At a Congress of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1910, March 8 was designated as an international day of commemoration of the struggle of women for their liberation. The day itself was chosen in honor of a militant march by women garment workers in New York City in 1908, demanding an end to inhuman working conditions and the right of women to vote. It was on International Women’s Day in 1917 that female textile workers in Russia rose up and sparked a strike wave that culminated in the overthrow of the tsar.
After years of ritualistic celebration of International Women’s Day, primarily by the Soviet Union and other bureaucratized workers states, this day took on a new dimension beginning in the late 1960's with the new wave of women’s liberation struggles that has become an international movement. First involving only small layers of relatively privileged women, the movement has steadily extended its impact into every crevice of society in the advanced capitalist countries, while beginning to find expression in the colonial world as well.
On the occasion of International Women’s Day 1978, it is clear that the women’s liberation struggle is becoming a more and more important aspect of the class struggle as a whole.
On the economic level, the working masses throughout the capitalist world are faced with having to bear the burden of continuing bouts of economic downturn or stagnation caused by the mechanisms of the profit system. Everywhere, the push is on for the imposition or strengthening of austerity programs designed to make working people work harder, tighten their belts, and do without social services so as to boost profit margins.
Women—along with youth, immigrant workers, and workers of oppressed nationalities—are central targets of the bourgeois offensive. They face higher unemployment, greater ghettoization into lower-paying job categories, and cutbacks in child-care centers and medical facilities connected with control of their reproductive functions (abortion and contraception clinics). Charged with management of the household, they are also the ones who feel 260 most immediately the squeeze of rising prices and declining real wages. Women are victimized indirectly as well: the burden of the economic squeeze produces frustration and demoralizes some sections of the working class, increasing, among other things, the incidence of rape and beatings of women.
Events in the past year have shown the growing importance of struggles by women as part of the struggle of the whole working class against the austerity attacks. One of the most dramatic examples occurred in Britain, where workers at the Grunwick photo-processing plant—most of them women and Asian immigrants—have waged a year-long struggle for the right to form a union to fight conditions of superexploitation. The tenacious battle of these workers took center stage in British politics for weeks, with the strikers setting an example for the whole working class in their calls for labor solidarity and mass picket lines, and coming up against the combined onslaught of the police, the courts, the bourgeois press, and the far right—aided and abetted by the tradeunion and Labour Party bureaucracy.
In the United States, one of the products of the capitalists’ austerity drive has been a broad public debate over the issue of “quotas” or affirmative-action programs aimed at reducing discrimination against women, Blacks and other oppressed minorities, in educational and job opportunities. The debate has crystallized around the “Bakke case,” which is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. (Allan Bakke is a white man who was refused admission to the University of California medical school for alleged “reverse discrimination” against him because of special admission quotas for Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asians.)
In defending the principle of affirmative action against discrimination, the women’s movement has joined the Black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican movements in helping to educate the whole labor movement that a fight against discrimination inside the working class is a precondition for mobilizing the full, united power of the class against the exploiters.
More generally, women in many countries have begun to demand preferential measures to assure them access to the whole range of jobs and educational opportunities, in order to have the possibility of breaking out of the traditionally “feminine” roles and occupations that have imposed on women the lowest-paying jobs and the double day of work in the home. In Italy, women have been in the forefront of the struggle for jobs, organizing separately—both inside and outside of the trade unions—to fight for their own special needs. And throughout the advanced capitalist countries, women have been in the forefront of resistance to cutbacks in social spending, whether for child-care centers, medical facilities, or education.
On the broader political level, women’s struggles have been responsible for bringing to the fore important social and democratic issues. Foremost in many countries continues to be the struggle for the right of women to control their own bodies through the right to safe, financially accessible contraception and abortion on demand and an end to forced sterilization,
In all countries where the right to abortion was liberalized in the late 1960s or early 1970s (such as France, Britain, and the United States), this right is now being cut back—whether through legal restrictions or cutbacks in abortion facilities—as part of the general ruling-class offensive against the rights and standard of living of the oppressed.
On May 14, 1977, 10,000 people marched through London demanding an end to restrictions on the availability of abortion. In France, the refusal of the government, doctors, and hospitals to implement the Veil law, which allows abortions, with certain restrictions, up to ten weeks, has sparked broader opposition than ever before, involving the two major trade-union federations and figures from the Communist and Socialist parties. An example was given by the February 5 meeting on abortion organized by the coordinating body of women’s groups of Paris and supported by the CFDT and other mass organizations. This meeting succeeded in bringing together more than 2,000 people.
In Switzerland, a hard-fought referendum to eliminate restrictions on abortion was only narrowly defeated (929,239 to 994,677) on September 25, after an all-out antiabortion campaign by the Catholic Church and certain leading Protestant figures together with Christian Democratic politicians.
In the battle for the right to abortion, women have been in the front lines in answering and mobilizing against the ultraright. The international network of antiabortion organizations is in all countries linked with racist, anti-immigrant, ultraright, and fascist groups. The efforts of the women’s movement in politically answering and mobilizing against these Intercontinental Press groups is important to the whole working class.
