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Revolutionary Feminism Communist Interventions, Volume III

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Revolutionary Feminism Communist Interventions, Volume III Revolutionary Feminism Communist Interventions, Volume III Communist Research Cluster 2016 Women must completely discover their own possibilities|which are neither mending socks nor becoming captains of ocean-going ships. Better still, we may wish to do these things, but these now cannot be located anywhere but in the history of capital. {Mariarosa Dalla Costa Preface The history of the communist movement, in the twentieth century, is also a history of women. Many women stood on the movement's front lines. They struck in the factories, demonstrated in the streets, and died on the barricades. Revolutionary women fought under both the red flag and the black one. They partook of the movement's few victories and suffered under its massive and in the end overwhelming defeats. Yet women's participation in the communist movement also raised certain questions. Or else, perhaps more accurately, their participation provided many different answers to a question that remained frustratingly undefined. This question was called, rather vaguely, the \woman question," and it concerned the \role" of women in social life and in struggle. Revolutionary women|who were among the communist movement's most prominent theorists, generating texts on every line of revolutionary inquiry|posed and answered this question in different ways. This reader examines revolutionary debates around the \woman question" (and we include both men and women in this history, since the former also played a role in these debates). Towards that end, this volume is organized, loosely, into two parts. The first goes through the history of revolutionary feminism. It begins with a selection from Friedrich Engels' text on the origins of the family. This text is included at the start, since it is both referenced and criticized by so many of the texts that follow. We then continue through the first half of the twentieth-century| looking at socialist, anarchist and communist perspectives|before moving on to the radical feminist critiques of the New Left. The second part of the reader then stops moving forward in time, to linger on some of the key debates of the 1960s and '70s. To return to these texts, today, is clearly of great importance. Many of the gains of 1960s and 70s mainstream feminism have stagnated. Visible feminism today is largely bifurcated between esoteric academic cultural critique and neoliberal corporate sloganeering. A certain form of feminism has become de rigueur among liberals, yet the lives of many women and queer people have seen little material improvement. This lack of improvement comes, moreover, during a time of massive transformations in social life. Women in low-income countries make up a large portion of the world's manufacturing workforce (and the world's total workforce). Meanwhile, in the high-income countries, women have moved into the workforce in unprecedented numbers, driven in part by declining real wages and welfare austerity. The work of social reproduction is increasingly commodified in healthcare, education and domestic work, and food service industries. At the same time, birth rates among women, the world over, are falling to historic lows. In stark ways, women's lives are being transformed by the changing class dynamics of capitalism. Women are also playing dramatic and visible roles on both sides of an escalating class war. Ruling-class women are widely known as major political leaders, corporate CEOs, or heads of i ii PREFACE media empires. Meanwhile, working-class women and queer people|in the US, poor black and brown women in particular|are at the forefront of many struggles. Black women were the leading organizers in the 2014{2015 wave of anti-police brutality protest in the US, as well as many other community-based struggles. Insurrection by women is crucial to the future of all social movements, and increasingly our survival as a species. These issues call out for a critical engagement with basic questions of the nature of women's oppression in capitalist society. This reader returns to historical debates, looking towards substantive theoretical arguments made in the heat of earlier waves of struggle. These authors both speak to their particular historical conditions, often during periods of rising revolutionary consciousness and insurgency, and to the relentless questions of gender oppression in the capitalist world. What accounts for the persistence of women's oppression? What drives the major changes in the conditions of women's lives and in family reproduction? What is the role of unpaid domestic labor in class struggle and for class power? What are the causes of pervasive violence against women? How should feminist movements engage the race and class stratification among women? What role does independent and autonomous women's organizing play in revolutionary movements? And how will revolution transform