The present economic crisis, through its sheer scale and reach, is bringing about a wholesale change in the consciousness of working people the world over. It is the poor, the oppressed, and the workers who shoulder this weight in order to hold up the privileges of the rich. There is no portion of the working class that has so greatly and extensively borne this affliction than working women.

Lis Mandl looks at how Rosa Luxemburg considered the women’s question as inseparable from the struggle of the working class as a whole. She also looks at how the struggle for women’s rights was also a struggle against the reformists within the movement who constantly tried to limit demands for full women’s emancipation.

Many in the US corporate media have hailed “progressive” the choice of Sarah Palin by John McCain as his vice presidential running mate. Women workers are being told that they “finally have someone to vote for!” But even the most cursory glance at Palin’s politics is enough to show that she stands for big business interests, and is only using the gender question as a fig leaf.

The idea of guaranteed quotas for women on trade union and party committees has become fashionable. But there are no shortcut solutions to this problem. Inequality exists because of capitalism and will continue to exist as long as capitalism exists. This inequality can only be fought by a united struggle of the whole labour movement. Only when capitalism is abolished and a system of democratic planning introduced will we be able to create the material basis for all inequality and prejudice to whither away once and for all.

Today is International Working Women’s Day – originally instituted not as a day to celebrate, but as a day for militancy and action. Now many liberal institutions and feminist organizations recognize International Women’s Day, but few acknowledge its roots or its historical significance. They have in fact attempted to remove the class content of this day of struggle.

 "The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly - and this is the main thing - they remain in "household bondage", they continue to be “household slaves", for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the family household." V.I.Lenin, March 4, 1921