Marxism, Mariategui, and the Women's Movement

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of Marxism, Mariategui, and the Women's Movement has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published by the magazine Sol Rojo.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is a lecture delivered by Comrade Gonzalo in Ayacucho, Peru before January 1974. It was first published as a pamphlet by the Popular Women's Centre in January 1974 and later republished as a document of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru in April 1975.

In this document, which is largely based on the work of Friedrich Engels, J.C. Mariategui, and Simone de Beauvoir, Comrade Gonzalo outlines the fundamental thesis of proletarian feminism, an integral part of scientific Socialism and Communism. This fundamental thesis can be summed up in the following statement by Gonzalo: «To Marxism, women, just like men, are nothing but a set of social relations, which are created and change as a result of the historical process of development of society, and which, in turn, serve to change these social relations. Women, then, are products of society, and their transformation demands the transformation of society.» Thus, in this document, Gonzalo contributes greatly to the solution of the women's question and, by extension, the queer question.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PREFACE TO THE 1974 PERUVIAN EDITION

#Popular Women's Centre

#January 1974

#★

The women's question, that is, the question of women's emancipation, as viewed from the Marxist standpoint, is becoming more important by the day. For example, the United Nations has decided to celebrate the International Women's Year in 1975; multiple publications are circulating on the subject; and, more importantly, the mobilization of the masses of women is increasing all over the world.

In our country, too, we for years have seen a revival of the mobilization of women, one expression of which is the increase in the number of organizations and the growing interest in the women's question as expressed in publications and propaganda. The fact is that the greater incorporation of women in the process of production and the sharpening of the class struggle in our country obviously are posing the central question of women's political education as an indispensable part of the revolutionary march of our people. This is even more significant when we recall the great Lenin's words: «The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.»¹

Hence, today, in our homeland, the theses of Jose Carlos Mariategui echo profoundly: «In our times, we cannot study the life of a society without investigating and analysing its basis: the organization of the family, the condition of women.»² «People who feel the great emotions of the times should not and cannot be strangers or indifferent to this movement. The women's question is a part of the human question.»³ In this way, he predicted the future of the women's movement. If we want to be «people who feel the great emotions of the times», we must bear these words very much in mind, so that we can serve the process of the national-democratic revolution through which our people are passing, a process whose realization is still a pending task. We thus shield ourselves against comfortable indifference, superficial criticism, and attacks that negate the women's question, behind all of which lurks a profound ignorance. By supporting the mobilization of Peruvian women, we shall truly serve the people and the revolution that nobody but the people can carry out.

This being the case, a question is posed: What kind of women's movement should we promote and support? This question is of vital importance today, when bourgeois feminism is being loudly promoted and spread. There is only one concrete answer to this question: A true popular women's movement cannot be built and developed without proceeding from the standpoint of the working class, Marxism, and without being part of the people's movement on which women's emancipation depends. A popular women's movement can therefore only emerge on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, and, in our country, this means on the basis of Mariategui's Thought. In sum, the development of the women's movement in Peru depends on whether Mariategui's road is reclaimed, on whether his policies on women's emancipation are raised, and on whether this ideological and political struggle to put Mariategui's Thought in command of our people is waged in polemical form. If we fulfil these tasks, then we shall protect ourselves against bourgeois feminism, which counterposes women to men, break apart our organizations, and split the mass movement. Thus, only by adhering to Mariategui's policies on women's emancipation in particular will it be possible to create women's organizations and women's sections in other mass organizations, as our Amauta [teacher] pointed out should be done in the trade unions, which serves to strengthen and further develop the mass organizations and achieve the militant unity of the people.

The Popular Women's Centre follows this line, and, as the facts are demonstrating, by being conscious of the urgent necessity of the political education of Peruvian women, which has been caused by the oppressive social conditions that derive from our condition as a semi-feudal and semi-colonial nation, we are fighting for the creation and development of a Popular Women's Movement in Peru. The fulfilment of this task demands long and arduous work, which requires that the formation of such a movement is made a guideline for every part of the Centre's mass work in all parts of the country, including that of other organizations with which the Centre works. In sum, we conceive of this movement, whose creation we serve, simply and plainly as a movement created by the proletariat among the masses of women, whose characteristics must be adherence to Mariategui, being a mass organization, and observing democratic centralism.

That is why the Popular Women's Centre, confident in the task that we are fighting for and conscious of the necessity of the building the Popular Women's Movement for which we fight ideologically and politically, is now publishing this work, Marxism, Mariategui, and the Women's Movement, as a contribution to the research, discussion, and laying of foundations for the genuine process of mobilization, education, and organization of Peruvian women, which has now begun. It is certain that the discussion is open to those who want to discuss clearly and openly, those who affirm rather than negate the masses, as Mariategui taught us. Even though the road shall be long, we shall get nowhere if we do not base ourselves on a clear and defined policy on women's emancipation. For us, and for Peruvian women in general, this policy cannot but be the reclaiming and further development of Mariategui's road.

This is the spirit that we embody, and, if we succeed in promoting this polemic according to the standpoint of the proletariat, so as to serve the political education of Peruvian women, our efforts shall not be in vain and shall bear ample fruit; moreover, proletarian propaganda is never lost, no matter how much time separates the sowing from the reaping, as Lenin taught us. We adhere to this idea, because we are confident in the women and the people of Peru.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PREFACE TO THE 1975 PERUVIAN EDITION

#National Coordinating Committee of the Popular Women's Movement

#April 1975

#★

The sharpening of the class struggle in the 1960s pushed forward anew the development of the women's movement in our country, in a way similar to the impetus given on the world level. Until now, this decade has demonstrated with facts that the question of women's emancipation has become one of the most important questions in the political struggle. The coming years shall further emphasize the importance of the masses of women in the great struggles to come.

The United Nations has declared the year 1975 the «International Women's Year», and, in our country, it has been declared the «Peruvian Women's Year». Therefore, this year is extremely important for the mobilization, education, and organization of women. Within the framework of these tasks, the bureaucrat road and the democratic road contend sharply over the question of whether women are to be organized along corporative lines to benefit the exploiting classes, or along democratic lines to serve the people.

Within this context and prospect, in December 1974, the women's organizations that, under the banner of reclaiming Mariategui's road, have been fighting for several years to mobilize, educate, and organize the women of our country held a meeting. Thus, the National Coordinating Committee of the Popular Women's Movement emerged, which has opened up a new stage in the process of development of the women's struggle in our country, characterized by the Popular Women's Movement working on the national level.

One of the tasks of the National Coordinating Committee is to carry out propaganda. The fulfilment of this task now begins with the publication of a second edition of the work, Marxism, Mariategui, and the Women's Movement, which was published one year ago by the Popular Women's Centre in Lima, and whose 5'000 copies have been completely sold out. In this way, we are contributing to the increasingly indispensable and urgent growing ideological and political construction of the women's movement. In doing so, our starting point is the firm conviction that only by applying and further developing the line for women's emancipation in our country as established by Mariategui can we build a true people's movement capable of fighting for the people's liberation.

With this publication, we begin our Women's Emancipation Series, which will serve mainly to deal with the various ideological, political, and organizational questions posed by the construction of a popular women's organization. The necessity and urgency of this task is evident, even more so if we take into account how little attention has been paid until now to the question of mass organization in our country.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#MARXISM, MARIATEGUI, AND THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

#Gonzalo

#Before January 1974

#★

#1. MARXISM AND THE WOMEN'S QUESTION

The women's question is an important question for the struggle of the people, and its importance is even greater today, because actions for the mobilization of women are intensifying; this mobilization is both necessary and beneficial according to the standpoint of the working class, as it serves the masses of the people, but, at the same time, when it is promoted by the exploiting classes to serve their own interests, it splits and fetters the struggle of the people.

In this new period of education of the masses of women in which we now live, its basis being a greater degree of women's participation in the national economy, it is indispensable to pay serious attention to the women's question in terms of research, political incorporation, and consistent organizational work. This task demands that we bear in mind the following thesis, which Mariategui taught us: «Women, like men, can either be reactionaries, moderates, or revolutionaries; therefore, they cannot all fight the same battle side by side. In the human panorama of today, class differentiates individuals more than gender.»³ In this way, taking this thesis as our starting point, the necessity of understanding the women's question in a scientific way undoubtedly demands that we adhere to the Marxist worldview of the working class.

#1.1. THE THEORY OF THE «INFERIOR NATURE OF WOMEN»

For centuries, the exploiting classes have held and imposed the pseudo-theory of the «inferior nature of women», which serves to justify the oppression that women experience to this day in societies where exploitation continues to prevail. Thus, a Jewish men's prayer reads: «Blessed be the Lord our God, and the Lord of all worlds, that has not made me a woman.»⁴ A corresponding Jewish women's prayer reads: «Blessed be the Lord for creating me according to His will.»⁴ These prayers clearly express the contempt that the ancient world had for women. These ideas also predominated in Greek slave society; the famous Pythagoras said: «There is a good principle that created order, light, and man, and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness, and woman.»⁴ Even the great philosopher Aristotle proclaimed: «The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.»⁴ «We should regard women's nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.»⁴

These propositions were inherited by the Middle Ages via the last period of Roman slave society, with the contempt for women intensifying in the works of Christian thinkers, who portrayed women as the source of Original Sin and the «antechambers of Hell». Tertullian claimed: «Woman! You are the Devil's gateway. You have convinced the one the Devil did not care to confront directly. It is your fault that God's Son had to die. You should always dress in mourning and rags.»⁴ Augustine of Hippo wrote: «A woman is a beast who is neither firm nor stable.»⁴ While these thinkers condemned women, others talked about the supposed inferiority and submission of women; thus, Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle, preached: «The man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.»⁴ «For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church.»⁴ Hundreds of years later, in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas followed this up with a similar preaching: «Man is the head of woman, just as Christ is the head of man.»⁴ «It is a constant that woman is destined to live under the authority of man and has no authority of her own.»⁴

The understanding of the condition of women did not advance much with the development of capitalism, even though Condorcet pointed out the social cause of this condition when he said: «Women are said [...] not to have their own feeling of justice, that they listen to their feelings more than to their conscience [...]. [But] it is not nature, it is education, it is the social existence that causes this difference.»⁴ The great materialist Diderot wrote: «Women, I pity you!»⁴ «[...] in all customs, the cruelty of civil laws makes common cause with the cruelty of nature against women. They have been treated as idiot beings.» Rousseau, the progressive ideologist of the French revolution, insisted: «All the education of women should be relative to men [...]. Woman is made to yield to man and to bear his injustices.»⁴ This bourgeois standpoint has been inherited by the era of imperialism, becoming more reactionary as time went on, and becoming linked with Christian standpoints and reiterating old theses, for example that sanctioned by Pope John the 23rd: «[...] God and nature have entrusted [woman] with different tasks, which perfect and complete the mission assigned to man.»⁵

In this way, we can see how, throughout history, the exploiting classes have preached the «inferior nature of women». By relying on idealist concepts, they have repeated the existence of a «women's nature» existing independently of social conditions, which is part of the anti-scientific thesis on «human nature»; this so-called «women's nature», which is supposedly the eternal and unchanging essence of women, serves to prove that women's condition of oppression and guardianship is the result of their supposed «natural inferiority compared with men». The intention behind this pseudo-theory is to maintain and «justify» the subjection of women to men.

