defined or ranked in order or urgency.

I can predict, if the past is any guide, that someone will object that the experience of the Eastern European countries of ‘real’ or ‘actually existing’ socialism (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania) is not germane because these countries have not achieved ‘true’ socialism (i.e. our idea of socialism). This assumes that the failure of this brand of socialism to liberate women can be traced entirely to bizarre distortions in the Soviet model that would never be repeated by any proponent of democratic socialism. I shall argue that on the contrary the problem lies both in the original theory and in specific practices of these societies that are essentially exagerations of a familiar male developmental model.

2. MARXISM AS A MALE VIEW OF THE WORLD

Marx and Engels followed the French and English Utopian Socialists in regarding the status of women as a measure of the general level of society. They saw women’s social inferiority as a secondary problem, however; one which would respond to treatment of the main disease, which of course was the existence of private property. They never dealt with gender inequality in any comprehensive way during Marx’s lifetime.

It is clear from their early works that they recognized the character of women’s exploitation by men in the home. They saw the unequal division of labour in the family (‘where wife and children are slaves of the husband’) as the first primitive form of property, the prototype of exploitation (defined as the power to dispose of the labour power of others) (Marx and Engels, 1978; p. 52). Engels vividly describes women’s double exploitation in his Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1953). Marx, in his unfinished Philosophical Manuscripts, written in 1844 when he was 26, made the character of the relationship between men and women the touchstone of the extent to which the nature that we share with the animal world has become human, the specifically human character of our behaviour as a ‘species-being’ (‘the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, . . . to which man’s needs have become human needs, . . . to which in his most individual existence he is at the same time a communal being’ (Marx, 1975; p. 347).

But unlike the Utopian Socialists, who made men’s treatment of women a moral question, Marx sought a scientific explanation for all alienation and found it in the relations of material production. As Marx develops the argument in his Philosophical Manuscripts, the source of all estrangement of individuals from each other lies in the alienation of the worker from the product of his [sic] labour (the objectification of his ‘species-life’, his ‘human essence’) and its appropriation by another in the form of private property-which is at the same time ‘the product of alienated labour’ and ‘the means through which labour is alienated’ (Marx, 1975; p. 332). He writes, ‘ . . . the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are nothing but modifications and consequences of this relation.’ This is why, according to Marx, ‘universal human emancipation’ is contained in the emancipation of the workers (p. 333).

Why the Revolution doesn’t Solve Everything 453

Forty years later, after Marx’s death, Engels put forward what he believed was the evidence for the origin of women’s subordination in private property. In his preface to The Origin ofthe Family (1884) Engels wrote that in the earliest prehistoric times, social institutions were determined both by the state of development of production and by ‘ties of sex’, that is, by reproduction. But, he said, at a later stage the family comes to be ‘completely dominated by the property system’ (Engels, 1948; p. 14). This meant to Engels, and to later socialists, that the relationship between men and women could be made human, could be de-alienated, only through changes in the realm of commodity production. In industrial society, however, the world of production is man’s world. The exclusion of the family, of the sphere of personal relationships, means the virtual exclusion of the area of activity assigned to women. Together with women, the important categories of reproduction and unpaid work in the home simply drop out of sight in Marxist theory. In real life, on the other hand, they stand in a reciprocal relationship to commodity production, which could not exist without them.

It is useful here to recall an analogy developed by the Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (Smith, 1977). She points to the way Hegel analyzed the relation of the master to the servant. Hegel showed that to the master the work of the servant is invisible. The master has a direct relationship only to the end result. Marx, she continues, uses this method of analysis to justify writing a political economy from the standpoint of labour. Capitalist political economy, he said, did not study the experience of the workers in the labour process. It saw only the result of the labour incorporated in the final product. Smith has applied this to the subject matter of sociology to show how it excludes women’s experience. It can be extended specifically to Marxism.

