Women are being infected by the same spirit of resistance seen among workers and farmers fighting against speedup on the job, attacks on our standard of living, and assaults on our dignity and unions. This is fueling a deepening consciousness in the working class about the need to defend women's rights.

Women are stepping forward to build street protests such as that on April 22, in union organizing drives, protests such as those in Cincinnati against police brutality and racism, and the struggle in rural areas of farmers to retain their land in the face of exploitation by agribusiness billionaires and bankers. All of these make women less likely to stand for sexual harassment on the job, discrimination, or a rollback of abortion rights or other hard-won gains.

Historic, irreversible structural changes in the working class are taking place. These include the rising percentage of women who work, the wave of immigration that is changing the composition of the class and bringing fresh combatants to the labor movement, and the sharp rise in nearly every industrialized country of the percentage of women who head households. These changes, like the shifting of tectonic plates beneath the earth that build up the pressure that moves mountains, contribute to the combativity of the working class as a whole.

Relying on either big-business party to "give" us our rights can only lead to disaster. As a young woman said at the 1995 women's rights march in Washington, "We shouldn't have to ask for our rights, we should take them." The mobilizations of the last decade by women's rights supporters pushed back a rightist, antiwoman offensive that threatened to shut the abortion clinics. The president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court all take heed of the relationship of class forces and the level of protest in the streets around social questions such as abortion. If this weren't so, Jim Crow segregation would still exist, and women would still be doomed to back-alley butchers.

Victories for women's rights cause problems for the bosses and their government. That is why they are driven to wage a war of ideas that aims to scapegoat women, blame them for the crisis caused by the lawful workings of capitalism, and make them feel less confident in themselves.

The struggle by women against their oppression as a sex is a form of the class struggle. While important for women of every class, this struggle is essential for the working class in its line of march toward a colossal showdown and struggle for power. Fighting relentlessly against everything that treats women as less than human and less than equal is in the material interest of every worker or farmer, male or female, because it removes an obstacle to the unity workers need to forge. Only with this kind of unity can working people build a movement that can defeat the death grip of the billionaire families, whose system inevitably drives toward war and fascism and generates race and sex oppression and anti-immigrant chauvinism.

Rallies like the Emergency Action for Women's Lives are a step toward taking what is rightfully ours. The labor movement has every interest in supporting such actions and in demanding:

Keep abortion safe, legal, accessible, and affordable!

Defend affirmative action!
 
 
Related article:
Support building for women's rights march  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home