Finally, it should be pointed out than even outstanding materialist thinkers, such as Democritus, were prejudiced against women. He said: «Let a woman not practise speech; for that is terrible.»⁶ «A woman is much more impetuous in foolish speech than a man.»⁶

Moreover, the defence of women in the past was always based on metaphysical or religious arguments. For example, the statement by Cornelius Agrippa: «Eve means Life and Adam Earth. Created after man, woman is more finished than he.»⁴ Even when the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class, it was incapable of conceiving of women as independent beings, and could only do so in relation to men.

#1.2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM AND THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

The development of capitalism led to the incorporation of women in productive labour, which provided the basis and conditions for women's development; in this way, with their incorporation in the process of production, women obtained the possibility of more directly participating in the class struggle and in militant actions. It was in the furnace of the bourgeois revolutions launched by capitalism that the masses of women, mainly of working women, began to advance.

The French revolution, the most advanced of the revolutions led by the bourgeoisie, greatly nourished women's action. Women were mobilized as part of the masses, participated in bourgeois political clubs, and carried out revolutionary actions. In the course of these struggles, they organized the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, and, in 1789, through Olympe de Gouges, demanded a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen and published newspapers like L'Impatient [The Impatient] to demand improvements in their conditions. In the course of the revolutionary process of development, women achieved a ban on primogeniture and the abolition of male privileges, as well as equal rights of succession and the right to divorce. Their militant participation in the revolution thus bore some fruits.

However, once the great revolutionary push was halted, women were denied access to political clubs, their political education was suppressed, and they were attacked and told to return to the household by Chaumette: «Since when are women allowed to renounce their gender and become men? [...] [Nature] has told woman: Be a woman. Childcare, household tasks, sundry motherhood cares, those are your tasks.» Moreover, when Napoleon launched the bourgeois reorganization via the Civil Code, married women were once again made subject to guardianship, thus falling under the domination of their husbands in terms of both their persons and their property. They were no longer allowed to question their fathers. Married women and prostitutes lost their civil rights, were denied the right to divorce, and had their property confiscated.

We can already see from the French revolution that progress and retrogression in the status of women are linked with progress and retrogression in the status of the people and in the revolution. This unity of interests of the women's movement and of the popular struggle, the fact that the former is part of the latter, is an important lesson.

Moreover, this bourgeois revolution showed that ideas about women follow a process of development that corresponds to the political process of development; as soon as the revolutionary upsurge met with opposition and defeat, reactionary ideas about women reemerged. Bonald held that «man is to woman what woman is to the child».⁴ Comte, considered by many to be the «father of sociology», put forward the idea that femininity is a kind of «prolonged childhood», and that this biological infantilism expresses an intellectual weakness.⁴ Balzac wrote that woman's destiny, and her only glory, is to make the hearts of men beat. «Woman is a possession acquired by contract; she is personal property, and the possession of her is as good as a security — indeed, properly speaking, woman is only man's annex.»⁴ This whole reactionary ideology was summed up by Napoleon in the following words: «[...] nature has made [women] our slaves [...].» «[...] woman is our property [...].» «Woman is given to man to bear children to him.»⁷ «Women are nothing but machines for producing children.»⁸ To this individual, women's lives should be oriented by the slogan, «Kitchen, Church, Children», which was also raised in this century by Hitler.⁴

The French revolution raised the three principles of «Liberty, Equality, Fraternity» and promised justice and fulfilment of the people's demands. Very soon, however, it demonstrated its limitations and the fact that its declarations of principle were nothing but formal declarations. At the same time, its class interests were counterposed to those of the masses. Poverty, hunger, and injustice continued to exist, only in new forms. In the face of this established order, the Utopian Socialists launched into a sharp and destructive critique, but, due to the historical conditions, they could not grasp the root of these evils. The Utopian Socialists also condemned women's status under capitalism. Fourier, a representative of this standpoint, stated: «Social progress and changes of historical period are brought about as a result of the progress of women toward liberty [...] the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental principle of all social progress.»⁹

It is worth comparing this great assertion with the ideas about women of the Anarchist Proudhon, bearing in mind his ideas today, when attempts are being made to propagate Anarchism to the four corners of the Earth, presenting it as an example of revolutionary vision and resolution. Proudhon held that women were inferior to men physically, intellectually, and morally, and that, as a numerical representation, women were worth 8/27 of what men were worth. So, to this hero, a woman was worth less than 1/3 of a man. This is nothing but an expression of the small-bourgeois thought of Proudhon, which is the common root of all forms of Anarchism.

Throughout the 19th century, women were increasingly incorporated in the process of production. As a result, they continued to develop their struggle for their own daily demands by participating in the trade unions and in the revolutionary movements of the proletariat. One example of this participation is Louise Michel, who fought in the Paris Commune of 1871. However, the feminist movement in general oriented itself toward the struggle for women's suffrage in pursuit of the wrong idea that women's rights would be respected if they won the right to vote and parliamentary posts. In this way, the feminist struggle was channeled in the direction of parliamentary cretinism. However, it is good to bear in mind that the right to vote was not given to women for free, but rather was conquered by women in open and resolute struggle since the turn of the century. The struggle for women's suffrage and its conquest once again shows that, while it was indeed a conquest, it was not and cannot be the means for a genuine change in the status of women.

The 20th century brought with it a greater development of the economic struggle of women. Strong contingents of female workers, employees, and professionals emerged on a massive scale, and women entered all branches of the economy. The world wars had a great importance for this process, because they incorporated millions of women in the economy as replacements for the men, who had been mobilized and sent to the front. All this pushed forward the mobilization, political education, and organization of women. Moreover, beginning in the 1950s and increasing in the '60s, the women's struggle once again achieved great force, which shows its great future prospects.

In conclusion, by incorporating women in the economy, capitalism has laid the foundation for their economic independence. However, as capitalism itself is not even capable of providing women with formal legal equality, it can in no way emancipate them. This has been proved by the whole history of the bourgeoisie, a class that, even during its most progressive revolution (the French revolution of the 18th century), was never able to go beyond a formal recognition of women's rights. Furthermore, the later development of the process of development of the bourgeois revolution up to the beginning of the 20th century demonstrates, not only that the bourgeoisie is incapable of emancipating the masses of women, but also that, with the emergence of imperialism, the bourgeois outlook on the status of women becomes more reactionary with time and in fact promotes the social, economic, political, and ideological oppression of women, even when that oppression is disguised and covered up in countless different ways.

#1.3. MARXISM AND WOMEN'S EMANCIPATION

Marxism, the ideology of the working class, conceives of human beings as a set of social relations that change as part of the process of development of society. Thus, Marxism absolutely opposes the thesis on an eternal, immutable «human nature» that exists outside the framework of social conditions; this thesis is idealist and reactionary. The Marxist standpoint also implies the overcoming of mechanical materialism (that is, the materialism of the old materialists prior to Marx and Engels), which is incapable of understanding the historical and social character of human beings as actors capable of changing reality, and which, consequently, had to irrationally rely on metaphysics or spiritualism to explain human nature, as in the case of Feuerbach.

Just as Marxism considers human beings to be concrete realities created by history and society, it also rejects the thesis on «women's nature», which is nothing but a supplement to the thesis on so-called «human nature», as it holds that women are subject to an eternal and immutable nature. This is nothing but an aggravated repetition of the above idealist and reactionary arguments, which conceive of «women's nature» as being «lacking» and «inferior» compared to that of men.

To Marxism, women, just like men, are nothing but a set of social relations, which are created and change as a result of the historical process of development of society, and which, in turn, serve to change these social relations. Women, then, are products of society, and their transformation demands the transformation of society.

Therefore, when Marxism deals with the women's question, it does so from the standpoint of dialectical materialism, that is, from a scientific worldview that alone allows for a complete understanding of the question. In studying, researching, and understanding women and their status, Marxism deals with the women's question in the light of the questions of the family, private property, and the State, because, throughout the course of history, women's historical status and role have been intimately linked with these three questions.

An extraordinary example of the concrete analysis of the women's question according to this standpoint can be seen in Friedrich Engels's book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Pointing out that the oppression of women by men began with the replacement of mother right by father right, Engels wrote:

Thus, as wealth increased, it, on the one hand, gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and, on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilize this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of the children. [...] this revolution — one of the most far-reaching ever experienced by humanity — did not have to affect one single living member of a clan. All the members could remain what they had been previously. The simple decision sufficed that, in the future, the descendants of the male members should remain in the clan, but that those of the female members were to be excluded from the clan by being transferred to that of their father. The reckoning of descent through the female line and the right of inheritance through the mother were thus overthrown and male lineage and right of inheritance from the father instituted. We know nothing as to how and when this revolution was effected among the developed peoples. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. [...]

The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of women. The man seized the reins in the house, too, the woman was degraded, enthralled, became the salve of the man's lust, a mere instrument for breeding children.¹⁰

This paragraph of Engels's establishes the fundamental thesis of Marxism on the women's question, namely, that women's status is based on the relations of property, on the form of ownership of the means of production, and on the relations of production arising therefrom. This Marxist thesis is extremely important, because it establishes that the root cause of the oppression associated with the status of women is the formation, emergence, and development of the right to own the means of production, and that women's emancipation is therefore linked with the destruction of that right. In order to have a Marxist understanding of the women's question, it is indispensable to take this great thesis as one's starting point. This is especially the case today, when supposed revolutionaries and even self-proclaimed Marxists pretend that the oppression of women arises, not from the formation and emergence of private property, but from the simple division of labour according to gender, because it supposedly assigns less important duties to women than to man, thereby confining women to the household. In spite of all the propaganda and efforts to present this idea as revolutionary, it is nothing but the replacement of the Marxist standpoint on the women's question by bourgeois propositions, which in essence are but variations of the supposedly immutable «nature of women».

In further developing this dialectical-materialist starting point, Engels teaches us how, on this basis, the monogamous family was instituted. Concerning monogamy, he says: «It was the first form of the family based, not on natural, but on socio-economic conditions, namely, on the victory of private property over original, naturally developed, common ownership.»¹⁰ «Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one gender by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the genders until now unknown throughout preceding history.»¹⁰

After establishing that private property is the basis for the monogamous form of the family, which sanctions the oppression of women, Engels establishes the way in which the three fundamental forms of marriage correspond to the three great stages of human evolution:

• Savagery and group marriage.
• Barbarism and pairing marriage.
• Civilization and monogamy, and «its complement — prostitution» and «adultery».¹⁰

In this way, by pointing out how the status of women is intimately linked with private property, the family, and the State (the machine that legalizes, imposes, and upholds women's status by way of violence), the Marxist classics developed the thesis on the historically mutable status and role of women in society.