Marxism analyzes the relation of workers in the production process, but the reproduction of the workforce and the unpaid social labour in the home, which are responsible for the fact that the workers are on the job, is invisible. Yet the exploitation of women’s sexuality and housework, which are usually defined as personal life, describe most women’s existence whether they work outside the home or not. An analysis which excludes the activity of the very people you are trying to analyze cannot be complete. This is the world seen from the perspective of a male working class.

Eli Zaretsky argues convincingly in Capitalism, The Family and Personal Life that the failure of Marxism to concern itself with personal life was compounded by the fact that the first attempt to build socialism was made in Russia, a country where because of its industrial and cultural backwardness a philosophy of personal life was not yet on the agenda (Zaretsky, 1976). Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in the first Soviet government, was one of the few people who saw that real equality involved a searching analysis of personal relationships as well as economic change (Kollontai, 1972). Her call for a ‘new morality’ can be viewed as an attempt to restore to Marxism a missing component and reintroduce the world of women. Kollontai’s ideas derived primarily from currents outside Russia, however, where industrial progress had created time and space for the cultivation of the individual. The Soviet Union needed to weaken the feudal peasant family through legal and educational measures directed at women, through easy divorce and abortion, and through heavy state intervention in the education of children. All this corresponded to the programme set forth by Engels. But the upheaval in personal relationships which this implied, the sexual revolution, could not be accepted or even comprehended by Lenin and the majority of Bolshevik leaders.

To add to the theoretical problems inherent in the Marxist solution to ‘the woman question’, Engels’ proof that women’s inferior status could be wholly subsumed under commodity production did not stand up in the light of twentieth century anthropological

454 HILDA SCOTT

research.3 This was known to at least some Bolsheviks; Kollontai takes note of it in one of her lectures at Sverdlov University in 1921 (Heinen, 1978; p. 47). Nevertheless, under Stalin in the Soviet Union and in the rest of Eastern Europe after World War II, the formula that women had been toppled from power by men to preserve their property interests, but would be reinstated as equals when private property was eliminated, became a basic tenet of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ (Scott, 1976; pp. 4041).

While Engels had suggested a role for reproduction and ‘ties based on sex’ in determining social institutions at least at the dawn of prehistory, Stalin proclaimed this to be an error. In an introduction to Engels’ Origin which is attributed to Stalin it was announced that ‘the condition which determines society’s whole physiognomy (including the relations between the sexes, the forms of the family and of marriage) is . . . the mode of production’ (Engels, 1948; p. 9). The reduction of individual relationships to manifestations of property relations was now complete. Since the mode of production was now socialist, the basic conflict had been resolved and society would draw the appropriate conclusions.

This is, of course, an example of Stalin’s simplifications and his extreme voluntarism-the belief that things will happen spontaneously from the nature of the circumstances. I believe that there is a more subtle kind of voluntarism implicit in the original Marxist theory. Since it was property relations and not men as such that originally caused women’s downfall, in theory there never was a real conflict of interests between working men and working women. Under socialism, therefore, men could continue to speak for women as well as women can speak for themselves-just as they always had done in the socialist and communist parties. It is assumed that male aims are synonymous with the aims of all society, and that the male working class will reorganize society to take over the housework and child care so that women can enter production and become economically independent and the equals of men.

Lenin in 1919 thought it quite realistic to call for a ‘mass struggle’ against housework, ‘led by the proletariat’ (Lenin, 1919; p. 233). Of course this has never taken place anywhere, and don’t hold your breath until it does! Male priorities are naturally anchored in the categories that are visible to men. In the socialist economies it is the productive sphere that transforms society and creates new values. Housework remains invisible, part of private life, and of no economic value. When women’s unpaid work is transferred to the marketplace in the form of various services, these are regarded as non-productive and of secondary importance. Women are thus incorporated into male society on male terms. I will try to show what this means in concrete circumstances.

