Iraqi Women Still Fighting for Freedom and Equality

By Anne Jaclard.

Exclusive interview by MHI with Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which she co-founded shortly after the US invasion in 2003.

Iraq is fast becoming a forgotten story to the rest of the world, but women continue to be killed in the streets of Baghdad simply for being women. OWFI activists are still in constant danger of assassination by political Islamists. I still have to sleep in secret locations and travel with guards, and we need guards to protect our office. Fortunately, we share a building with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI), who support all our endeavors, events, and programs.

One of our new projects is organizing women workers to lay the groundwork for unionization, a joint project with FWCUI. Few women in Iraq are in unions, and most other unions have shown little interest in bringing them in. Our project, called “Women at Work,” consists at this stage of finding interested nurses in private hospitals and helping them learn leadership skills, so they are able to start preparatory committees toward unionization. They are now organizing for a nurses’ annual conference. We found some “experienced” women who were union leaders under Saddam, but they tend to be nationalistic or patriarchist; we want to help new left-leaning leaders to emerge. Read More

Left Forum 2009: Building Solidarity with Iraq’s Civil Resistance

The National Organization for the Iraqi Freedom Struggles (on the web at NO-IFS) sponsored the panel “Building Solidarity with Iraq’s Civil Resistance” at this year’s Left Forum. Read More

Theorizing Women’s Liberation Before, During, and After the Revolution

April 17, 2009 by MHI  
Filed under Alternatives to Capital, Forces of Revolution, Philosophy/Organization Tags: Feminism, Marxist-Humanism, Women's Liberation

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A talk by Anne Jaclard at the Anarchist Book Fair, New York City, April 12, 2008, on a panel entitled “Building a Movement Against Capitalism through Thinking of its Alternatives.”

My title is tongue in cheek because I can’t possibly talk about all that in a few minutes. My point is to pose a theoretic challenge to feminists to work out the relationship of women’s liberation to the transformation of society as a whole. I think such a transformation of all human relations necessitates tearing up capitalism and starting a new society based on a new mode of production. My view is that the mode of production and women’s freedom are inextricably intertwined, not as if one were first and the other second, but as a revolutionary process of self-emancipation by massive movements of people before, during and after the overthrow of capitalism. And I argue that a philosophy of liberation—Marx’s humanism—is essential to this process. I can’t discuss very much of this project today, but I invite you to join the investigation.

Some background: The so-called second wave of feminism (1960s-80s) raised these issues in a period when there was widespread discussion of Marxism and revolution within mass social movements of African Americans, anti-war youth, students questioning their place in society and rank-and-file workers fighting automation. Many feminists came out of those movements and considered themselves to be “socialist-feminists” or “Marxist-feminists. ” Read More