Rev Left Radio - Socialist Feminism, Class Struggle, and the Cold War

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

Kristen R. Ghodsee returns to Rev Left on International Women's Day to discuss the real history of the holiday, socialist feminism, liberal co-option of radical history and movements, the Cold War alliances between socialist states and women in the global south, and so much more!  Kristen's website: https://kristenghodsee.com/ The AK47 podcast created and hosted by Kristen: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast   SRA gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/f/sra-community-range-and-defense-education-project   Southern New England SRA twitter: https://twitter.com/sne_sra   Coffee With Comrades episode with the SNE SRA: https://coffeewithcomrades.com/episode-122-under-no-pretext-ft-the-sne-sra Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and happy international working women's day. This is Rev Left Radio and today we have a special and very timely episode with the one and only professor Kristen Godsey to discuss the actual history of International Women's Day, the sort of socialist and proletarian forces behind it, how it's co-opted. And then we get into a discussion of her book, Second World Second Sex, which explores women's movements within the socialist eastern countries, the Soviet Union, as well as their connection with struggles by and for women in the global south. And just tying all of these wonderful strains together, showing how they forced concessions by the Western capitalist states with regards to women's rights.

And then we explore what happens in lieu of those forces. how neoliberalism can really take off unchallenged. So we discuss so many wonderful things related to proletarian feminism and the general struggle for women's liberation and how it's inherently connected with class struggle, with anti-imperialism, and with a vision of a wholly different world rooted in emancipatory and egalitarian politics. As always, Kristen Godsee is an absolute treasure and is a fountain of wisdom and knowledge.

when it comes to this sort of stuff. So I'm really excited to have this conversation and to share it. And, of course, it's also the 110th anniversary of the proper beginning of International Women's Day, which makes it all the more interesting to have this episode come out. Kristen, of course, has been on other Rev. Left episodes, our Red Hangover episode, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism episode. So if you haven't heard those and you like this conversation, definitely check them out, though there's no specific order, of course, in which you have to listen to them.

Kristen also participated in something I and many others participated in, which is this ongoing Michael Brooks tribute series. Michael Brooks, obviously, the famed and well-known and loved, a left-wing commentator who passed away last year. His sister put together a tribute series in every episode of the series investigates a certain specific topic that meant a lot to Michael and is meaningful and important for the left generally. So Kristen part took in part seven of the Michael Brooks tribute series

called Sex and Gender on the Left, I believe. And I took part in, I believe it was part 12 of the Michael Brooks Tribute Series. I moderated it with Adnan Hussein, Susan Green, and Marianne Williamson discussing mysticism, religion, and spirituality on the left. So if you're at all interested, definitely go check those out. And there's a bunch of other wonderful Michael Brooks tribute series episodes as well covering a whole slew of topics. So we'll check that out and support that if you haven't already. And I also wanted to boost some comrades in the Northeast involved with the Socialist Rifle Association.

They're putting together a donation, GoFundMe basically, to launch a fundraiser for a range project. And I'll just read very quickly from their press release. And it's a couple months old, but the campaign is still ongoing. So it says on Friday, November 20th, the Socialist Rifle Association chapters of the Northeast region launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the construction of a shooting range in southern New Hampshire. This project is a leftist answer to difficulties of inclusive firearm education

that exist throughout the country and are especially prevalent in the northeastern states. This area of the country has very limited public shooting options. options, private clubs and ranges are almost exclusively owned, operated, and frequent in by reactionaries. Nobody in marginalized communities should need to suffer at a range that sells Confederate flags or be surrounded by those who believe they do not deserve their rights or worse, their lives. So really important that SRA and various chapters have always been interested in and initiating, which is trying to create a healthy constitutional legal framework for which people that would not feel comfortable in regular gun shops and at regular shooting

ranges can go and develop their capacity for self-defense. It's incredibly important. And as somebody who is well-armed myself, I'm very familiar with the sort of demographics that come with places that sell guns and shooting ranges, especially coming from a deep red state like I live in, I totally understand and appreciate the desperate need. to decouple our ability to learn how to competently defend ourselves in the lives of innocent people from some of these institutions that are, in some cases, apolitical, but in many cases, very, very reactionary. So that's a worthy cause that you could donate to, spread the word about,

or if you're in that region, reach out to one of the chapters of the SRA in the Northeast and see how you can get directly involved in doing such a thing. really important stuff and as always if you like what we do here at rev left radio we do have a patreon um you can go to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio and in exchange for a couple dollars a month you get access to bonus content and as i tell my patrons all the time i use on average hundred sometimes well over a thousand dollars of patreon money every month to help other people sometimes it comes in the forms of donations to on the ground organizations sometimes it comes in the form of helping individual people. I've prevented friends from being evicted during COVID because

they lost their job during this. I conducted a go fund me for my father who lost his job and could not afford his medical bills and was getting his utility shut off. Just this last month, I paid a friend's rent who was about to lose their job because they, or has already lost their job and can't find employment in this, in this economy. And I made sure another friend kept their electricity on their utilities were up and backlogged and the power company cut off their power after they had just went and used their snap benefits to fill their fridge and so that food was at risk of being wasted and because of the supporters on Patreon we've been able to help people in those instances and we'll continue to do that as long as revolutionary left radio exist

because it's incredibly important to me to give back and to use some of these amazingly generous donations that people make to us and our shows and our families turn around and pay it forward in the form of material interventions in other innocent people's lives. So if you're at all interested in that, link to that in the show notes as well. Without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with my good friend, Kristen Godsey, on International Women's Day, it's actual history, and so much more. Enjoy. My name is Kristen Gadsie and I am a professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. And I've written a number of academic books about the experiences of mostly women and state socialism before and after 1989 in Eastern Europe.