This scientific proposition, which was systematized by Engels above, is a product of the Marxist analysis of the status of women throughout history, and even the most elemental study fully supports the accuracy and relevance of this proposition, which is the basis and starting point of the working class for understanding the women's question. Let us now proceed to recount this historical process of development, so as to illustrate what Engels and the classics established.

In primitive-communal society, where there was a natural division of labour based on age and sex, man and woman lived their lives in spontaneous equality, and woman participated in decision-making in the clan. Later on, woman was accorded respect and deference, that is to say, she occupied a privileged social position. Once the wealth began to grow, which elevated the position of man in the family, and which pushed forward the replacement of mother right by father right, woman began to be pushed into the background, and her social status decreased; echoes of this fact reached as far as the times of the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus, who, in his work, The Eumenides, wrote: «The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger, she preserves a stranger's seed, if no god interfere.»⁴

Thus, in Greek slave society, the social status of women was one of submission, inferiority, and contempt. Back then, the following was said about women: «The slave is entirely deprived of the freedom to deliberate; woman does have it, but she is weak and powerless.»⁴ (Aristotle.) «The best woman is she of whom men speak the least.»⁴ (Pericles.) To a woman who questions him about public affairs, a husband responds: «This is none of your business. Shut up, or you'll be beaten... Go back to your weaving.»⁴ (Aristophanes.) What reality is expressed in these words? In Greece, the woman is shut up in her quarters, held by law under severe constraint, and watched over by special magistrates. She spends her whole life as a minor; she is under the control of her guardian: either her father, or her husband, or her husband's heir, or, by default, the State, represented by public officials. But Greek law assures woman of a dowry used to support her and that must be restored in full to her if the marriage is dissolved; the law also authorizes the woman to file for divorce in certain rare cases; but these are the only guarantees that society grants. All inheritance is bequeathed to the male children, and the dowry is considered, not acquired property, but a kind of duty imposed on the guardian. However, thanks to this dowry custom, the widow no longer passes for a hereditary possession in the hands of her husband's heirs: she returns to her family's guardianship. In this way, woman could not inherit property directly, but merely served to transfer the inheritance. All this served to preserve the private property of the family.

The status of woman in Rome, also a slave society, is easier to understand in the context of its derivation from private property, the family, and the State. After Tarquinius's death, patriarchy asserts itself. Woman will be strictly subservient to the patrimony and thus to the family group. She is excluded from public affairs and prohibited from any «masculine office»; she is a perpetual minor in civil life. She is not directly deprived of her paternal inheritance, but, through circuitous means, is kept from using it: she is put under the authority of a guardian. «Guardianship was established in the interest of the guardians themselves, so that woman — of whom they are the presumptive heirs — could not rob them of their inheritance with a will, nor diminish the inheritance by alienations or debts.»⁴ Thus, the patriarchal root of the male guardianship imposed on women was clearly exposed and expounded.

From the time of the Law of the 12 Tables, because the Roman woman belonged to both paternal and conjugal clans (which also strictly served to safeguard private property), conflicts arose, giving rise to her «legal emancipation». As a result, the manu marriage dispossesses her male agnates (parental relatives). To defend the paternal relatives' interests, sine manu marriage comes into being; in this case, the woman's property remains under the guardians' control, and the husband's rights are only over her person; and even this power is shared with the father, who keeps his daughter under his absolute authority. The family court is in charge of settling disputes arising between father and husband: such an institution gives the woman recourse from her father to her husband or from her husband to her father; she is not one individual's thing.

On this economic basis (the woman's participation in inheritance, even if under guardianship), and on the basis of the conflict of rights between the paternal and conjugal clans over the woman and her property, a major development in the social participation of the Roman woman occurs: the atrium is established, the centre of the domicile. It is she who presided over the slaves' work; she oversees the children's education, and her influence on them often extends to an advanced age; she shares her husband's work and his concerns, she is considered a co-owner of his property. She is not confined to her quarters: she is present at meals and celebrations, she goes to the theatre; men give her right-of-way on the street, consuls and lictors stand aside for her. The eminent role of the woman in Roman society is reflected in the figure of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi.

In the course of Roman social development, the State takes authority over the opposition of father and husband to restrict their rights: the State court will now rule over adultery cases, divorce, and so on. Family courts bow to public justice. Under imperial legislation, guardianship will be entirely abolished. Woman simultaneously gains a positive guarantee of her independence: her father is obliged to provide her with a dowry; and it will not go back to the agnates after the marriage's dissolution, nor does it ever belong to her husband; a woman can at any moment demand restitution by a sudden divorce, which puts man at her mercy. In this way, woman obtains the economic basis for her independence and development. From the end of the Republic on, the mother's right to her children's respect was recognized as equal to the father's; she is granted custody of her children in case of guardianship or of the husband's bad conduct.

Under Emperor Marcus Aurelius, from 178 on, a great leap forward is taken in the process of development of private property and the family: the mother's children become her heirs, over her male relatives; from then on, the family is based on kinship, and the mother is equal to the father; the daughter inherits like her brothers.

However, rendering woman «emancipated» from the family, the State takes her back under its guardianship and subjects her to various legal restraints. It is when the social status of woman is probably at its highest point that the inferiority of her gender is proclaimed in Rome, and she is refused equality with men because of her gender; the pretext for persecuting her becomes the «imbecility and fragility of her gender».

In Rome, then, the social status of woman was higher than that in Greece, and she acquired respect and even great influence in social life, as demonstrated by the following words of Cato's: «Everywhere, men govern women, and we, who govern all men, are governed by our women.»⁴ Roman history knows outstanding and eminent women: those of the Sabine women, Lucretia, and Virginia are well known.

The end of the first century and the beginning of the second see attacks, not on women in generally, but mainly on contemporary women. Juvenal reproaches their hedonism and gluttony; he accuses them of aspiring to men's professions; and he attacks them for taking an interest in hunting and sports.

Thus, Roman society recognized some of the rights of woman, particularly the right to own property, but it did not accord her the right to participate in civil society, much less public affairs. Nonetheless, they did so in an «underground» and limited way. That is why Roman matrons, lacking the power to act politically, demonstrated other talents instead.

Slavery declined, and feudalism rose to take its place. To understand the status of woman during the feudal period, we must bear in mind the influence of Christianity and its juxtaposition with Germanic traditions. Christian ideology played no little role in women's oppression; in the Church Fathers, we find a definite contempt for woman, whom they consider to be inferior, a servant of man, and the source of evil. To what was already quoted in Section 1.1, let us add the condemnation of women by St. John Chrysostom, a Catholic saint: «Of all the wild animals, none can be found as harmful as woman.»⁴ Under Christian influence, the progress achieved by the Roman woman in her social status is at first undermined and then negated.

In Germanic society, which was based on warfare, woman was assigned a subordinate position due to her lesser physical strength; subjugated, she was nonetheless respected, having rights that made her a close partner of her husband. Tacitus said the following about this topic: «In peace and in war, she shares his lot; she lives with him, she dies with him.»⁴

Christianity and Germanic culture influenced woman's status in feudal society. The woman is absolutely dependent on her father and husband: during Clovis's time, guardianship weighs on her throughout her life. She lives her life completely subject to the feudal lord. Laws protect her, but only inasmuch as she is the man's property and the mother of his children. A woman who has proved herself fertile is worth three times a free man; but she loses all worth when she can no longer be a mother. In other words, she is treated as nothing but a womb for reproduction.

As happened in Roman society, likewise in feudal society. Woman's status evolves as part of the process of the decrease in the power of the feudal lords and the increase in the power of the monarchy. Guardianship is transferred from the feudal lords to the king; it becomes the guardian's responsibility. This protection brings about the same slavery for woman as in the past.

When feudalism emerges out of the convulsions of the formation of feudalism, woman's condition looks very uncertain. What characterizes feudal law is the confusion between sovereign and property law, between public and private rights. This explains why woman is both put down and raised up by this system. She first finds herself denied all private rights because she lacks political capacity. Until the 11th century, order is based on force alone and property on armed power. A fief, legal experts say, is «property held against military service»;⁴ woman cannot hold feudal property, because she is incapable of defending it. Her situation changes when fiefs become hereditary and patrimonial; in Germanic law, some aspects of mother right survived: if there were no male heirs, the daughter could inherit. However, woman's lot does not improve with her ability to inherit; like in Greece, woman is the instrument and not the bearer through which the domain is transmitted. The domain is no longer the family's thing, as it was for the Roman clans: it is the lord's property, and the woman also belongs to the lord. He is the one who chooses a spouse for her. «An heiress means land and an estate: suitors fight over this prey, and the girl is sometimes not even 12 years old when her father or his lord gives her to some baron as a gift.»⁴ Woman still needs a male guardian to «protect» her and her rights. Thus, a Burgundian duchess herself went to the King to demand a new spouse, saying: «My husband has just died, but what good is mourning? Find me a powerful husband, because I need to defend my land.»⁴ One sees the husband treating the woman given to him as a gift without any respect; he verbally abuses and slaps her, drags her by her hair, and beats her; the husband is asked at most to «punish his wife reasonably»⁴ — the same that is today asked of parents who «discipline» their children.

This warlike civilization has only scorn for women. The knight is not interested in women: his horse is a treasure of much higher value to him. The lords preached: «Cursed be the knight who takes counsel from a lady on when to joust.»⁴ Meanwhile, women were ordered as follows: «Go back into your painted and golden quarters, sit ye down in the shade, drink, eat, embroider, dye silk, but do not busy yourself with our affairs. Our business is to fight with the sword and steel. Silence!»⁴ This is how the mediaeval world of the feudal lords demeaned and isolated woman.

In the 13th century, a women's literary movement develops. First in the South and then in the North of France, culture thrives, giving women new prestige. This literary movement is connected with the chivalry, courtly love, and intense glorification of the Virgin Mary of this period. However, while courtly love might ease woman's lot, it does not modify it substantially, as Simone de Beauvoir says in The Second Sex, a book in which abundant information on women's history can be found. This data is useful, of course, if one looks past the existentialist worldview of its author — after all, it is not ideas that give rise to fundamental changes in woman's status, but rather the economic basis on which those ideas rely. When the service of the fief is converted to a monetary fee, woman gains a little ground; woman was unable to perform military service, but she was as capable as a man of paying the financial obligations. In this way, the lord loses a large part of his rights; in particular, his right to decide on his vassals' marriages is progressively suppressed. Thus, guardianship itself disappears.

