vengeance. What such a position refuses to take into account and what women's liberation asserts is the specific oppression of women.
Within modern society women are made inferior and dependent. Our inferiority is given "scientific" biological justification. We are inefficient and unpredictable, due to premenstrual depression, emotional and irrational, therefore cannot be given responsibility; our only fulfilment comes trom bearing children, therefore our natural place is in the home. The kinds of jobs we do bear this out. Typists, workers in electronics because of our dexterity, teachers because of our special relationship to children-like paid mothers;
nurses because of our patient humanity and our role as life-givers and nurturers.
We are always, somehow, "naturally" suited to the low-paid work we do, and to the subservient role we play. Society thus asserts the results of our oppression as the cause of that oppression.
What women's liberation does is to confront these social definitions' and taking them as a starting point to begin to redefine the woman question. The criticism that to discuss our role as housewives and mothers, our Scruan commercialisation, the family women's exclusion from public production and from political work as "trivial complaints" about "petty problems" is arrogant, ludicrous and totally apolitical.
The oppressed are defined largely by the oppressive system. Women are defined by men as the agents of that oppression. The fact that our subjugation permeates all relationships including personal relationships indicates the need to locate the struggle at all levels of experience. (This in turn challenges the sexual ideology of existing revolutionary groups.)
The fact is that most women come to Women's Liberation through discontent with their individual situations. This itself has important implications both for the analysis of woman and for the practise of the movement. Women are socialised to regard their most important vocation as that of marriage and child-rearing.
talism is a better vehicle. No-one realised the fundamental importance of repressive culture in analysing the woman's situation better than Mao-tse-Tung who when writing of the suicide of Miss Chao said:
was to seek life. If Miss Chao rather sought death it was because circumstances drove her there. The circumstances in which Miss Chao found herself were the following: 1) Chinese society; 2) the Chao family of Nanyang st., in Changsha; 3) the Wu family of Kantzuyan St. in Changsha, the family of the husband she did not want. These three factors constituted three irons nets, composing a kind of triangular cage. Once caught in these three nets, it was in vain that she sought for life in every way possible. There was no way for her to go on living, the contrary of life is death, and Miss Chao felt compelled to die...if among these three factors there had been one that was not an iron net, or if one of these nets had opened, Miss Chao would certainly not have died...If Miss Chao is dead today it is because she was solidly enclosed by the three irons nets (society, her own family, the family of her future husband)"
The woman under capitalism may not be situated in such a tight geometrical trap, but is certainly as isolated as was woman in traditional China. If we seek life we must come fully to grips with the rigidity of the circumstances outside ourselves. which have made what we are. A suicide of the nature of Miss Chao's reflects those social factors which dominate the individual, and particularly the individual woman, who, robbed of the will and the power to change them by herself is forced into submission.
Male chauvinists who try to trivialise women's liberation groups as "group therapy" sessions are simply reinforcing a bourgeois ideology which tries to mask social oppression and reduce it to the level of a personal neurosis. The way in which we assert the social nature of our oppres sion, in these preliminary stages of the Women's liberation movement, is thus through the politicisation of psychology.
"private, they don't work with other secretaries, but usually for one or more men. Even if the boss is a woman the odds are that the secretary isn't going to be man. This isolation confuses: like the housewife we might feel-and we'll certainly be induced by the office structure to feel-that our frustrations are individual maladjustments to a well-tried system. But when we talk to each other we soon find that our experience is a shared one. Only by clarifying this common area and by working out its rationale can we begin to have a basis for concerted action.
To some extent we are losers even before we get to work. The tube ads showing the most desired woman in the world' after her 7½ hours of super-typing must be set against the 'Hints for Comportment' promulgated in the dingy secretarial manuals. Job expectations beginand end here: Do not have preferences. if preferences among the staff or customers, it means you have dislikes also...Outmust nevertheless present a 'neat, tidy, polite and genial impression' to that strange and awesome creature advertisementseither strange and awesome, or even individualistic, Since it is patterned by the structure of the work situation. Compare this structure the bourgeois family structure: it fits exactly. The paternalistic boss (male) and the inferior secretary (female) doing the drudgy chores, always on a collar and lead lest she should stray too far.
A brief description of my own experience will illustrate what mean-and this experience is not unique. The two of us who work as secretaries for a small group of men have different backgrounds, and we react—in some details differently to the situation. Anne left school at 15 is married and has two children. What she resents most are the exten sions of her Housewife role forced on her: she is the one who has to make the coffee, buy the biscuits and lava tory paper and see that the place is tidy. She says she does enough charring at home. What oppresses me most-this being my first job since leaving university-are the strict boundaries of my job. I don't have ideas; I only type out other people's. If I point out a spelling mistake that's just about the limit of my terri tory. A suggestion for a more substantive change is ignored Consequently, although what
----- pull-quotes -----
"A suicide is entirely determined by cir- cumstances. Was the original idea of Miss Chao to seek death? On the contrary it
side the office you can let yourself go, but inside you must keep steady'. Even though devoid of feeling we