PART III THE REBIRTH OF RADICALISM IN THE 1960S AND 1970s

  Chapter 9    Angela Davis (1944- ): Socialist Feminism and the Black Liberation Movement

Angela Davis is sometimes credited with being the first to incorporate an analysis of race and gender into socialist/ communist thought; however, Davis sees herself part of a much longer    tradition, citing Claudia Jones as among the first to articulate a theory of intersectional socialist feminism. Davis tried to play a balancing act between her academic career and political activism. In the late 1960s, the acceleration of ultra-left radicalism and the virulent right-wing reaction made it difficult to maintain this balance and Davis found herself caught up in the maelstrom. On August 7, 1970, the guns used in an attempt to free political prisoner George Jackson were found to be registered to Davis, who was charged as an accessory to the crime of kidnapping and murder.

On June 4, 1972, Davis was acquitted of all charges and resumed her career as a scholar/activist, publishing Women, Race and Class, generally considered the first book-length analysis of what we now call intersectional feminism. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism was a major a contribution towards expanding the socialist feminist tradition by including the politics of sexuality. In 1991,  Davis left the Communist Party because of its failure to engage in internal democratization. Although no longer a party member, Davis continues to identify as a communist, what she describes as a “small c” communist. Her socialist consciousness informs her work in the abolitionist movement, “linking struggles against racist prison repression to feminist and anti-capitalist agendas.” 

Chapter 10   Sheila Rowbotham(1943- ) & Zillah Eisenstein(1948- ): Second Wave Feminism in the Streets and in the Academy

  Chapter Abstract: Historically, socialist feminists emphasized placing women’s issues in the forefront of the socialist agenda; second wave socialist feminists have also emphasized incorporating what are generally considered feminist values into socialist organizational forms and practices, advocating non-hierarchical organization rather than the top-down model of what historian Sheila Rowbotham refers to as the Leninist left. Rowbotham was among the second wave scholar/activists who looked to the values and practices of the women's movement as a model for a reinvigorated socialist movement. Rowbotham hearkened back to an earlier tradition of socialist feminism, including that of Alexandra Kollontai and Lily Braun who sought not only a transformation in the workplace and the public sphere, but also profound changes in gender roles and in personal relationships. 

Socialist feminism had certainly declined by the mid-1980s; although it lived on in the academy, generating a good deal of ground-breaking feminist theory, as a political movement it had virtually disappeared. Zillah Eisenstein was among the scholar activists who kept the socialist flame alive as the country turned to the right and who served as a bridge between 20th and 21st Century Socialist Feminism. In her 2019 book, Abolitionist Socialist Feminism,Eisenstein develops what she sees as a new conceptualization of socialist feminism involving a transformation of intimate relationships as well as a revolution in political and economic systems. Eisenstein is a visionary rather than a strategic thinker. Although her writing does not suggest a clear path forward, the left nonetheless needs her unwavering insistence that another world is indeed possible.