First Published: Frontline, Vol. 3, No. 15, February 3, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Women attending the second national congress of the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression (AAWO) held here January 9-12 rededicated themselves to the fight for a working class and anti-racist perspective in the U.S. women’s movement. To put that commitment into practice, congress participants mapped out ambitious plans for organizing efforts in two main areas: the defense of reproductive rights, where the AAWO will stress the demand for funding and access to abortion for all women; and building international solidarity, where the organization will emphasize political support and material aid for women in Central America and South Africa. Other highlights of the proceedings included an examination of the different dynamics of women’s liberation in societies at different levels of socio-economic development, and an extended discussion’ of lesbian oppression.
Nearly 50 delegates and observers from Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area took part in the congress. Participants represented a broad spectrum of women with histories in the left, anti-racist, lesbian and radical feminist movements; over half were women of color. This breadth reflected years of painstaking work to unite women from diverse backgrounds around a working class orientation to the fight against women’s oppression.
The AAWO traces its roots to the mass struggles of the 1960s, in particular to the Civil Rights Movement. It began as the Black Women’s Alliance, a caucus in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which fought for the equal participation. of women in the anti-racist struggle. The group went on to become the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), an independent anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist organization, publishing the newspaper Triple Jeopardy and addressing the "triple oppression" of women of color.
In 1980, the TWWA united on the need to reforge the U.S. women’s movement on the basis of anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics. The organization changed its name to the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression and opened its ranks to all women committed to that goal. The AAWO held its first national congress in July 1983, bringing together initial cores of activists prepared to build the AAWO into a national organization
Since that congress, the AAWO has worked in the reproductive rights movement, the Jesse Jackson campaign and the Free South Africa Movement, sponsored annual International Women’s Day celebrations and taken up major international solidarity campaigns. The initial cores have become stable chapters which have established a presence in their respective cities.
Current plans build on this foundation. A major priority will be involvement in the National Campaign to Restore Abortion Funding (NCRAF), initiated by the AAWO, as well as various local reproductive rights groups. The AAWO will also mobilize for the national March for Women’s Lives actions initiated by the National Organization for Women to be held this March. Work will also be increased on infant mortality, sterilization abuse and population control, and plans are being developed to become actively involved in the fight against violence against women. In each of these areas, the AAWO perspective calls for placing the particular needs and demands of working class, especially minority, women at the forefront.
International solidarity is targeted for even greater expansion. In celebration of International Women’s Day, 1985, the AAWO initiated the First West Coast Conference on Women in Central America. This resulted in the ongoing formation Somos Hermanas (We Are Sisters), which has chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz/Watsonville, New York and Boston. Somos Hermanas is conducting a material aid campaign to rebuild child care centers in Nicaragua that have been destroyed by the contras. Plans are in the works to build support for women in EI Salvador and Guatemala as well.
Opening up another front of solidarity work, the AA WO will be responding to a request from the African National Congress Women’s Section to develop a material aid campaign to expand child-care facilities for exiled freedom fighters in Lusaka, Zambia. The campaign will be launched on International Women’s Day, 1986.
Such extensive work in the international solidarity arena has catapulted the AAWO into numerous struggles with national chauvinist prejudices in the U.S. women’s movement. To give AAWO members a firmer basis to combat these biases, the congress took up a detailed examination of the relationship between each society’s overall level of development and the fight for women’s liberation within it. The discussion stressed the fact that in the developing and newly liberated nations the level of technology is low and women’s lives are dictated by scarcity and imperialist-imposed underdevelopment.
Thus women’s battle for liberation will necessarily stress national liberation and economic development. This differs from the priorities of women in the advanced capitalist countries, where the scientific/ technical basis exists for women’s full emancipation but capitalist relations continue to stand in the way. An exciting discussion also took place on the advanced experience of women in the socialist countries, where in the absence of exploitative class relations, the different aspects of women’s emancipation can be tackled.
The congress also broke new ground for the AAWO with a major discussion of the dynamics of lesbian oppression. The organization targeted the tendency to ignore or underplay this oppression’s impact, and recommitted itself to fighting against manifestations of homophobia within the AAWO, the broader women’s movement and the left, and U.S. society as a whole. As a result of this discussion, the AAWO decided to explicitly identify itself as an organization composed of lesbian and straight women and to establish a Lesbian Task Force to develop a more thorough view of the intersection between the struggles for lesbian equality and women’s liberation.