But most recently, I wrote a popular book, which is called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence. And so, yeah, that's unfortunately what most people know me for these days and not the rest of my academic work. But I am also an academic. Absolutely. And longtime listeners of Rev. Left will be familiar with you from the episode in which we discussed why women have better sex under socialism, but also the debut. episode of you coming on Rev Left to discuss Red Hangover and the collapse of the Eastern Block and all of the sort of brutalizations that happened to people throughout the 90s because of that. So you're definitely a fan favorite here at Rev. Left. And you reached out to me over

email and saying, you know, International Women's Day is coming up. I would like to talk about it specifically. I would like to push back against the liberal, bourgeois, feminist co-option of the holiday and the sort of obscurantism or the complete obliteration of the actual history which undergirds it. And, you know, I'm speaking about a day or two after the Senate just passed the COVID relief bill. And one of the big images coming out of that debacle was the progressive, quote unquote, Senator from Arizona, Kristen Cinema doing a rather flourishy thumbs down vote on the minimum wage after patting Mitch McConnell on the back. I don't know if you, did you have a chance to see that? Do you have any thoughts on

that? I did not, but I certainly heard about it. Yeah. I just thought that was a wonderful sort of encapsulation of a certain sort of, you know, feminism. And it also speaks, I think, to the co-option process that happens when people, you know, otherwise progressive people try to get into the Democratic Party and change it from the inside. What more happens more often than not, I think, is the reverse. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I, um, one of the reasons, I was so keen to try to save the socialist history of International Women's Day from its co-optation is precisely because tonight Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, together with Chrissy Teigen, were originally planning to do a International Women's Day fundraiser for their political action committee. And in the very fine print of this, it says to help elect women. and other Democrats.

So, and then they, I think they were criticized because the lineup was so white. So, you know, about a week ago, they added Amanda Gorman as a moderator, as if that, you know, these are, you know, very centrist Democrats, obviously, and very much opposed to the kind of progressive politics, that International Women's Day as a holiday was founded to celebrate. and for which, you know, those politics, this holiday celebrated for over a century. And it's only in the last couple of years that suddenly, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton think this is a great day to do a Democratic fundraiser to get a lot of women to open their wallets to help the Democratic Party. And it really frustrated me to no end to see this happening in the United States in 2021 because, you know, this is really a holiday that has, been ignored in the United States for such a long time, precisely because it was associated

with socialism. So that was one of the reasons why I thought it's really very important for us to at least briefly discuss like this important holiday, you know, similar in stature in some ways to May Day. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get into that in a second, a whole section dedicated to discussing that real history and talking about the co-option. But before we do that, I know we mentioned in the intro, the last conversation that you had on, have left. We discussed your book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. And since its initial release, it spawned up to, I think, 13 foreign editions thus far. So I was just wondering what you thought about the international reception of the book and sort of how that's gone for you.

Yeah. Well, I have to say, it was a big surprise to realize that the book was going to be translated into so many languages, particularly translated into five of the languages of some of these former socialist countries. So it's been translated into German, Russian, Czech, Slovak, and Polish so far, in addition to, you know, Spanish and Dutch and French and Portuguese and Korean and Indonesian and Thai. Like, you know, when you write a book, you really have no idea where it's going to go. And I think what's interesting about the international reception of the book is that obviously a book like this enters the domestic political discussion in different ways depending on the country, you know, and where they are in terms of their sort of left-right political divides and

so on and their histories. So, you know, it was very, I feel like, warmly received in Germany. And it was a huge, you know, I think a big hit in Spain, partially, of course, because the Spanish, I think, have a socialist government. And there's a really active left. movement in Spain. In Germany, they were sort of coming to terms with 30 years of reunification and a kind of lingering frustration by former East Germans about the ways in which their culture had been erased after reunification in 1990. So in some places, I feel like the book has been really warmly received. It's just come out a couple months ago in France. There was a big review that just appeared today in a sort of a leftist publication in France.

And so it's getting some interesting attention there. I would say that in Russia, the Russians, you know, they had a very different experience of state socialism, a pretty negative one. And so, you know, I never for a second thought that that book would appear in Russian. And I think that having it appear in Russian was a very odd choice. I mean, you know, the Russian publishers thought that it would at least get a conversation started. And I think it got a conversation started. But I think that readers in Russia were very critical. of my generalization. Although I don't generalize in the book, I think the title certainly seems to

suggest that like all socialist countries were the same. And obviously they were not. And I speak about that at length, not only in that book, but in all of my other work, about how there were so many varieties of state socialism in Eastern Europe in the 20th century. But overall, I would say that it's been a really positive experience in the sense that every time the book comes out in another language, I get a whole other round of media interviews and reviews and reviews and discussions in different political and economic contexts around the world. And so it's really forced me to learn a lot about the French left or the Dutch left or the way that the book has been received in Poland and how it has entered particular domestic political debates around

reproductive rights and abortion in Poland at a time when reproductive rights are being extremely threatened by a very populist sort of right-wing government. So, yeah, and then it's also instructive where the book has not been translated, like Romania, which was one of the worst places under communism after 1966 to be a woman or Albania, very similar kind of situation. So people are not at all interested in the kinds of arguments that I'm making largely about countries like Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, the GDR, Poland, or Czechoslovakia or Hungary when they're coming from places like Romania or Albania or to a certain extent, the former Soviet Union and, you know, the successor states. So it's been really, it's been eye-opening, I will say that. And the other thing

that I'll say is, you know, be careful if you write a popular book. I went into this kind of blind and had no idea that this, you know, short little thing that I put together in a very brief period of time would sort of grow to be the monster that it has become in some ways so much so that it, you know, I feel like in many respects it sort of overshadows the other work that I've been doing for almost 25 years now. So it's been interesting as a scholar, but also as, you know, a person with a certain amount of, political conviction in the world, living as a person in late capitalism, I've suddenly found myself in a weird way at the center of a lot of different debates that I never thought I'd find myself in the middle of. Yeah, it's really, really fascinating to just see the trajectory from what started off as an article to a book, the thing is translated, and there's every specific country's reaction to it. But I just wanted to reiterate that point that you said about, you know,

yeah, the book title seems relatively general, but you've always done an amazing job. of in your work being very specific about, you know, the varieties of socialism that flourished and the pros, the honest stock, you know, taking stock of the pros and cons of each individual manifestation. And, yeah, very specific to like, you know, in this country, these advancements were made in this country, not so much. And so I think any critique that tries to bulldoze over the nuances that you spend so much time exploring is always going to fall fly, you know. Yeah, you know, it's funny that you say that during the sort of, of the earlier part of quarantine. I can't remember. I think it was in May last year. The Irish

Workers Party invited me to give a talk about women's rights and in the Eastern Bloc. And I think that they were hoping that I would do a kind of, you know, general overview. But instead, I think I was probably the most tedious, boring person you can imagine. I went through like reproductive rights in Poland, reproductive rights in Bulgaria, reproductive rights in Romania. reproductive rights in the Soviet Union, and then I went through sex education, because I wanted to impress upon them that it was different in different countries, right? And the problem with that kind of level of nuance, where you're really talking about very specific situations in different state socialist countries is that it's tedious and boring, and people like big sweeping arguments

where you can generalize. And so I have definitely felt the tension in trying to make my work more accessible to not only, you know, the general public, but also activists, very specifically people who are in leftist political parties around the world. And, you know, and I don't want to try to cherry pick, you know, data and say, you know, this is representative of the entire former Eastern Bloc, because as you said, you know, one of the things that I have always done in my work for the last 20 years or more is to just say, look, it's different in different places. is we cannot homogenize the experience of 20th century state socialism. Yeah.

