Wayback Wednesday - Back in the day when Radical Women had solid theory for the long run
The Radical Women manifesto : socialist feminist theory, program and organizational structure
https://archive.org/details/radicalwomenmani0000unse
"When I first met Radical Women in 1972, the Manifesto took up only two mimeographed pages, yet it already encapsulated Radical Women’s core beliefs on the cause of, and cure for, women’s oppression. It described the origin of patriarchy in the rise of private property. And it explained that women’s emancipation could only be achieved through socialism which for its part, could only be won by a movement of the most oppressed, with women, especially women of color, playing a defining role. These were heady and subversive concepts and they still are today!" - p. 6
"We believe that solidarity and mutual aid of all the op- pressed are necessary for the genuine liberation of any one sector: either we all are free or none of us is free. Only the unity of people of color, indigenous and ethnic minority liberation fighters, the working class, the youth resistance, the women’s movement, sexual minorities, prisoners, the aged, people with disabilities, and all those tyrannized by capitalism can free us from our collective oppression. At the same time, we cannot and will not acquiesce to male chauvinism in the guise of an unreal “class unity” or “race unity” or “peace" - p. 18
"LAVENDER POWER When the gay movement burst into flower in the early 1970s, Radical Women enthusiastically welcomed this key political development. Our lesbian members set to work to expand Marxist theory by analyzing how homophobic persecution connects to gender oppression and class exploitation. Radical Women was instrumental in obtaining a Seattle city ordinance providing employment and housing protections for sexual minorities. We have helped build militant lesbian/gay rights organizations and have been involved in innumerable coalitions devoted to prevented forced AIDS testing, squashing ballot-box attacks on gay rights, lobbying for state gay rights bills and more." " - p. 12-13
"Radical Women knows that the women’s movement will have ups and downs, and that only a confident grasp of his- tory, social theory, and tested organizational principles can provide the ballast to weather the storms ahead. The Radical Women Manifesto is our guide to achieving equilibrium amidst the chaos and corruption of the society around us, a guideline firmly grounded in women’s historical past — in the beginnings of our oppression as a sex." - p. 20
"In interpreting the source of the oppression of women, Radical Women concurs with the anthropological evidence, historical view, and socio-economic analysis formulated by Karl Marx’s brilliant co-thinker, Frederick Engels. In his classic work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ (based on Lewis Henry Morgan’s pioneering research on Native American society),” Engels demonstrates that the first division of humans into oppressed and oppressor occurred between men and women. This ancient schism resulted from replacement of communal ownership by private property, and of female-reckoned descent by patriarchy. This strikes us as the most logically consistent and historically self- evident explanation of our own past." p. 21
"Radical Women is dedicated to exposing, resisting and eliminiating the inequities of women's existence. To accomplish this task of insuring survival for an entire sex, we must simultaneously address ourselves to the social and material source of sexism: the capitalist form of production and distribution of products, characterized by intrinsic class, race, sex, ethnic and caste oppression. When we work for the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into a socialist society, we work for a world in which all people may enjoy the right of full humanity and freedom from poverty, war, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and repression." - pp. 17-18
"We believe that the liberation of women is indissolubly linked to the battle against all the burning injustices that define capitalism. We constitute at least half of every stratum of the exploited and are part of every struggle for freedom. We experience in life the commonality among all forms of subjugation and their shared origin - the insatiable demands of capital for profit. Thus, we cannot isolate our struggle by creating a single-issue movement that ignores the multifaceted reality of women’s oppression. All oppressed groups are fighting the same enemy, and we must build a movement that can bring our separate struggles together. Unified we become strong." - p. 18
#RadicalFeminism #RadFem #WomynsHerstory #Solidarity #WomensLiberation #SocialistFeminism #MarxistFeminism
