the Boston International Socialist Organization presents:

Women's Liberation and the Socialist Movement

Saturday, June 7

11am - 4pm

42 Seaverns Ave, Jamaica Plain

(Haymarket People's Fund - Conference Room A)

for more information: contact@bostonsocialism.org, 617-902-0476

“If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.” - Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand 

The Marxist tradition has always stood for the liberation of women.  Far from seeing the oppression of women as subordinated to the economic exploitation of workers, the Marxist movement has seen the fight against women's oppression as central to the struggle for socialism. At the same time, the various Socialist movements have had different and sometimes contradictory relationships to feminist politics. What has the tradition of the socialist movement looked like, including in the ISO?  What has it's relationship been to Black Feminism - a largely ignored but significant contribution to the politics of women's liberation? And what about the debates taking place today - around post-structuralism (or post-modernism), identity and the politics of privelege?

Join the Boston ISO at this Day School to read and discuss these questions with guest speaker Sharon Smith, author of Haymarket Books publications Subterranean Fire and the soon to be re-published Women and Socialism: Essays on Women's Liberation. 

Today, as the gains of the women's rights movement of the 60's and 70's is eroded more and more, we need to look to the politics and the theories - including the debates - that can help us chart a course for the struggles today and in the future towards socialism and full equality.

Session 1 - Women's Liberation and the Socialist Movement

• Required reading (attached PDF) - The Marxist tradition on women’s liberation

Session 2 - Black Feminism versus Privelege Politics

• Required reading (attached PDF) - Intersectionality, Oppression, and Marxism