But that turns out to be not as fun as just making sweeping claims, like, for instance, the title of that book. Yeah, absolutely. And I also think, you know, in the West, there is a sort of totalizing view of the Cold War. It was very dichotomous, you know, it was the West and then the Eastern Block. And in the minds of especially many Americans, it does sort of, it can often be thought of as like this, yes, it was all the same in all those different countries. And, you know, it was over here in the West, more or less the same. And I think you break that down, but to somebody's, like, knee-jerk reaction that's gotten that sort of post-Cold War education, I could see why they'd fall

into like a sort of simplistic narrative. And that nuance would ruffle their feathers or just, you know, reorient their paradigm regarding it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, people, you know, whenever you try to protect, you know, you try to push back against the sort of narrative that all 20th century state socialism in Eastern Europe was one endless bleak, gray, totalitarian hellscape of gulogs and purges and famines. People get, yeah, feathers ruffled is definitely how I would describe it to say the least. People really push back. They don't want to hear about women's rights. They don't want to hear, I was at a conference on Friday about global architecture under state socialism and all these architects from the eastern bloc countries who went to southern Africa and helped build these

huge new cities in decolonializing post-colonial countries. So there are all sorts of things that we could talk about, music and culture and sport. And it's a complicated picture. And nuance and detail are the enemy of simplicity. And the Cold War narrative that we've inherited in this country is a very simplistic one. And it necessarily has to be because all of the negative parts of our society need to be papered over in order to say that, you know, democracy and capitalism are the best, or at least they're better than anything else that's out there. And all of the positives of the other alternative system have to be papered over in order to say that everything that's associated with any kind of left politics is inevitably evil and will is a slippery slope into

some kind of gulag famine purges politics of Stalinism. And so that east-west divide, good, bad, black and white, I mean, it's a really, really stark division. And it's, it's very, very difficult, I think, to push back against that. And one of the ways of pushing back is by really digging in to the details and figuring out like, okay, you know, how was it different in Yugoslavia versus Bulgaria versus Hungary versus Poland versus the Soviet Union? But that's a discussion that requires time and energy and thought and all of those things I feel sometimes these days are in very short supply. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, well, you know, this episode will come out on International

Women's Day. And as such, it really does provide us with a great opportunity to discuss its actual history. So how did International Women's Day come to be a sort of holiday? And can you talk a bit about its real history? Sure. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people don't realize that the original events that precipitated International Women's Day happened in the United States in 1908 and 1909. It was an uprising, a mass demonstration of needleworkers, women needleworkers in New York.

And it happened on March 8th. And it led to the first permanent unions for women in the United States. States. And in 1909, Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party of America decided that they wanted to mark a special Women's Day, a national women's day. And so they proposed that this March 8th would be a good day to celebrate a national women's day. And then in 1910, Claire at Zetkin and the German Social Democrat, a woman who was the editor-in-chief of a newspaper called the Gleichite or the equality, which was a kind of a socialist women's newspaper in Germany at the time. And Alexander Collentai, who was a at that time, a Menshevik, she was a Russian women's activist.

They were in Copenhagen for the second international Congress of Socialist Women in 1910 in Copenhagen. And they, Claire and Zetkin put forward a resolution to declare an international women's day. And initially, it wasn't on March 8th. It was declared. The first time it was celebrated was 1911. So this is actually the 110th anniversary of the first celebration of International Women's Day. And it was largely a working women's holiday. It was a holiday where working women went out and demanded certain kinds of labor protections for themselves as workers and showed solidarity with the trade unions and socialist and other left parties in Europe at the time. Then during the the First World War, Working Women's Day, as it was called. The date was moved to March 8th, I believe, in 1913. And then during the First World War, it was more of a pacifist holiday. Women had a hard time actually gathering, because obviously pacifism was not really well

liked by the belligerent powers. But there was a demonstration in Norway. Often March 8th was used as a time for women to demand the end of the war and a return of their sons and brothers and husbands and fathers. And then the big moment, of course, is in Russia in 1917 on what was by the old Julian calendar, which is the calendar that they used in Tsarist Russia, February 23rd, but by the Gregorian calendar, March 8th, it was Women's Day. There was a huge demonstration of women who were demanding peace and bread. They wanted Russia to pull out of the First World War. There were, you know, lots of hardships associated with

war. And what's interesting is that there was a plan for a big mass demonstration that the male trade unions had been planning for May 1st of 1917 against the Tsar. But the March 8th, or, you know, we call this the February Revolution because by the old Julian calendar, it happened in February. But the abdication of the Tsar was a result of a Women's Day March. that really got out of hand in Petrograd. And so, you know, there was this sort of radical history of women out in the streets demanding bread, demanding peace, and demanding the abdication of the Tsar. And four days later, he does abdicate.

And that is the February Revolution, which brings in the provisional government of Konensky. So the Soviet Union, you know, it becomes a holiday in 1919. it was originally called Working Women's Day. And then, you know, it becomes a very important day in the 20s. It's called just International Women's Day because it's meant to be a day also of solidarity with women in other countries. And then in 1965, the Soviet Union declares it, you know, what they call a bank holiday, you know, like a public holiday where you don't go to work. So like Martin Luther King Day or President's Day or Memorial Day or something like that. It becomes a international holiday officially in 1975 when the United Nations declares International Women's Day on March 8th during the U.N. international women's year.

And then, you know, it slowly spreads around the world after the U.N. declares it. You know, in some countries, it is a time when you give women, you know, flowers and chocolates, sort of like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day kind of bound up into one. In other countries, it's a day of radical protest. It's a day when women go out on the streets. In some socialist countries, it was a very beloved holiday before 1989. People exchanged gifts and they had a day off of work and they usually had parties and hung out with their friends. And in other countries, women just hated it. It was not very popular in the Soviet Union, especially because once it became a bank holiday, men just use it as an opportunity to go out and get drunk.

