International Women’s Day 2009

Azar Majedi, chairperson of the Organization for Women’s Liberation and a member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI) leadership, has circulated the following report:

The International Conference on Why is Secularism Necessary? A complete success

On 7th March 2009 an international conference organised by Organisation for Women’s Liberation (OWL) was held successfully in Gothenburg, Sweden. The conference heard speeches from many invited speakers and ended with the showing of the film “Maria’s Grotto” about honour killings in Palestine. Many organisations supported and sponsored the event, including: European Feminist Initiative, Network against Honour Crimes, Women for Peace in Sweden, Centre for Research which is a secular and academic institution.

More than 20 speakers were invited to the conference. Many activists from Ghana, Uganda, Pakistan and Bangladesh had shown interest to attend the conference but could not get entry visa. Also 3 of the speakers from Iraq, Jordan and Syria could not come due to visa difficulties.

The speakers who attended the conference were: Layla Al Ali, a secularist activist of women’s rights in Lebanon who lives in Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon; Hugo Esterla from Argentine living in Italy; Imma Barbarossa from Italy; Soad Baba Aissa from Algeria living in France; Malene Busk from Denmark; Susana Tampieri from Argentine; Frances Raday from Israel; Boriana Jonsson from Bulgaria living in Sweden; Lia Nadaraia from Georgia; Maria Hagberg from Sweden; Karim Noori from Iran living in Sweden; Lilian Halls-French from France; and Azar Majedi the Chair person of OWL. Buthina Canaan Khoury, a Palestinian film maker showed her film at the end of the conference. Buthina talked about her film and the audience shared their views with her.

The conference started by the opening speech of Azar Majedi. She focused on the necessity of an international secularist movement in defense of women’s rights. The conference was divided into 4 paneled sessions during which the speakers delivered their talks followed by questions from the audience and discussions. Imma Barbarossa and Susana Tampieri talked about the Catholic Church in Italy and Argentina and the devastating situation of women under the control of the church. Lia Nadaraia talked about the role of Orthodox Church in Georgia and the situation of women after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She explained how the collapse of the former Soviet Union and building of democracy gave some hope to women only to find out later that their situation has worsened. She noted that Orthodox Church has massive powers which make the necessity of secularism even more desirable.

Layla Al Ali talked about the situation of women in Palestine and the degree of insecurity and violence imposed on them. Maria Hagberg showed a slide show about violence against women and honour crimes. Hugo Estrella talked about multiculturalism, cultural relativism and the regress of the international community on the issue in past decades. Karim Noori talked about the corruptive role of religion on children’s rights and the necessity of banning faith schools. His speech led to a lively debate in the hall. Soad Baba Aissa talked about individual rights and women’s rights. Azar Majedi talked about the obstacles and challenges facing secularism. She focused on the fact that unlike the general belief that considers religion as a moral and spiritual phenomenon, religion is a political institution. She mentioned the role of mass media and engineering of public opinion especially in the Middle East as obstacles for secularism.

Frances Raday talked about monolithic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity and their common aspects in suppressing women. Boriana Jonsson delivered her speech on the issue of militarism and its close relation to religion and suppression of women. She explained how during war, women’s suppression is used as a weapon against the enemy and how women are tortured and raped. Malene Busk’s speech was titled “Women’s Rights and why God should not have a role in them”. Lilian Halls-French talked about building a bridge between Feminists and Secularists. She emphasized the fact that secularism is a universal phenomenon and hence the best obstacle against fundamentalism and the apparatus of religion.

Resolutions:

After the speeches and discussions, Azar Majedi read out the resolutions submitted to the conference.

OWL had 3 resolutions:
* Condemning Islamic Republic of Iran for suppression of women;
* Condemning Gender Apartheid in Iran;
* The necessity of building an international secularist movement for women’s liberation.

Resolution submitted by Susana Tampieri and Hugo Esterla:
* Condemning the Catholic Church; and recognition of the right to retract one’s baptism and leaving the church.

Resolution submitted by Frances Raday:
* Criticizing all religions.

It was decided to make some alterations in the resolutions before publication.

