Feminism

“In these times of revolts and urgent responses that are insufficient, we have to think about how we organize ourselves, how we again fall in love with the dream that ‘changing the world is possible’.”

“The history of our movements, be it women’s movements, LGBTIQ movements or other emancipatory movements, are full of examples where professionalization and discourse of efficiency damages the real cause: emancipation and empowerment of the very subjects of the movement.”

“We can see that a new wave of feminist struggles of a mass and international nature is sweeping the planet against gender-based and sexual violence and on issues of abortion rights in particular. We can only rejoice. Let us hope that this will make it possible to revitalize all feminist struggles within a unitary framework […].”

“Today is the beginning of a new movement. Today is the end of millennia of oppression.”
— Kate Millett, feminist author, speaking to 50,000 in New York City, August 26, 1970.

“[T]his brief but inspiring example of workers’ power could have won more time and so provided us with many more examples of how working-class people can organise together to create a socialist society.”

The socialist women’s young international has but one slogan: ‘Forward!’

For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East. Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality.

Tithi Bhattacharya offers an introduction to the methods, insights, and strategic implications of Social Reproduction Theory.

Jules Falquet looks at the complexity of identities, loyalties and the interests of everyone in social movements. The book Imbrication. Femmes, race et classe dans les mouvements sociaux published in February 2020 by Éditions du Croquant, presents the history of guerrilla (Salvador), Indian-peasant (Zapatista movement in Mexico) or Black (Brazil, Dominican Republic, USA) struggles, as well as the women’s, feminist and lesbian movements of the continent: the women of the Americas and the Caribbean offer us an exceptional mirror to better understand “intersectionality” at a time of a profusion of struggles, sometimes confusing . Starting from the daily life of these movements in order to reach a veritable "science of the oppressed", this book is aimed at an inquisitive public as well as activists and the world of research. [Contretemps]

Terry Conway is a social feminist and LGBTIQ activist. She is LGBT officer in Islington North Labour Party, Chair of Hackney and Islington Unite Community and officer of Labour Women Leading and a supporter of Socialist Resistance. This is an edited and expanded version of a contribution she made at a meeting at Houseman’s bookshop on March 4.