Unmarried or widowed, woman has all the rights of man; property grants her sovereignty: she governs the fief that she owns, meaning she dispenses justice, signs treaties, and decrees laws. She is even seen playing a military role, commanding troops, taking part in fighting. Nonetheless, feudal society, like all societies based on exploitation, requires woman's subordination to her husband. Thus, marital power outlives the feudal regime; the husband remains the wife's guardian. Beaumanoir justifies this as follows: «As soon as the marriage is consummated, the possessions of each party are held in common by virtue of the marriage, and the man is the guardian of them.»⁴

In feudal society, like in any other society ruled by exploiters, such as slavery or capitalism, the above has been and still is the case. However, we must emphasize that it is only in the poor woman's status that different and softer forms of marital power are seen. The root cause of this condition is the working woman's participation in the economy and her absence of great wealth.

The development of capitalism leads to the decay of feudalism, which characterizes woman's status, as has already been seen. It should suffice to emphasize that, in the Middle Ages, the woman still retained some privileges: she took part in local meetings in the villages, and she participated in the primary meetings for the deputies' election to the Estates-General. This demonstrates the degree of woman's participation in politics. Moreover, her husband could exercise his own authority only over movables: his wife's consent was necessary to alienate real estate. However, during the absolutist period, legislation is enacted to fetter woman by restricting these rights, so as to combat this «bad example» set by the urban bourgeoisie.

This historical exposition serves to provide examples to back up the thesis of Engels and the classics on the social causes of woman's status and its relation to private property, the family, and the State. It helps us to understand the truth of this thesis and to see its relevance more clearly. All this leads us to the following conclusion: It is necessary firmly to adhere to the standpoint of the working class and to apply it in order to understand the women's question, to participate in solving it, and always and resolutely to reject the distortions of this Marxist thesis and all so-called «contributions» to it, which are nothing but attempts to replace the proletarian outlook on this front with bourgeois ideas, so as to disorient the developing women's movement.

Having expounded woman's social condition and having outlined its historical process of development in connection with private property, the family, and the State, we must now treat the question of women's emancipation from the Marxist standpoint.

One of the fundamental standpoints of Marxism is that the development of machinery leads to the incorporation of women and children in the process of production, thus increasing the amount of exploited hands, destroying the working-class family, physically impairing women, and causing their material and moral collapse into poverty and exploitation.

In analysing women's and child labour, Karl Marx wrote:

Insofar as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing labourers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and labourers was immediately changed into a means for increasing the number of wage labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the worker's family, without distinction of age or gender. Compulsory work for the capitalists usurped the place, not only of the children's play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family.

The value of labour power was determined, not only by the labour time necessary to maintain the individual adult male labourer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour market, spreads the value of the man's labour power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labour power. [...] Thus, we see that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms the principal object of the exploiting power of capital, at the same time raises the degree of exploitation.

[...]

By the excessive addition of women and children to the ranks of the workers, machinery at last breaks down the resistance which the male operatives in the manufacturing period continued to oppose to the despotism of capital.¹¹

In continuing his masterly analysis, Marx himself describes how capitalism uses even women's virtues and obligations to its own advantage:

Mr. E., a manufacturer [...] informed me that he employed females exclusively at his power looms [...] gives a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessities of life. Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character, to be perverted to her injury — thus, all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering.¹²

However, while capitalism has increased the degree of exploitation by incorporating women in production, it has, at the same time, provided the material basis for woman to fight for her rights, which serves as a starting point for the struggle for woman's emancipation. As Engels taught us: «[...] the first precondition for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female gender into public industry; and [...] this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society be eliminated.»¹⁰ Thus, capitalism, by pursuing its own immediate interests in violation of its long-term ones, has evidently laid the foundation for the future emancipation of woman, just as it has created the class that shall destroy capitalism itself: the proletariat.

Woman's participation in the economy and the development of the class struggle push forward woman's political education. We have already emphasized the way in which the French revolution pushed forward woman's political education and organization and how it, by uniting women, mobilizing them, and forcing them to fight, laid the foundation for the women's movement. We have also seen how woman's demands were conquered during the rising tide of the revolution, but were abolished and swept away when the revolutionary process was fettered and ebbed out. However, despite all the positive aspects of the incorporation of women in the French revolution, the resulting political education of women was elementary, restricted, and small in comparison with the great strides taken in women's political education by the working class since. What does this political education imply? It implies that, when capitalism incorporates the masses of women in the economic process, it wrests them away from the household, exploits them (mainly in factories), and turns them into industrial workers; in this way, women are tempered and develop as a component part of the most progressive and last class in history. The process of the radical political education of women begins at the moment of their incorporation in the trade-union struggle of the workers — the great transformation that this implies can be concretely observed in our country when one looks at the transformation of the female workers, peasants, and teachers of Peru in the course of the trade-union struggle. Women are organized step by step, from lower to higher organizational forms, thus training and shaping them ideologically in the worldview of the proletariat, and, finally, they arrive at the higher forms of struggle and of political organization when they are incorporated in the ranks of the political party of the working class, in which they serve the people in all the different ways and on all the different fronts in the struggle that the working class organizes and leads through its political vanguard. Only the proletariat is capable of creating such a process of political education, and it has created a new type of female fighter, embodied in the many glorious female fighters whose names are etched in history: Louise Michel, Nadezda Krupskaja, Rosa Luxemburg, Liu Hulan, and others, who are fondly remembered by the proletariat and the people.

To Marxism, the political education of women is the key link in the struggle for women's emancipation. This standpoint is not new, but has always been held by Marxists, and the classics paid special attention to it. Marx taught us:

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of women.¹³

To Lenin, women's participation was very urgent and important for the revolution:

The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.¹

Thus, the increasing development and sharpening of the class struggle, as part of the specific social conditions of the revolutionary struggle in the era of imperialism, demands the increased political education of women. That is why Lenin himself, in the midst of the First World War, and predicting that the future battles of the working class would require us to get prepared for them, called on us to fight for the following demand: «Abolition of all restrictions without exception on the political rights of women compared with those of men. It must be explained to the masses why this reform is particularly urgent at the present time, when the war and the high cost of living are agitating the minds of the broad masses, and, in particular, are rousing the interest and the attention of women toward politics.»¹⁴ He also pointed out: «[...] we should carry on systematic work among these masses. We must teach the women that have been shaken out of their passivity, recruit them, and arm them for the proletarian class struggle under the leadership of the Communist Party. I have in view not only proletarian women who work in mills or cook the family meal. I also have in mind the peasant women and the women of the various sections of the lower-middle class. All of them are also victims of capitalism [...].»¹⁵ In these words, Lenin demanded the political education of women, the struggle for their daily demands and political rights, the explanation to the masses of the urgent need of incorporating women in politics, of working together with them, so as to educate them, organize them, and prepare them for all the different forms of struggle. Finally, he emphasized that we must orient ourselves toward working-class women, without forgetting the importance of peasant women and the women who belong to other exploited classes and strata, because all of them can and should be mobilized for the popular struggle.

We can derive from the above that Marxism has put forward the political education of women ever since it was founded, and that it has always considered the struggles of women to be on the same side as the struggles of the working class. That is why, during the last century, August Bebel said, «it is the common lot of women and workers to be oppressed»,¹⁶ and the International Socialist Congress of 1889 proclaimed the necessity of fighting for gender equality, thus reiterating that the revolutionary struggle of the working class and the feminist struggle of women stood in solidarity with one another. Or, in other words, as China today proclaims under the guidance of Mao Zedong: «Women's emancipation is a component part of the proletarian revolution.»¹⁷

This poses the following question: How can women's emancipation be achieved? By investigating capitalist society and societies where exploitation and oppression prevail in general, Engels confirmed that men are separated into classes characterized by their inequality and the subjection of one class to the other. He then emphasized the women's question by pointing out the following: «The position is no better with regard to the legal equality of men and women in marriage. The inequality of the two before the law, which is a legacy of previous social conditions, is not the cause, but the effect of the economic oppression of women.»¹⁰ He continued as follows: «The emancipation of women becomes possible only to a minor degree. And this has become possible only as a result of modern large-scale industry, which not only permits the participation of women in production in large numbers, but actually calls for it, and, moreover, strives more and more to reduce private domestic duties to a public industry.»¹⁰

This proposition of Engels's, when taken out of context and removed from the framework of the rest of his work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, is being used to help some people — pseudo-Marxists and people who distort Marxism — to transform his ideas, so as to claim that women's mere participation in the economic process is enough for their emancipation. However, Engels pointed out that the incorporation of women in production was a condition, a basis upon which women can fight for their emancipation, and that this emancipation demands that an end be put to the way in which social and domestic labour absorb and destroy women, which, to Engels, implied the destruction of private ownership of the means of production and the development of large-scale production on the basis of public ownership of the means of production. We repeat the importance of clarity on this thesis of Engels's, because some people today are trying to cover up their distortions of the Marxist standpoint on the women's question with Engels, precisely because he is one of the Marxist classics, and they preach, to the benefit of the exploiting classes, that women's emancipation can be achieved plainly and simply by women's participation in the economic process. Thus, they cover up the root cause of women's oppression, namely, private property, and ignore the necessity of large-scale socialized production on the basis of the destruction of the private ownership of the means of production.

The classics predicted that this and other distortions would be made, and so they analysed the question of whether women's incorporation in the process of production (which was begun by capitalism) was capable of making men and women truly equal. Once again, Mao Zedong gave a concise and powerful answer to this question in the 1950s, saying: «Genuine gender equality can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.»¹⁸

Lenin studied the status of women in bourgeois society and compared it to the status of women under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This analysis led him to the following conclusion:

From its very inception, council power set out to be the political power of the working people, hostile to all forms of exploitation. It set itself the task of doing away with the possibility of the exploitation of the working people by the feudal lords and the capitalists, of doing away with the rule of capital. Council power has been trying to make it possible for the working people to organize their lives without private property in land, without privately owned factories, without that private property that everywhere, throughout the world, even where there is complete political liberty, even in the most democratic republics, keeps the working people in a state of what is actually poverty and wage slavery, and women in a state of double slavery.

Council power, the political power of the working people, in the first months of its existence, effected a very definite revolution in legislation that concerns women. Nothing whatsoever is left in the Council Republic of those laws that put women in a subordinate position. I am speaking specifically of those laws that took advantage of the weaker position of women and put them in a position of inequality and often, even, in a humiliating position, that is, the laws on divorce and on children born out of wedlock and on the right of a woman to summon the father of a child for maintenance.¹⁹

From this comparison, Lenin draws the conclusion that only a revolution that puts the working class in power together with the peasantry is capable of sanctioning genuine juridical and legal gender equality, and, moreover, of enforcing it. However, as Lenin himself taught us, this genuine legal equality implemented by the revolution is but the beginning of a protracted struggle for full and complete gender equality in real life:

But the more thoroughly we have cleared the ground of the lumber of the old, bourgeois laws and institutions, the clearer it is to us that we have only cleared the ground to build on, but are not yet building.

Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating women, they continue to be domestic slaves, because small-scale housework crushes, strangles, stultifies, and degrades them, chains them to the kitchen and the nursery, and they waste their labour on barbarously unproductive, small-scale, nerve-racking, stultifying, and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding State power) against this small-scale housekeeping, or, rather, when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins.²⁰

That is how Lenin and Mao Zedong answered the opportunist distortions and pseudo-contributions to Marxism that they predicted, and that today are being made in an attempt to distort Engels's theses and sow confusion about what the working-class standpoint on the women's question is.

Marxism conceives of the struggle for women's emancipation as a protracted struggle, but one that is bound to be victorious. Lenin said:

This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction, both of social technique and of morals. But it will end in the complete triumph of communism.²¹

What has been quoted above essentially demonstrates that there exists unity between the revolutionary women's struggle and the working-class struggle to build a new society. Besides, it helps us to understand the meaning of Lenin's call on working women to further develop the institutions and means placed at their disposal by the revolution:

We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and, in exactly the same way, the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves.¹⁹ [Our emphasis.]

These are the central Marxist theses on women's status, political education, and emancipation. We prefer to expound these standpoints mostly by way of transcribed quotations from the classics, because these standpoints are not well enough known; besides, they were masterly and concisely expressed in this way by their authors themselves, which relieves us of the task of attempting to reinvent the wheel, even more so after we have demonstrated that they continue to be fully and completely relevant today. On the other hand, the dissemination of the words of the classics themselves is demanded by the fact that attempts are currently being made to distort the Marxist standpoint on the women's question.

Finally, it must be noted, even if only in passing, that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao Zedong established the thesis on women's emancipation, not on women's liberation, as can be seen in the above quotations. On this particular question, it should suffice to say that an analysis of women's status throughout history demonstrates that women have been subject to guardianship and submission to men, thus turning women into people who, although they belong to the same class as their men, find themselves being considered inferior to these men — and the law blesses, sanctions, and imposes this inferiority. Consequently, because of women's historical devaluation, the necessity of demanding formal gender equality under capitalism does exist, but only a revolutionary struggle led by the proletariat is capable of implementing and fulfilling genuine gender equality, even though, as we have seen, and as Lenin said, genuine gender equality in real life shall only develop along with the development of large-scale socialist production. These simple observations demonstrate the truth of the thesis that women's emancipation is part of the emancipation of the proletariat. The thesis on women's liberation has historically emerged as a bourgeois thesis, whose essence is the opposition of men and women to each other on the basis of their gender and the covering up of the root cause of women's oppression. Today, the thesis on women's liberation is being increasingly exposed as a form of bourgeois feminism, which seeks to split the popular movement by separating it from the masses of women, so as to oppose the development of the women's movement under working-class guidance and leadership.

#2. MARIATEGUI AND THE WOMEN'S QUESTION

Due to his sharp historical foresight, 50 years ago, Mariategui understood the importance and the prospects of the women's question in this country. He said: «The first feminist concerns are being born in Peru.»³ He devoted two of his works to this question, namely, Women and Politics and Feminist Demands, in addition to many other contributions which can be found in his writings. If we want to discover the standpoint of the Peruvian working class concerning the women's question, we cannot but return to the source of Mariategui's works, even more so today, because this question is neither well known nor sufficiently studied.

Jose Carlos Mariategui taught us: «In our times, we cannot study the life of a society without investigating and analysing its basis: the organization of the family, the condition of women.»² In studying the Peruvian feminist movement, he wrote: «People who feel the great emotions of the times should not and cannot be strangers or indifferent to this movement. The women's question is a part of the human question.»³

So, let us bear in mind that, beginning with its political emergence, the working class in this country has always paid attention to the status of women, and it has established its standpoint on the women's question through its great representative. Moreover, it supported the women's struggle concretely, as demonstrated by the strikes of textile and transportation workers in solidarity with the female workers of the A. Field company in 1926.

What development in the women's movement drew this sharp attention? The status of women in this country has undergone a notable change during this century, especially since the two world wars. Even though the status of peasant women has been slower to change, the status of their working and professional sisters has experienced a more rapid and profound change. We shall demonstrate that the women in our society have conquered ever broader positions.

In the 19th century, the activities and literary work of Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, and Margarity Praxedes Muñoz emphasized the presence of women in society; their background was millions of peasant, working, and other women, who, despite being anonymous, were subject to a harsh social oppression with feudal roots. Peruvian women in the 19th century had minimal access to education, and when they were allowed to attend high school, the curriculum they were allowed to follow was watered down, equivalent to the last year of middle school for boys, plus a few of their high school courses. Women's education was abandoned by society, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that, even though there were private institutions helping female students enter university, it was not until 1928 that the National Women's School opened its doors in Lima. Until that time, there was no school of its kind in the capital. We should pay attention to the fact that, by the end of the 19th century, some women educators were concerned with women's education and proposed its revival; they demanded the overcoming of the erroneous conception of «only educating women for marriage, which leads them to think that marriage is their only purpose in life»; they demanded that women's education should not be in the hands of nuns, who, because they had abandoned the physical world, were not in a position to educate women well; and they demanded that an end be put to the misconception that single or married women who worked outside of the home would deteriorate socially; at the same time, they demanded the creation of new educational centres and worked toward that it. Teresa Gonzalez de Fanning played an outstanding role in this regard.

Likewise, university education was unavailable to women; no women entered university in Peru until the 1890s, and it was not until 1908 that women were allowed to obtain degrees and lecture there. Women were demeaned and isolated socially, and this can clearly be seen in the sphere of education. However, with the changes brought about during the 20th century, women obtained increased possibilities for study and professional work, with most of them finding work as teachers. Only after the Second World War was there a diversification of women's careers. At the turn of the century, female university graduates could be counted on one hand; today, they amount to 30% of the country's university graduates.

However, what really brought about a profound, radical, and far-reaching change was women's incorporation in factory production. The proletarianization of Peruvian women began during this century, hand in hand with the introduction of machinery and the development of bureaucrat capitalism. In our environment, with its particular characteristics, we can see the situation described by Marx, which we quoted above, in which women are incorporated in the process of production and the prospect of political education thus opens up for the masses of women in Peru. Women's participation in trade unions began, and they joined the struggle for higher wages, the eight-hour workday, and better working conditions. They began to participate in the popular struggle together with other workers, carrying out actions against the high cost of living and price hikes, which further developed their ideological understanding. Thus, in the midst of revolutionary struggle, the women of the country have become political fighters for the working class.

The process of political development of Peruvian women, which took place simultaneously with their incorporation in labour, created significant advances in the domestic class struggle during the first 1/3 of this century. During this period, we should emphasize the following milestones: firstly, the struggle for the eight-hour workday by the farm workers at Huaral, Barranca, Pativilca, and Huacho, in which five working women laid down their lives in 1916, thus sealing women's role in the class struggle with their blood; secondly, women's participation in the momentous actions against price hikes and the rising cost of living in May 1919, during which they organized a women's committee to mobilize for supportive actions and issued «a call on all women, without class distinction, to support the struggle in defence of the rights of Peruvian women; during this great struggle, the women fought off the police, who tried to disrupt a meeting on the 25th of May, 1919, and, after overcoming this bloody police repression, issued the following statement:

The women of Lima, the surrounding towns, and the countryside, having met at a great public assembly on Sunday the 25th of May, 1919, in Neptune Park, consider that it is not possible to further tolerate the impoverishment, to which the high cost of commodities, necessities of life, and housing condemn the people; that Peruvian women, like women in all developed countries, have understood that their mission is to participate in resolving the economic and social problems affecting them.

These women have decided:

• To adopt the decisions of the people's asembly at Alameda de los Descalzos on the 4th of May.
• In case those decisions are not implemented, to declare a general women's strike in all branches of industry, with the date being at the discretion of the men's Committee for Lowering the Cost of Living.²²

Another chapter in the history of our women's struggle took place when the Red Aid fought in defence of the people's rights and liberties, especially those of the proletariat, against the policies of persecution, repression, imprisonment, and massacre unleashed by the Sanchez Cerror dictatorship.

In these struggles, in addition to the political education of women, we must emphasize, so as to have a correct standpoint, that the masses of women fought in close connection with the interests of the people, themselves included, and in direct solidarity and unity with the struggles of the working class, their own class.

In sum, in this century and the latter part of the previous one, Peruvian women have taken a road marked by their widespread incorporation in production and their increased access to education, especially university education; the former of which has been pushed forward by bureaucrat capitalism under US imperialist pressure. This is the basis on which the feminist movement first began in Peru, a phenomenon that Mariategui described as follows:

Feminism has not appeared in Peru artificially or arbitrarily. It has appeared as a consequence of the new forms of women's mental and manual labour. The women of real feminist affiliation are the women who work, the women who study. The feminist idea thrives among women of mental or manual crafts: university professors, workers. It finds an environment conducive to its development in the university classrooms, which attract more and more Peruvian women, and in the trade unions, in which factory women join and organize with the same rights and the same duties as men. Apart from this spontaneous and organic feminism, which recruits its adherents among the various categories of female labour, there exists here, as elsewhere, a somewhat pedantic and somewhat mundane feminism of philistines. Feminists of this rank turn feminism into a mere literary exercise, a mere fashionable sport.³

On this basis, Mariategui expounded the standpoint of the Peruvian proletariat on the women's question by establishing the line on this question. Whoever wants to take up the Marxist standpoint must follow this line. Let us proceed to look at the fundamental questions at hand from this standpoint.

#2.1. THE STATUS OF WOMEN

Our starting point in studying the women's question from the standpoint of the Peruvian proletariat must necessarily be to bear in mind that Mariategui represents the integration of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the material conditions of our backward and oppressed country; this integration led him to scientifically present the semi-feudal and semi-colonial character of our society, in which a national-democratic revolution has been developing since 1928 in the course of a long and windy process, whose higher stage is still pending. This is the basis for Mariategui's Thought; and, by taking these considerations as our starting point, we must treat all the policies established by him, including those that are relevant to the women's question.

