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…
By JUSTA MONTERO MADRID—On Sept. 23, the prime minister of the Spanish State, Mariano Rajoy, announced that he was withdrawing the proposal to amend the abortion law. The law’s main architect, Minister of Justice Alberto Ruíz Gallardón, immediately resigned. Gallardón never tired of repeating that the preliminary draft for “protection of the life of the…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Review of Lise Vogel, “Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory” (Leiden: Brill Academic Books, 2013; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). In the late 1960s, more feminist theorists than not assumed that Marxism offered the main analytical tools necessary to understand women’s oppression and, in turn, to chart the strategic…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Tansey E. Hoskins clearly loves art, understands the impulse to body modification and sartorial statement, and can imagine a socialist society where the creativity of the vast majority will be unleashed to spectacular ends in clothing and many other spheres. She has also written the most devastating deconstruction of the fashion industry, as…
BY JEFF MACKLER Whenever I flinch at yet another reactionary U.S. Supreme Court decision I am reminded of Anatole France’s famous observation, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, or steal bread.” In late June, in the now infamous Hobby Lobby case, the…
By CARRIE LESTER The author is of Kanien’ke’ha:ka (Mohawk)-Onondaga and British-Canadian settler ancestry. TORONTO—There is a renewed push for a national inquiry into the disappearances and murders of Indigenous women and girls across Canada. The numbers are ever changing, but the most recent list involves 824 Indigenous women and girls whose murders or disappearances over…
By MARK T. HARRIS — Religious Freedom or Reproductive Freedom? — If there weren’t already enough problems involved in the start-up to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), here come the Little Sisters of the Poor to further complicate matters. Whatever charity work the sisters do, their lawsuit challenging the contraception mandate in the new health-care law…
By CHRISTINE MARIE March 8 was declared International Women’s Day by the Socialist International in 1910. On this day, we can gain inspiration for the battles ahead through a look at the dramatic entrance of working women into history. Socialists traditionally discuss the magnificent strike of 20,000 shirtwaist workers in New York City that was…
By CHRISTINE MARIE The following presentation was given by Christine Marie, representing Socialist Action at a Nov. 10 forum in Philadelphia called Feminist Rebellion Today. The other panelists were Preeti Pathak, Co-Chair of Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment (PAVE), a new group that uses education and action to shatter the silence of sexual violence; Rebecca Katherine…
BY JEFF MACKLER Afghan women’s rights and antiwar fighter Malalai Joya toured the U.S. for three weeks in October on behalf of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and the Los Angeles-based Afghan Women’s Mission. Joya’s national tour included 10 cities: New York, Boston, Amherst, Albany, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.…
By SANDRA EZQUERRA — BARCELONA — The debate in political circles and in the media in recent decades around the question of abortion has been accompanied by a growing monopoly ownership of the defense of the right to life by the Right, in a way that skillfully counter-poses it to the feminist demand of the…
By GAETANA CALDWELL-SMITH “Wadjda,” a film written and directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour. In Arabic with English subtitles, filmed in and around Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Al-Mansour’s beautiful, thought-provoking film focuses on a mother and daughter who live in socially, religiously, and culturally male-dominated Saudi Arabia. Here, females are so devalued they are not included in depictions…
