Here is more from Selma James:
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2008/11/selma-james-–%C2%A0a-class-act-on-sex-race-and-power/
Selma James – A class act on sex, race and power
Sixty years after the publication of the women’s movement’s classic A Woman’s Place, Cary Gee talks to its author, Selma James, and asks where now in the struggle for female equality
by Tribune Web Editor
Monday, November 3rd, 2008I am used to conducting interviews in the cool and orderly surroundings of a ministerial office or in the quiet intimacy of a hotel, so arriving at the somewhat chaotic Crossroads Women’s Centre in north London, a building which houses a proliferation of women’s groups, including Wages Due Lesbians and the English Collective of Prostitutes, takes some getting used to, as do the boisterous border collies that take up a position at my feet. But then their owner, Selma James, is no ordinary interviewee.
Born in Brooklyn in 1930, she worked in factories before becoming a full-time wife and mother. At the age of 15, she joined the Johnson-Forest tendency, the radical left movement, one of whose leaders was CLR James, the renowned writer, Marxist, cricket enthusiast and her future husband. At the age of 22, she wrote the classic
A Woman’s Place.
As soon as she finishes the soup someone brings her for lunch, I ask her where a woman’s place is now. October 30 this week has been declared “Women’s No Pay Day” by the Fawcett Society. The pay gap between men and women in Britain is so large, claims the organisation, that women effectively work the final two months of the year for nothing. “The terrible thing is that the book is not completely outdated”, she says, while acknowledging that a woman’s place has shifted.
“When I wrote the book, women had to fight to go out to work. And men were ashamed to help around the home. Now men are more likely to ask women: “Why are you working?’ Fundamentally, men and women still lead separate lives.
Despite the fact that millions of women go out to work, it still comes down to housework. It’s a tragedy. The two sexes live lives where they deeply misunderstand each other. Women may be working in non-traditional jobs, but men are not. There may be 200 women in a company, but only two in the management. This does not change the nature of the division between the sexes.
It’s really a horrendous situation and an education for children. You do not have to tell a child where a woman’s place is. They see it – and have seen it from the moment their eyes are open. You’re not going to convince any child that we’re equal.”
James recalls her experiences of having to work to support her own son, who was born when she was just 17, her disquiet at having to rely on outside childcare and her first realisation that women needed financial independence.
“I met a woman who had collected all her children’s outgrown clothes and strung them on a line. I asked her why. She told me she was selling them, that if she didn’t get some money of her own she would go crazy. What she expressed was something deep within every woman’s experience.”
When James was again offered work outside the home, she reached the conclusion which has remained with her. “What was wrong with society was not that women were at home, but that men were not. If men worked less, the family would not be so fragmented.”
She is quick to dismiss any notion that this idea of family plays into the hands of conservative politicians. “Absolutely not. My proposal is not that one parent works while the other stays at home. Both parents should work outside the home and both parents should look after the children. The right wing is not saying this. Neither is the left. Nor are feminists.”
So did an earlier generation of feminists miss the point? “They were making a different point. This was that there was a lot of talent among women and why weren’t they getting a piece of the action? I never believed in that, I believe we are all extremely talented and that to divide us between those who have talent and those who do not undermines any conception of equality in society. I cannot possibly be in favour of a few people moving up. Society is built on a very inhumane basis. I found that out long before the banks failed”, she adds with a wry smile. “All that happened when a few women moved up was an integration of the establishment. I certainly did not need Margaret Thatcher, although in some ways it was useful to show that a woman can be as much of a pig as a man.”
On the subject of the Iron Lady, James is less than forgiving. “Thatcher said there was no such thing as society and then built a society in her image. She trained young people in all sorts of ways to think as she did. And we are still paying through the nose for it. Boy, does she have a lot to answer for. When Thatcher dies, people will not say we have lost someone big. They will say we have lost someone deeply destructive.” Thatcher’s legacy, according to James, is to have created a generation of politicians in her own image. “The business of politicians now is to keep the lid on – and they do it in a variety of ways. They manage us. That’s their job. That’s all. They discourage us from going for the things we want. They offer cups of tea at crucial moments to prevent us from boiling over and I think Tony Blair was much better at it than Gordon Brown. Blair was also a much better liar than Brown and should have received an Academy Award for it. Hollywood missed out on a great talent.”
It seems the only politician in Britain James has any respect for is John McDonnell. She describes him as a good and, more importantly, an honest man. Most politicians indulge in “skulduggery, lying, and since Thatcher, they are thieves as well”.
James has lived in Britain since 1955 and says: “Throughout that time, you would never have believed that politicians would steal from the people, until 1979 when Thatcher came in. Of course, they stole in the colonies, but they were careful with what they stole.”
