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SOVIET WOMEN-EQUAL BUILDERS OF THE SOCIALIST SOCIETYWomen in the Land of Socialism
N. Popova
VI. The Condition of Women Abroad
In all capitalist countries – in the U.S.A., England, France, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc., and in the colonial countries – women’s political, economic and civil rights are to a greater or lesser degree curtailed. Women enjoy no equality with men in society.
The “theory” that women are inferior is part and parcel of the ideology of the contemporary bourgeoisie, a tool in its fight against democracy and Socialism. The practical aim of this “theory,” besides that of upholding and perpetuating conditions most advantageous for the unbridled exploitation of the working people in general and of women in particular, is to exclude women, who comprise half of humanity, from public and political activity and struggles. The bourgeois ideologists realize that the larger the section of exploited people who take part in the active political struggle grow, the more acute will that struggle become and all the more reason will there be for misgivings about the fate of capitalism. The unavowed but real aim of all the diverse bourgeois “theories” on the woman question is to prevent the millions of working women from taking a direct and active part in the class struggle, and thus to hamper the course of social development and prolong the existence of capitalism.
The ruling classes of the U.S.A. leave no stone unturned in their efforts to present the American way of life as the ideal of political freedom and democracy. But no matter how hard they try, the journalists, “scholars” and politicians, bought and maintained by the magnates of capital, cannot convince anyone that the U.S.A. is a model of democracy and political freedom.
Innumerable facts disprove the fairy tale about American democracy, assiduously spread by the bourgeois ideologists and propagandists for the purpose of deceiving millions of people both in the U.S.A. and in other countries on which the American imperialists want to fasten their will. One need but acquaint oneself with the condition of women in the U.S.A. to see how utterly narrow, empty and false is American bourgeois democracy.
Officially, under the Federal law, American women enjoy equal rights with men. But this is mere form. Bourgeois legislators have nothing against passing a law now and then which may give them a chance to advertise their “democracy.” But it is a far cry from legislated rights to their actual implementation.
The factories and mills, mines and power stations, oil fields and railways, trading firms and banks are in the hands of an insignificant minority, of a handful of monopolists who are the real bosses of the country. The possession of untold wealth gives them the power to subordinate the government’s internal and foreign policy to their own interests. They own all the means by which ideological influence is exerted on the masses – the newspapers, radio, publishing houses, cinema, etc. The millions of exploited people, on the other hand, do not possess one thousandth of the material means and opportunities necessary in order to oppose the truth, that which might really promote the interests of the people, to the stupefying, corrupting propaganda of the bourgeoisie. Clearly, under such conditions the really free expression of the wishes of the great majority of voters – the working people of town and country – is virtually ruled out.
In 1924 Comrade Stalin gave an exhaustive characterization of bourgeois democracy, one which has been borne out again and again by subsequent developments. “Under capitalism,” he said, “the exploited masses do not, nor can they, really participate in the administration of the country, if for no other reason than that, even under the most democratic regime, governments, under the conditions of capitalism, are not set up by the people but by the Rothschilds and Stinneses, the Rockefellers and Morgans, Democracy under capitalism is capitalist democracy, the democracy of the exploiting minority, based on the restriction of the rights of the exploited majority and directed against this majority.”45
By its very nature bourgeois democracy always has been and always will be, as Lenin and Stalin repeatedly stressed, formal democracy, pseudo democracy. Bourgeois democracy is one political form of the rule of the bourgeoisie, of the propertied classes. It is inimical to the people, because it is directed against their real rights and interests. This anti popular essence of bourgeois democracy becomes most evident when we consider the condition of women.
The bourgeois ideology according to which women should be relegated to an inferior position in society is widely propagated in the United States. At the first session of the Council of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Prague in February 1947, the American delegate Helen Phillips pointed out that in the U.S.A. women have to wage an incessant struggle against public pressure exerted by the press, radio, cinema, the clergy, who describe women as inferior beings of no importance to the country. Fully in accordance with this ideology and in manifest contradiction to the Federal law, which proclaims the equality of women, the laws of various states greatly restrict women’s rights in society and in the family. Under the laws of forty-one states a married woman can have no other residence save her husband’s. In eight states the husband alone has the right to dispose of the family’s property. The laws of six states compel women to turn their earnings over to their husbands. In four states women’s right to conclude contracts or agreements is limited.
All these laws plus the widespread propaganda belittling women’s role in society actually lead to their exclusion from participation in the political life of the country. The facts speak for themselves. The number of women in the highest government bodies is insignificant – of 435 members of the U. S. House of Representatives, only nine are women. Women comprise only two per cent of the members of state legislatures.
The equal pay for equal work issue is still on the order of the day. In recent years this issue has become a particularly sore point because during the war, when many of the men were called up, while war production was being vastly expanded, millions of women entered industry. In 1944 the number of women in industry was eighteen million, or over 30% of all labour employed. During that period women’s wages increased slightly, but by the end of the war they were still, on the average, only 65% of men’s wages for the same work. To this day women in the U.S.A. are paid less than men for the same work.
