THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 59 to recognize what the principal contradiction was—what made women and agricultural labourers join a movement which underplayed. It was a larger issue, a class-issue, which brought them together. Custers' total obliviousness to this makes his reconstruction of the episodes in the Tebhaga struggle colourful and melodramatic, but hardly realistic. The 'brave' 'militant' women are set against the dithering men and the unscrupulous and inefficient party leaders. The historically spcsific character of women's bravery is entirely lost in his portrayal. It seems to be something instinctive, apriori. To make up for the invisibility of women in history, Custers has succeeded in making invisible all other social relationships apart from the patriarchal. Thereby the reality of the partriarchal relationship itself gets completely fuzzed up. 15. Granthabali, Vol. 6, p. 262. 16. Krishak Sabhar Itihas. pp. 82, 100. 17. An example of increased organizational activity among women making them question the domestic role of subservience is given by Renu Chakravartty in Commnmuists in the Indian Women's Movement, Delhi 1980, p. 156. ^An old kisan hearing all the talk of women participating in the work of the Kisan Sabha asked : "How can the Kisan Sabha help you ?" Pat came the answer : "Your members can stop beating their wives." 18. The term is used by Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class (N.Y. 1981, p. 19) to denote the similar standards of treatment meted out to the male and the female black slave in America by their owner.