Given such a bleak diagnosis how can we possibly engage young people in politics? “Tell the truth’ says James. “When Hugo Chávez was elected, he told people the truth. Barack Obama does not tell the truth. He is a classic example of someone who told the truth when seeking the nomination, but stopped telling the truth when it was in the bag and he had an election to win. Chávez was trying to do something else. He wanted to change the world. I don’t think Obama wants to change the world.”
However, James is convinced that, while the United States might not be ripe for another revolution just yet, people all over the world over know a lot more than their politicians give them credit for. The bank crisis is just one example. And for the first time James is unable to control her anger.
“I sat here fuming, while bankers received huge bonuses for failing. And then the Government comes along and gives them more money. These people had been stealing and everyone knew they had been stealing.” Instead of bailing out failure James would rather have seen those responsible thrown into jail. “For stealing, you should go to prison. Especially when the people you have stolen from then have to give you more money to save the businesses you have bankrupted. Something is very wrong here. Instead the crooks are in the House of Commons or in the boardroom pocketing millions.”
However, James does not necessarily agree with “Nye Bevan’s idea of nationalisation”, claiming it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. But doesn’t money have to circulate somehow?
“Not necessarily”, counters James, who believes it is not too late to create a very different kind of economy. She talks with enthusiasm about the “eBay generation, bartering and ‘freecycling’. She recently managed to acquire a new fridge without money changing hands.
“Of course, it’s absurd to think the whole economy can be run this way, but there has to be a better way to organise things. Millions are starving, the people in charge are stealing and we are all going to lose our jobs and homes because of the mess they have made. We couldn’t do a worse job.”
James contends that politics is all about the abuse of power. “Politicians see who is weak and who is strong and whom they can use against whom. It has nothing to do with what they actually think about you. They ask themselves: ‘Are you strong? Can you make trouble? Do I have to give you something? Or are you weak and can I ignore you?’ Mothers and in particular single mothers are always weak. Mothers remain unwaged. That’s a deep weakness.” Nevertheless, James believes that her campaign for paid housework will become a political reality sooner rather than later and adds that she recognises a “palpable change” in women’s attitudes.
“In the 1960s, women determined to tell men where to get off. They decided to get a job and pay off their own mortgages. At some point in the 1990s, a lot of women grew very tired. They are literally exhausted and ask themselves: ‘What is all this in aid of?’ They have changed. They are not willing to give up independent money, but many are ready to give up the outside work.”
Wages for housework is a “no-brainer” for James. “You will find very few people with the courage to disagree, because it’s just so obvious. In a world being destroyed by war, it has to be right to invest in caring not killing.”
Despite this, James sounds a note of indignant fury when she talks about how members of the armed forces are treated. “You can not live knowing billions have been spent on arms and a young man dies because his helicopter was not properly kitted out. It is not important whether these tragedies occur through incompetence or stupidity.”
But James is no pacifist. She cites the example of a murderous elite operating in Bolivia, killing indigenous people for their own economic ends “because they have always done so” and says: “I think that killing these murderers would be entirely justified. The thing about killing is that if you are doing it for a good purpose, you don’t have to do a lot of it.”
She is in no doubt that, if the West had dropped food on Iraq instead of bombs, Saddam Hussein would have been removed by his own people without thousands of Iraqi lives being lost. “All we had to do was say: ‘Here’s the first instalment. Overthrow that son of a gun and more food will follow.’ If we didn’t want to kill the population, we should not have bombed them.”
Finally, James touches on the subject of race relations. As one half of a mixed marriage, these have played a major part in her life. She pours scorn on one police officer who was sacked for displaying a racist emblem on his uniform. “You’re not supposed to do that. You should at least wait until you’re off duty and not wearing a uniform before you beat the hell out of black people.” Stop and Search is, claims James a euphemism for “Stop and interfere with, stop and beat up, and sometimes something much worse.”
“No one is discussing the fact that the British National Party made inroads into the police and that sections of the police are clearly connected with the BNP. I do not want any member of a racist organisation in charge of law and order, in charge of children. Why are the BNP not vilified in the same way as child molesters?”
Without pointing the finger at new Tory Mayor Boris Johnson, James echoes Doreen Lawrence’s assertion that he is not the right leader for London. “I think schoolboys should play, not wield power over the rest of us. I do not think Johnson is fit to govern but I do not think he is unusual in that.
“Something in this country has disintegrated. We are trying to defend the indefensible. In our society, people are deeply unhappy, apart from those who have derived great financial benefit from it. But I don’t think even these people have much of a thrill in their lives. You can never be happy living in a prison.”
James believes all people in power are there “simply to keep us in order. They have no leadership, they have no standards and no principles.” So who should be in charge instead? Finally this remarkable woman runs out answers.
“I’m in the same position as everyone else. Whom do you vote for when everyone else is more or less the same? This wasn’t true when I came to this country in 1955. Then you knew the difference. Labour was on your side.”
