Revolutionary Feminism Communist Interventions, Volume III

489 Pages·2015·1.88 MB·English

Revolutionary Feminism
Communist Interventions, Volume III
Communist Research Cluster
2015
Women must completely discover their own possibilities—which are neither mending socks nor
becoming captains of ocean-going ships. Better still, we may wish to do these things, but these now
cannot be located anywhere but in the history of capital.
–Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Also from the Communist Research Cluster in the Communist Interventions series:
Volume I: European Socialism and Communism
Volume II: Black Revolutionaries in the United States
ii
The history of the communist movement, in the twentieth century, is also a history of women.
Many women stood on the movement’s front lines. They struck in the factories, demonstrated in
the streets, and died on the barricades. Revolutionary women fought under both the red flag and
the black one. They partook of the movement’s few victories and suffered under its massive and in
the end overwhelming defeats.
Yet women’s participation in the communist movement also raised certain questions. Or else,
perhaps more accurately, their participation provided many different answers to a question that
remained frustratingly undefined. This question was called, rather vaguely, the “woman question,”
and it concerned the “role” of women in social life and in struggle. Revolutionary women—who
wereamongthecommunistmovement’smostprominenttheorists,generatingtextsoneverylineof
revolutionary inquiry—posed and answered this question in different ways. This reader examines
revolutionary debates around the “woman question” (and we include both men and women in this
history, since the former also played a role in these debates).
Towards that end, this volume is organized, loosely, into two parts. The first goes through the
history of revolutionary feminism. It begins with a selection from Friedrich Engels’ text on the
origins of the family. This text is included at the start, since it is both referenced and criticized by
somanyofthetextsthatfollow.Wethencontinuethroughthefirsthalfofthetwentieth-century—
lookingatsocialist,anarchistandcommunistperspectives—beforemovingontotheradicalfeminist
critiquesoftheNewLeft.Thesecondpartofthereaderthenstopsmovingforwardintime,tolinger
on some of the key debates of the 1960s and ’70s.
To return to these texts, today, is clearly of great importance. Many of the gains of 1960s
and70smainstreamfeminismhavestagnated.Visiblefeminismtodayislargelybifurcatedbetween
esotericacademicculturalcritiqueandneoliberalcorporatesloganeering.Acertainformoffeminism
has become de rigueur among liberals, yet the lives of many women and queer people have seen
little material improvement. This lack of improvement comes, moreover, during a time of massive
transformations in social life.
Womeninlow-incomecountriesmakeupalargeportionoftheworld’smanufacturingworkforce
(and the global workforce). Meanwhile, in the high-income countries, women have moved into the
workforce in unprecedented numbers, driven in part by declining real wages and welfare austerity.
The work of social reproduction is increasingly commodified in healthcare, education and domestic
work, and food service industries. At the same time, birth rates among women, the world over, are
falling to historic lows. In stark ways, women’s lives are being transformed by the changing class
dynamics of capitalism.
Women are also playing dramatic and visible roles on both sides of an escalating class war.
Ruling-class women are widely known as major political leaders, corporate CEOs, or heads of
media empires. Meanwhile, working-class women and queer people—in the US, poor black and
brown women in particular—are at the forefront of many struggles. Black women were the leading
organizers in the 2014–2015 wave of anti-police brutality protest in the US, as well as many other
community-based struggles. Insurrection by women is crucial to the future of all social movements,
and increasingly our survival as a species.
These issues call out for a critical engagement with basic questions of the nature of women’s
oppressionincapitalistsociety.Thisreaderreturnstohistoricaldebates,lookingtowardssubstantive
theoretical arguments made in the heat of earlier waves of struggle. These authors both speak to
their particular historical conditions, often during periods of rising revolutionary consciousness
and insurgency, and to the relentless questions of gender oppression in the capitalist world. What
accountsforthepersistenceofwomen’soppression?Whatdrivesthemajorchangesintheconditions
iii
of women’s lives and in family reproduction? What is the role of unpaid domestic labor in class
struggle and for class power? What are the causes of pervasive violence against women? How
should feminist movements engage the race and class stratification among women? What role does
independent and autonomous women’s organizing play in revolutionary movements? And how will
revolution transform women’s lives?
Some equally important questions remain largely or wholly unasked in this reader: what is the
relationship between feminism and other movements seeking emancipation from the confines of
gender? How is a revolutionary approach to “the woman question” transformed by struggles over
whocountsasawoman?Poorqueerandtranspeopleofcolorarepresentlywagingfiercestruggles,
often for their very survival. These struggles have been some of the most radical in the streets.
They are also some of the most productive, in terms of generating new revolutionary perspectives,
in the present moment.