Czechoslovakia was also not popular after 68. So it had a kind of a weird, divided history in the Eastern Bloc. But it was very much associated with the socialist countries until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. And then in 1993 or four, I believe, Representative Maxine Waters of California decided to propose it as an official holiday, you know, as a date to mark the day, March 8th in the United States is International Women's Day, but the bill never got out of committee. And so it's, you know, it's never really been a big thing in the United States. And it's always been a big thing in many other countries of the world, but particularly in Europe. So in Bulgaria, for instance, it was declared, I think it's been a holiday since

1915. So, you know, it has a long history in Europe and certainly in any countries in the global south, which had, you know, socialist alignment or even non-alignment during the Cold War. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. And the history that I think is not very well known, especially, as you said, here in the U.S. And I do think there is something important when you have a sort of class consciousness and historical consciousness expansion over time, part of the reclaiming of socialist and radical history, I think is, in part, a reclaiming of the holidays, which were, rightfully ours in the sense that it comes out of these more radical socialist left-wing emancipatory traditions it's certainly true for international women's day it's also true for things

like may day and you know i think there is something to be said for left-wing attempts today to try to reclaim those holidays and make them about what they originally were and tell people about that history etc but you know like everything good and beautiful in this world there will inevitably be an attempt by the forces of liberalism to co-opt and defaying such things. And this is certainly true again for holidays like May Day, which in the U.S. has pretty much been annihilated and Labor Day is created on the other end of the calendar as a sort of day to do that that is extracted from its radical roots. And it's also true maybe to a slightly lesser degree with MLK Day insofar as while in the U.S. we celebrate MLK Day. It's like also celebrated quote unquote by

like the right wing figures who had they lived during MLK's day would have just been the violent white reaction that he spent his entire life fighting against. I mean, even so far as Trump tweeting out, happy MLK day or like Glenn Beck saying actually MLK was a conservative, that's a way of co-opting the life and legacy of MLK by the very people who would have stood and still in many ways stand against everything he stood for. So with all of that in mind, can you kind of talk about some of the ways in which International Women's Day and maybe even just feminism in general has been sort of co-opted and defanged by the forces that want to maintain the status quo. Yeah, wow.

I mean, again, this is one of those wonderful questions that I feel like we could just like have a whole conversation on just this one conversation on this one question. I think, you know, the thing that's so interesting, thinking about the radical history of International Women's Day is that women went out on the street as well. workers and mothers. And they saw themselves as the allies of men. And they saw themselves of part, as part of a broad-based social movement that was seeking both institutional power in terms of, you know, especially in Germany where you had, you know, the Social Democratic Party running in parliament and so on and so forth, but also real power within the workplace in terms of unions,

in terms of democratizing the economy and real power out in the streets, bodies in the streets to argue for profound and fundamental changes in the political economic system so that workers would have not only a greater say in their government, but also a greater proportion of the wealth that they help create. So this was never about having a few women, more women in positions of power, or sort of girl bosses, CEOs in the C-suite, or more women on corporate boards, or all the kinds of corporate feminism that we find in the United States today, which can be promoted by, you know, cosmetic companies and, you know, various brands that are trying to get women to buy their products that kind of feel good, defanged. I like your choice of word there, defang. feminism that is removed from its connections to these broader worker movements. I mean, the fact that the original name of the holiday was international working women's day,

I think is really significant. Because there are so many ways in which liberalism and particularly liberal feminism has completely let down working class women and men in this country. And I think that what women like Claire Zetkin and Alexandra Colentai stood for, and they were very much opposed to what they called bourgeois feminism. They would be very much opposed to what we call liberal feminism today. And they would be rolling over in their graves, I think, if they knew that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton were doing a fundraiser for Democrats on International Women's Day. But what they stood for were broad coalitions with working class men. And they wanted to talk about the ways in which women were particularly negatively impacted by capitalism,

especially with regard to their role as mothers, because they, as we have found in this pandemic, women overwhelmingly have responsibility for the care work that needs to be done in the home, especially when schools are closed or relatives get sick. there's all of this unpaid labor that's being done. And so they wanted equity. They wanted to have special kinds of government programs, of public programs, of expanded social safety nets that would allow them to better combine their work and family responsibilities. But they never wanted those things independently of profound transformations in the political and economic system. And I think that what we think of or hear as feminism today, certainly the way in which IWD has been co-opted,

is that feminism is imagined as compatible with capitalism, that women's empowerment is imagined as women being able to slay the boardroom just as well as a man. And it's not, it's been disassociated from demands for radical transformation within our political economy. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a crucial element of it is this unmooring from any sort of class struggle and transformational vision. And there's also, you know, representational politics, which lets, and it's very individualistic in a bourgeois sense, because it lets one, particularly lucky individual stand in for an entire group. And therefore, when Hillary Clinton is running for president or Kamala Harris gets VP, it's said as if, it's presented as if it is synonymous

with advancement for all women. And, you know, there are plenty of pros to that. I mean, I'm not anti-representational. I mean, I think more, you know, diverse people all across our society is never a bad thing in and of itself. But when it is presented in that way, it's sort of sort of ideological in that it is hyper individualist, it reifies individual success, and it obscures the fact that a couple women in very high positions of power in a brutal imperialist state is not only not synonymous with women's liberation, but in so many ways they act specifically against women's liberation, whether that's low-wage women workers here in the U.S. or women across the world. Hillary Clinton can gleefully laugh in the face of toppling

Libya and the suffering of the women in Libya is never brought up in relation to her being a hashtag girl boss or Kamala's help in constructing the incarceration state and putting people away in California for many years and she's still represented and presented as this wonderful feminist figure and you know Kristen Sinema it's a tiny thing but when she votes no on the minimum wage you know, more women are represented as minimum wage workers than men. So it's like, no, I don't believe $15 an hour you should get that. And $15 an hour is not even a living wage, right? That's still poverty wages in today's world.

And more women suffer from that than men because more women have minimum wage jobs. And so in all of these ways, they're presented as synonymous with feminist advancement while at the same time, you know, doing things actively which obliterate the lot. and devastate the lives of women more generally. Yeah, you know, I'd like to quote, in Ghana, in West Africa, there was a woman named Annie Giage. And she was the first, I think she was the first lawyer in Ghana, female lawyer, and she was eventually appointed as a justice to the High Court of Ghana. And she led the Ghanaian delegation to the first international Congress of women during

International Women's Year in 1975. And she was very critical of American women, American feminists at that time. And this is a quote, which I think is really exactly gets to the heart of what you just said. She said in 1975, women's liberation has no meaning unless it produces the will in women to couple their own freedom with the struggle for liberation from all forms of oppression. The liberated woman cannot support her own country's oppression of other countries. In a world in which one third of the population drains off two thirds of the wealth and leaves two thirds of the population to manage one third of the wealth, some adjustments in the standard of living of the affluent nations are necessary. This was in 19.

