The twentieth century was marked by national liberation struggles that emerged in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin America, where neocolonial structures had subordinated the formally independent countries. The achievements of the Russian Revolution in 1917 inspired the peasantry and the working class across the Global South. The fight for equality and liberation under the leadership of working people is ongoing in the anti-imperialist struggles of our time. Women, in a myriad of ways, have powerfully shaped and continue to shape all of these struggles.

In the Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we present the stories of women in struggle who contributed not only to the wider arena of politics, but who also pioneered the establishment of women’s organisations, opening up paths of feminist resistance and struggle throughout the twentieth century.

Praxis, as a knowledge of theory and organisational methods of struggle as they change and respond to history, gives sustenance to ongoing struggles against oppression. As militants, we study the diverse lives, contexts, and organisational methods of these women not only to better understand their political contributions, but also to inspire us as we build the organisations necessary to win the fight against oppression and exploitation today.

In the fourth study of this series, we discuss the life and political struggles of Josie Mpama (1903–1979), a leader in the resistance against colonial oppression and the apartheid system in South Africa. Josie was a key figure in the history of women organisers in South Africa and a leader in the Communist Party of South Africa. Her life teaches us about the importance of grassroots and mass organising, as well as the challenges that come with that work. Like so many women involved in radical politics, particularly in the Global South, Josie’s extraordinary political contributions and theoretical acumen have been overlooked and largely excluded from the mainstream historical record.

Born Josephine Winifred Mpama on 21 March 1903, Josie – as she was known to family, friends, and comrades – came to have many names depending on the manoeuvres she needed to make in different contexts. Where the English language dominated and allowed for greater social and economic mobility, her surname was anglicised and she went by Josie Palmer. At other times, when she was with her common law partner, Edwin, and respectability politics came into play, she used his surname and became Mrs. Mofutsanyana. In more covert work, her known aliases included Winifred Palmer, Beatrice Henderson, and Red Scarf.

Josie was born a year after the end of the South African War (1899–1902), during which the British Empire and the Boers (the descendants of Dutch colonial settlers) wrestled for control over the region. She grew up and became politically active during one of the most tumultuous political periods in South Africa’s history, when the white minority was attempting to cement its control of land, labour, and political power. At the same time, deep shifts and conflicts were also taking place in the international political and economic landscape: before she reached the age of forty, Josie would live through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the formation of the Communist International (Comintern), the rise of European fascism, and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Although the Treaty of Vereeniging, signed on 31 May 1902, brought the war between the British Empire and the Boers to an end, it brought no peace to South Africa. During the decades that followed, the foundation was laid for the systematic and structural ascendance of white rule and the racial segregation, land dispossession, and enforcement of cheap migrant labour that came with it. The establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, which consolidated various British colonies and Boer settlements into a unitary state, initiated a phase that built the foundations for the emergence of the apartheid system of racially segregated governance. The most heightened application of this system would come following the 1948 electoral victory of the right-wing white Afrikaner National Party, whose leaders, such as John Vorster, had direct connections to German fascism.

Amidst these broader political convulsions, a young Josie experienced personal turmoil and poverty at home. At the age of seven, her parents divorced, setting off a protracted custody battle and a period in which she was continually passed between the care of different relatives, some of whom were highly abusive.¹ Her working-class family was also divided by the racial categories imposed by the colonial state: her father was Zulu and worked as a court interpreter, while her mother was designated as ‘Coloured’ and was employed as a domestic worker for several years, though amongst the better paid.²According to the state’s designation, Josie was considered ‘Coloured’, which meant that she could have chosen to live apart from and ‘above’ the African majority by accepting the economic and political advantages, limited as they were, that came with conforming to the racial hierarchy imposed by the apartheid system. Instead, Josie rejected it and chose to identify with and work amongst African people all her life, living in predominantly African working-class communities or racially diverse areas, such as Sophiatown, that challenged state-sanctioned segregation.

Josie came to activism through community protests for better residential conditions and rights during the late 1920s and early 1930s in her home town of Potchefstroom, located roughly 120 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg. It was there, in the trenches of struggle, that she became one of the first Black women to join the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1928 and, later, to hold a senior leadership position in the party.³The communist movement deeply influenced Josie’s thought and action. At a commemoration of the Russian Revolution organised by the CPSA in November 1932, she affirmed the relevance of the revolution to ‘every worker irrespective of colour’ and continued to hold deep admiration for the Soviet project up until her death. ⁴

In the 1930s, Josie became involved in the South African section of the Comintern’s International Red Aid, known as Ikaka la Basebenzi (‘Workers’ Shield’), which was created in 1931 following the assassination of the communist organiser Johannes Nkosi by police at a protest in Durban.⁵ A few years later, Josie travelled to the Soviet Union and gained greater first-hand experience with the Comintern.

Though some of her most pivotal contributions were made to the national campaigns against the apartheid pass law system, her focus on organising women, such as being a founder of the multiracial Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) in 1954, is particularly significant. Josie was amongst few to publicly advocate for women’s increased political participation and for the advancement of working-class women, and she was amongst the first Black women to publicly speak to the connections between gender, race, and class.⁶

Due to various biases – then and now – around who is considered to be an intellectual and what is considered to be intellectual work, Josie’s roles as an organic intellectual, political thinker, and leader are often overlooked.⁷ Although her education in Marxist theory was somewhat informal and irregular in nature, she had a clear appreciation for the necessity of organised class struggle. For Josie, theory and ideology served their purpose in so far as they took stock of the concrete realities and conditions to inform the course of action. Though guided by the party line, as her biographer Robert R. Edgar notes, ‘she was not reticent about staking out independent positions and sharply criticising CPSA policies that she believed were not rooted in South African realities’.⁸

Like many organic intellectuals, Josie came to politics through her experiences – in her case, growing up under white rule in apartheid-era South Africa and participating in grassroots community protests. Finding Marxism and revolutionary theory in shards and fragments, she – like many organic intellectuals and political organisers across the Global South during the era of national liberation – pieced together the concepts that she learned and applied them to her specific context in order to advance the people’s struggle.⁹

Outside of her public political life, she took on as many roles as she did names, including those of mother, grandmother, and, in her later years, church-based community organiser and folk medicinal healer. Ultimately, her enduring commitment to changing the social reality of her people was based on her genuine affection for her community and galvanised by a framework of social revolution.

Serving the Burgeoning White Economy

During the turn of the twentieth century, African men from rural areas in South Africa and neighbouring countries were drawn into the emerging industrial hub of Johannesburg as labour for the city’s churning mines. Only men were permitted to undertake this type of work and, upon their arrival, lived in semi-carceral worker compounds, renumerated at a rate so low that they could not support their families back home. The making of modern South Africa was rooted in a segregated, segmented organisation of labour, relying not only on the ruthless exploitation of a racialised working-class majority, but also benefiting substantially from gendered divisions of labour within that workforce. As the leading journalist and South African communist Ruth First wrote in 1978:

It is a system of cheap labour, of migrant labour, which first drags the men out of the rural reserves to serve the white economy, then shovels them out of that economy when they are too old and sick to work; sends them out of the way, back to the reserves when they are unemployed. Thus, the white rulers simultaneously absolve themselves of any responsibility for the old, the sick, the unemployed and their families; and remove the source of rebellion of working-class revolt.

…

It is the women who carry the heaviest burdens of this migrant system. They are left behind with the burden of the family; and they are left behind as producers, to keep the agriculture going. So, they are responsible for both family and production.¹⁰

This labour consisted not only of caring for the young and old, the sick and unemployed, to ensure that families and communities survived in the rural African ‘reserves’ (a concept taken from Native American reservations in the United States), but, later, also included the domestic and social reproductive work that was essential to maintaining the white ruling class.

Although African women were initially excluded from the burgeoning industries, the harsh conditions on the rural reserves – along with the fact that they received little to no remittances from their urban-based male relatives – eventually pushed them to seek out work or livelihoods in cities. Most toiled as domestic servants, beer brewers, small traders, and washer women. Precarity and low wages characterised this new reserve army of casualised labour, which was pushed to the peripheries of cities and heavily controlled and policed.

In her early teens, Josie joined this informal workforce, taking on a variety of short-term, precarious domestic jobs such as washing clothes, cleaning homes, and cooking, as well as two sewing apprenticeships. She earned extremely low wages, in part due to her young age.

After the South African War, the British and Boers (or Afrikaners) entered into an alliance to establish the Union of South Africa in 1910 and enact a system of oppressive laws and discriminatory processes to cement white rule. African families, homes, labour, and lands were targeted in a number of ways, notably through the pass law system, which placed various restrictions on the African majority and their ability to live in cities, move freely, and work. The system included measures that made strikes a criminal offence for African workers, barred them from certain types of employment, and provided them with less injury compensation than their white counterparts. These policies sought to control and limit their ability to work in urban areas, which had the highest earning potential, and limit their social and, ultimately, political existence. Yet, pass laws were also used to ensure a cheap supply of labour in cities designated almost exclusively for the burgeoning white economy. At various points, the apartheid system was enforced through systematic policing, such as through the use of pass books, which Africans had to carry at all times and which contained personal identification information, including biometric and employment details. Under this regime, Africans were subject to constant surveillance, harassment, and the threat of being fined or arrested.

Popular and organised resistance to pass laws emerged across the country in the early 1910s, one of the earliest being the historic women-led campaign of 1913 in Bloemfontein. Although these struggles were able to win concessions in some cases, the pass law system continued to expand. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act, passed in 1923, paved the way for the tightening of the influx control system that would unfold during the apartheid era, which further restricted the movements and conduct of African people in metropolitan areas. Under the 1923 act, African people were defined as ‘temporary sojourners’ who were only permitted in cities insofar as they served ‘the wants of the white population’, as the act states.¹¹ Though laws enacted in 1902 and 1913 had already established the grounds for racial segregation and land dispossession (allocating less than ten percent of arable land to Africans), the 1923 Natives Act gave local authorities greater powers to enforce controls within their municipalities.¹² It was within this context that Josie made her political debut.

Potchefstroom Resistance

Potchefstroom was a political stronghold for the Afrikaner settler project and, later, the apartheid system. Unlike Bloemfontein, where anti-pass struggles developed within a context of labour shortages, the struggles in Potchefstroom unfolded within the context of a labour surplus.¹³ In an attempt to control the growing African population in the area, the colonial government imposed a range of restrictions, including night curfews and fees for public services (such as the construction of water pipes), many of which deeply affected African women.

Fed up with an onslaught of restrictions and the increased costs to their daily lives, on 28 September 1927, an organised group of around 200 African women marched in opposition to the closing of water wells. The women, many of whom made their living by washing white families’ clothes, marched to the local magistrate with a red, white, and blue banner inked with the words ‘For Mercy’ to show their discontent.¹⁴

The state enacted such measures in order to extract revenue from African households to cover public financial deficits that otherwise would have had to be paid by white households.¹⁵ The most intense opposition emerged in response to the lodger’s permit policy, which required anyone above the age of eighteen living in a home owned by another person to register and pay the municipal authorities for a monthly permit. This meant that one’s own children and relatives had to pay a monthly fee to live in their family homes. Those who did not pay faced prosecution, eviction, and expulsion, further undermining the social cohesion of the African family already unseamed by the migrant labour system.

Alongside other community leaders and communist cadre (including Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, who later became her husband), Josie led important protests against the local municipality and white residents over lodger’s permits, including a passive resistance campaign that called for the refusal to pay the lodger’s fee. Women were particularly creative and resilient during this period, using various tactics of collective resistance such as quickly returning evicted residents and their furniture back to their homes.¹⁶ Though the protests began spontaneously, the CPSA provided organisational and legal support as well as political direction to the movement. By 1928, the growing local CPSA had roughly one thousand members, with Josie amongst the first recruited in this wave.¹⁷

In the lead up to a mass meeting of over five hundred people held on 16 December 1929 that aimed to agitate and recruit people to struggle against the racist regime, CPSA flyers declared:

Roll up in your thousands! African workers! You have no guns or bombs like your masters, but you have your numbers; you have your labour and the power to organise and withhold it. These are your weapons; learn to use them, thereby bringing the tyrant to his knees.¹⁸

The struggle in Potchefstroom peaked in January 1930, when a general strike largely shut down the town. African women led the charge, organising pickets, blocking key roads, and preventing other Africans from going to work.

Though these struggles created obstacles for the local authorities, who finally capitulated and dropped the lodger’s permit fees in May 1931, by May 1930 active resistance had died down, party organisation had almost ceased to exist, and Josie was forced to leave the town. ¹⁹ The white authorities used the struggle in Potchefstroom as an experiment in how to improve control mechanisms, which would find new, harsher expressions in later years.

The community struggles that unfolded in and around the resistance to the lodger’s permits in Potchefstroom were formative experiences for Josie, both in terms of organising women and being introduced to communism. They cultivated in her a deep sense that, in order to advance, the political struggle had to be grounded in the bread-and-butter issues that most affected the majority. When members of the CPSA or officials in the Comintern downplayed the importance of these struggles, Josie continued to insist that the party needed to support them in order to be more relevant to the working masses.²⁰

Wearing the Red Scarf

Following months of discussion and debate between various left organisations about the possibility of forming a communist party, the CPSA began its founding conference on 30 July 1921. It was the first of its kind on the continent. The party’s initial aim was, as stated in its founding manifesto, ‘to establish the widest and closest possible contact with workers of all ranks and races and to propagate the Communist gospel amongst them’, drawing inspiration and direction from the Comintern.²¹ The party recognised the importance of supporting African struggles, particularly related to housing, land dispossession, labour influx controls, and political enfranchisement.²²

Moses Kotane, who became the second African general secretary of the party in 1939, recalled that, of the early Black cadre, Josie was amongst the first to join the party (Comintern records indicate that she was the 516st member to join in 1928).²³ The party organised Saturday night classes on communist ideology and organisation, which new recruits like Josie attended after moving to Johannesburg at the end of 1931. Later, she established a branch in Sophiatown and opened a night school for ideological training as well as basic mathematics and English.²⁴ By the mid-1930s, Josie had entered the party’s senior leadership. She was in the Political Bureau at various points and in the Central Committee until at least 1946, perhaps the only Black woman to hold such positions in any political party in South Africa at the time.²⁵

Generally speaking, the party had a lack of active women members and leaders. This was largely due to material conditions, namely domestic burdens, racial divisions, patriarchal practices, social and geographical restrictions, and a lack of access to education. When it came to the perception of women’s ability to effectively carry out political work, patriarchal attitudes prevailed both in society and the party, and party work was at times considered to reflect a culture of ‘exclusive intellectualism’ that marginalised those without a formal or political education.²⁶Nonetheless, though small in numbers, women played an important role in the CPSA from the late 1920s through the 1940s. This remained the case after the party was banned in 1950 and forced underground, reconstituting itself as the South African Communist Party (SACP). Amongst these women were Ray Alexander, Molly Wolton, Hilda Bernstein, Dora Tamana, Fatima Seedat, Cecilia Rosier, Rebecca Bunting, Sonia Bunting, Rica Hodgson, Thoko Mngoma, Winifred Seqwana, Florence Mkhize, Letitia Sibeko, Violet Weinberg, and Ruth First.

To rise in the ranks of the party, one needed political education and experience. When the opportunity to train abroad arose, Josie jumped at the chance, accompanying Matilda First, the mother of South African journalist and communist icon Ruth First, to Moscow in 1935 to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.²⁷ Using the pseudonyms Red Scarf and Beatrice Henderson, Josie participated in various activities during her time in the Soviet Union, including the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern.

While in Moscow, she testified and provided reports before a commission on South Africa regarding the internal strife between opposing groups within the CPSA, which had reached such a point that many considered the party to be on the brink of collapse. Then General Secretary Moses Kotane raised the important criticism that the party was not sufficiently ‘Africanised’, referring to the fact that a significant section of the leadership, led by Lazarus Bach, knew little of the realities of the African masses and was instead preoccupied with European debates, disconnecting party ideals from party organisation and activity.²⁸ Though she called for greater efforts to ‘Africanise’ the party and recognise the existing divisions that ran along racial lines, Josie, alongside Kotane, opposed positions to split the organisational structure of the party along racial lines, including Edwin’s proposal to form separate wings of the party based on race in 1938.²⁹

Josie was careful not to take sides during the commission and prioritised holding the party together. She did not, however, shy away from sharing her concerns, such as the lack of initiatives to organise workers in factory cells as well as poor membership retention, insufficient training of African cadre for leadership positions, and the decision to prioritise uniting all races into one front at the expense of addressing the unique issues faced by African people.³⁰Josie also pointed to the party’s approach to writing and publishing articles, expressing her frustration with the leadership for failing to nurture workers’ literary endeavours.³¹ ‘If anything was wrong with the article,’ she asked, ‘could it not have been corrected?’³²

An important theme in Josie’s criticisms of the party was its lack of engagement with reality and its lack of political vitality. She expressed concerns over the mechanical nature of leadership meetings, saying, ‘We only used to discuss the work of the group and never did we discuss political questions’.³³ This approach, she argued, led to a fundamental problem: the party’s overall neglect of the issues raised by and affecting African people. For Josie, the party was not sufficiently rooted in the country’s social reality, focusing instead on orthodox Marxist theoretical discussions and European political developments.³⁴

Notably, Josie warned the party against dismissing African nationalist leaders, arguing that they constituted a ‘native bourgeoisie’ and that, within the broad front of resistance, they would ‘help us unite and struggle against imperialism’.³⁵

She explained that ‘if we will underestimate the bourgeoisie as a class, it means we do not as yet understand the power of capitalism’ and that ‘we must not run away from the fact that though they are reformist, they have influence over the masses’.³⁶ In its early years, the CPSA explicitly discouraged alliances with African nationalist groups, despite the Comintern’s position that advocated for the tactical support of those leading national liberation and decolonisation movements.³⁷ The Comintern’s conclusions from the commission on the party’s internal strife echoed many of Josie’s concerns regarding the CPSA’s failure to build a mass base and tactical alliances, which, they argued, arose from a failure to adequately grasp the South African context. Here, the efforts of Josie and others were successful: by the 1940s the CPSA had increased its cooperation with the African National Congress (ANC), a movement for national liberation that began as an African bourgeois project in 1912, in an attempt to build a broader, mass-based front of struggle.

