To begin the fifth part of my International Working Women's Day series, I need to tell you a little about the Stonewall uprising.
The Stonewall Inn was a queer pub in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, back in the sixties. As you'd expect, the police regularly raided the bar. They would subject the patrons to sexual harassment and assault, as they did in most queer bars at the time. On the night of the 28th of June 1969, though, they came to the wrong pub.
It's often said that noone knows who struck the first blow, but that's inaccurate - we know who struck the first blow, and the second, the third, and the hundredth. The police did. What we don't know is who was the first to fight back. The way I heard it was that Marsha Johnson was the second one to bottle a police officer, and it's her that I'll be focusing on today.
Johnson was no stranger to police brutality. As a black, transgender, homeless woman she was regularly on the receiving end of violence from queerbashers, civilian and police both. Many others who fought at Stonewall had similar experiences - the uprising was led by the queer street youth, who were primarily transgender and black or latino. As the police began loading people into a waiting van, the patrons of the bar began throwing coins at the officers. That they threw coins was especially important - many of these were people who may not have eaten that day, who had practically nothing, but they took the change in their pockets and used it as a weapon to fight for their brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings. That is what solidarity means.
The coins were followed by bottles, and soon the rioters had rushed the van and liberated the prisoners, while the police resorted to locking themselves in the pub. Detective Inspector Pine, one of the men who was involved in the raid, said, "I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time I felt more scared than then." (1)
He had reason to be scared - the rioters were nowhere near finished. There was an attempt made to set fire the the Stonewall Inn and burn the police inside - when that failed, the rioters ripped a parking meter out of the ground and used it as a battering ram.
When riot police arrived to back up their colleagues, the Stonewall rioters took them on, too, and held their own. Altogether, the uprising continued in spontanaeous protests and disturbances for five days.
Marsha Johnson fought in the Stonewall uprising, but that wasn't her only, or even her most important, achievement. Soon after Stonewall, in the face of condemnation from mainstream gay organisations like the Mattachine Society, Johnson and several other radical queers form the Gay Liberation Front. They consciously named themselves after the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and they linked the struggle for queer rights to socialism. They raised money for striking workers, and organised in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, leading Huey Newton to publicly declare his support for queer rights. Soon, the GLF had sister organisations on three continents, including one lead by Peter Tatchell.
Along with her close freind and fellow Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera, Johnson founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 as a caucus of the GLF. STAR took in homeless queer youth, giving them a place to stay and a surrogate family, led by the Queen Mother herself, Marsha Johnson. Johnson and Rivera often did sex work in order to pay rent and bills, and to keep their young charges from having to do the same.
Later, in the 1980s, Johnson became a part of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. At a time when the US government was content to let gay people die from AIDS, ACT UP organised demonstrations to bring attention to the AIDS crisis, and to push for government action to deal with it. They had many successes, and their actions have been credited with helping push the government into passing reforms that made AIDS and HIV medication easier to access.
In 1992, Marsha P Johnson's body was found floating in the Hudson River.
There is some debate over whether she was murdered or committed suicide, but it comes down to the same thing in the end. Regardless, Johnson's life was one worth celebrating: she was by all accounts a colourful, vivacious woman who brought great joy to those who knew her, and she was one hell of an activist, which is why I'm writing about her here.
1. http://www.socialistalternative.org/stonewall-riots-1969/
Monday 14 March 2016
Sunday 13 March 2016
International Working Women's Day - Part Four
Hello again - I was travelling most of Friday and working yesterday, so I didn't get a chance to post the fourth part of my International Working Women's Day series. Anyway, here it is.
Leila Khaled has been a hero of mine ever since I saw her speak at an SWP event in London in 2012. She had to give her lecture via Skype from Oman, because due to her activities as a member of the PFLP she had been denied entry to the UK.
The PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group fighting for an independent, socialist Palestinian state. Leila Khaled is a founding member of the group, which grew out of the Pan-Arab Nationalist Movement, and she has participated in numerous actions, including being part of the Black September hijackings in 1970.