By reading and debating these older texts, we hope to reflect on our own answers to these
questions. For that reason, we include work by authors with whom we disagree, to better aid
ourselves in discussion and debate. We include both well-known historical figures and forgotten
movement scholars. Some of the later authors are academics, though we tried to hue to the leading
thinking from within revolutionary movements themselves. We decided to stop the reader in 1984,
at the end of one era and the cusp of another.
May this reader aid our work, and the work of those to come, in the liberation of all women,
the abolition of gender oppression—and perhaps gender as well—and our collective realization as
full human beings.
Communist Research Cluster
New York, NY
2015
[email protected]
http://communistresearchcluster.wordpress.com
iv
Contents
1 The Origins of an Orthodoxy 1
1.1 Frederich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) . . . 1
2 Second International 33
2.1 August Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879/1910) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question (1886) . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.3 Clara Zetkin, Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be
Victorious (1896) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.4 Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Suffrage and the Class Struggle (1912) . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.5 Rosa Luxemburg, The Proletarian Woman (1914) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3 Anarchism 61
3.1 Lucy Parsons, Woman: Her Evolutionary Development (1905) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2 Voltairine de Cleyre, The Woman Question (1913) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.3 Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation (1911) . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.4 Emma Goldman, Woman Suffrage (1911) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.5 Milly Witkop-Rocker, The Need for Women’s Unions (1925) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4 Russian Revolution 77
4.1 V.I. Lenin, Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women (1918) . . . 77
4.2 V.I. Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.3 Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Woman Question (1934) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.4 Alexandra Kollantai, Communism and the Family (1920) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.5 Alexandra Kollantai, The Woman Worker and Peasant in Soviet Russia (1921) . . . 98
5 American Communist Party 109
5.1 Margaret Cowl, Women and Equality (1935) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.2 Mary Inman, In Woman’s Defense (1940) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.3 Claudia Jones, We Seek Full Equality for Women (1949) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
5.4 Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women (1949) . . . 131
6 Women’s Liberation 143
6.1 Casey Hayden and Mary King, Sex and Caste (1965) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
6.2 Women’s Collective, Consciousness-Raising (early 1970s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.3 Jo Freeman, Women’s Liberation Movement (1971) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
6.4 Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1971) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
6.5 WomenoftheWeatherUnderground,ACollectiveLettertotheWomen’sMovement
(1973) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 173
7.1 Radicalesbians, The Woman Identified Woman Manifesto (1970) . . . . . . . . . . . 173
7.2 Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto (1970) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
7.3 Radicalqueens, Radicalqueens Manifestos (1973) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
7.4 Charlotte Bunch, Lesbians in Revolt (1972) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
8 Socialist Feminism 193
8.1 Barbara Ehrenreich, What is Socialist Feminism? (1976) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
8.2 Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Socialist Feminism (1972) . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
8.3 Marlene Dixon, The Rise and Demise of Women’s Liberation (1977) . . . . . . . . . 214
9 Sexual Violence 227
9.1 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (1975) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
9.2 Alison Edwards, Rape, Racism, and the White Women’s Movement (1976) . . . . . 230
9.3 Combahee River Collective, Why Did They Die? (1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
10 Black Feminism 247
10.1 MaryAnnWeathers,AnArgumentforBlackWomen’sLiberationasaRevolutionary
(1969) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
10.2 Third World Women’s Alliance, Women in the Struggle (1971) . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
10.3 Frances Beal, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (1976). . . . . . . . . . . . 254
10.4 Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement (1977) . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
10.5 Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class and Sex (1980) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
11 Biological Reproduction 271
11.1 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (1967). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
11.2 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
11.3 Toni Cade Bambara, The Pill: Genocide or Liberation? (1969) . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
11.4 Iris Morales, Sterilized Puerto Ricans (1970). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
12 Wages for Housework 297
12.1 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972) . . . . 297
12.2 Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox, Counter-Planning from the Kitchen (1975) . . . . . . 317
13 Domestic Labor 329
13.1 Wally Seccombe, The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism (1974) . . . . . . 329
13.2 Jean Gardiner, Women’s Domestic Labor (1975) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
13.3 Angela Davis, The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework (1981) . . . . . . . . . . 354
14 Materialist Feminism 367
14.1 Christine Delphy, The Main Enemy (1970). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
14.2 Monique Wittig, The Category of Sex (1976) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
14.3 Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman (1980) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
CONTENTS vii
15 Sexuality 391
15.1 Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood (1975). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
15.2 Silvia Federici, Why Sexuality Is Work (1975) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
15.3 Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic (1978) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
15.4 Pat Califia, Feminism and Sadomasochism (1981) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
16 Dual Systems 413
16.1 Heidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (1979) . . . . . 413
16.2 Iris Marion Young, Beyond the Unhappy Marriage (1981) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
17 Social Reproduction 447
17.1 Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, Rethinking Women’s Oppression (1984) . . . . 447
viii CONTENTS