Maria Hagberg, the coordinator of the Network against Honour related Crimes, Lilian Halls-French the chairperson of European Feminist Initiative and Azar Majedi the chair of OWL delivered their closing speeches. They all emphasized on the necessity of struggle for women’s equality, secularism and building of an international secularist movement. A music video given to the conference by Soad Baba Aissa was played at the end of the conference. The music video was a performance by a few Algerian women singers about women’s rights. The video is dedicated to women’s movement. The music video invoked warm applauds from the audience. Soad then talked about the gains of women’s movement in Algeria in changing the laws in that country which was warmly received by the conference.

Conference ended by showing the film “Maria’s Grotto” made by Buthina Canaan Khoury. This film is beautifully made and is extremely moving. It depicts honour killing and the role of religion and the ruling ideology in maintaining the horrendous statuesque. Heated discussion followed the showing.

The conference thanked Shahla Noori who had a major role in organizing it. OWL book stall was visited through out the conference. Azar Majedi’s book on women’s rights in opposition to political Islam was displayed and sold. Maria Hagberg’s book “It starts to rot at 20” about honour killing was also on sale.

The conference was widely advertized internationally. Its announcement was published in various secular and women’s rights websites. The organizers and some of the speakers were interviewed by different radio and TV stations before, during and after the conference: Swedish National Radio Farsi section interviewed Azar Majedi and Esmail Owji, Radio Sepehr and For a Better World, Radio LoRa a Swiss radio and Hambastegi TV in Pars TV interviewed Azar Majedi, For a Better World TV interviewed Shahla Noori and Azar Majedi and Danish Radio 1 talked with Malene Busk. A public local TV recorded the whole programme and a French film maker, also recorded the whole conference and interviewed some of the speakers for a documentary on the conference. Maria Hagberg and Azar Majedi wrote an article about the conference for Fria Tidningen Journal. Those interested to find out more about the conference can visit our website at: www.womensliberation.net for the films of the speeches and photos of the conference.

This was a very successful conference. Although it went on for 7 hours the participants wanted it to continue. It was decided that a similar conference will be held in 6 months time over a period of 2 days to meet this demand. Those interested to participate please visit our website where we will announce the details shortly. http://www.womensliberation.net.

For more information please contact Majedi.azar@gmail.com
Organization for Women’s Liberation

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/03/international-conference-on-secularism.html

To mark International Women’s Day, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is publishing an excerpt from Resistance Books’ Comrades in arms: Women in the Russian Revolution, by Kathy Fairfax, and making available the entire pamphlet to download in PDF format (see below).

The popular image of the Russian Revolution is of a revolution made by men. Ask the person in the street to name a figure from the Russian Revolution and most could come up with Lenin, Stalin, maybe Trotsky. A few might have heard of Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin. But how many would name Kollontai, Armand or Krupskaya? How many know of the women who helped make revolution in Russia? How many know about the thousands of female Bolsheviks who marched through the streets of Petrograd in 1917 or shouted revolutionary speeches to cheering crowds or wrote and distributed pamphlets calling for revolution? In fact, women revolutionaries inspired the working class the world over and inaugurated a new era in world history.

These women worked alongside men in all the campaigns that ultimately brought state power. For twenty years before the revolution in 1917 they sustained the underground Bolshevik party organisation and agitated for revolution by writing and distributing leaflets and newspapers. After the fall of the tsar they became stump speakers, agitators and party recruiters. During the civil war they fought alongside men to defend their revolution and after the war was over they worked with men to build the institutions of the new society. This, at a time when women in the rest of Europe were still asking for the vote.

Who were these women? Like the male Bolsheviks, they were mostly Russian, from the cities and in early adulthood. Unlike the men though, most women Bolsheviks came from the middle and upper classes. It is not hard to work out why this should be so. Working-class and peasant women had a daily struggle to survive that left time for little else, while more-affluent women had the leisure to read and think and discuss ideas. As well, Russian society discouraged all women from participating in the male business of politics, and this prohibition was enforced particularly strongly within the working class and the peasantry.

Nevertheless in the first decades of this century so many thousands of women made the dangerous decision to become revolutionaries that Russia ended up with more radical women than any other country. Not all joined the Bolsheviks; some joined the Socialist Revolutionaries, others joined the Mensheviks. There were anarchist women as well. But a majority of women activists chose to join the Bolsheviks. For many of these women the decision to join the revolutionary movement before 1917 came about because of the political situation in Russia and because the revolutionary movement had always welcomed women into its ranks. For decades the oppression of women had been considered by social critics to be one of Russia’s great injustices. Upper- and middle-class women had access to very limited education and employment while most peasant girls never went to school. Women could not separate from their husbands, change their residence, leave the country, take a job or execute a bill of exchange without the permission of a male guardian. Divorce was practically impossible and women had significantly less property and inheritance rights than men.