Though the process of participating in Comintern meetings was in itself a part of Josie’s political education, her primary reason for travelling to the Soviet Union was to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. One of the university’s mandates was to provide Marxist-Leninist political education and training to anti-colonial leaders and communists from the Global South, with alumni including Jomo Kenyatta, Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, and Harry Haywood. In the 1930s, the university offered a fourteen-month-long course for international students that focused largely on theory but also included two months of practical work (including three days on a collective farm and fifteen days on party organisation³⁸ Subjects included political economy, history, Leninism, historical materialism, party-building, military science, contemporary politics, and English-language education.³⁹

Though Josie’s studies were disrupted by several bouts of poor health and hospitalisation, this international experience nonetheless had a profound impact on her, deepening her internationalist perspective and class consciousness and further solidifying her belief in the centrality of organisation to advance the struggle. During the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, while discussing the mobilisations of Black dock workers in Cape Town who were refusing to load or crew Italian shipments during Italy’s 1935–1936 invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Josie highlighted the importance of working-class internationalism: ‘although protests took place, we did not do enough. If all the Africans were organised like the dock workers, no boats would have been loaded with supplies for Italian troops… African workers must help the workers in Europe to fight for their liberty. Peace is only possible by action of the workers’.⁴⁰ In the same speech, she also spoke of the ‘necessity of organisation’, contending that the CPSA’s ‘composition is bad’ as it had no Afrikaners and too few Africans and arguing that its core mandate had to be to create an organisation that ‘will attract all the poor people and become a mighty mass party’.⁴¹

Upon returning to South Africa in late 1936, Josie focused on building the mass character of the party, fuelled by an urgency to build a broad and organised opposition to the burgeoning apartheid system. She was a member of the CPSA’s coordinating committee, which was formed in 1937 to work on ‘the question of organisation on a national scale’.⁴² This shift towards organising a mass movement across the country marked a new phase for the CPSA, the labour movement, and the liberation struggle as a whole. This was in part furthered by the political and economic consequences of the Second World War, such as the influx of African people to urban areas that resulted from the labour requirements of increased industrialisation within a context of harsh economic conditions (inflation, food shortages, overcrowding, etc.).

For Josie, the priority was clear: as she said in a party debate, ‘Comrades must come among the masses’.⁴³ At a meeting of the Non-European Unity Front in 1939, she encouraged the audience to ‘Go into the factories, go on the lands, and wherever the non-European is working for the benefit of the employers, tell them that they have a right to a share and that we have a right to a share of the profits of the wealth of South Africa’.⁴⁴

The CPSA became a leading force at this time and after the war. One key role it played was amongst political groups that gathered for the Anti-Pass Conference in November 1943, where they agreed to pursue all possible means to mount pressure for the abolition of passes, including working more closely with groups that were less ideologically aligned but shared overlapping interests. Josie was at the fore of various women’s efforts in this struggle, including organising a conference on pass laws in March 1944 in the lead up to the launch of an official campaign that May.⁴⁵ These efforts would lay the groundwork for later campaigns to fight the apartheid system after it was formally inaugurated with the 1948 election of the National Party.

Throughout the 1940s, the CPSA built a broad front against colonial domination by forming new tactical alliances and national campaigns, such as the anti-pass movement. As the author Tom Lodge describes, this resulted in the ‘broadening of public support for the organisation, [greater] militancy of communist activities, and the development of mutual perception and understanding between it and the African National Congress’.⁴⁶ Josie could often be found alongside a broad array of political leaders at meetings of the ANC and other groups that organised multiracial gatherings advocating for non-racialism and the participation of Black women as well as offering perspectives of resistance rooted in a class analysis.⁴⁷

Make Way for Women Who Will Lead

As the CPSA grappled with the challenge of organising a national mass movement, it also faced the need to pay heed to the unique issues facing women and make a more concerted effort to organise them. By the 1930s, organised labour and the CPSA had started to turn their attention towards women workers and their role in the manufacturing and processing industries. However, African women were mostly restricted to domestic service and made up a fraction of the formal workforce (less than 1% according to available data in the 1950s).⁴⁸ Here, Josie would play an indispensable role, building connections between the party, other political groups, the labour movement, and women. Since her political debut in women-led community struggles, Josie had consistently advocated for women’s rights, with a particular focus on the struggles of African women. As one historian put it, ‘through her, the CPSA was able to disseminate more radical ideas on the part women should be playing in black opposition politics, amongst black women’.⁴⁹

For Josie, it followed that women’s participation was a strategic necessity for the working class to succeed in overthrowing the racist colonial rule. As a result, she fiercely advocated for women’s political participation at a time when few women were participating in such radical public discourse. Along these lines, she made the following appeal in the party’s newspaper against the 1937 Natives Laws Amendment Bill, which would further limit the size of African populations in urban areas in accordance with the minimum number of labourers required, in addition to other restrictions:

We, women, should come on to the field as strugglers, for only with our help can our men fight successfully against this new bill. Only by joint struggle can we compel [the withdrawal of] this new slave law.

Women, we can no longer remain in the background or concern ourselves only with domestic and sports affairs. The time has arrived to enter the political field and stand shoulder to shoulder with men in the struggle.⁵⁰

At the same time, she did not refrain from pointing out and criticising how patriarchal relations were infused not only in society but also within the party, limiting women’s political participation:

Amongst all our leaders it is very seldom that one will see their wives or women friends accompanying them to meetings, and in all their struggles only few women take active part, except in locations when such struggles for lodger’s permits are fought, then some who cannot afford to pay such fees, and because it affects the family as a whole [when] then they find that there is no other way out than to unite with the others and attend meetings. Then as soon as they find that they have either won or lost they go back home and take to their domestic spheres.⁵¹

Along with combating patriarchal influences, Josie also grappled with how to encourage women to take part in struggles that seemed distant from their immediate realities. In the case of a proposal to give African men limited voting rights and representation, she reflected that ‘very few women took part in the struggle against the Native Bills, probably because not having had the vote they did not think it important to assist their men to maintain the vote’.⁵²

Though African women resisted the colonial control of their labour, lands, and daily lives throughout the early twentieth century (and well before), their early organising in South Africa nonetheless reinforced conservative gender roles, demanding a say as mothers, home makers, etc., or was limited to supportive roles in the struggle against racism. In certain limited frameworks, women did consciously and tactically leverage concepts such as motherhood, which were held in high esteem, to advance their emancipation more broadly, intentionally using them to manoeuvre within limited political spaces and bring in women who were not politically active (despite the essentialist undertones such concepts retained).

Following the political enfranchisement of white women in 1930 and the ensuing swell of women’s participation in political activity, the CPSA created a women’s department in 1931 that Josie would lead. Initially, women were seen merely as supporters of the men in the struggle. However, this began to change as the party placed a greater emphasis on women being able to work shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts, encouraged more radical conceptions of gender roles, and provided greater flexibility for women to organise on their own terms.

Though women remained a minority in party membership and leadership, as the historian C. J. Walker notes, ‘in the area of women’s emancipation, the CPSA brought new perspectives to the incipient national liberation movement of this time’.⁵³ The progressive evolution of the CPSA’s approach towards the gender question grew out of its understanding that the principal contradiction in society was that between the owners of property and capital and those who sold and relied on their labour to survive. As a result, although their words often spoke louder than their deeds, this analysis, as well as its advocacy for non-racialism, positioned the party to best understand the issues facing working women compared to other organisations of the era. For instance, in a statement released in February 1932, the party declared:

Toiling native women, white working women, realise your interests, wake up to fight for better conditions side by side with your husbands, fathers, and brothers: only by a united front can you get rid of all the exploitation which you suffer under capitalism and where you as women are the greatest sufferers.⁵⁴

In the early 1930s, the party planned to hold a national conference of working women, which, it stated, aimed ‘to unify and consolidate the sectional struggle of women… [and] to bring into existence a permanent organisation of struggle for the working women of South Africa’. Though this conference would not come to fruition due to the political upheaval within the party, between 1935–1937, Josie, along with other party members such as Ray Alexander, continued to call for militant women’s organising and activity.⁵⁵ As Josie stated while criticising a conservative women’s social welfare organisation for failing to successfully organise campaigns around issues that affected women, ‘they must make way [for] women who will lead and make a move to carry out the work’.⁵⁶

As the anti-pass law campaign began to grow in the late 1940s, the need for more broad-based women’s organising increased. In 1947, women of the CPSA gathered in Johannesburg to establish a non-racial women’s organisation, the Transvaal All-Women’s Union, electing Josie as its president. Though small and localised, it was in some ways the prototype for a larger, national women’s organisation that formed in later years.⁵⁷ Shortly thereafter, the repressive legal system shifted into high gear with the passing of the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act, which effectively banned the CPSA, and a renewed proposal to issue pass books for African women, amongst many other measures, was once again put on the table.

Women on the March

The increasing repression of the apartheid state only spurred the women’s movement to deepen their efforts to organise. In 1954, 146 delegates representing around 230,000 women across the country from a variety of political backgrounds gathered in Johannesburg for the founding conference of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). At the conference, the delegates pledged their support for the emerging Congress Alliance, a multiracial coalition that was formally established the following year and would launch a national anti-apartheid campaign that generated the largest mass participation yet seen. Josie attended the conference on behalf of the Transvaal All-Women’s Union and became the president of FEDSAW’s Transvaal branch.

Although public historiography propagated by the ANC after the formal end of apartheid in 1994 has portrayed the federation as being led almost exclusively by ANC-affiliated liberal women, it is important to note that FEDSAW was, in fact, the brainchild of CPSA member Ray Alexander and had considerable participation from left-wing working women, from trade unionists such as Francis Baard to communists such as Josie. Though generally putting forward broad liberal demands and aims, such as the right to vote, its founding document, the Women’s Charter, also included a number of more radical elements that were likely added due to the participation and efforts of left-wing women. These included provisions that called for ‘equal pay and possibilities of promotion in all spheres of work’, ‘equal rights with men in relation to property, marriage and children’, and ‘the organisation of women in trade unions’.⁵⁸While the charter outlined the particularities of women’s social reproductive burdens and called for women to self-organise to achieve equitable political rights and economic conditions, it also called for women to struggle alongside men in ‘a common struggle against poverty, race and class discrimination, and the evils of the colour bar’. The Women’s Charter would eventually become the basis for certain constitutional rights in post-apartheid South Africa.

Though FEDSAW worked within the Congress Alliance, it also had an independent mandate. In the year following its establishment, FEDSAW and its branches organised women around gender issues as well as broader Congress Alliance campaigns. Josie could be heard speaking at events such as the commemoration of International Women’s Day in Johannesburg in March 1955 addressing women from various backgrounds on the plight of African women.

FEDSAW’s first large-scale national protest took place on 27 October 1955, when two thousand women of all races marched against pass laws and the apartheid system. However, one month before the march, Josie was served banning orders, which made it a criminal offence for her to engage in public political meetings and participate in various political organisations, including FEDSAW. At the age of fifty-two, these repressive measures forced Josie to withdraw from publicly participating in demonstrations and the leading organs of struggle. In her last official FEDSAW communication, Josie declared to her comrades:

Never were the minds of human beings controlled. Never were the eyes of human beings closed… It is therefore natural that every living soul will ultimately see and follow the road to FREEDOM.

Josie or no Josie, the struggle will go on and ours will be the day of victory.⁵⁹

A year later, on 9 August 1956, in the culmination of decades of the work, 20,000 women descended on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the official seat of the colonial government, carrying with them bundles of signed petitions demanding the abolition of all apartheid pass laws. The march, showing the success of efforts to organise women of all races on a mass scale within a relatively short period of time, inaugurated a new phase that brimmed with hope. The Congress Alliance would later decide that 9 August would be celebrated as Women’s Day in South Africa. Today, the anniversary of the historic multiracial Women’s March to Pretoria is an official public holiday.

Always Uplifting the People

Beginning in the late 1940s, Josie became more active in the Anglican Church and women’s church groups, such as the Mzimhlophe Church Women’s Society and the Ekurhuleni Church Committee, both of which played a role in securing bursaries for children, food parcels for poor families, and other forms of assistance.⁶⁰ A number of factors led Josie to make this shift, including a desire to reconnect with her family and community after decades of prioritising political work, as well as a desire to improve her physical health and spiritual wellbeing. Perhaps most importantly, for many women who, like Josie, had been connected to FEDSAW and were banned from public political life, women’s church groups served as a refuge and alternative form of social organisation within a hostile political climate shaped by the repression of anti-apartheid political activity.⁶¹

Josie saw no contradiction between communism and Christianity.⁶² Rather, as Edgar notes, she saw both as ‘expressions of her commitment to social justice’.⁶³ Much like the traditions of liberation theology that took root in various national liberation struggles across the world, Josie’s involvement in church-based communities in the last decades of her life can be better understood as being embedded in a similar liberatory understanding of theology and recognition of the social functions that religion can fulfil.⁶⁴

Despite her retreat from public political life, Josie continued to be targeted by the state. She was detained and imprisoned for several weeks during the state of emergency that was declared after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 (the police killing of sixty nine people during a public protest against pass laws) and remained on the radar of the apartheid police in the years that followed.⁶⁵ This did not deter her from, in her own words, continuing to ‘uplift my people’.⁶⁶ She supported her grandchildren as they came of age in the political struggles of the late 1970s, particularly during the 1976 student uprisings, and continued to encourage women to ‘get up and get moving’.⁶⁷

After her death in 1979, Josie was laid to rest at Avalon Cemetery in Soweto alongside many known and unknown stalwarts of the struggle.

Josie or No Josie, the Struggle Will Go On

From high rates of violence to chronic unemployment, low wages, and precarious work, African people, and African women in particular, live in a state of profound crisis nested within a wider social context of the crisis of capitalism. In modern-day South Africa, feminism is routinely understood as a profession, a mode of academic and NGO work rather than a popular political project. Grassroots feminists are systemically ignored and undermined by elite discourse. Today, there is no organised popular national feminist movement that is advancing Josie’s legacy.

The stranglehold of elite feminism can only be challenged and undone by developing a genuinely popular feminism, a feminism that understands anti-capitalist political agency and organisation as essential to transforming our social reality. As Josie put it, ‘it is only when [the oppressed] are politically advanced that they can and will have advanced education[ally], socially, economically, and commercially.’ ⁶⁸ Unlike many women of her time, for Josie, being a member and leader in a communist organisation played a large part in enabling that political advance.

Throughout her life, Josie never wavered from her commitment to changing the social reality of the majority. In a letter to the apartheid government’s minister of justice protesting Josie’s banning from public political life, Congress Alliance activist and FEDSAW national secretary Helen Joseph described her as someone who ‘has always worked for the good of the people as whole’.⁶⁹ For the good of the people as a whole: that is the legacy of Josie Mpama.

Notes

Introduction

In this publication, we are setting out to recover histories, struggles, and resistance in Latin America and place ourselves in moments of the history of Nuestra América ¹– ‘Our America’ – when women have been on the front lines of the battle to build a more just world. This history encompasses an enormous diversity of sectors, geographies, climates, flavours, and sounds, an entire universe of people, of dissidents, who, step by step, have walked the path of history. We are setting out on a path to recover the history of struggles, resistance, insurrections, and revolutionary dreams that have been led by women and LGBTQ+ people throughout the region at different times in order to find the seeds of the popular Latin American feminisms that exist today.

These feminisms emerge from popular, collective struggles that are born as vital means of self-defence on the fringes of the peripheries. To speak of popular feminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean means thinking about all that women and LGBTQ+ people do every day as they fight for the common good in places where precariousness prevails. It is to speak of that intersection where the communal becomes a fundamental space to guarantee life, always in tension with the pedagogy of cruelty that governs our societies. Popular feminism raises the banner of the collective over the individual; it transforms everything that must be transformed for the decent life that the ‘nobodies’ deserve.

In addition to being organisers and leaders of national processes in various social sectors, popular feminists have set to work vigorously alongside hundreds of comrades to create and sustain a continental platform of social movements as part of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA (which translates as ‘dawn’). Founded one dawn on Venezuela’s Margarita Island by Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, ALBA is a polysemic concept that is dear to our region.

The continent’s platform of popular organisations, known as ALBA Movimientos, seeks to understand the continent’s current context through the eyes of struggle and mobilisation. Of course, in order to do this, it is essential to have material that reclaims the history of the struggles of the women and dissidents of Nuestra América who preceded what today is a struggle for the transformative power of history in every corner of our region.

Arlen Siu

The Mockingbird Tells of Arlen ²

Those who knew her say that, despite the times in which she lived, Arlen was a woman of revolutionary and advanced ideas whose intelligence was complemented by her musical talents playing the guitar, accordion, and piano as well as the gifts of writing, drawing, and painting. She was a poet, artist, intellectual, and revolutionary.

