Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics by Michael Walzer

Author:Michael Walzer [Walzer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681373539
Google: aYyFDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2019-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

12. THE WOMAN QUESTION

PROFESSIONAL politics is overwhelmingly a man’s world. In citizen politics, women play a much larger part. Indeed, they constitute a majority of the adult participants in many activities. Young activists, struggling to get something started “in the community,” find women reachable in ways that men on the job are not (to them); and women with families and without jobs in fact have time to spare for politics—just as they have time to spare for the church, the PTA, hospital aid, and so on. Politics is not so different from these, though it is sometimes more important. So women are drawn in; they do important work and work at which they are often highly experienced. But they only rarely emerge as leaders, and they rarely make the weight of their experience and participation felt when crucial decisions are being made.

The reasons for this don’t have much to do with citizen politics in particular. The subordination of women, especially older women, in the new party or movement is only one more example of their position in the old society. The conventional activities that women most readily take up in the movement are those that are most seriously underpaid out of it. And the part-time work that is easiest for women with children is everywhere undervalued, by no means peculiarly so in the movement. Yet in the movement as out of it, women defer to men—to young activists, political old hands, semi-professionals, and part-time leaders who meet, argue, bargain, and hand down decisions. Even when women play key managerial roles in citizen politics, they are usually excluded from the boards of directors and steering committees which assume ultimate responsibility for movement projects. Sometimes this exclusion has a political excuse; often, it has to be said, the women involved do not resist. Unsure of their political roles, nervous about their family commitments, lacking in self-confidence, they allow themselves to become the common laborers of the movement.

There are any number of objections to be made to this situation, and the most important I leave to the women themselves. I only want to point out one consequence of their subordination for citizen politics, that is, the ephemeral character of so many amateur movements. This is caused at least partly by the way in which power in these movements gravitates toward people who are marginal to any particular local community and away from people—a very large number of them women—who have established themselves where they are and assumed local responsibilities.

It is important to point out the contrast here with established political parties and labor unions which are essentially associations of adult males, rooted in their communities, supplemented and sometimes strengthened by Ladies Auxiliaries. Citizen politics can rarely take that form, since so many men are committed elsewhere. More important, it shouldn’t take that form since one of its characteristic claims is to mobilize people who have been previously passive, unheard within the system. Women are one of its key constituencies, and their degradation is its especial loss.

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