Today is International Women’s Day, and this is my blog post for Gender Across Borders’ Blog for IWD.  This year’s theme, set by the United Nations, is “Equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all.”  In answer to the questions posed by GAB:

What does “equal rights for all” mean to you?

For me, equal rights means equal economic rights — equal pay, the ability to have a decent standard of living, affordable and accessible health care, including contraception and abortion.  However, it  DOESN’T mean a marketing opportunity to sell stuff to the “ladies”.  From Susan Campbell’s blog for her book, Dating Jesus:

“similar to Washington’s Birthday (where car sellers honor our first president by saying things like “I cannot tell a lie: This is the lowest price you’ll find.”), IWD has become a special window through which to hawk products.

Check out Feminist Peace Network’s wall of shame here. Note particularly the special deals on Hot Russian Brides, in honor of the day, March 8.”

Describe a particular organization, person, or moment in history that helped to mobilize a meaningful change in equal rights for all.

There are so many — how does one choose?   In my introductory remarks for our annual women’s history month celebrations, I point out that International Women’s Day began as a day to honor and promote the rights of working women.  So, I choose the Women’s Trade Union League as my example of promoting economic rights for all.  This organization demonstrated the emerging political awareness and activism of working women during this time. It was also an example of cross-class cooperation between women in the early twentieth century, a time of social and political reform tied to Progressive movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage.  The annual May Day celebrations by labor leaders served as a model for IWD.  Historically May Day (May 1st) celebrated the arrival of spring.  In the 1880s, labor leaders adopted May 1st to promote the rights of workers — and most of the time this meant the rights of men to earn a “family wage” so that their women did not have to work to support their families.  Male labor leaders criticized the women’s suffrage movement as a “bourgeois” agenda to consolidate the power of the middle and upper-classes (and given the elitism and nativism of some suffrage leaders, this claim was not unfounded).

However, it’s important to recognize the ways in which middle-class suffrage leaders recruited working-class women to the cause of suffrage and how both fought together for better wages and hours for working women.  Here’s their symbol:

The Socialist party in the U.S. created a Women’s National Committee to Campaign for the Suffrage, which held their first mass meeting on March 8, 1908.   Middle-class women participated in strikes and other protests by working women.  For example, during the Uprising of 20,000 in 1909, college girls who wore shirtwaists and the striking garment workers who made them walked arm in arm down Fifth Avenue to protest for working women’s rights.   The success of women labor leaders and their supporters led to the creation of International Women’s Day in 1911.

Unfortunately, the Red Scare of the 1920s, and later McCarthyism in the 1950s, targeted leftist women’s groups in the United States.  While other countries continued to celebrate International Women’s Day, the United States didn’t until Second Wave feminists in the 1960s revived the event.   Radical Women, an organization that emerged in Seattle, Washington, are a prime example of how some women’s organizations in the U.S. revived this link between women’s rights and economic and social justice for all women.  Here is Radical Women’s statement for this year’s IWD celebration:

“Women now, just as they did one hundred years ago, hold a unique economic and social position in society – oppressed in the home and super-exploited in the workplace. Women suffer more frequently from poverty; they labor long hours at home, raising the young and nursing the aged and sick; and they often also perform double-duty outside the home, working for lower wages than their male counterparts. This harsh reality makes women the best and toughest leaders of movements fighting for social and economic justice. In other words, women always have everything to gain and little to lose by organizing for a better world. As the South African song proclaims, “When you strike a woman, you strike a rock!”

Rebellion by women against an unjust global economic order is very much alive. In Iran, women are revolting against a thoroughly bankrupt, oppressive regime; in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian women are organizing an international boycott of Israel; in Italy, France and Spain, immigrant women went on strike against xenophobic racism; in Australia, feminists convened a national conference to coordinate and re-energize the abortion rights movement; in Mexico, women staunchly defend striking mine workers who fight for basic labor and human rights.

In the United States, queers and their allies are agitating for equality in all aspects of life. On university and college campuses, young women are organizing strikes and conferences in answer to the draconian cuts and tuition hikes that politicians of both parties are implementing to balance shrinking state budgets.

Radical Women in the U.S. and Australia is in the thick of these fights. Over the past year, members have also campaigned for fully-funded health care and other human services; helped pass laws to tax the rich and corporate profits; defended clinics and protested for reproductive freedom; organized to stop raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); raised money for our sisters and brothers in Haiti, who are rebuilding their homeland; and much more.

On this 100^th anniversary of the declaration of IWD, the issues may have changed, but the nature of the struggle remains the same. Like the socialist women who founded IWD, Radical Women believes the movements for social and economic justice must be independent and anti-capitalist to realize their full potential. Independent because it doesn’t matter which political party holds power if they aren’t accountable to the workingclass majority. If women are ever to achieve equality, we must cut the ties to politicians who demand our votes and hard-earned money, but give little, if anything, in return.

