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
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