Over the past year women have also come to the forefront in struggles against certain dictatorships. In the past three months, hundreds of women participated in women’s demonstrations and hunger strikes against the military or police-state regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, demanding democratic rights and the release of all political prisoners.
In Pakistan, where there is certainly no “women’s liberation movement” such as exists in the advanced capitalist countries, 1977 saw the entrance of masses of women into political activity for the first time. According to Islamic tradition, Pakistani women are supposed to stay in the home and not show their faces in the street, much less organize politically. But last spring, during the upheavals that followed the March elections, women spontaneously poured into the streets for the first time in history, protesting the repression and demanding the release of political prisoners. Women’s liberation organizations as such are also spreading to the colonial and semicolonial countries. In Brazil, still locked under a dictatorial regime, several women’s liberation groups have arisen, as well as two feminist newspapers and women’s centers in a half dozen major cities.
The increasing centrality of the struggle of women has also been reflected in the impact of the women’s movement on the mass reformist parties (the Communist and Socialist parties) and in the trade unions. In the early years of the most recent rise of the women’s movement, the Communist parties generally tried to oppose or ignore it as alien to working-class women. But the spread of feminist ideas, including among working class women, has forced the CPs to be more cautious in dismissing this movement, and in some countries to adapt to it in words so as to be in a better position to lead women into reformist channels. Thus, we saw the Spanish CP campaigning in the June 1977 elections as “the party of women’s liberation.” But such shifts of position have the effect of creating opposition to the CP’s reformist line among women of the party, as the interests of women are in fact sacrificed on the altar of a_ classcollaborationist austerity pact with the bourgeoisie.
In Britain the betrayal of women by the governing Labour Party has been particularly blatant. Women have seen the Labour Party government and Labour members of Parliament spearheading the attacks on the right to abortion. In addition, the Labour government has presided over a huge increase in unemployment, which has hit women especially hard, and drastic cuts in social services, the major March 6, 1978
Joanna Rossi
March by supporters of women’s right to abortion in Kortrijk, Belgium, in February 1977. Signs read, “Decriminalize abortion"; “Free abortion.”
burden of which falls upon women. These attacks, together with the glaringly inadequate nature of the Labour government’s legislation on women’s rights, has led to a sustained and many-sided fight-back by women.
The widespread interest in socialist ideas in the women’s movement around the world, manifested in such events as the recent Socialism and Feminism conference of 1,000 women in Manchester, England, demonstrates the great potential that exists to win radicalizing feminists to socialism.
The role of revolutionary socialists in this process is vitally important. In contrast to all the reformist currents in the working-class movement on the one hand, and to the proponents in the women’s movement of the struggle of sex against sex on the other, the Fourth International offers a class-struggle strategy for building a mass movement centered on the most burning needs of women of the working class and other oppressed layers.
Women are making their needs and demands felt inside the trade unions as well. In Spain, women workers have been a dynamic part of the upsurge of unionization in the post-Franco era, demanding the right to meet separately to discuss their special concerns and to press most effectively that these needs be fought for by the union. In France, the leaderships of both major union federations, the CGT and CFDT, have openly discussed and legitimized over the past year the right of women unionists to form internal women’s caucuses.
In Spain, Italy, France, and elsewhere, women have pressed for the unions to take up broader social issues, such as the need for child-care centers, for a shorter workweek and jobs for all, and the right to adequate maternity-paternity leaves.
Trade-union women’s formations have also been able to pose clearly the objective need for unification of the trade-union federations in Western Europe, which are divided along political party lines. In both Italy and Spain there have been instances of women forming committees that cut across trade-union lines in order to strengthen the struggle of the women. This points the way to the need for the whole working class to overcome the sectarian divisions between trade unions maintained by the policies of the reformist parties.
Another salient feature of the women’s movement that should be pointed to on this year’s International Women’s Day is the internationalism of this movement. From the very beginning, the new feminist movement was _internationalist. The number of international conferences and rallies, as well as the rapid international diffusion and assimilation of the literature of the movement reflected the consciousness of women that their struggle was international, extending across national boundaries as well as social systems.
The women’s movement is an example in this sense to the rest of the working class. Over the past year especially, we have seen growing pressure toward protectionism, expulsion of immigrant workers, and attempts by the ruling classes to blame the effects of the economic crisis on the workers of other countries. In its internationalist dimension, which will be expressed in thousands of rallies and marches on International Women’s Day this year, the women’s movement points the way for the workers movement as a whole on this key principle, which is necessary for an effective struggle against the exploiters.
On International Women’s Day 1978, these are some of the themes and demands that stand out as most pressing:
© For defense and extension of the right to contraception and abortion on demand, paid for through public health services or medical assistance programs.
e An end to cutbacks in social services such as child-care centers and women’s medical facilities.
¢ The right of women to jobs. No discriminatory firings and layoffs of women. * Equal rights for women. Down with all discriminatory laws.
* Solidarity of the whole working class movement with the struggle of women!