Michèle Barrett

Ethnocentrism and socialist-feminist theory

Definitions relating to ethnicity and race are muddled and politically contentious. Empirical information is often collected on varying criteria and this makes it difficult for adequate comparisons to be made. We propose to follow the most usual definition of ‘black’ in the British context by using the term to refer to people of Asian, African and West Indian origin. Hence we include people from the Indian sub-continent and their descendants (sometimes excluded in strict definitions of ‘black’), African people and their descendants and, most importantly as far as Britain is concerned, people from the West Indies – sometimes known as ‘Afro-Caribbean’ society or the African ‘diaspora’ (dispersed peoples) – and their descendants. This definition draws a sharp line between ‘black’ people and members of other ethnic minorities (Chinese, Cypriot, Iranian and so on, who may suffer comparable conditions in some respects). Amina Mama, writing in Feminist Review No. 17 on these and other definitional questions (1984: 34), endorses this general approach; it is also the one followed in the recent survey by the Policy Studies Institute from which unique information is available. We shall discuss in due course some of the difficulties created by this definition, but for the moment it seems the most desirable one to adopt. In practice most British statistics break down the category ‘black’ into two groups based on Asian and West Indian origin. In comparison with the situation in the United States the ethnic composition of contemporary Britain falls fairly clearly into the way the Policy Studies Institute (hereafter PSI) entitles its report: Black and White Britain (see Brown, 1984). In the US, the black population is complemented by substantial Hispanic, Pacific Asian and American Indian minorities, rendering the empirical data far more complex. We are not in a position to give an adequate discussion here of either the empirical or the political dimensions of race and gender in the US, although obviously some of the debates in Britain are directly influenced by previous developments there. Nor can we address the situation in the rest of Western Europe, where the patterns of race and ethnicity are different again. The major sources for empirical information are, in the absence of data from the census of 1981 (information about place of birth is not very helpful and the ethnic origin question was in the end rejected because of its political sensitivity), the Labour Force Survey and the recent PSI report. The Government Labour Force Survey, 1983, included a significant set of questions on the basis of ethnic origin as defined by the respondent; it is summarized in Social Trends 15 (Central Statistical Office, 1985). The survey was used to calculate details of the ethnic distribution of the British population (94% white, 1% West Indian, 2% Asian and so on); as far as women are concerned it was of use in that some questions, particularly relating to employment, generated data that was broken down by sex. (The LFS was an improvement on the General Household Survey, which has generated data on ethnicity, but based on the interviewers assessment of ethnic origin and much less reliable.) The PSI survey has provided completely different, information in that it was an extremely detailed study using very long interviews with a smaller sample (a nationally representative sample of 5,000 black people of Asian and West Indian origin and a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 white people). It is systematically broken down by sex and covers many topics of interest to feminists, such as household composition and so on. In addition to these major sources there are useful figures in Britains Black Population (The Runnymede Trust and the Radical Statistics Race Group, 1980). In using aggregate figures of these kinds, there is a great danger that the categories that are used (‘white’, ‘Asian’, ‘West Indian’) will be seen as homogeneous. We hope that in challenging old stereotypes we will not be guilty of parading new ones: evidence that one group earns more on average than another does not mean that all its members do, or that they are absolutely well off. Furthermore, aggregate figures such as these may occlude and mask class variation of a more general kind within ethnic minorities. In what follows we attempt to reconsider some of our previous work in the light of the question of race. Although we believe it to be typical of – certainly indebted to – a much wider body of socialist-feminist work, we feel it is easier and less contentious to re-assess our own work than to take on this much wider field. We begin by looking at the relationship of household and wage labour, move on to broader questions of theory and ideology, and conclude with our critique of the family.

SUBALTERNS AT WAR

This paper considers the politics of naming in memorials of the First World War. That such memorials are highly political is shown in the case of the ‘Indian’ memorial at Neuve Chapelle: at the request of Pakistan, who wanted it to be retitled the Indo-Pakistan memorial, the War Graves Commission attempted to erase the word ‘India’ from the memorials register, documentation and signage. Comparing this memorial on the Western Front with its counterpart in Mesopotamia reveals that the listing of dead and missing servicemens names was a policy specific to Europe. Colonial rank-and-file soldiers, and labourers and porters, were normally not named on memorials elsewhere. In Africa, evidence from the archives of the War Graves Commission demonstrates a sharp differentiation between the treatment of ‘white graves’ and those of ‘natives’. These practices, some formally encoded in a policy ruling, rested on contemporary assumptions about stages of civilization and lives worth commemorating. The paper concludes that the equal treatment in terms of ‘race’ and ‘creed’, which the War Graves Commission and its historians persistently claim alongside equality irrespective of social class and military rank, was an aspiration rather than a practice.

Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion

In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the womens movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of sexual difference than the economic contradictions of capitalism. Meanwhile the conditions of working-class and black women have been deteriorating. In this situation, they argue, feminists can only serve the general interests of women through alliance with working-class movements and class struggle. Weir and Wilson represent a minority position within the British Communist Party (the CP), which argues that ‘feminism’ is now being used by sections of the left, in particular the dominant ‘Eurocommunist’ left in the CP, to justify their moves to the right, with an accompanying attack on traditional forms of trade union militancy. Beatrix Campbell, who is aligned to the dominant position within the CP, has been one target of Weir and Wilsons criticisms. In several articles from 1978 onwards, and in her book Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell has presented a very different analysis of women and the labour movement. She has criticized the trade union movement as a ‘mens movement’, in the sense that it has always represented the interests of men at the expense of women. And she has described the current split within the CP as one extending throughout the left between the politics of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: traditional labour movement politics as against the politics of those who have rethought their socialism to take into account the analysis and importance of popular social movements – in particular feminism, the peace and anti-racist movements. In reply to this debate, Anne Phillips has argued that while womens position today must be analysed in the context of the capitalist crisis, it is not reducible to the dichotomy ‘class politics’ versus ‘popular alliance’. Michèle Barrett, in another reply to Weir and Wilson, has argued that they have presented a reductionist and economistic approach to womens oppression, which caricatures rather than clarifies much of the work in which socialist-feminists have been engaged. To air these differences between socialist-feminists over the question of feminism and class politics, and to see their implications for the womens movement and the left, Feminist Review has decided to bring together the main protagonists of this debate for a fuller, more open discussion. For this discussion Feminist Review drew up a number of questions which were put to the participants by Clara Connolly and Lynne Segal. (Michèle Barrett was present in a personal capacity.) They cover the recent background to socialist-feminist politics, the relationship of feminism to Marxism, the role of feminists in le ft political parties and the labour movement, the issue of racism and the prospects for the immediate future. The discussion was lengthy and what follows is an edited version of the transcript.

Dehumanization and the War in East Africa

This paper considers the dehumanization of the African during and after the First World War, focussing on East Africa. During the campaign dehumanization was evident in attitudes towards African soldiers but was most starkly seen in the treatment of the carriers. These attitudes informed the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, which largely excluded Africans from individual commemoration in British cemeteries and memorials. The German authorities were more inclusive in their commemoration of African casualties, at both Moshi and Tanga (Tanzania). The paper puts these attitudes in historical context, looking at dehumanizing approaches to Africans in a range of sources from the pre-war and wartime period.