3. THE EFFECT OF INDUSTRIALIZATION ON WOMEN IN EASTERN EUROPE

We cannot be surprised that socialist men, like capitalist men, believe that male goals and human goals overlap completely. Women themselves believed this until not long ago, and many still do. It is only recently that we have begun to realize that since there are two sexes

3 Feminist anthropologists have done much in the last decade to counteract the male bias in the field, and have produced a wealth of evidence concerning the variability of gender relationships in prehterate societies. This has helped to undermine the myth of ‘natural’ male dominance, but has not established a correlation between women’s status and the form of property such as Engels assumed. For an idea of the complexity of the issues, see the review article on anthropology by Louise Lamphere in Signs 2 (3), 612627, 1977. A summary of some recent findings ;;r in Carol Tavris and Carole Offir, The Longest War, pp. 238-269. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York,

Why the Revolution doesn’t Solve Everything 455

each experiences this fact differently, each ‘constructs reality’ differently as a result, and finds the other’s reality foreign territory. Socialism acquires from capitalism plants, technology and criteria of success which were created by men for men. It also inherits a division of labour developed over centuries and deeply rooted in society’s consciousness. Consequently there is an irresistible tendency to continue in the same male style. This style is characterized by rapid development of the productive forces, big projects, ‘scientific management’, maximum use of resources, absolute faith in technology, emphasis on material wealth, centralized decision- making and a hierarchical power structure. The resemblance between capitalist and Eastern European goals and ways of achieving them has been pointed out by authors of various persuasions (Taylor, 1979, pp. 296-299; Bahro, 1977, p. 29; Wilczynski, 1976, pp. 176-177).

In Eastern Europe the goal set in this style shortly after the end of World War II was the creation of a group of states with great industrial potential that would be independent of the capitalist market economy. Economic plans provided a crash programme for the development of heavy industry through forced accumulation and investment in each country. This was inevitably carried out at the expense of agriculture, the service sector and housing.

These plans required an enormous expansion of the industrial labour force. In most cases women were the main, if not the only, source of additional labour. One might imagine that this gave women an advantage on the labour market and an unlimited choice of jobs. Of course many factors influenced the way women’s employment developed. I will concentrate on the way industrialization was carried out because it illustrates how policies not obviously related to any goals involving women’s equality had an important effect on the kind of work available to women and eventually upon their freedom of choice.

3.1. Women in agriculture

At the end of the Second World War, only in Czechoslovakia and that part of Germany which became the German Democratic Republic were as much as half the population living in urban communities. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania were primarily agricultural lands with two-thirds to three-quarters of the population living in villages. In these four countries much of the new industry was built around a few existing large towns and cities. In Hungary one large city, Budapest, and in Bulgaria, Sofia, absorbed much of the industrial growth. This naturally led to a wave of migration to these particular areas. In a detailed study of urbanization in Eastern Europe a Czechoslovak sociologist, Jii? Musil, points out that urban growth in the 1950s and 1960s occurred in a spontaneous fashion and was only sporadically planned (Musil, 1977). The rapidly swelling industrial settlements were not capable of absorbing the changes and adapting to them. Serious difficulties were caused by the neglect of the infrastructure-shopping facilities, distribution, housing, public transport, gas and electricity, and other services.

As a result, a large commuting population developed. Table 1 shows the gap that grew in a number of countries between the percentage of the population that lived in rural areas and the percentage actually engaged in agriculture. In three countries-Romania, Poland and Hungary-this gap produced a particularly large category of peasant workers who had jobs in the city but maintained a subsistence farm, and of mixed peasant worker families where one adult travelled to the factory and the other worked in private or collectivized farming.

In Romania the number of industrial workers living in the country rose from 1.5 million in 1956 to 3.2 million 10 years later. The absolute number of people living in rural areas actually increased by 2 million or 42% in Poland between 1960 and 1970. This was greater

456 HILDA Scorr

Table 1. Urbanization and Industrialization in Eastern Europe

Year

Urban* population

(%) Index

Population employed

outside agriculture Index

G.D.R.