Thus, Mariategui' starting point in judging the status of women is the semi-feudal and semi-colonial character of Peruvian society. This in itself is a rejection from the start of the obsolete theory of «women's nature» — instead, Mariategui conceives of the status of women as being derived from the social formation in which they live, and he emphasizes the dynamic and changing character of the status of women, pointing out the ability of labour to transform the social status of women and people's ideas about them. In the following paragraph, this and other points are expressed well:

But if bourgeois democracy has not realized feminism, it has unintentionally created the conditions and the moral and material premises for its realization. It has valourized women as productive elements, as economic factors, by making of their labour an ever more extensive and intense use. Labour radically changes women's mentality and spirit. Women acquire, by virtue of labour, a new notion of themselves. Formerly, society destined women to marriage or to prostitution. Today, they are destined, first and foremost, to labour. This fact has changed and elevated the status of women in life.³

So, it remains clear, to the Peruvian proletariat, that society is what creates the status of women, not some mischievous «women's nature»; that the status of women is going through a process of change; and that labour is what brings about great leaps forward in the status of women and people's ideas about them. This is Mariategui's starting point, which, at the same time, is an attack on the biological-determinist reduction of women to simple creatures of reproduction, and on the rose-coloured myths that treacherously help to maintain the oppression of women:

The defence of the poetry of the home is, in reality, a defence of the servitude of women. Instead of ennobling and dignifying the role of women, it diminishes and demeans it. Women are something more than mothers and females, just as men are something more than males.³

In further developing his thesis on the social origin of the status of women, Mariategui points out the difference between Latin and Anglo-Saxon women by establishing the cause-and-effect relation between the feudal background of Latin women and their differences as opposed to Germanic women:

The Latin woman lives more prudenly, with less passion [than the Anglo-Saxon woman]. She does not have the same urge for truth. In particular, the Spanish woman is very cautious and practical. Waldo Frank has defined her in a precise way, with admirable accuracy. He has written: «The Spanish woman is a pragmatist when it comes to love. She considers love to be a means for creating children for Heaven. Nowhere in Europe may one find a less sensual, less lovable woman. As a girl, she is pretty; fresh hope dyes her cheeks and enlarges her black eyes. To her, marriage is the highest state to which she can aspire. Once married, this innate, spring-like innocence disappears in her like the season; in a moment's time, she turns judgemental, fat, and maternal.»²³

What Mariategui said about Spanish women naturally applies to Latin American women as well, including Peruvian women, and shows that women's mentality, which has been created by both the ancient and the modern feudal background, has still not been overcome. Moreover, in analysing the relations between imperialism and the oppressed countries of the Americas, Mariategui emphasizes the mentality of alienation that US domination imposes on the mentality of women:

The Lima bourgeoisie fraternizes with the Yankee capitalists, even with their mere employees at the Country Club, the Tennis Club, and in the streets. The Yankee can marry the native girl without the inconvenience of differences in race or religion, and she feels no national or cultural misgivings in preferring marriage with a member of the invading race. The middle-class girl has no qualms in this regard, either. The girl who can trap a Yankee employed by the Grace Company or the Foundation does it with the satisfaction of thereby raising her social position.²⁴

By thus typifying the status of women in our society as their serfdom, and establishing that the root of this serfdom is the semi-feudal and semi-colonial background of this society, Mariategui discards any interpretation that is bases on the so-called «inferior nature of women».

On this basis, Mariategui goes on to make a material analysis of the women of different classes in Peru. He masterly depicts working women as follows in the Manifesto of the CGTP to the Working Class of the Country, a document edited under his direction:

Proletarian women suffer the same exploitation as, or even worse exploitation than, the masses of the youth. Until very recently, the labour of proletarian women was performed in the domestic sphere at home. As industrialization progresses, they enter into competition in the factories, shops, enterprises, and so on. [...] Thus, they are to be found in the textile factories, cracker factories, laundries, container and cardboard-box factories, soap factories, and so on, where they perform the same labour as the male workers — from operating machinery to the most menial jobs — always earning 40 to 60% less than them. At the same time as women are trained to perform industrial labour, they also penetrate into office work, commerce, and so on, always in competition with men and to the great benefit of the industrial enterprises, which can notably reduce wages and immediately increase profits as a result. In agriculture and mining, we find proletarian women honestly competing with men, and, wherever we look, we find large numbers of exploited women offering their services in all sorts of ways. [...] In the course of our social struggles, the proletariat has needed to put forward particular demands in defence of women. The textile trade unions have shown the greatest interest in this question until today, but not exclusively, and have gone on strike more than once with the objective of forcing the capitalists to comply with legal regulations that they simple refuse to implement. There are some capitalists (such as the «workers' friends» Mr. Tizon y Bueno) who do not hesitate to consider it as an «offence» when a female worker gets pregnant, and to terminate her for this «offence», so that these capitalists do not have to comply with the regulations of the law. At the cracker factory, the exploitation of women is vile.

Is this description still valid? Yes. In essence, the situation of the workers remains the same: widespread exploitation in increasing amounts of branches of industry, which, in some cases, is truly horrifying; the use of women's labour for the purpose of lowering wages, because women's wages are lower than those of men; lack of respect for the laws that are meant to protect women; and anti-worker standpoints covered up by the capitalists with talk about being «friends» of the proletariat. One thing that is immediately necessary is to defend the conquests won by the female workers.

Likewise, Mariategui went on to sum up the status of indigenous peasant women, of whom he said that they, together with their children, are forced «to perform unpaid services to the owners and their families, as well as to the authorities», and he points out the two-fold root of their miserable social status and living conditions: big landownership and serfdom.

As to the small bourgeoisie, in addition to pointing out the trials faced by the women of this class, Mariategui makes an analysis of the primary-school teachers, which helps him to establish that their attitude and spirit are modified as a result of their social status, closeness to the people, and full-time dedication to the teaching profession, which leads them «easily to take on the ideals of the class that will temper a new social State». Mariategui writes: «They have no interests in common with the capitalist regime. Their lives, poverty, and work fuse them with the masses of the proletariat.» He puts forward the necessity of appealing to them, because «the vanguard will recruit more and better elements from their ranks».

#2.2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE WOMEN'S STRUGGLE

As we have seen, to Mariategui, industrialization incorporates women into labour, and, in this way, transforms their status and spirit. Like the classics, he points out the two implications of this fact: «When woman takes the road to her emancipation that passes through the bourgeois-democratic terrain, she, in return, provides the capitalist with cheap labour and the male worker with serious competition.» On the other hand, he points out that the French revolution did lead to advances in the feminist movement, and promotes the figure of Babeuf, the leader of the Conspiracy of Equals, whom he said «asserted feminist demands» and quotes as follows: «Do not impose silence on this gender that does not deserve to be scorned. Enhance rather the most beautiful part of yourselves. If you do not count women at all in your Republic, you will make of them little lovers of the monarchy. Their influence will be such that they will restore it. If, on the contrary, you count them for something, you will make of them Cornelias and Lucretias. They will give you Brutuses, Gracchi, and Scaevolas.» Polemicizing against the anti-feminists, Babeuf spoke of «this gender that the tyranny of men has always wanted to annihilate, this gender that has never been useless in revolutions».³

Moreover, in summing up the contribution made by the French revolution to the emancipation of women, he said, in Women and Politics:

The French revolution, on the other hand, inaugurated a regime of political equality for men, but not for women. Quite appropriately, what today are known as «human rights» were then known as the «rights of man». Under the rule of the bourgeoisie, women became much more alienated from politics than under the rule of the aristocracy. Bourgeois democracy was an exclusively male democracy. However, its course of development was, of necessity, intensely favourable to women's emancipation. Capitalist civilization gave women the means to increase their abilities and to improve their position in life.

Mariategui thus accurately established the contributions to the women's movement of the bourgeois class: While it is capable of providing the conditions for women's development, the bourgeoisie is incapable of emancipating them. Mariategui knew very well that, in spite of this limitation, capitalism, in the course of its development, opens the door for women to participate in various activities, including politics, especially in the 20th century — so much so that the 20th century has become a symbol of this. In developing this statement further, Mariategui promotes a number of notable women and demonstrates the contributions made by many women to poetry, literature, art in general, and to our political struggle. He thus teaches us how to evaluate the famous women of various classes by pointing out their merits and their shortcomings and demonstrating which is the main thing in each case; moreover, what is even more important, he emphasizes their contributions to the progress of women.

#2.3. THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

A central point that is very important today is what Mariategui pointed out about the women's question in general, particularly his theses on the feminist movement. On this subject, there are three notable questions:

• First, feminism.
• Second, the political education of women.
• Third, organization.

#2.3.1. FEMINISM

Mariategui held that feminism «has not appeared in Peru artificially or arbitrarily»³, but that it rather corresponds to women's incorporation into manual and mental labour. With this as his starting point, he emphasizes that feminism thrives among women who work outside the home, and points out that the best environments for the development of the feminist movement are the university classrooms and the trade unions. He then directs us to orient ourselves toward these fronts, so as to push forward the mobilization of women. However, it must be pointed out decisively that this orientation in no way implies that we should not pay attention to peasant women; we must remember that Mariategui considered the peasants to be the most important class in our process, so the peasant women, too, are no doubt a front in this mobilization; moreover, they are the main source that the whole feminist movement, as well as the proletariat, wants to reach.

In Feminist Demands, Mariategui puts forward the essence of the feminist movement:

No one should be surprised that not all women come together in a single feminist movement. Feminism has, necessarily, several colours, several trends. One can distinguish in feminism three fundamental trends, three substantive colours: bourgeois feminism, small-bourgeois feminism, and proletarian feminism. Each of these forms of feminism formulates its demands in a different way. Bourgeois women, in their feminism, practise solidarity with the interests of the conservative class. Proletarian women substantiate their feminism with the faith of the revolutionary masses in the future society. The class struggle — a historical fact and not a theoretical assertion — is reflected on the feminist level. Women, like men, can either be reactionaries, moderates, or revolutionaries; therefore, they cannot all fight the same battle side by side. In the human panorama of today, class differentiates individuals more than gender.³

This is the essence of our women's question, the class character of the whole feminist movement. We must bear this very much in mind, today more than ever, because the organization of women is being pushed forward once again. Many small groups are emerging which, in general, are silent on or cover up the class characters on which they are based, that is, the classes which they serve, and preach that women must unite in order to demand their rights in opposition to men, as if all women could unite, without class distinction, and arrive at a so-called «humanist, Christian, and solidaric» social transformation — to mention a few different unclear or confusing class standpoints. The essence of the question is that one must differentiate between the class roots of every small group, organization, alliance, and movement of women, so as to differentiate between their class standpoints and clear up whom they serve, which classes they serve, and whether they truly are on the side of the people.

These points pose a crucial question for us: According to what principles, class criterion, and orientation are we to build a feminist movement in the service of the people? Mariategui's standpoint on this question is brilliant and concise: «Feminism, as a pure idea, is essentially revolutionary.»³ To him, the word «revolutionary» essentially meant «proletarian»; hence, the whole Popular Women's Movement, if it truly wants to serve the people and the revolution, must be a feminist movement that adheres to the proletarian class standpoint, and, today, in our country, to adhere to the proletarian class standpoint means to adhere to Mariategui's Thought.

