Australian Left Review
Article Title
Victims of Double Oppression
Abstract
Much of what follows here can be challenged as impressionistic but can, perhaps, be excused since too little research has been undertaken by anyone to provide hard facts on the “woman question”. It is not my intention to offer this as a definitive summation of the development movement for the liberation of women but simply to indicate some of its sources and concerns and hopefully to provoke some reactions. It is no argument against this movement that most women “enjoy being girls” or don’t want to be liberated. If the working class, even its male component, had achieved self-awareness then revolutionaries would be almost out of business. Of course the movement has problems. There are liberationists who regard any criticisms of their actions as bourgeois or conservative, an old lefty trick which impedes consideration of valid criticisms; and there are too many on the left, especially the older left, who accept mass media versions of the movement and damn it as middle-class, adventurist, man-hating or feminist, more old lefty tricks.