>I really see no reason to assume that women are somehow
>cowed into silence on lists, or that they lack confidence in
>writing to a public forum. If anything this medium should
>serve to minimise such inequities. I think the problem is
>mainly a different one, that there are very few women
>actually subscribed to the lists you mention, just because
>they are not interesting enough to women. On all these
>forums the discussion always steers very firmly away from
>the personal. I'm not a woman but I find this very worrying,
>because I think it is an unacceptably conservative limit on
>radical questioning of class society, which depends on
>institutions like the family, like romantic love, etc., to
>reproduce itself. I'm HIGHLY suspicious of a marxism that
>anxiously cringes away from such topics. Watch how quickly
>any discussion of gender issues peters out on the Marxism
>list (on this list it never even starts!). I don't think a
>marxism list should be just an alternative news channel. It
>should be a forum for radical critique without limits. I
>think that such a marxism would become more attractive to
>women, and rightly so.
I haven't seen the subscription list of any of these lists, but it is probably true that (at least) on Leninist-International, Marxism, & PEN-L there is a dearth of women subscribers to begin with (I know on LBO there are quite a few women, which is one of the reasons why I stay on LBO -- it's just that LBO women post much less often than LBO men; maybe LBO men, on average, have more free time than LBO women; on gender & free time, see, for instance, Juliet Schor, _The Overworked American_).
I very much agree with Tahir on the urgent need for "radical critique without limits," including issues that ideology makes us think are "private problems." Esepcially with regard to gender, simply making laws gender-neutral in the so-called "public" spheres of paid employment (which is important & left incomplete) leaves the main locus of gender oppression, the generative mechanism of "genders" as we know them: the *nexus of biological & social reproduction* (the site of oppression to which Nestor rightly called attention), which in turn has a large impact on whether and how women can participate in the "public" sphere (paid employment, political organizing, etc.). In fact, how the line between the private & the public is politically drawn under capitalism in itself contributes to the making of "genders" and oppressions based upon them. Both feminists and Marxists have correctly called for the socialization of care-giving; and the issue remains important, especially in that neoliberal cutbacks of social programs have had and continue to have gender-disproportionate negative effects on women. For instance, in Japan, with radical aging of the population in the context of very inadequate old-age pensions, health care, etc., women have been compelled to take on more and more care-giving labor (taking care of the old, in addition to the sick, the disabled, the young), which has enabled capital to benefit from women's so-called "preference" for part-time labor (on gender-making, social reproduction, and part-time labor in Japan, see, for instance, Sandra Buckley, "Altered States: The Body Politics of 'Being-Woman,'" _Postwar Japan as History_, ed. Andrew Gordon, Berkeley: U. of California P, 1993); at the same time, with the increasing hegemony of the nuclear family, grandparents and relatives have been less and less available for the care of the young, while affordable public day care is in short supply, and even expensive private day care centers tend to have a long waiting list. In fact, for today's women, *day* care doesn't go far enough; for women to participate in the "public" sphere on equal terms as men, we need care facilities that are available for 24 hours a day.
Nonetheless, socialization of care-giving in itself doesn't undo gender oppression & unmake genders. For instance, studies of care-giving labor in well-developed welfare states like Sweden and socialist countries revealed that care-giving labor, even when it was publicly provided, still employed predominantly female workforce; "separate but equal" has not worked, in terms of providing equal pay, social recognition, etc. This gendering of socialized care-giving created a gender-disproportionate effect when the welfare state & socialist state came under attack. For instance, with the end of socialism in the Easten Bloc, women suffered from a higher level of unemployment than men, since their jobs were cut back first; with reactionary attacks on abortion, women have been dealt a double whammy. Now many formerly socialist women have been reduced to selling the feminine masquerade: mail brides, sex work, etc. (BTW, reactionary neoliberals & nationalists who backed capitalist restoration benefited, in their rhetoric and practice, from the sexist social relations that socialist states left untouched; socialism that does not undo gender oppression sows a seed of its own destruction.)
Yoshie