The twentieth-century woman has come of age politically, and she is demanding her rights as a citizen in a determined way.”
Thus began the appeal distributed by the tens of thousands in Germany on the first International Women’s Day in 1911. “Arise, working women and girls! Rise and begin the battle for the right to vote! March 19 is your day, the day when you will show that you are tired of having the same duties without enjoying the same rights.”
On Clara Zetkin’s initiative, a call for an annual day to celebrate women’s struggle for emancipation had been voted the previous year at the second Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen. While the battle for the vote was on the agenda of the first International Women’s Day, it was in protest against rising prices and low wages that the women textile workers of Petrograd decided to call a one-day strike in March 1917. We know what role this played in detonating the wave of strikes that was to lead to the overthrow of the tsar.
Nearly three-quarters of a century later women are still struggling to exercise their rights, and they know that they have a bitter battle to fight. In spite of all the talk about ending inequality, women still suffer discrimination in all areas. “Underpaid, last hired, and first fired”—that statement has never been truer than it is today.
Like young people, immigrant workers, and members of oppressed nationalities, women are the first to pay the price for the economic crisis. In France, the female unemployment rate has risen faster in the last two years than the rate for men. Not one of the countries in the European Economic Community implements the guidelines on equal pay. In Britain, for example, almost ten years after passage of the equal-pay law, women still earn only 65 percent of what men earn, on the average. The austerity policy imposed by the bourgeoisie on the working class takes the form not only of wage curbs but of drastic cutbacks in the funds allotted for social services. Closings of schools, child-care centers, and hospitals are among the measures that primarily affect women, particularly working women, since they are considered responsible not only for household chores but for the care of children, the aged, and the sick.
With all these inequalities remaining, the tendency for the number of working women to increase, both in the capitalist and in the semicolonial countries, is nonetheless an irreversible phenomenon and one that is full of explosive contradictions. It was in 1978 that 100,000 women were forced to take to the streets of the United States to shout their determination to win constitutional guarantees of equal rights. It was in 1978 that the women workers at the Fleck plant in English Canada went on strike to win recognition of their right to organize and to obtain a labor contract. Finally, a few weeks ago, after sermons by the pope and bishops threatening to excommunicate anyone who “violates Christian values” by showing disrespect for the “right to life,” 7,000 Italian women gathered in Florence to demand implementation of the new abortion laws and the right to freely decide whether or not to have children.
One of the clearest signs of the spread of radicalization among women is the appearance of an independent women’s movement in many colonial and semicolonial countries.
In North Africa, Central Africa, and Asia, we have recently seen the rise of women’s groups—still few in number, of course—which testify to the impact of the women’s struggle around the world. In particular, in several countries of Latin America, we have seen groups capable of working together and waging battles in common formed out of the first few struggles around feminist demands. Witness the first national gathering of women in Colombia, which was held in December in Medellin. This meeting was attended by nearly 300 participants from several cities and from several recently formed groups. There can be no doubt that the revolutionary process in Iran, which has seen women in the front ranks of mobilizations, will help strengthen the radicalizing women’s movement there, and will lead women to question the most reactionary aspects of Islam, which justifies the worst aspects of women’s oppression, at the same time that they are questioning the oppression that exists in class society.
The most important development of the past year for the women’s liberation struggle was the growing interpenetration between the struggles of women and those of the working class.
In 1978, in the capitalist countries, we saw stepped-up attacks on the standard of living and rights of all workers, particularly women, youth, and other specially oppressed layers. At the same time, the past year also brought a growing reaction to these attacks from the most powerful sectors of the workers movement, such as the coal strike last year in the United States, the Ford strike in Britain, and the strikes by steelworkers in West Germany, and more recently in France.
The rise of struggles by the most powerful sectors of the working class around the world has given a new perspective to the women’s liberation struggle. It will give working women greater confidence with which to fight for their own demands on the job and in the trade unions. And it can also raise the level of consciousness within the independent women’s movement, by showing the possibilities for an alliance between the women’s movement and a fighting, reinvigorated labor movement, which can lead the working class to power based on the demands of all the oppressed. An example of this growing interpenetration can be seen in the recent developments that have occurred within the Italian metalworkers union, the FLM. The FLM was in the front ranks of opposition to the capitalist austerity policy, having organized a demonstration of 100,000 workers against the government in Rome in early December.
