Britain
“The scorn which the angry young men hurled at the establishment was a class resentment but one devoid of any class consciousness,” feminist Lynne Segal writes perceptively in Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy. In the decades that followed, shaped by race riots, feminism, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and the collapse of heavy industry and trade unionism, working-class solidarity appeared to fracture. The rise of what’s now called identity politics began.
From the the Blitz to Brexit
"While in 1931 10% of married women were in work, that rose sharply to 21% in 1951 and 47% in 1972
It is interesting to draw a comparison here. If in an industrial power like Britain, an Empire, with 200 years of capitalist development, women became half of the workforce only in early 1970s, how should one analyse the condition of women in Africa and the Middle East? Why Arab women, for example, do not in total terms make half of the workforce? Does that have something to do with the colonial era which ended only in the 1950 and 1960s, the failure of the industrialisation attempt after the nationalist revolutions, the move from defunct state capitalism to rentier economy, which has not only maintained the ossified state structures of autocracy and authoritarianism, but blocked economic development, including creating jobs for the general population, to a rentier economy that has relied on hydrocarbons and squandering of wealth at home and abroad.
One stark example is Turkey. Unlike in the rentier economies, Turkey's female workforce amounts to 32%. That is also a refutation of the essentialist view that religion is the cause. Even in Afghanistan, according to the World Bank data, has a bigger female participation in the labour force than the MENA countries.
Similarly, one should look at the role of industrialisation in China and its impact on gender relations and work relations.
One can also compare the effects of industrialisation in the Soviet Union on bringing women into the workforce and what that brought with it in terms of gender and sexual relations, and financial independence, among other changes.
“The scorn which the angry young men hurled at the establishment was a class resentment but one devoid of any class consciousness,” feminist Lynne Segal writes perceptively in Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy. In the decades that followed, shaped by race riots, feminism, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and the collapse of heavy industry and trade unionism, working-class solidarity appeared to fracture. The rise of what’s now called identity politics began.
From the the Blitz to Brexit
"While in 1931 10% of married women were in work, that rose sharply to 21% in 1951 and 47% in 1972
It is interesting to draw a comparison here. If in an industrial power like Britain, an Empire, with 200 years of capitalist development, women became half of the workforce only in early 1970s, how should one analyse the condition of women in Africa and the Middle East? Why Arab women, for example, do not in total terms make half of the workforce? Does that have something to do with the colonial era which ended only in the 1950 and 1960s, the failure of the industrialisation attempt after the nationalist revolutions, the move from defunct state capitalism to rentier economy, which has not only maintained the ossified state structures of autocracy and authoritarianism, but blocked economic development, including creating jobs for the general population, to a rentier economy that has relied on hydrocarbons and squandering of wealth at home and abroad.
One stark example is Turkey. Unlike in the rentier economies, Turkey's female workforce amounts to 32%. That is also a refutation of the essentialist view that religion is the cause. Even in Afghanistan, according to the World Bank data, has a bigger female participation in the labour force than the MENA countries.
Similarly, one should look at the role of industrialisation in China and its impact on gender relations and work relations.
One can also compare the effects of industrialisation in the Soviet Union on bringing women into the workforce and what that brought with it in terms of gender and sexual relations, and financial independence, among other changes.
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