Women and the Equal Rights Amendment by Caroline Lund and Betsey Stone [New York: 1970]

March is Women's History Month: Sexism and media

"Settling for Mr Good Enough" a slap in the face to women Sarah Garnham 02 March 2010

The mainstream media has a long history of promoting sexism and repressive gender roles, but the flurry of reactionary reviews and commentary following the release of Marry him: The case for Settling for Mr Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb has been particularly galling. “Every woman – no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure – feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.” In just this passage, Gottlieb assumes that every woman wants a heterosexual relationship and that every woman wants a marriage. This is just a taste of the reactionary assertions that pile up throughout the book. You have to pinch yourself to check that you have not been teleported back to the 1950s. But in fact, Gottlieb is very much aware of the way things have shifted since the 50s. This is precisely her point. Alongside a general decrease in marriage rates and an increase in divorce rates, women these days are getting married later. Seemingly unbeknownst to the many women who have benefited enormously from the liberalisation of marriage and other oppressive strictures that have bound them in the past, they are in a state of “panic” and “desperation”. Gottlieb’s book is an analytical and advisory polemic aimed at treating this condition. The source of the problem, she explains, is our over inflated sense of “entitlement”, which has meant that we’re all a bit “too picky”. The solution is to settle for any old slob; someone that doesn’t tick all the boxes and doesn’t fulfil any of our needs. What we supposedly need is someone that will be able to help “put the infrastructure in place” to start a family; someone who will be a “good father and a good provider”. Her model for this vision of marriage is the pre-70s period, when “our mothers didn’t expect that their husbands would constantly want to please them, be attracted to them”. Instead, they stoically accepted abusive and loveless relationships based on “co-operation and hardship and boredom”. That such relationships are superior to economic independence, sexual freedom and equality must not have been pointed out to the millions of women around the world who participated in the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. Those who fought to break free of the stultifying stereotypes that women should not be “picky” – should endure without complaint their role as wife and mother – were, according to Gottlieb, misguided. Basically, her argument is that the women’s liberation movement was a bad thing, because it has left women with far too much of a taste of our self worth. Now it’s time that for us to pick up the Good Wife Guide and rediscover our “place” in society. To add insult to injury, Gottlieb not only rejects the liberationist ideas established as a result of the women’s liberation movement, but asserts that they are delusional fantasies: “To the ­outside world, we still call ourselves feminists and insist that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.” Gottlieb is particularly blunt, but the argument that women should crave toward a traditional family is neither new nor rare. Despite the material and ideological gains that were made by the women’s liberation movement, women still feel the pressure of these arguments, and there are still many willing to prosecute them. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Gottlieb’s trashy and rather obnoxious book is that excerpts from it have been published in most Western newspapers. Not to be scorned, mind you, but as an example of a serious analysis of modern social behaviour. Even when the themes of the book have been criticised, writers have done so on the basis of a sappy defence of romantic love, rather than a rejection of the notion that women can only find fulfilment in heterosexual, marital unions. Gottlieb’s report is a worthy addition to the enormous catalogue of books, magazines, advertisements and films informing women that in order to fulfil our natural role in life we must subordinate our own interests and turn instead to the task of finding a husband and building a family. According to Gottlieb, this basic formula is every woman’s secret desire even if we don’t admit it. Thankfully, she’s totally wrong.

March is Women's History Month: British Miners Strike

Organised women are key to strike success: Learning from the 1985 British miners’ strike

The British coalminers’ strike of 1984-5, which ended 25 years ago on March 3, was a turning point in British politics. In this article, Terry Conway discusses the impact of Women Against Pit Closures and its legacy.

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March 3, 2010 -- Socialist Resistance -- Since her election as prime minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher had wasted little time in attacking working people in every way she could. The massive program of coal pit closures was critical for her government.

The strike was to be “the” central issue of British politics. The stakes were understood by the majority of members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), who saw that what was at stake was the loss of the thousands upon thousands of jobs and the devastation of entire communities in the many areas where the coal pit was the centre of local life.

March is Women's History Month: Yevgenia Bosch

Revolutionary women: Yevgenia Bosch

Katja Teran
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 22:51

This site, along with www.workerspower.com begins a new series on revolutionary women to highlight their often forgotten role in the communist movement. Katja Teran starts the first in the series on Yevgenia Bosch

Yevgenia Bogdanovna Bosch was born on 11 August 1879 (23 August after the calendar was modernised) in Ochakiv in the Ukraine.

Victor Serge, the communist writer, who was once a supporter of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, called Bosch one of the “most capable military leaders to come to the fore in the early stages of the Russian civil war.”

Although there is unfortunately very little surviving information about her, Serge’s comment shows that Bosch was no insignificant figure in the struggle for soviet power in the Ukraine.

She engaged in political activity from a very early age and quickly began to make a name for herself in the communist movement. She joined the revolutionary social-democrats in 1901 at the age of 22 and took part in political activity, mainly in Kiev. Work at that time was mainly underground. She joined the Bolshevik (revolutionary majority) faction in 1903.

She broke with her husband in 1907 and became one of the leaders of the regional organisation in 1909. In 1912 she was arrested and imprisoned, catching tuberculosis, which severely aggravated her congenital heart and lung condition. Nevertheless she escaped from prison in 1914 and at Lenin’s invitation attended the conference of Russian revolutionaries in Berne in 1915. She opposed Lenin’s support for the right of nations to self-determination and campaigned against his policy.

By the February 1917 revolution, her standing in the movement was such that she was elected as a member of the Kiev Committee of the revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, and was a member of the Kiev Soviet. From April onwards she served not only as a chair of the District Committee of the RSDWP in the southwestern region, but was also a delegate to the 6th party conference in 1917 and the 7th All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

Initially Yevgenia opposed the idea that the Bolsheviks should lead the revolution forward to socialist tasks, and her newspaper Social Democratic Voice argued that "We believe that the development of productive forces and social power of the proletariat have not reached the level at which the working class could carry out the socialist revolution”. However, in April she was persuaded of Lenin’s view that the working class should go forward to take the power and break the hold of capitalism.

By September preparations began in earnest for the armed uprising against the capitalist Provisional Government and for the establishment of soviet power in Kiev, Vinnytsia and other cities – and Yevgenia Bosch was at the centre of the action. It was above all for her outstanding military skills that she was elected at the first All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets to be part of its central executive.

After the defeat of Petlyura’s counter-revolution, the first soviet government took power in Ukraine, she took on the post of People’s Secretary for Home Affairs – taking direct charge of the struggle to resist the bosses and landlords’ counter-revolution.

At the January 1918 congress of Ukrainian peasants in Kharkiv she declared:

"The fight must end with the transfer of power into the hands of the working class, which we see in Russia, where power has passed into the hands of workers in their organisations - the Soviets of Workers and Peasants’ deputies. ... We must go on, must stop at nothing and eventually strangle the power of capitalism.”

On the great issue of the Brest-Litovsk Peace of 1918, Bosch initially opposed the peace and supported the position of the ‘left-communists’; she later worked on behalf of the Communist Party’s central committee as a military and state official.

In 1923 she backed the Left opposition of Leon Trotsky against the emerging bureaucratic faction of Stalin, and signed the first official statement of the opposition, the Platform of the 46. Increasingly opposed to the party’s course, suffering from ill-health and great pain from heart disease, cardiac asthma and pulmonary tuberculosis she took her own life on 25 january 1925.