Arlen Siu was born in Jinotepe, in the department of Carazo in Nicaragua on 15 July 1955. She grew up in an intercultural family, her father a migrant of Chinese origin and her mother Nicaraguan. Considering the financial means of Arlen’s family and her intelligence, she could have achieved any of the goals that young women of her time and economic status set for themselves. However, she chose to be a guerrilla fighter, and, with that commitment, she decided to take to the mountains, where the cruelty of the Somoza dictatorship was most relentless. ³

Arlen was a gifted writer, and she used her words to express her indignation in the face of injustice. Among her most revealing pieces was the final letter she sent to her parents:

Mankind’s ⁴ determined struggle to achieve perfection is true love. We are more authentic insofar as we break down barriers and limitations, bravely and optimistically confronting the vicissitudes that appear along the way. One day, you come to discover that we are capable of more than what is asked of us, and that we can achieve what for some is forbidden or impossible.

With each of her revolutionary acts, Arlen became more authentic. Such was the case in December 1974, when after having accompanied over five hundred workers rebelling against the abuses committed by the textile company Sacos Centroamericanos, S.A. (SACSA) in Diriamba, Carazo, she organised study circles with worker leaders. In these circles, she made use of two communiqués issued by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) during their raid on Minister Chema Castillo’s house and during the release of Somoza’s captured henchmen in exchange for FSLN political prisoners.⁵ On 1 August 1975, Arlen was killed in action in El Sauce, León (in the west of Nicaragua) while covering for her comrades as they retreated during an unequal battle against three hundred armed national guards. Mario Estrada, Gilberto Rostrán, Julia Herrera de Pomares, Mercedes Reyes, Hugo Arévalo, and Juan and Leónidas Espinoza were also killed.

Arlen Siu did not live to see the triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution in 1979, but she nonetheless played a key role in the struggle and in organising workers and the population. Even after her death, she inspired the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (Rural Workers’ Association) in their work building a rural workers’ social movement through her poem María Rural (‘Rural María’).

Rural María

Dona Nina

‘I began my activism very early, without realising I was an activist, you know? As a feminist, from home, in the struggle for independence’. ⁶

-Dona Nina

Maria Madalena dos Santos, better known as Dona Nina, is seventy-three years old and has two daughters, three sons, three granddaughters, and two grandsons. She was born in the quilombola⁷community of Cafundó dos Crioulos in the city of Santa Maria da Vitória, Bahía State, where she began and continues her activism. Dona Nina is a rural quilombola woman, a popular educator, trade unionist, and the president of her community association.

Dona Nina became involved in organising around the struggle of rural women in the early 1980s following the attacks on peasants in her home region, including through land evictions, displacement caused by the construction of dams, and the extreme exploitation of their labour, which mostly fell on peasant women who, at the time, received a quarter of what men received for a day’s work. She later learned that the same phenomenon was taking place in several regions across the country, and that rural women were also organising there.

In the 1980s, there was a resurgence of popular organisations in Brazil. In Bahía, Dona Nina, together with other rural women, realised that they needed autonomous and self-organised processes; without this, their demands would not be included as part of broader struggles. So, she became one of the coordinators of the National Platform of Rural Women Workers (ANMTR) and actively participated in the struggles to ensure that social security programmes and protections would be included in the 1988 Constitution. She was also the coordinator of the national campaign ‘No undocumented rural workers’.

The fight for a better world led Dona Nina to travel all over Brazil and the world, where she participated in debates on the need for a global peasant organisation and in the first congresses of CLOC/La Vía Campesina.⁸Dona Nina was instrumental in the process to create the national Peasant Women’s Movement (MMC) in 2004, which emerged together with the international peasants’ movement. As the coordinator of peasant women in the northeast, she travelled to several states to discuss the importance of a national movement so that the feminist and peasant struggle would become a reality. Dona Nina recalls: ‘It was not easy; some people didn’t want it [to happen], and they got in the way, but we knew it was important that women be fully included in the term “peasant”. Today, we have achieved that’.

At the age of 73, Dona Nina continues to contribute to the political coordination of the MMC in Bahía. She is a guardian of indigenous seeds and of the Cerrado savanna, serving as inspiration for resistance and commitment to women’s struggles in the fields, forests, and wetlands. She is part of the living history of popular peasant feminism.

Las Bartolinas

‘The double discrimination we suffer as women and as Indigenous peasants in our families, communities, organisations, and society as a whole has led us to fight against the violation of our fundamental rights and to defend our full and equal participation in decision-making’.

–Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant Women of Bolivia

The Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant Women of Bolivia (whose members are known as ‘Las Bartolinas’) is the most influential women’s movement in Bolivia and is well-known far beyond the country’s borders.

The confederation, named in homage to the Aymara hero Bartolina Sisa (one of the most emblematic women of Latin America’s eighteenth century anti-colonial struggles), was founded on 10 January 1980 in a national congress, continuing the legacy of the decisive role that many women played through the peasant women’s unions during the period of military dictatorships. This movement emerged and developed as Bolivia rebuilt its democracy and as popular organisations began to regroup. It was created with the vision that rural women would fully participate in this process through their own organisation and would be able to fully participate in roadblocks, hunger strikes, marches, and other forms of collective action by peasants.

Through their actions, Las Bartolinas seek to reclaim land and food sovereignty as well as dignity among Bolivia’s peasant and Indigenous women. The confederation seeks the equal participation of women in political, social, and economic spaces through the Aymara framework of chacha warmi ⁹as a concept of gender equality. They also promote the ongoing education and training of women as the only way to free their minds from oppression and ignorance and achieve true freedom.

Las Bartolinas fight for the social, economic, political, and cultural advancement of peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Bolivian women. They also strive to build a political platform for peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Bolivian women based on their nationality, political programme, unity, reciprocity, and solidarity with the country’s labour and popular organisations.

Furthermore, they are part of the fight against illiteracy in the countryside, demanding public and free education for children in coordination with parents, teachers, and education authorities and promoting bonds of fraternity, solidarity, and reciprocity among the peasant and indigenous women and girls of Bolivia. This process must also defend fundamental rights, including women’s rights to education and food sovereignty, and guarantee gender equality and the full participation of all women.

Las Bartolinas also fight for land and territorial rights and ownership, which are key to the sovereignty of indigenous and rural peoples. In doing so, they seek to disseminate and reaffirm the cultural and historical identity of the indigenous peoples and nationalities of Bolivia in order to build a unified, plurinational state.

Three Periods in the History of ‘Bartolina’ Women

The Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant Women of Bolivia was shaped by a progression of events, beginning with its incipient debate on its role within the peasant movement. This included the need to build an autonomous organisation rather than join the existing organisation formed by men, the Unified Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (CSUTB). So, Las Bartolinas built their own identity as an autonomous movement of peasant women, forming their own confederation with the same influence and importance in the Bolivian sociopolitical scene.

The Bartolina Sisa Confederation soon took on a leading role in the country. In 1994, the confederation was among the organisations that founded the Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (IPSP), later to be known as the MAS-IPSP, with the aim of securing a leading role and direct participation in the country’s parliamentary politics. MAS-IPSP would later become the party through which the working, indigenous, and peasant classes came to power for over a decade beginning with the presidency of Evo Morales.

During this period, the organisation directly participated in the state and in forming public policy, such as seeking to guarantee the political participation of Bolivian women through a policy of gender parity. It has since become impossible to speak of Bolivian politics without recognising the pioneering role of Las Bartolinas. Today, women who are part of the organisation hold senior positions in the state and are leaders of regional politics.

Las Bartolinas’ leading role among Bolivian social movements and their influence on Bolivian public policy represent a huge step forward in terms of women’s political participation in the country. It is important for this successful example of women’s advancement in such key spaces to spread, but it is also the duty of all organisations to guarantee women the full exercise of their political rights not only in Bolivia, but across the Global South.

Back cover

Notes

Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle

Nela Martinez in August 1988, one month after the death of her husband Raymond Mériguet. 
Source: Nela Meriguet Martínez / Martínez-Meriguet Archive

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by national liberation struggles in the colonised countries of Africa and Asia. In Latin America, neo-colonial structures had subordinated the republics founded as independent countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century, cementing their subaltern position in the international division of labour.

During decades of global crisis (1914–1948), Latin America saw battles between an oligarchy that violently sought to make the working class pay the price of the economic meltdown and a left-wing tendency boosted by two processes: the growing peasant and trade union organisations on the one hand, and a radicalised middle class on the other. Observing the new forms of material dispossession that made the promises of republican democracy impossible, peasant and worker organisations advanced a discourse highlighting class conflict and patriarchal and neo-colonial domination. They also voiced new visions of the nation state and the perspectives for democratic and socialist internationalism against the unfolding fascism, inspired by the mobilisations and transformations of public power achieved by the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution.

The fight for equality and liberation under the leadership of working people is ongoing in the anti-imperialist struggles of our time. In a myriad of ways, women powerfully shaped and continue to shape this struggle against oligopolistic, patriarchal, racist, and neo-colonial capitalism. In the Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we present the stories of women in struggle who contributed not only to the wider arena of politics, but who also pioneered the establishment of women’s organisations, opening up paths of feminist resistance and struggle throughout the twentieth century.

Praxis, as a knowledge of theory and of organisational methods of struggle as they change and respond to history, gives sustenance to ongoing struggles to face oppression. As militants, we study the diverse organisational methods of these women not only to better understand their political contributions, but also to inspire us as we build the organisations necessary for our fight against oppression and exploitation today.

In this third study, we discuss the life and legacy of Nela Martínez Espinosa, an Ecuadorian fighter for the people. Nela was a writer and communist activist^[i] from an early age with extensive internationalist experience. As the first woman elected to Ecuador’s parliament, she created one of the country’s first mass women’s political organisations in 1938 and, as the first woman minister of the interior, she was effectively in charge of the country in the chaotic three days that followed the insurrection known as La Gloriosa, or the Glorious May Revolution, in May 1944.

Nela’s rich life-long activism teaches us about the history of women in local, national, and international struggles that linked women’s rights with anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles throughout the twentieth century. In a speech at Ecuador’s National Congress in 2003 (a year before her death), Nela spoke about becoming the first woman legislator in 1945:

I came [to the parliament] for the first time in a trance of my love for this homeland, which is still struggling with itself, but by then had been rescued from a dictatorship that intensified its oppression. Those of us who experienced the dangers of demanding a revolution which was subsequently denied to us were simply moved. A woman in Congress among those who spoke and not simply among those who listened? Those who ruled inherited the colonial way of thinking and acting […] which during the colony destroyed the culture […] of indigenous peoples to the point of becoming part of the norm, the way of life for those who later became the leaders of the republic. The practice that we are speaking of persisted in social norms and especially behaviour. That is why my presence was strange in the National Congress and, on welcoming it, political leaders for the first time also recognised women citizens in the upper echelons of power.

Early Years

Nela Martínez was born into a landowning and very religious family in 1912 in Cañar, a small town sheltered by the Andes in southern Ecuador. Her father, César Martínez, was a member of the Conservative Party. Her mother, Enriqueta Espinosa, was an educated woman with liberal tendencies who instilled a love of reading, knowledge, and culture in her fifteen children.

During her childhood, Nela grew close to the children of the indigenous workers on her father’s landed estate, who were subjected to the economic and racial exploitation inherited from the colonial period that continued in the republican era following independence from Spain. ‘Hence my devotion to indigenous issues’, Nela told Tania Laurini. ‘When I was very young, I saw that the world of indigenous peoples was very far removed from the world of landowners. Indigenous people were there, involved in everything, but were absent at the same time’. At the age of ten or eleven, Nela took part in a protest against her father carried out by indigenous farmworkers.^[ii]

At age twelve, Nela entered the Colegio de los Sagrados Corazones Catholic boarding school in the southern city of Cuenca. It was during this stage of her young adolescence that she first came into contact with revolutionary texts. The journal Amauta, edited and published by José Carlos Mariátegui in Lima (Peru) was one of the first revolutionary texts that she read. She spent the pocket money her family gave her on books and studied Andean socialism. She returned to her hometown in 1927 without a diploma, since women at that time were not allowed to graduate.

Plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ecuador in Quito in 1947. Three women were part of the meeting, seated from left to right: Luisa Gómez de la Torre, Dolores Cacuango, leader of the Ecuadorian Federation of Indians, and Nela Martínez Espinosa.
Source: M. Wengerow / Martínez-Meriguet Archive

The Liberal Revolution and the Crisis of the Radical Liberal Project

The Liberal Revolution of 1895, led by General Eloy Alfaro, had begun the arduous process of shaking the foundations of the landowning conservative state in Ecuador. This state was characterised by the subordination of the republic to the transnational church, censorship of the press and of the political representatives of the Ecuadorian Radical Liberal Party (PLRE) and radicalism, and the subjugation of servile indigenous communities in the Sierra region propelled by the dispossession of their ancestral land.

These new political horizons mobilised broad rural strata, urban masses, and even marginal sectors of the bourgeoisie. Successful coordination between these groups underpinned the military victory that marked a new course of state-building – one that was opposed to that of the traditional ultra-conservative and clerical landowning party. The impact of the liberal boom permeated the state and shaped the social identities of progressive sectors in the following decades. However, economic expansion based on cocoa production and export, as well as the financial and commercial dependence of Ecuadorian elites on foreign trade, characterised an even more pronounced oligarchy during the global crisis following World War I.

The political hatred of conservatives and the internal disputes within the PLRE led to the brutal assassination of Eloy Alfaro by a lynch mob in 1912. This incident did not put an end to the liberal regime, but it did initiate a period of recomposition of its internal forces. A new alliance between the oligarchs of the coastal region of the country – associated with commerce and banking – and the incipient bourgeoisie embedded in the structures of the PLRE caused the most progressive and revolutionary sectors of the workers, peasantry, and indigenous communities (best represented by Alfaro’s tendency) to react and question liberal hegemony.

The 1922 Guayaquil General Strike: The Power of Class-Conscious Organisations

Faced with growing inequality and the resulting popular discontent, the liberal government resorted to more violent and assiduous repression. In the port city of Guayaquil, home to the largest working-class population in the country, a successful general strike broke out, bringing together the demands of numerous professional sectors and the industrial proletariat. After the city was completely paralysed for days, the liberal government sent in the army to crush the strike, resulting in the massacre of hundreds of people on 15 November 1922. Joaquín Gallegos Lara immortalised this massacre of workers in his novel Las cruces sobre el agua (‘Crosses on the Water’), alluding to the corpses floating in the Guayas River.

Far from quelling discontent, this brutal episode radicalised the most organised and revolutionary sectors of the working class. In a context of growing class conflict, the repression cemented new political players who were emerging in the struggle. This included the indigenous movement, the peasant movement, the nascent industrial proletariat, and women, all of whom were previously deprived of political power and representation by the state and the oligarchy.

Some of these new figures presented a radical critique of the liberal project’s loss of direction. On the one hand, radical groups within the PLRE questioned the new alliances with the commercial and financial oligarchy and eventually joined the Ecuadorian Socialist Party. On the other hand, indigenous and peasant communities that had been dispossessed of land and were experiencing increasing pressure from powerful landowners (whether conservative or new landowners allied with the liberal elites) intensified their demands for political recognition from the liberal state. Thirdly, the urban working masses (the new industrial proletariat) developed new tools for organisation and struggle through the newly created sectoral and local trade unions, a process in which the Communist Party of Ecuador played a crucial role. Other sectors dissatisfied with the liberal regime fed into the progressive opposition, including broad sectors of teachers, young intellectuals, and progressive sectors of the army.

The Communist Party of Ecuador (PCE) was formed in 1931 from a split in the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE), founded in 1926. The dispute over whether or not to join the Third International was the final chapter in the growing difference of opinion between PSE leaders not only in the doctrinal and ideological spheres, but also in terms of organisation and tactics. After its formation, the PCE joined the Comintern.

The PSE had been a key player in the state reforms implemented through the newly formed Ministry of Social Security and Labour. These included redistributing land to indigenous communities; outlawing bonded labour on landed estates; enshrining labour rights; and ensuring representation of the working class, indigenous people, teachers, and public servants in the Senate. Despite their commitment to intervention from within the structures of the state to bring about radical democratic reform, the socialists were unable to contain the pressure from the elites to repress autonomous working-class organisations. Reformist aspirations for social justice, political representation, social and political rights, and the recognition of ancestral rights (in the case of indigenous sectors) were included in the 1928 Constitution, and socialist cadres and lawyers played a key role in putting these reforms into law.

Meanwhile, the PCE played an active role in organising both the urban and rural working class. Aware of the importance of strengthening organised action among the working class in order to fulfil the rights enshrined in the new Constitution, the communist leadership proposed working closely with the indigenous communities of the central highlands and the dispossessed peasant sectors; promoted links between sectors of the working class to strengthen solidarity between collectives and in the organisation of strikes both at the local level and in the trade union and professional sectors; and was key in the battle of ideas, developing a strong, critical press.

As an incipient political organisation, the PCE organised itself into local cells made up of a few members who were very active and well-connected between regions. This structure allowed party members to create links with a wide range of organisations of various kinds, including indigenous communities in the centre and north of the highlands and the coastal region, trade unions, and other associations. Some estimates suggest that the Party organised up to 600,000 peasants in 1943.^[iii] The Communist Party’s militant grassroots work from 1941, side by side with trade unions and peasant organisations in workplaces, communities, and gradually in institutions (often in coordination with the PSE, which had a greater number of cadres and institutional representation) placed it at the forefront of the efforts to gather the forces that would participate in the 1944 insurrection known as La Gloriosa, or the Glorious May Revolution.

