In the 20th century, the rise of the women's movement has reinforced the tendency witnessed in previous centuries for women to come to the forefront in battles against exploitation and oppression. This has reflected itself in all three sectors of the world revolution. MARIAN BRAIN has been looking back in admiration
Women have played a remarkable role fighting for democratic rights against our own oppression but also identified with the struggles of the so called third world, anti racist struggles, struggles for lesbian and gay rights and ecological struggles.
One of the dominant features of the 20th century has been the uprisings against colonialism. and women have played an indispensible role in these armed struggles.
Internationally the same pattern has been seen across North America, and Western Europe. The women’s liberation movement in America sent shock waves throughout the whole world and affected the language and attitude of many layers.
One of the main gains in the 1970s was around the abortion issue. This was a development from early in this century, when women gained rights for contraception.
Women now make up more than 50 per cent of the workforce. The development of affirmative action has led to a beginning of changes in women’s status.
The revolutionary left has been pushed into understanding the centrality of the struggle for women’s liberation to the project of socialist revolution. An slogan that I remember vividly from my early years of involvement is : "No women’s liberation without the socialist revolution. No socialist revolution without women’s liberation"
It is just as relevant today.
Perhaps one of the most impressive expressions of women’s self organisation in Britain was the development of women’s support groups during the miners’ strike . These lessons have been built on in more recent disputes; the dockers, Burnsalls, Hillingdon, Magnet and Critchley labels.
In recent years there has been a major ideological attempt to turn this back. There have been set backs too on affirmative action and as a result of individual terrorism by the right wing against abortion clinics in the USA.
In reasserting that we will not be post-feminists until we live in a post-patriarchal society, women - and men - can draw inspiration from the struggles of our sisters throughout history. Indeed rediscovering our history which had been hidden from us has been one of the crucial gains of the modern women’s movement.
In 1884 Flora Tristan was on an organising tour in provincial France to promote the ideas of an international association of workers. Harassed and exhausted, she fell ill and died. Her name became a legend in the French working class.
Shortly time before her death she summed up her fate in a letter to one of her friends and comrades. She wrote
"I have nearly the whole world against me. Men because I demand the emancipation of women, and the owners because I demand the emancipation of wage-earners"
In 1848, women gathered in Seneca Falls, New York State, to adopt their own Declaration of Independence
Seven years later at a Women’s Rights convention in Ohio, the former slave Isabella, who is better known as Sojourner Truth, took the floor. She rose to answer a preacher who had ridiculed women as weak and helpless and therefore undeserving of the right to vote. In a stirring speech that turned the entire convention around she declared:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place – and ain’t I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could head me – and ain’t I a woman?
"I could work as much and eat as much as man – when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?"
Between these two events came the historic year of 1848. This was the year that women gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, to adopt their own Declaration of Independence and to launch a conscious, organized movement of women against their oppression as women.
It was also the year that the Communist Manifesto was published, proclaiming to the world the birth of scientific socialism. This marked the beginning of the working-class movement as a self-conscious, political movement of the majority of humanity in the interest of the majority.
This coincidence of dates is no real coincidence at all. Both movements came onto the historical stage with the rise of industrial capitalism. Both were generated by the changes that capitalism brought in the social relations of production and reproduction. the twin pillars of all human societies.
The oppression of women did not begin with capitalism. On the contrary, it extends back to the dawn of recorded history. But it was the advent of capitalism with its continuous, revolutionary development of productive capacities that made women’s liberation a realisable goal.
Just as capitalism itself organised the working class as a whole – increasing its size and concentration, skill, educational level, and political consciousness it also transformed the conditions of women. It brought millions of women out of the countryside, and out of the home and into the labour force.
It began the process of socialising the chores of the individual family – "women’s work" – such as baking, weaving, and making clothes. New social and political horizons were opened for women.
Not only did masses of women begin to become conscious of their oppression, but more importantly they began to see a way to end that oppression. They began to raise demands, formulate a programme and organise themselves for struggle.
One of the most noteworthy aspects of the Paris Commune in 1871 was the formation of mass independent all-women organisations which fought for women’s interests and mobilised them in defence of the commune.
Separate women’s organisations first emerged during the siege by the Prussians, and there was considerable discussion then about establishing a separate women’s battalions.
A number of women’s organisations came together and won mass support and important gains for women. These included equal pay for teachers, and pensions for any women who asked for a separation even if it was a common law marriage.
Pensions were given to women and children of National Guardsmen killed defending the commune. The hated Morality police, used to hunt down prostitutes, were abolished, and technical and professional education for women and free compulsory and secular education for everyone were introduced.
