Socialist Women's movement

Abbas Goya

First

The First Socialist Women’s Conference was held on 17 August 1907 in Stuttgart, where 58 delegates from 15 countries gathered at the Liederhalle. The conference brought together representatives from a wide range of socialist and working-class women’s organizations, including:

1. German Social Democratic Women
2. Executive Committee of Women of the Austrian Empire
3. National Federation of Socialist Women of Belgium
4. Dutch Social Democratic Women’s Clubs and the Amsterdam Women Dressmakers’ Union
5. Federation of Swiss Working Women’s Associations
6. Paris Socialist Women’s Committee
7. Finnish Social Democratic Party
8. Swedish Working Women’s Federation
9. National Progressive League of Women and the *Socialist Woman’s Journal* (United States)
10. British organizations, including the Independent Workers’ Party, the National Federation of Working Women, the Women Workers’ Union, and the Women’s Committee of the Social Democratic Federation

Although the conference addressed numerous issues—such as social legislation, education, public health, and the Tsarist attempt to abolish Finnish sovereignty—the most intense debate centered on women’s suffrage. A clear division emerged between the British delegates, who supported cooperation with bourgeois feminist organizations, and the German delegates and the socialist left, who argued that the struggle for women’s suffrage should be embedded within the broader working-class movement. The latter position prevailed.

As a result, the conference endorsed the idea of a global day of action, modeled on May Day, and established International Working Women’s Day—now known as International Women’s Day—as a means of coordinating the international struggle for women’s suffrage (adapted from Clean Separation: Clara Zetkin, the Socialist Women’s Movement, and Feminism).

Within this context, Clara Zetkin played a decisive role in shaping the Proletarian Women’s Movement within the German Social Democratic Party. She emphasized the fundamentally different interests of women from exploiting and exploited classes and laid the groundwork for a mass movement of socialist working women. Centered around the magazine Die Gleichheit, edited by Zetkin, the movement grew rapidly, reaching a membership of more than 170,000 by 1914.

The movement’s central theoretical proposition was that Marxism, as a working-class political tendency, was incompatible with feminism as a cross-class movement. Accordingly, working-class women required their own organizations within socialist parties—parties that included both women and men of the working class (Wikipedia).

Zetkin consistently argued for the independence of the working women’s struggle, writing:

“The liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be, like that of the bourgeois woman, a struggle against the men of her own class.”

Lenin echoed this position in his discussions with Zetkin on the women’s question:

“We must create a powerful international movement for women on clear theoretical foundations. There is no good practice without Marxist theory… For us communists, absolute clarity of principles is required on this question. Real freedom for women is possible only through communism.

The inseparable connection between the social position of women and private ownership of the means of production must be clearly demonstrated. This forms an unmistakable line of division between our politics and feminism.”

Second

As stated in The Communist Manifesto:

“In your existing society, private property has already disappeared for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is due solely to its non-existence for the many.”

If 173 years ago the Manifesto estimated that approximately 90 percent of society were workers, it is reasonable today to estimate this figure at closer to 99 percent. This follows directly from the historical tendency toward the concentration of property in ever fewer hands.

If working people constitute the overwhelming majority of society, then a so-called “universal women’s movement” that fails to distinguish between the interests of working women (the vast majority) and bourgeois women (a small minority) cannot genuinely represent women as a whole. The socialist women’s movement is capable of representing the interests of the overwhelming majority of women.

Third

The movement against the compulsory hijab in Iran was first emerged within the socialist tradition on March 8, 1979. The participants in those protests were overwhelmingly labor activists and socialists. Even some members of the Fedayeen-e Khalq (a mass leftist body at the time) participated independently, despite their leadership labeling the protests “bourgeois.”

Notably absent from this movement were the left organizations of the national-Islamic current, including the very Fedayeen-e Khalq mentioned above. The socialist activists joined the movement even though the organizational body they belonged to were not officially present.

Thirty years later, decades after continuous fight against compulsory hijab, some fragments of  middle class and bourgeois opposition to the Islamic regime managed to organize limited, clandestine, and largely ineffective protests. These actions functioned primarily to obscure and appropriate the historical socialist battles for women's rights. The non-worker left, associated with the Fedayeen of 1979, now seeks, out of retrospective guilt for once dismissing these protests as bourgeois, to place the leadership of the socialist women’s movement -- particularly the anti-hijab fight-- in the hands of bourgeois opposition figures.

In doing so, they conveniently forget that neither Masih Alinejad nor Voice of America in 2011, nor wealthy women from the upper districts, initiated the struggle against compulsory hijab. That fight was initiated exclusively by the socialist movement in March 1979.

The socialist women’s movement owes its existence to militants who were “nothing” in social status but everything in political clarity, who raised the banner of equal rights and opposed compulsory hijab from the get go. This movement is not a universal women’s movement. It has a clear political direction and a socialist root. Anyone is welcome to join it though.