Meeting of the Ecuadorian Women’s Alliance (AFE) at the Workers’ House, Quito. Seated at the centre is Nela Martínez and standing, first on the right, is Luisa Gómez de la Torre. 
Source: Pacheco / Martínez-Meriguet Archive

Activism First: Trade Unions, the Communist Party of Ecuador, and the Ecuadorian Indigenous Federation

In 1930, Nela Martínez visited Guayaquil with her mother. There, she met with Joaquín Gallegos Lara, which would change both of their lives forever. At the age of 21, Joaquín was already an established writer linked to the trade union world and a member of the Communist Party. Nela discovered a lifelong bond of shared activism with Gallegos, or a ‘love of the collective future’, as she put it.

In 1933, Nela moved to Ambato, a city in the central highlands, and got a modest job as a teacher. That year, she joined the Communist Party as the only woman in the local cell and began her political activity through intense grassroots organisational work with workers and peasants. During this period, she established relations with several trade unions, published radical revolutionary texts, and organised protests and demonstrations.

The physical distance between Nela and Joaquín did not prevent their relationship from becoming increasingly intimate on a personal level and more committed on a political level. For years, their correspondence was the mainstay of their love affair and the vehicle for the fruitful exchange of political ideas that enriched the dialogue between the highlands and the coastal region. In one of the letters that Nela wrote to Joaquín at the age of 19, she expressed her position on the situation of women, referring to her father’s attempt to marry her off to the son of a landowner:

He wants to trap me in the unconsciousness of the everyday routine, to make an irony of my thoughts – the few that he knows of me – as I resign myself to the reality of what I should be. He wants to give me a Catholic husband so that neither my children nor future generations will change, so that I too will be what my mother is, what the wretched women of this world are: the woman/victim, the woman/thing, the woman/slave. My flat refusal has exasperated him.^[iv]

Nela’s father never looked kindly on her relationship with Joaquín. Despite his objections, they married in Ambato in 1934. Shortly afterwards, Nela and Joaquín moved to Guayaquil, fleeing political persecution by the local authorities. Nela’s reputation as a communist activist, trade unionist, and agitator prevented her from getting a stable job. Despite the difficulties, the couple remained very politically active, working in both the highlands and the coastal region. Their role as leaders and organic intellectuals of the Communist Party – forging links and alliances with different sectors of the working class and the intelligentsia – was key to overcoming the sectoral and regional divisions that would make the united action of the working class possible.

In 1935, the PCE sent Nela to Quito to meet with different political sectors in the country. She decided to settle in the capital, and Joaquín followed her there shortly afterwards. Their relationship deteriorated and they ended up living separately, although they continued their marriage and political work.

That same year, Joaquín wrote the first chapters of a seminal work of Ecuadorian literature, Los Guandos, a moving account of the dispossession and subjugation of the indigenous people of the highlands, the brutality of the system of domination imposed by the landowning class, and the contradictions of modernisation. The novel, written jointly by Nela and Joaquín, is based on the violent exploitation of indigenous people that Nela witnessed in her childhood and youth. In a 1930 letter to her, Joaquín describes it as ‘An indigenous book. The first indigenous book that will have been made in our Ecuador. A new book. But it will not be my name alone that appears. We will write and publish it together’.^[v] Decades later, in the 1980s, Nela would finish writing and publish the text, which had remained unfinished when Joaquín died in 1947. The work forms part of the Ecuadorian literary style known as indigenista, in which non-indigenous authors write about indigenous people, seeking to defend them in the context of the struggles to recover their national legacy.^[vi]

After attempting suicide, Joaquín decided to return to Guayaquil in 1936 accompanied by his mother, who had always looked after him since he was an infant born with an illness that prevented him from walking. This new separation turned out to be definitive; Nela wrote to Joaquín expressing her wish for a divorce. However, the end of their marriage did not prevent them from continuing to share their activism and lives up until Joaquín’s death.

After the divorce, Nela continued her political work in the Communist Party and began a relationship with Ricardo Paredes, its first secretary general and the architect of the split with the PSE. She went on to raise their son alone, as Paredes, who was married, refused to get a divorce. As a single mother, Nela had to face the condemnation of a deeply conservative society, which she confronted from day one by walking openly in the street with her son.^[vii] She went to live with her friend Luisa Gómez de la Torre, also a teacher and PCE member, who helped her look after her son for a decade.

During those years, Nela was closely involved in the formation of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Federation (FEI), the first national organisation representing indigenous peoples in Ecuador. The FEI was formed in 1944 from various unions and organisations that had existed since the 1920s, which had fought against brutality towards indigenous peasants working on land owned by white Ecuadorians, demanding effective equality, the right to land, and to their identity. In 1930, a strike was organised at the Pesillo estate (located in Cayambe, in the highlands), which would become the founding event of the federation. The Communist Party was involved in this and subsequent mobilisations. It was in this process that Nela met indigenous leader Dolores Cacuango, known as ‘Mama Dolores de los indios’ (‘Mother Dolores of the Indians’), a key figure in the indigenous movement and the PCE.

Since Dolores Cacuango was illiterate, Nela acted as her secretary. During this period, Nela deepened her awareness of the importance of education as an emancipatory tool and process. As early as 1940, Dolores, Nela, and Luisa began to set up bilingual schools so that indigenous children could have a proper education. The schools were designed to educate children with the hope that they would then become not only teachers, but also leaders and activists, which would support the creation of tools to support popular mobilisation.

The FEI was founded by these indigenous groups that had mobilised as well as by some white and mixed-race Ecuadorians. There were many communist activists in both groups, evidence of the close relationship between the FEI and the PCE that existed since the FEI’s founding.

The Anti-Fascist Struggle and the Ecuadorian Women’s Alliance

From the 1930s, Nela Martínez was involved in the Ecuadorian anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian movement resisting the influence of Italian and Spanish fascists as well as German Nazis. The Nazi agenda was widely disseminated on the radio and in Ecuadorian universities, and German Nazi sympathisers had a strong business presence in the country, particularly in the oil industry. SS officers directed the operations of independent German spies and military strategists close to the Ecuadorian president’s office, who consulted them on how to structure the government and the army. General Franco’s fascist government was also influential in Ecuador through its ties with the Conservative Party. However, there was also a movement for a free Spain composed of Spaniards and Ecuadorians who opposed fascist Spain as well as various anti-fascist groups who collaborated and communicated with the British and Soviet governments in particular.

In 1941, the Anti-Totalitarian People’s Movement of Ecuador (MPAE), a left-wing anti-fascist organisation, was set up in Quito, mainly driven by the French anti-Nazi activist Raymond Mériguet. Nela, who became the secretary of organisation and propaganda for the MPAE, wrote about anti-fascism in various media and called for mobilisation in the popular assemblies organised by the movement. The assemblies saw anti-fascist activists of various tendencies – both Ecuadorians and foreigners – build unity against collaboration with the Axis powers. In 1942, Nela became the secretary of the MPAE’s Women’s Section.

As a member of both the central committee and the executive committee of the Communist Party, Nela firmly believed in the need for grassroots organisational work. Her involvement in this task challenged the party structures on more than one occasion, especially with regard to the active participation of women. As early as 1931, in a letter to Joaquín, she wrote:

The socialist ideology can only discover complete triumph in the idiosyncrasy of women by channelling them into its movement… Who are the first to launch their anathema against the new woman? To criticise her, to slander her, and to put up impossible barriers to her redeeming acts? Men.^[viii]

Based on the legitimacy she built through years of grassroots activism and her influence on public debate through articles in the press, Nela contributed to broadening spaces of unity and coordination, particularly with indigenous sectors and women. She supported the formation of autonomous organisations that would allow these excluded sectors’ voices to be heard. She was also aware of the importance of engaging other prominent regional communist leaders and activists in these spaces of unity.

Although women had significant participation and even leadership roles in working-class struggles in Ecuador, this was not reflected in the leadership of political parties. During her trip to Quito in 1935, Nela learned of the existence of right-wing and religious women’s organisations, but none that brought left-wing women together. So, she put into practice her vision of uniting all women from left-wing parties and different backgrounds to fight for common causes and participated in the founding of the Ecuadorian Women’s Alliance (AFE) in 1938. This was a broad and diverse platform of women from different social and political sectors, including progressive liberals who had fought for the right to women’s suffrage; indigenous leaders such as Dolores Cacuango; communists such as Nela; socialists; and workers and women from neighbourhood committees. Nela soon became general secretary and president of the organisation, which sought to further women’s political autonomy in order to express themselves in the national political sphere.^[ix]

The AFE’s philosophy included ‘equal economic, social, and political rights for all Ecuadorian women’. Ecuadorian women were the first in the region to secure the right to vote in 1929. As a result, this demand was not a focus of their political agenda as it was in the rest of the region in the 1930s and 1940s. The women of the AFE sought to unite all women’s forces (fuerzas femeninas) around the defence of women and the transformation of the entire country. They initially combined political struggle with social welfare campaigns, though these campaigns soon became political bodies of mutual support promoting the collectivisation of reproductive and care duties. This was the case with the creation of community kitchens, various workshops, and literacy training for women incarcerated in the García Moreno prison in Quito. The organisation was strengthened by the struggle for women’s labour rights in the midst of the national debate on the new Labour Code (1938), when it fought for equal pay for equal work, job security during pregnancy, maternity leave, and the creation of nurseries. Although they did not put it in such terms, at the time Ecuadorian women were already thinking about politics in terms of gender disparities.^[x]

As an organisation allied but not subject to the Communist Party structure, the AFE functioned until 1950, mainly in Quito, but it also sought to carry out activities in other parts of Ecuador and even abroad, with delegates in the US.

The Glorious May Revolution (1944)

Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Río, who became the president of Ecuador in 1940, was a representative of the new international financial elite that sought to reposition the power of capital over the reformist states of Latin America. This elite intended to put the brakes on the redistributive policies of taxation, nationalisation of strategic sectors, and the expansion of labour rights adopted by several states in the region (Ecuador and Mexico, among others) in the 1930s.

Left-wing opposition in the struggle against the return of the oligarchy was united by a number of factors: Arroyo del Río’s reactionary line, which went against the 1928 and 1938 constitutions; his enmity towards public employees in the national education sector and the universities; and his attacks on previously secured land and labour rights, together with the use of repressive force.^[xi]

In July 1941, Peru invaded Ecuador from the south and seized an area of Amazonian territory equivalent to almost half of the country. At the root of the conflict were the interests of European and North American companies in the rich oil deposits in the area. The conflict ended, the plunder confirmed by the 1942 signing of the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro, which established new borders. The Arroyo del Río government’s handling of the conflict was regarded as treason at a critical moment of the national mobilisation against the oligarchic government.

In the short period between 1943 and 1946, the process of building the autonomous power of Ecuador’s popular organisations accelerated. While in previous years efforts had been made to mobilise and organise the working class at the local level and on a sectoral basis, the priority now was to form alliances at the national level, seeking an accumulation of forces that would effectively confront the dominant blocs in the political and economic sphere. On the one hand, there was the Ecuadorian Workers’ Confederation (CTE), a broad alliance of trade unions and peasant organisations from all over the country. The CTE was the result of a long process of drawing up alliances and creating spaces for united action. On the other, there was the aforementioned Ecuadorian Indigenous Federation.

The revolutionary forces of the left, with the PCE on the frontlines, promoted the creation of a national front through their commitment to a national reconstruction project that would overcome feudal structures and boost the productive forces on the path to socialism. They not only called on the socialist and communist left, but also on the liberal followers of former President José María Velasco Ibarra and ‘conservative democrats’ to join them. They sought to fight the authoritarianism of Arroyo del Río; confront the crisis of the oligarchy and the threat of fascism; and advance the programme of national industrial development and the defence of democracy.

A result of these efforts was the formation of Ecuadorian Democratic Alliance (ADE), a coalition that included the conservative, independent radical liberal, socialist, and communist parties, as well as the National Democratic Front and Ecuadorian Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard platforms. The ADE drafted a programme that included the historical demands of excluded sectors and consolidated united action towards national reconstruction. The programme demanded popular democracy; guaranteed freedom of organisation and of the press; proposed economic organisation to increase productive capacity in both industry and agriculture; pledged to improve the living standards of the working class and peasantry and establish a living wage; advocated for the full ‘integration of indigenous peoples and the Montubio’; promoted access to education; called for the democratisation the Armed Forces; and encouraged continent-wide collaboration against fascist forces.^[xii]

It was in this context that a major uprising took place on 28 May 1944 against the Arroyo del Río government, organised through the ADE and led by the popular forces: workers, students, indigenous people, and women. On 29 May, President Arroyo took refuge in the Colombian Embassy. The national police then visited the ADE headquarters to indicate that they would not attack, though they would defend themselves if necessary, and finally, the military recognised the right to rebellion and the ADE leadership. Nela Martínez identified the power vacuum and decided to occupy the Government Palace accompanied by students, where she served as the minister of the interior and led the country for three epic days.

From the Ministry I ordered the release of prisoners, mainly those of the anti-fascist movement, who were in different provinces or imprisoned in the East for fighting against the Arroyo del Río regime. The whole country was informed that ADE had taken over the Presidency of the Republic; we asked that local governments be organised to prevent the counterrevolution from acting – although that term is not precise. I ordered what had to be done: the coordination of all activity on a national scale.^[xiii]

When José María Velasco Ibarra – who was in the north of the country at the time of the uprising – finally arrived and directly installed himself in power instead of calling elections, Nela realised that the popular revolt had been betrayed and left the palace without accepting a government post. Velasco immediately closed the public office where she worked, leaving her unemployed.

A constituent assembly made up of representatives of workers and previously excluded social sectors enacted a new constitution in 1945. This enshrined social rights in favour of the working class and indigenous people, subordinating private property to the public interest and recognising ancestral rights to community land. The new constitution also guaranteed parliamentary representation for workers, indigenous people, educators, and other previously excluded sectors through the ‘functional system’ of voting.

Led by Nela, AFE women sought formal political representation in the Constituent Assembly, which they had to fight for despite already having the right to vote and having actively participated in La Gloriosa. At the assembly held at the Ecuadorian Workers’ Confederation headquarters to nominate candidates for the Constituent Assembly, communist leaders conspired to ensure that the candidacy for assemblywoman did not go to Nela, despite the support she enjoyed. However, this did not stop her: she ran as a substitute assembly member and won the seat. She finally substituted the main assembly member and became Ecuador’s first woman legislator in 1945. This was perhaps the first major internal battle that Nela had to fight against the very clear gender discrimination of her own PCE comrades.

Ibarra took advantage of the infighting in the multi-party, cross-class ADE and manoeuvred to abolish the 1945 Constitution and proclaim himself dictator in 1946. Though the counterrevolution he led helped consolidate the power of conservative sectors within the state, it did not immediately weaken the momentum of the popular organisation that had built up over the previous two decades.

Speech by Nela Martínez at the First Congress of Working Women in Quito, 1956. 
Source: Pacheco / Martínez-Meriguet Archive

An Internationalist Communist Activist

After the defeat of the popular forces in May 1944, Nela distanced herself completely from the government and devoted many years to the internationalist struggle. On a long tour of several Central American countries that began with an invitation to the Inter-American Congress of Women in Guatemala in 1946, Nela clandestinely helped restructure the country’s communist party, which had been banned by the dictatorship, and founded the Women’s Alliance (Alianza Femenina), a national women’s organisation. In Honduras and Nicaragua, she experienced the repression of communist activists first-hand. In Costa Rica and Panama, Nela came into contact with communist parties that were more organised and able to participate in their countries’ politics. In Colombia, she played an important role in establishing the Women’s Alliance in the country.

In 1949, Nela began a year-long stay in Europe. She travelled to Paris as a representative of Ecuadorian communist women, invited by the International Women’s Federation, where she contributed to the organisation of the First World Peace Congress. She was then invited to take part in the international gathering of communist women held in Moscow. This trip enabled Nela to meet communist leaders and activists not only from various European countries but also from Cuba, which was a stopover on her transatlantic journey. She strengthened these ties even further after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

After her travels, Nela returned to her activism in the Communist Party and the AFE. Together with Dolores Cacuango, Luisa Gómez de la Torre, and other communist activists, she worked on the consolidation of indigenous schools in Cayambe in the following years.

In 1950, Nela married French communist and anti-fascist activist Raymond Mériguet, one of the founders and secretary general of the Anti-Totalitarian People’s Movement of Ecuador (MPAE). Mériguet had settled in Ecuador in the 1930s and the two had known each other since the creation of the MPAE. They had three children together and shared their lives and activism until Mériguet’s death in 1988.

The Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Women

In the 1950s and 60s, the PCE faced great tension over the questions of armed struggle and the participation of women and youth in the party. Stalin’s death in 1953 called into question the ‘cult of the leader’. In 1959, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution sparked heated debates about armed struggle. The PCE, which at its 1962 Congress defined armed struggle as the road to revolution, in 1964 ultimately disciplined and expelled party members who had organised an attempt to create a guerrilla force in 1962 with the mass front of the party’s youth, the Revolutionary Union of the Ecuadorian Youth (URJE).

Between 1954 and 1955, three projects to create a women’s organisation were presented to the PCE Central Committee, two of which were proposed by the party’s National Women’s Commission (most likely drafted by Nela Martínez and Luisa Gómez de la Torre): the Organisation of Democratic Women and then the Democratic Federation of Ecuadorian Women. For their part, Pedro Saad and Rafael Echeverría of the PCE Central Committee presented the Organisational Plan for Work among Women. The Democratic Union of Ecuadorian Women was created, though there is very little information available about it today.^[xiv]

In an incident often referred to as ‘internal clashes with members of the Central Committee’, the details of which are largely unknown, Nela was suspended from the PCE in 1957. ^[xv] In the following years, she dedicated herself to feminist organising and solidarity with refugees fleeing from various dictatorships on the continent in addition to caring for her three young children.

