The Feminist Subversion of the Gender System
January 20, 2004
by Carey Roberts

In recent years, the battle of the sexes has escalated into a full-fledged gender war. This conflict is playing out in the boardroom, the courtroom, and the bedroom.

What is the origin of this feminist assault?

And as early as 1886, Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl, issued this indictment: "Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers."

The linkage between socialism and American feminism can be traced back to the earliest years:

• Susan B. Anthony held a 1905 meeting with Eugene Debs, perennial socialist candidate in the US presidential elections. Anthony promised Debbs, "Give us suffrage, and we'll give you socialism." Debs shot back, "Give us socialism, and we'll give you the vote."

• Helen Keller, well-known suffragette and advocate for the blind, became an outspoken member of the Socialist Party in 1909. She later joined the ultra-radical Industrial Workers of the World. Keller's 45-page FBI file can be viewed at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/bio/fbi-file.pdf.

• Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was a member of the Woman's Committee of the New York Socialist Party. In her book, Women and the New Race, Sanger wrote: "no Socialist republic can operate successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree."

• Mary Inman was an ardent feminist and Communist in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During that era, the Communist Party of the USA often used the phrase "white chauvinism" to refer to racial prejudice. It was Inman who reworked that phrase to coin the term, "male chauvinism."

• Simone de Beauvoir was a well-known socialist with Marxist sympathies. In The Second Sex, she lionized socialism as the ideal for gender relationships: "A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised."

• Betty Friedan went to great lengths to cover up the facts of her Communist past: her membership in the Young Communist League, her 1944 request to join the American Communist Party, and her work as a propagandist for Communist-led organizations in the 1940s.

• Gloria Steinem once admitted, "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era, and that made me a Marxist." (Susan Mitchell: Icons, Saints and Divas, 1997, p. 130), Later, Steinem joined the Democratic Socialists of America.