This seminar explores the early theoretical debates of women in the Marxist tradition.
Women's emancipation became an objective political project in the 19th century. This occurs simultaneously with the worker’s movement and national liberation struggles in Ireland and India.
Socialist political thinkers attempted to articulate these various fronts as a single war for the emancipation of humanity. Feminism did not have a monopoly on the discourse of women's emancipation.
Learn why abolishing the family means freeing it from the state.
Discover why Rosa Luxemburg did not consider herself a feminist.
And at the end of this short series we hope to prove that the liberation of the female sex means nothing less than the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
Family:
Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James, Women and the Subversion of Community (1975)
Alexandra Kollontai, Women and the Family (1918)
Hegel, Philosophy of Right: The Family §158-§181 (1820)
Work:
Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle (1912)
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Feminist Struggle for Time to Care (2021)
Sex:
August Bebel, Woman and Socialism Ch12: Prostitution a Necessary Social Institution of Bourgeois Society (1879)
Clara Zetkin, Lenin on the Women’s Question (1920)
Alexandra Kollontai, Prostitution and Ways to Fight It (1921)
Revolution:
Rosa Luxemburg,