Womens Day
Socialist Organiser1984 1984-03-08Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 5 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 5
Intemarional Women's Day 1983 - marching in support of Greenham INTERNATIONAL Women's Day 1984 seems a rather low-key affair - a far cry from either the bitter disputes between women of recent years, or the dazzling highpoint of International Women's Day 1917 (see an account elsewhere on this page). How have we arrived at this?
International Women's Day originated in 1908 in the US, when women needle trades workers in Manhattan marched for "equal suffrage for women", "an eight-hour day" and the end of child labour.
Clearly, those women workers saw no • contradiction between women's political demands (the vote) and overtly class demands (eight-hour day). Because of the underdevelopment of women's formal (as opposed to real social) equality the dividing line between "bourgeois feminists" and socialist, working class women was much clearer.
The bourgeois feminists limited themselves to demands for political equality and equal access to class privilege with men of their class. Socialist women could show clearly that liberation for all women could only come about in conjunction with class struggle.
It was therefore the socialist women's movement, as part of
Gerry
a feature of class society to patriarchy and the contradiction between men and women. International Women's Day became a battle ground for this split.
Rows took place about whether to focus on themes relating to the most oppressed women (e.g. working class women and the right to work, or black women and imperialism) or issues that unite all women regardless of class and race (sexual violence). The split was demoralising for both sides and the present downturn in interest can be seen as a kind of battle-weariness.
But now class has reared its head again in the women's liberation movement in a new guise. We now have "classism"' to add to the "isms' of oppression.
But it has largely become a depoliticised concept. Whereas racism or imperialism have both strict structural meanings and a more general liberal sense. "classism" seems only to have a liberal content. It's about the way middle class feminists one -* the Vyborg borough-