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Recent pronouncements of the swift and painful death of Marxism, and repeated debates over the demise of feminism, or the meaning of neo-feminism or post-feminism, make the discussion of the relationship between communism and feminism an important one. Given the events of 1989 and the twists and turns of more recent global politics, understanding the history of the past relationships between these two ideologies and movements might help us to determine whether there is still life in these two movements, and whether they can overcome their differences to create a synthesis that is more than the sum of its parts. As an historian I would like to consider these issues by looking at the past and listening to what others have had to say about them. As a feminist I will occasionally insert some of my own ideas and judgements into the discussion.
Asking, as Mihaela Miroiu does, what is the place of feminism within communism or if communist (or socialist) feminism is a contradiction in terms is not a new exercise. Early in the twentieth century, as socialist movements emerged throughout Europe and in the United States, and as feminism became a recognisable political identity, a number of socialists had similar concerns.1 In 1910, British Socialist Labour Party member Lily Gair Wilkinson saw no value in working separately for women's rights, because 'There can be no freedom for single individuals but men and women as a community?', while her contemporary, Hannah Mitchell, of the Independent Labour Party, 'realised that socialists were not necessarily feminists in spite of the item in their programme affirming their "belief" in the complete social and economic equality of women with men'.2 Across the Atlantic an anonymous woman contributor to Socialist Woman wrote: 'In battling for my class, I shall never forget the needs of my sex whose oppression is even greater and of longer duration than the oppression of the working class. I find it perfectly compatible to serve both socialism and the woman's cause'.3 In 1920, Crystal Eastman, who was engaged in a variety of reform and socialist activities, wrote that 'the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, knows that woman's complete emancipation is not assured by the...