The women’s organisations enforced the latter demand by forcibly removing priests, nuns and mother superiors from the schools when they refused to comply. Women participated in the six-person "Society for New Education", which in five days drew up a new educational programme for presentation to the Commune.
The women’s clubs usually met in churches they took over for the meetings. They discussed child-care centres and nurseries, divorce laws, and many other topics.
The extent of the reforms was limited by the harsh military necessities of defending the Commune, in which women played a heroic role.
Not only were they nurses and canteen workers, many of them were soldiers on the front line. There was a separate women’s company, commanded by women officers.
Louise Michel a leader of the First International and one of the most important figures of the Paris Commune recounts
"The army fraternised with the people instead of shooting them down. That triumph of the popular cause is perhaps chiefly due to the intervention of the women, who covered the artillery with their own bodies, and even placed themselves at the muzzles of the guns, to prevent the latter being fired."
She also argued that in the last desperate battles within the sectors of Paris itself, the women "flinched at nothing. They reconciled themselves much more speedily to the inevitable" It took Thirez’s troops another week to break the resistance.
The history of the Commune illustrates that Andre Leo was right when she wrote during the Commune, pointing out that women had not helped ‘dethrone the Emperor and God’ simply to let the ruling class re-establish power:
"The Revolution means – since we must take its side – liberty and responsibility for every human being, with common rights as their only limit, and without any privilege of race or Sex."
The experience of 1871 showed the world the power of women, organised and ready to throw of their yoke of oppression. As Louise Michel noted,
"In rebellion alone woman is at ease, trampling upon both, prejudice and sufferings. All intelligent women will sooner or later rise in rebellion."
I would want now to look at the struggle in China in the early 1920s. Through the eyes of Chen Pi-lan we see how the struggle for women’s liberation from feudal traditions developed into a struggle for socialism.
Chen Pi-lan was a leading member of the Chinese section of the Fourth International, having originally been recruited to the Chinese Communist Party in 1922. A party leader came to her girls boarding school and gave a speech on "women’s position in society".
Li Han-chun described the different positions of women in different societies, beginning with primitive communist society, through feudal society, capitalist society and finally the future socialist society. He concluded was if women wanted equality they must have economic independence.
The prerequisite for achieving complete liberation was a change in the social system. Only after the proletariat had been freed would women have their liberation. He had used Auguste Bebel’s Women and Society as his text.
Pi-Lan describes how they went on to organise the girls’ school, demanding the right to cut their hair, to have coeducation, to hold discussion circles on questions such as freedom to love and freedom of marriage. They later participated in strikes, May Day demonstrations and formed working women’s clubs.
In an article in International Socialist Review September 1976 she states : "In describing my experiences in the revolutionary movement, especially my activities and role in the women’s movement, I cannot separate it from the earlier history of the Chinese Communist Party, because the women’s movement was part of CCP’s work, and the women’s movement in each period has it different historical and political background."
The highest form of revolutionary leadership to this date was the Bolshevik Party’s leadership of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Although Stalinism later destroyed many of the gains of the revolution, the lessons remain vital because they pose the way for women’s emancipation.
One of the highlights of the Russian Revolution was the role women played in the February revolution. Women from the textile industry went on strike and held mass demonstrations and sparked the uprising that led to the fall of the Tzar.
Petrograd women poured into the streets demanding "bread for our children" and "the return of our husband from the trenches" The Russian Revolution marked its beginning that day.
After the victory in October many changes began to take place. The concept of social responsibility rather than individual burdens being placed on women started to lay the basis for women beginning to break the chains of our oppression.
Free abortion on demand meant that for the first time women had some control over their fertility, instead of being bogged down by unwanted pregnancies. Women for the first time could plan their lives.
In order to remove the economic chains of dependency that form the basis of the patriarchal family it is necessary to replace the family with institution that can provide the valid functions of the family even better. Nurseries and socialised kitchens were developed.
Government agencies and women’s commissions were set up as a way of reaching out to women in the remote rural areas. This was crucial as the Bolsheviks and socialist ideas were less strong in these areas and the hold of religion was stronger.
In 1917 when the All Russian Congress of Soviets convened in Petrograd on the evening after the fall of the discredited Kerensky regime, Lenin went to the tribune and announced quite simply and with an acute sense of history, "We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."
Over the next weeks, months and years ahead, in our battles to free the world from barbarism and in our struggle to construct a socialist alternative, we know that women will play their full role.
Without women’s liberation there can be no socialism and without socialism there can be no women’s liberation.