Following is the seventh part of an eleven-part series of study columns on the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
The study series was originally developed for study groups conducted by the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L) and is the product of a number of years of practice in leading study groups in Marxism-Leninism among workers and students.
The Woman Question: Selections from the Writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, New World Paperbacks, pp. 9-33, 42-47, 81-82.
UNITY, Vol. 4, No. 4, International Women’s Day issue, especially pp. 11-16.
(Supplementary Readings: Lenin, “Soviet Power and the Status of Women,” and “On International Working Women’s Day,” both in The Emancipation of Women, pp. 73-76 and 80-81.)
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The oppression of women has weighed down half of humanity for thousands of years. The current shift to the right by the ruling class in the U.S. has particularly affected the masses of women in this country. The “New Right” has built itself to a great extent around issues concerning women, such as opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. These are manifestations of how much the oppression of women is an integral part of the entire oppressive system of monopoly capitalism.
It is important for workers and revolutionaries to have a basic understanding of the historical origins and significance of the woman question. As Lenin once stated, “There can be no socialist revolution unless very many working women take a part in it.”
The question of women’s liberation should be viewed in relationship to the class struggle. Frederick Engels traced the origin of women’s oppression to the development of private property and class society itself. He wrote: “The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.” It is because of this historical origin that Lenin later stated that the “true emancipation of women is not possible except through communism. You must lay stress on the unbreakable connection between women’s human and social position and the private ownership of the means of production.”
In the U.S. today, the masses of women suffer great hardships. Women are denied many rights (equal employment, pay and health care rights). Women are the victims of an horrendous amount of violence, and daily endure particular exploitation and humiliation at work. There is also the ideology of “male supremacy” promoted in this society and held by many men which justifies keeping women in a lower position, degraded and chained to the home and family and separated from political affairs.
The revolutionary movement must take up the special demands and circumstances of women in order to help lift their oppression and incorporate them into the movement for socialism. Every effort must be made to oppose male supremacist thinking, to involve women in the revolutionary movement and concretely show that it is the monopoly capitalist system that is the enemy, not men, as some have put forth.
1. What is the historical origin of women’s oppression? How is women’s oppression connected to class society? What are some manifestations of the oppression of women in the U.S. today?
2. How must women achieve their emancipation? What is the relationship of women’s liberation and the socialist revolution in the U.S.?
3. Lenin once pointed out the hypocrisy of capitalism’s declarations of equality, including sexual equality. What are examples of this hypocrisy in the U.S. today?
4. Mao Zedong wrote: “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.” Discuss his view compared with the view that women’s liberation is a question of “liberation” from men or one of developing a different “lifestyle.”