On the one-hundredth anniversary of American women’s right to vote, let’s remember the working-class socialist suffragists who struggled for the franchise. And let’s devote the next hundred years to realizing their vision.
The seeds for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering sex-discrimination Supreme Court briefs were planted in the early years of her legal career of the 1960s, from an unlikely source: Sweden, under the prime ministership of social democrat Olof Palme.
During Spain’s Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri was famed worldwide as La Pasionaria, the brilliant orator who stirred anti-fascists’ souls. Fleeing to Moscow in 1939, she soon became the exiled Communists’ leader — both political guide for a defeated party and a “Spanish mother” confronting the expectations of her male comrades.
In Wollongong in the 1980s, four young socialist activists founded the Jobs for Women campaign to take on the mighty Port Kembla steelworks, demanding equal employment rights. The solidarity they built achieved a historic victory that reverberated across Australia.
Tunisia under French colonial rule was deeply undemocratic, with a social order built on formalized racial categories and the near exclusion of women from public life. But women Communists refused to accept a merely subordinate role — and built the only organizations that united Tunisians across the official racial divides.
Scott Morrison has responded to scandals over misogyny and sexual assault with token gestures and hollow words that won’t get near the root of the problem. In order to challenge sexism, we have to empower working-class women through economic justice and redistributive policies.
Soviet chess grandmaster Nona Gaprindashvili has announced that she is suing Netflix for belittling her achievements in The Queen’s Gambit. Her career shows we don’t need fictional rags-to-riches stories but welfare states that allow us to realize our true potential.
Last week, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her courage in interrogating France’s collective memory. Her work has been concerned with the lives of working-class women, which her books have treated with an uncommon dignity and respect.
Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is hardly a feminist. But battles over gender are key to her rise, in a far-right agenda that fuses motherhood, nationalism, and the demonization of Muslims.
When Britain’s miners went on strike from 1984 to 1985, women joined the picket lines in unprecedented numbers. These women refused to be intimidated by the police or stay at home, and they left a lasting mark on the British labor movement.
From an early age, socialist labor leader Eugene Debs was committed to women’s rights.
Nostalgia for a bygone gender regime is more than a weird social media trend. It reflects larger system pressures — on elites facing technological disruption that might generate social unrest, and on ordinary women buckling under the weight of modern work.
Restoring big ideas.
There's no need for excessive complexity — some people are worth hating.
Jameson writes from an immense sense of engagement with the world around him, and with faith in what that engagement might accomplish.
Tony Benn really did pose a danger to the British establishment; because he continued, even after Thatcher and Blair, to inspire those pushing for radical change.
Philanthropy thrills to begging and tolerates activism, but cannot abide a demand from those it wants to save.
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias on radical politics and what it takes to build mass movements.
Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism.