Czechoslovakia

1952 71.3 1964 72.9 1970 73.8 1975 75

1050 51.2 1965 61 1970 62.4 1975 66

Hungary 1949 1960 1970 1975

Poland

Romania

Bulgaria

1950 1965 1970 1975

1948 1965 1970 1975

1950 1960 1970 1975

36.4 41.2 47 50

39 50 52 56

23.4 38 40.8 44

27.5 38 53 58

100 102 103.5 105

100 119 121 129

100 44.5 113 65.8 129 73.6 137 77

100 128 133 143

100 162 174.3 188

100 138 192 211

42.8 56 65 68

25.8 43.3 50 61.9

44.5 64 72

77.2 83.5 87 89

61.4 80.5 82 85

100 108 112.6 115

100 131 135 138

100 147.8 165.4 173

100 130.8 152 159

100 167.8 232.5 240

* Urban is defined variously by individual countries, usually according to socio-economic criteria and not size. An urban community may have less than 5000 (even as few as 204lO) inhabitants.

Sources: Jifi Musil, 1977. Urbanizace v socialistick$ch zemt’ch, Svoboda, Prague; National statistical yearbooks; RG W in Zahlen/CMEA Data 1978, Vienna.

than the increment in the urban population in the same period (Musil, 1977; pp. 287,320). A Hungarian economic historian, T. Ivan Berend, has observed that in 1970, as far as the share of the urban population was concerned, Hungary was on the level of England in 1850. Yet threequarters of the population was no longer engaged in farming (Berend, 1976; p. 119).

The workers that travelled long distances to their jobs were primarily men. The existing division of labour in the home determined that women with families stayed in the village and increasingly took over the work in agriculture. While the share of the total workforce in farming steadily declined, the share of women rose. Official statistics show that they made up more than half of agricultural labour in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria as late as 1976 (Table 2).4 Hungarian figures indicating that women are less than half the farm workforce are

* The information on Poland derives from a study by Mieczyslaw Kabaj, Director of Research of the Institute of Labour and Social Studies in Warsaw, entitled Manpower Resources and Employment in Poland 19504990, published by the Wiener Institut ftir Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche, Vienna, 1978. Reliance on the official Polish statistical yearbook, which does not include private farmers in its breakdown of occupations by sex, can give the impression that women are a relatively small percentage of those working in agriculture. See for example Barbara Lobodxinska, ‘The education and employment of women in contemporary Poland, Signs 3 (3), p. 695, Table 7, 1978.

Why the Revolution doesn’t Solve Everything 457

Table 2. Women as percentage of the workforce in six East European countries

Romania Bulgaria Poland Hungary Czechoslovakia G.D.R. (1977) (1976) (1976) (1976) (1975) (1975)

Percentage of total workforce

In agriculture

In industry textiles clothing food leather printing electrical, electronics chemicals machine bldg

Construction

Communications

Transport

Trade

Non-material production health,

services education finance,

insurance municipal

services etc.

44.2 46.8

58.8 52.6

37 45.4 76.7 78% 79.2 83t

6Ot 57.6 58t 50.8 59t

35.9 22.8

9.2 17.6

50 58.3 17.9 17.5 1 53.9 64.3

46

55.4+

39.2

::

& 50% 42% 36%

43.9

40.6

44.5 68t 78t 46.7 58t

48

47.2

44.7 70

-3 84.2 50 65 50

49.6

42.9

43.7

71.0

50

47.6 42.2

30

17.3

30.4

14.9 18 16.9

66

24.2

75.7

24.5 24.1

72 63.5

37.3

71.4

54 55.7 68.7 59.9 59.6 72.3

72.3 72.8 81 77.19 80.5 64 68.8 73.3 68.25 68.2 71

60.3 73.9

32.0 52.4

80

44.7

71.4

51.5 55.98

* 1970 data. % 1965-1966 data. -% 1975 data. 4 1974 data Sources: National yearbooks; Scinteia 8 March, 22 April 1978; Note verbale of the Permanent Mission of Poland

to the United Nations, 21 July 1975 (A/10140); Miecxyslaw Kabaj, Manpower Resources and Employment in Polamf~ Wiener Institut Fti Intcmationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche, Nov. 1978; RGW in Zahkn/CMEA Data, Vienna, 1978.

