Comrade Ella gives a short, amusing and informative talk about the recent history of the women’s movement in Britain.
Addressing a meeting to mark International Working Women’s Day in Birmingham, on 8 March 2014, she outlines why working-class women have not been involved in the women’s movement – because it has not addressed their needs.
Speaking from her experience, and with reference in particular to the 1971 women’s conference held in Skegness, which she and her comrades attended, she illustrates how a potentially progressive and liberating movement was effectively hijacked and sidetracked by a number of petty-bourgeois groups, which pushed their false, anti-men, anti-worker, anti-social(ist) and anti-Marxist views onto the mass movement that had developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, effectively destroying it.
She prefaces her remarks by noting that women have everything to gain by pursuing the path of socialism and the overthrow of the capitalist system, which exploits the majority, divides them and gives them a life of servitude in the interests of fabulous superprofits of an insignificant handful (of men predominantly, but a few of the few are, in fact, women) – the finance capitalists.
How can real equality and liberation be won by working women? By liberating humanity from the system of wage slavery.
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Read: Marxism and the Emancipation of Women, Ed: Ella Rule