Our movements must also be anti-capitalist and tackle head-on the bankrupt economic system that pits nations and peoples against each other in a dog-eat-dog race to the bottom so that a tiny minority can exploit the earth’s resources and human labor for private gain. The day the world’s peoples turn this “free” market pyramid upside down will be a great advance along the path of achieving full equality and quality of life for all of humanity.

So, on this March 8, Radical Women unites in solidarity with all our sisters and brothers around the world who are marching, protesting, and raising their voices to win a socialist future where all people have not only bread, but roses too!

Margaret Viggiani
Radical Women
National Executive Committee
www.RadicalWomen.org

National Radical Women
625 Larkin St. Ste 202, San Francisco, CA 94109
Phone 415-864-1278 ● Fax 415-864-0778
RadicalWomenUS@gmail.com

via : Historiann who comments on the shitsorm heated discussion in the comments section of an obituary for Mary Daly posted at Shakesville.  The fourth comment at Shakesville said, “Honestly I am somewhat happy [to hear of her death] considering the transphobic bigotry of hers that I have read.”  There ensued further discussions of transphobia in Mary Daly’s work.  Kittywampus also has a thoughtful discussion of this issue, and also mentions the ways in which creation of a “safe space” at Shakesville also tends to silence those who want to make nuanced arguments.  One of the commentators on Kittywampus, who blogs at Solidaridad, wrote the following in defense of Daly:

“I got to know Mary in the last few years of her life – and of course I had to speak up for my trans friends – I’ll gladly report that Mary no longer held the same trans-phobic views that Jan Raymond expressed in her dissertation decades ago. I cannot report changes about Raymond’s thoughts only because I have not followed up on how her ideas developed. But I can attest that Mary’s own thoughts and perspective on this definitely changed – which only makes sense considering that for her to live is to change and move and grow with the movement of Ultimate Intimate Reality – Goddess is Verb for Mary Daly – there is no way she would have maintained static ideas.

One day I will write more on this – I do not want future generations of feminists, trans friends included, thinking of Mary Daly as their enemy.

She really is an ally. Of course this is not to diminish the harm and effect that any trans-phobic expressions will continue to have. That’s the risk any of us take when we put something in writing – it seems so permanently true. But in reality, all texts simply capture one moment – it is only a reflection of that one moment in ones developing thoughts and theories…”

In the comments on Historiann’s post, I wrote:

’m glad you and Sungold have commented on this issue. This problem isn’t limited to blogs — I saw the same thing happen on WMST-L last year, only in that case it involved a living person whom I know very well and whose work I respect.

Part of the problem is the lack of historical perspective. Daly’s early work was a product of its time — similar to the homophobia and racism in NOW and other mainstream feminist organizations. Women of color and LGBT theorists called them out on this and their views changed over time. Daly apparently also changed her views over time as well. That doesn’t seem to get acknowledged.

I think folks need to give some thought to diversity among trans persons. For example, a few trans men have told me that trans women are not necessarily allies to either trans equality or feminism. Just thought I’d throw that in there.

The same thing happened to Margaret Sanger, who has been picked apart for not being perfectly politically correct according to today’s standards.  Like many individuals across the political spectrum  endorsed eugenics and who reflected many of the race and class prejudices of the era.  This sad fact has been picked up by religous conservatives and used to discredit the entire birth control movement.

Ellen Chesler told me that when writing her biography of Sanger, she struggled with how to handle the issue of eugenics.  In the end, she decided to “give Sanger the biography she deserved” by balancing her obvious flaws with her accomplishments.  Chesler didn’t whitewash Sanger’s participation in eugenics — in fact, she takes Sanger to task for failing to consider that persons with disabilities had a right to reproduce — she also puts Sanger’s work within the “popular craze” for eugenics among key public figures in the early twentieth century,  including, ironically, Helen Keller.

The following quote, often misattributed to Sanger, actually was made by W.E.B. Dubois in article published in Birth Control Review:

“The mass of ignorant still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among Whites, is from a part of the population least intelligent and fit, so that the least able to rear their children properly.”

As Loretta Ross observes in her essay in Abortion Wars, this quote “reflected the shared race and class biases” of those who worked with Sanger in the Negro Project of the Birth Control Federation.

Ross and other women of color rightly trounced white middle-class women for their elitism and racism in promoting birth control as a solution to the “population crisis.”  As a result, the reproductive rights movement has become more inclusive and mindful of issues of diversity, including differing opinions of women from the same background.    I wish certain blogs written by third wave feminists would do the same.