Reflections on International Women's Day, 2022, with Hester Eisenstein, Barbara Foley, & Zhongjin Li
Channel: Shelter & Solidarity
Date: 13/03/2022

Barbara Foley, Hester Eisenstein, and  Zhongjin Li discuss what International Women's Day means today, and what the challenges and opportunities are in 2022 for thinking and linking women's oppression and women's liberation to struggles for a radically better world. Hosted by S&S producer Lena Durkin.

5:00 Background of International Women's Day (IWD)
6:30 Question to panel: What does IWD mean today, and to you, based on your experience?
7:15  Hester Eisenstein responds
10:30 Barbara Foley responds
19:50 Zhongjin Li responds
27:00 Question to Hester:  How have ruling elites sought to co-opt "mainstream" feminism?
34:20  Question to Barbara: What are the limits of "Intersectionality" as a framework for grasping women's and other oppressions? 
35:00 Barbara addresses the role of racism the "welfare reform" movement
37:30 Barbara summarizes marxist critique of intersectionality 
39:00 Barbara traces marxist theory of woman's oppression as rooted in devaluing of unwaged social reproductive labor in the home
42:30 Questions to Zhongji: How has the "crisis of care" been exacerbated or exposed by COVID19, and how so does the burden of care under a privatized capitalist system fall on women?  How do different countries responses to COVID, including in China, shed new light on the crisis?
48:00 Zhongji describes communist care infrastructure in China
54:00 Zhongji on possibilities for uniting people and tapping collective memory through struggle for public sector 
56:00  Question from Lena for the panel: What do you see as the way forward for the women's movement as a progressive, revolutionary, international force? At level of ideology or strategy?  How can the women's movement link to other movements for transformative change?
57:30  Hester on returning to revolutionary ideas of early feminist movement and the linkage of patriarchy, the state, and militarism, and reclaiming the utopian promise of IWD!
1:01:44 Barbara on tapping into the revolutionary and communist memories, urgency, and capacity in the present.
1:05:00 Zhongji on realizing that the current system will continue to produce more ecological and social crisis; the possibility of testing the limits of the system and supporting the people through broad movement to rebuild or defend the public sector.
1:09:00  from striking women workers in China: "To rebel is right" "Women hold up more than half the sky"
1:13:30  Turn to Q&A

**
Barbara Foley is Emerita Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. Her scholarship has ranged over the fields of Marxist literary criticism, literary radicalism, and African American literature. A communist, feminist, and antiracist, she came of age politically in SDS during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Long-time former president of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association and current vice president of the Marxist journal Science & Society, Foley has stressed the importance of antiracist and anti-sexist proletarian internationalism. For two decades she served as the chair of the Combating Racism task force of NOW-NJ.

Hester Eisenstein retired (with very mixed feelings!) from Queens College in August 2020. She was a Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, from 1996. From then until 2001 she served as the Director of Women’s Studies at Queens. She also served as the founding director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center from 2015 to 2017. Her most recent book is Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Taylor and Francis, 2009). Her previous books include Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State (1994), Gender Shock: Practicing Feminism on Two Continents (1991) and Contemporary Feminist Thought (1984). She serves on the board of the journal Socialism and Democracy and is a frequent contributor to the annual Historical Materialism conference in London.

Zhongjin Li is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. Her research fields include political economy, development economics, comparative economic systems, and East Asian economies. She has published papers on the political economy of development and labor in a variety of academic journals in English and in Chinese, also writes for Dollar & Sense, Jacobin magazine, etc.  She is the coeditor of China on Strike published by the Haymarket Books in 2016.