When the war ended, the position of women in the U.S.A. became much worse. Unemployment hit them first. Several million women workers were discharged. Yet only 16 out of 100 women who work can subsist in case they lose their jobs. The U.S.A. laws do not guarantee working women maternity leave. On the contrary, in most cases women are fired at the first signs of pregnancy.
This is women’s inevitable lot in a capitalist country, where everything is subordinated to the interests of a handful of exploiters. Millions of American women whose work during the war yielded the exploiting capitalists billions of dollars in profits have now become superfluous, thrown out of work and doomed to poverty and starvation.
Very few women in the U.S.A. are in the position to obtain a college education. High tuition fees are the first barrier, for only well-off Americans can pay them. Besides, not all institutions of higher education admit women. Even medical colleges, where one might expect women to make up a considerable part of the student body, have a 5% quota for women.
Racial discrimination is a part of the American scene. Negroes were slaves for centuries, and their status is virtually the same today. This has always been considered a natural state in bourgeois America. Even Abraham Lincoln, an outstanding progressive leader in the fight against slavery in America, set himself very limited objectives. He said that it was not his intention to introduce political and social equality between the races.
And political and social equality between whites and Negroes certainly does not exist in America today.
The laws of most of the states forbid marriages between whites and Negroes, Indians or representatives of the “Mongolian” races. The penalty for infringement is imprisonment for from two to ten years. In some states, according to these laws, persons with l/4 “non-white” blood are classed as Negroes, Indians or representatives of other non-white races. In other states the corresponding figure is 1/3, and under a Virginian law a person with 1/16 non-white blood is not legally a member of the white race.
The discriminatory race legislation in America does not differ from the pure “Aryan” blood policy the Nazis enforced in their day. As a matter of fact, the ruling classes of America were the predecessors of the German obscurantists, in this respect.
Considering all this, it is easy to understand how cheerless is the life of the 6,000,000 Negro women in the U.S.A. Since the first slave ship arrived in North America three hundred years ago, Negro women in the U.S. have been exploited ruthlessly, and to this day they are employed on the heaviest and dirtiest jobs, mostly unskilled – as laundresses, scullery maids, domestic servants.
According to figures for 1940, only eight per cent of working Negro women were employed in industry. This percentage increased somewhat during the war, but when the war ended Negro women were the first to be discharged or transferred to heavy and dirty work. The average wage for Negroes is half that of a white worker. Hardly any safety devices or proper sanitary conditions are provided for Negro labour. As a result, the mortality rate among Negro women and children is twice as high as among white women and children.
Negroes in the U.S.A. live under unbearable conditions. They cannot reside in sections where white people live. The Negro sections are overcrowded and sanitation there is very poor. In many states Negroes are debarred from moving-picture houses, theatres, libraries, restaurants patronized by whites, nor may they ride with whites in the same street cars or railway cars. Lynching of Negroes is still a frequent occurrence in the U.S.A. Day after day the newspapers, books, theatre, cinema, radio conduct unbridled anti-Negro propaganda, no different from the racist hate propaganda which the German fascists carried on against many peoples of the world.
The position of Negroes in the U.S.A. is a manifest example showing that in capitalist society the class oppression of the working people is combined with national oppression, both products of this society. Millions of Negro women in the U.S.A. endure a triple yoke – as women, as workers, as Negroes.
Since the end of the second world war American imperialism has adopted an aggressive, openly expansionist policy, aiming to gain world supremacy, and, naturally, the reactionary forces have stepped up their offensive against the democratic rights of the working people in the U.S.A. The American imperialists are bent on introducing more and more fascist methods in the country’s political life, in order to crush the class protest of the exploited and all popular resistance to the policy of reckless ventures abroad.
The Taft-Hartley Law actually nullifies the workers’ rights. According to this law, the capitalists, in violation of obligations undertaken in collective agreements with the workers, have the right to hire non-union members. This is a blow against the trade unions and opens the doors wide for strike-breakers. The trade unions’ right to declare strikes and their right of collective bargaining with the bosses has been restricted. The law obliges trade unions to remove Communists from leadership. But the fight against Communists is merely a pretext for the persecution of all democratic elements in the country. The same law drastically restricts political activities of the trade unions, making it illegal for the latter to make any contribution for political campaigns, including presidential and congressional elections.
American reaction is using the Taft-Hartley anti-labour law in order to fetter the American proletariat.
The most elementary democratic rights of tens of millions of people are being trampled in the U.S.A. today.
The whole world knows about the doings of the “un-American activities” Committee. The Committee has blacklisted whole organizations and hundreds of thousands of Americans, has subjected them to humiliating examinations. Filthy and fraudulent methods are used to stamp people as “disloyal,” and thousands of democratic, progressively-minded people are discharged from government services.
