[THE Coventry Committee for a Woman'e Risht tn…]

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THE Coventry Committee for a Woman'e Risht tn Work which is campaigning in support of both the demonstration and the festival on June 5, has registered some important successes.

Regular meetings of the committee have been held for some time, with an average attendance of 20.

Delegates and/or sponsorships so far have come from the Labour Party (District Women's Council, SE Constituency Labour Party, the NW, SW and SE Women's Sections, Radford, Upper Stoke,. Earlsdon and Whoberley ward Labour Parties.

support has come from eldester is coaches from Leicester 1 the trades ASIMS, NU. A Amira ATTT NUPE Sch GEC, CPSA Warwick M Civil Servant utive, and f groups int Coventry Wo and Covent Fightback as the Coventry Tenants.

Local orgal been asked coach seats and this has over £200.

The idea is seats on the so far booked neople who Three attri recognition. ouncil, UCW, rE Hospitals, ools, APEX Coventry and ISC Branch, s' Area Execrom women's eluding the men's Group, ry Women's well as from Federation of nisations have to sponsor at £5 a time so far raised ; to allow free five coaches for low waged want to take ne 5 activities. active leaflets (Labour PPC East) speak• Watson from immittee for a ght to Work. bout 30 people was a very hot he traditional of this year. •ment. We're contect with have been produced' so far and a large proportion of the cost of this was raised last Saturday at a successful fund-raising social.

A week. of action has been organised for May 2229 during which the main shopping area in the city will be leafleted.

A local alternative register of women who are unemployed but cannot sign on is being compiled and a questionnaire on women's" experiences in job seeking is also being used.

On Friday 21st, the week of action will be launched at a public meeting with speakers from Kigass in Leamington, • --e - 1L- ine Women's Right to an Income Campaign, local NHS workers and the Committee itself.

The success achieved in Coventry shows just what can be done. The key is and ti THE NORTH-West Action Committee for a Woman's Right to Work was set up as The group has since then er of trade unions and LabGreater Manchester area.

International Women's DEMON 1000 MANIES consistent work and big thinking.

It's better to book eight coaches, work to fill them and readjust your size he North aign, Women's Right to Work, and the US mineworkers' union.

Organising

The last iwo months have been spent organising support in the labour movement for both the June 5 demonstration and a North West demonstration, to be held in the autumn. This North-West event is sponsored by Salford Trades Council, Bury NALGO, a number of ASTMS and CPSA branches, and women's sections, women's coun cils, and constituency Lab10•30 TO JOIN IN NATIC FEST our Parties in the area.

involved should write to:

ittee for a Woman's Right to Work, 61 Bloom St, Manchester 1, or ring 061 636 0350 (ask for Kath) between 10 and 5 any weekday.

Train tickets for June 5 are priced £10 for adults and £5 for children: The train leaves Manchester at 7.40, and you can return either Saturday or, if you wish to stay for the CND demo, Sunday.

KATH CAULFIELD less alienated, more human, than wage labour. It is a sort of 'work' which merges without a sharp frontier into 'life'. It is also said to give the individual more freedom in how the work is done - though Ann Oakley cites a survey which suggests that this is only half-true. Housewives, it found, feel pressured by working to time limits even more than assembly-line workers do.

Maybe 'work' merges into 'life' - but 'lite' is also drowned in 'work' Housework in any case is extremely isolated and isolating work - in contrast to wage labour which generally slots the individual into a huge cooperative effort. Millions of housewives carry out similar work each day, side by side, but rarely with any cooperation.

This isolation, it seems, is a major factor in the depression which hits housewives - especially housewives who do not also have iwage-jobs - much more "than other people.

For-many housewives it is worse than that. IsolatFIGHTBACK are wife-beating.

When housewives do get a job outside the home, it is very often one where the work is much like domestic labour - cleaning, laundry, nursing, teaching... -And it is usually low-paid:

Most oppressed Housewives, then, have a fair claim to be the most oppressed workers in the working class. But these workers have no trade union, no shop steward. They do not even have any wages. After all her labour the woman houseworker is usually left dependent on what a male wage-worker

Conclusions

Ann Oakley's book only briefly covers the 'wages for housework' debate, and not at all the even longer debate on the economic theory of housework which has concerned Marxists and feminists since the early '70s. But her political conclusions are clear.

''The housewife role must be abolished. The family must be abolished. Gender roles must be abolished". On the economic level we must socialise housework, on the legal level we must enable people to live in whatever groupings they choose, on the ideological level we must break down stereotypes of women's roles and men's roles.

Ann Oakley backs up these conclusions with a thorough demolition of the idea that women's present role is natural and unchangeable. Some societies, she shows, have only a very slight division of labour by sex. And the separation off of housework as women's job in the home, placed outside the world of social production, is a specific product of capitalism.

Specific Women's oppression dates back over thousands of years - but its specific form today is the result of the combination of pre-existing male domination with an economic system which makes wage-labour (in society) and housework (in the home) two opposed but interdependent poles.

Ann Oakley's concluding chapter quotes Lenin: 'No nation can be free when half the population is enslaved in the kitchen". By the same token, no working class struggle can be socialist unless together with the fight against wage-slavery it includes a women's movement rebelling against domestic slavery.

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