•WORKING women are the weakest of their sex. Their lives were too hard and their education too meagre to equip them for the contest. Surely it is a mistake to use the weakest for the struggle! We want picked women, the very strongest and intelligent! You have your own ideas. We do not want that; we want all our women to take their instructions and walk in step like an army.
So spoke Christobel Pankhurst in 1914 expelling her sister Sylvia from the 'official' Suffragette movement, The Women's Social and Political Union.
History never repeats exactly the same way. While there are lessons that we can learn from the Suffrage movement about the need to build democratic Liberation Movement today takes up the concerns of all women -particularly working class women — we have not got a great evidence to support the view that the modern British women's movement has the same ideas as Christobel.
Unfortunately, the Workers Party gives us the impression that it has.
Haying neglected the Liberation movement years, without once attempting debates and local groups WLM, this. organisation, 3,000 people, has decided to build its own 'communist women's ment'.
At its conference a couple of weeks ago a resolution was passed saying Womens Voice aims of the Socialist Workers Party. It is organisationally but based on the politics of the SWP'.
If the SWP want to organise their own women members and supporters in a periphery organisation - fine. They'll probably find that women ger a bit fed up with this ghetto but that's their business. What we object to is the ambiguity of the formula and the suggestion that revolutionary socialists in Britain today should build their own movement in contrast to building the campaigns and initiatives of the existing women's movement.
Sylvia, we could understand it. But most this is not the case. the Women's Movement was completely moribund and doing absolutely could understand it. But in the light of the does not stand up.
Hectic If the Women's itself Movement did not allow the SWP to light sympathise. But movement is broad and heterogenous Women's and allows anyone who has a view to that put forward in a written and an oral COMIN does ACL sometimes of course deal of structure].
If socialist ideas were unpopular as indeed they are in the movement in the United States it would seem a Socialist more reasonable course of at the Conference, 2,000 women came, so Women's that one doesn't rub either. for several base of the WLM. Well, why should the working class women be persuaded to of the revolutionary of SULt Womens Voice rather than a broad-based women's movement that does move- not demand that they're revolutionMary before they can fight against their own oppression?
the SWP say, but the "supports the. well organised. It's not fighting hard enough against tenuelle against the cuts, technology.
and make sure it is then. *We welcome his topic from the Womens Voice supporters. expelled from the "official' Suf • 25 October 1979 Fage 4 If the SWP had been expelled, like Liberation nothing anti-Corrie campaign this just Liberation we could the women's bit hectic due to lack of Group achon.
Socialist Feminist So perhaps the problem is the class project workers and socialist Action Group.
That's all very well, the sisters of WLM is not to the demo.
the Bill, against the Our answer is simple - get involved bureaucracy. encouraged contributions Group: ticai issues to fight leatleted. movement closure. including Cette movement On 10 September Islington Social Services Committee decided to cut grant aid • to Fives by 53 per cent. In response a meeting was called of parents, local people which became the Islington Under Fives We decided to lobby the council, leaflet all houses in the borough, organise petitions and planned a demonstration. Six hundred people, mostly women and children, came Women were affected by these cuts as parents and as paid workers.
the Way!
women willing to do the necessary We have only won à temporary reprieve. Our grants for next year going be decided November. The battle has only just begun.
The fact that the social services committee were forced by the full council to back down at all entirely due to the fantastic amount . of pressure put on parents and workers from all groups in the borough.
All cuts in welfare provision hit women hardest. Women have to stay at home, caring for children, the sick and the elderly when welfare Kids by come so far members, trades councilors Dy campaiens.
Women's Charter Campaign.
London NI
into are 'Women in Action', the newspaper for action in the unions on women's rights. Regular production starts in new year, 1980. Interested? Contact the editorial group for orders and info. Send us articles and letters. Contribute to the £1,000 launching appeal.
You'll be in good company. Support has from union branches and NUri, Civil Service Women in NUT, Women's Rights Group, and the Working WOMEN IN ACTION Box 2, 190 Upper St,