The path which the U.S.A. has taken in its home and foreign policies is not a sign of strength of the American bourgeoisie; it is a sign of weakness. The profound crisis of bourgeois democracy stands out most glaringly in the U.S.A. The imperialists are conducting a frenzied offensive against the remnants of bourgeois-democratic liberties, striving to establish a regime of terrorism in the country and in international affairs they are violating the principle of the sovereignty of nations, large and small. Actually, this is a continuation of the policy of the fascist countries, the savage policy which was utterly defeated thanks to the mortal blows dealt fascism by the Soviet people and the Soviet Army in World War II.
While pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, the American imperialists are reducing the standard of living of working people within their own country. In a demagogic campaign speech President Truman had to admit that in the U.S.A. inflation “is undermining the living standards of millions of families. Food costs too much. Housing has reached fantastic price levels.” “Millions of them,” [the youth], he said, “live in city slums and country shacks,” “most of our people cannot afford to pay for the [medical] care they need.” “Our educational systems face a financial crisis... millions of children... do not have adequate schoolhouses or enough teachers for a good elementary or secondary education”....
Such are the realities of American democracy.
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England, that land of “classic parliamentarism,” also provides an example graphically revealing the effects of the general crisis of capitalism. England has, in fact, became the junior partner of rapacious American monopoly capitalism, its mere satellite. British foreign and home policy is directly influenced by the undeniable fact that capitalist England is steadily losing its independence and becoming dependent on the U.S.A. The British government’s policy furthers this process. Nor does the fact that a Labour government is in office in England, a government that calls itself “socialist,” make any difference in this respect. On the contrary, the Labourities, as Right-wing Socialists, are capitalism’s most loyal defenders. They try to disguise the true rapacious essence of their imperialist policy with talk about democracy and Socialism, while actually they are in all things the faithful tools of the imperialists, doing their best to demoralize the ranks of the working class. This is the true essence of Attlee and Bevin, as well as of the Right-wing Socialists of other countries, as pointed out in the declaration of the conference of nine Communist Parties in 1947.
Lenin wrote:
“Practice has shown that leading figures in the working-class movement who adhere to the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself. Without their leadership of the workers, the bourgeoisie could not have remained in power.”46
In a radio address in January 1948 Attlee sang the praises of the Labour government and Labour Party, which, he alleged, was consistently following the principles of “democratic Socialism,” “individual freedom” and “political democracy,” “freedom of opinion,” “freedom of speech.” Naturally, Attlee refrained from illustrating his statements with facts from life in Britain, for the facts are in crying contradiction to his demagogic declarations.
Here is one fact: 2% of the population of England own 64% of the national wealth. Is it not clear, then, that only a handful of rich enjoy “individual freedom,” while millions of working people, men and women, have no freedom, except the “freedom” of selling their labour power to the capitalist and living in poverty?
The Labour government, far from cutting short the fascist intrigues in the country, condones them. The fascists in England get police protection, openly hold their meetings, and organize anti-Semite pogroms. In the name of “individual freedom” and “freedom of opinion,” the police of the “socialist” government guard the fascist assemblages and beat up anti-fascists. Of late, the British fascists have become so aggressive as to cause serious alarm among the broad masses of the English proletariat.
The offensive of the reactionary forces in England is gaining momentum. Elementary democratic rights are being curtailed more and more every day. As in all other capitalist countries, women are in the worst position.
Officially, women in England enjoy the franchise, but the formal, hypocritical recognition of women’s right to vote and hold office in government bodies is a screen for numerous restrictions which greatly limit women’s rights and their part in political life.
The electoral rights of both men and women are limited by educational, residential and property qualifications. It is not difficult to see that these restrictions are directed primarily against the exploited classes, who comprise the majority of the population, and this affects working women especially, for they are materially dependent on men and have even less opportunity than men to acquire an education.
How small is the part women play in political life in Britain may be seen from the fact that of 640 members of Parliament only 24, i.e., less than four per cent, are women.
Is it possible in general to speak of real political rights of the people, when the upper house of Parliament is not elected but made up of men who belong to it by right of birth or of position, appointed by the king? Not representatives of the people but dukes, marquises, counts, viscounts, barons, archbishops and bishops make up the House of Lords.
The law forbidding the employment of married women in the civil services in Britain was repealed only at the end of 1946. However, this does not mean that women are widely admitted to the civil service. The law permits the employment of women in courts and in state attorney’s offices, yet there are no women judges in England.
Thus, not only is the right of women to participate in government administration limited; even their right to work in government administration is restricted. The great majority of Englishwomen are excluded from active political life.
The economic rights of Englishwomen are also infringed. Inequality in payment for equal work is a crying form of discrimination against women and one of the most characteristic and disgusting features of capitalist exploitation. The employment of female labour power increased rapidly during World War II. In 1944 the proportion of women working in war industry was 37% against 16% in 1939. Several million women in England work side by side with men in capitalist factories and mills, in public utilities, in trade, but for the same work they receive only from 50% to 70% of the wages paid to men. Women are doubly exploited by the capitalists, who exploit all wage workers.
