From Meredith Tax of Taxonomy Blog:
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I’ve been thinking about feminism, human rights, and the left and want to explore some of the ideas I laid out in a blog in February called “Underlying Philosophical Differences,” which discussed Gita Sahgal’s struggle with Amnesty. I kept asking myself why I cared so much. I have never even been a member of Amnesty; why should Gita’s struggle resonate so deeply? I have come to realize that her struggle mirrors my own political journey.
I became a movement activist initially because of the war in Vietnam. I wanted to end US imperialism and racism, and bring about social justice for all. Though I had a sense of women’s oppression from childhood and became active in the women’s liberation movement as soon as I made contact with it, I continued to identify as a left wing person and to raise women’s issues within that context.
This approach didn’t work very well. The men of my generation were never very happy about the women’s movement and, in the 70s, as much of the student movement turned Marxist, they began to see us mainly as a constituency group, useful as a source of recruits but not worthy of respect as an autonomous movement. Most leaders of Marxist groups did their best to dampen or stamp out any feminist sparks within their own organizations. And, while women in these organizations tried to struggle, the ideological basis of Marxism offered no way to do so.
The assumption underlying Marxism—and almost everything else in the history of political thought—is that the experience of men is the rule and the experience of women is an exception to the rule. The primary categories of Marxism are the class and the nation. Women, who are half of every class and nation, are thus submerged and invisible except in terms of their activity in the class or national struggle. Our needs as women are assumed to be taken care of by the liberation of our class or nation. In movements that subsume women in group identities, we have no philosophical basis to argue from when we are accused of being divisive or diverting attention from the main struggle.
In a Marxist organization, the main way to bring up women’s issues is in terms of male chauvinist attitudes—a framework that does not even address structural problems. And a battle around attitudes is hard to fight because it always comes down to personal issues.
Despite these problems, women have been part of leftwing movements for centuries, devoting themselves to social justice and trying to find ways to work for women’s liberation in that context, rather than all leaving to become feminists. This is because feminist movements have so often focused only on what women need, often in a narrow way, ignoring other social problems, rather than working on what women need in the context of broader social problems and in collaboration with other movements. (For more on this, see my articles on US Movement History and Strategy in this website.)
Only in the late 20th century, when masses of women all over the world became literate and politically aware, did it become possible to develop a new approach that integrates women’s issues with a broad, radical social analysis. Today we understand that women’s struggle is part of every other struggle, and must be a fundamental motor in any movement for democracy and social transformation. This means that women must have an equal voice on matters of basic strategy and war and peace—not as tokens but because we bring indispensable knowledge to the table.
It is no accident that the global women’s movement has expressed this vision using the language of human rights rather than the traditional language of either feminism or the left. This is because human rights begin with the rights of the individual, not of any group. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every individual has a right to housing, food, health care, education, and freedom from torture and fear, as well as all the civil and political rights Americans are brought up to value. The goal of these principles is to create the social conditions necessary for the full development of each individual. This is as radical as the vision of the Communist Manifestoof a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
With a philosophy that makes the rights of every individual equal to those of every other individual, and sees these rights as both universal and indivisible—meaning you can’t divide the economic rights from the political ones—women have a basis from which to argue against subordinating our rights to those of another group, or to traditional cultural norms, economic needs, religion, or the nation.
But to say that a human rights analysis provides women with this basis does not mean that the existing human rights movement always acts as if the rights of women were as important as those of men. Far from it. The controversy currently going on between Amnesty and Gita Sahgal shows that the problems women have had on the left exist in the human rights movement as well. But because human rights ideology is based on the rights of the individual, we have more of a place to stand within the human rights movement than we ever did arguing about women’s issues within the left.