Marxism and women's liberation

Marxism at Work: Women's Liberation

Women in rail and transport work in a male-dominated industry. The higher grades especially are dominated by men. In the areas with more women, such as catering or cleaning, the low wages reflect that these jobs are devalued as ‘women’s work’. We face sexist comments and sexual harassment, and when...

Alexandra Kollontai: Socialist Feminist

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. At the end of her life Kollontai made this comment: “Women and their fate occupied me all of my life, and concern for their lot brought me to socialism.” Kollontai did see her special mission as fighting for the interests of working class wohien. However, when she wrote some...

The Unhappy Marriage of Socialism and Feminism?

Notes from AWL dayschool on socialist feminism, April 2007 What is socialist-feminism? The basic and defining arguments of socialist-feminism are: • Sexual difference, gender roles and the sexism and oppression of women that arises from them are not biological or inevitable, but socially constructed and rooted in the structures of society. • The oppression experienced by women in our society is particular to and rooted within capitalism. Class and sex oppression are intertwined and interdependent, and therefore the liberation of women and the emancipation of the working class must take place...

Restarting our women's work

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. Much of this has been said more comprehensively elsewhere (The case for Socialist Feminism, Comrades and Sisters ). Some of it is individual opinion, raising points for discussion. It also summarises our recent debates (abortion rights, hijab). It is an attempt to refamiliarise ourselves with the political ideas and point up areas for further discussion, to help us restart our work in this area. There are gaps. There is nothing here about the basic...

Socialist Feminism: Engels and the origin of female subjection

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. When studying the progress of human society it becomes apparent that the emergence of a class society and the origins of female subjugation go hand in hand. Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State explains that class society arose when, out of the conditions of...

Gender and class: why women are oppressed

How the oppression of women began, and what that implies for fighting oppression today. By Lilian Thomson As long as recorded history has lasted, so too has women's oppression. To many people, it just seems natural that women are worse off— it's because of women's smaller size or their capacity to bear children. Men comfort themselves with the thought that women need looking after. It's hard to combat that when history shows that not just the present capitalist system is to blame: in feudal society, and in earlier societies too, women occupied second place to men. But in the late 19th Century...

Dora B Montefiore: a half-forgotten socialist feminist

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. They marry and live happily, not for "ever after" — there is no such thing as ever after, no more than there are happy endings! — but for about a...

Sylvia Pankhurst: an organiser for working-class women

"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...

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