At the Labour Party Conference in Margate, in May 1947, the great majority of delegates, against the will of the Party leadership, adopted a resolution calling for an end to be put to discrimination against women in respect of wages. However, the resolution remained no more than just another pious wish, for the Labour government leaders declared that it was impossible to carry out this decision at the present time. They “forgot” to explain that if the Margate decision were carried out it would cut into the capitalists’ profits.
The Labour government in England faithfully serves monopoly capital. The standard of living of the working people there keeps falling steadily. On the pretext of “reducing dollar expenditures” food rations were considerably cut in 1947.
In September 1947 meat rations were cut to 350 grams per week; on October 15 the milk ration was cut 25%; in November a weekly potato ration of three pounds was introduced, the butter (fats) ration was reduced to 240 grams per month; the price of sugar was increased 66%. Simultaneously with the reduction of food rations prices of food, fuel and clothing and other prime necessities have considerably risen. Rent, gas and electricity cost much more, as does transportation of all kinds. There has been a big increase in taxes working people have to pay. They are on an average 50% higher than during the war. On the other hand, the profits of British capitalists increased by 85% between 1938 and 1946.
Naturally, the capitalists, who refuse to satisfy working women’s irrefutable right to equal pay for equal work, cannot be expected to give women paid maternity leave and guarantee them their jobs upon return. Thus, the vital interests of mothers as well as of women workers are trampled underfoot. The laws of England, like the laws of other capitalist countries, do not provide for maternity protection or care of mother and child. In France it was only after World War II that a clause was included in the Constitution granting women equality of rights, and this was the result of a stubborn fight waged by women with the support of the progressive forces of the country. However, constitutional recognition of equal rights is far from equality in fact.
For instance, the law provides for equal pay for equal work. Actually, women’s wages are from 10% to 15% lower than men’s in industry, and 20% -30% lower in agriculture. In addition, women’s rights to a professional education and to advancement at work are restricted.
At present the French people are in very difficult straits as a result of the betrayal of their national interests by the Right-wing Socialists and the ruling reactionary circles who servilely curry favour with American imperialism. Frenchwomen are suffering want and privation.
The conditions are described in a letter to Soviet women from Simone Beauclais, a Frenchwoman:
“You probably know that we almost never have enough bread. Endless queues line up before bakeries which are open once a week, and the bread we get is baked from imported American flour which is part soya and part cornmeal. The bread is bad, mouldy and absolutely inedible. My youngest daughter had a liver attack and my sons got bad stomach pains due to eating this bread, while for me, who have been suffering from intestinal trouble for years, this bread is simply poison. You know that for centuries bread and wine have been staple foods in France. Wine is extremely expensive now. Last year’s grain crop was an excellent one. Naturally, one asks, where did the bread go?! This year the crop is poor. Most peasants won’t even manage to pay for new seed from the proceeds. The peasants say that the harvest won’t last them more than a month or two. I don’t like to bore you with these problems of food, but they haunt me: I have four children, I have to count every franc, and I have many worries. Besides, it is terribly depressing to see wretchedness all around, and the number of unfortunates is countless. I am referring to people who work with all their strength, not sparing themselves. One of my neighbours is a dressmaker. Yesterday she showed me a beefsteak she bought, hardly enough for lunch, and it cost her two days’ earnings.”
The butcher Franco, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist fosterling, is still in power in Spain, and this is due entirely to the fact that reactionary forces in America and England are helping him. 125,000 Spanish republicans are being inhumanly tortured and are dying in hangman Franco’s prisons, among them many heroic daughters of the Spanish people. There are 20,000 Spanish women in the prisons of Franco Spain.
In Belgium, Switzerland, Argentina and many other bourgeois countries a married woman has no right to perform any legal act without her husband’s consent. She does not even have the right to dispose of the personal property she owned before marriage. In Switzerland, Turkey and other countries women employed in the civil service must give up work at once if their husbands order them to. Under the laws of many states mothers have no parental rights; only the father has parental authority. In many countries a woman has no right to sue for divorce even when she has sufficient grounds for it.
Almost thirty years ago V. I. Lenin gave the following description of bourgeois democracy, which remains true to this day:
“Bourgeois democracy is democracy of flowery phrases, solemn words, pompous promises, high-sounding slogans about freedom and equality, which actually disguise the lack of freedom and equality for women, the lack of freedom and equality for the toiling and the exploited people.”47
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As we see from the above, women’s rights are greatly curtailed in the capitalist home countries. In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, which are under the yoke of imperialism, women’s position is very much worse.
