Re: Socialism and Women's Leadership (was China Drafts Law to Boost Unionsand End Labor Abuse)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> That said, you evade the question of why socialist states and
> movements have had only a few women leaders, fewer than one would
> expect, when women have managed to rise to the top in a number of
> capitalist states, even ones that are poor or on the Right where one
> might not have expected them to do so.
> --
> Yoshie

You really should find the time to read Trotsky 
one of these days. I guarantee you that it would 
be more rewarding than Shi'ite radical texts.

The mass homelessness of children is undoubtedly 
the most unmistakable and most tragic symptom of 
the difficult situation of the mother. On this 
subject even the optimistic Pravda is sometimes 
compelled to make a bitter confession: ?The birth 
of a child is for many women a serious menace to 
their position.? It is just for this reason that 
the revolutionary power gave women the right to 
abortion, which in conditions of want and family 
distress, whatever may be said upon this subject 
by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is 
one of her most important civil, political and 
cultural rights. However, this right of women 
too, gloomy enough in itself, is under the 
existing social inequality being converted into a 
privilege. Bits of information trickling into the 
press about the practice of abortion are 
literally shocking. Thus through only one village 
hospital in one district of the Urals, there 
passed in 1935 ?195 women mutilated by 
midwives??among them 33 working women, 28 
clerical workers, 65 collective farm women, 58 
housewives, etc. This Ural district differs from 
the majority of other districts only in that 
information about it happened to get into the 
press. How many women are mutilated every day 
throughout the extent of the Soviet Union?

full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/ch07.htm#ch07-1

Women were not presidents of "socialist" 
societies because these were not socialist 
societies. They were transitional systems in 
between capitalism and socialism. There was a 
Thermidor in the USSR that held back woman's 
liberation. Who knows. If Stalin had not 
prevailed, then perhaps the USSR would have had a female president.

In any case, even without a female president, 
these societies represented a qualitative advance 
over the capitalist system. For somebody who 
identifies themselves as a socialist, Yoshie, 
this dimension is strikingly absent in your 
recent theoretical wanderings in the desert.