The name of this column is taken from the comments made by feminist and ex-slave Sojourner Truth when she addressed the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in the United States.
The women's rights movement in mid-19th century North America grew out of the white abolitionist movement. Frustrated with their exclusion from decision-making, women organised a series of conventions calling for speaking rights at abolitionist conventions, changes to the marriage act and, eventually, the right to vote.
Male speakers at the 1851 convention argued that the "physical weakness" of women made them incapable of any role in public affairs. When Truth rose to respond to these arguments, dozens of white women hissed at the chairperson to prevent her speaking. But Truth ignored them, saying, "I think between the Negroes of the South and the women of the North — all talking about rights — the white man will be in a fix pretty soon.
"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me to any best place. And ain't I a woman?"
Truth's comments electrified the convention. By highlighting the different treatment of white and black women she drew attention to the limitations of the bourgeois women's feminist movement. While white, rich women were talking about struggling for the vote, black women were still struggling against slavery, and most poor women lacked even basic economic independence.
But Truth believed that the struggle of women for equality before the law, of black people against slavery, and of poor whites for better wages and social services were part of the same struggle against a common oppressor. She passionately believed that these diverse movements needed to work together and support each other's aims.
This motivated her to endure the sexism of the abolitionist movement, and the racism of the white women's rights movement to become a leader of both.
Truth never articulated who this common oppressor was. But her example and arguments paved the way for the development of a socialist women's movement in the United States.
One year after Truth's death in 1883, Frederick Engels published The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. This book provided the basis of an analysis of the connection between capitalism and the oppression of women.
Engels argued that capitalism, like all class-divided societies, needed the oppression of women. In capitalist societies, individual family units take responsibility for the maintenance of a household, the rearing of children, care for the elderly and the sick. The vast bulk of this unpaid work is carried out by women.
This system of forced labour is justified by sexist ideas which claim variously that women are "naturally" nurturing, that they are less "work driven" or that they are not intelligent enough to function independently of the "guiding hand" of a male — a father or husband. While the exact form of these arguments may change, they all serve to reinforce the concept that women will always be the providers of private household services.
The idea that women are inferior workers is also used to drive down their wages, enabling women to be used as a cheap source of labour.
In his book, Engels identified Truth's common oppressor of women, blacks and workers — the capitalist owners of the instruments of production of social wealth. Engels' collaborator, Karl Marx, had previously argued that the development of racism in the United States was used to justify the horrendous practice of black slavery, an essential foundation of the early development of capitalism in North America.
The oppression of women as a sex provides the basis for a movement uniting all women against it. But Marxists recognise that under capitalism, the burden of this oppression, this systematic discrimination and inequality, will fall most heavily upon the propertyless majority of women, upon female members of working-class families. Marxist socialists seek to build a working-class oriented, anti-racist feminist movement that will fight for demands relevant to the majority of women.
We seek to continue Sojourner Truth's example of building alliances between women and other victims of capitalism. This is why members of the Democratic Socialist Party argue that feminists should get involved in the May 1 strike against corporate tyranny. This mass blockade of stock exchanges around Australia is in opposition to the capitalist offensive against the majority of the world's population which is known as "globalisation".
May 1, like the S11 demonstrations in Melbourne last year, provides feminists with an opportunity to point to the links between the oppression of women, of non-white people, of workers, the unemployed and all those suffering the effects of imperialism in the Third World.
May 1 provides an opportunity for a "festival of the oppressed" that would have made Sojourner Truth proud.
BY ALISON DELLIT
[Alison Dellit is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party and a regular contributor to Green Left Weekly.]