The Evolution of Socialist Feminism : A Photo Gallery

Socialist feminism can best be understood as a current within socialism and within feminism. It rarely assumes an independent organizational form, but it is nonetheless an identifiable tradition. In an essay about the poet Irena Klepfisz, Molly Crabapple has drawn an analogy between the feminist left and the term “Goldene Kayt” or Golden Chain, which Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz used to portray “the way Jewish culture had been transmitted from one generation to the next.” Crabapple asked Klepfisz, “What makes up our Goldene Kayt on the feminist left?” Klepfisz replied, “The links are there, but you have to put them together into a chain.” She described the efforts that feminists and lesbians have made to uncover their history: “We discovered all these women we had never heard of. They left an imprint on the world. It’s just that they were never put together. The Goldene Kayt is there. We just have to fashion it.” [1] The Evolution of Socialist Feminism is an incomplete attempt to fashion that chain for socialist feminism. The story of the evolution of socialist feminism could, of course, be told with different examples and different emphases. And I hope this account will inspire others to expand and enrich the narrative.