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Women and Socialism - Accounting for our Experience

Publisher:  Vancouver Women's Study Group, Vancouver, Canada
Year Published:  1979  
Pages:  28pp  
Book Type:  Handbooks/Manuals

Resource Type:  Article

Abstract:  The authors of this booklet, the Vancouver Women's Study Group, came together to make sense of their Marxism and feminism, and to see where and how the two fit together. They feel the tension of being "feminist" and "socialist" when certain elements of the women's movement accuse them of selling out the men, and when the communist movement brands them as "bourgeois feminists", who post a threat to unity in the working class.

The booklet reacts to attitudes of certain leftist groups around the position of women in the revolutionary struggle. Such groups deny that working class men benefit materially from women's oppression in the family and labor force; they misunderstand the divisions existing between men and women and are out of touch with the realities of women's oppression. Women are expected to fit into the revolutionary struggle without bringing their own life experience with them.

This booklet challenges the popular notion that women are making headway in a labor force which is still essentially segregated by sex: women are paid less than men, and get less skilled jobs; unions are male-dominated; women, whether in the labor force, at home or in the process of separation find themselves dependent on male incomes. Women are treated and defined as dependent on men: thus a class analysis is essential to the women's movement.

"The experience of working class women is 'different' from that of working class men; this difference provides a material basis for divisions between men and women," differences (which) cannot be overlooked in their privileges gained from keeping women unequal. The authors say that equal participation is essential to any true future revolutionary movement.

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