Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in Mira's Blurty:

Monday, November 16th, 2009
11:11 am	Serious Ideological Resistance in the Party There was also serious ideological resistance in the party to taking noneconomic forms of oppression seriously. This was clear from an early crisis over birth control in summer 1922, after which the leading advocates of women's reproductive rights, Stella Browne and the Pauls (Maurice Eden and Cedar), either left the party or withdrew into less prominent roles. As Bruley points out, feminists radicalized during the suffrage campaigning before 1914 were a significant group in the foundation of the British CP, and the party missed a valuable chance to build on this relationship. Professional Thesis writing service and custom help online. Order thesis done by professional thesis writers! That it let this opportunity pass reflected both the gender blindness of the socialist tradition and the limiting effects of the tightened discipline the Comintern was imposing on national Communisms by 1922 to 1924. This British experience typified most of the new Communist parties in the 1920s. Initial assembly points for diverse radicalisms frustrated with the available Left parties, which might include feminists and sexual radicals, the new parties provided a brief context in which experimental and heterogeneous ideas could flourish, before "discipline" took over and a more orthodox frame of revolutionary politics became restored. It was the smaller parties more marginal to their national labor movements that showed this pattern most strongly, and there seemed least room for any feminist politics of gender where Communists failed to carry a mass social democratic membership with them in the course of the split. At the Fourth Comintern Congress in December 1922, the International Women's Secretariat reported a women's membership of only 2 percent in France, 1.5 percent in Italy, 6 percent in Belgium. To a get a better sense of Communist politics on the gender front, therefore, it's important to look at the larger parties, which took a larger body of the existing labor movements with them in the splitting of 1917 to 1921, and which showed a larger proportion of women in the membership. In 1922 these included Germany (12 percent of overall membership), Norway (15 percent), and Czechoslovakia (20 percent). (Comment on this)
11:11 am	"Petty Bourgeois Backwardness" In many ways the KPD displayed a predictable outlook for the time in gender terms -- the insistence on the primacy of the class struggle in production, for both the party's general strategy and the specific mobilization of women; the belief that women's emancipation was an economic question linked to productive employment in industry, with the associated socialization of child care, housework, and other domestic services; the hostility to reformist politics short of these goals, whether the SPD's stress on the welfare state, or the more individualistic emancipation espoused by the so-called bourgeois women's movement; and so on. But as it consolidated its politics during the 1920s, the KPD also took these perspectives to an extreme, demanding that all women's activity be focused on the factory, denying the validity of women's separate concerns, and attributing to women a specific psychology (including even the most "proletarian" women, such as the women textile workers), whose "pettybourgeois backwardness" could only be overcome by an undeviating stress on the necessity of the class struggle and the unity of the working class. If you want Essay help, order essay help at the best site! We write custom essays from scratch! For instance, true proletarian consciousness, Ruth Fischer claimed, could never be generated within the four walls of the household, so that working-class housewives could never escape their backward mentality until shown the "hard reality" of working for wages in industry. 12 But at the same time, the KPD was a large and extremely unruly party, whose membership experienced wild and unpredictable fluctuations: 66,373 in July 1920, rising to a notional 450,000 after the unification with the USPD majority in October; down to 157,168 paid-up members in summer 1921; back to 255,863 in October 1922; 294,230 in September 1923 plummeting to 121,394 in April 1924; 112,511 in the second half of 1929, rising to 176,000 in December 1931, and 287,180 by March 1932. These see-sawing membership figures give a better clue to the experience of being a German Communist than the now stereotypical representations of the party. In much of the literature the KPD is a by-word for stolid and unimaginative Stalinist orthodoxy. But almost despite itself, it provided a home for politics that frequently belied this description. (Comment on this)
11:11 am	A Large Party In the first place, a large party like the KPD had a range of contacts with women that were simply not available to a small sectarian cadre party like the CPGB in the 1920s. Aside from its efforts among women as wage workers in industry (the true female proletarians, according to its strict understanding), in the early 1920s the KPD had three main fields of activity among working-class women: 1) consumer cooperatives, seen not just as a practical benefit for overburdened and individualized working-class households, but also as a school of the class struggle comparable in principle to the trade unions; 2) anti-inflation actions and the wider protest activity against shortages and prices; and 3) general educational work among workers' wives. Urgent Editing service by trained editors: online editing of high quality only! For our purposes, the second of these provides the best illustration. Beginning as spontaneous protests by housewives and the young, initially at the end of 1919 and again in summer 1920, repeated in the winter of 1921 to 1922, before reaching 526 a 526 climax in the second half of 1922, with a major coda in the summer of 1923, such actions frequently produced negotiated settings of fair prices with shopkeepers and the local authorities, but often also escalated into full-scale riots, with looting of food, shoes, and clothing, and violent confrontations with the police. From the outset the KPD was concerned to shape and discipline this activity. At first, this took the form of political injunctions: while understandable, "robbing the property-owner is not the abolition of property," and instead of looting, working-class housewives should concentrate on working for a revolutionary movement to expropriate the bourgeoisie. But by fall 1922 "control committees" were being formed based on the works councils to monitor prices, but with an unclear and uncertain relationship to the women's direct actions that originally posed the issue. (Comment on this)
11:10 am	The Experience Worked for Women The experience worked for women with some economic independence, whether coming from wage-work, family background, and a profession, or from full-time employment in the party itself. By contrast with these "cadres," for whom the party was a support for equality, which "they took ... to mean emancipation from anything designated 'women's work,"' the ordinary female "supporters" were connected to the party mainly through their husbands: they "tended to be married to party activists and have several children. They were home centered and placed their domestic responsibilities before their political involvement." In fact, relieving their husbands of domestic duties was itself considered "party work. Affordable Online editing service by trusted editors: online editing of academic quality only! " It was here that the Women's Sections found their function, usually with afternoon meetings in homes, ensuring that party wives remained supportive of their husbands' political activity, giving them some chance for political discussion, and overcoming their isolation as housewives to this extent. Of course, this also institutionalized the wider society's sexual division of labor inside the party itself, and drew the women supporters into party life largely through servicing activity -- as "a sort of housewife to the party," as one Communist husband disarmingly put it. In the 1920s, the CPGB never escaped this dilemma: women were hard to organize because they were removed from the public sphere as wives and mothers, or (with some exceptions) were working in contexts resistant to trade unionism; yet when they were recruited into the party's orbit (with the exception of the category of the "cadres" mentioned above), they assumed the old familiar role -making the tea, organizing the social, sometimes developing a speciality in welfare or education, but generally confining themselves to these "women's" concerns. Some of this came from the smallness of the British party. Diversifying its strategy to recruit outside the conventionally recognized core of the working class would have stretched its resources very thinly. It also meant that female cadres were drawn immediately into the same organizational priorities, leaving little intermediate space between such full-time officialdom and the more marginally involved women supporters where a more creative gender politics might have developed. As Kay Beauchamp, a CPGB organizer in London in the 1920s explained it: You see, it was a small party then. The women who had any ability at all were seized on. Within six months of joining the party I was secretary of the biggest organization in London, St. Pancras.... Those of us who were active in that way, I suppose, didn't feel any need for any special women's activity, except as a means of winning other women, and you hadn't got time to do much of that because you were so busy on other things. (Comment on this)