By Joy Macready The 1917 Bolshevik government advanced a revolutionary programme for women’s rights, struggling to break with the backwardness and prejudice of Russia. The Bolsheviks argued that for women to be liberated, they would have to be relieved of their semi-slave status within the family. This would only happen if the state, now based […]

By Martin Suchanek  This article was originally published in Neue Internationale – Frauen Zeitung, the German language magazine of the League for the Fifth International The war against Islamic State, the renewal of state bans on Islamic women’s dress in the West and the spread of Islamist terrorism has renewed the focus on Islam as […]

The revolutionary legacy of Clara Zetkin By Joy Macready CAPITALISM from its earliest years gave birth to the modern women’s question. Women, particularly the women of the poorest classes, played a major role in its model revolution – in France in 1789. But the Rights of Man and Citizen it proclaimed turned out to be […]

Joy Macready reviews Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

Joy Macready reviews 'Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (2013)'

In celebration of International Women’s Day and as part of an ongoing debate about the principles of women’s organisation and the revolutionary movement, Joy Macready looks at the history of early Soviet Russia and its lessons for today The Marxist position on women’s liberation owes a great debt to a remarkable group of women in […]

Revolutionary communists start from the view that working class women are the central agency in the struggle against their own oppression, aided at every step by class-conscious working class men. As Lenin wrote: “We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the […]

We staged a 24-hour “teach-in” on Wednesday 8 December in a form of protest against this coalition Government, which has now voted for the raising of tuition fees up to £9,000. The main reason for the occupation was to raise awareness through media coverage about this rise in tuition fees, and we feel we were […]

The day after the mass student walkout on 24 November, the Daily Mail ran the headline, “The Rage of the Girl Rioters”, supposedly exposing a new generation of mindless female thugs. Although the Mail described the images as “disturbing”, I think it was an inspiration to see so many young women protesting. Ninety years on […]

Our series on the lives and struggles of great revolutionary women continues with Marija Cubalevska’s look at the life of Russian underground militant Ludmila Stal Ludmila Stal was born in 1872 in Yekaterinoslaw in the Russian Empire, which today is Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine. Although her family were well-off, she was a rebel from her early […]

“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!” Here we look at the life of Helen Keller as part of our series on revolutionary women in history Many people have heard of Helen Keller, the blind and deaf woman who learned to talk when her friends wrote sign language on her hands. Films […]

This site begins a new series on revolutionary women to highlight their often forgotten role in the communist movement. Katja Teran starts the first in the series on Yevgenia Bosch Yevgenia Bogdanovna Bosch was born on 11 August 1879 (23 August after the calendar was modernised) in Ochakiv in the Ukraine. Victor Serge, the communist writer, […]

The nuclear family is not as normal as its defenders would have us believe.

A Marxist analysis of the origins and forms of women's oppression and the communist programme for liberation.