Underlying these legal restrictions was a patriarchal value system that granted all men power over the women in their families. Whatever her class a woman was expected to marry a man of her parents’ choice and live her life as the dutiful wife of an authoritarian, if sometimes benevolent, husband. She owed her husband complete obedience and was compelled by the state to live with him, take his name and assume his social status. Social reformers and novelists such as Chernyshevsky and Turgenev deplored the situation and the small revolutionary organisations of the 1870s welcomed so many women into their ranks that by some estimates one third of their membership was female.

The position of women in Russia was complicated by the political situation. Although reformers from many different quarters were calling for fundamental change in many areas, among them the position of women, the recalcitrant tsarist government refused all possibilities of change. Not for them a constitutional monarchy with an independent parliament as in Western Europe. The tsar maintained a strong autocratic government whose liberal opposition was weak. And if the liberal opposition was weak, the feminists in the liberal intelligentsia were equally weak.

Here we must make a distinction between what we think of as feminism today and how it was viewed at the turn of the century. Feminism is one of the main tenets of our party. I consider myself a feminist. Probably most of you do as well. But early this century there was a real dividing line between feminism and socialism. In Russia, liberal feminists called for the government to reform the laws relating to women on the Western European model, so that women would have a few more rights within marriage, could own property and perhaps vote. They had no wish to challenge the capitalist system and the reforms they worked for benefited middle-class and aristocratic women, who were concerned with inheritance and property rights, far more than working-class or peasant women. Like their Western European counterparts, the women’s organisations they built urged the opposition liberal parties to include these reforms in their platforms.

The women who joined the Bolsheviks did so because they rejected liberal feminism, condemning it as a bourgeois ideology that overrated the significance of legal gender inequality and ignored the fundamental roots of the oppression of women that sprang from the private ownership of the means of production. For women Bolsheviks, liberation could not be given by governments: it had to be seized by women and men acting together to create a new society of equals.

As Lenin put it in a 1920 discussion with Clara Zetkin:

The theses [on communist work among women] must emphasise strongly that true emancipation of women is not possible except through communism. You must lay stress on the unbreakable connection between woman’s human and social position and the private ownership of the means of production. This will draw a strong, ineradicable line against the bourgeois movement for the “emancipation of women”. This will also give us a basis for examining the woman question as a part of the social, working-class question, and to bind it firmly with the proletarian class struggle and the revolution. Although discontent with the government was widespread, very few people, and far fewer women than men, chose a perilous life on the run in pursuit of a popular upheaval that might never come. Those who were willing to live that way were, by definition, exceptional.

Why did they join the Bolsheviks? What was it about this section of the international socialist movement that attracted so many women? To understand what the Bolsheviks offered women activists we have to look at the history of the Marxist movement and its attitudes to women.

Marxism and women’s liberation

The first Marxist work to consider the subject of women and the family was Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class of England written in 1844. The book dealt at length with the effects of capitalism on the family as women and children were increasingly substituted for male workers at a fraction of men’s wages. Capitalism, Engels noted at length, was destroying the traditional division of family labour, where woman was homemaker and man was breadwinner.

Within a year Marx and Engels had made a great advance in their thinking on women and the division of labour in The German Ideology. They suggested that the family was not a set of natural or biological relations but a social institution that corresponded to the mode of production. Further, they argued that a communal domestic economy was a necessary prerequisite for women’s liberation and that this would lead to the abolition or “supercession” of the family itself. This was an enormous advance on the prevailing attitude that the family was a natural entity and that women’s inferior position was biologically determined. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels also contrasted the loveless matches of the bourgeoisie with the affectionate matches of the proletariat and decided that property was the main obstacle to relations based on love, equality and mutual respect.

In Engels’ catechism of late 1847, “The Principles of Communism”, he asks “What influence will the communistic order of society have upon the family?”:

It will make the relations between the sexes a purely private affair which concerns only the persons involved, and calls for no interference by society. It is able to do this because it abolishes private property and educates children communally, destroying thereby the two foundation stones of hitherto existing marriage — the dependence of the wife upon her husband and of the children upon the parents conditioned by private property.