75, right? So I think that these left women, these progressive women all over the world, but especially during the Cold War, were very critical from the very beginning of the particular form of feminism that we have in the United States, that we've come to develop in the United States, which is one that, as you pointed out, I think quite astutely, is very individualistic. But it also allows women to think about their own liberation, their own emancipation in very narrow, tiny terms associated with just maybe themselves and their immediate communities, their own autonomy and their own self-actualization to the exclusion of other forms of oppression in the world. And I don't think if we go back and we look at the kinds of women and social

movements who celebrated International Women's Day, historically, they would have been people who saw that feminism and that women's emancipation were part and parcel of a broader struggle for the emancipation from all forms of oppression, not just that of patriarchy. Absolutely. And that is why a robust feminism needs to always be tied to class struggle, and specifically in imperial countries to a robust anti-imperialism, because, you know, those those policies of imperialism brutalize the lives of countless women and human beings just more broadly across the globe. Before we move on to your work, second world, second sex, do you have any thoughts on

how socialist and revolutionaries can sort of meaningfully fight back against this co-option? I know it's a huge question, and there's probably a ton of answers to that, but do you have any specific thoughts on that? I mean, I think what we're doing is really important. I mean, talking to people, telling people, not letting it be forgotten. You know, sometimes this work feels like, you know, you're just sort of speaking into the darkness.

You're just sort of shouting into the woods. But I do think that especially the next generation, young people, I have a 19-year-old daughter, and I teach students, you know, between the ages of 18 and 22 primarily. So I deal on a regular basis. with a lot of young people. And I think young people, they are the ones

that they hold the future in our hands in so many ways, especially with respect to things like climate change, right? And the way that we're going to be pushing back against the commodification of our lives. So to the extent that we can reach out and talk to and educate people, young people, in particular, I do think that that helps It's not always enough.

We need other kinds of broad-based social movements for sure. But sometimes information and idea can be a really powerful light in the darkness. And we need more voices out there. We need more people out there sharing this history and writing about these different trajectories, these different ways of understanding social movements like feminism. I think that what we're doing, you know, podcasts and YouTube shows, and writing for general audiences, all those kinds of things. You know, look, 10 years ago, I could never believe that somebody who called himself

a Democratic socialist would almost win the nomination for the Democratic Party, right? The fact that people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a congresswoman. I mean, there have been changes, and part of those changes have been the result, I think, of changes in the discourse and changes in the discourse come from education yeah and and these changes these transformations they're happening at every level so that is more people getting active on the street local community organizing more progressive specifically women of color infiltrating the actual system as a whole and whether you agree with that strategy or not it's still an important manifestation of this underlying bubbling up of change and whenever there's big transformational change

whenever there are movements coalescing for transformation and we're living in a period like that right now, there is always and everywhere this synonymous parallel development of rhetoric, of talking, of spreading these ideas of what the new world could sort of look like and importantly, deconstructing the myths that uphold the old world. And I think we're living through a radical time right now of the myths that capitalism, neoliberalism tells itself, about itself, you know, the rich or rich because they work hard, the poor lazy, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, everybody has equal opportunity. Nobody believes in those anymore, you know, less and less at the very least every single day, believe in the core myths that America survived on for decades. And that process, I think, is part and parcel with this bubbling up of radical change, radical voices, et cetera. Of course, it's a protracted process. And anybody that

thinks this stuff happens in a four-year election cycle or, you know, over one summer of protesting, it's just never going to be that way. All of history says these are much longer processes and they unfold at their own pace. But I think there's that important stuff is happening. And then zooming down into the personal level, you know, I have a daughter and a niece who I'm very, very close to. They are entering their teenage years. One is entering middle school, the other is entering high school, their best friends. And from day one, I've always been, you know, a lot of my family's not very political. But I've always been teaching them the history of feminism,

the feminist issues of today relating their experiences that they go through as girls growing up to feminist sort of paradigm thinking. And I'm always tying that in also with like class, politics, anti-imperialism, right? When they're the U.S. bombs another country. I tell them, like, imagine if you and your family were living there, you know, or like, you know, you might be okay, but what about it? that the homeless person because of COVID and now they're on the street and you know she can't provide food for her her kids etc and so insofar as we have an influence over young women in our

lives whether that is the form of family friends or if you're a teacher etc you definitely have to agitate in that sphere of your influence and that can be a meaningful contribution to these overall forces of transformation absolutely I 100% agree I think that we we we never realize how important a personal, one personal connection can be. You know, just the right, being the right person at the right time. I, you know, just to sort of give you a little example, when I was a brand new assistant professor up in Maine in the early 2000s, I think this would have been 2002 or 2003. I was the faculty advisor to the YDSA club. There was a YDSA unit at the college where I taught up in Maine. And one of the students in the YDSA chapter that I was, you know, involved with, I think ended up

being pretty prominent in the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2018, 2019, 2020. And so, So, you know, it was a very small thing for me. You know, it was time out of my day to organize these meetings. And I think we had, we would come, you know, I'd bring some students over to my house and we'd have a reading group, kind of a radical reading group. And I was a young mother and I was just starting out and I was constantly stressed all the time. I don't know how. And another one of the students actually from that, from that early YDSH. is now a professor, actually, of religion at Haverford College. And she also does really interesting

work combining social justice issues with faith. And I think that when I think back to those early years of my career, it's just like a blur of, you know, diaper changes and feedings and rushing up and down, getting home and walking the dogs and doing the grocery shopping. And I mean, I just felt like my whole world lesson plans and meeting with students. all of that just felt meaningless to me. I just felt like I was a hamster in a wheel. And yet out of that, those small little commitments of time and energy, which really did seem like a footnote to the larger chaos of my life,

I was able to connect with some young people who 20 years later, literally, that was 2002, so almost 19 years later, you know, are sort of grownups out there in the world doing things that are making it different. And to me, I think we always underestimate the impacts that we can have on not only our friends and colleagues and comrades, but also the young people in our lives, even if they're not our children or our students, just taking the time to pay attention and give your attention freely to interact with and debate with and take seriously the thoughts and worries and concerns of the younger generation. a huge part of what it means to build a movement. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, you don't need to have, as you've made very clear, like you don't need to have like a huge reach or some huge platform to be able to do this. Everybody has within their lives, people that they can reach out to, that they can impact,

change their way of thinking. They go out and change people subsequently. And it really does have a ripple effect. Of course it needs to be glued to these broader processes to organization, to these forces, coalescing, all of that is true. But you can do, you can influence people in your sphere and you can contribute in whatever ways you can to this overall movement. I think that's really important to keep in mind because that includes everybody.