#2.3.2. POLITICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN

The Marxist classics always paid great attention to the political education of women, because, without it, it is impossible to mobilize and organize women, and, without this, women cannot fight together with the proletariat for their own emancipation. By taking Mariategui as its great example, the Peruvian working class has pointed out the importance of the political education of women and highlighted that not to carry out this education serves the reaction. Mariategui wrote:

For the most part, women, due to their lack of any or sufficient political education, are not serving as a force for renewal in the current struggles, but as a reactionary force.

This is clear enough. The question we must ask ourselves is: What does this political education imply? To the founder of the Communist Party, it meant the resolute and militant incorporation of women into the class struggle, their mobilization as part of the people, their integration into the organizations fighting for the people's interests, their individual study of the ideology of the working class, and all this is part of, and under the leadership of, the proletariat. In sum, it means to incorporate women into politics, into the class struggle, under the leadership of the working class.

#2.3.3. ORGANIZATION

Marxism teaches us that, in order to face its enemies and fight for its class interests, the proletariat has no other weapon than its own organization; this principle applies to the people, whose only strength lies in organization, and therefore also to women, who can only fight successfully when they are organized.

As a Marxist, «guilty as charged», Mariategui applied this principle in a creative way. He paid very special attention to the organization of the female workers, as can be seen in the points he raised in the Manifesto of the CGTP quoted above:

This accumulation of «calamities» that weighs down on the exploited women cannot be removed except through their immediate organization. Just as the trade unions must train cadres from among the youth, they must create women's sections for the education of our future female militants.

Mariategui showed the same concern when, under his guidance, the rules of the CGTP were being revised in preparation for the formation of the Standing Women's Commission of its Executive Committee. Unfortunately, these guidelines have not been put into practice correctly; the aforementioned body has remained a purely bureaucratic union post, usually called something like «female affairs», if it exists at all, which doesn't correspond to the women's sections of the trade unions. Thus, the creation of such bodies remains a pending task.

Later, in March 1930, the Communist Party adopted the following motion:

Firstly, to create a Provisional Secretariat for the organization of the Socialist youth under the Party's immediate control.

Secondly, to create a Provisional Secretariat for the organization of the working women under the Party's leadership and control.

Thirdly, both secretariats must fight for the immediate organization of the youth, regardless of gender, and for their political and ideological education as a preparatory stage in their process of admission to the Party.²⁵

Here, Mariategui's thesis is given material form in the necessity of paying attention to the organization of women, even at the highest political level, and his standpoint is expressed that the organization of women means, in the last analysis, their organization under the leadership and control of the working class and the Party. These points pose the following question about each small group, organization, or movement of women: How, why, and for which class are the women organizing? We should bear in mind that this question can only be satisfactorily answered (that is, answered in a way that is satisfactory to our class and the people) by adhering to the standpoint of the working class.

#★ ★ ★

We must consistently study the questions of feminism, the political education of women, and the organization of women, and apply the theses established by Mariategui on these questions; only thus can an authentic Popular Women's Movement be developed.

#2.4. WOMEN'S EMANCIPATION

On this point, too, just like the classics did, Mariategui also holds that, under capitalism and industrialization, «women advance on the road to their emancipation». However, under the capitalist system, women cannot even obtain full legal equality. For this reason, a consistently feminist movement emerges, which wants to go further, and, in order to advance on this road, it necessarily must join the struggle of the proletariat. This understanding led our country's greatest proletarian thinker to state that «the feminist movement appears in close unity with the revolutionary movement»; he also stated that, although Liberalism had given birth to it, feminism can only be fulfilled through the revolution:

Born of a Liberal womb, feminism could not be implemented during the capitalist process. It is now, when the historical trajectory of democracy comes to an end, that women acquire the political and juridical rights of men. And it is the Russian revolution that has explicitly and categorically granted women the equality and freedom that, more than a century ago, Babeuf and the Equalitarians demanded in vain from the French revolution.³

Thus, it is in connection with the construction of a new society that a new woman emerges, who «must be substantially different from that which has formed the civilization now in decline».³ This new woman will be tempered in the revolutionary forge, and she will place the old type of woman, who is deformed by the old system of exploitation, in the museum of antiquities along with this system, which is now collapsing in the face of genuine dignity for women:

As the socialist system replaces the individualist system, luxury and feminine elegance will decline. [...] Humanity will lose some luxury mammals; but it will gain many women. The costumes of the women of the future will be less expensive and sumptuous; but the status of those women will be more dignified. And the axis of female life will shift from the individual to the social. [...] A woman, in short, will cost less, but will be worth more.²⁶

In addition to these fundamental ideas, Mariategui discusses other questions that are intimately linked with women in particular, such as divorce, marriage, love, and so on; he treats them with a fine irony and takes sharply critical stands on them. However, as any good Marxist, he doesn't focus his attention on them, as they are not primary in relation to the women's question. To focus one's attention on such questions would mean to forget the main struggle and the fundamental objective, and to spread confusion and mislead the revolutionary struggle.

So far, we have presented the central theses on the women's question in Mariategui's Thought. In doing so, we have used many quotations for the same reason as when we dealt with the standpoint of Marxism on the subject.

#3. DEVELOP THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF MARIATEGUI'S THOUGHT

#3.1. MARIATEGUI'S CURRENT RELEVANCE

We can draw the following obvious conclusion from what has been said above: The theses that Mariategui established on the women's question were the result of the consistent application of Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions of a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country like ours. There are generally no disagreements about this, and, even when some people don't adhere to these theses, they at least quietly accept this conclusion. However, the point is not whether Mariategui's Thought used to be a correct application of Marxism to our country; rather, the central issue is how relevant his Thought is today. On this subject, some people, while apparently recognizing Mariategui, so as not to attack his immense and growing prestige, question his current relevance by mentioning that more than 40 years have passed since his death, and raise, in an erroneous and treacherous way, the necessity of «taking into account the creative further development of Marxism, so as to surpass it».

In analysing this question, we should review, if only in passing, some of the standpoints on the women's question that have been held in this country. For example, the notable and controversial thinker, Don Manuel Gonzalez Prada, said the following on this question in his 1904 work, Slaves of the Church, a work now published in Hours of Struggle. He expressed the following important concepts: «We cannot know the people well until we have studied the social and legal status of women.» «The moral level of man is measured by his view of women. To the ignorant and brutal man, woman is but a female; to the thinking and cultured man, she is a brain and a heart.» «Just as we carry our father's family name, we carry our mother's moral formation.» «The motive force, the great driving force of societies, is not the noise in the streets nor in the small revolutionary group; it is the household.» These ideas focus our attention on the importance of women. At the same time, he expressed ideas such as the following: «Women's emancipation, like that of the slaves, is not due to Christianity, but to philosophy.» «In Protestant nations, women's ascendance is taking place so certainly that their complete emancipation can already be predicted.» «Slaves and serfs owe their personal dignity to the efforts of noble and sophisticated people; the Catholic woman will only be emancipated by the energetic action of men.» «In the battle of ideas, no ally is stronger than love.»

We thus see that Gonzalez Prada's contribution to women's emancipation was generally positive. He exposed and denounced the oppression of women, pointed out the important role played by women, and the necessity of solving the problem through women's emancipation. However, to him, the root of the problem is these women's belief in Catholicism; he believes that it is possible to reach emancipation under capitalism; and he focuses on the individual. However, his ideas (above and elsewhere) generally represent a positive contribution to the study of the women's question in our country.

These ideas are more outstanding in view of the fact that, nearly 30 years later, Jorge Basadre put forward: «Woman's essential role is that of lover, while man's essential role is that of labourer. [...] That is why little boys prefer to play with action figures, symbols of struggle, an urge for supremacy, while little girls prefer to play with dolls, inherently motherly. [...] By her nature, the charm of the Creole woman, even when not mixed race, is different from that of the women of other latitudes by a wide margin, like a fruit or a vegetable. [...] Meanwhile, the greatest superiority of man lies in his mind, and, because the American mind is still decidedly under European influence, the glory of the American man is lost or decreased. [...] A famously beautiful woman in the Americas can, however, raise eyebrows anywhere.»²⁷ (This standpoint is so clearly reactionary that no comment is necessary.)

If, at this time, the ruling classes spoke to us through Basadre about a «nature of women», whose essential role is as a lover, they also, in 1940, expressed themselves through Carlos Miro-Quesada Laos as follows:

The role of woman in modern life is manifold. The times have passed for good when labour was prohibited for her. Quite the contrary. Today, woman works in various spheres [...] because she has demonstrated that she is as effective as any man. [...] She, therefore, has the duty to study, to prepare herself for the future. And, even though woman shares these duties with man, there are other duties at which she is, and will always be, superior to man. Woman contributes many things to life that are innate in her. She has the hands of a mother and of a nurse [...]. Thank God, she will never lose this femininity, in spite of the 20th century, with all its wars and revolutionary theories. The word «consolation» awakens woman. [...] After creating man, the Lord [...] made her to be at his side as his mate, to stimulate and sweeten his life. [...] Firstly, she must obey her parents, then her teacher, later her husband, and always her duty.²⁸

In the person of Basadre, the exploiting classes sought to delay women's productive labour; in the person of Miro-Quesada, they sought the fulfilment of new requirements and exalted and demanded women's productive labour. However, at bottom, both standpoints are based on «women's nature». However, it is not only in this sphere that these ideas can be found; incorrect standpoints are also to be found in publications and magazines which claim to be revolutionary or even Marxist. In these, we can read ideas such as the following: By participating in the «meaning of life», that is, «social change», women will become able «to undo their existential problem, because the meaning of life will then reside in the profit that each individual is able to offer their neighbours by way of willpower and effort». Under the heading «Women and Society», after attempting to outline Engels's thesis on the development of the family, we read the following: «We are possessed by the myth of women's inferiority. This raises the necessity of women's liberation [...]. Their liberation can only take place when the socio-economic basis changes in the course of development of a new society. Thus, women's liberation is emphasized, but not is social background, which is kept ambiguous and imprecise, and what ends up being focused on is how to «regulate romantic relationships in a way that corresponds to the new ideology.»²⁹

If woman is to be equal to man, the basis for such a relationship must be:

• Firstly, woman's liberation from religious alienation. [...]
• Secondly, the exercise of woman's right to choose her partner without having to obey prejudices about man's initiative. [...]
• Thirdly, not understanding woman's liberation as a synonym for free love. [...]
• Fourthly [finally!], woman's equality to man. She must not be divorced from politics due to her alleged status. [...]

Love, as the starting point for social change, should stimulate the youth (men as well as women) to fight for building an equalitarian world without oppression or injustice.²⁹

This magazine also published the story, The Grave of the Unemployed, a Christmas story which handily spreads ideas about «women's generosity» and «men's selfishness», a treacherous edition of «women's nature», in which it is stated: «Later on, the two ghosts became silent, each in deep thought. The woman thought about her past; the man thought about his future. The woman thought about what is to be done; the man thought about what is to be done for him. The one thought about generosity, the other about selfishness, both always nailed to their heads, both always wrestling with these ideas in the depths of their consciousness.»²⁹ (From the magazine Mujer [Woman], Nos. 1 and 2. The issues are not dated, but they were published in the 1960s.) Evidently, the ideas promoted in Woman, in spite of their supposed Marxism and revolutionary phrase-mongering, neatly reveal a bourgeois standpoint. In no way do these ideas express the proletarian standpoint on the women's question.