misleading, since persons who work less than 90 days a year in farming are not included (Timar, 1979; pp. 18-19).’ In Hungary women typically supply the bulk of unskilled seasonal workers in the fields. Moreover, 20% of the wives of blue-collar workers (mostly in rural areas) and 45% of wives of farmers stay at home and raise animals and vegetables on their private plots. Although cooperative farms account for more than 80% of agriculture in Hungary, the government finds it expedient to support this kind of individual enterprise in order to improve food supplies. Today some 1.3 million families representing 3.9 million people, or nearly half the population, produce on their private plots or in their gardens as

5 According to an informant in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the reason for the change in the method of recording the number of farm workers, introduced in 1970, was ideological: to ‘improve’ the working class composition of the population.

458 HILDA Scxxr

much as 50% of the eggs, poultry, fruit, vegetables and pork that is put on the market.6 Most of the people doing this work are listed as housewives. Thus, although they are putting produce on the market, they are neither ‘workers’ nor ‘productive’.

The situation in Poland developed quite differently. Nearly 80% of food has been grown on private farms since the collapse of collectivization in the 1950s. The feminization of agriculture caused by migration and ‘shuttle migration’ is striking. ‘Most individual farms in Poland are operated only by the women’ (Turowski, 1972; p. 124). Barbara Tryfan, a Polish rural sociologist, reports that according to a study made in the 196Os, 130 men had migrated permanently from their village to industrial jobs for every 100 women who had done so. For every 100 women who commuted to work in production plants there were nearly 500 men. Many of these men travel long distances to work and may come home only at intervals. In Poland women have acquired modem agricultural skills and make up a high proportion of students in agricultural schools at all levels. They alone are responsible for an important part of family income and their authority in the family and the community has increased. On the other hand, in the absence of men, the women must assume full responsibility for the family as well as the farm. Tryfan reports that the average working day of the country women rose from more than 13 hours in the 1930s to more than 15 hours in the 1970s and 16 hours in the summer (Tryfan, 1976).

In contrast, in Romania more than 90% of the land is now farmed by cooperatives, and in 1974 women represented 63% of the total labour force on these farms. It is estimated that 6&70x of peasant families have at least one male member involved in permanent or temporary migration or commuting. Observers have also noted that women on the whole work considerably fewer hours in the cooperative than the men who remain (Cemea, 1978; Kideckel, 1977). Family strategy, designed to maximize earnings, usually decrees that the woman whose husband is employed elsewhere puts in just enough time in the cooperative to gain the family’s right to a private plot, where she works her remaining hours. The bulk of family responsibilities falls on her and her female relatives. While access to paid employment either on the farm or in the local community has changed the economic role of Romanian women, ‘the high number of women on cooperative farms . . . is more an indication of the low status and low pay of agricultural work than of occupational advance and greater freedom’ (Sampson, 1976; p. 332).

Women are the backbone of agriculture as long as it is based on unskilled labour and hand techniques. This situation long continued on cooperative farms because of the general policy of withholding investments from other sectors to put them into industry. As farming is gradually mechanized, however, and elderly workers retire, the total workforce decreases and individual earnings rise. Farming becomes more attractive to men. In Czechoslovakia in 1960 the average monthly earnings of a cooperative farmer were only 61% of those of a worker, while in 1976 the average cooperative member earned more than a worker.’ In that period the share of women in the agricultural labour force dropped from 52.6% to 45.7% (Statistickd rochdu~ CSSR, 1961, 1978). In the German Democratic Republic where, as in Czechoslovakia, farming is almost entirely collectivized, the female share in farming had

6 I am grateful to Prof. Magda Hoflinann of the University of Economic Sciences, Budapest, for contributing her data.

’ These figures were given in &xi&tick& zemlidelstui 11 October 1968, and P&e 3 1 August 1978. The articles are summarized in Radio Free Europe Czechoslouak Report No. 4, 31 January 1979, Munich.

