Feminism

It has been more than two years since the emergence of the Me Too movement that unveiled the enormous extent of sexual harassment in the workplace and gender-based sexual violence around the world! Not at all ephemeral, this movement does not stop surprising us. Not only does it persist and now extends to all continents, but it also evolves from a virtual phenomenon on the Internet to a real social movement of the 21st century. And above all, it becomes the banner of workers provoking victorious mobilizations of historical dimensions against two gigantic multinationals of the most merciless capitalism...

Considering his work as a whole, Marx had little to say directly about women’s oppression or the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. And some of what he had to say was, well, misguided. Yet Marxist feminists have drawn on his thought to create a distinctive approach to understanding these issues.

Does Karl Marx have any relevance for today’s struggles for women’s liberation? Do his theories of society and revolutionary transformation present us with tools that in any way continue to be useful?

In Turkey, nationalist dogma and women’s subordination go hand in hand.

Marxist attempts at integrating gender in the class-struggle framework was uneven in the Russian revolutionary movement. A class reductionism often held back the Bolsheviks, but contests with the liberal feminists, as well as the objective reality of more women entering the labour force, led to changes. Women activists took the lead in this. The Revolution of 1917 saw a much greater degree of women’s involvement. Women workers provided leadership in the early stages of the February (…)

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.