What can we see from this summary? The cold, hard truth that the point is by no means the time when a standpoint is presented, nor is it to «take into account the creative further developments of Marxism»; rather, what is central is the class standpoint on which a proposal is based. We have seen a standpoint before Mariategui's time, that of Gonzalez Prada, which, despite being almost 30 years before Mariategui's standpoint, contains a number of positive elements. We have also seen a standpoint by a contemporary of Mariategui's, namely, Basadre, which is openly reactionary. Finally, we have seen two later standpoints, that of Miro-Quesada, which renovates some elements, but is still reactionary, and that of the magazine Woman, 30 years after Mariategui's death, which definitely adheres to the bourgeois standpoint, in spite of the fact that it is painted in Marxist colours and is presented as being revolutionary and in the service of women's emancipation.

What is our conclusion? As we have said, the point is the class character of a standpoint, in this case, of a standpoint on the women's question. Mariategui, the greatest exponent of our working class, established the proletarian standpoint on the women's question. He laid the basis for the proletarian political line on this question, and his standpoints are completely valid today, on this subject as well as on others that have to do with the revolutionary politics of the proletariat in our country. Therefore, to develop a Popular Women's Movement demands, today more than ever, that we firmly and consistently adhere to Mariategui's Thought, beginning with accepting its relevance today.

#3.2. RECLAIM MARIATEGUI'S ROAD

The struggle of the women of the Peruvian proletariat and people has a long tradition of more than 50 years, which is sealed in their blood. Likewise, our feminist organizations have existed for a long period of time. However, the process of organization of Peruvian women began to expand in the 1960s, which foreshadows brilliant prospects, although long and winding ones.

Today, we have a mass of organizations of varying sizes and levels, and, more importantly, the old seeds are beginning to sprout — there are already signs pointing toward a genuine Popular Women's Movement. Today, we have a National Women's Council, which has existed for 50 years, and which is based on the decrepit and obsolete theory of «women's nature»; a «Women's Rights Movement» that upholds a feminism which is aimed at women's liberation from dependence on men; and a whole set of organizations in a process of formation that support the current regime and are at the service of its process of corporatization, under the leadership and control of the National Support System of Social Mobilization [SINAMOS] and guided by its concept of «women's participation», which s part of the regime's «fully participatory democracy», which covers up the fact that private property is the root of the oppression of women and that the subjection of women began alongside it. These organizations twist our history and make use of a lowly and vulgar «materialism» to propagate that, «in 1968, a revolutionary process began that seeks genuine liberation of women and their political equality and active participation», and they conclude that «we are the ones who must create the different forms of women's organizations», which are saturated with bourgeois feminism in disguise. Moreover, there is the National Popular Women's Union of Peru, a Right-opportunist organization which, as is usually the case, collaborates with and is totally at the service of the regime.

This increase in the organizational strengthening of the masses of women demands serious research of the women's question and a class analysis of the different organizations that either already exist or are being formed, so that the different camps and lines can be differentiated in the sphere of the women's question, just as in other spheres: on the one hand, the counter-revolutionary line of imperialism and the middle bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, the revolutionary line under the command and guidance of the proletariat. This will help the organizational development of the Popular Women's Movement, which necessarily requires that its construction be developed in the midst of the two-line struggle, which expresses the class struggle and the conflicting interests of the contending classes. Of course, it must not be forgotten that, within each line, there are variations and differences of opinion according to the different classes grouped around each line. The point is to establish what the two contending lines are, and, within each line, the variations and nuances; to establish which class standpoint guides each line; and, depending on which classes the lines represent, to define which lines have a revolutionary and which ones a counter-revolutionary character.

Everything that we have presented thus leads us to the necessity of reclaiming Mariategui's road on the women's question, so as to serve the formation and development of the Popular Women's Movement, conceived of as a movement created by the proletariat for its work among the masses of women, which must be guided by the following characteristics:

• Firstly, adherence to Mariategui's Thought.
• Secondly, class-conscious mass organization.
• Thirdly, subjection to democratic centralism.

The construction of such a movement poses two questions for us:

• Firstly, the question of building the movement ideologically and politically, which necessarily implies the adoption of its Declaration of Principles and its Programme.
• Secondly, the question of building the movement organizationally, which we can serve by forming activist cells or groups to bring the Declaration of Principles and the Programme to the masses of women: female workers, peasants, professionals, university and high-school students, and so on. They should work for the political education of women, the mobilization of women through their struggles, and the organization of women as part of the political struggle, all according to the orientation and politics of the proletariat.

Finally, as the conclusion to this contribution to the study and understanding of the women's question, it makes sense to transcribe the Declaration of Principles and the Programme which for some time have been circulating in our ranks. Although we must emphasize that these documents are works in progress, they can serve as a useful basis for the discussion of how to build the Popular Women's Movement ideologically and politically.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES

#Popular Women's Centre

#January 1974

#★

At the same time as the appearance of classes, which marked the beginning of exploitation, the weight of women's oppression also began. From slaves to serfs, from serfs to workers, until today, as long as there are exploiters, women are subjugated, and this can only end once the class basis for this oppression is cut off at the root.

From women's slavery yesterday to formal equality today, women have wrested conquests away, both in centuries of silent and tenacious struggle and in the mass violence of battles without quarter. Society develops in the midst of the class struggle, and the fighting masses make it progress.

Progress for women has always been and remains progress for the people. But women have not been passive beneficiaries, but rather militant sisters and determined fighters for the cause of the oppressed — revolutionaries of the highest rank. The trenches in the people's struggle everywhere are stained with the indelible traces of their blood. Women are not, as is falsely claimed, apolitical and indifferent; women, especially those who belong to the people, are revolutionary fighters.

The daughters of the oppressed classes — the slaves, peasants, and workers — have given us the glorious names that adorn the emancipatory deeds of the masses: Rosa Luxemburg and Liu Hulan are examples of the international revolutionary struggle; Micaela Bastidas is an example of our national revolutionary struggle.

Women are not simply passive beings, nor banal household decorations, nor instruments to be wielded; class-conscious women are indefatigable fighters and determined militants.

Peruvian women have always been and remain fighters for the people, and, as part of our people, they have fought alongside them throughout our history; the struggle of the women of our country is embodied in the person of Micaela Bastidas.

Women today suffer exploitation and oppression, the cause of which is the semi-colonial and semi-feudal status of our country; this status weighs down on our people like a mountain, and its weight is doubled on the backs of the masses of the women of Peru.

In this society, where the masses are rising up against imperialism and feudalism, women are taking up arms and adding their voices to the choir of the people's roaring battle-cries. The struggle of Peruvian women is part of the struggle of the oppressed and exploited people, and they have the same enemies. Their common struggles and their unstoppable and necessary final victory will also be the same triumphant and liberating victory.

Although Peruvian women have never ceased to fight, the times of today demand that they broaden and deepen their participation in the struggle.

Today, when the ruling classes are deepening imperialist-dependent capitalism in the country; when they are applying anti-democratic and verticalist conceptions in their aim to organize the masses along corporate lines in negation of the class struggle; when they are promoting the mobilization and organization of women outside of the class struggle and in favour of the ruling classes; the Popular Women's Movement once again sets out on its fighting march, and, with clear consciousness of the situation of our homeland, launches itself into the struggle for the class-conscious mobilization of Peruvian women to serve the national-democratic revolution.

This task will be accomplished by adhering to the following essential principles:

• It is only possible to play a consistently and firmly revolutionary role by following the invincible light of Mariategui's Thought.
• The masses liberate themselves, and we must serve them by making them aware of their role as the makers of history.
• In our country, the masses to which we must go are mainly the workers and peasants, and we must always orient ourselves toward the poorest and most exploited people.
• It is necessary to conduct research and propaganda in order to mobilize and organize; this means that we must understand the concrete problems faced by the masses and develop revolutionary agitation and propaganda in their midst.
• It is necessary to organize according to all the forms created and developed by the proletariat. Women must participate in all of them.
• Women can only be correctly organized if they are organized according to the class principle of grouping women on the basis of their class standpoint.
• Without a clear and appropriate political orientation, one has no soul. We must consciously and firmly follow the laws of the people's struggle in our homeland.
• Start from the concrete, fundamental, and primary needs of the majority of the masses in order, step by step and through struggle, to raise their political consciousness.
• The revolutionary struggle can only win victory by uniting all oppressed people and classes, but the main thing is to rely on one's own forces.

According to these principles, and in order to fulfil the objective of the class-conscious mobilization of Peruvian women, the Popular Women's Movement of Ayacucho commits its efforts, tenacity, and struggle in order to join together with other similar movements, so as to create the Popular Women's Movement of our homeland as the movement created by the proletariat among the masses of women, and according to the following three characteristic:

• Firstly, adherence to Mariategui's Thought.
• Secondly, class-conscious mass organization.
• Thirdly, subjection to democratic centralism.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#PROGRAMME

#Popular Women's Centre

#January 1974

#★

• Class-conscious mobilization of women to fight for the objectives of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal Peruvian revolution.
• To fight against the oppression of women in the economic, political, and ideological spheres. Equal pay for equal work. Effective equality before the law. Equal opportunity for education. Dignity for women. Opposition to prejudice, superstition, and depolitization. Against ideological deformation.
• Fulfilment of women's rights and benefits. Defence of the conquests won and expansion of rights through struggle.
• Ideological and political mobilization of women by developing propaganda and agitation based on Mariategui's Thought and on the struggle against imperialism, feudalism, and all Right- and «Left»-opportunist standpoints.
• Formation of class-consciousness and the spirit of serving the people, of integrating with the masses (mainly the workers and peasants), and of fighting alongside them for their rights, conquests, and democratic freedoms.
• Organization of women at all levels. To fight for the formation of the National Women's Federation of Peru, as part of the Popular United Front.
• To promote women's activities and meetings in order to achieve the revolutionary organization of Peruvian women, and to carry their voice to the people's activities.
• Mobilization of women to unite them with the masses of the people and to link their struggle with those of the people.
• Creation of a press organ as the class-conscious expression of Peruvian women. Rimariyña Warmi serves this purpose.
• Contribution to tempering the Popular Red Aid, and promotion of economic campaigns, so that our people can rely on their own means.
• Propagation and development of the people's culture.
• Cultivation of solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed classes and exploited classes by joining their struggles against the reactionary alliance between US imperialism and Soviet revisionism. To link up with the consistent organizations, especially the women's organizations, as part of a worldwide revolutionary front.