By MARK UGOLINI — CHICAGO — Over 1000 trade-union women and supporters gathered at the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Hall on Mar. 8 to celebrate International Women’s Day and declare solidarity with women everywhere struggling to protect and extend woman’s rights. Chairing the rally, Adriana Alvarez of Fight for $15 spoke of the struggle of…
By ANN MONTAGUE International Women’s Day, March 8, is set as the date for women’s strikes around the world. This event comes on the heels of a series of strikes and mass demonstrations last year when women poured into the streets of Poland, Ireland, Turkey, Italy, Argentina, and Iceland. This time, the call by the…
By ANN MONTAGUE Women in Ireland are going on strike to protest the country’s ban on abortions. In Ireland it is a crime to have an abortion, and the procedure carries a 14-year prison sentence. There are no exceptions for rape or incest or when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb due to a…
By PENELOPE DUGGAN “Over the next months and years we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice, to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy had better watch out. “The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be…
By DAVID KIELY and CHRISTINE MARIE With the advent of the Trump administration and a conservative Congress, women and their allies marched in Washington and in hundreds of other cities on Jan. 21. The fact that the Washington march blossomed from a little seed into a huge national undertaking almost overnight is a sign that millions…
By ANN MONTAGUE and MICHAEL SCHREIBER Jan. 21 laid the foundations for a powerful movement for women’s rights. The Women’s Marches, which took place in Washington, D.C., in over 600 sister U.S. towns and cities, and in many more cities around the world, were an unprecedented expression of the determination of women and men to…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Hundreds of thousands are joining the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21. On the same day, at least 200 sister marches are taking place in cities and towns all over the United States. The outpouring, which reportedly began as two social media posts in response to the defeat of Hillary Clinton…
By ANN MONTAGUE A mass march of women will take place in the nation’s capital on Jan. 21, 2017. This is the first full day that Donald Trump will be president, and will follow demonstrations that are being called for Inauguration Day. The call states, “We will stand in solidarity with our partners and children…
By ANN MONTAGUE In October there were mass protests linked with strike activity by women in three countries. The feminist strike demands were unique to each country and an indication of increased militancy around demands that address issues women have been fighting for year after year. Poland: Abortion On Oct. 3, seven million women throughout…
By TATIANA COZZARELLI After the shocking tape discussing sexual assault, how can women fight against Trump’s misogyny? Hillary is no alternative, with her imperialist policies abroad and a history of hurting working women in the US. Last week’s examples from Argentina and Poland show women a way forward in the fight against misogyny and for…
By ANN MONTAGUE — JUNE 27 — Women are celebrating today in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building after a 5-3 ruling reaffirmed Roe v. Wade and struck down two provisions of a Texas state law that restricts women’s access to abortion. The 2013 law that the court nullified required all abortions to take…
By ANN MONTAGUE In one of the early Democratic Party debates, in order to inflate her credentials as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton threw out an off-the-cuff comment about her relationship with Henry Kissinger: “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better—better than anybody had run it in a…
By CHRISTINE MARIE “The most significant abortion rights case in a generation.” “The greatest threat to reproductive justice in 25 years.” These are just a few of the headlines to the many articles providing background to the news that on March 2, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v.…
By ANN MONTAGUE Jan. 22 marked the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which ruled that abortion is a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution. Rallies in cities around the country reflected the fact that the right to abortion continues to be under attack through state restrictions, continual anti-abortion rhetoric, and…
By JOHN WILSON “The Danish Girl,” 1 hr. 59 min., directed by Tom Hooper. “The Danish Girl” is a mesmerizing, moving account of how transgender pioneer Lili Elbe (originally Einar Wegener) came to be one of the first persons known to have gender reassignment surgery. Adapted from David Ebershoff’s fictionalized novel of 2000, it features Eddie…
By ANN MONTAGUE As soon as the news first broke of a gunman’s murderous assault inside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Col., women all over the country understood the meaning of the attack. The Nov. 27 shooting was another attack on a woman’s right to abortion. But that is not how it was…
By CHRISTINE MARIE On Tuesday, Sept. 29, women in at least 90 cities around the United States demonstrated in defense of the health provider Planned Parenthood. “Pink Out Day,” the organizers state, provided the opportunity to say: “Listen to over a million Americans who are sick and tired of the relentless attacks on reproductive health…
By GAETANA CALDWELL-SMITH I liked “Mad Max Fury Road” much more than I thought I would. Critics seemed to focus on only the action, of which there was scads—relentless, spectacular, and loud. Cirque du Soleil gone gritty: Men clinging to the tops of swaying poles attached to souped-up speeding cars while blasting with automatic weapons.…
By STEFANIE LEVI The struggle for women’s right to choose gained an important, if temporary, victory in the state of Texas. On June 29, in a five to four vote, the U. S. Supreme Court blocked HB2, a portion of Texas’ new abortion laws that would have forced the July 1 closure of many of…
By CHRISTINE MARIE “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry,” a documentary film directed and produced by Mary Dore, 2014. When the noted documentary filmmaker Mary Dore set about to tell the story of the beginning of the feminist movement that burst onto the scene in the mid-1960s, she could find no funders. Dore was supported when…
By CHRISTINE MARIE The fight to save the planet as a viable home to our species will require the most powerful social movement ever organized. Necessarily central to that project is solidarity and collaboration with those who are most immediately vulnerable to the dire effects of the capitalist carbon-fueled economy. An international movement that fails…
On March 8, 2013, International Women’s Day, KFAI in Minneapolis presented a program, “Women and Global Climate Change.” The speakers were Christine Frank, Climate Crisis Coalition Twin Cities (3CTC), and a frequent contributor to Socialist Action newspaper; Patricia Shepard, Idle No More Minnesota Activist, Ojibwe and Prairie Band Potawatami; and Karen Redleaf (now Schraufnagel), 3CTC…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, The State & Revolution: Soviet Family Policy & Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); La mujer, el estado y la Revolución (Buenos Aires: Pan y rosas and Ediciones IPS, 2012). On Oct. 10, the Marxist scholar Wendy Z. Goldman published a piece in Counterpunch entitled “The…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Book Review: Adrienne Mayor, “The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Marx and Engels, when developing their understanding of the relationship between class society and the oppression of women, relied heavily on the ethnology and archaeological science of their day. They wrote…
By ANN MONTAGUE Abortion has been legal in Cuba since the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and was codified into law as a women’s “sovereign right” in 1968. Vilma Espin, a feminist and revolutionary fighter, was made the head of the new Federation of Cuban Women and later created the National Center For…
