The Proud History of Women in Progressive Social Movements

I decided to write this article as an homage to International Women’s Day, and particularly to a number of historically important women who, I think, should be better known in the mainstream. I also think it’s important to emphasize just what a proud history women in general have in progressive social movements relative to men, and how this can inform our efforts in promoting progressive change into the future.

As the starting point for this article, I’m going to state upfront a belief I’ve had for quite some time: women are, on average, better human beings than men. When we think about our (largely in-built and universal) moral code, almost every one of the values that it captures is traditionally more strongly associated with women. I think it’s also fair to say that, on average, women live up to almost every one of those values to a greater degree than men ever have. Our moral code as human beings is based on a set of principles that can broadly be summarised as something like “it’s important to consider the interests of others before acting, and we should treat others at least as well as, if not better than, the way we would like to be treated”. Some logical corollaries of these principles are things like cooperation, altruism, equality, respect for individual agency, freedom from oppression, non-violence, and so forth. Logical opposites of these principles are things like competition, self-interest, hierarchy, infringement on individual liberty, oppression, violence, and so forth. Historically and to the present day, every one of the corollaries of our moral principles is far more likely to be seen in women, and every one of their opposites is far more likely to be seen in men. Women engage in far less crime than men, and particularly in far less violent crime than men, as we see tragically every day in the statistics on domestic violence. Women are far more likely to favour cooperative social policy than men, with the percentage of women supporting universal health care, welfare measures, aged care, and the rights of minority groups almost always outstripping the percentage of men. Women are far more likely to vote for progressive political parties, and far less likely to vote for far-right, jingoistic political parties than men. Women are far less likely to be dictators and despots, to engage in genocide, or to slaughter, torture, rape, maim and kill than men are. And women are far less likely to support Donald Trump than men are.

Looking to historical social movements, it is also apparent that women have almost always been associated with the most progressive (“left-wing”) factions of those movements, and have advocated more inclusive and more universally beneficial social changes than their male counterparts. Early trades unions, for example, were exclusively male institutions, despite both men and women being victims of the owners and managers for whom they worked. These same trades unions, in the US, the UK, Australia and elsewhere, were also notoriously racist, openly excluding non-white men and women, and fighting only for the rights of white working men - as can be seen in the White Australia Policy, initially championed by the Labor Party and many of the unions it represented. Women’s organisations, on the other hand, were, more often than not, explicitly inclusive, commonly inviting minority women as natural allies, and fighting for causes beyond those that directly affected their female members. Women’s organisations - such as the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, founded in the 1830’s to protect the rights of female textile workers in Massachusetts, or the Syndicalist Women’s Union, founded in Germany in the 1920’s to push for the rights of the wives of working men - often joined actions initiated by the male-dominated unions. These organisations also typically advocated for the advancement of other social causes, such as the abolition of slavery, the rights of native people, universal education irrespective of social class, and the rights of LGBTQI people. Despite some of their prejudices, the male-dominated organisations certainly still have much to be proud of in past struggles for human rights, but the women’s organisations should be seen, I think, as a model of the inclusivity, broad scope, and cooperative endeavour needed for achieving progressive social change.

Within these women’s organisations and beyond them, there are also many individual women who embody the inclusivity and universalist orientation necessary for the success of progressive social movements. They span the gamut from early feminists, through 19th and early 20th century factory workers, to modern-day revolutionaries and human rights activists. Most of them are unknown to history, often because patriarchical structures suppressed their achievements, but also simply because the most important figures through history typically emerge from the mass of the population where they work tirelessly in anonymity. A few, though, are known to us, if still quite obscurely. For this article, I have chosen to highlight four of these women - Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Beecher, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman - who, I think, should be better known for their achievements in advancing the status of women, but also for their advocacy of universal principles of justice, irrespective of gender, race, class, or sexual orientation. These are just some of the women, among many, whose lives we should be celebrating on this International Women’s Day.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English author and very early advocate of women’s rights. She is best known for writing a history of the French Revolution, a number of novels and children’s books, and particularly for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, in which she argues that men and women are born equal, but made unequal by the lack of education afforded to women. She was a vocal opponent of monarchy and hereditary privilege, and an early supporter of republicanism. She wrote extensively on the need to educate girls, and on the virtues of rational thought in solving society’s ills. Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 and died in 1797.