The PCE maintained its alignment with the USSR as well as its position of creating alliances with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie so that it could participate in elections. From this period on, the PCE harshly criticised the Chinese Communist Party on several occasions; it also expelled several party members who were labelled ultra-leftists. In 1964, a group of cadres and activists split from the PCE to create the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador, a Maoist tendency.

Over time, the PCE gave women a greater (albeit still limited) role in the party, propelled by the influence of women leaders of the Cuban Revolution and the creation of the Federation of Cuban Women, as well as Vietnamese women guerrillas. The party understood that the role of women, like that of all members, was to participate in class struggle in order to put an end to capitalism. However, the specific problems experienced by women were reduced to the struggle for peace and their role as mothers and, therefore, protectors of children. The PCE always believed that any women’s organisation should be under the tutelage of the Central Committee, both because of the risk of factionalism and because it feared the reformist influence of bourgeois feminism.^[xvi] Though the party was committed to building mass women’s fronts, there were no proposals at the time regarding the need to improve women’s political representation or the conditions for their participation, nor was the sexual division of labour questioned.

The AFE only functioned until the early 1950s, but many of the women who founded it remained politically active. In 1962, they founded the Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Women (URME), strengthening the links with university students and trade unionists that they had established earlier. Its objective was ‘the effective liberation of Ecuadorian women that would allow them to exercise their rights as citizens without restrictions or limitations; the real independence of Ecuador, in full exercise of its sovereignty; [and] popular sovereignty as a political, social, and economic expression of a people whose rights have been systematically ignored or betrayed’.^[xvii]

The URME was created without a classic hierarchical structure, organising its work around commissions. The organisation did not identify itself as feminist; in fact, its members rejected the concept outright as bourgeois and reformist, a view generally shared among the Ecuadorian left at the time.

On 8 March 1963, the URME, the United Committee for Peace and Sovereignty, and the Democratic Union of Ecuadorian Women called a meeting on International Women’s Day, in which members of the socialist, revolutionary socialist, and communist parties participated in addition to the convening organisations. The meeting was interrupted by an altercation with members of the University Women’s Alliance (AFU), an organisation created by the PCE in 1952. According to the URME, its members attended the meeting with the intention of sabotaging it. Following this incident, in March 1963 the PCE announced that Nela was no longer a party member. She was accused of not asking to be reinstated after her suspension in 1957, of having ‘an attitude contrary to the party line’, and of attacking party leaders. The two other members of her local cell, Primitivo Barreto and Modesto Rivera, faced the same situation. Meanwhile, Jaime Galarza and José María Roura were expelled from the party, both accused of being factionalists, with Galarza described as an ultra-leftist and María as a Maoist. According to the leaders of the URME and especially Nela, the conflict lay in the fact that they had refused to allow the women’s organisation to be completely under the aegis of the PCE Central Committee. However, Nela and her cell had long-standing differences with the Central Committee over the relationship between the PCE and other political forces, which they believed was influenced by Browderism.^[xviii]

Internationally, the URME established formal relations with the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a global communist women’s organisation created in 1945 that served as the PCE’s greatest influence on communist women as well as their demands and forms of organisation until the 1970s. This affiliation was a new source of conflict with the PCE, which considered itself to be the only legitimate representative of the WIDF in Ecuador.

Nela wrote regularly for Nuestra Palabra (‘Our Word’), the official publication of URME, founded in 1963. The magazine represented a media milestone of the Ecuadorian women’s movement that not only published articles about the situation of women – including issues such as the double discrimination against Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous women – but also about the most significant national affairs. The leading article in its first issue stated the organisation’s ideology:

NUESTRA PALABRA comes from a centuries-old silence, from centuries of servitude, from a pain that weighs on us as part of a long-suffering people, the burden of which increases when one is a woman. We have to speak Our Word to express a thought: the liberation of women has to be the work of women themselves. Our voice has been silenced, unheeded, vilified. The hallmark of an unjust society has weighed like a tombstone on the destiny of Ecuadorian women. The survival of patriarchy and feudalism, bourgeois prejudices, and the selfishness of the ruling class extend to all sectors, even to those who, due to their revolutionary character, should be the first to clear the cobwebs from their minds.^[xix]

Nuestra Palabra ceased publication after four issues, when the fifth issue was stopped at the printers following a coup d’état. The military junta that took over began to repress all left-wing organisations, but especially communist ones, officially declaring communism and the PCE illegal. The URME had to go underground, and several activists were forced into hiding or exile. Nela took refuge with her three young children in her mother’s home near to her hometown, Cañar.

The URME remained active until 1966 – the same year that the dictatorship ended – beyond the guardianship that the PCE tried to exercise through some of its members. URME members continued to meet and distribute pamphlets of resistance in defence of people detained and persecuted; against US imperialism, clearly reflected in the actions of the military junta; rejecting the blockade against Cuba; and in favour of sovereignty, peace, and world disarmament. They constantly collaborated with other women’s organisations such as the Women’s Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, the National Women’s Front against the Dictatorship, and the Human Rights Commission. The motives for the dissolution of the organisation are unclear.

Class in one of the bilingual schools for indigenous people, created by the Ecuadorian Federation of Indians in Cayambe, which Luisa Gómez de la Torre and Nela Martínez helped form.
Source: Blomberg / Martínez-Meriguet Archive

The Struggle against Dictatorships and Solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution

The Martínez-Mériguet household always welcomed political refugees from the various dictatorships that ravaged Latin America, especially during the 1970s. In 1983, Nela actively participated in the formation of the Women’s Continental Front for Peace and against Intervention. She was part of the coordinating committee of this platform to condemn the US interventionist plan both in Ecuador and internationally. The Front was founded in the midst of Latin American international solidarity with Cuba, under a blockade but victorious; Nicaragua, suffering the war imposed by Reagan; Guatemala and El Salvador, immersed in a heroic struggle for the rights of their peoples; Chile, under the cruel dictatorship of Pinochet; and Argentina, with its civic-military dictatorship that disappeared and detained thirty thousand people.

The international meeting ratified four key points:

1. To affirm the solidarity that women build in their daily lives.
2. To build strong and combative anti-imperialism.
3. To require self-determination.
4. To strengthen women’s self-esteem and the will to fight against all forms of discrimination, and to build the awareness of the status of women.

During the 1980s, the committee also called on the women of Latin America to recognise and honour South American independence heroine and native of Quito, Manuela Sáenz, given her contributions both as a politician and in the battlefield.

Solidarity with Cuba

In 1977, Nela founded the José Martí Cultural Institute together with other intellectuals. In 1979, after the return to democracy following the last period of dictatorship (1971–1979), Ecuador resumed diplomatic relations with Cuba. Nela returned the Cuban flag that had flown at the Cuban embassy until Ecuador broke off diplomatic relations in 1962 (under pressure from the United States) to the new Cuban ambassador.

She supported the initiative led by Oswaldo Guayasamín to create the National Coordinating Committee for Ecuadorian Friendship and Solidarity with Cuba in 1992, which she chaired for several years. Guayasamín was the most important Ecuadorian painter of the last century, had close ties to the Cuban Revolution, and was a prominent member of the José Martí Cultural Institute.

Nela also founded the Ecuadorian-Nicaraguan Casa de la Amistad in solidarity with Nicaragua and continued the work of the Anti-imperialist Tribunal of Our America.^[xx]

Throughout her life, Nela wrote not only articles and essays, but also poetry and some short stories. Her texts were sometimes published in newspapers, but above all in communist publications and magazines and those of the various feminist and anti-fascist organisations in which she was active. Often (more than a hundred times, as she noted in an interview), she published under pseudonyms. Whenever one of the frequent dictatorships or authoritarian governments in Ecuador discovered that it was her – a communist woman – who was writing under a certain pseudonym, that pseudonym was banned, and she had to invent a new one.

Opposition to the Military Base in Manta and Plan Colombia

Nela remained active until her final days. In the 1990s, she opposed Ecuador’s participation in Plan Colombia, an initiative of the US as part of what it called the War on Drugs but what was in reality another step in its constant attempts at the geopolitical control of Latin America, in this case through the penetration of police forces and armies.

In 2000, as president of the Women’s Continental Front for Peace and against Intervention, Nela participated in a lawsuit to oppose the establishment of a US military base in the port of Manta. Though the base was built, it had to be dismantled following the approval in 2008 of a new constitution prohibiting foreign military bases on Ecuadorian territory. Upon receiving the Dr. Matilde Hidalgo de Prócel Award in May 2003, Nela stated:

Colonisation returns. Concretely, the land of the fighter and president Eloy Alfaro is North American today. Manta is a base for ships and implements of war; it is on loan for the new Yankee onslaught. So too is Esmeraldas and all its bay and possibly the Galapagos. We, the survivors, learned – in my case in a convent school – to love the exploits of Bolívar and his armies of patriots. How will we escape this colonisation? How can we justify ourselves in the face of our cowardice?^[xxi]

In the 1980s, an illness left Nela almost paralysed, but she managed to recover thanks to her enormous efforts that included two years of intense rehabilitation. Despite her illness, she worked hard for the decades that followed.

In 2004, already quite ill, Nela travelled to Havana for medical treatment. She died there in July of the same year. Her ashes lie in both Havana and Quito, and she received heartfelt tributes in both countries.

Women of the Revolutionary Union of Women of Ecuador (URME) in Quito, 1963.
Source: Utreras / Martínez-Meriguet Archive

Acknowledgments

This study was conducted by a team composed of Pilar Troya from Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research, historian Valeria Coronel, and Daniela Schroder, and Iván Orosa who were part of the research group on Nela Martínez formed during the 2020 course offered by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the International Peoples’ Assembly entitled ‘Marxism and National Liberation’.

This is a joint publication with the Martínez-Meriguet Archive, who we thank for their great openness and for the dedicated collaboration of Nela Meriguet Martínez.

Women from various political movements in the Independence Square in Quito, rejecting the presence of foreign military bases in Ecuador, circa 2000.
Source: Martínez-Meriguet Archive

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Letter from Nela Martínez to Joaquín Gallegos, 1 January 1930. Document N-19300101, Collection of letters between Nela Martínez Espinosa and Joaquín Gallegos Lara. Martínez Meriguet Archive, Quito.

Letter from Nela Martínez to Joaquín Gallegos, 2 January 1932. Document N-19320102, Collection of letters between Nela Martínez Espinosa and Joaquín Gallegos Lara. Martínez Meriguet Archive, Quito.

Letter from Joaquín Gallegos to Nela Martínez, 23 November 1930. Document J-19301123, Collection of letters between Nela Martínez Espinosa and Joaquín Gallegos Lara. Martínez Meriguet Archive, Quito.

‘Manifiesto del Comité Ecuatoriano por la Paz y la Soberanía’ [Manifesto of the Ecuadorian Committee for Peace and Sovereignty], 4 July 2001. https://www.voltairenet.org/article121693.html.

‘Prólogo’ [Prologue]. In Historia del movimiento obrero ecuatoriano, Segunda parte, Patricio Ycaza. Quito: Centro de Investigación de los Movimientos Sociales del Ecuador (CEDIME) – Centro de Investigaciones CIUDAD, 1991.

Martínez, Nela, and Costales, Ximena. Yo siempre he sido Nela Martínez Espinosa. Una autobiografía hablada [I Have Always Been Nela Martínez Espinosa: A Spoken Autobiography]. Quito: Universidad Nacional de Educación,

Mériguet Cousségal, Raymond. Antinazismo en el Ecuador. Años 1941-1944 [Anti-Nazism in Ecuador: Years 1941-1944]. Quito: Self-published, 1988.

Mériguet Calle, Pablo Raymond. ‘Antifascismo en el Ecuador (1941-1944): Historia del Movimiento Popular Antitotalitario del Ecuador y del Movimiento Antifascista del Ecuador’ [Anti-fascism in Ecuador (1941-1944): A History of the Popular Anti-totalitarian Movement of Ecuador and the Anti-fascist Movement of Ecuador]. BA diss., Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, 2013.

Mora, Galo. Revolucionarias del siglo XX [Revolutionary Women of the 20th Century]. Quito: Ministerio del Trabajo, 2015.

Muñoz Vicuña, Elías. Temas obreros [Labour Issues]. Guayaquil: Departamento de Publicaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas de la Universidad de Guayaquil, 1986.

Prashad, Vijay. ‘Belgrade, the 1961 Non-aligned Movement Conference’, and ‘Havana, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference.’ In The Darker Nations, A People’s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press, 2007.

Romo-Leroux , Ketty. ‘Nela Martínez Espinosa, revolucionaria ejemplar’ [Nela Martínez Espinosa: An exemplary revolutionary]. El Telégrafo, 18 February 2016. https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/columnistas/15/nela-martinez-espinosa-revolucionaria-ejemplar.

Rodas, Germán. La izquierda ecuatoriana en el siglo XX [The Ecuadorian Left in the 20th Century]. Quito: Editorial Abya Yala, 2000.

Salazar-Cortez, Tatiana.

‘La experiencia militante de la Unión Revolucionaria de Mujeres del Ecuador (URME), 1962-1966’ [The militant experience of the Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Women (URME), 1962-1966]. MA diss., Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017a.

‘La militancia política femenina en la izquierda marxista ecuatoriana de la década de los sesenta: La URME y el PCE’ [Women’s political activism in the Ecuadorian Marxist left of the 1960s: The URME and the PCE], Procesos: revista ecuatoriana de historia 46, 2017b.

‘Una lectura a la versátil militancia de la Alianza Femenina Ecuatoriana, 1938-1950’ [A reading of the versatile activism of the Ecuadorian Women’s Alliance, 1938-1950], Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social, no. 11 (2018): 164-186.

‘Ecuatorianas comunistas entre las décadas de los 60 y 70: estrategias locales para intereses internacionales’ [Communist Ecuadorian women in the 1960s and 1970s: Local strategies for international interests]. Crisol. Las mujeres en los Andes (siglos XIX-XXI): entre la participación y la disputa, no. 20 (2022).

Ycaza, Patricio. Historia del movimiento obrero ecuatoriano. Segunda parte [History of the Ecuadorian Labour Movement. Second Part]. Quito: Centro de Investigación de los Movimientos Sociales del Ecuador (CEDIME) and Centro de Investigaciones (CIUDAD), 1991.

ENDNOTES

^[i] Translator’s note: In this text, militante in the original Spanish is translated as ‘activist’ or ‘party member’. In Spanish, militante is commonly used to refer to someone who is part of an organisation and is fully committed and does not carry the carry the connotation of armed struggle as in some parts of the world.

^[ii] Tania Laurini, ‘Ser mujer y rebelde nunca fue fácil’ [Being a woman and a rebel was never easy], Explored, 9 March 1992, https://hoy.tawsa.com/noticias-ecuador/nacer-en-1912-ser-mujer-y-ser-rebelde-nunca-fue-facil-61358.html.

^[iii] Valeria Coronel, El Estado Indoamericano: reforma, democracia y socialismo en el Ecuador de entreguerras [The Indo-American State: Reform, Democracy and Socialism in Interwar Ecuador] (Quito: FLACSO, Colección Atrio, 2022 [forthcoming]).

^[iv] Letter from Nela Martínez to Joaquín Gallegos, 2 January 1932. N-19320102, Collection of letters between Nela Martínez Espinosa and Joaquín Gallegos Lara. Martínez Mériguet Archive, Quito.

^[v] Letter from Joaquín Gallegos to Nela Martínez, 23 November 1930. Document J-19301123, Collection of letters between Nela Martínez Espinosa and Joaquín Gallegos Lara. Martinez Mériguet Archive, Quito.

^[vi] Translator’s note: indigenista from indigenismo refer to a broad movement covering politics, social sciences, literature and the arts, concerned with the status and problems of indigenous peoples in Latin American societies.

^[vii]Nela Martínez and Ximena Costales, ‘Yo siempre he sido Nela Martínez Espinosa. Una autobiografía hablada’ [I Have Always Been Nela Martínez Espinosa: A Spoken Autobiography] (Quito: Universidad Nacional de Educación, 2018).

^[viii] Letter from Nela Martínez to Joaquín Gallegos, 1 January 1930. Document N-19300101, Collection of letters between Nela Martínez Espinosa and Joaquín Gallegos Lara. Martinez Mériguet Archive, Quito.

^[ix]Tatiana Salazar-Cortez, ‘Una lectura a la versátil militancia de la Alianza Femenina Ecuatorana, 1938–1950’ [A reading of the versatile activism of the Ecuadorian Women’s Alliance, 1938–1950], Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social, no. 11 (2018): 164–186.

^[x] Tatiana Salazar-Cortez, ‘La experiencia militante de la Unión Revolucionaria de Mujeres del Ecuador (URME), 1962–1966’ [The militant experience of the Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Women (URME), 1962–1966], MA diss., Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017a.

^[xi] Coronel, El Estado Indoamericano.

^[xii] Translator’s note: The Montubios are an ethnic minority of mixed ancestry from the coastal region of Ecuador dedicated to agricultural work.

^[xiii] Nela Martínez and Ximena Costales, ‘Yo siempre he sido Nela Martínez Espinosa’.

Nela Martínez and Ximena Costales, ‘Yo siempre he sido Nela Martínez Espinosa’.

^[xiv] Tatiana Salazar-Cortez, ‘La militancia política femenina en la izquierda marxista ecuatoriana de la década de los sesenta: La URME y el PCE’ [Women’s political activism in the Ecuadorian Marxist left of the 1960s: The URME and the PCE], Procesos: revista ecuatoriana de historia 46, 2017b.

^[xv] Ibid.

^[xvi] Salazar-Cortez, ‘La militancia política femenina en la izquierda marxista ecuatoriana de la década de los sesenta: La URME y el PCE’; Salazar-Cortez, ‘Una lectura a la versátil militancia de la Alianza Femenina Ecuatoriana, 1938–1950,’ 164–186.