By 1970, twenty-six-year-old Khaled was no stranger to hijackings - the previous year she had become the first women ever to hijack an aeroplane. That plane had been TWA Flight 840, flying from Rome to Athens, with - so the PFLP leadership thought - Yahtzik Rahman, Israeli ambassador to the United States, on board. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. Khaled had the pilot fly over Haifa, her birthplace, before landing in Damascus - she wanted to see the place where she was born, a place she hadn't been to since she and her family were forced from their country in 1948. The passengers were allowed to disembark (unharmed, I should add) and once they were out of harm's way Khaled and her fellow hijackers blew up the nose section of the plane.
After the hijacking, a picture of Leila Khaled wearing a kaffiyeh and holding an AK-47 was widely publicised. A cross between Audrey Hepburn and Che Guevara, Khaled's image became iconic - this posed a problem for her. If she was to carry out further hijackings, she couldn't afford to be recognised.
For Khaled, the answer was simple: if her face made her a less effective revolutionary, then she would change her face. And that's just what she did - between her first hijacking and Black September, Leila Khaled had six operations on her nose and chin to alter her appearance. Clearly, the operations worked.
Unfortunately, the hijacking was a failure. Israeli air marshals captured Khaled and killed her comrade, Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello. She was later released as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP.
At the lecture she gave in 2012, Khaled proved that the years have done nothing to dull her intellect, or her commitment to the struggle. She brilliantly broke down the events that were then occurring in Syria, and spoke of the need for Syria - and all Arab countries - to be free from both Western imperialism and their own home-grown tyrants. She also warned of the risk of "further Islamification" (her words) of the Middle East, a warning that, with the rise of ISIS, proved to be accurate.
Leila Khaled was, and remains, an iconic example of someone who has dedicated her life to a noble cause.
Leila Khaled has been a hero of mine ever since I saw her speak at an SWP event in London in 2012. She had to give her lecture via Skype from Oman, because due to her activities as a member of the PFLP she had been denied entry to the UK.
The PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group fighting for an independent, socialist Palestinian state. Leila Khaled is a founding member of the group, which grew out of the Pan-Arab Nationalist Movement, and she has participated in numerous actions, including being part of the Black September hijackings in 1970.
By 1970, twenty-six-year-old Khaled was no stranger to hijackings - the previous year she had become the first women ever to hijack an aeroplane. That plane had been TWA Flight 840, flying from Rome to Athens, with - so the PFLP leadership thought - Yahtzik Rahman, Israeli ambassador to the United States, on board. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. Khaled had the pilot fly over Haifa, her birthplace, before landing in Damascus - she wanted to see the place where she was born, a place she hadn't been to since she and her family were forced from their country in 1948. The passengers were allowed to disembark (unharmed, I should add) and once they were out of harm's way Khaled and her fellow hijackers blew up the nose section of the plane.
After the hijacking, a picture of Leila Khaled wearing a kaffiyeh and holding an AK-47 was widely publicised. A cross between Audrey Hepburn and Che Guevara, Khaled's image became iconic - this posed a problem for her. If she was to carry out further hijackings, she couldn't afford to be recognised.
For Khaled, the answer was simple: if her face made her a less effective revolutionary, then she would change her face. And that's just what she did - between her first hijacking and Black September, Leila Khaled had six operations on her nose and chin to alter her appearance. Clearly, the operations worked.
Unfortunately, the hijacking was a failure. Israeli air marshals captured Khaled and killed her comrade, Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello. She was later released as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP.
At the lecture she gave in 2012, Khaled proved that the years have done nothing to dull her intellect, or her commitment to the struggle. She brilliantly broke down the events that were then occurring in Syria, and spoke of the need for Syria - and all Arab countries - to be free from both Western imperialism and their own home-grown tyrants. She also warned of the risk of "further Islamification" (her words) of the Middle East, a warning that, with the rise of ISIS, proved to be accurate.
Leila Khaled was, and remains, an iconic example of someone who has dedicated her life to a noble cause.
Thursday 10 March 2016
International Working Women's Day - Part Three
In my previous post, I wrote about Mary Barbour, and how socialism is a necessary part of feminism - in this post, I'll be looking at the flipside of that. Just as most women are working-class(1), about half of working class people are women; in other words, feminism is a necessary part of socialism just as socialism is a necessary part of feminism. Of course, male socialists all too often forget (or deliberately ignore) this, and this is what gave rise to the formation of the Mujeres Libres.
