WOMAN’‘S VIEWPOINT

“THE subject of our debate today is: ‘Resolved that the

spoken word is more important than the written
word’.” What kind of a queer argument is this? Tim
Buck, LPP national leader, told an audience at the recent

Place some years ago.

But, he explained, in reality the spoken word and the
; printed word supplement and build upon one another,
in the- process of expanding and deepening the under-
standing of the progressive movement. The printed word,
he said, “acts as the advance guard for probing into
circles never reached before . . . batters down prejudice
. and is essential not only in winning a fortress but

in holding it once won.”

Publishers of the capitalist press are certainly well
aware of this power of the printed word, and the hysteri-
cal headlines, the distorted reports, even the selection
of the news in the daily papers today show how they

t exploit their power in a mass way.

Particularly they try to reach into circles of women
and divert their thinking from their basic problems, in-
fluencing them to take a position hostile to their own
fundamental interests. This is so in international, nat-
ional, and family affairs. Witness Dorothy Thompson’s
column, and more recently Eleanor Roosevelt’s column.

Claudia Jones in the New York Daily Worker of
December 17 refers to Mrs, Roosevelt’s red-baiting of
the recent delegation of over 2,000 American Women for
Peace to the UN. Mrs. Roosevelt told the women that
their petition for peace “showed how little they under-
stood the situation, but spoke of the yearning of every
women’s heart when she sees her men in danger...
The FBI may . list some of these people .>.and may
prevent them getting jobs .. . some day.”

In domestic affairs, remember Byrne Hope Sanders

predicting in a Chatelaine editorial two years ago that

. Canadian women were going to have to choose between

guns and butter, and if they were wise they would do
without the butter.

Magazines for women are half-filled with articles and
advertisements catering to the secondary but natural
interests of women in personal appearance, home decor-
ation, food preparation, gardening, but offering no answer
to the basic problem of how to satisfy these interests
within the average family budget. The other half is
filled with fiction cut to fit the pattern laid down by
capitalist society: shearing away the romanticism —
woman is an inferior being whose main life interest is

LONDON LETTER

ORD CAMROSE’S weekly Everybody’s a few weeks ago
reproduced three Russian posters, to “unmask” Soviet
peace policy. The captions contain five falsehoods.

Everybody’s reproduces one famous Soviet peace
poster as evidence. The words upon it—in Roman letters
“Mir Pobiedit Voinu!’’—mean “Peace will conquer war.”

ve . But Everybody’s has managed to read a sinister
; \ meaning into this simple peace message.

Falsehood number 1

The caption says: “The Russian wording translated
can mean either ‘Peace will Conquer’ or ‘We will conquer
the world.’ ” In fact, the words cannot bear either of
these meanings, but only “Peace will conquer war.”

: Falsehood number 2

Russian words “Silui Mira Nepobedimi” which it trans-
R lates “Anmed force will never conquer peace.”

In fase these words mean, and can only mean “The
forces of peace are ynconquerable.”

Falsehood numer 3

Everybody’s writes: “These vivid Soviet ‘Peace’ posters
have been smuggled out from behind the Tron Curtain.”

William Wainwright, secretary of fae British-Soviet

; Toronto Book Fair that such debates actually did take |

Everybody’s publishes another poster bearing the >

By HAZEL WIGDOR

W omen writers must answer
t / a BS
questions women’s journals ignore

to hunt a mate to provide a meal ticket; her place is in
the home with the man being the head of the family; if
she does go out to work she accepts second-choice jobs
with sceond-place wages as her natural) inevitable fate.

How extensive is the probing of the capitalist press
in women’s circles? New Liberty claims the lead in
circulation among Canadian magazines with 416,610 as at
June 30, 1950, and lists the following: Maclean’s 396,069,
Chatelaine, 370,558, Canadian Home Journal, 356,071.

And how extensively does the progressive and labor
press probe into circles of women otherwise unreached?
The combined circulation of the progressive and labor
press probably runs into five figures, but certainly it
does not come anywhere near six figures. If all of us
worked as consistently—and successfully—in extending
the influence of the labor press as Eve Colby in Toronto,
Margaret Milburn in Nova Scotia, and Rita Whyte in
Vancouver, and at the same time made more effective
use of the written word to supplement the spoken word,
there is no doubt about what could be done. Such papers
as the Canadian Tribune and Pacific Tribune give real
answers to the questions being asked by women across
the country,

“It just makes you sick to think of it, all this talk
about war and prices going up all the time,” I overheard
one women saying to another on the streetcar the other
day. “You just don’t know what to do.”

But there are women in the progressive labor move-
ment who do know what must be done and who can,
through contributions to the labor press, answer the
questions women generally are asking.

In Toronto and Vancouver groups of women. have
made a beginning. And women writing for: the pro-
gressive press in languages other than English are also
making a splendid contribution.

For instance Lisa Bonder and a number of other
Russian-Canadian women do an excellent job in Vestnik.

The only progressive magazine for women in Canada
is A No—Hungarian for The Wpmen, but it is to be hoped
that before too long there will ‘be other progressive publi-
cations for women in this country similar to those now
published in Britain, France, and closer to home, Cuba.
We may look forward to the day when the same medium
can be used for reaching both English-speaking and
French-speaking women in Canada. In the meantime,
there is need for more women to write for and extend
the influence of the progressive press we already Have.

