THE Communist Party of Britain has organised a New Year feminist conference celebrating Sisterhood, Socialism & Struggle in the UK and across the world. This free weekend event on January 16-17 2021, will provide a virtual opportunity for women and men on the left to discuss and debate the importance of women’s liberation for the whole human race.  

The conference will focus on a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression and super exploitation. It will also highlight the Communist Party’s policy on women & gender. The first session of the conference will explore these themes with speakers from the London Communist Party & YCL including Mary Davis, Jen Izaakson and Jess Duggan. Drawing on this analysis, the conference will go on to discuss the three themes of our Charter for Women.

The Charter for Women, which originated in the Communist Party, was launched in the labour movement in 2004 and has since been adopted by 27 trade unions (including 18 national unions) and trades councils. It has been re-launched in 2020 under the aegis of the National Assembly of Women.

The Charter aims to inspire a new and inclusive socialist feminist theory and practice that will motivate a new generation of women activists and will help to revitalise the fight for women’s liberation. It proposes that one of the ways of doing this is to unite around its campaigning programme. In this respect the Charter does not offer new policy but instead seeks to bring together the key demands for which progressive women continue to struggle in innumerable arenas.

Three of the six sessions of the conference will cover the three broad themes of the Charter. These will be addressed by our wonderful panel of speakers who are all well-known women labour movement activists. These are the themes:

• Women in society: with Mollie Brown, Laura Pidcock, Pragna Patel and Kellie O’Dowd

• Women in the workplace: with Denise Christie, Rohan Kon, Helen O’Connor and Sarah Woolley

• Women in the labour movement: with Sarah-Jane McDonough, Heather Wakefield and Annette Mansell-Green

These sessions will address the main concerns and issues for which women are campaigning under each of these three headings. The panels will highlight such questions as the feminisation of poverty, unfair job segregation and the erosion of women’s sex-based rights, calling for urgent change to secure equal pay and access to decent childcare. The sessions will address some of the most pressing challenges facing women today including domestic abuse, abortion rights porn, prostitution, racism, misogyny and sexual violence, rape and harassment.

A session on Marxism, feminism and ecology with Olivia Palmer and Wendy Emmett will show the connection between the capitalist system’s destruction of the environment and sex-based inequality, and how scientific ecofeminism can be a force for change.

As internationalists, we recognise that the fight against women’s oppression is worldwide. Thus a key element of this conference is to highlight and show solidarity with the struggle of our sisters in other countries. We are fortunate to have secured the participation of communist women leaders from three continents, including Liz Rowley, (Canada), Jenny Schreiner (South Africa), Annie Raja (India) and Socorro Gomes (Brazil). This final session promises to be both educational and inspirational.

The shared aim of all our speakers is to attract more women to our ideas. Our objective is to win an understanding that the road to socialism is unattainable without an awareness of the link between women’s oppression and class exploitation.

A regenerated women’s movement is a vital core element in such a struggle. The building of a broad-based women’s movement and a strengthened labour movement which rejects capitalist ideology must go hand in hand. This conference will, we hope, help to ensure that sisterhood, socialism & struggle is a living reality and not just a slogan.