Message #81986

[Bianca]

                                             Feminism and political movements





Feminism and socialism

Main article: The left and feminism



Some early twentieth century feminists allied with socialism.

In 1907 there was an International Conference of Socialist Women in Stuttgart where suffrage was described as a tool of class struggle.

Clara Zetkin of the Social Democratic Party of Germany called for women's suffrage to build a "socialist order, the only one that allows for a radical solution to the women's question".



In Britain, the women's movement was allied with the Labour party.


In America, Betty Friedan emerged from a radical background to take command of the organized movement.


Radical Women, founded in 1967 in Seattle is the oldest (and still active) socialist feminist organization in the U.S.


During the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) led the Communist Party of Spain. Although she supported equal rights for women, she opposed women fighting on the front and clashed with the anarcho-feminist Mujeres Libres.



Revolutions in Latin America brought changes in women's status in countries such as Nicaragua
where Feminist ideology during the Sandinista Revolution was largely responsible for improvements in the quality of life for women but fell short of achieving a social and ideological change.



See also:

Post-Communism Gender Roles in Eastern Europe and Role of women in Nicaraguan Revolution





Feminism and fascism



Scholars have argued that Nazi Germany and the other fascist states of the 1930s and 1940s illustrates the disastrous consequences for society of a state ideology that, in glorifying women, becomes antifeminist.

In Germany after the political shift of 1933, there was a rapid dissolution of the political rights and economic opportunities that feminists had fought for during the prewar period and to some extent during the 1920s.



In Franco's Spain, the right wing Catholic conservatives undid the work of feminists during the Republic. Fascist society was hierarchical with an emphasis and idealization of virility, with women maintaining a largely subordinate position to men.