Evelyn Reed Speaks! Women  Caste, Class, or Oppressed Sex? 1970
Channel: Matthew Siegfried
Date: 2015-07-01

Evelyn Reed Speaks! Women: Caste, Class, or Oppressed Sex? Lecture with Question & Answer July, 1970. Evelyn Reed (1905 – 1979) was an American communist and women’s rights activist.
In January 1940, she traveled to Mexico to see the exiled Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova. There, at the house of Trotsky in Coyoacán, Reed met the American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, leader of the Socialist Workers Party (United States). Reed joined in the same year, and remained a leading party member until her death. An active participant in the Women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Reed was a founding member of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition in 1971. During these years she spoke and debated on women’s rights in cities throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland, the United Kingdom and France.
Inspired by the works on women and the family by Friedrich Engels and Alexandra Kollontai, Reed is the author of many books on Marxist feminism and the origin of the oppression of women and the fight for their emancipation. Some of the most notable works by Reed are: Problems of Women’s Liberation, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family, Is Biology Woman’s Destiny?, and Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women (with Joseph Hansen and Mary-Alice Waters.) Archive of her work: https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed-evelyn/