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

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/14/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Oct 14, 2006, at 2:11 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > How does that explain the death or absence of women leaders of
> > Communist Parties and other socialist formations in the West?
>
> Which ones? Classic Stalinist CPs? Those were different times; there
> were few women in bourgeois parties either. Scandinavian social
> democracies, however, have been pretty gender-egalitarian, no?

I've already pointed out in my first posting on this topic that social
democratic countries such as Finland, Germany, and Norway have had
female heads of state (though Germany may be more neo-corporatist than
social democratic).  I'm talking about CPs (Stalinist or
post-Stalinist), Trotskist, and other socialist formations of the
West.  You say that being educated in the West promoted some
third-world female political leadership, which doesn't quite amount to
explanation, for it doesn't explain why people of their countries, who
were largely not educated in the West, promoted them.  More
fundamentally, being in and of the West doesn't seem to have promoted
female political leadership of Western socialist formations (also,
it's possible that social democrats are worse than liberals and
conservatives in promotion of female political leadership to the
highest level, though I have yet to compute this).

--
Yoshie
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