Everybody has a role to play in this stuff. Let's go ahead and move on. And I believe it's your most recent book, which came out a couple of years ago, but has just been translated into Bulgarian is called Second World Second Sex, Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Can you talk about why you wrote that book, the sort of immense research that went into it, and what you hope to accomplish with it?

Yeah, so just really briefly, this was a labor of love. I worked on this book for nine years, actually more, but seriously concentrated work for about nine years between the research and the writing and all of the travel that it required. I worked in archives on three continents in the United States, in Europe, and in Africa, because I did work in Zambia primarily. And I interviewed about 43 women's, progressive women's activists who had been involved in the United Nations decade for women. There were three big world conferences, one in 1975, I've already mentioned that one, one in Copenhagen in 1980, and one in Nairobi in 1985. And the reason I wrote this book was because I had a mentor back when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, an American woman who had been an activist at these world conferences, and she had been a board member. of an organization called Instraw, which was a UN training center for women, which was based in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic. And she said something to me one day about how when she was at Instra, that they would often see these reports about how good things were for women in the

socialist countries. And she just thought they were propaganda at the time. But then she started going to these international conferences and she met some of these women from the state socialist countries, state socialist countries in Eastern Europe, as well as from countries like Cuba and Ethiopia and Tanzania and Nicaragua and where they had really strong left movements. And she started to wonder if maybe there wasn't something true about what was going on in that part of the world in terms of women's emancipation. And so she really sort of encouraged me. to do this kind of research and to try to find the stories

of women's activism, socialist women's activism at the UN because everything had been, as far as she was concerned, right, from the American perspective. Much of what had been written about the decade had been written by Americans and their allies in the global South.

And there was a big hole in the literature in terms of, you know, what were the perspectives, what were the goals, what were the achievements of women from the socialist countries? And so that's really what I set out to do. And I had no idea how long it was going to take me to do it. Yeah. Can you talk about some of the advancements made by and for women by various socialist states and various women's organizations during the Cold War?

Because I really think that even people on the left have an impoverished understanding of this history specifically. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the big thing that you have to understand is that women were emancipated in the Soviet Union starting in their early, you know, teens, 19. 17, almost immediately after the Bolshevik revolution, people again, like Alexandra Kalentai, who I've mentioned a couple of times, she was the first commissar of social welfare. And she was very instrumental in putting in place a series of policies that would allow women to get education and training. And then once they were educated and trained to mobilize them into the labor force. And so she understood very clearly, because she was herself a woman and a mother, that women have this challenge of having to deal with the domestic sphere.

So all of the housework and the care for the children largely falls onto the shoulders of women. And in order for women to get education and training and then use those skills in the labor force, they needed support and they needed public support. So Cullen Tye puts in a series of policies that allow for the socialization of a lot of domestic work. So public cafeterias, public laundries. Children centers, so daycare centers, both for toddlers as well as for infants, child allowances, maternity leaves, all sorts of policies that would allow women to more fruitfully combine work and family life. And this starts in, you know, the early 20s in the Soviet Union. And so when the

countries of Eastern Europe, which largely become, you know, state planned economies after the Second World War. When they move on this socialist path to development, they implement a lot of the same policies that Colentai developed in the 20s, partially because there were male labor shortages. So just like you had Rosie the Riveter in the United States during the war, you had the mobilization of women into labor force across the socialist countries during war. The difference is that in the United States, after the war was over, women were pushed back into the home, into the kitchen. This was true in Western Europe as well. But in the socialist countries, they maintained women. They built a huge social safety net to support women so that they could go out and become

professionals and contribute to the socialist economy. So, you know, I could say a lot about this. I'll just give you one figure to give you an example. In 1957, there was a national manpower planning council, which was convened in the United States. And they were very worried about shortages of skilled personnel, particularly scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the United States because we were fighting, you know, the space race against the Soviets. And in this national manpower council report that I found from 1957, they report that in that year, they had statistics that the Soviet Union was graduating 13,000 female engineers a year by 1957. And in the United States, we were graduating way less than 100 a year.

And these men in the American government were very nervous that the Soviet Union was winning the space race precisely because we were, they were, very successfully incorporating women into the labor force, and especially in these technical professions that were in very high demand in the late 50s. So there was a huge amount of forward progress that was being achieved in the Eastern Bloc during this time. And eventually, I think it puts pressure on the American government to act, to try to incorporate more women into the labor force at the very least. Absolutely. And I think that is a point I make over and over and over, over again about the Soviet Union, that period of time in the Cold War, how that engagement that

the West had to have with those sorts of movements and formations ended up benefiting dramatically people over in the West, whether that's workers with FDR and doesn't want a Bolshevik-style revolution in the U.S., so we need to meet some of these knees or women's movements, as you've said, and gains for women. But also, like, in the decolonial period, decolonial struggles and how they manifested in the U.S. with like the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party and the American Indian movement, you know, really you can't divorce that period of time and the advancements made globally from this sort of conflict between socialism and capitalism. And when socialism fell, the repercussions were felt not only on that side of the globe,

but as well on this one as with the formal introduction in many ways of neoliberalism because that huge sort of counterweight and challenge to the capitalist status quo was no longer present. And so, you know, that's a crucial thing about history that I think we all need to understand. One of the fascinating things, actually before I do that is like, I just wrote this in my notes, like, Collentai really was a hero. And the impact she had, I think, is still not well understood, even on the Marxist left. And I think you and I, Kristen, one of these days, should just do a whole episode dedicated to her

and her life and her story because I think it's absolutely fascinating. Oh, I would absolutely love to do that. You know, I do have this podcast called AK-47, right? Which is all about Alexander Collin-Tai. I could literally talk about Alexander Collin-Tai until the end of the world. She wrote so much, and she was so important and so influential

that we, and too many people on the left are unaware of how you know, just basic things about your life today. If you drop a kid off at a daycare center, you have Alexandra Colentine to thank for that almost. There's almost a direct line that I could draw between some of the policies that she put in place in the early 20s in the Soviet Union and some of the daily realities of our lives today.