The Mujeres Libres, or "free women", were a group of anarcha-feminist women who formed in anarchist areas during the Spanish Civil War. While anarchism proposes the liberation of all people, the men in the CNT-FAI (the organised anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain at the time) had been raised in an extremely patriarchal society, and they acted like it. This problem was compounded by the fact that the CNT focused mainly on factory workers, while many of the working women worked from home and were not unionised(2). Women were laughed at in meetings, paid less money than men for doing the same job, and their needs were generally ignored by men who thought that class and the state were the sole systems of oppression in their society. The Mujeres Libres disagreed; they were no more willing to be subservient to a husband than to be subservient to a boss.
During the attempted revolution in Spain, women were present in every area of activity, and the Mujeres Libres reflected that. In addition to brigades of female soldiers, they had numerous labour divisions, each representing workers in a different sector of the economy - transport, public services, nursing, clothing, and so on. By July 1937, their members numbered around twenty thousand(3).
As today, many anarchists opposed the formation of separate groups for women. Creating women-only organisations was seen as "divisive", and contrary to the anarchist idea of freedom for all, regardless of gender. This argument will be familiar to anyone who is passingly acquainted with modern activism and, in 1937 as now, it functioned as a silencing tactic; the meetings that were nominally "for everyone" were in fact meeting for men, which women were grudgingly allowed to attend. The women needed a separate organisation because they, and they alone, could be trusted to fight for women's liberation.
So what can we learn from the Mujeres Libres? First, that the struggle against oppression must be led by the oppressed themselves. The primary victims of patriarchy are women and non-binary people; the men of the CNT-FAI were not affected by the oppression of the Spanish women, and their upbringing had taught them to disregard women's complaints. For these reasons, they could not be trusted to do what was in the interests of the women. The Mujeres Libres were women who had personal experience of being on the wrong side of the patriarchal hierarchy, so they had the motivation to do something about it.
The second lesson we can learn from them is that addressing the concerns of a particular group (in this case women) is not divisive, or detrimental to a comprehensive liberatory struggle. The women of the Mujeres Libres worked, fought, and died alongside their male comrades, and contributed just as much to the struggle against capitalism and the state. The really divisive thing - the thing that is actually detrimental to the struggle as a whole - is to focus on class to the exclusion of all else. If your organisation doesn't oppose racism, it is exclusionary towards ethnic minorities; if it does not oppose patriarchy, it is exclusive to women and non-binary people, and so on. If we want to build a truly, radically free society, we need to oppose all forms of oppression, ,regardless of whether they affect us personally. As the Industrial Workers of the World put it, an injury to one is an injury to all.
(1) when I say "working class" in this context, I'm including all those whose class interests align with those of the working class - so, this includes rural workers and peasants, and the wage-earning portion of the middle class.
(2) https://libcom.org/history/separate-equal-mujeres-libres-anarchist-strategy-womens-emancipation
(3) Ibid
The Mujeres Libres, or "free women", were a group of anarcha-feminist women who formed in anarchist areas during the Spanish Civil War. While anarchism proposes the liberation of all people, the men in the CNT-FAI (the organised anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain at the time) had been raised in an extremely patriarchal society, and they acted like it. This problem was compounded by the fact that the CNT focused mainly on factory workers, while many of the working women worked from home and were not unionised(2). Women were laughed at in meetings, paid less money than men for doing the same job, and their needs were generally ignored by men who thought that class and the state were the sole systems of oppression in their society. The Mujeres Libres disagreed; they were no more willing to be subservient to a husband than to be subservient to a boss.
During the attempted revolution in Spain, women were present in every area of activity, and the Mujeres Libres reflected that. In addition to brigades of female soldiers, they had numerous labour divisions, each representing workers in a different sector of the economy - transport, public services, nursing, clothing, and so on. By July 1937, their members numbered around twenty thousand(3).
As today, many anarchists opposed the formation of separate groups for women. Creating women-only organisations was seen as "divisive", and contrary to the anarchist idea of freedom for all, regardless of gender. This argument will be familiar to anyone who is passingly acquainted with modern activism and, in 1937 as now, it functioned as a silencing tactic; the meetings that were nominally "for everyone" were in fact meeting for men, which women were grudgingly allowed to attend. The women needed a separate organisation because they, and they alone, could be trusted to fight for women's liberation.
