Women's Fightback, Feminism

I would like to respond Esther Townsend’s article “The things we do for love” ( Women’s Fightback , January/February 2014). On becoming a mother at the age of 21 I believed feminism was something that fought for me to have choice, the choice to work like my elder sister, or stay home, like my mum. But I found that SAHMs (stay-at-home mothers) are seen as out-dated and that my rights as a mother revolved solely around my right to return to the workplace; my right to stay home is poorly accounted for and the decision to do so is often viewed negatively. Esther’s article reflects this. Esther...

The Women’s Conference of transport union RMT, held on 7-8 March in Glasgow, saw a new determination to campaign against sexism and for women workers’ rights and to tackle the under-representation of women within the union. Guest speakers included North Ayrshire and Arran Labour MP (and RMT Parliamentary group member) Katy Clark and Scottish TUC Assistant Secretary (and former railworker and RMT activist) Ann Henderson. The conference passed a resolution noting that next year marks 100 years since the first woman joined RMT’s predecessor the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), and calling on...

Recently the 17 year old daughter of poor village labourers was subjected to 110 lashes. Her crime was to give birth to a child whose parenthood her husband refused to accept. Part one Part two

An all-party parliamentary group on prostitution has recommended Britain follows the lead of countries such as Sweden and Norway, which make the purchase of sex illegal. Neither buying nor selling sex is illegal in the UK but soliciting, pimping, brothel-keeping and kerb-crawling are all criminal activities. The Nordic model, which also decriminalises sex work, rests on the argument that all prostitution is violence against women. The parliamentary group, following that line, says the current law “serves to normalise the purchase and stigmatise the sale of sexual services — and undermines...

The campaign now spreading in some parts of the student movement for the SWP to be banned from campuses should be opposed. We should defend freedom of political expression and debate on campuses. The form of “banning” varies: tipping over and physically destroying SWP stalls; insisting that SWP members either absent themselves from campaigns or agree to not have SWP materials on them; or banning the SWP from booking or using rooms in students’ unions. In whatever form it takes, the campaign to “ban” the SWP is not the way to challenge the SWP’s behaviour or combat their ideas; it is not the...

Around fifty cleaning workers, their families, and their supporters marched through Kingston, south-west London, on International Working Women’s Day (8 March), with red flags flying. We marched from the train station to Kingston University, for an event organised by the London Cleaners and Facilities branch of the Independent Workers’ of Great Britain union (IWGB, the same union whose University of London branch has been has been waging the “3 Cosas” campaign). A contingent from the University of London IWGB branch, including Workers’ Liberty members, joined us later in the day. Kingston...

In December 2013, French MPs voted for new laws to make the buying of sexual services a criminal offence and subject to a minimum fine of €1,500. The new law, which is still to be passed by the French Senate, is based on the so-called “Nordic model” (i.e. originating in Sweden), where clients rather than sex workers are heavily penalised and where sex work remains, in theory, legal. The policy is aimed at abolishing sex work altogether. In France migrant sex workers who “give up” sex work will be given exceptional “leave to remain” in France. They will also get 336€ a month. The architects of...

It's impossible to discuss women's experiences of work without considering childcare. In England in 2011 78% of families with children under 15 used some form of childcare, ranging from nurseries and pre-schools; childminders; breakfast and after school clubs; to holiday care - we can't live and work without it. But for many families these arrangements aren't working. In the last year childcare costs have soared by 19% in the UK. This is part of a longer term trend upward with The Family and Childcare Trust showing the cost of childcare has increased by 77% over the past decade while wages...

Published in 1984, Tony Cliff’s book Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation set out the SWP’s theory on women’s oppression and how to fight it. This was a couple of years after the SWP had shut down its inconveniently independent ‘Women’s Voice’ paper and organisation, and Cliff’s cliched tale of “good” revolutionaries putting the class struggle first and “bad” bourgeois/radical feminists was clearly aimed at members of his own party. The book begins: ‘Two different movements have sought to achieve women’s liberation over the past hundred or more years, Marxism and feminism.’ Feminism, he...