Which way for the women's movement in
International Viewpoint #149 • October 17, 1988
GREECE
W E WANT to center this con-
tribution on two questions: what are the tendencies in the women's movement today in Greece? and what are their conceptions and activity? Secondly, we want to stress the need for unity in action of the various currents through democratic modes of functioning.
Let us begin, however, with a short introduction about the framework of our struggle in the period since 1974. The period since the transition to parliamentary rule, in
THE PAPER of the Greek section of the Fourth International, which we have seen the emergence both of
Spartakos, published the following article in its September the modern women's movement and women's movement integrated into the poissue. It is a contribution from the autonomous women's litical parties, has been a difficult one for group Lamia ['Witch"] to the women's forum held in the feminism. We have had a clash between
"tradition" and "modernism."
During the 1960s, there was rapid capi-
In its introduction, Spartakos noted that the article was an talist development and deepgoing economic and social changes, which created a
"initial critical assessment of the course, the mistakes and the strain between the new position of women gains of the modern women's movement," and that it could and the backward attitude toward them. It became clear that we had to change this atnot "help but arouse a deeper, more expansive elaboration of tituedand the institutions to fit the new situation that was developing.
Throughout the dictatorship, not only
Given the general lack of knowledge about the Greek was there obstruction of those social trends women's liberation movement in Western Europe, this piece but also the propagation by the government of an incredibly backward and reactionary also has the advantage of offering a general perspective on ideology for women and head-on opposithe development of the women's liberation movement in tion to these modernizing social trends.
This imprisonment of social development led to an explosion at the first democratic opening.
Clash between tradition and modernization
From then until today, there have been important changes in the status of women in Greek society, produced both by capitalism's need for institutions more in line with the modifications that have occurred and by the struggle of the women's movement.
In the framework of the "Europeanization" of Greece in every respect, a clash between tradition and modernization is occurring in all areas of social life,.
From the time that it came into office,
[the ruling party] PASOK has tried - and entirely succeeded — in channeling these contradictions (removing their explosive element) into the framework of parliamentary reform, without provoking any significant social upset. This goes especially for the status of women in a society which, at least in comparison with European conditions, is strongly male-dominated.
Young women who are enjoying the gains of the new legal situation today can better understand the limits of this equality, which is a formal one. It is in this layer that we can place our hopes for a renewal of the feminist movement.
Greece is marked by the existence of big women's organizations tied to the parties of the left. The development and the weight
10 of these organizions does not ha we any counterpart in the big developed countries of Europe, where mass mobilizations of women have become familiar events. These organizations correspond to the old conception of the traditional Communist parties, which built around themselves a series of apparently independent formations or fronts, but which in reality were transmission belts for the party line on specific political levels and on special questions.
Such structures, however, could not play a major political role except in countries with limited democratic possibilities or where democracy was constantly under threat. In such circumstances, women's mobilizations have a humanistic character (campaigns against repression, solidarity with political prisoners and so on), and often substitute for direct political activity when the latter is illegal.
The existence of such forms of women's organization can be seen mainly in the countries of Latin America (a movement against torture and against the "disappearances" of people), as well as in the Middle East (Palestine) and also in the Greece of the 1950s.
The reconstruction or construction of mass women's organizations was accomplished after 1974 by the existing parliamentary opposition of the left.
First, we will look at the Women's Organization of Greece [Organosi Gynaikon Elladas - OGE], which is linked to the
Athens city hall on June 26. the questions it touches on."
Greece today. KKE [the Moscow-loyalist Greek CP]. Its main objectives are to defend the democratic and civil rights of women and to deal with questions of equality and material rights on the job.
The OGE does not challenge the status of women within the family, or the sexual oppression of women and what flows from it, such as sexual oppression as a whole and violence against women. Likewise, it does not challenge the traditional values bound up with motherhood and all the backward conceptions that are also rooted among the popular strata. It has never understood initiatives on questions such as abortion, or mistreatment of women, or questions of sex education. In the various social areas, it does not raise the question of developing the conditions for women's participation in the centers of decision-making
Therefore, it has never worked out a strategy with a full body of demands and with a corresponding orientation to fight for in the trade-union movement, because in no way does it want to come into conflict with established male conceptions and structures.
The OGE's way of functioning is hierarchical. There are a series of cadres whose only task is to represent women's problems - and that is how they see them - to the state institutions and to defend and advance women's interests, but not to mobilize women for concrete demands. When they organize mass mobilizations, these actions have only generic aims, and seek to ad-
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Greece?
October 17, 1988 • #149 International Viewpoint vance the party's women's work. Generally, they do not do grass-roots work to develop the consciousness and activity of women.
The EGE [Enosis Gynaikon Elladas] was formed in 1978 in the framework of a more general attempt by PASOK to build and structure itself as a mass movement. It has many features similar to those of the OGE. But it has distinguished itself from the latter by a greater sensitivity to specifically women's questions and also by a more mass character, greater spontaneity and grass-roots activity, especially in the provinces....