So what can we learn from the Mujeres Libres? First, that the struggle against oppression must be led by the oppressed themselves. The primary victims of patriarchy are women and non-binary people; the men of the CNT-FAI were not affected by the oppression of the Spanish women, and their upbringing had taught them to disregard women's complaints. For these reasons, they could not be trusted to do what was in the interests of the women. The Mujeres Libres were women who had personal experience of being on the wrong side of the patriarchal hierarchy, so they had the motivation to do something about it.
The second lesson we can learn from them is that addressing the concerns of a particular group (in this case women) is not divisive, or detrimental to a comprehensive liberatory struggle. The women of the Mujeres Libres worked, fought, and died alongside their male comrades, and contributed just as much to the struggle against capitalism and the state. The really divisive thing - the thing that is actually detrimental to the struggle as a whole - is to focus on class to the exclusion of all else. If your organisation doesn't oppose racism, it is exclusionary towards ethnic minorities; if it does not oppose patriarchy, it is exclusive to women and non-binary people, and so on. If we want to build a truly, radically free society, we need to oppose all forms of oppression, ,regardless of whether they affect us personally. As the Industrial Workers of the World put it, an injury to one is an injury to all.
(1) when I say "working class" in this context, I'm including all those whose class interests align with those of the working class - so, this includes rural workers and peasants, and the wage-earning portion of the middle class.
(2) https://libcom.org/history/separate-equal-mujeres-libres-anarchist-strategy-womens-emancipation
(3) Ibid
Wednesday 9 March 2016
International Working Women's Day - Part Two
Welcome to part two of my seven-part series on awesome women from history. This time, I'll be focusing on Mary Barbour.
In 1915, thirty-year-old Mary Barbour was living in Govan, Glasgow. The men were mostly away at war, and the landlords of the area - thinking that the women would be unable to resist - had raised rents to extortionate levels. They had already met with some resistance - along with Mary Laird and Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour had founded the Glasgow Women's Housing Association to fight for the right to decent housing and affordable rents. There were many protests over rents in previous years - trade unions had been putting their weight behind the struggle for housing justice since 1910 - but it was in 1915, the second year of the First World War, that things came to a head. Barbour organised a rent strike. The tenants refused en masse to pay the rents the landlords asked of them, often driving off rent collectors with violence, and quickly found widespread support. The police, of course, attempted to evict the strikers, but the women from the housing association - collectively known as Mrs Barbour's Army - were more than willing to defend themselves and their fellow workers. The rent strikers were supported by mass demonstrations, and soon more strikes broke out across Glasgow and the surrounding area - by October of 1915, an estimated fifteen thousand people were refusing to pay rent. By November, a further five thousand had joined them, and trade unions were threatening to down tools if their demands were not met. On the 17th of November, all legal proceedings against the strikers were halted, and in December the Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act was passed, reducing rents to their pre-war levels.
As a working-class woman, Mary Barbour understood that it is meaningless to talk of women's liberation without also talking of the end of capitalism. The majority of women in the world belong to what could broadly be called the global working class, and have to deal with the double whammy of capitalism and patriarchy - both of those are systems of unjust hierarchy, and both need to be abolished. A feminism that does not address the intersection of gender and class is a feminism that ignores the interests of most of the world's women - a female prime minister doesn't mean shit if she enacts policies that further the oppression of marginalised women.
Mary Barbour understood intersectionality, not as an abstract idea, but as an everyday experience. She was a woman, so she experienced misogyny; she was working-class, so she knew what it was like to get the shitty end of the capitalist stick. Barbour would have none of the insistence that marginalised people settle for fighting single-issue campaigns, because she knew that people do not live single-issue lives. She helped organise the rent strikes, and was a dedicated anti-war activist, but she also started Glasgow's first family planning centre, to help women take control of their lives and their bodies. Mary Barbour has been commemorated in songs, poems, and plays, and I'm happy to add this (very small) celebration of her life to the historical record.
