Anticolonialism and the Woman Question

• In Event: Marxism and Anti-Colonialism (Co-sponsored by Marxist Sociology Section)

Abstract

In the Marxist tradition, ‘the woman question’ refers to systemic analyses of capitalism that reveal how it relies on gendered regimes of reproductive and productive labor to extract value and refresh access to workers on a daily and generational basis. Centrally, ‘the woman question’ also includes how to imagine and then build socialist alternatives for women’s full emancipation from capitalist exploitation and from patriarchal oppression. A less studied aspect of the woman question is an organizational one internal to communist movements of how to open the doors of communism to women, and why more women don’t join communist movements. In this regard, the growing imperatives of the anticolonial movement launched at the end of the second world war saw a marked increase in the emerging leadership by communist women from the colonized world. It also provided new methods to organize women against that third element of Marxist theories of reproduction: the reproduction of capitalism. In Asia, women activists set the terms for debates around a central question of “unity” within the prosocialist mass organizations that emerged from the ashes of the second world war, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students (IUS). As a result of their leadership, their interventions and answers to this question shaped the politics of anticolonialism in the communist world for the next decade.

Author

• Elisabeth Armstrong, Smith College