Women protest in Wellington on International Women’s Day 1978 over the newly passed abortion law. [Photo from Socialist Action newspaper]

“Not the Church, not the state, women must decide their fate”: this was the fighting slogan of the abortion rights campaign of the 1970s. Women’s liberation was a movement that swept across the world, growing out of and alongside the New Left of those days. Women were organising – protesting, campaigning, and demonstrating for the right to abortions, for equal pay, against workplace discrimination. Ideas were in ferment.

That’s a legacy we should be proud of; the organizations of that time fought for access many of us take for granted today. When you bring up abortion rights nowadays, often the response you’ll get is, ‘don’t we already have those?’ [Read more...]

This talk was given to the Dunedin branch of the International Socialists by Miranda B to mark International Women’s Day 2013.

The first International Women’s Day (IWD) celebration was held over 100 years ago in 1911. In the last few years it has been taken over by mainstream or bureaucratic bodies, in particular the United Nations. In Australia, the 2011 centenary had major corporations as sponsors. Get “Platinum Empowerment” with PricewaterhouseCoopers and “Gold equality” with Avon. Big business is genuinely interested of course – in promoting women bosses, and telling rich women where to spend their money.

Indeed, the exclusivity of the whole shebang was illustrated by the NZ contingent of the United Nation international women’s committee’s invitation to a $30 breakfast at the Milford Cruising Club on Auckland’s North Shore. This year the UN IWD website is sponsored amongst others by the International Finance Company, Scotia Bank and BP. In many countries IWD is a public holiday, but in many places has also lost much of its political flavour, taking on the equivalent status of Mothers’ Day or Valentine’s Day.

Now the real history of IWD is of a day that belongs to socialists and activists within the working class and in movements for change from below. [Read more...]

A major theme at the Hikoi at Waitangi this year was violence towards women. (Photo: Derwin Smith)

Marx’s collaborator Engels wrote that “…the first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.”

So women’s oppression existed before the rise of capitalism, but has not always existed. It is not to do with innate differences and inequalities between the sexes, though, nor is it timeless: women’s oppression is a product of class society. To fight for women’s rights today, we need to understand this history. [Read more...]