British weekly’s ‘unmasking’ of

USSR shows own false face

Friendship Society, commented: “What poisonous rub-
bish! We've had copies of these posters since last April
and used them to decorate our meetings.”

Falsehood number 4

Everybody’s goes on to “explain Russia’s insistent
demand for peace” by repeating the story that a leading
French Communist, M. Waldeck-Rochet, told a private
meeting of Communists at Limoges:

“A world war ... for the time being, is contrary
to the peace policy of the Soviet Union. We can be
certain that a year of guaranteed peace, is a year utilized
to the utmost by the Soviet Union to reinforce its army
and those of the popular democracies.”

Everybody’s says: “This statement has never been
denied.” In fact, it was denied by M. Waldeck-Rochet
in the French Press on November 16 and in the Man-
chester Guardian on November 17.

Falsehood number 5

Everybody’s also says that this statement was “re-
printed in many Soviet provincial newspapers.”

It was mistakenly reported in the Manchester Guard-
ian to have been reprinted in Soviet papers. In fact, it
was reprinted in French provincial newspapers and never

appeared in the Soviet Union.

LABOR FOCUS By J. B. SALSBERG

Defend our

living standards

| sag stock market is up and up. Bay Street and St.
James Street are chortling with glee. Millions are
made in the market every day.

Prices are rising fantasically. Profits skyrocket.
Dividend payments are higher than ever. Extra bonuses
are paid to stockholders by most monoply concerns. Re-
serves are swelling to a degree that’ makes concealment
impossible.

The war'of aggression against the Korean people and
the frenzied preparations for a full-scale third world war
are proving to be more profitable for
the profiteers than they dreamed of.
The Bank of Montreal Business Re-
view of December 21 looks back on
the last year and says: “The year be-
gan with ominous signs of recession
visible in shrinking overseas export
markets, in prospects of some curtail-
ment of both domestic capital outlays
and consumer spending and in grow-
ing numbers of unemployed. It ends
with activity at a hectic pace and with
the accent, to an increasing degree,
on problems of supply, allocation and
price .... the outbreak of armed
aggression in Korea at mid-year, the consequent upsurge
of demand and prices on a world-wide scale quickly
made its mark on the Canadian situation.”

It certainly did make its mark. It knocked the life
out. of the workers’ purchasing dollar. It took all
meaning out of wage contracts. It made wage demands
an urgent necessity for all wage and salary earners in
the country: It compels the opening of all contracts—
whether they have or have not got “wage openers”—in
order to raise wages at once. Wage increases are imper-
ative to protect the living standards of the workers and
to halt the skinning of the working people.

The Canadian ruling class is experienced in the art
of loading the tax burden on the masses of people—those
least able to pay; Now it is recklessly proceeding to
put the staggering’costs of its imperialist war preparations
on the backs of the workers as never before. That’s
what the profiteering and the inflationary government
policies mean. The Bank of Montreal puts it quite plainly
when it says, in its own jargon, “For some time to
come, rising business indices are likely to reflect the
shadow rather than the substance of enhanced prosperity
in terms of civilian living standards.” That’s it, my
friend, there will be prosperity—war prosperity—but not
in terms of living standards ....

The prognostication of the Bank of Montreal is based,
of course, On past experiences of bankers and monopoly
industrialists. But that does not have to be true today.

Now we have a powerful army of one million trade
unionists to lead people in the battle against the war
profiteers. What is more important is the fact that the
bulk of Canadian people do not want war but peace, do
not favor the machinations of the ruling cliques to drag
Canada into wars of aggression which are instigated by
U.S. imperialism, and see no reason why they should
make the least sacrifice for such diabolical and bloody
ventures. That was shown by the railway workers who
went on strike in the fall and that has been shown by
tens of thousands of workers in the auto, metal mining,
electric and other industries who fought and already won
new wage increases, a

But what must be recognized is that only a small per-
--centage of the Canadian working class won new wage
increases during the last few months. The vast majority
of wage and salary earners did not. They didn’t because
their leaders failed them and because the rank-and-file
wasn’t sufficiently mobilized for the battle to force the
issue.

The elementary task of the great Canadian trade
union membership is ,therefore, glaringly clear: they
must unite and launch “the fight for higher wages now.
The left and progressive sections of the.trade union mem-
bership have the special task of giving leadership to
the necessary rank-and-file wage movement that must
spread throughout the land before the “shadow,” that the
Bank of Montreal speaks about, turns into a long-term
darkness...

The steel union leadership, for example, crowed about
price control when more militant and progressive unions
went after wages. Now, when the pressure of the steel
union membership for wages has become irresistable,
that leadership has announced that it will also seek
higher wages. But that’s where the matter has rested.
The only wage action discerned anywhere in the steel
industry is where the rank-and-file and not the leaders
are determining policy. That is so in the Steel Company
of Canada plant in Hamilton and in a few lesser plants.
But what of Algoma, Dosco and the hundreds ‘of other
steel plants? And what of the coal mining industry? Yes
and what of packing, rubber and scores of other bir :
ized industries?

z The left wingers, the progressives and all militants
in the trade union movement have their immediate task
cut out for them, They must go to it with vigor and de-
termination. They owe it to their fellow workers and
they owe it to the entire working class. The struggle
for higher wages now, the fight against the profiteering
and inflationary architects of our economy is the battle
for the defense of the living standards of the Canadian

° people and is, therefore, a national duty.

1951 — Page 9

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 12,