This commitment to the liberation of women and children and to the personal and sexual freedom of the individual was a strong current in late 19th century socialism and was part of the deeply felt heritage of the Bolsheviks as well. Thus, by 1850, Marx and Engels had formulated many of the ideas that would shape the Bolshevik vision. Unlike earlier utopian social theorists — such as Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen — their vision of the future was based on their understanding of past modes of production and reproduction and their evolution. Recognising the family as a social and not a natural construct, they began to challenge the gender division of labour.

In Volume I of Capital, Marx spends a lot of time discussing the factory system, the extensive employment of women and children and the effect this was having on the family system. But even in the hellish crucible of capitalist industry he saw the germ of something better:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes … It is also obvious that the fact that the collective working group is composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages must under the appropriate conditions turn into a source of humane development, although in its spontaneously developed, brutal capitalist form, the system works in the opposite direction …

The reality of massive female employment in industry meant that it was imperative that women be incorporated as active participants in political work. Furthermore, as Marx wrote to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann in late 1868: “Everyone who knows anything of history, knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment.”

In 1871, Marx was instrumental in having the International — the International Working Men’s Association or First International — adopt a new rule recommending the establishment of female branches, without excluding the possibility of branches composed of both sexes. The prospects for such a commitment were poor and in any case the International was nearing the end of its life, but Marx’s recommendation did leave an important legacy by establishing in principle the legitimacy of autonomous women’s organisations within the mass movement.

However this did not mean that the socialist workers’ movement in Europe accepted either female labour or equality of women and many early unions excluded women on the grounds that their presence lowered male wages and worsened the material condition of the working class as a whole. Unions demanded a family wage that would enable women to return to their “proper” places in the home.

August Bebel’s famous work Women and Socialism, first published in 1879, began the move away from “proletarian anti-feminism” and towards a more unifying strategy within the workers’ movement. The book, which by 1910 had gone through 50 editions in Germany as well as numerous translations abroad, became the basis for subsequent social-democratic organising efforts among women. Bebel’s thesis that only through the destruction of bourgeois society would all women be emancipated struck a chord with many women, as did his argument that women’s entry into industry and organisation into unions was a necessary step in the historical process which would terminate in socialism.

For decades Bebel’s work was the official line on the role of the socialist movement in women’s emancipation. Later criticism of the book revealed its limitations but the central thesis remained valid: “There can be no emancipation of humanity without the social independence and equality of the sexes” (emphasis in original).

It had an enormous effect on many of the future women leaders of the international socialist movement. As Clara Zetkin, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) noted:

The book must not be judged according to its positive aspects or its shortcomings. Rather, it must be judged within the context of the times in which it was written. It was more than a book, it was an event – a great deed. The book pointed out for the first time the connection between the woman’s question and historical development. For the first time, there sounded from this book the appeal: We will only conquer the future if we persuade the women to become our co-fighters.

If the work of Bebel was crucial in combating proletarian anti-feminism in the workers’ movement, so were the practical efforts to implement those ideas by women socialists such as Clara Zetkin. She was a tireless proponent of the rights of working women and her organisational work, speeches, writing, and lifelong commitment to women workers helped to chart a new direction within the European socialist movement. Zetkin repeatedly clashed with the more conservative members of the labour movement who wanted women out of the workforce. If employers insisted on female labour because it was cheaper, her answer was to fight for equal pay for equal work. In a speech to the founding congress of the Second International in 1889 she argued, according to a report, that:

… it is not women’s work per se which in competition with men’s work lowers wages, but rather the exploitation of female labour by the capitalists who appropriate it.

Zetkin not only defended women’s right to work, but said that women’s participation in the workforce was a prerequisite for women’s independence. “The slave of the husband became the slave of the employer” but women still gained from this transformation.

While Marx and Engels made no distinction between the oppression suffered by women of different classes, Zetkin was the first social theorist to place women’s oppression within the different classes of society. In essence she proposed a different “woman question” for every class in capitalist society. Upper-class women wanted freedom to manage and inherit money and property; middle-class women wanted education and job opportunities while proletarian women, compelled to work in the least paid jobs to supplement their families’ income, wanted better working conditions for all.

Zetkin’s efforts on behalf of women workers received international recognition in 1907 at the first International Conference of Socialist Women where she was elected secretary of the International Women’s Bureau. It was at this conference that Zetkin, together with Rosa Luxemburg, proposed to the international socialist movement that March 8 be celebrated annually in all countries as International Working Women’s Day.