The great majority of the population of the globe, and, consequently, the great majority of women, live in the colonies and semi-colonial countries. England, France, Holland and Belgium, as we know, possess colonies which are many times as large as themselves, both in territory and in population. Formally the U.S.A. has no colonial possessions, but actually many countries in the world are controlled and exploited by American imperialism.
The life of the peoples of all these countries presents a dismal picture.
Morocco is not a colony juridically. It is a protectorate of France, which has undertaken to “promote” the economic and cultural development of that country. The population of Morocco is 8,000,000, Arabs and Berbers. Morocco is a fertile country, rich in natural resources. Yet Morocco cannot provide its own inhabitants with bread. Naked, dirty, tubercular Moroccan children, covered with sores and tormented with the itch, fill the city streets, hunt for food in garbage dumps. In Casablanca homeless women give birth right in the street. Many women die on the sidewalks, with their babies still sucking at their shrivelled breasts. There are no hospitals, nurseries or sanatoriums for children in Morocco. Over 2,000,000 children of school age do not attend school. Syphilis and tuberculosis carry off whole tribes.
“We are full of fear for the future of our Morocco,” said a representative of Moroccan women at the first session of the Council of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. “We are full of fear for the future of our children, of our people! We are horrified by the prostitution, thievery, the utter loss of human dignity.”
There is no limit to the avarice, selfishness and rapacity of the imperialist colonizers. They ruthlessly exploit not only the rich natural resources of the colonies, but also the most precious wealth on earth – human beings. India – the jewel of the British Empire – is a vivid example. In 1943 famine killed 3,500,000 people in India. That is ten times the number of dead the British Empire lost in the war. And famine is a common thing in India. In this country of fabulous wealth millions of people die of starvation every year.
“With their own hands mothers killed their babies to end their suffering,” said Vidia Kanuga, delegate from India, at the WIDF Congress.
National disasters are turned to account by profiteers and marauders. Thousands of colonizer-profiteers grew rich through the death of millions of Hindus. The British authorities did not deem it necessary to interfere with their sordid practices.
In a country of about 400,000,000 inhabitants there are only 600 maternity hospitals and child care institutions, i.e., one institution for 667,000 inhabitants. And it is not the state that maintains these few institutions. They are maintained by non-governmental organizations.
Child mortality in India is among the highest in the world. It is especially high in industrial cities. In the one-room homes inhabited by 90% of the factory workers of Bombay, child mortality reaches 55%: less than half the number of children born live to be a year old! Millions die of starvation and disease.
The evils of economic and racial discrimination are aggravated by the dire material plight of the people, by the absence of any laws protecting female labour, or providing for mother and child care. There is no such thing as social insurance. Here are characteristic figures: In India the average length of life of women is 26.6 years; six million women die of various diseases every year.
A Communist newspaper in India published a letter from a peasant woman of Bengal, Mina Ron Gaudharn, to the Provincial Prime Minister. Here is an excerpt:
“If you want to behold India as she really is you will see, first of all, a crowd of middle-aged women with hungry children in their arms, looking for work. They replenish the ranks of those who die in the streets of Calcutta.... Children die for lack of milk, and those who survive bear no resemblance to human beings.... In the villages many people die of cholera. Do not be surprised if you see corpses in the wayside, covered with plantain leaves or merely with paper. For where can the dead get clothes if they did not have them when they were alive!?...
“If you stop at our house (my husband is a teacher, and his pupils come home to him for their lessons), you will see that the pupils are naked, while the teacher wears only a loin girdle. We own only one dhati between us for wearing in the street....
“Sir, will our troubles never end? When will we the in a position to cook dinners for our husbands and sons? When will landless peasants have land?”
The full extent of the falseness of bourgeois democracy is revealed most glaringly in the colonial policy pursued by England and the U.S.A. The imperialists continue to oppress hundreds of millions of colonial slaves, at the same time trying to sweeten their brutal policy with hypocritical talk about granting them sham independence.
An article in the Daily Worker, describing the condition of women in Nigeria, shows that they live in horrible poverty, starve, suffer and perish from disease. No more than one per cent of the women of Nigeria know how to read and write. Nigeria has only four secondary schools for girls.
The majority of women in Nigeria suffer from disease, and mortality – from malaria, skin diseases, tuberculosis – is extremely high. Women and children receive no medical attention. In Nigeria women have to pay a special tax after they have reached a definite age, and official tax collectors frequently strip girls right in the street in order to determine whether they are subject to taxation.
The author of the article declares that the English are to blame for the lamentable condition of the people in Nigeria.
In Kenya Africans are paid one-fiftieth of the wage paid Europeans for the same work. The two thousand British residents of Kenya, which has a native population of four million, own fifty per cent of the most fertile land. Natives are actually deprived of all civil rights. Ninety-five per cent of the population are not represented in the Legislative Council of Kenya. Child mortality in Kenya is 500 per 1,000 children born.