Why the Revolution doesn’t Solve Everything 459

fallen to 42.9% by 1975. Moreover, 65% of women farmers were over 40 years of age (Fleischer et al., 1978; pp. 152-153). In both countries, among young people learning farming skills women are a majority of those studying gardening and animal husbandry, a minority of those training for better paid jobs in mechanized crop cultivation.

3.2. Women in industry

Women were the main source of personnel for the new urban workforce in all the Eastern European countries, and in the cities a much wider range of jobs was open to them. At the same time, the move to the city did not represent a qualitative lightening of women’s household tasks because of the scissors effect. While an urban environment requires a greater per capita investment to satisfy basic human needs, the economic policies of the 1950s and 1960s consciously diverted funds and labour away from consumer goods, housing, transportation, utilities and other services. Berend writes that in Hungary between 1950 and 1960 industry recorded an annual growth rate of more than lo%, contributing to the slow growth of agriculture (0.7 % annually) and the stagnation of housing (Berend, 1976; p. 114). In spite of officially expressed intentions to improve the balance, the share of industrial production devoted to consumer goods actually declined between 1960 and 1974 in five of the six countries, and rose only slightly in Hungary (Paradyz, 1976; p. 207). In 1975,22-38 % of the workforce in these rapidly industrializing countries was employed in the service sector, compared to 5065% in Western Europe and the U.S.

While in the West this highly developed tertiary sphere offers numerous unnecessary and wasteful services, by-passing the needs of many who cannot pay high prices for essentials, in the East basic requirements for life in industrial society have not been met. As a by-product of this situation, a whole officially invisible and partly illegal service sector has grown up, known as the second economy. Skilled craftsmen of all kinds engage in moonlighting and cannot keep up with demand: building workers, plumbers, painters, carpenters, auto mechanics etc. In turn they are able to pay their fellow moonlighters for other services or obtain an inside track for the purchase of scarce goods. Markus and Hegedus (1976; p. 112) report that in Hungary at the beginning of the 1970s earnings in this ‘free market’ economy were at double the official rate. Moonlighting is a male activity, and this naturally has an effect on the male-female earning gap, the actual distribution of labour, and the actual amount of free time men have available for home and children.

Not just people’s prejudices rooted in traditional ideas about male and female roles, but the entire macrostructure directed the deployment of the female workforce along conventional lines from the beginning. Table 2 shows how similar the pattern is in all six countries.

As I have discussed elsewhere at length, the multiple pressures on women, and particularly urban women, were reflected in a declining birthrate which in turn prompted a series of measures directed at women’s behaviour rather than at economic priorities : restrictions on the right to abortion; extended child care leaves which help to strengthen the traditional division of labour; protective legislation which further limits women’s employment opportunities (Scott, 1976-1979). The creation of a living and working environment consistent with Marxist promises to liberate women would have required a major shift in economic and social aims. Significantly for the argument that democratic socialism would do things differently is the experience of Czechoslovakia during the short-lived Dub&k regime in 1968 known as ‘Prague Spring’. The Action Programme adopted by the Communist Party and the government, which outlined numerous democratic reforms of the economy and the

460 HILDA Scorr

whole social structure, and drew the wrath of the Soviet Union, was 63 pages long. One short paragraph was devoted to the situation of women. It was recognized that this was a serious political question that had been neglected, but none of the predominantly male reformers thought of it as something that had to be solved as an integral part of the solution of all other economic and social problems.8

4. OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION-A CONTINUING TREND

East Germany represents a special case among the Eastern European countries because it inherited from capitalism-a relatively high level of industrial development and a stable urban structure when it became the German- Democratic Republic. Its experience is therefore particularly instructive for women in the advanced Western countries.

