INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPATION IS LIMITED IN BUREAUCRACIES

GOVERNMENT SHOULD SUPPORT WORKING MOTHERS

1. THE LAW MUST HELP WOMEN COMBINE WORK AND MATERNITY Alexandra Kollontai, Russian-socialist feminist author, ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI: SELECTED WRITINGS, 1977, p. 135.

The first thing that can be done and the first thing that working men and women are doing in every country is to see that the law defends the working mother. Since poverty and insecurity are forcing her to take up work, and since the number of women out working is increasing every year, the very least that can be done is to make sure that hired labour does not become the “grave of maternity.” The law must intervene to help women to combine work and maternity.
2. THE STATE SHOULD PROVIDE MATERNITY BENEFITS

Alexandra Kollontai, Russian-socialist feminist author, ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI: SELECTED WRITINGS, 1977, p. 136.

It is essential that society guarantees the material well-being of the woman during pregnancy. It would not be much of a “rest” for the woman if she were simply prevented from earning her daily bread for sixteen weeks. That would be dooming the woman to certain death. The law must therefore not only protect the woman at work but must also initiate, at state expense, a scheme of maternity benefits.
3. LAWS SHOULD PROVIDE BASIC RIGHTS FOR WORKING MOTHERS

Beatrice Farnsworth, author, ALEKSANDRA KOLLONTAI: SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, 1980, p.³².

She argued that women can be fully liberated only through radical change. This meant abolishing all laws subordinating women to men; providing women with the right to be elected to all institutions of self-government on the basis of a direct, equal, and secret vote; providing legal protection of all areas of women’s work; forbidding night work, overtime, and all work under conditions damaging to women or their future off-spring; and guaranteeing enforcement of these rules by means of female factory inspectors to be chosen by the workers from among themselves.

Cberis Kramarae

Feminism

Cheris Kramarae is a modem-day philosopher who specializes in the study of gender, communication, society and feminism. She has published a significant number of scholarly articles and served as editor for several books. Her writings tend to focus on issues related to language, feminist methodology, power, and women and technology. Kramarae teaches courses on language and gender, and language and power in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

an ecofeminist.

discrimination against women in our society. Kramarae’s main thrust, however, is the attempt to uncover and change our language in order to provide women with equal footing in their communication with others.

Kramarae believes that language is the predominant vehicle for change in the liberation of women. She

maintains that the women’s movement and women’s experiences have raised questions not only about sex

differences in language and speech, but also about the ways language aids the construction of a male

dominant, or patriarchal, society. Kramarae’s work illustrates how language actually aids in the defining, deprecating, and excluding of women. For example, men have traditionally labeled women as parts of the body, fruit, or animals -- labels that, Kramarae argues, have no real parallels for men. Additionally, she cites studies indicating that there are 220 terms for a sexually promiscuous woman and only 22 terms for a sexually promiscuous man (c.f., Language, Gender and Society, 1983). She insists that it is this kind of language use that reflects men’s contempt for women and helps to maintain gender hierarchy and control in our society. What is most bothersome about the ways in which language is used is that men can make remarks on parts of women’s bodies, call them “honey,” and yet fail to recognize how offensive these remarks are to women. This is the crux of her research and writing.

Kramarae maintains that “technology” should not be thought of as machines, but as social relations --communication systems which facilitate or hinder various kinds of communication. The specific type of technology she focuses on is the sewing machine, an icon for all technology. She maintains that the sewing machine was advertised as something that would revolutionize women’s sewing. Unfortunately, while it did revolutionize women’s work, it disbanded women’s social time together in sewing circles and moved women into sweatshops, where their interaction was virtually nonexistent. Therefore, to the extent that the sewing machine lessened the quality of the social lives of the users of that technology, it was bad. She criticizes technological development because it has historically excluded women. That is, when we think about technology, we tend to think of science and, therefore, men.

Like Marilyn French, Kramarae is, in part, an “ecofeminist” seeking ways to make new and positive links

with the environment. For scholars such as French and Kramarae, humans are intimately linked with nature, and therefore, we must incorporate the needs of both humans and nature into our policy making decisions. In contrast to French however, Kramarae thinks of language as a way to help us make connections with the environment. She envisions language as the way to establish a peaceful coexistence on earth.

Because Kramarae focuses on both explicit and implicit forms of discrimination, the debater may be able to reveal how the opposition’s value(s) implicitly perpetuate sexism. An additional avenue available to debaters is her critique of technology and progress. Any value or debate that advocated technology and/or progress could be critiqued by the debater as inherently sexist.