In a number of countries of the East, where the Anglo-American imperialists openly and insolently interfere in the internal affairs, the reactionaries crush every hint of democratic liberties; they persecute democratic organizations and progressive leaders. This naturally makes life even harder for women.
Egyptian women sent a letter to the secretariat of the WIDF describing the hard lot of Egyptian women. The anti-Communist campaign launched by the government served as a pretext for arresting many patriots, shutting down democratic clubs and banning newspapers that expressed opposition to the treaty of “alliance” between Egypt and Britain. The Egyptian League of women college students and college graduates has been disbanded. Orderly student demonstrations are dispersed by force of arms.
Activities of pro-fascist organizations are encouraged in the countries of the Levant with the knowledge and the protection of the British, while the activities of democratic organizations, including the Women’s Social-Democratic League, are restricted.
Reactionary elements in Iran, enjoying the support of the Anglo-American imperialists, savagely repress every manifestation of the democratic movement. Women in Iran possess no rights whatsoever. They are deprived of the franchise, along with the insane and criminals. They must obey in everything their fathers or husbands. Girls may not marry of their free will; wives have no right to sue for divorce. The husband possesses unlimited power over his wife, he may cast her out into the street and take her children away from her.
In Abadan the British banned seventeen Iranian trade union clubs and opened brothels in most of the buildings. Iranian reactionaries together with the foreign imperialists who are behaving like masters in that country humiliate and outrage the Iranian people, Iranian women.
In Turkey only seventeen per cent of the population are literate. Tens of thousands of villages have no schools at all and there is a strict ban on the sale of such world literary classics as the works of Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Chekhov, labelled “Communist propaganda.”
There are numerous brothels in the capital of Turkey. In Istanbul there is a whole street of them, and they are listed in the city’s official directory. Prostitution is encouraged by the Turkish authorities.
In a letter to American women the Union of Democratic Women of Korea wrote in 1946:
“On behalf of 800,000 members of the Union of Democratic Women of Korea we consider it our duty to inform you of the fact that Korean women in the American zone of occupation possess no civil rights....” The situation has not improved since then. In Northern Korea, where the working people have set up a people’s government, women enjoy equal rights with men. In Southern Korea, the American zone of occupation, women are still deprived of elementary human rights, and their democratic organizations are persecuted.
The whole world knows how bitter is the lot of women in Japan. From time immemorial Japanese cities were full of brothels, into which girls were sold for a mere pittance by their poverty-stricken parents. According to official statistics for 1933, fifteen per cent of the female population of the prefecture of Akita between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five were sold to brothels, into domestic service or to factories. The war and its aftermath have made the condition of Japanese women even worse, for not only have the democratic changes called for by the surrender terms not been introduced, due to the policy of the American occupation authorities, but they are countered in every possible way by the placement of American reaction in Japan.
In fact, the compulsory labour system for women has been reintroduced in Japan. The majority of working girls are bound by contracts concluded with their parents. They live in barracks divided into small cells of ten to twelve square metres each, six or seven girls in a cell. They must have permission of the management to leave the premises even for a short time. The girls live like veritable slaves.
At present brothels are officially banned in Japan. However, in Tokyo the red-light district is being rebuilt much faster than any other section. Hose Otome, a medical nurse, writes that, unable to find work anywhere, she had no other way out but to sell her body. That is the fate of many thousands of women in Japan.
The lot of women in Kuomintang China is a tragic one. Decades of interference in the internal affairs of China by European and American imperialists, the years of the Japanese invasion and of civil war have devastated the country, drenched it with the blood of tens of millions of men, women and children, condemned hundreds of millions of Chinese toiling people to an existence of semi-starvation and misery.
The sanguinary war in China started by the reactionary Kuomintang government with the direct military support of American imperialist circles, is still going on, even though World War II has been over for several years now.
Ruin, unemployment, famine reign in the Kuomintang-controlled areas. Over half the arable land lies fallow, for the peasants have been brought to such dire straits that they have no seed to plant.
The situation is no better in industry. Factories, mills and shops keep dosing down, and masses of men and women workers are cast out into the street, doomed to death by starvation. In May 1947, according to a statement by a Chinese leader, over two thousand persons died of starvation daily in the streets of Shanghai.
Unbridled terrorism against democratic and trade union leaders and against various social organizations, assassinations of progressively-minded people, fusillading of student demonstrations are all typical of Kuomintang China. Naturally, there is no hint there of elementary political and civil rights for women.
Family customs entangle Chinese women in a hopeless web, make them dumb and obedient slaves to the head of the family, first the father, then the husband and father-in-law. Polygamy and the sale of daughters into slavery by their parents, are still practised.
Large numbers of young women and girls who are without homes, work or any other means of support become prostitutes or slaves of the rich.
The percentage of women workers in industry in Kuomintang China is very high and their condition is appalling. Women workers receive lower wages than men for the same work. They work eleven, twelve and more hours a day. The lot of Chinese working women is unbearably hard – no labour protection regulations or medical aid, semi-starvation with mass tuberculosis as a consequence, frightful housing conditions and absolutely no rights at all. They are not allowed to read newspapers or books, and there are even rules against laughing.