In her own words:

• On the objectification and treatment of women by men: “I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.”
• On liberty: “The birthright of man […] is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact.”
• On hierarchy, equality and charity: “Man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he is born, [which prevents him from] discovering that true happiness arises from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is […] an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.”
• On universal education: “The good effects resulting from attention to education will ever be very confined, […] till education becomes a grand national concern.”

Catharine Beecher

Catharine Beecher was an American teacher, particularly known for her promotion of universal education, irrespective of gender or social class. Some of her views on the role of women in society, and the form that she believed education should take would seem outdated, or even regressive, today, but she took very principled and progressive views on the education of girls, and on the rights of native Americans. She helped found many schools in the US mid-west, was a critic of slavery, and opposed the ‘Indian Removal Bill’ instituted by US President Andrew Jackson, which legalised the transfer of Native Americans from their own lands onto distant reservations. In opposing that legislation, she led the first national campaign on the part of women in the United States. Catharine Beecher was born in 1800 and died in 1878.

In her own words:

• On the education of girls: “If all females were not only well-educated themselves, but were prepared to communicate in an easy manner their stores of knowledge to others, the face of society would be speedily changed.”
• On women’s rights: “It is the right and duty of every woman to employ the power of organization and agitation in order to gain those advantages which are given to the one sex and unjustly withheld from the other.”
• On Native American rights: “If [the Indian Removal Bill] is permitted to take effect, the Indians are no longer independent nations, but are slaves, at the sovereign disposal of the whites, who will legislate for them. […] Should they be driven to the west, a fate no less cruel awaits them there, where they lose even the last sad hope of reposing from their oppressions in the sepulchers of their fathers, and beneath their native soil.”

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist economist, revolutionary and social theorist. She was a key figure in the libertarian left-wing of the Marxist movement. Though often quite ideologically driven, she espoused a form of social organisation based on diffusion of power among trades unions, rather than the centralized party control favoured by mainstream Marxist-Leninists. She believed in the complete liberation of the entire working class, including all ethnic minorities. She opposed the First World War as an imperialist war of aggression, and fought against conscription of German soldiers, for which she was imprisoned. She also sharply criticized the Bolshevik October revolution of 1917, after initially having expressed optimism about the toppling of the Tsar in the February revolution of the same year. Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871. She was murdered by government forces during the German revolution of 1919.

In her own words:

• On the Bolshevik coup: “Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only with the closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable […] The only way to rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.”
• On the subjugation of women: “Behind the throne and the altar, as behind the political enslavement of the female sex, lurk today the most brutal and evil representatives of exploitation. The monarchy and disenfranchisement of women have taken their place among the most important tools of domination.”
• On imperialism and the First World War: “Imperialist bestiality has been let loose to devastate the fields of Europe. It is our hope, our flesh and blood, which is falling in swathes like corn under the sickle.”

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was a political activist and a prolific writer. She was particularly concerned with the rights of women, and of the working class. She wrote extensively against the senseless violence of the First World War, and against the Bolshevik takeover of Russia after the October revolution. She travelled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to support the anarchist revolution that was spreading through Catalonia, Aragon and Andalucia. She was an early advocate of birth control, and wrote articles in support of homosexuality (at a time when this was otherwise unheard of), Palestinian rights, atheism, democracy, and free speech. She consistently denounced the ill-treatment of prisoners and the unequal power relations inherent in traditional marriage. She believed that all forms of centralized power - including the state, organised religion, and capitalist corporations - were illegitimate unless they were able to prove that their structures resulted in a greater good for the majority. She was imprisoned many times for her writings and for her public lectures, which often attracted crowds of thousands. Emma Goldman was born in Russia in 1869, and died in Toronto in 1940.

In her own words:

• On the rights of women: “Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of submission and slavery.”
• On prisons and crime: “Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, willess, shipwrecked crew of humanity, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence.”
• On homosexuality and gender: “It is a great tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life.”