^[xvii] Statute as cited in: Salazar-Cortez, ‘La experiencia militante de la Unión Revolucionaria de Mujeres del Ecuador (URME), 1962–1966’.

^[xviii] Browderism was a short-lived Marxist tendency that argued for the need for communist parties to make alliances and create cross-class fronts with governments and sectors of the centre and right in order to confront the threat of fascism. Its name derives from that of the general secretary (1930–1945) and chairman (1932–1945) of the Communist Party USA, Earl Browder. This tendency was especially influential in Latin America. Nela Martínez later wrote an article on the subject entitled ‘Pedro Saad y el browderismo’ (‘Pedro Saad and Browderism’), published in Mañana, Época III, No. 225, 11 January 1968, p. 16. (cited in Ycaza, 1991).

^[xix] Nela Martínez and Ximena Costales, ‘Yo siempre he sido Nela Martínez Espinosa’.

^[xx] Translator’s note: Nuestra América, or ‘Our America’, is a construct linked to promoting the regional integration of Central and South America and forging a Latin American identity as a project opposed to European and US cultural imperialism. The concept stems from Cuban national hero José Martí’s 1891 essay of the same title.

^[xxi] Speech on receiving this award granted by the National Congress (now the National Assembly) of Ecuador, which bears the name of the first woman to vote in Ecuador (1924), who, in addition to being a pioneer in the struggle for women’s suffrage (secured in 1929), was the first woman doctor and the first woman candidate and elected city councilor in the country.

Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle

Women and Secularism, a book by vice president of AIDWA in Tamil Nadu Mythili Sivaraman. Both the text and illustration address the importance of secularism for women’s rights.

The twentieth century was marked by national liberation struggles that emerged in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin America where neo-colonial structures had subordinated the formally independent countries. The achievements of the Russian Revolution in 1917 inspired the peasantry and the working class across the Global South. The fight for equality and liberation under the leadership of working people are ongoing in the anti-imperialist struggles of our time. Women, in a myriad of ways, powerfully shaped and continue to shape all of these struggles.

In the Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we will present the stories of women in struggle who contributed not only to the wider arena of politics, but who also pioneered the establishment of women’s organisations, opening up paths of feminist resistance and struggle throughout the twentieth century.

Praxis, as a knowledge of theory and of organisational methods of struggle as they change and respond to history, gives sustenance to ongoing struggles to face oppression. As militants, we study the diverse organisational methods of these women not only to better understand their political contributions, but also to inspire us as we build the organisations necessary for our fight against oppression and exploitation today.

In this second study, we discuss the life and legacy of Kanak Mukherjee, a fighter for the people and people’s struggles who was born in undivided Bengal, India, in 1921. The rich trajectory of her activism teaches us about the history of women organising in local, national, and international struggles that linked women’s rights to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles throughout the twentieth century. In Mukherjee’s own words: ‘We cannot see the question of women’s rights in isolation. The roots of women’s subjugation and the discriminations against them lie in class exploitation’.

A Lifelong Commitment to Activism 

Kanak Mukherjee was born Kanak Dasgupta in 1921 in Benda, a small locality in the Jessore district of east Bengal, India (now part of Bangladesh), to an educated nationalist family. She entered the Freedom Movement at the age of ten when she joined the Salt Satyagraha agitation with her family. The entire nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in India were brimming with social reform movements where debates on gender and the issues of women’s rights were at the centre stage. The province of Bengal was an epicentre of such activities. This clearly had a strong impression on Kanak’s young mind, as she was deeply moved by and sympathetic towards many of her very close relatives who became widows at a very early age. In her autobiography, she recalls the agony of one of her cousins who was essentially forced to live the life of a recluse.[1] This was perhaps Kanak’s earliest conscious encounter with patriarchy operating under the garb of tradition and religion.

Kanak also participated in the more clandestine anti-colonial movements that sought to directly oppose the British occupation of India. Her brother and cousin, members of an armed revolutionary organisation, hid their weaponry in the house. As a child, Kanak sometimes kept watch for authorities while they held meetings. During this period, women moved from being supporters of anti-colonial sabotage activities to becoming key members in various forms of militant direct action, from transporting weapons to distributing pamphlets, writing articles, and becoming active participants. There were many clandestine armed groups, such as Yugantar and Anushilan Samiti, which were active in Bengal in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Their members mainly came from the ranks of urban, educated, and unemployed youth – including unmarried young women – and they mostly carried out isolated killings of colonial British officers. Gradually realising both the limitation of these kinds of activities to effectively fight colonialism and the need for wider mass action, many of the members of these groups joined the budding communist movement in India in the decades following its formation in 1920.

While Kanak was in middle school, she joined underground communist study circles to read and discuss core Marxist texts. In an interview conducted in 2001, she reflected on the struggle to gain her political education:

There was the period of the underground Party – ki kosto amader korte hoyechhe ma (‘what pains we had to take, mother’). These days you get all kinds of political literature, in English and Bengali, in huge numbers, you get so many daily papers, so many meetings, so many public speeches – you have such opportunities for increasing your political consciousness. For us, they gave us one Communist Manifesto, which you had to keep hidden… that was in English, and I was then in class eight or nine… Deep at night, when others were asleep, I would read the Manifesto by the light of a lamp, and with a dictionary by my side.[2]

In 1937, Mukherjee joined Bethune College in Calcutta (now Kolkata), part of the University of Calcutta. Like many of the communist women leaders from this period, she began by working through communist mass organisations, such as the All India Students’ Federation (AISF). This was the path for both Renu Chakravartti and Kanak Mukherjee. In 1938, at the age of seventeen, Mukherjee joined the Communist Party of India (CPI), becoming one of its first women members in Bengal. Renu Chakravartti, another early member of the CPI who was only four years older than her, recounted her impression of Mukherjee during this time as ‘a tiny, thin, live-wire girl’.[3] She was also the only woman on the executive board of the Bengal Provincial Students’ Federation. Apart from the working-class movement, left-leaning women’s and students’ mass organisations were the two most significant political forces that contributed to the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle.

Communist women such as Latika Sen, Manikuntala Sen, and Kalpana Dutta Joshi would later take leadership in building the women’s mass movement. Though there was a rise in women’s participation in public life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, joining politics and becoming a full-time activist was not easy for women, nor was it well accepted by family members. Shyamoli Gupta, the state secretary of the West Bengal Democratic Women’s Association and editor of Eksathe, a journal started by Mukherjee, said that this complexity was prominent in Mukherjee’s own life. Despite the lack of family support, Mukherjee continued her political activism out of her sheer conviction and indomitable commitment to revolutionary working-class politics.[4]

Communist and mass movements that were sympathetic to the cause of the working class and peasantry experienced substantial growth during the 1920s and 1930s. Calcutta, as one of the prime colonial metropolises of the British Empire, saw a huge influx of migrants from across the country. People belonging to varied ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds came to the city in search of jobs, higher education, political activism, and intellectual pursuits. For two decades, the city witnessed what has been termed a ‘strike wave’ due to strong trade union and militant working-class resistance, especially after the First World War. The rise in prices for basic goods, massive unemployment, poor living conditions of the propertyless, rampant racism, and social alienation gave these strikes a wider dimension.[5] Mukherjee arrived in this vibrant city not only in pursuit of higher education, but also to be part of the wider anti-colonial working-class struggle. Along with continuing her work organising students in Bengal, Kanak would volunteer with the literacy campaign undertaken by trade union leaders in Kashipur, one of the industrial pockets where these migrant labourers lived. in order to teach migrant labourers to read and write in their own language.

The cover of an All India Democratic Women’s Association pamphlet in Tamil Nadu from the late 1980s. The organisation has long been fighting dowry murders by burning, which are often falsely blamed on kerosine stove explosions. The text reads ‘We are Being Consumed by Fire, Let the Volcano Erupt!’

Living in Calcutta was not easy for political activists – especially for communists. Much of the Communist Party’s work was underground. Landowners would not allow communists to rent from them once they learned of their party affiliation/membership; many party workers, both male and female, lived in the houses of party sympathisers. With colonial masters constantly hunting for them, their stay was never without incident, and they frequently had to move. This harassment was extended to those who gave refuge to communists. As a result, communes developed to provide stable living conditions for party cadres.[6]

Like many communists in that era, Kanak lived in the houses of active party workers after reaching Calcutta. She later moved to a commune in central Calcutta where she would meet Muzaffar Ahmad (‘Kakababu’), one of the stalwart leaders of the communist movement in India. Kakababu looked after the young entrants in the party; his warmth easily drew in those around him. Very soon, a relationship of comradely affection grew between Kakababu and Kanak.

Kanak was heartbroken when she had to take a job as a schoolteacher to support her family, thinking that she was compromising her political commitment by not being able to give as much time to political work. She broke down into tears in front of Kakababu, who consoled her by saying that she was not withdrawing from political activism due to her economic hardship and family responsibility. She should not feel bad about it, Kakababu told her; it is never an either-or situation for a communist. This relationship of fondness, care, and mutual respect between Kanak and Kakababu continued till his death.[7]

Kanak lived in a communist commune with her husband, Saroj Mukherjee, a communist activist whom she first met in 1939 while they were both underground, as well as another married couple – each of whom had their own room – and four or five unmarried women and men who lived in the other two gender-segregated rooms. Mukherjee wrote about the positive role of communes in her memoir, Mone Mone (‘In Memory’): ‘The atmosphere of joint life in our commune was quite warm… We who were married did not feel any unease at living with others while living a conjugal life’.[8] Mukherjee’s memories counter the dominant narratives that speculate that these unconventional households were rife with petty jealousies and infidelity.

The Women’s Movement in India

The tired yet persistent question of whether communist and leftist women’s groups are part of the wider feminist movement should finally be put to rest. Women in communist movements have long had explicit feminist demands for women’s equality economically, politically, and socially. They have sought leadership by and for women. Leftist women have pushed all progressive movements to support women’s rights, from peasant movements to Dalit (oppressed caste) movements and Adivasi (indigenous peoples’) movements. They have built strong ties between these movements and coalitional feminist campaigns for women’s equal franchise, property rights, and the right to divorce. In the case of India during this period, this solidarity moved in both directions: communist women activists shifted the terms both of communist organising methods and leadership and of the Indian women’s movements’ class and caste bias against women from agricultural classes, working classes, and Adivasi and Dalit communities. If the farmers and working-class women and men were to support women’s rights, the women’s movement had to widen its demands to include all women’s needs, not just those of middle-class and elite women.

In 1927, the Congress Party formed a women’s organisation, the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC). However, the AIWC did not organise women from marginalised communities to join their movement and fight for their own rights or shape their own demands. By design, AIWC members primarily belonged to princely families allied with the British and zamindari (large landowner) families. Many prominent communist leaders, such as Manikuntala Sen, Phulrenu Guha, and Renu Chakravartti, were initially part of the AIWC. However, they soon realised that the marginalised sectors of women – those belonging to the peasantry and the lower ranks of the society – had no membership or representation in the organisation, nor were their class interests reflected in its demands. Above all, there was no attempt to radically alter the fundamental patriarchal structure of society.

Youth and Student Organising 

By the late 1930s, girls in middle school and young women attending college played a vital role in the freedom movement in India. Renu Chakravartti recounts the reasons that spurred Mukherjee to create the Chhatri Sangh or Girl’s Students’ Association (GSA), a branch of the All India Students’ Federation of India (AISF):

When in 1938 the agitation for the release of the Andaman prisoners reached its peak, women students in larger numbers participated in the huge meetings and demonstrations that the students held throughout the country. It was at this stage that the need for organising the girl students was felt. But they had not come in large numbers into an organisation like the AISF where the predominant membership was of men students. The social taboos were still strong.[9]

The GSA sought to counter the social disapproval of young women working with young men in the same organisation and to make it possible for young women not just to join mass protests, but to play an active role in building the movement. They sought to use a gender-segregated organisational form to break down social taboos of young women mixing with young men on equal terms. To this end, the GSA developed young women’s leadership skills of public speaking, organising public meetings, and navigating the tactics and strategies of radical anti-colonial politics. They also developed different methods for organising, as well as different campaigns, and took leadership in projects to organise women from primarily indigenous regions of Bengal, including peasant women. The effects of these young women entering nationalist politics on the cusp of the Second World War fuelled some of the country’s most radical anti-imperialist movements.

This report, ‘The Brutal Killing of Manjolai Tea Garden Workers’, was published by AIDWA in Tamil Nadu following workers’ demands for better wages and housing accommodations, as well as maternity leave, and the subsequent murder of seventeen workers in 1999 at the hands of the police.

In January 1940, Mukherjee and other leaders held the first national conference for the All India GSAs in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. The conference focused on demands for equitable divorce rights, the abolition of polygamy, and free education for girls.[10] At the conference, Mukherjee spoke in favour of the Hindu Code Bill, which would guarantee women’s rights in personal laws. Sarojini Naidu, a nationalist feminist leader in the independence movement, was the guest of honour; ‘Join with the young students’, she said, ‘and bring fresh blood into the mainstream of the battle for freedom!’.[11] After the conference in Lucknow, the student leaders toured the country to expand the GSA, from Madras (now Chennai) to Bombay (now Mumbai) to Punjab. Large numbers of young women attended GSA regional and national conferences, drawing the attention and ire of the imperialist British government on the eve of their entry into the Second World War.

The Imperialists’ War

British authorities repeatedly arrested Mukherjee from 1939-1942 for opposing what Indian communists argued was an imperialists’ war. In 1940, she was arrested with her sister and her niece. Though she was released after seven days in prison due to a lack of evidence, the colonial police issued a special order against her that forced her to leave Calcutta within twenty-four hours of her release and refrain from visiting the industrial areas of the city and the adjacent Howrah district. She moved to Jamshedpur, where she continued her activism, was arrested again, and was then banned from this city as well. In Barisal, her next residence, she was also arrested and banned from re-entry. At this point, as a full-time worker for the CPI, she went underground, moving from house to house for safety.

In July 1942, the British colonial state lifted the ban against the CPI that had lasted for nine years, from 1934 to 1942. In October 1942, Mukherjee returned to Calcutta to resume her political work, shifting the focus of her activism to women’s political organising. In this context, she continued to agitate against British imperialism and fascism.

The Bengal Famine and Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti

The decade of the 1940s was perhaps the most eventful and turbulent phase in pre-independence India, especially in Bengal. The great Bengal famine of 1943 (known as tettalisher mannantor in Bangla), the horrific communal[12] riot of 1946, and the partition of Bengal along religious lines suddenly brought the cruel and hateful tendencies of the human psyche into broad daylight. The Bengal famine of 1943 resulted in large-scale poverty and mass starvation in the countryside. The accompanying epidemics, such as cholera, malaria, and smallpox wiped out a large section of the rural population. An acute labour shortage in Bengal in the agrarian sector forced men to migrate to distant places in search of a livelihood. The women and children who survived became vulnerable in myriad ways, including rampant human trafficking, as the famine unleashed massive gender-based violence and sexual assault on women.

It was in this context that the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (‘Women’s Self Defence Committee’ or MARS) was formed on 13 April 1942 during an anti-fascism convention held by women in Calcutta. Mukherjee was among the founding members of MARS and was on its organising committee. During this period, she wrote numerous, hard-hitting newspaper articles about the effects of the famine on rural, poor women.

MARS filled the vacuum left by an indifferent colonial state and directly addressed the devastating effects of the famine by carrying out large-scale relief work. During the famine of 1942-1943 and throughout the Second World War, the British military prioritised allocating food for their troops rather than ordinary people, a choice precipitated by the halting of rice imports from Japanese-occupied Burma. MARS organised against distributors who were hoarding grain for greater profits.

MARS’ role during the Bengal famine catapulted the organisation to the frontlines of the freedom movement. During this time, hungry people poured into the streets of Calcutta from surrounding areas in search of food. MARS members decided to work alongside women in urban slums and rural areas, as well as with the middle class. Often, the members of MARS would stand beside the queue of food distribution to ensure that young women were not groped or kidnapped as they waited in line. These most vulnerable sectors of women emerged as the core members of MARS and would later play a key role in expanding and strengthening the women’s movement in India. The fight for rights and dignity, and an end to sexual assault remains among the most central issues today in Indian society.

Mukherjee witnessed the impacts of the famine first-hand and discussed the struggle and desperation of women during this time. In one instance, she saw a mother sell her seven-year-old daughter for a small amount of grain, which she received two months after selling her. In another instance, she witnessed a young woman enter the quarters of US soldiers after receiving a meagre ration from the food distribution centre.[13] During this time of great distress, the exploitation of women escalated, as many entered sex work to survive. Soldiers, as well as landlords and others, brutally channeled the desperation of the population by sexually assaulting women­­. Mukherjee, as a journalist and as an activist, raised awareness about these rape crimes as well as many poor women’s lack of employment opportunities other than sex work.

Mukherjee was integral to a coalitional campaign to link the rural and urban organising of communist and nationalist women in a united effort to fight the starvation and sex trafficking of dispossessed women and girls. As a member of the organising committee of MARS, she travelled throughout rural Bengal to organise women to fight for basic necessities and to fight against colonialism and imperialism. She went to the tea plantation sector of north Bengal and Dooars in the Rangpur district of present-day Bangladesh, which suffered from acute poverty and distress due to massive colonial exploitation.