There is not a single social right women enjoy in colonies and semi-colonial countries. They receive miserable wages for their work, and are relegated to a position of inferiority in the family. Semi-starvation from birth to death, hopeless ignorance, the absence of elementary mother and child care, epidemics which carry off every other child – that is the lot of women in these countries.
All this is an excellent illustration of the “civilizing” influence of the imperialist colonizers.
Only the achievement of freedom and independence can ensure real progress for the colonial peoples. A vivid illustration of this is the Mongolian People’s Republic, which, with the help of Soviet Russia, inaugurated a, new life, took the path of free development.
At present women in the Mongolian People’s Republic take an active part in all spheres of life. There is not a single branch of economy or field of culture in which women do not participate.
About twenty-five years ago Mongolian women were granted full equality. In 1947 seventy-five women were members of the highest Mongolian organ of state power, the Small Hural, thirteen women were members of the Presidium of the Small Hural and 1,193 were deputies to local councils.
Of the leading cattle breeders honoured with the title “Merited Cattle Breeder of the Republic,” 30.5 per cent are women. Thirty-eight per cent of the industrial workers in the Republic are women, while in Ulan-Bator, the capital, women comprise 73 per cent of the industrial workers. Eighteen per cent of the schoolteachers and 70 per cent of the medical workers are women. Women comprise 25 per cent of the college students.
The law guarantees women equal pay for equal work and provides for maternity leave. Women receive free medical aid, can place their children in nurseries and kindergartens, and mothers of large families receive special allowances.
Orders for valour in battle were awarded to sixty-five women for their part in the war against the Japanese aggressors in 1945. Mongolian women formed a Women’s Democratic organization with a membership of 125,000 which is affiliated to the WIDF.
Time and again the peoples of colonial countries have risen against the imperialist robbers, have taken to arms to fight for their liberation.
The second world war further aggravated the crisis of imperialism’s colonial system; it has brought about a further upsurge of the movement for national liberation of the peoples in colonial and semi-colonial countries.
The heroic fight the Chinese people and its People’s Liberation Army are waging, and the magnificent victories they have won against the American-supported Kuomintang government clearly show that the colonial and semi-colonial peoples are up in arms, determined to fight it out to the end with the imperialist invaders and their agents. The fight of the Chinese people for national liberation is led by the Communist Party of China. The People’s Liberation Army is waging a heroic and successful war against the Chinese reactionaries and American imperialists.
In a report to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in January 1948, Mao Tse-tung, its Chairman, analyzing the current situation in China, said that the revolutionary war of the Chinese people had reached its turning point. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army had repulsed the offensive of the Kuomintang reactionary army, watchdog of the U.S.A., which was seven million strong at the time, and had itself taken the offensive. Mao Tse-tung spoke of the mighty resistance the People’s Liberation Army offered the forces of world imperialism and Kuomintang reaction and declared that the Kuomintang army was approaching its doom. The People’s Liberation Army was firmly treading the path to victory, he said. It was the turning point – away from the road to destruction along which the Kuomintang had been leading the country in the twenty years of its counterrevolutionary rule. It was the turning point from the extermination to which the Chinese people had been subjected for over a century of imperialist rule in China.
This was a great event, he continued – great because it was taking place in a country with a population of 450,000,000 and because it was heralding the certain victory of the people throughout the country. It was a great event because it was taking place in the East – a part of the world with a population of over one billion, a part of the world inhabited by a half of mankind and suffering from the yoke of imperialism.
All anti-imperialist forces in all countries of the East, concluded Mao Tse-tung, must unite against imperialism and the reactionaries in their own countries. They must set themselves the goal of liberating the oppressed countries of the East, with their population of over a billion.
In the People’s Democracies
The political, social and economic position of women is a true index to the degree of democracy that exists in a country. Only in genuinely democratic countries are women equal members of society, active participants in their country’s political, economic and cultural life.
The victory of the new democracy, of people’s democracy, in a number of countries in Central and Southeast Europe opened up to the people wide fields of activity and opportunities to work for the good of their countries, made it possible for these countries to start on the path to Socialism.
The victory of the Fatherland Front in Bulgaria brought women equality in social, economic, political and cultural life, and this vitalized the boundless energy latent in them.
Like all the working people, the progressive women of Bulgaria enthusiastically welcomed the five-year plan (1949-53) for the development of the national economy adopted in December 1948. In the villages women are playing an important part in forming cooperatives. Women in all fields of endeavour – factory and office workers, teachers, actors, artists, actresses – take an active part in labour and culture brigades.
The number of women employed in industry is growing, and they are prominent in the emulation movement for higher output per worker.
