"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."

April 13, 2016 9:52 AM

Reader on Revolutionary Feminism "The Revolutionary Feminism reader includes a century of debates between communist, anarchism and radical feminists, extending from 1890 to 1983. Groups in 21 cities and four countries did study groups on the Revolutionary Feminism reader in the fall and winter of 2015. This collection is beautifully laid out, easy to share, and includes a lot of great material on lost traditions of queer and women's liberation movements." From Mefi's own alexkollontai, via MetaFilter Projects.

From the Mefi Projects link above:

"Here is a direct link to the PDF of the new edition of the Revolutionary Feminism reader:
https://communistresearchcluster.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/crc_ci_vol_three_2_01.pdf

Here's a full table of contents:

Revolutionary Feminism, Communist Interventions vol. 3, Second Edition

Table of Contents

Preface

1 The Origins of an Orthodoxy
1.1 Frederich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)

2 Second International
2.1 August Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879/1910)
2.2 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question (1886)
2.3 Clara Zetkin, Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Women Will Socialism Be Victorious (1896)
2.4 Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Suffrage and the Class Struggle (1912)
2.5 Rosa Luxemburg, The Proletarian Woman (1914)

3 Anarchism
3.1 Lucy Parsons, Woman: Her Evolutionary Development (1905)
3.2 Voltaire de Cleyre, The Woman Question (1897)
3.3 Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation (1906)
3.4 Emma Goldman, Woman Suffrage (1910)
3.5 Milly Witkop-Rocker, The Need for Women’s Unions (1925)

4 Russian Revolution
4.1 V.I. Lenin, Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women (1918)
4.2 V.I. Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919)
4.3 Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Woman Question (1920)
4.4 Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family (1920)
4.5 Leon Trotsky, Thermidor in the Family (1937)

5 American Communist Party
5.1 Margaret Cowl, Women and Equality (1935)
5.2 Mary Inman, In Woman’s Defense (1940)
5.3 Claudia Jones, We Seek Full Equality for Women (1949)
5.4 Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women (1949)

6 Women’s Liberation
6.1 Casey Hayden and Mary King, Sex and Caste (1965)
6.2 Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, Redstockings Manifesto (1968)
6.3 Anne Koedt, The Politics of the Ego: A Manifesto for N.Y. Radical Feminists (1969)
6.4 Roxanne Dunbar, Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution (1969)
6.5 Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1971)
6.6 Women of the Weather Underground, A Collective Letter to the Women’s Movement
(1973)

7 Gay Liberation Front
7.1 Radicalesbians, The Woman Identified Woman Manifesto (1970)
7.2 Carl Wittman, A Gay Manifesto (1970)
7.3 Radicalqueens, Radicalqueens Manifestos (1973)
7.4 Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, Street Transvestites for Gay Power Statement (1970)
7.5 Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization and Fems Against Sexism, Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation (1970)
7.6 Charlotte Bunch, Lesbians in Revolt (1972)

8 Socialist Feminism
8.1 Barbara Ehrenreich, What is Socialist Feminism? (1976)
8.2 Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Socialist Feminism (1972)
8.3 Marlene Dixon, The Rise and Demise of Women’s Liberation (1977)

9 Sexual Violence
9.1 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (1975)
9.2 Alison Edwards, Rape, Racism, and the White Women’s Movement (1976)
9.3 Lilia Melani and Linda Fodaski, The Psychology of the Rapist and His Victim (1974)
9.4 Combahee River Collective, Why Did They Die? A Document of Black Feminism (1979)

10 Black Feminism
10.1 Mary Ann Weathers, An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary (1969)
10.2 Third World Women’s Alliance, Women in the Struggle (1971)
10.3 Frances Beal, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (1976)
10.4 Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement (1977)
10.5 Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class and Sex (1980)

11 Wages for Housework
11.1 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972)
11.2 Selma James, Sex, Race and Class (1975)
11.3 Angela Davis, The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework (1981)

12 Materialist Feminism
12.1 Christine Delphy, The Main Enemy (1970)
12.2 Monique Witting, The Category of Sex (1976)
12.3 Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman (1981)
12.4 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1979)

13 Sexuality
13.1 Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood (1975)
13.2 Silvia Federici, Why Sexuality Is Work (1975)
13.3 Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic (1978)
13.4 Patrick Califia, Feminism and Sadomasochism (1981)

14 Dual Systems
14.1 Heidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (1979)
14.2 Iris Marion Young, Beyond the Unhappy Marriage (1981)

15 Social Reproduction
15.1 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (1983)

Epilogue to the Second Edition"

posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (11 comments total)

(I grabbed the title from Virginia Woolf, fyi. - jcifa)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:53 AM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

I graduated from college in 1987 with a Women's Studies major. So many familiar titles in this collection!

