[n.s.]: Communist Research Cluster, 2016. — 438 p.
The third volume of the Communist Interventions reader series, on Revolutionary Feminism. A century of debates between communist, anarchist, and radical feminist militants on women's oppression and capitalism. This reader provided the basis for reading groups in 21 cities and four countries during the fall and winter of 2015.
The history of the communist movement, in the twentieth century, is also a history of women. Many women stood on the movement’s front lines. They struck in the factories, demonstrated in the streets, and died on the barricades. Revolutionary women fought under both the red flag and the black one. They partook of the movement’s few victories and suffered under its massive and in the end overwhelming defeats. Yet women’s participation in the communist movement also raised certain questions. Or else, perhaps more accurately, their participation provided many different answers to a question that remained frustratingly undefined. This question was called, rather vaguely, the “woman question,” and it concerned the “role” of women in social life and in struggle. Revolutionary women — who were among the communist movement’s most prominent theorists, generating texts on every line of revolutionary inquiry — posed and answered this question in different ways. This reader examines revolutionary debates around the “woman question” (and we include both men and women in this history, since the former also played a role in these debates).
The Origins of an OrthodoxyFrederich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)
Second InternationalAugust Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879/1910)
Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question (1886)
Clara Zetkin, Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be Victorious (1896)
Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Suffrage and the Class Struggle (1912)
Rosa Luxemburg, The Proletarian Woman (1914)
AnarchismLucy Parsons, Woman: Her Evolutionary Development (1905)
Voltaire de Cleyre, The Woman Question (1897)
Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation (1906)
Emma Goldman, Woman Suffrage (1910)
Milly Witkop-Rocker, The Need for Women’s Unions (1925)
Russian RevolutionV.I. Lenin, Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women (1918)
V.I. Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919)
Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Woman Question (1920)
Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family (1920)
Leon Trotsky, Thermidor in the Family (1937)
American Communist PartyMargaret Cowl, Women and Equality (1935)
Mary Inman, In Woman’s Defense (1940)
Claudia Jones, We Seek Full Equality for Women (1949)
Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women (1949)
Women’s LiberationCasey Hayden and Mary King, Sex and Caste (1965)
Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, Redstockings Manifesto (1968)
Anne Koedt, The Politics of the Ego: A Manifesto for N.Y. Radical Feminists (1969)
Roxanne Dunbar, Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution (1969)
Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1971)
Women of the Weather Underground, A Collective Letter to the Women’s Movement (1973)
Gay Liberation FrontRadicalesbians, The Woman Identified Woman Manifesto (1970)
Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto (1970)
Radicalqueens, Radicalqueens Manifestos (1973)
Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, Street Transvestites for Gay Power Statement (1970)
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization and Fems Against Sexism, Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation (1970)
Charlotte Bunch, Lesbians in Revolt (1972)
Socialist FeminismBarbara Ehrenreich, What is Socialist Feminism? (1976)
Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Socialist Feminism (1972)
Marlene Dixon, The Rise and Demise of Women’s Liberation (1977)
Sexual ViolenceSusan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (1975)
Alison Edwards, Rape, Racism, and the White Women’s Movement (1976)
Lilia Melani and Linda Fodaski, The Psychology of the Rapist and His Victim (1974)
Combahee River Collective, Why Did They Die? A Document of Black Feminism (1979)
Black FeminismMary Ann Weathers, An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary (1969)
Third World Women’s Alliance, Women in the Struggle (1971)
Frances Beal, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (1976)
Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement (1977)
Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class and Sex (1980)
Wages for HouseworkMariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972)
Selma James, Sex, Race and Class (1975)
Angela Davis, The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework (1981)
Materialist FeminismChristine Delphy, The Main Enemy (1970)
Monique Witting, The Category of Sex (1976)
Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman (1981)
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1979)
SexualityAndrea Dworkin, Our Blood (1975)
Silvia Federici, Why Sexuality Is Work (1975)
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic (1978)
Patrick Califia, Feminism and Sadomasochism (1981)
Dual SystemsHeidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (1979)
Iris Marion Young, Beyond the Unhappy Marriage (1981)
Social ReproductionLise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (1983)
Epilogue to the Second Edition