The Fatherland Front government attaches great importance to mother and child care. Whereas in 1944 there were only 19 maternity hospitals in the country, in 1948 there were over 150, and about 80,000 children from 3 to 7 years of age were taken care of in nurseries and kindergartens. Special dining rooms for children have been opened in the cities. The number of special medical institutions and various facilities for women is growing all the time.
The elections demonstrated women’s rapidly increasing part in political activities in Bulgaria. Thirty-eight women are members of the Grand National Assembly. Over 2,600 women took an active part in the election campaign.
In an article entitled “The Pride of New Bulgaria,” Tsola Dragoicheva, Chairman of the National Women’s Union, said:
“The Bulgarian women see from the example of their Soviet sisters who have travelled the glorious path of socialist construction for over thirty years what boundless opportunities open up for women emancipated from social oppression. We are aware that the sacrifices which the Bulgarian people made in the trying years of struggle against fascism and the despicable Coburg monarchy might all have been in vain, that our fate might have proved a tragic one, had not the eldest brother of the Slav peoples, the powerful Soviet Union, given us help. Bulgarian women will never forget this.
“It is with deep love and gratitude that Bulgarian women utter the name of the great man who saved their country from German enslavement and who is defending the cause of peace and democracy all over the world, the name of the leader and teacher of peoples – Stalin.”
Rumania, too, has a truly democratic regime for the first time in her history. Women there now have equal rights with men in all fields – economic, social and political.
The women of Rumania are active in the struggle for the establishment and consolidation of democracy in their country and do their part working for Rumania’s economic transformation.
Rumanian women take full advantage of the political equality granted them by the new, democratic regime and they play an increasingly prominent part in political life. At the last elections about 3,800,000 women came to the polls and voted for the democratic government.
All women who have reached the age of 21 have the right to vote, and at 23 they are eligible for election to any government body. In the last elections 20 women were elected to Parliament. Two ministers of the republic are women. Anna Pauker, splendid daughter of the Rumanian people who devoted her whole life to the fight for the interests of the people, is Foreign Minister of the Rumanian People’s Republic.
Working women, peasant women, women engaged in intellectual pursuits and housewives are united in the Federation of Democratic Women of Rumania. One of the Federation’s aims is to rally all the women of the country for the fight against the instigators of a new war. It sets itself the task of rallying women for the effort to consolidate the regime of democracy and to further the progress of the national economy, of helping women to make the most of their newly-won equality, of conducting extensive educational work among the masses, and of promoting the proper education of children.
The Federation has before it the big task of helping speedily to wipe out the accursed heritage of boyar rule. The fact that there was not a single maternity hospital in the rural areas of old boyar Rumania is an illustration of what this heritage represents. Within two years the democratic Rumanian government established 508 maternity hospitals and 539 children’s homes for orphans in the rural areas.
One of the main tasks of the Democratic Federation of Rumanian women is to put an end to illiteracy and semi-literacy among women and young people.
In all their work for the welfare of their rejuvenated and renovated country Rumanian women take the women of the Soviet Union for their example. Speaking at a meeting of women active in various public organizations in Moscow in November 1947, Maria Sirbu, head of a Rumanian women’s delegation, said:
“We have not seen even one hundredth part of what you and your people have built, but we are already impressed by the respect shown human labour in your country, by the high cultural standards of your country, by the care and attention your children receive, by the way women perform their duty to their country and their people.
“Soviet women, their heroic efforts, their inexhaustible enthusiasm and strength in work were an inspiration to us in the days when we were kept in prison and concentration camps, in the days of the hard fight against reaction.”
The League of Polish Women heads the women’s democratic movement in Poland. It takes a most active part in the political, economic and cultural life of the country. The League has arranged thousands of meetings of women. It has organized assistance to the government in the restoration of Warsaw. Women all over Poland make contributions to the fund for the reconstruction of the capital.
Polish democratic women are active in many fields. They take part in the fight against profiteering, help the farmers in the sowing and harvesting, work for the organization of cooperatives, establish public laundries, tailor shops, dining rooms, women’s medical institutions, vocational courses and schools for teaching adults to read and write. Assisted by the democratic authorities and the whole Polish people, women have been able to achieve a great deal.
The women of the other new, People’s Democracies are likewise making the most of the true emancipation and equality they have gained.
The splendid way the woman question has been solved in the U.S.S.R. is and will always be an inspiring example to all freedom-loving peoples of the world, to the oppressed and enslaved women of all the countries who are fighting for their emancipation.
In his greetings to Moscow on its eight-hundredth anniversary Comrade Stalin wrote:
“Moscow now is not only the source of inspiration for the construction of new Soviet democracy, a democracy which rejects every kind of inequality, direct or indirect, of citizens, sexes, races, nations and which guarantees the right to work and the right to equal pay for equal work. Moscow is at the same time the standard of the struggle of all working people the world over, of all oppressed races and nations, for their liberation from the rule of plutocracy and imperialism.”