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…
By CHRISTINE MARIE An extraordinary mobilization of support for abortion access in Texas last week has stimulated the imagination of reproductive justice activists everywhere. On June 25-26, close to 200,000 people around the country stayed up past 4 a.m. to watch the livestream of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis wrapping up an 11-hour filibuster that…
By ANN MONTAGUE The economic burdens on women are triple—working in undervalued jobs, domestic work, and cutbacks in social services used by women. In the first place, women’s work continues to be undervalued and underpaid. Women are half the labor force and continue to earn 76 cents on the dollar earned by men. There remains…
By CHRISTINE MARIE On April 25, Black women lawmakers, including Representative Barbara Watson, walked out of a Florida state legislative session to protest the introduction of an anti-abortion bill that would prohibit pregnancy terminations based on “race.” The bill, introduced by white Republican lawmaker Charles Van Zant, is typical of a spate of reactionary laws…
By CHRISTINE MARIE This article is based on a portion of the resolution on the oppression of women, written by the author, that was approved by the 2012 Socialist Action convention. “Such demands [from the women’s liberation movement] go to the very heart of the specific oppression of women exercised through the family and strike…
By ANN MONTAGUE SEIU 503 announced it supports a living wage for its workers in Oregon, and is taking the issue to the bargaining table and possibly to the streets. While President Obama has proposed an increase in the Federal Minimum Wage to $9 an hour, SEIU doesn’t believe that is the solution. Oregon’s minimum…
By CHRISTINE MARIE Book Review: Kristin Bumiller, “In An Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). On Feb. 14, the streaming videos of the flashmobs of young women determined to claim a violence-free life set my feminist heart to humming. But the hum quieted a…
By DAWN ROSE “Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it. It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he’s done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker.” –Darren Washington, abstinence…
By ALICE RICHARD On Oct. 3, President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney squared off in the first presidential debate, in which independent parties were prohibited from participating. The debate was focused on domestic policy, and the candidates primarily sparred on taxes, Social Security, and the federal deficit. Despite the White House’s assurances that…
PINK RIBBONs, INC., directed by Léa Pool, written by Patricia Kearns and Léa Pool; based on the book by Samantha King. Statistics show that every 23 seconds a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, and one dies every 69 seconds from the disease. The eye-opening Canadian documentary, “Pink Ribbons, Inc.,” is aptly subtitled…
