Workers' Liberty

Women in rail and transport work in a male-dominated industry. The higher grades especially are dominated by men.

London socialist-feminist reading group: leaflet for meetings February-May 2008. Download pdf (see "attachment").

Women's Fightback no. 4 has gone to press, with a lead story on the Fremantle workers' struggle. Download it here as pdf (see "attachment").

The Russian revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, is best known for her organisational work among Russian working class women prior to, and immediately after, the 1917 revolution and her writings on sexual morality and the family. She has become better known largely as the result of feminist interest in her life and career.

Notes from AWL dayschool on socialist feminism, April 2007

What is socialist-feminism?

The basic and defining arguments of socialist-feminism are:

This background document for the AWL 2007 AGM includes a restatement of the immediate history of the modern women’s movement and our own history.

By Ella Downing

The two largest economically deprived groups in the world today are the working-class and women. This is not unrelated. Often states and religious institutions present this as an innate feature of human society. But we must reject this. The origins of inequalities must be understood instead.

How the oppression of women began, and what that implies for fighting oppression today. By Lilian Thomson

By Sean Matgamna

In its early phase, her life-story was a bit like a Barbara Cartland-style romance. In the late 1870s, the conventional young Englishwoman, Dorothy Fuller, bred in a Victorian manor house in Surrey and educated there by governesses and private tutors, goes out to Australia to visit relations and there meets and falls in love with a fine, rich, young Australian, George Barrow Montefiore. After a short trip home, she goes back to Australia to stay.

By Jill Mountford, from Workers' Liberty 58

"The name of our paper, the Woman's Dreadnought, is symbolic of the fact that the women who are fighting for freedom must fear nothing. It suggests also the policy of social care and reconstruction which is the policy of awakening womanhood throughout the world, as opposed to the cruel, disorganised struggle for existence amongst individuals and nations from which Humanity has suffered in the past... the chief duty of the Dreadnought will be to deal with the franchise question from the working-woman's point of view... (and) to review the whole field of the women's emancipation movement."

From Workers' Libety 56, June/July 1999

Constance Markievicz and the other women who fought in the Easter Rising struggled to be accepted on equal terms by the Irish labour movement and among nationalists. Their experience holds many lessons for today's socialists and feminists.

During the nineteenth century, the emerging workers’ movement began to develop its policy on the “woman question”. Some of the early, “utopian” socialists argued strongly for women’s liberation.

Introducing a series of articles on the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, by Janine Booth

During the nineteenth century, the emerging workers’ movement began to develop its policy on the ‘woman question’. The early, ‘utopian’ socialists argued strongly for women’s liberation. Ferdinand Lassalle led the ‘proletarian anti-feminists’, opposing votes for women and urging male workers to strike against women’s entry into industrial labour. Marx and Engels opposed Lassalle, arguing that women’s work was a step forward, and a precondition for liberation.

The third in a series of articles about the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, by Janine Booth

What is often seen as one issue - referred to at the time as the ‘woman question’ - actually developed quite differently amongst women of different classes.

The last in a series of articles about the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, by Janine Booth

Divided loyalties

Socialist feminists are continually accused of ‘divided loyalties’, challenged to declare which is our priority: class or sex. It makes a lot more sense to direct this challenge at feminists who defend capitalism, or at socialist men.

The second section of the Workers' Liberty pamphlet 'Comrades and Sisters' looks at women's situation today.

Domestic work, (badly-)paid work, the vast gulf between working-class and ruling-class women. Women in communities, and women in the welfare state. Religious fundamentalism, the state, New Labour and family values.

How can Marxism explain women's oppression?

The final section of the Workers' Liberty pamphlet 'Comrades and Sisters' looks at what socialism can offer women, and what sort of movement we need to win liberation.

Formal Equality and its Limits

What is 'feminism' and the women's movement all about?

Last time we looked at what exactly socialist feminism is, but what have socialist feminists had to do with women's struggles?

The development of industrial society threw masses of women into the factories. Whole industries, like the cotton industry, had a majority of women and children workers, existing in terrible conditions of super exploitation; as Marx put it in Capital, “Robbed of all that had previously been considered necessary for life".(1)