### Development of state feminism
The fate of the EGE was determined not only by the level of development of feminist concerns in Europe and in Greece but to a large extent by the development of PASOK in other areas of work (trade-unions, farmers and so on). The advance of PASOK toward governmental power at the end of the 1970s and its conquest of power afterwards were accompanied by an attempt to co-opt these movements, to neutralize them and to transform them into instruments of the government's policy in these areas.
Thus, from being a relatively massive, living movement, the EGE was transformed in a few years into an ossified group of female cadres whose main goal was to put forward the government's policy on the international level....
Another form of state feminism is the Equality Council, the state institution created by the PASOK for the advancement of equality between the two sexes. In reality, it does not have decisive powers, and functions both as a propaganda mechanism for disseminating general ideas and as a tranquilizer for women who have not understood that motherhood is the solution to all women's problems.
The Movement of Democratic Women [Kinese Demokratikon Gynaikon - KDN) is the third mass women's organization linked to a left party. The question of the autonomous women's movement (and the question of the room that the KKE-interior [the Euro-communist CP] offered for autonomy more generally) differentiated its cadres, both as regards their aims and functioning, from the above organizations. They adopted the aims of the autonomous women's movement and participated in all its initiatives. However, as was natural, the women who were not integrated into this political space could not go along entirely with them.
The autonomy of the KDN was relative, and all the problems and political choices, weaknesses, actions and divisions in their milieu also influenced the movement.
The autonomous women's movement started off in Greece with the Women's Liberation Movement at the beginning of
1975. In this same period, of course, we saw the rebuilding of the left, the reforming of the big parliamentary parties, the proliferation of the far left organizations and the rebuilding of the unions. The women who originally formed this movement were mainly intellectuals. They belonged to the left and the far left, and had close political relations with these political milieus but also many conflicts with them.
Over and above ideological nuances, these women agreed in their estimate that the oppression of women as a social category was systematic and could not be combated except through the organized struggle of women themselves. They confronted the hostility of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary left. In the initial period, their primary concer was to demolish the charges leveled against them that they were taking an "apolitical stand." They tried through statements of principle and actions to demonstrate their anticapitalist position. But they did not try to work out a revolutionary strategy for the
This defensive position aggravated the contradictions created by the dual commitment of many of the participants. Thus, the movement oriented toward the left and not so much toward women, who as an oppressed category would have been able to form the collective base of feminism.
Despite all this, this movement laid the basis for an autonomous existence of the women's movement. It conducted campaigns for contraception and abortion, against conscription of women, against beauty contests. It organized solidarity with working women fighting super-exploitation and sexual oppression at work (midwives, telephone operators and so on), for the rights of women students in dormitories, campaigns against the oppression of women in Iran and other international
From 1978, the movement started to dissolve, and at the same time, a plethora of small feminist groups started appearing in Athens and in many provincial cities. There were groups in the neighborhoods, universities and so on.
Effects of the decline in the mass movement
In the same period, the explosive movement that existed at the time of the transition to parliamentary democracy ended and was channelled through the official party and trade-union structures into a parliamentary logic. At the same time, the far left began to break up.
In 1978, we had a burgeoning of a campaigns against rape, for the freedom of women to walk the streets and for justice in the family. But that period favorable because the people's movement had ebbed. Those conditions aided the development and the perpetuation of an
GREECE inward-looking, anti-political feminism, distrustful of the left. Instead of working out a revolutionary feminist strategy, we saw a preoccupation with the formation of a private feminist sphere. Until today, this tendency has prevailed in the autonomous women's movement, and has marginalized
In Europe, there are two distinct, well defined and consolidated currents in the women's movement. Here, to the contrary, the currents that exist have not crystallized.
From the beginning of the autonomous women's movement there have been latent orientations — one was represented by socialists with a dual allegiance or a more general reference to the left; others who mainly stressed ideological, political and sexual oppression instead of working out a revolutionary feminist policy and forming a movement around concrete
Need for an open discussion
The first tendency believes that there is a many-sided oppression, economic, social, ideological, political and sexual. All the initiatives of the autonomous women's movement, except on rape, have been taken essentially by socialist women. But these women have also failed to advance a strate-
So there has been a great deal of caution about making these differences public. This, however, would promote discussion, sharpen up the points of disagreement and raise them to a theoretical level. These differences have been covered up out of fear that they might disrupt solidarity among women. The main cause for this concealment was the great hostility that society then held toward feminism. Thus, the autonomous feminists sought to protect their common existence by veiling the differences among themselves.
The concealment of these differences, however, and the failure to discuss them did not, in the last analysis, promote the unity and development of the women's movement but to the contrary led to neutralizing it and making it ineffective. This is a historical lesson that must be embodied in our collaboration and activity today.
We want a movement capable of taking initiatives on all questions of women's oppression - campaigns for women's representation, campaigns for sexual education, refuges for battered women, campaigns for introducing the women's question into the unions and so on.
We ourselves have to understand that the right to criticism, to differences and to form systematic currents is a fundamental democratic right, and begin to operate on the basis of this conception, which has not existed in the past.
We want a living feminism, based on reason, responsibility, criticism and effective. 11