Under the influence of the women’s liberation movement and women trade unionists, the FLM refused to allow part-time work to be made a part of the contracts negotiated between the union leadership and the bosses. At an FLM conference, the women delegates explained that “part-time work cannot be the first step toward this goal (shortening work hours for everyone), precisely because it divides the workers instead of giving everyone a chance to take part in the debate over the relationship between working time and leisure time.”
The alternative solutions these delegates suggested included the demand that women be allowed to enter all types of trades, and that they be given special job training.
For their part, the women shop stewards of the Spanish Workers Commissions led the same kind of fight last year. They succeeded in opening a debate at the tradeunion congresses on the body of demands that they were raising, on the need for the leadership to promote the setting up of women’s commissions in the trade unions everywhere, and on the need for ties between the trade-union movement and the independent women’s movement.
Another example of this growing interpenetration is the United States, where for years the labor movement appeared monolithic, conservative, and hostile to the independent women’s movement, as well Intercontinental Press as to the interests of its own members. The militancy of the miners’ strike began to break down this image and to inspire other sectors of the labor movement, by showing the possibility for the unions to play a new role.
The unrest in the ranks of the U.S. working class led trade-union bureaucrats like Donald Fraser of the United Auto Workers to call for an alliance between the labor, women’s and Black movements.
Even though this speech was designed only to polish Fraser's image, it reflects the changes in consciousness taking place both within the labor movement and within the women’s movement. A particular illustration of this change is the decision of the National Organization for Women, the largest women’s organization in the U.S., to call a national conference in 1979 on the problems of women in the trade unions and organizing in the workplace.
Another aspect of the radicalization of working women is the fact that their struggles are not concerned only with economic problems but with much broader issues connected with the special oppression of women.
Thus, the Women’s Rights Committee of the British Columbia Federation of Labor got a resolution passed at the federation’s last congress in November which takes up the union’s tasks in fighting the sexual harassment that working women face daily.
Pointing out how hard it is for women, especially if they are unskilled and afraid of losing their jobs, to fight back against sexual abuse by the boss or foremen, the document underscored the union’s responsibility to expose specific cases in which working women are the victims of sexist attitudes, and to educate its own members on the subject.
This consciousness on the part of working women about the need to fight against their oppression is beginning to have an impact on the workers movement as a whole. Isn't this what we saw a few months ago in Britain, when 500 delegates—men and women—attended a conference on abortion organized by the National Abortion Campaign and the LARC (a grouping within the Labour Party fighting for abortion rights)?
This conference—endorsed by five national unions and many _trade-union branches, and including delegates from such diverse sectors as health care, social services, the engineering industries, public transportation, education, journalism, tobacco, and even mining—mainly discussed what kind of campaign would be necessary to fight cutbacks in health services and force the government to open centers where women could safely obtain a suction abortion, with or without anesthesia, without delay and without hospitalization.
These are some of the examples that show that the radicalization of women is March 26, 1979 no longer the exclusive prerogative of a small layer of relatively privileged intellectuals, as was the case ten years ago when the women’s liberation movement first emerged. Today, there are tens and hundreds of thousands of working women fighting against everything their exploitation and special oppression are based on. This fact, along with the growing struggle against the bourgeois offensive being led by the most powerful sectors of the working class, opens up new possibilities for revolutionists to discuss what strategy is needed to win the liberation of women. Women can now more clearly see how it is possible to transform the trade unions into organizations of struggle that could ally with the battles of all the oppressed. The strategy to follow to win liberation for women must be an alliance between the women’s movement and a fighting labor movement.
Working women are the future leaders of the women’s liberation movement, and it will be their role to forge an alliance—and to be the center of it—between the great power of the labor movement and the independent organizations which up to now have spearheaded the fight around women's demands.