Women, organized and speaking up for themselves, naming their oppressors and fighting back. Inspiring stuff. :)
“It is an urgent necessity for the development of the communist movement and the revolutionary movement in general, that every viewpoint which sees the oppression of women as a “side issue” or any feminism as “petty bourgeois” be smashed. The women of the working class suffer a double oppression, their oppression as part of the proletariat and their oppression under the patriarchy.
The working-class women are exploited not only by wage slavery, but also by the their slavery under the patriarchy. A communist and revolutionary politics is worth its name only so long as it is an expression of the interests of the most oppressed and exploited, accordingly, no communist and revolutionary force can negate the special role and importance of the mobilization, politicization and organization of women, especially the women workers, without unmasking themselves as impostors.”
–Red Women’s Committee Hamburg, “Towards March 8th! Fight Patriarchy and Imperialism!”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
4 comments
February 13, 2016 at 10:17 am
Emma
I grew up under communism (or extreme socialism, since that’s what that was in the Soviet era Poland) and given that equality of the sexes was very much a reality, we didn’t need feminism (or so I believed for many years, looking back), nor ever heard about it.
Now I’m not so sure about that “not needing” part. Because even though we were light years ahead of the Western world, and certainly of the US, our society was still fundamentally patriarchal. And so, for example, while women were encouraged to enter every so-called ‘masculine’ field of education and work (my MIL was a metallurgical engineer in charge of a large operation of a major national company), politics, for example, was almost strictly a male domain. It “just so happened” — but obviously not really.
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February 13, 2016 at 10:29 am
liberationislife
That’s interesting Emma, I hadn’t realised things felt so equal in socialist Poland (which I had assumed was more influenced by the USSR, which of course had, by then, wound back the Bolsheviks’ world-leading feminist gains, under the influence of the counter-revolution led by the bureaucratic caste, and was rather socially conservative on some measures). It sounds like you didn’t have anything like the Cuba’s FMC? I think the Cubans are absolutely right that they need an ongoing, organised women’s lib movement to continue carrying the feminist revolution forwards. No rubbish about ‘the anti-capitalist revolution will fix it all’ for them.
Anyway, thanks for this OP, and how necessary it is. Feminism really has conservatised lately, and women are too busy identifying with forces that will never really back us.
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February 13, 2016 at 12:25 pm
stchauvinism
Reblogged this on things I've read or intend to.
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February 13, 2016 at 1:40 pm
Emma
@liberationislife:
I had to look up the Cuban FMC. No, I don’t believe we had anything similar — and, as far I can tell, there was “no need” for it. I put that in quotes, because yeah, now I’m not sure it was really the case. Women were genuinely equal to men and that simple fact was trumpeted from every public podium, so it had to be doubly true. ;)
Women voted. Equal pay, guaranteed by our constitution for decades, was a reality, as far as I know, and not just an empty slogan. Women were encouraged to pursue any and all areas of their interests and talents. Women engineers, scientists, tractor drivers, welders, builders, etc. were our everyday reality and not just some rare cases trotted out for special occasions. What’s more, we had two to three years of paid maternity leave, day care was easily available to all (I hated it, by the way — I was a day care kid for a time), and health care and education on all levels were free and quite good, as I can attest from the perspective of time and comparisons with the US.
Of course we were poor, but there was no inequality to make it hurt.
The main observable differences were in the domestic sphere, where women generally were burdened with the second shift (although Polish men raised before and during that time are far more egalitarian than their American counterparts, in my observations, and much more involved in the domestic and child rearing work), and in politics. I cannot recall any women in the uppermost (or any, really) levels of the government during that time — a stunningly glaring “omission” in a society priding itself on equality.
One of several reasons behind it was the non-ceasing influence of the Catholic church, which has been holding Poles in its ever-tightening grip for a millennium. It is much worse now, from what I see, than I remember (and what I remember was oppressive). There are openly Catholic TV and radio programs in the Polish media now where the announcers start and end with a prayer which includes “and praise Mary, the forever virgin.” (gag)
However, I would also say that, paradoxically perhaps, the influences of the Catholic church were also in part responsible for the respect that Polish women generally had within our society. Not that this respect necessarily translated into practice (and this is an understatement of the 20th century). It was / is such a mixed bag now that I think about it.
I should also mention that abortion was legal, even though very restricted (and often horrible for women who chose it, because of the purposeful mistreatment by the medical personnel and the stigma that followed), and we had an extremely limited access to contraception (it may have been by design, I suspect, although have no evidence for it — not that I looked for it either). This made abortion practically the only effective “contraception” available to women.
Below is a link to paper by a Romanian sociologist discussing Ceausescu’s draconian Decree 770, which outlawed contraception and abortion, and turned women into walking wombs to increase the country’s population. While things were never as dire and inhumane in Poland, the overall picture of the society and women’s equality she paints in the opening parts generally applies to Poland and other countries of the Soviet bloc:
Click to access 010623_paper25.pdf
In retrospect, I would say (sarcastically) we had the best equality that patriarchy would allow.
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