by Florika, New York
 What
strategies do radical women, in groups and individually, consider
necessary for female human social liberation?
This is one
of the questions that brought twenty women from different groups across
the country together at Sandy Spring Friend School in Maryland for
the weekend of August 2-4. While the group developed no definite answers
either for a strategy of liberation or for with the system, they did
raise and examine some very crucial questions.
We began
by discussing the purpose of the individual groups, their members,
activities, and political orientation. Two basic positions prevailed.
One view feels that women's liberation leads logically and necessarily
to the destruction of capitalism The other believes that the existing
system, with its technological sophistication, might be able to absorb
and accommodate new social patterns and should therefore be attacked
directly.
It is important
to stress here that the issue was not whether women's liberation should
be separate from the struggle against capitalism or the latter undertaken
at the exclusion of our own liberation. It was a matter of emphasis.
We realized that before we can come up with a long-range strategy
we must first know our enemy.
The women
who view women 's liberation as leading directly to an anti-capitalist
stance tend to define men and the system as an interconnected enemy
(the dominators). Men are controlled through their jobs by the system,
but women, in addition to being subject to the same domination by
the system, are also under the direct domination of men.
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Implied
in this analysis is the feeling that despite the diffusion and impersonalization
of is not undergoing fundamental' changes. Accordingly, male chauvinism
and its counterpart, white racism, are not of only interrelated and
supportive of each other but may also be considered to be two of the
underlying roots of capitalism.
The other position
raises doubts about the intrinsically revolutionary nature of the woman
issue. It begins by locating certain key sources of power in the system
and examining their contemporary tools of expression.
To say that
people are controlled or manipulated by the system means that the corporation
is the institution which dominates our lives. It is an all-pervasive
social, cultural and political force. For the majority of people in
this country, it has superseded the "free enterprise" system.
Woman is directly
oppressed and subjugated by the corporation whenever she functions as
a consumer. Her mind is saturated with ads, products and gadgets at
all times, She is not only projected by the mass media as an object
and a commodity for consumption----she has in fact emulated and reinforced
that image by becoming a self-conscious, self-acting commodity.
Under modern
capitalism there are two main kinds of exploitation. One is the blatant
oppression of the non-consumer, and the other is the invisible control
of the consumer, For the middle-class woman, consumption and the mass
media have totally obliterated her sense of reality. Nothing but a full-fledged
attack by women on these"invisible" powers of manipulation
is going to put her back in touch with reality.
White racism
and male chauvinism, two characteristics of capitalism, unquestionable
exist. But they exist (Continued on P. 3)
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