This is recommended reading for anyone who still believes that feminist "progress" is a good thing:
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=books&subName=display&bookId=8
"... the first premise for the emancipation of women is the re-introduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and ... this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society be abolished''' (Engels).
" ... Public dining rooms, creches, kindergartens - these are examples of the shoots, the simple everyday means, which assume nothing pompous, grandiloquent or solemn, but which can in fact emancipate women, which can in fact lessen and abolish their inferiority to men in regard to their role in social production and in social life" (Lenin).
These quotations encapsulate the mission of the proletarian revolution finally to put an end to the social inferiority of the female sex, by removing every last barrier to women's participation in social production on an equal basis with men. The victory of socialism in the USSR and other socialist countries brought final proof of the correctness of this, the Marxian, thesis on the woman question -US women were systematically freed from their age-old shackles of domestic slavery for the first time to show that anything men can do, women can do too.
The aim of this book is four-fold - namely (1) fully to familiarise readers with this Marxian analysis; (2) to celebrate women's emancipation in the socialist countries which provides incontrovertible evidence in support of the correctness of the Marxian analysis; (3) to expose the false ideology of women's liberation being peddled by petty bourgeois elements in the movement; and (4) to demonstrate how in practice revisionist and Trotskyite opportunists work in the women's movement, as in the general working-class movement, against Marxism, and against women actually achieving their liberation. The aim of the book is to arm advanced workers with the knowledge and understanding that will enable them to bring together an invincible mass organisation of women) with a proletarian orientation and a correct programme for their liberation, to fight for proletarian revolution and their own emancipation.
"A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised." (Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex")
ANY QUESTIONS? (Fedders, 2007)