Absolutely. We'll definitely make that happen. And I just have to say, kudos on that name, AK-47. Absolutely brilliant. love it well it's 47 works of alexander colentai yeah so it's kind of a you know it's meant to be a little funny but it hurt her you know her initials are okay so i had to do something with it and i know we plugged that in the last episode you were on but is that an ongoing project i'm still working on it i've gotten i think i've gotten through 29 or 30 of her distinct work so i've got about

17 more to go it's been going for about two years now so beautiful i'll make sure to to link to that in the show notes of this episode as well. So let's go ahead and shift toward the global south. And I think this is a really interesting aspect that I was fascinated to learn about in the article and the book you sent over for me to skim through. And can you talk a little bit about the east-south coalitions of socialist women, both within the UN and just throughout the global south more broadly, and how it materially benefited women in the global south specifically? Yeah. You know, I think that you have to understand that, in the period of decolonization. So as the European countries were either withdrawing voluntarily

or being kicked out of their imperial possessions in the global South, many of these countries turn toward socialism, turned towards the socialist bloc or the non-aligned block, which had its own kind of leftist politics associated with it, in order to pursue a more socialist path to economic development. They wanted to develop rapidly. They wanted modernization. They wanted urbanization. And so they forged these very close alliances with the Soviet Union and its affiliated countries in the Eastern Bloc. And because of the international women's year, as I said in 1975 and the UN decade for women that followed, there was a lot of pressure on the Western countries to sort of step up their game in terms of women's rights.

You know, again, as you said earlier, the fact that the Soviet Union existed, the fact that there was a real alternative to capitalism forced Western capitalists to behave much better than they otherwise would have. And we saw exactly what happened. Once that alternative disappeared, we got this sort of rampant cutthroat capitalist needs. neoliberalism that has completely upended our lives and destroyed the planet and all the other things that we are all aware of if you listen to this podcast in particular. But I think that this period in the 70s and 80s was really productive for women's rights because socialist women from the East were forging alliances with socialist and leftist women in the global South. And these were

very strong affective bonds. And they did it by bringing women together. So in an era before email and podcasts and Zoom and Skype and all of these cheap information technologies that we have that allow us to connect over large distances, political education largely had to be done in person or it had to be done on paper. And these women from the East expended really consistent. considerable sums when you think about them relative to the time to forge and build strong networks with progressive women in the global South. And I think that those material resources really created a global women's movement, a global socialist women's movement. Sometimes it's called global socialist feminism. It was a very strong movement of women who believed

that women's concerns, women's issues could not be separated from larger issues of political and economic struggle. And they brought that message to the United Nations. And they really forced the Western countries onto their back feet. You know, they really pushed this issue of women's rights at the UN. And eventually, we got out of it this thing called the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It's called CEDAW. And it was signed in 1980 in Copenhagen at this conference. It's been ratified by almost every single country around the world except for the United States. And I think like Iran and Somalia and Sudan. And so, you know, we really, we really have to think about this alternative history of socialist feminism and especially

the alliances that were forged between women in the old socialist bloc countries and progressive of women in countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who were taking this alternative pathway to modernization and development. Yeah. Nothing scares the American capitalist patriarchs like socialist women in the East and Global South coming together for their own self-determination. Exactly. Definitely puts them on the back foot.

You've previously written the following. A quote, after 1989, many women from the global South openly mourned the loss of the superpower rivalry that had energized the global women's movement. Suddenly, the capitalist path to social and economic development became the only game in town. And funding for women's initiatives and international collaborations disappeared. End quote. Can you talk about this period and sort of what was lost during and after this brutal period of collapse in Western triumphalism? Yeah. I mean, I think it's really important to understand that once the Cold War was over, all of the resources that had flowed from not only the Eastern Bloc, but also from the Western countries into the global

South. And this is not just around women's issues. This is around all sorts of issues. Once the Cold War was over, the West just said, we won. We don't need to help anybody anymore. And we don't need to regulate our markets. We don't need to check the, you know, rapaciousness of our employers. We can sell workers down the river. We can do whatever we want because nobody's going to challenge us. And in fact, that's kind of exactly what happened, right? I remember, you know, the end of the Cold War very clearly. And back in those days, there was discussion of something called the peace dividend. So there was this idea that all of the money that different governments around the world had spent on armaments and on, you know, foreign aid in order to fight communism or resist

socialism and vice versa, all of the massive amount of human resources and technology that had gone into this Cold War competition, this superpower rivalry, suddenly we'd be able to use those resources for peace and for, you know, increasing and improving the quality of living for humanity. We'd have more education and better health care and wider social safety nets and more leisure time and, you know, how naive we were in retrospect, you know, that instead what happened was that the capitalist, there was no peace dividend for the population. It all went into the pockets of the economic elites who stood to gain from these geopolitical shifts. You know, Russia and Eastern Europe plunged into an economic depression that was in most places longer and deeper than that

of the Great Depression. The 1990s were a terrible time in Eastern Europe. And while in the United States, the 1990s were boom time, right? And a lot of people got really rich very quickly. So I think that what happened was in the wake of this geopolitical catastrophe and the shifts in power. You know, I think it's Winston Churchill who says that history is written by the victors. So we suddenly get endless stories of how capitalism was bound to win because socialism was a completely defunct and unsustainable, inefficient economic system. And so what happened was just the natural triumph of Western capitalism. I think Fukuyama called it the end of history. And we would all now live in these perfect capitalist, free market, liberal democratic societies

and be happy. And that would be the end of, you know, the development of humankind. And, you know, and we know now that the last 40 years have not been as beautiful and perfect as everybody was promising at the time. And so these narratives have arisen to try to erase this alternative, to erase this alternative path to modernity, erase the real achievements of the socialist countries. Again, as I've said in much of my other work, there were lots of negatives to 20th century state socialism. I certainly don't want to make it sound like it was a paradise.

But there were things that were achieved. And one of those things were these East-South alliances that really did not only help these countries in the global South achieve national independence, sometimes very directly through military aid, but also helped them to achieve a certain level of autonomy and economic development that otherwise would not have been available to them and which disappeared in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Absolutely. Yeah, whether it's overly cynical, pessimistic views of the socialist experiments at this time

or overly romantic ones, they both serve to obscure reality and prohibit us from actually learning the real essential lessons that we need to learn from. those experiments. So having all of the pros and the cons, like, you know, nuanced and deeply laid out in front of us allows us to better pull from what we can and discard what we don't need, learn from how certain things went astray, et cetera. And so that's always going to demand intellectual honesty and a real taking of honest account of these experiments and all their different manifestations. And, you know, just looking today, like, what, I'm 32 years old, So I was born in 89. My entire life has been the sort of rabid neoliberal period here in the U.S.

