The involvement of women-not all of them either middle class or pro-British -on the 'peace at any price demonstrations in Belfast brings home the urgent need to organise women against imperialism and their own oppression. While it is important not to overestimate the spontaneity of the present peace movement-behind it are the pro-British parties and press—it is important to recognise their ability to use the isolation of women to mobilise some of them against the IRA.
Although the level of involvement in the anti-imperialist struggle since 1968 has been and remains very high, the fact remains that the early potential for organising large numbers of women has not been realised. To a great extent this is due to the elitism of the Republican movement and its failure to seize upon and develop the mass movement which gave rise to it. But there is also a basic lack of understanding by Republicans of women's oppression in Ireland.
OVERNIGHT There have also been failures by the women's movement itself. In 1970 a ognise that the isolation of women has been used by the media and British political parties to fuel the women's liberation movement was set up, gained the support of hundreds of women almost overnight, and just as rapidly faded out of existence. It is not difficult to see why. 1970 was the year of internment; the issue of women's oppression seemingly paled into insignificance beside the resistance in the NOTED.
This need not have happened. Had the women's movement been able to show how the liberation of women was bound up with the national question need lo mobilise women against imperialism on the issue of their own oppression, the movement could have become part of the mainstream of the struggle. Instead it isolated itself by not finding its relation to the primary task of the Irish working class, the resolution of the national question.
Women's liberation groups have revived to some extent but problems remain. The Belfast Socialist Women's Group manifesto addresses all its demands to the British state. This is not only a denial of self-determination, but results in cutting off the movemen the majority of Catholic women, to whom it is clear that the British state is incapable of granting the minimum of democratic