I, like so many women, have watched the news of Sarah’s disappearance and the subsequent arrest and charge of a serving police officer for her murder. We have all watched with our hearts in our mouths and a beating sense of dread as the story unfolded. Women, every woman, knows that we could have been Sarah. Women... Continue Reading →
WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH: Engels on the Origin of Women’s Oppression
The great significance of Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State is that it is one of the first Marxist analyses of development of family and origins of women’s oppression (the first was August Bebel’s Women & Socialism, 1879) — a subject in which most men were uninterested. A Short Summary... Continue Reading →
Marxist Feminism Part IV: Historical, Material Oppression
This article is part of a series. Read Part I here. Read Part II here. Read Part III here. A significant contributing factor to the current trend of conceptualising 'gender' as a standalone form of oppression is a lack of familiarity with its application throughout history as the ideological enforcement of material female oppression. Here,... Continue Reading →
Marxist Feminism Part II: Social Reproduction
This article is part of a series. Read Part I here. Rejecting dualist and identity approaches to women's politics, Marxist feminists argue that the domestic sphere and the capitalist mode of production are not separate, autonomous systems; but that social reproduction (including the vast amount of unpaid work which takes place outside the workplace) is... Continue Reading →
Marxist Feminism Part I: Fragmented Feminism
The left is plagued by a paternalism which treats feminist issues and organising with condescension at best; at worst, with contempt. This attitude demonstrates not only the prevalence of individual prejudices towards women but, more importantly, a significant theoretical misunderstanding which fails to adequately consider the totality of the capitalist mode of production. Due to... Continue Reading →
Book Launch: Women & Class
Women and Class frames women's oppression as central to the struggle against capitalism and oppression. It is essential reading for all communists and feminists alike. In this article, Professor Mary Davis introduces the latest edition of her book, Women and Class. Buy your copy here. The aim of this book is to assert and consolidate... Continue Reading →
Book Review: Eleanor Marx A Biography
This single volume new edition of Yvonne Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx, first published over 40 years ago, was deservedly highly acclaimed at the time. EJ Hobsbawm praised it as “one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of 20th century biography” and Michael Foot described it as “a work of scholarship but also a work of... Continue Reading →
The Women of the Russian Revolution
The centenary of the Russian Revolution has triggered a great deal of interest, not all of which is helpful or illuminating. However, one aspect of the two revolutions of 1917 which has been almost completely disregarded is the role of women. The commonly accepted view is that Russian women featured only twice in 1917. The... Continue Reading →
Women and Homelessness
The last Labour Government made the reduction in homelessness a key priority. Thousands of families were languishing, sometimes for years in unsuitable bed & breakfast accommodation, and rough sleeping had reached unprecedented levels by the turn of the century. Local authorities were set targets of halving the number of households in temporary accommodation by... Continue Reading →
Book Review: The Women’s Revolution by Judy Cox
Premised on the indisputable fact that women’s role in the revolutions in Russia of 1905 and the two revolutions of 1917 have been largely hidden from history, Judy Cox’s book redresses the imbalance in the torrent of publications two years ago marking the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution which largely ignored it. Her slim volume... Continue Reading →