In 1915, thirty-year-old Mary Barbour was living in Govan, Glasgow. The men were mostly away at war, and the landlords of the area - thinking that the women would be unable to resist - had raised rents to extortionate levels. They had already met with some resistance - along with Mary Laird and Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour had founded the Glasgow Women's Housing Association to fight for the right to decent housing and affordable rents. There were many protests over rents in previous years - trade unions had been putting their weight behind the struggle for housing justice since 1910 - but it was in 1915, the second year of the First World War, that things came to a head. Barbour organised a rent strike. The tenants refused en masse to pay the rents the landlords asked of them, often driving off rent collectors with violence, and quickly found widespread support. The police, of course, attempted to evict the strikers, but the women from the housing association - collectively known as Mrs Barbour's Army - were more than willing to defend themselves and their fellow workers. The rent strikers were supported by mass demonstrations, and soon more strikes broke out across Glasgow and the surrounding area - by October of 1915, an estimated fifteen thousand people were refusing to pay rent. By November, a further five thousand had joined them, and trade unions were threatening to down tools if their demands were not met. On the 17th of November, all legal proceedings against the strikers were halted, and in December the Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act was passed, reducing rents to their pre-war levels.
As a working-class woman, Mary Barbour understood that it is meaningless to talk of women's liberation without also talking of the end of capitalism. The majority of women in the world belong to what could broadly be called the global working class, and have to deal with the double whammy of capitalism and patriarchy - both of those are systems of unjust hierarchy, and both need to be abolished. A feminism that does not address the intersection of gender and class is a feminism that ignores the interests of most of the world's women - a female prime minister doesn't mean shit if she enacts policies that further the oppression of marginalised women.
Mary Barbour understood intersectionality, not as an abstract idea, but as an everyday experience. She was a woman, so she experienced misogyny; she was working-class, so she knew what it was like to get the shitty end of the capitalist stick. Barbour would have none of the insistence that marginalised people settle for fighting single-issue campaigns, because she knew that people do not live single-issue lives. She helped organise the rent strikes, and was a dedicated anti-war activist, but she also started Glasgow's first family planning centre, to help women take control of their lives and their bodies. Mary Barbour has been commemorated in songs, poems, and plays, and I'm happy to add this (very small) celebration of her life to the historical record.
Monday 7 March 2016
International Working Women's Day - Part One
I thought it would be a great idea to do a post each day in the week leading up to International Working Women's Day, each post celebrating an iconic woman who I thought the world should know more about. Unfortunately, I had that idea just now, so it's too late. Instead, I'm going to do a post every day for a week, starting today, on International Working Women's Day itself. This first post is on Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman said, on the subject of her escape from slavery, "There was one of two things I was entitled to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other." She got her liberty, probably in part because even the Grim Reaper didn't want to fuck with her. Born into slavery in 1822, Tubman made her escape in 1849, but her own freedom wasn't enough - her family were still slaves. Working with the Underground Railroad - a secret network of free black people and white allies - Tubman made several trips back to the South to help her family escape. Though every rescue put her in mortal danger, Tubman reportedly grew more confident with every family member she led to freedom, and quickly became one of the Underground Railroad's most famous heroes. Over eleven years, in thirteen expeditions, Tubman is estimated to have helped around seventy slaves escape, leading no less a figure than Frederick Douglass to say, in a letter to Tubman:
The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.
John Brown, of course, was the white abolitionist who attempted to lead a slave rebellion to create a free state for escaped slaves. Harriet Tubman, being the badass that she was, helped Brown recruit escaped slaves for his army. Tubman was not present at Brown's ill-fated raid on the town of Harper's Ferry - some say she was sick with a fever, others that she was on a rescue mission in the South at the time. Whatever the reason, Tubman's absence saved her life - had she been there, she would almost certainly have been killed as Brown himself was.
When the American Civil War broke out, Tubman came to Port Royal to serve as a nurse, but managed to find enough free time to become the first woman to lead an armed assault in the civil war. Basically, her life was a combination of Glory and Django Unchained.
Later in life, she got involved in the women's suffrage movement, travelling around the US to make speeches in favour of women's emancipation. This post is getting a little long, so I'll end it here. Tomorrow, I'll be writing about Mary Barbour.
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