The G.D.R. owes its post-war expansion almost entirely to women, more so than any ofthe other countries of ‘real’ socialism with the exception of the Soviet Union. It has taken concrete legislative and administrative steps not only to give women professional and occupational skills but to make on-the-job training and promotions available to them. It has introduced farm machinery especially designed to be suitable for women to operate. It has not restricted the right to abortion, which has been available on demand since 1972. It did not introduce its ‘baby year’ until it could accommodate a majority of pre-school children in day care (today 60% of those under 3 and 90% of those aged 3-6) so that mothers actually have a choice between going back to work immediately after childbirth or staying home for a year. Family law places responsibility for the conduct of the household and the care of children on both partner~.~ Yet in the G.D.R. the home remains women’s sphere and the workforce is somewhat more segregated than in Czechoslovakia (Table 2), to which almost none of the above applies. There has been a steady trend towards polarization of men’s and women’s jobs from the beginning.‘O

It is true that women make up a much greater proportion of workers in industry in the G.D.R. and the other East European countries than they do in the West. This is not only because of the higher overall participation rate for women due to the shortage of men. Another important reason is that in the East the demand for women has coincided with a period of expansion of industrial em$oyment which is still continuing. In Western Europe, however, opportunities for women began to grow when the need for industrial workers was declining. Between 1960 and 1970-a period of economic boom-in all West European

’ ‘Also part of the deformation of Party and State policy is the fact that in the past the problem of women, especially of employed women, was not considered an important political question. It is necessary to accord women the place in state, economic and cultural policy which corresponds to the principles of socialist democracy and the significant share pla ed by women in creating the material and intellectual values of society.’ AkEni program komunisrickP strany E e&sloven&a Prague, 1968, p. 13 (my translation).

9 For a comprehensive description of East German policies and measures relating to the position of women, see the collection published by the Advisory Council on Women in Socialist Society attached to the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic: Kuhrig, Herta and Speigner, Wulfram, eds., Zur gesellschqftlichen Stellung der Frau in der D.D.R. Verlag fur die Frau, D.D.R. Leipzig, 1978. It is unfortunately almost entirely lacking in statistical data.

i” For example, in the G.D.R. between 1955 and 1975 the total number ofworkers in the service sector (including trade and communications) arew bv 675,000,. the number of women in this sector by 710.000. When in 1960 45% of all gainfully employed East&m& women were working in service occupations, the corresponding figures for males was 28%. By 1975 the percentage of females had reached 52%, while the percentage of all men remained at 28%. In other words, thegap had increased. Calculated from Sratistisches Jahrbuch der D.D.R. 1976,,pp. 53-54.

Why the Revolution doesn’t Solve Everything 461

countries except Finland and Italy, the proportion of the workforce engaged in industry either fell or remained stable (due to automation and the export of some production), while the services were the dynamic sector.”

Although industry has grown faster than services in Eastern Europe, the share of women in the services has grown faster than their participation in industry. It seems probable that the rate of increase will be more rapid when rationalization eventually slows the growth of industrial employment.

5. DI!XXSSION

By excluding women’s unpaid labour from production and reducing the relations between men and women to a function of production relations, classical Marxist theory effectively renders women invisible and places decision making about the future structure of society lirmly in the hands of men, who traditionally dominate production. It does not uncover the dialectic relationship between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ and the necessity of synthesizing the needs which arise out of these two areas of life. It encourages the assumption that women can be successfully integrated and ‘made equal’ in a society whose goals and priorities continue to be set from a male perspective.

East European experience demonstrates the complicated way ‘public’ and ‘private’ interact and the cost of ignoring this in countries at various stages of economic development. Even an industrially advanced society like the G.D.R., which ranks high as far as meeting the conventional requirements for women’s equality are concerned, does not deviate from the trend whereby industrialization and increased employment of women lead to increased occupational segregation (and with it perpetuation of income differentials and the unequal division of tasks in the home). The drift is not reversed by mechanization, technological changes, improvement in services.

6. CONCLUSION

Just as the old conditions for women’s equality-first education, then the vote, then jobs and equal pay legislation-proved to be not enough, so the new conditions-anti- discrimination legislation, affirmative action, day care-while likewise essential, are not enough. The vast hidden economic contribution of women stands between them and equal participation in the visible economy. What is needed to begin with, and what is actually emerging in feminine scholarship,” is a questioning of classic economic assumptions and goals, and a redefinition of such concepts as production, wealth, growth, efficiency and economic democracy.

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