BREAKTHROUGH/page 41 unions joined with the employers to drive women workers out of industrial jobs back into traditional "women's jobs," into the reserve army of labor, or back into the home. A solid anti-white supremacist base among women in the labor force has not yet been built. The post-war expansion of clerical work has been almost entirely ignored by the trade union movement, even at the cost of a declining percentage of union members in the labor force. Since the 1960's, women in public employment have been organized to some extent, but the organization of private clerical workers is still in its infancy. White women have begun to struggle for union organization, in part following the leadership of Third World women in the farm worker, hospital worker and textile worker struggles in particular. A Note on the Left and the Women's Movement The revolutionary left generally did not adequately grasp the political importance of the oppression of women, male supremacy and male chauvinism. The Socialist Party, the CPUS A, and especially the IWW in its earlier days, had some strong women members and leaders, but almost always reduced the question of women to a class question narrowly defined in terms of wage labor. Women's oppression in the family, the imperialist function of the institutions of male supremacy, and the impact of male chauvinism in the society and on the Left were taken seriously only partially and exceptionally for short periods. Even so, individual socialist and communist women exerted leadership in the struggles of women for union organization and in community organizations of tenants, the unemployed, etc. MOVEMENTS OF WOMEN INTHE1960'sand70's In the 1960's the movement of women within the oppressor nation once again became a leading social movement. This women's movement had two social origins. The first was the revival of the equal rights movement, led by Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women which she founded. This movement exposed the pervasive forms of women's oppression, mainly among petit-bourgeois and bourgeois women. The Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement in the US oppressor nation which developed into support for the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people stimulated and encouraged the second main political tendency of the new women's movement. Both these sources built the women's movement as a force against Imperialism.
Black women were leaders in the civil rights struggle; Vietnamese women led the struggle for women's emancipation in a movement for national liberation; women led in the anti-war and student movements in the oppressor nation. In all these struggles, women came to realize the contradictions between women's strength and creativity and their subordinate place and function under imperialism. This realization was the basis for the explosive development of women's consciousness of the nature of their own oppression as they played a leading role in spreading anti-imperialist consciousness among masses of people. As white women began to struggle to apply their growing consciousness of the contradictions between women's strength and their oppression under imperialism, they faced strong male supremacist opposition within the sexually mixed white Left. The struggle was so sharp that masses of women made the decision to withdraw from activity and organization with
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men so they could address the nature of women's oppression. This withdrawal was portrayed by the white male dominated Left as an abandonment of Left politics and solidarity with Third World struggles. This was not true. This part of the women's movement was in fact rooted in solidarity with the struggles of oppressed peoples in this country and around the world. It unleashed women's energy to analyze and organize around the basic forms of women's oppression— national, economic, social, psychological, sexual and cultural. Job inequality, abortion, women in prison, education, cultural work, lesbianism, rape, psychological and physical abuse were taken up by the women's movement in the oppressor nation. From this base of strength the women's movement has become a leading force in the anti-imperialist movement in the oppressor nation. The white women's movement began to