AIDWA’s quarterly English-language journal, Women’s Equality, vol.1, no. 2 (July–September 1988)

She described the devastation caused by the famine as well as MARS’ response:

In October 1943, the man-made Famine in Bengal started. The members of MARS plunged into the work of relief and rehabilitation. The experience of those days was harrowing; we saw women with children dying on the Calcutta streets. Starving village women were brought to the city by touts [traffickers] and sold off as prostitutes. The word ‘Kalobajar’ [black market] was introduced for the first time in our vocabulary. The rape of village women by European and American soldiers was also not unknown. Thus, while we supported the war against fascism at the international level, our anger and hatred against British imperialism that was creating famine and causing endless suffering to our people remained as strong as ever. In this period and immediately afterwards, we concentrated our attention on setting up rehabilitation centres in the districts for women who were the victims of famine or communal riots. MARS played a central role in social rehabilitation.[14]

MARS combined internationalism and anti-colonial nationalism with local campaigns, such as an early campaign led by MARS that publicised the rape of Bengali women by Allied soldiers stationed in Bengal. These campaigns marked a radical call to action that advocated for women’s defence of the nation against military attacks and against colonialism while simultaneously fighting for women’s self-defence against the sexual violence that accompanied military and colonial occupation.

Partition and the Communal Riots

In 1946, women’s suffering once again came into the spotlight during the communal riots. Large-scale violence across the state was spurred by the British partition of Bengal, which was divided along largely religious lines. In Calcutta alone, the death toll neared 4,000 people over the course of three days. The widespread sexual assault of women during the riots took a horrific turn in rural Bengal, especially in the Noakhali area. Even with its limited strength, the Communist Party was at the forefront of the campaign against any kind of communal divide, urging for peace. It is because of the communists’ campaign that some of the trade unions, such as the railway workers’ and tram workers’ union, showed remarkable working-class solidarity and physically confronted rioters in some areas of Calcutta.

Both during the riots and the famine, MARS played a major role by campaigning against communal polarisation amongst rural women. A joint relief committee was formed, as was done during the famine. MARS volunteers were sent to rural Bengal along with the AIWC, travelling on foot from one village to another and distributing milk and other basic supplies to villages such as Chandpur and Haimchar. The impact of the famine, communal riots, and the partition of 1947 on the most vulnerable sections of women of Indian society has remained an important lesson for the women’s movement.

Bowbazar Street and the Crackdown on Communists

India’s independence in 1947 did not end the persecution of communists. On 27 April 1949, MARS organised a gathering in Calcutta to demand the unconditional release of all political prisoners who remained in jail even after the ban against the CPI had been lifted in 1942. This marked a sad but memorable day for the history of the women’s movement in India. After the convention, the attendees marched towards Bowbazar Street but were soon stopped by the police. During the clash, the police opened fire under the orders of West Bengal’s Congress government. Communist leaders Latika Sen, Pratibha Ganguly, Gita Sarkar, and Amiya Dutta, who played a major role in building the women’s movement in India, died on the spot. Yamuna Das Mahato was taken to a hospital, where she later died of related injuries. Kanak Mukherjee spent many days in jail, during which time she was separated from her young son.

In jail, the women went on an indefinite hunger strike, demanding their release and the release of other political prisoners. Though suppressing the feeling of tremendous hunger was often difficult, Kanak recalled the determination and energy of some of the younger women who were in the same jail:

These young schoolgirls – Mamata, Nirupama, Usha, Arati Chaya … during their hunger strike were simultaneously singing, dancing, merry making and also studying with great enthusiasm. For a while Mamata shared the same cell with me. The hungrier we were, the louder her revolutionary songs would be. We would often chatter ‘Oh! I wasted that delicious food once or this is my favourite dish’. Eventually we ‘banned’ any discussion on food. [15]

Refugee Organising

The decade of the 1950s marked another chapter of struggle in the history of Bengal’s communist movement. A wave of refugees from then-East Bengal (now Bangladesh) began to migrate to West Bengal after the partition, leaving behind all their possessions, houses, and land. These migrants resettled themselves across West Bengal. Calcutta, the state capital, received a huge influx of people who were living in squatter settlements – some of which were located near the holiday abodes of the city’s elite – where they were subjected to wretched living conditions.

At around the same time, the city corporation – under the leadership of the Congress Party – unleashed a constant onslaught of stringent bills and ordinances with the intention of disfranchising the urban poor and safeguarding the property interests of the traditional elites. Bengal’s state government was not only unwilling to provide the refugees with any permanent rehabilitation, such as housing; it was also openly hostile to their presence and often used the police force to suppress the refugees’ demands. With the backing of the Congress Party, goons unleashed terror on the refugees.

In the face of state-sanctioned terror, the communists organised among the refugees to raise their demands. As a result, many new refugee settlements came into existence as the communists, many of whom were migrant refugees themselves, fought for the refugees’ rights and livelihood. Kanak’s brothers migrated to one such refugee settlement in Calcutta, where they lived together with Kanak, her son, and her ill brother-in-law while Saroj Mukherjee was still living underground.

The movement for refugees’ rights was among many landmark battles fought by the communists during that period, alongside others such as the movement against tram fare and the women-led movement to increase state assistance for refugee women. It is in this context that many women leaders from these refugee settlements contested and won seats in the first general election of independent India.

Women’s Equality, vol. 2 no. 1 (January–March 1989)

The Formation of the All India Democratic Women’s Association

In 1954, Mukherjee helped found the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), an organisation affiliated with the Communist Party of India that drew together leftist feminist groups from states across India. In June 1954, their founding conference in Calcutta brought together 602 delegates representing the larger membership of over 129,000 women from fourteen states across India.

In 1964, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) was formed following a split in the Communist Party of India or CPI. For a long time, an ideological fight had been developing within the Party around the debate on revisionist tendencies and the true struggle for the emancipation of the working class on the basis of Marxist principles; Mukherjee was one of the leaders of the women’s movement in India who fought against revisionist tendencies.[16] Such debates had an impact on the women’s movement, and many fearless and strong leaders – such as Manikuntala Sen – left the CPI during this time. These were tumultuous years in West Bengal.

Despite the split in the Communist Party, and despite internal ideological debates, NFIW remained intact till the 1970s. In March 1970, a leftist women’s organisation affiliated with the CPI(M) was formed. It was called the Paschimbanga Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti (‘West Bengal Democratic Women’s Association’).

In June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a nationwide state of emergency (often referred to as the Emergency) that suspended a wide range of civil liberties and made protests illegal. While most communists went underground during this period, they did not stop organising. Mukherjee continued to build the newly formed Paschimbanga Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti alongside other women comrades and joined the state committee of the CPI(M) in West Bengal in 1978 after the Emergency ended. She served as a member of the Party’s central committee from 1989 to 1998.

In 1981, the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), a mass women’s organisation linked to the CPI(M), was founded; within its first year, it reached a membership of 590,000 women. From its early years, AIDWA developed a firm ideological and organisational foundation; it emphasised the linkage between socio-economic structures such as class, caste, and religion with the gender question, and at the same time organised women from across class lines and from all communities into a disciplined mass organisation. AIDWA sought to organise large numbers of poor and working-class women throughout India and to create a bridge for radical middle-class women to join their struggle. AIDWA’s core struggles centred around India’s most marginalised groups of women, a consequence of the organisation’s class approach to struggles.

Mukherjee served as the vice-president of AIDWA from 1981 to 1999. Through her organising and her writing, she insisted on the importance of placing feminist struggles within the context of a broader class struggle. As she wrote in her pamphlet about women’s emancipation, ‘We cannot see the question of women’s rights in isolation. The roots of women’s subjugation and the discriminations against them lie in class exploitation’.[17] She was also central to developing AIDWA’s constitution, which states that:

As the oppression of Indian women is an integral part of the exploitation of the Indian people in general, and the struggle for women’s emancipation is inseparably connected with the struggles of the workers, peasants, youth and all other sections of oppressed toiling masses of the people waged for their common interests and to bring about a radical change in our socio-economic set-up, the All India Democratic Women’s Association extends its full co-operation with all these progressive and democratic sections of the people.[18]

AIDWA’s organising methods during the 1980s were centred on running coalitional campaigns with other women’s groups and with allied organisations of left-wing youth, students, peasants, workers, and agricultural workers’ unions. The organisation was widely known for its uncompromising stance on dowry murders, in which young women are murdered or driven to suicide by their husbands and in-laws over disputes regarding their dowry. This campaign fought to create better laws to protect women and to guarantee them economic independence by providing better material support and therefore enabling them to leave abusive marriages.

AIDWA also fought against dowry murders by organising women, including mothers-in-law, and by using their fraternal organisations such as trade unions and farmers’ unions to fight for women’s right to live without violence. The AIDWA activists led neighbourhood campaigns in their units across the country to pressure all families to end the practice of dowry and to treat daughters-in-law with dignity. AIDWA activists became known for their fearlessness, for fighting powerful people and institutions, and for their dogged pursuit of justice.

What made AIDWA unique in the Indian women’s movement during the 1980s was the attention that it gave to rural women. By 1984, most of the proliferating sections of the Indian women’s movement were ignoring rural women’s visions for a better future. Pamphlets like Kamla Bhasin and Nighat Said Khan’s Some Questions on Feminism and its Relevance in South Asia (1986) contain almost no mention of the differences that separate women across South Asia. A secular feminism that imagined unified solidarity across women throughout South Asia was unsustainable without addressing the power of the Hindu majority in India, along with other power imbalances of caste, class, and region.

From the 1940s, Mukherjee saw clearly how rural areas were severely impacted by religious fundamentalism and its divisions. Religious fundamentalism divided women along the lines of religious identity. The communist approach in India was to inculcate class unity in the fight against communalism and fascism. No true mass feminist movement could emerge in India unless it addressed the many divides exacerbated by the ruling class such as divides along the lines of caste and religion.

In New Delhi, AIDWA – alongside seven other national women’s groups – organised the first massive demonstrations in 1993 against the Congress government-abetted communal actions. This included the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque, which Hindu fundamentalists claimed was built on a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram. AIDWA and other groups built a multi-religious coalition of activists committed to fighting for a secular social fabric. AIDWA members also organised a joint delegation of national women’s organisations to create an unbiased assessment of the anti-Muslim violence.

Women’s Equality vol. 1 no. 3 (October–December 1988) 

AIDWA’s Strategy of Inter-Sectoral Organising

Over the span of forty years, with the leadership of women like Mukherjee, AIDWA built a cross-class movement among rural and urban working-class women and progressive middle-class women. The organisation fought for working-class women’s emancipation not as an undifferentiated mass of women facing the same sites of exploitation and oppression, but in their full complexity as agricultural waged workers, as indigenous women, as Dalit women, and as Muslim women.

In Mukherjee’s public life, she developed and extended this vision through her work as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s bicameral legislature, and as an alderwoman in Calcutta. She also took up editorial responsibility for the magazine Ghare-Baire, where she was the editor from 1957-1967, and the Bengali-language journal Eksathe, where she became the founding editor in 1968, and which would later become AIDWA’s bangla journal. Through her work as an editor, she made sure that the lives of working women were at the heart of these publications.

Mukherjee remained a communist and women’s activist until her death in 2005, at which point AIDWA had over 10 million members. She shared AIDWA’s hard-fought strategies to organise rural women against the patriarchal gender relations that infused caste oppression and religious communalism in the face of rising neoliberal scarcity. Mukherjee set an example that remains important today as a tireless fighter for working-class urban and rural women across all sectors of society, religions, and ethnicities.

Third AIDWA Conference in West Bengal, 9-12 October 1990. Kanak is standing second from the right in the front row, in white, with other participants of the conference.

Bibliography

AIDWA. Aims & Objects Program Constitution of All India Democratic Women’s Association, Adopted at the First Conference of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, Held in Madras on 10–12 March, 1981. New Delhi: no pub., 1981.

AIDWA. ‘Homage: Comrade Kanak Mukherjee’, Women’s Equality. (October–December 2004 & January–March 2005): 3.

Armstrong, Elisabeth. Interview with Kanak Mukherjee, 6 August 1994.

Armstrong, Elisabeth. Gender and Neoliberalism: All India Democratic Women’s Association and the Fight for Socialism. New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2021.

Bhasin, Kamla and Khan, Nighat Said. Some Questions on Feminism and Its Relevance in South Asia. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986.

Bhattacharya, Malini. ‘An Interview with Kanak Mukherjee,’ Women’s Equality. (April–June, 1998): 28-30.

Chakravartti, Renu. Communists in Indian Women’s Movement. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980.

Chatterji, Joya. Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Chattopadhyay, Suchetana. An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, 1913–1929. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2012.

Marik, Soma. ‘Breaking Through a Double Invisibility: The Communist Women of Bengal, 1939–1948’, Critical Asian Studies, 45, no.1 (2013): 79–118.

Menon, Parvathi. Breaking Barriers: Stories of Twelve Women. New Delhi: Leftword Books, 2005.

Mukherjee, Kanak. ‘Save from Dishonour Your Bengali Sisters’, People’s War. 9 January 1944.

Mukherjee, Kanak, Narimukti Andolan O Amra. Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1993.

Mukherjee, Kanak. ‘Our Famine-Homeless Sisters’ Plight: Bengal Government’s Work Houses Closing Down’, People’s War. 24 September 1944.

Mukherjee, Kanak. Women’s Emancipation Movement in India: A Marxist View. New Delhi: National Book Centre, 1989.

‘Report of the Women’s Delegation to Bhopal, Ahmedabad and Surat’, Equality 5, no. 1 (January–June 1993): 10–22.

Roy, Anwesha. Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Sarkar, Paromita. ‘Kanak Mukherjee: Ekti Rajnaitik Jiban

(1921–2005)’, (unpublished MPhil, University of Calcutta, 2014).

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India.

Sengupta, Amalendu. Uttal Challish: Asamapto Biplab. Kolkata: Parul Publishers, 1957.

[1] Sarkar, Kanak Mukherjee, 16-18.

[2] Nag, interview, 2001, cited in Marik, 2013.

[3] Chakravartti, Communists in Indian Women’s Movement.

[4] Sarkar, Kanak Mukherjee, 50.

[5] Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, 50-88.

[6] Sengupta, 1957.

[7] Sarkar, Kanak Mukherjee.

[8] Marik, ‘Breaking Through a Double Invisibility’, 93.

[9] Chakravartti, Communists in Indian Women’s Movement, 9.

[10] Bhattacharya, ‘An Interview with Kanak Mukherjee’, 29.

[11] Chakravartti, Communists in Indian Women’s Movement, 10.

[12] Communalism in South Asia refers to the idea that religious communities are political communities with secular interests that are opposed to each other. Political parties that subscribe to the worldview of communalism are called communal parties; terms like ‘communal violence’ and ‘communal riots’ are used to refer to clashes between people belonging to different religious communities in the context of an atmosphere charged with communalism.

[13] Sarkar, Kanak Mukherjee.

[14] Bhattacharya, ‘An Interview with Kanak Mukherjee’.

[15] Sarkar, Kanak Mukherjee, our translation.

[16] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India

[17] Mukherjee, Women’s Emancipation Movement in India.

[18] AIDWA, Aims and Objects Programme, 1981.

A women’s march in Argentina as part of the Ni Una Menos (‘Not one less’) movement that has mobilised on themes including gender-based violence, abortion and reproductive rights, feminicide and the gender wage gap, 2018. Bárbara Leiva 

Lenin announced in 1918 that the experience of all liberation movements attests to the fact that the success of a revolution is dependent on the level of women’s participation. Over a century later, this statement continues to tell the story of the women who have built revolutionary movements and movements of resistance to neoliberalism and – most recently – to reactionary populism.

The inspiration of the October 1917 Russian Revolution arrived early in the colonised agrarian continents of the Global South; it raised the hope that the working majority could defeat the exploiting minority. This belief motivated popular struggles and stimulated political organisations around the world. National liberation struggles emerged in Africa and Asia during the 20th century, while the capitalist economies in Latin America experienced the contradictions of dependent growth and saw the rise of their own resistance movements. Women played a crucial role in all of these struggles.

In a time of resistance against an aggressive assault of conservative neoliberalism, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research offers its first publication of Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle. This is an introductory analysis of women’s struggles on the continents of Africa, Asia, and America. The policies of neoliberalism and neofascism put immense pressure on women, who become the primary and principal targets of precariousness, oppression, and exploitation.

In this series, Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle, we will present the stories of women in struggle who contributed not only to the wider arena of politics, but in particular those who pioneered the establishment of women’s organisations, opening up paths of feminist resistance and struggle throughout the 20th century.

It is the task of militants to study the diverse theories of the organisational methods of these women, not only to better understand their political contributions, but also to inspire us as we build our own necessary organisations to fight against oppression and exploitation today.

Women and Inequality

The world that we live in today is characterised by great social and political upheavals – especially in the Global South, with workers facing overwhelming attacks from neoliberal politics. Political and social movements work hard to resist the impact of political fragmentation, economic precariousness, and the depletion of the capacity for social reproduction.

This upheaval is part of the recent structural crisis of capitalism, as its contradictions clash to a deadly crescendo. Contradictions in politics, ecology, and social reproduction shake the foundations of the economy, which seeks to restore its strength through non-economic relations. As Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser explain, ‘Behind capitalism’s official institutions – wage labour, production, exchange, and finance – stand their necessary supports and enabling conditions: families, communities, nature; territorial states, political organisations, and civil societies; and not least of all, massive amounts and multiple forms of unwaged and expropriated labour, including much of the work of social reproduction, still performed largely by women and often uncompensated’ (2019, p. 64).

Taking these challenges – and collapses – as a starting point for a new financialised economy, these contradictions appear as consequences of problems that do not seem easy to solve – such as the unprecedented increase in inequality on a global level. As the latest Oxfam report (2020) shows, in addition to maintaining the gap between the incomes of men and women, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of people and corporations has reached record levels. The wealth of the richest 1% of the world’s population is more than double the wealth accumulated by 6.9 billion people – that is, 92% of the world population – while the 22 richest men in the world have more money than all of the more than 667 million women in Africa combined.

