Women

50 years ago, women at the Dagenham Ford factory began a strike that became a turning point in the fight for equality.

We publish here a statement by the International Marxist Tendency that is being distributed in demonstrations across the world for International Women’s Day. The struggle for women’s liberation must also be a fight for socialism.

We publish here a collection of articles by female comrades from the Marxist Student Federation looking at the many ways in which capitalism oppresses women.

A century on, Maxim Wright discusses the signficance of the 1918 Act that expanded the franchise to millions of women and men. But genuine democracy today remains restricted by capitalism.

Pakistan’s history is rich in struggle, with waves of strikes, mass movements, and revolution. At the forefront of that struggle have been Pakistani women, some of the most heavily and harshly oppressed women in the world. Speaking at the 2017 RMT Women’s Conference, Vic Dale reports on the terrible conditions facing Pakistani women.

The history of Bolshevism from the very early days right up to the Russian revolution contains a wealth of lessons on how it is the class struggle that provides the final answer to the women’s question. In this article, Marie Frederiksen looks at the approach of the Bolshevik Party to the women’s question from its early days, right through to the revolution and after taking power.

Every year on 8th March, International Women’s Day is celebrated all over the world. This year, it has particular significance because it is also the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which was sparked by a mass movement of women workers exactly 100 years ago, beginning a revolution that made spectacular gains for women.

In her campaign to receive the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Hillary Clinton has tried to portray herself as a defender of women’s rights. Many young women and men in the U.S., however, can see right through the smoke and mirrors, and recognise Clinton as a member of the increasingly hated establishment.

8th March marks International Women’s Day, originally founded over a century ago by socialists to remember the struggles of working class women. Today, we are still a long way from achieving equality between the sexes in the workplace; and with the onset of the crisis in 2008 things have only gotten worse.

As Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign surges forward, his right-wing rivals are scrambling to find ways of defeating him. For Cooper and Kendall, one of the latest tactics is an attempt to appeal to female voters on the basis of their “feminist credentials”. Despite this, Corbyn is predicted to get 61% of first preferences from women.

To celebrate International Working Women’s Day 2015, Natasha Sorrell from the Sheffield Marxists discusses women’s role in revolution throughout history. Alongside Natasha’s talk, we reproduce several quotations from Lenin, Kollontai and others on the same subject.

This Sunday, on 8th March, is International Women’s Day. More than one-hundred years since the first International Working Women’s day in 1911, what is the situation for women in Britain in today? Seven years after the onslaught of the financial crisis, working class women remain oppressed due to their gender and exploited due to their class.