katie roiphe

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Sun Jun 20 12:34:30 PDT 1999


In message <v04011706b391755ea34e@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>
>I guess the U.S. is very different from Europe, because here women are less
>warlike, more in favor of social spending, and generally to the "left" of
>men on almost all issues.

I'm not so sure. I suspect that the figures you show could be reproduced in Britain, or the rest of Europe today. But I was looking back over the century. It was a consequence of the fact that men had a monopoly over wage labour that they were also to the left of women. With the breakdown in the sexual division of labour, one would expect women to move to the left.

There is little doubt that the reason that the British establishment supported female suffrage was because they hoped that women's votes would be a more conservative counterweight to men's. This was effectively what Mrs Pankhurst promised Lloyd George when she traded support for the war effort for the vote.

Retrospectively we tend to interpret the family values campaigns of Thatcher and Reagan as driven by male oppression. Certainly that was their character. But as I remember it, those campaigns were oriented to getting out the female vote, not the male. In 1987 I was a member of a local government union, in the education department, at a time when the Thatcher government was proposing a succession of repressive legislation, on abortion rights and upon gay rights. My fellow workers were mostly women, school secretaries, who had returned to work after having children. As a group I think it would be fair to say that they were morally conservative, especially on questions of family values, more so than most male members of Nalgo. They were also a lot more militant, when they decided to be.

-- Jim heartfield



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