Attending the Socialist Women’s Conference were many Russian women, among them Alexandra Kollontai, who left convinced of the need to begin organising women at home.

In the same year the congress of the Second International endorsed the principle of women’s right to work, the creation of special women’s organisations within all socialist parties and a position on active organising for women’s suffrage. An active strategy for women’s full enfranchisement — political, social and economic — was finally in place.

[Kathy Fairfax is a longtime feminist and a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective. This is an excerpt from the pamphlet, Comrades in arms: Women in the Russian Revolution, which is based on a talk given at the 18th Congress of the DSP in January 1999. You can read the entire pamphlet, or download it in PDF format, below. You can purchase the hard copy edition of the pamphlet from Resistance Books.]

http://links.org.au/node/934

Download `Comrades in Arms: Women in the Russian Revolution’ from http://www.scribd.com/doc/13047091/Comrades-in-Arms

International Conference in Gothenburg/Sweden – Why is Secularism Essential?

Organization for Women’s Liberation is organizing a one day conference in commemoration of 8 March, International women’s day on the impact of religion on the situation and status of women. Why is secularism essential? In this conference veteran women’s right activists and scholars are coming together to analyze the devastating effects of rise of religious movements and religion’s influence in the running of state in many countries on the situation of women: the effect of catholic church, orthodox church, Judaism and political Islam will be discussed.

We are pleased to announce that following organisations have supported our conference:
* Centre for Inquiry
* European Feminist Initiative
* International Network against Honour Crimes
* Women for Peace (Sweden)

Guest speakers so far confirmed:
* Homa Arjomand; coordinator of No Sharia Campaign; Canada/Iran
* Soad Baba Aissa; European Feminist Initiative; France/Algeria
* Imma Barbarossa; Partito della Rifondazione Communista, Italy
* Julie Bindle Journalist; a founder of feminist law reform NGO Justice for Women, and of the Feminist Coalition against Prostitution; England
* Malene Busk; women’s right activist, Center for Inquiry; Denmark
* Buthina Canaan Khoury; Film maker; Palestine
* Beth Ciesielski; Centre for Inquiry, Rumania/USA
* Hugo Esterla; Centre for Inquiry, Italy/Argentina
* Caroline Fourest; writer; columnist, activist and a Member of Libre Pense; France
* Maria Hagberg; MD in social work and chair of Network against Honour Crimes; Sweden
* Lilian Halls French; sociologist, President of the European Feminist Initiative; France
* Boriana Jonsson; Member of the Coordinating Committee of European Feminist Initiative, Bulgaria/Sweden
* Parvin Kaboli; coordinator of White Carnation; Sweden/Iran
* Khanum R. Lateef, manager Asuda women’s center Suleimania; Iraq/Kurdistan
* Azar Majedi; President of OWL, writer; England/Iran
* Azza Kamel Mohamed Abdel Meguid, Appropriate Communication Techniques for Development, ACT, Egypt
* Lia Nadaraia; President Feminist Club, Georgia
* Layla Naffa Hamarneh; Director of Projects Arab Women Organisation of Jordan
* Karim N. Noori; Mäns nätverk mot hedersförtryck, Sweden/Iran
* Frances Raday: Chair, Israeli Association for Freedom of Science, Religion and Culture; Israel
* Nina Sankari; Polish Rationalist Organisation and EFI Poland
* Sabine Salmon; President of Femmes Solidaires; France
* Lisa Sorush; women’s right activist; Afghanistan
* Susana Tampieri; writer, women’s right activist, Argentina
* Nawal Yazeji, researcher and activist on women issues, Syria

Moderator: Maryam Kousha; editor of Women’s Liberation,

We invite all concerned feminists, secularists and human right activists to participate in these events. We need to demonstrate a show of secularist force against religious inroads in the society.

Date: 7 March 2009
Venue: Folkets Hus Göteborg, Olof Palmes Plats, Järntorget
Admission: 100 SKr or 10 Euros

Details of the events will be published as soon as they become available.

For more information or to register please write to: Majedi.azar@gmail.com;

Phone:
Azar Majedi:+44 (0)7886973423
Shahla Nouri: +46(0)737262622

Medusahuset Göteborg
wlmedusahuset@gmail.com
maria.hagberg@minheder.nu

Or visit our website: http://www.womensliberation.net/