Look at the U.S. and Russia today. Both are in many ways deteriorated from where they were at the peak of the last century, and they're both increasingly dominated in their political sphere by not only corruption, but by far right-wing forces and violent reaction. And you can't separate this current period that both countries are going through from that history. exactly so that's another listen i know you touched on this a little bit but maybe there's something more you have to say maybe even specifically with regards to academia but how has this general history been obscured or ignored in the west and how does that help prop up ideologically the

sort of bourgeois feminism that we were critiquing earlier yeah no i do think that um this history has been very deliberately obscured um and it you know without going into great details here. I think that the culture that we have in academia of blind peer review, not only for articles and for books, but also for things like grant proposals, you know, doing research on three continents for nine years to write that book, I required a lot of external funding to help me travel to these countries, to help me go to these archives and interview these women. And even just small things like, you know, having a scanner to scan their documents or being able to negotiate, you know, interviews and, you know, taking people out to dinner

or whatever, bringing people bottles of wine and chocolates whenever I met with them. Like, there are lots of resources that are required to do this kind of research. And as I'm sure you understand, If you're doing a project like this that has real political salience in challenging certain kinds of Cold War narratives that are persistent in our society, you're going to run afoul of a lot of people who are going to throw roadblocks up in front of you. And I can tell you from a personal perspective that I have faced many personal challenges precisely around this issue. and I know that many of my younger colleagues are facing these challenges when they try to do work that challenges certain kinds of narratives. So within academia very specifically, there are real structural barriers that prevent this kind of research. And on the other hand, there are also bountiful resources for the digitization and the preservation of Western women's voices and

perspectives. And so, you know, when we think about archives and access to personal papers and oral history interviews, all of that stuff has been very well preserved in the United States and not so well preserved in places like Bulgaria and Zambia where I've done my research. So, you know, if you're a young dissertation, you know, dissertating graduate student and you want to pick a topic that is going to allow you to write a dissertation, in a reasonable amount of time, you're going to pick a topic if you're, you know, if you're being well advised, well mentored, that is not going to be as difficult to do as something like what I tried to set out to do with this book. I originally wanted to include many more countries.

I wanted to go to Ethiopia and Ghana, but the resources just were not there. And so I do think that, you know, if I were working on a nice liberal feminist topic, I would not have had the struggles that I had for resources. I was very lucky in that I had two institutions that generously funded my research. And I did win a couple of external grants that allowed me to travel, particularly I won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which paid for me to go to Zambia. And that was really lucky. That was an incredible, I don't think this project would have been done had it not been for that grant. So, you know, sometimes you get lucky, but, but it's been an incredible push and an incredible amount of labor. And so, you know, for young scholars out there who may be listening to

these people who are thinking about doing this kind of research, you know, they should know that there are these structural, structural barriers. And, and you can fight them, but it's going to take a lot of energy. Yeah, absolutely. Well, salute to you for everything that you've done. I really do genuinely admire you and your really important work and it has done enormous benefit to me and informed me enormously on all of this history and will continue to going forward. Maybe one way to zoom in towards the end of this conversation, again, touching base with the fact that it is International Women's Day today, the day we're releasing this. What would you say, or what would you want to say in honor of our, as you call them, red grandmothers? And what do you hope

revolutionaries today ultimately remember about this history? So, you know, one thing that I've been thinking a lot about, I'm putting together a little book of biographies of five of these red grandmothers, as I call them, is that they weren't perfect. They were flawed. You know, every single one of them did something or many things that would have gotten them canceled and they lived in in 2021. Cullen Tye included. They were hypocrites. They sometimes were selfish. They were sometimes careless with other people. They sometimes made poor decisions. But over the course of their lives, the arcs of their lives, they stayed committed to their ideals. And they kept fighting for a world which many of them thought that they would never live to see.

And despite their flaws, despite the fact that they were human, like everyone else, right, that they made mistakes that they sometimes said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing, at the end of their lives, almost all of these women, whether they were appreciated for it or not, whether they got credit for it or not, I think they could look back and say, that they had actually done some good. And that's what I hope, the books that I write and the work that I do and that my colleagues do helps us to reflect back on these women and others, right? Not just women, many men as well, who worked really hard for their entire lives

and faced many challenges and made a ton of mistakes, but they never gave up hope. And that's the message that I think that we need to remind ourselves of, that fighting, that living to see another day, standing up and dusting yourself off and getting out there and joining the fight again, no matter how many times you get knocked down, that's the message that we should be celebrating on International Women's Day today. Absolutely. Beautiful. I cannot agree with that more. And you've certainly made huge contributions in uncovering this past and teaching so many of us about the, really the ancestors ideologically and just those committed to human liberation that came before us and the best way that we can all continue to honor them is to pick up the torch and carry it forward however far we can whatever capacities we have do our best to advance the ball for human liberation and in that way I think we pay the best sort of homage that we can to those who came before us Kristen before I let you go I wanted you to be able to plug the keynote lectures

that you're going to have the day after this comes out on March 9th, and then let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Yeah, so I am giving a formal academic lecture on the International, the Socialist History of International Women's Day for the University of Kansas on March 9th. So that's Tuesday. I think central time, you know, in Kansas, I think it starts at 6 p.m. I think for me it starts at 7 because I'm still in Philly.

So if anybody is interested in listening to a more kind of academic talk about this international socialist history, as well as the ways in which socialist women's activism impacted women's rights in the United States, I encourage you to go to the University of Kansas website and sign up for that lecture. It's free and open to the public. All of my writing, both for popular audiences and my academic work is linked on my website, which is christengotsie.com. And, of course, I have a very kind of nerdy podcast, AK47. buzzsprout.com, where I read and discuss the works of one of these incredible red

grandmothers, Alexander Coulentai. Beautiful. And I'll link to as much of that as I can in the show notes. And I'll definitely reach out to you, Kristen, in a couple months, perhaps, and see if we can get together an entire episode on Collentine, because I think that'd be fascinating. Yeah, it would be a lot of fun. I'd be delighted. Wonderful. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You've been on many

times. Hopefully you'll be on many more times, but it's always an honor and a pleasure to speak with you and importantly to learn from you. So thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me.