![]() ![]() |
|
Radical books - Feminist writings - Socialist theory - Race liberation - Queer activism |
|
![]() |
|
home socialism 101 feminism 101 browse titles order form contact us search links |
Socialist feminism
Global activism |
![]() ![]() |
Socialist Feminism: The First Decade, 1966-76
by Gloria Martin Records the forging of the first Marxist feminist party in history -- the Freedom Socialist Party. Set in the tumultuous upsurges of the 1960s and '70s, Gloria Martin vividly describes the eruption of the women's liberation movement amidst the antiwar and civil rights struggles. Martin documents early lesbian and gay coalitions, the fight to legalize abortion in Washington State, radical labor organizing, community mobilizations against police brutality and poverty, campus upsurges, and the growth of the FSP's sister organization, Radical Women. She scathingly critiques the role of the Socialist Workers Party and other Left groups typified by sexism and opportunism. To them, she contrasts the Freedom Socialist Party's multi-issue focus on reaching those most oppressed as workingclass people of color, women, and sexual minorities. From the on-the-ground perspective of a seasoned organizer, Martin probes with a sharp scalpel the internal conflicts in the movements for social change. This is a story of years of intense work by radical women and men. It is a chronicle, a reference, an analysis, a judgment, and a guidebook. Its central message is inescapable: socialist feminism as a theme and strategy has never been more urgently needed than it is today.
Reader Comments |
Here's what readers are saying:
"... this book demonstrates forcefully that socialist feminism was not just a fad, but is a visionary politics of tomorrow." MITSUYE YAMADA, feminist poet and teacher at Cypress College, Irvine, California
"Gloria Martin's analysis ... describes a scenario of multi-dimensional change; from the heart to the workplace, from the fields to the schools, from the initial words by lovers of humanity to the global liberation of all." JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, Chicano poet, author of Exiles of Desire
"... a must for union activists ... linking racism and sexism with economic exploitation and describing the central role women play in unions -- from organizing on the worksite and walking the picket line to winning in court." CAROL TARLEN, editor of Real Fiction, member AFSCME 2318, San Francisco
"Magnificent ... extraordinarily honest, productively self-critical and powerfully inspiring. No other feminist organization has been so committed to the necessity of a national and global multi-issue movement. Gives me great hope." DR. CATHY DUNSFORD, writer and Pacific lesbian feminist activist, New Zealand.
Introduction
The FSP stand was openly socialist from the outset. We not only connected Vietnam to imperialism, capitalism and class struggle, we urged the antiwar movement to open itself up to include representatives ot the Black and Chicano struggles, and women's movement. We stressed the need to reach workers and unionists ... We emphasized the economic, class roots of war, and proposed a program for uniting all the disinherited into a political movement for socialism that would end all injustice.Martin exposes the vacillating and opportunist politics of the Communist Party, the International Socialists, and the Maoists. She sharply criticizes the Socialist Workers Party (the Trotskyist party from which the Freedom Socialist Party split in 1966 over the SWP's growing conservatism, anti-feminism, and crass opportunism in the Black struggle and with the antiwar leadership).
The FSP's program, like Lenin's, speaks to the needs and demands of all the exploited and oppressed ... workers, women, ethnic and sexual minorities, the poor, the aged, and the ignored. An interracial, intersexual, pro-workingclass mass movement, unified around the complementary needs and demands of minorities, women, labor and gays, would challenge the basic foundations of the system.
This is the key to revolution.
Karen Brodine, Seattle, Washington, February 1986