women's lives? Some equally important questions remain largely or wholly unasked in this reader: what is the relationship between feminism and other movements seeking emancipation from the confines of gender? How is a revolutionary approach to \the woman question" transformed by struggles over who counts as a woman? Poor queer and trans people, many of them people of color, are presently waging fierce struggles, often for their very survival. These struggles have been some of the most radical in the streets. They are also some of the most productive, in terms of generating new revolutionary perspectives, in the present moment. By reading and debating these older texts, we hope to reflect on our own answers to these questions. For that reason, we include work by authors with whom we disagree, to better aid ourselves in discussion and debate. We include both well-known historical figures and forgotten movement scholars. Some of the later authors are academics, though we tried to hue to the leading thinking from within revolutionary movements themselves. We decided to stop the reader in 1984, at the end of one era and the cusp of another. May this reader aid our work, and the work of those to come, in the liberation of all women, the abolition of gender oppression|and perhaps gender as well|and our collective realization as full human beings. Communist Research Cluster New York, NY 2015 [email protected] http://communistresearchcluster.wordpress.com Contents Preface i 1 The Origins of an Orthodoxy 1 1.1 Frederich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) . 1 2 Second International 33 2.1 August Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879/1910) . 33 2.2 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question (1886) . 38 2.3 Clara Zetkin, Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be Victorious (1896) . 48 2.4 Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Suffrage and the Class Struggle (1912) . 55 2.5 Rosa Luxemburg, The Proletarian Woman (1914) . 58 3 Anarchism 61 3.1 Lucy Parsons, Woman: Her Evolutionary Development (1905) . 61 3.2 Voltairine de Cleyre, The Woman Question (1897) . 62 3.3 Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation (1906) . 63 3.4 Emma Goldman, Woman Suffrage (1910) . 67 3.5 Milly Witkop-Rocker, The Need for Women's Unions (1925) . 74 4 Russian Revolution 77 4.1 V.I. Lenin, Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women (1918) . 77 4.2 V.I. Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919) . 79 4.3 Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Woman Question (1920) . 81 4.4 Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family (1920) . 91 4.5 Leon Trotsky, Thermidor in the Family (1937) . 98 5 American Communist Party 107 5.1 Margaret Cowl, Women and Equality (1935) . 107 5.2 Mary Inman, In Woman's Defense (1940) . 113 5.3 Claudia Jones, We Seek Full Equality for Women (1949) . 127 5.4 Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women (1949) . 129 6 Women's Liberation 141 6.1 Casey Hayden and Mary King, Sex and Caste (1965) . 141 6.2 Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, Redstockings Manifesto (1968) . 143 6.3 Anne Koedt, The Politics of the Ego: A Manifesto for N.Y. Radical Feminists (1969) 145 6.4 Roxanne Dunbar, Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution (1969) . 148 6.5 Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1971) . 151 6.6 Women of the Weather Underground, A Collective Letter to the Women's Movement (1973) . 160 iii iv CONTENTS 7 Gay Liberation Front 167 7.1 Radicalesbians, The Woman Identified Woman Manifesto (1970) . 167 7.2 Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto (1970) . 171 7.3 Radicalqueens, Radicalqueens Manifestos (1973) . 181 7.4 Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, Street Transvestites for Gay Power State- ment (1970) . 182 7.5 Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organi- zation and Fems Against Sexism, Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation (1970) . 183 7.6 Charlotte Bunch, Lesbians in Revolt (1972) . 184 8 Socialist Feminism 189 8.1 Barbara Ehrenreich, What is Socialist Feminism? (1976) . 189 8.2 Chicago Women's Liberation Union, Socialist Feminism (1972) . 194 8.3 Marlene Dixon, The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation (1977) . 210 9 Sexual Violence 223 9.1 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (1975) . 223 9.2 Alison Edwards, Rape, Racism, and the White Women's Movement (1976) . 226 9.3 Lilia Melani and Linda Fodaski, The Psychology of the Rapist and His Victim (1974) 238 9.4 Combahee River Collective, Why Did They Die? A Document of Black Feminism (1979) . 246 10 Black Feminism 249 10.1 Mary Ann Weathers, An Argument for Black Women's Liberation as a Revolutionary (1969) . 249 10.2 Third World Women's Alliance, Women in the Struggle (1971) . 252 10.3 Frances Beal, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (1976) . 256 10.4 Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement (1977) .
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