However, exploitation and oppression do not appear only in the economic sphere; they are also perpetuated in the domain of social, cultural, and moral values that support a conservative logic of the role of women in class society. This constitutes part of what we call patriarchy, which structures the social relations in society. The organisation, division, and hierarchy of work – as well as social, political, and cultural elements within families, the State, civil society, and social reproduction itself – help to maintain this status and are intertwined with other issues such as class and race.

The way in which the capitalist economy organises and structures the labour of men and women in society must be understood as the sexual division of labour. This structure of work not only divides tasks between men and women; it also creates a hierarchy that attributes a greater value to men’s work than women’s work. This structure promotes the separation between production and reproduction and only considers labour in the productive sphere of the economy to be ‘work’ – a space mainly occupied by men. Meanwhile, it separates the space for reproduction, care, family, domestic tasks, which becomes ‘non-work’ or barely recognised work and is (mostly) unpaid and often socially devalued.

According to Oxfam, poorly paid jobs are mainly occupied by women. They account for more than 75% of all unpaid care work in the world. Women and girls dedicate roughly 12.5 billion hours to unpaid work every day, either as caregivers for the elderly or taking care of the home (Oxfam 2020). As a result, 42% of women in the world are excluded from the labour market (compared to only 6% of men who are outside of the labour market), mainly due to the overload of domestic work.

This huge gap is based on a misogynist and defective economic system, which places women at the centre
of the debate on the current crisis of capitalism. Women are the first to feel the effects of this crisis, which leads to the precarisation of their jobs and to lower wages. The breakdown of crucial social assistance systems such as the social security system, the education of children (day care), and the care of the elderly, which have been exacerbated by the most recent neoliberal advance, also imposes an additional burden on the ‘care economy’, which is largely maintained by women. Moreover, violence against women has become normalized in a world in which more than 90,000 women are victims of femicide every year, with most cases occurring in their own homes in situations of domestic violence.

Resistance and Struggle

Neoliberal policy fractures society and fragments the political field, which makes it difficult to build unified resistance. At this juncture, any alternative to the reactionary neoliberal dispensation and to the populist political upsurge is seen as impossible; any other road – such as a socialist one – is made invisible. In this context of invisibility, it is especially important to remember the historic actions of emancipatory movements and to highlight the legacy of the current popular mobilisations of resistance that have taken place, from India to Chile.

Facing brutal oppression and violence, women – as the first and hardest hit by the economic exploitation driven by the crisis of capitalism – continue to be at the forefront of the growing social upheaval across the globe today. They have remained firmly at the centre of social struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where they have attended these protests in large numbers.

In this inaugural publication, we are particularly interested in highlighting the progressive, feminist, and mass resistance processes in the Global South and in identifying the key characteristics of the struggles of our time, inspired by the legacy of women in struggle throughout the 20th century.

Across Brazil, hundreds of millions of women, militants, and social movements say #EleNão – #NotHim – to then-candidate of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro in the largest women’s march in the country’s history, 29 September 2018. Sâmia Bomfim / Wikimedia

Women in Struggle in Latin America in Times of Conservatism

In Latin America, the turn to the right occurred both through elections and through institutional coups of various kinds. This return of the right wing has meant the acceleration of the neoliberal project in the region. In the 1980s and 1990s, the countries of Latin America – especially Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela – adopted the neoliberal structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); these included major cuts in public spending on education, health, and social assistance, as well as the privatisation of key public services. After a period of respite when the left was in ascendancy, the conservative phase has re-established itself and immediately turned to austerity, increasing exploitation and deepening precariousness for women both at home and at work.

At the same time, there has been a growing conservative reaction in the region. Right-wing organisations and religious groups have launched attacks against public policies that favour women and LGBT+ people, which include eliminating any mention of the word ‘gender’ in the school curriculum and limiting legal access to abortion. The right has driven a relentless campaign through social media and corporate media against what it calls ‘gender ideology’. Though this tendency has been stronger in Central America and in Peru, it is present across Latin America and threatens to undermine the achievements won through decades of struggle.

Having experienced conditions such as cuts in the care economy and campaigns against women’s rights has led to the radicalisation of women, prompting them to mobilise and join progressive organisations in different parts of the world. More women are demanding a new model that centres a feminist vision in the struggle to build a different world. This demand for a new world comes out of the experiences in struggle against the patriarchal structural adjustment policies.

The capitalist tendencies and this neoliberal wave have deepened the effects of the sexual division of labour, gender violence, and oppression, as well as the rampant exploitation of women. This has, in turn, accelerated the organisation of working women, including indigenous, black, and landless women, who have taken an anti-neoliberal or even socialist turn, as is the case in Venezuela.

The gender violence and oppression experienced by women is manifested through the expansion of State restrictions on sexuality and on the reproductive capacity of women (as theorised by Silva Federici). This attempt by the State to control female bodies has triggered protests by women’s organisations around the world, as has been the case in Argentina, where women are fighting for the legalization of abortion, taking to the streets en masse with symbolic green handkerchiefs in hand.

In Bolivia, women are at the centre of the protests against the 2019 coup against Evo Morales and the Movement to Socialism (MAS). Since the coup, the ruling government has humiliated and persecuted indigenous people as well as the entire peasant population. Together with the call for the restoration of their government, the women’s protests, which are socialist in orientation, include the call for the emancipation of women and the indigenous peoples.

In Brazil, women mobilised in large numbers after the coup against the Workers’ Party government. The famous Ele Não (‘Not Him’) march in September 2018 was the largest demonstration in Brazil’s history; thousands of women and men marched through the streets of more than 114 cities in the country against the growth of misogyny and the election campaign of the ultra-conservative candidate Jair Bolsonaro.

In 2019, under Bolsonaro’s presidency, repression, authoritarianism, and moral conservatism increased – with rates of violence against women skyrocketing. In the first half of Bolsonaro’s first year in government, cases of femicide increased by 44% in the country’s largest city (São Paulo) compared to the previous year. In a country where a woman is beaten every four seconds, investment in public policies to combat violence against women fell from R$ 119 million (reais) in 2015 – still under the Workers Party government – to R$ 5.3 million in 2019 – with Bolsonaro in power. The Ministry of Women, Family, and Human Rights decreased the budget for assistance to women in situations of violence from R$ 34.7 million to R$ 194,700 in the same period. Investment in day care and preschools has also drastically decreased and is currently the lowest it has been in the last decade; the budget for the construction of new day cares and preschools fell from more than R$ 506 million in the first half of 2014 to only R$ 10.2 million in the same period of 2019. This increase in neglect and budgetary cuts that directly affect the lives and working conditions of women has been accompanied by a process of the expansion of political, social, and cultural conservatism and authoritarianism and will require a new level of resistance and organisation of women in the country.

In Chile, the feminist struggle has grown considerably in recent years. This was evident in the March 8 International Women’s Day struggle of 2019, which – while it is often a very large demonstration – grew exponentially in size. Besides its size, the women’s movement consolidated its organisational power with the creation of the Feminist Coordination of 8M, which – along with other organisations – held the Second Plurinational Meeting of Women in Struggles in January 2020. More than three thousand women and LGBT+ people met to discuss the programme and plan an exit from the current scenario.

During the uprising that began on 18 October 2019 and still continues, Chilean women have taken to the streets to fight for a structural transformation of their country. They have faced brutal repression by the police and the military, which – led by the government of Sebastián Piñera – have blindly defended the interests of capital and its political representatives. During the protests and the repression, sexual violence by the police has been amongst the egregious and systematic human rights violations. The feminist movement made this violence visible with the performance of the collective Las Tesis and their chant, ‘The Rapist is You’; this performance has been echoed across the world in a range of languages.

The feminist movement in Chile works in solidarity with other social and political movements that reject the precariousness of life that has been imposed since the dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet and continues to be maintained today. One of the main struggles in Chile has been the defence of the constitutional process that fights to overcome neoliberalism and to guarantee the people’s right to political participation. Part of this struggle is to advance gender parity in the constitutional process.

In Venezuela, as pointed out by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Ana Maldonado, Pilar Troya Fernández, and Vijay Prashad in an open letter, the majority of those who defend the Bolivarian Revolution are women. As part of the revolutionary process in Venezuela, women have been essential in the role of rebuilding social structures eroded by decades of capitalist austerity. Their work has been crucial in the development of popular power and the creation of participatory democracy. Sixty-four percent of the spokespersons in the 3,186 communes are women, as are most of the leaders of the 48,160 communal councils and 65% of the leadership of the Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP). Women demand not only equality in the workplace but also in the social sphere, where communes are the atoms of Bolivarian socialism. Women in the social sphere have been striving to build the possibility of self-governance and dual power, slowly eroding the structure of the neoliberal state.

The current processes of struggle and resistance in Latin America must centre women and their demands in their analyses and debates on how to build a new world.

The Women’s Wall in Kerala was a mobilisation of 5.5 million women in the defense of gender equality and Kerala’s renaissance values, and against right-wing attacks.The wall covered 620 kilometres from the north to the south of the state, 1 January 2019. Vyshakh T.

The Situation of Women in India Under the Modi Regime

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its family of Hindutva organizations have sharply escalated the spread of a pervasive rhetoric of hatred towards minorities and progressive forces. Through this campaign of hatred, the right-wing forces have sought to tear up the fabric of Indian society and refashion it to suit their divisive ideology. Not only is there a threat of violence hanging over anyone who stands in opposition to this project; there is also a cloud of generalized violence that has settled over society. The horrific part is that the right-wing groups and lynch mobs enjoy impunity. Women are the most affected in this atmosphere of violence in the country.

Since 2014, there has been a visible rise in violence against women – particularly sexual violence – across India, instilling fear and cultivating anger in women throughout the country. This year, it has perhaps been the most visible in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). UP is the epicentre of the BJP’s communal politics, whose underlying agenda is to divide society along the lines of religion, caste, etc. It is the state where the Chief Minister Yogi Aditya Nath, a ‘man of god’ turned BJP leader, is bent on establishing his own version of the Hindu Rajya (‘Hindu State’), using state machinery to intimidate Muslims and devest them of their citizenship rights. Since Aditya Nath assumed the office of Chief Minister in Uttar Pradesh, crimes against women have increased by 33% according to the government’s own admission in the state legislature. The terrible ordeal of a young woman who was sexually assaulted by a BJP member of the legislative assembly (MLA) is symptomatic of the brutalities inflicted on women under the rule of the BJP. When the young woman dared to report this MLA to the police, her father was tortured in police custody, resulting in his death. When she persisted with her legal fight, a truck suspiciously rammed into a car in which she was traveling with family members and her lawyer; two of her family members were killed in the incident, and she and her lawyer were gravely injured.

When women have asserted their rights, the Hindutva forces have vehemently and violently opposed them. After years of women activists demanding entry into the famous Sabarimala temple of Kerala, in 2019 the Supreme Court of India held that women have the right to enter the temple. The BJP’s national leaders and central minsters decried the rights of menstruating women to enter the holy temple, which in their view pollutes the temple. Yet, when the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala implemented this right, the BJP and other right-wing organisations mobilized violent mobs to attack the women who visited the temple and went on a rampage across the state against women’s right to enter the Sabarimala temple.

At the core of the BJP’s ideology is Hindutva patriarchy that subordinates women and upholds the caste system. A woman, as per the BJP’s ideology is portrayed as a mother, Bharat Mata (‘Mother India’), who symbolises the national honour. The repeated myth that Bharat Mata is under threat from its internal enemies, that is Muslims, is used to polarize the society along religious identities and for political mobilization. The BJP’s inclusion of women is not a result of the dismantling of patriarchal norms or structures or by challenging patriarchy, but on the terms of Hindutva ideology and within the framework of Hindu Rashtra. The BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), places women in the role of bearers of chastity and as symbols of honour in the community. The RSS has promoted a wave of religiosity through temples and Bhajan (‘devotional song’) groups among women – with an emphasis on superstition and rituals. Through these groups, the Hindutva right-wing is mobilizing the labour force and has accelerated the far-right’s mobilization of women against their own interests. Over the course of several decades, there has been a drastic fall in the participation of women in the labour force among working-age women, which stands at 23% today according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data in July 2017- July 2018.

There is a false argument given by many right-wingers that women are staying at home instead of finding employment solely because men earn more. But there are other factors at play, as well, such as the fall in agricultural employment, due in large part to mechanization (among other reasons), which was a main source of employment for rural women. While men have tried to find work in urban areas through seasonal and long-term migration, this process has been tougher on women, for whom the responsibilities of childcare are infinitely more taxing when they are forced to move away from their communities. The reality that women are most often the primary caretakers for their families in turn makes finding suitable employment especially difficult for them. Away from their communities, it is difficult for women to find safe workplaces. In the case of women whose families have migrated with them, or who were already living in urban areas, the costly and time-consuming commute – which is a reality for the urban working class – poses an additional challenge who often bear the sole responsibility for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and other housework.

The BJP government has done nothing to improve working conditions for women in terms of policies such as equal wages, implementing creches at the workplace, or guaranteeing safe and harassment-free working places. Instead, its efforts have been geared towards turning the clock back and whittling away at the freedoms that women have won through decades of struggle, turning them once more in to upholders of religious honour and identity.

However, the severe and continuous assaults on women and their rights have been met with a massive wave of resistance across the country. Women are leading the ongoing movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the National Population Register (NPR), which fundamentally violate the provisions of the Indian Constitution. From Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh to various small towns, cities, districts, and villages, women are at the forefront of the movement against the BJP-led attack on the right to citizenship.

Domestic workers gather at Church Square in Pretoria, South Africa to begin their march to the Union Buildings in protest against unfair labour practices and low wages, June 2019.
Ihsaan Haffejee / New Frame

Resistance and Struggle in South Africa Since Apartheid

In South Africa, women have played a central role in struggles – notably in the fight against apartheid. The Federation of South African Women was launched in Johannesburg on 17 April 1954. It adopted a Women’s Charter that placed the emancipation of women at the centre of the struggle for a just future. A few years later, Dorothy Nyembe and Florence Mkhize emerged as key leaders in the insurrectionary resistance in the Cato Manor shack settlement in Durban in 1959. Following the Durban strikes in 1973 and the rebirth of the black trade union movement, women like Jabu Ndlovu and Emma Mashinini became important protagonists in the union movement. Women continued to play a vital role in the community-based struggles that came to the fore, often under the banner of the United Democratic Front, in the 1980s.

An influential strand of white academic feminism tended to argue that women’s participation in struggles enmeshed with the broader struggle for national liberation should not be counted as fully feminist. Nomboniso Gasa, a courageous anti-apartheid activist and major feminist intellectual, offered a powerful argument against this view in 2007, asking “Why the Berlin Wall between blackness and liberation struggle on the one hand and feminism on the other?” This debate has now been resolved with regard to history. Women who participated in struggles that linked questions of race, gender, and class are no longer excluded from the count of who is a real feminist.

But after apartheid, as part of the general process by which NGO-based ‘civil society’ came to replace popular organisations, feminism frequently became a profession, primarily located in NGOs and the academy. Grassroots, or popular, feminism was seldom recognised as feminism – even when it took on insurgent forms. The focus of this kind of professional feminism was often on changing laws and policies and achieving representation in elite structures. There were, of course, important exceptions, including the work done in and around the Treatment Action Campaign in the late 1990s and early 2000s – a struggle for access to medication that included a significant focus on popular political empowerment. In 2009, the limits of professionalised feminism came to the fore with the ascent of the deeply patriarchal Jacob Zuma to the presidency. Zuma came to power with significant popular support both from the left and organised women in the African National Congress (ANC) as well as from the electorate. Feminist advances in terms of policy, law, and elite representation had not been matched by advances in building popular power and shaping the common sense of society.

Today South Africa suffers terrifying rates of violence, including sexual violence, against women. Opposition to this crisis has sometimes taken the form of demanding the return of the death penalty, the suspension of the rule of law, or demands that men should ‘protect’ women. Popular feminisms, which are flourishing in some quarters, continue to be ignored in the elite public sphere and in the bulk of the academy and NGOs. However, not all struggles in South Africa have been co-opted by the ‘NGOization’ of social struggles; in this sense, Abahlali baseMjondolo is a key example of a contemporary instance of popular feminism. Abahlali baseMjondolo is a squatters’ movement that has become the largest social movement to have emerged since the end of apartheid; the movement has a majority of female members and many women in leadership positions and often raises feminist issues cast in the language of the political empowerment of women.

Unlike countries such as Brazil, or India, South Africa does not have the kind of sustained and national women’s movement that connects university-trained intellectuals and professionals – such as lawyers and journalists – to women active in community organisations, social movements, and trade unions. Building such a connection is an urgent priority, not only in South Africa, but for the whole continent and in solidarity with the other countries of the Global South.

Creativity, Strength, Solidarity

In opposition to austerity and capitalism in all parts of the world, women have shown their creativity, strength, and solidarity – not only against neoliberal policies and the increase of conservatism, but also in favour of socialist experiments. It is essential to promote international solidarity considering the similarity of these processes and the various alternatives that are being created by women.

What is clear from these examples is not only that women participate in these struggles, but that they take leadership positions in them. It is this participation and leadership that guarantee the inclusion of a socialist feminist perspective in the revolutionary process.

References

Lenin, V.I. ‘Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women, November 19, 1918’. Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 28, 1974, pages 180-182. First published: 22 November 1918, Pravda No. 253.

Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto. Brooklyn, New York, Verso, 5 March 2019.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, New York, Autonomedia, 2004.

OXFAM. Time to care: Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis. 20 January 2020.