Feminism

On the 20th of August in 1976, a group of Asian immigrants in London began a strike that would define an era.

Many things can spark a wildfire, but it’s what happens afterward that determines whether that fire will rage. In the case of the #MeToo campaign, the dozens of women who stepped forward to talk about their experiences of having been sexually assaulted by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was the catalyst for tens of thousands more women to break the silence about their own stories of sexual assault and harassment—providing fuel to a fire that has been long in the making.

Issues of gender and sexuality are dominating the American public in a way that has few precedents in the recent past. From the alarmingly open misogyny of the president to the cascading revelations of sexual attacks in the workplace on one side, to the energy behind the historic women’s marches on the other, gender relations have risen to the top of the political debate. In a wide-ranging conversation, historian Stephanie Coontz places the current juncture in historical perspective, and offers her thoughts on how gender relations have been affected by the recent stagnation in working-class incomes and skyrocketing inequality. She closes with an eloquent plea to integrate gender politics into a broader progressive political vision.

As the organizers of the International Women’s Strike (IWS) have declared, March 8, 2018 will be “a day of feminism for the 99 percent.” One year ago to the day, International Women’s Day, women and their allies around the globe participated in the first International Women’s Strike, which was billed as “A Day Without a Woman.” Building on the international momentum from the Women’s March earlier in 2017, strikers took to the streets and demonstrated from Tokyo to Rome, Istanbul to Mexico City, Manila to Los Angeles. In the United States, school districts in multiple states were shut down, demonstrators filled city centers and university grounds—even some elected officials in Washington, D.C., showed solidarity.

Forty years ago, a group of radical Black feminists who named themselves the Combahee River Collective released a statement defining their politics and describing their political work. The Combahee River Collective Statement has endured as a powerful document that clearly named the multiple oppressions that Black women faced due to their race, sex, class and sexual orientation; developed the idea of identity politics; and provided a key roadmap of the political work and organizing necessary to uproot all oppression.

The starting point of this study is a paradox: among social, institutional and political actors, peasant and family farming are gradually becoming established as legitimate and credible alternatives to an agro-productivist model that has ’run out of steam’. [1] They address both environmental and food-related challenges, are sustainable and successful in agro-economic terms, contribute to social change and operate on a human scale. This is one side of the coin.

George Souvlis and Ankica Čakardić of Salvage spoke to Cinzia Arruzza, one of the organizers of the call for the International Women’s Strike in the US, about why she came to be an activists, her views on the women’s strike, and more broadly her political views.

This interview with David McNally and Sue Ferguson was published in October 2015, on the occasion of the publication of a new version of Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, for which they wrote a new Introduction.

Johanna Brenner: I grew up in a staunchly liberal family and remained politically liberal until I joined the movement against the Vietnam war, where I was introduced to anti-imperialist politics and then Marxism and “third-camp” socialism. In the late 60’s I was part of the student left that turned toward organizing the working-class. I was a student at UCLA. We organized student support for a teamster wildcat strike and we had a group called the Student Worker Action Committee that published a newspaper, Picket Line, where we covered different worker and community struggles in Los Angeles. I was rather slow to embrace feminism, but in the 1970’s I got involved with a socialist-feminist group called CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) which began in New York City. Some friends and comrades formed a Los Angeles branch of CARASA and we were able to connect to radical women of color doing community organizing around sterilization abuse in LA. From that point on, I have been deeply immersed in Marxist-feminist theory and politics.

Zakia Salime is associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. This tribute is to Fatema Mernissi: mentor, insightful teacher, organic intellectual, incisive feminist, powerful voice, charismatic presence, craftswoman, generous host, and friend. It appeared on Jadaliyya and is reprinted here with the permission of the author and Jadaliyya.