That said, you evade the question of why socialist states and
movements have had only a few women leaders, fewer than one would
expect, when women have managed to rise to the top in a number of
capitalist states, even ones that are poor or on the Right where one
might not have expected them to do so.
--
Yoshie
You really should find the time to read Trotsky
one of these days. I guarantee you that it would
be more rewarding than Shi'ite radical texts.
The mass homelessness of children is undoubtedly
the most unmistakable and most tragic symptom of
the difficult situation of the mother. On this
subject even the optimistic Pravda is sometimes
compelled to make a bitter confession: The birth
of a child is for many women a serious menace to
their position. It is just for this reason that
the revolutionary power gave women the right to
abortion, which in conditions of want and family
distress, whatever may be said upon this subject
by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is
one of her most important civil, political and
cultural rights. However, this right of women
too, gloomy enough in itself, is under the
existing social inequality being converted into a
privilege. Bits of information trickling into the
press about the practice of abortion are
literally shocking. Thus through only one village
hospital in one district of the Urals, there
passed in 1935 195 women mutilated by
midwivesamong them 33 working women, 28
clerical workers, 65 collective farm women, 58
housewives, etc. This Ural district differs from
the majority of other districts only in that
information about it happened to get into the
press. How many women are mutilated every day
throughout the extent of the Soviet Union?
full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/ch07.htm#ch07-1
Women were not presidents of "socialist"
societies because these were not socialist
societies. They were transitional systems in
between capitalism and socialism. There was a
Thermidor in the USSR that held back woman's
liberation. Who knows. If Stalin had not
prevailed, then perhaps the USSR would have had a female president.
In any case, even without a female president,
these societies represented a qualitative advance
over the capitalist system. For somebody who
identifies themselves as a socialist, Yoshie,
this dimension is strikingly absent in your
recent theoretical wanderings in the desert.
