Let's not forget that these "duh it's a no-brainer" reactions were not at all intuitive to many of the men involved in Marxist Movements of the 60s. If so then a lot of feminist writers I've read have been lyin through their pearly whites: Shulamith Firestone ringa bell? Combahee River Collective? (yeah that group of black lesbians who insisted on identity politics, race/class/gender analyses, AND insisted on maintaining solidarity with Men, gad they were so ahead of their time). How 'bout Gayle Ribin? Heidi Hartman? Iris Young? Michelle Barrett? Zillah Eisenstein? Linda Nicholson maybe?
These were women steeped in Marxist theory and politics and they DID NOT feel that Marxist analysis, as it stood then, was capable of addressing 'women' and 'women's issues' Great stuff about Chicago politics Ken, but can you honestly say that it somehow was *obvious* at the time and didn't take a lot of complaining from the grrRls.
Call me a dim bulb, but I think Shulamith Firestone was a pretty pissed off woman, no?
"Engels has been given too much credit for these scattered recognitions of the oppression of women as a class. In fact he acknowledged the sexual class system only where it overlapped and illuminated his economic construct. Engels didn't do so well even in this respect. But Marx was worse: There is a growing recognition of MArx's bias against women...dangerous if one attempts to squeeze feminism into an orthodox marxist framework--freezing what were only the incidental insights of marx and Engels about sex class into dogma"
And The Combahee River Collective, ey?
"Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's....This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of *identity politics*. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression....We...find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experience simultaneously....We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives"
Anyway, when I get round 'tuit Alex, I'll send you some refs if you still want 'em. There isn't actually much out there if you ask me. Now, all this stuff about how it's soooo obvious that of course we support abortion, well again it just says to me that it's been relegated to the status of some tangential issue that *others* can work on.