Vol. 75/No. 26      July 18, 2011

The two books provide a Marxist explanation of how women came to be the oppressed sex with the rise of class-divided society several thousand years ago. Even more important, they explain the kind of revolutionary struggle it will take to overturn the capitalist rule and social relations that perpetuate the second-class status of women and make possible the fight by working people to win women’s full emancipation.

Woman’s Evolution was first published in English in 1975 by Pathfinder Press, some 90 years after Engels’s groundbreaking work. The Indonesian edition of Woman’s Evolution was launched April 26 by the Jakarta-based group Kalyanamitra. The back cover of the book says Kalyanamitra is a women’s organization working with other groups to “establish a social movement capable of liberating women from all forms of violence, ignorance, poverty and underdevelopment in order to create social and gender justice, and a democratic society in Indonesia.”

Made up of thousands of islands stretching from Asia to Australia, Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, 245 million. It has the world’s largest population of Muslims.

The appearance of Woman’s Evolution is striking confirmation of the political openings for working people and the oppressed in Indonesia, which a little more than a decade ago was in the grips of one of the bloodiest dictatorships in modern history.

In the early 1960s, as part of the rising struggle in the semicolonial world for national liberation, there were massive mobilizations of workers and peasants in Indonesia. They occupied factories and land and demanded relief from inflation and the plunder of their country’s resources by imperialist-owned companies.

The Indonesian masses were betrayed by the Communist Party of Indonesia, which was linked to the Mao Zedong-led Communist Party of China. The Indonesian party was at that time the largest CP in the capitalist world, with 3 million members. Urging a political bloc with the “progressive” bourgeoisie against imperialism, the CP diverted workers from seizing political power and establishing their own government, paving the way for a military coup by Maj. Gen. Suharto in 1965. Workers and peasants organizations were crushed and hundreds of thousands of CP members and supporters—along with thousands of ethnic Chinese—were killed, the worst defeat for the workers movement since the triumph of German fascism in 1933.

It was only in 1998 that a popular uprising finally overthrew Suharto.

Kalyanamitra was founded during the Suharto dictatorship, in 1985, “in response to injustices faced by Indonesian women,” its website states. “We fight for oppressed women such as labourers, farmers, fisherwomen and informal sector workers.” The dictatorship banned a newsletter and comic strip for women put out by Kalyanamitra in 1994.

On this page we print the preface to the Indonesian edition of Woman’s Evolution by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press. The books by Reed and by Engels, both in English and Indonesian, are available from Pathfinder.
 
 
Related articles:
Preface to Indonesian edition of ‘Woman’s Evolution’  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home