I am very curious about how the group handled copyright issues for the included materials. I am interested in publishing a very limited number of copies of a work that was originally published 60 years ago, and am having a heck of a time figuring out who holds the copyright—nobody who might know does now, if indeed the copyright didn't lapse at a certain point. The work is already available online as a pdf, which is how I got my copy to read, so its copyright has been pre-violated, but I don't feel that gives me carte blanche to do the things I want to do. I'd like to hear about the thinking the group did on this.

When I was a women's studies major, it was fairly common for a course to use photocopies of books that were still under copyright but out of print (this was in the early days of Kinko's, the dawn of the coursepack era, and they'd copy anything for you). On the one hand, there's the idea that you're breaking a law but for a good reason, and doing no harm—nobody's income, for instance, is being impacted by a small number of copies of a work that has been long out of print and is very difficult to get hold of. On the other hand, one would prefer not to infringe.

I love the post title. I re-read some Virginia Woolf a few months ago, and it was delicious.
posted by not that girl at 10:25 AM on April 13, 2016

I am very curious about how the group handled copyright issues for the included materials

Taking a quick scan through the pdf, I don't see any acknowledgements or "reprinted by permission" or even any copyright information. So, I'd say, they probably handled it by ignoring it.
posted by thelonius at 10:36 AM on April 13, 2016

This is great, thanks.

(I'd quibble that This Bridge Called My Back (1981) is a really important omission―any selection from that book, really―and probably will inform more contemporary debates than the American Communist Party stuff, and probably should have been in there or cued. But compilations are hard work, so looking forward to reading what's new to me!)
posted by migrantology at 10:38 AM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

fwiw, i was disappointed listening to claudia goldin minimize the gender pay gap on npr yday as just the 'high cost of temporal flexibility'...

Disproportionately, women, particularly those who are mothers or who are taking care of others, would like greater predictability in their hours. They would like less on-call hours. They would like fewer periods of long hours. Well, those jobs are often the jobs - the ones that have the longer hours, the less predictability - those are the ones that are often the higher income occupations.

So temporal flexibility is giving someone the ability not just to work fewer hours but to work their hours and not get a big hit for it or to work hours that are more predictable. A physician, let's say, could work 50 hours a week but work the days that they would like to work and not be on call. They'll probably get less than someone who is working the graveyard shift or who was on call, et cetera. And that's true in a lot of fields. And it's also as true at the top as it is at the bottom.

...without acknowledging women "spend roughly 5% more time working than men. But they spend roughly twice as much time on unpaid work, and only two-thirds the time men do in paid work. By leaving unpaid work out of the national accounts, the feminist argument goes, economists not only diminish women's contribution, but also gloss over the staggering inequality in who does it."
posted by kliuless at 10:40 AM on April 13, 2016 [6 favorites]

Hello everyone -

Thanks for the enthusiasm and interest in the Revolutionary Feminism reader! I am one of the editors. To respond to the various comments so far:

Joseph Conrad and thelonius: Yes, we ignored copyright. When we knew the author, we made an effort to contact them to let them know we were including their work. One publisher that owns the rights to a few recent pieces was familiar with our project, and expressed some support.

Migrantology: We do include one well-known piece that appears in This Bridge Called My Back: the Combahee River Collective statement. As well, we include work by Audre Lorde, though not her piece that appears in that collection. Overall, we tried to include work that was particularly significant at the time, but is not as well-known today. This Bridge Called My Back is still in pretty wide circulation, so we didn't make a concerted effort to represent its full spread.

Kiuless: Discussions of the gender pay gay today definitely draw on the thinking and work of socialist and marxist feminists in the 1970s, and are an important place of struggle. The debates in the reader go a bit further than current discussions, to see wage inequality as part of a broader question about the place of women's oppression in the overall reproduction of capitalism.
posted by alexkollontai at 1:20 PM on April 13, 2016 [11 favorites]

What a fantastic resource! Thanks for putting it all together. It's been too long since I've read a lot of this, too long that I've been meaning to read a lot of this and there's so much here I don't know anything about and look forward to discovering. Looking forward to checking it out!
posted by Cassettevetes at 3:30 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

I know many of the authors' names and recognize many of the titles, but I have read shamefully few of these.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:15 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is awesome! Thanks to all the folks responsible.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:39 PM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's a very impressive work.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:06 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

I am in the San Francisco group, which we've affectionately nicknamed "rev fem." We finished the reader about 5 months ago and are now on week 15 of a queer theory reader that one of our members is putting together. I look forward to it each week. I'm pretty sure I've told you this in some other context, but thanks for putting together the reader, alexkollontai ♥
posted by yaymukund at 11:19 PM on April 14, 2016 [1 favorite]