Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > > > No revolutionary movement has had as few women as lbo, pen-l, and > marxmail. Take the one in Nepal. While the leader of the CPN > (Maoist), too, is a man, you can see a lot of women in the rank and > file. So, in the case of actual revolutionary movements, the problem > is dearth or absence of women in the most powerful positions, whereas > on the mailing lists you mention it's the dearth of women, period, > that's the problem.
Another Hypothesis: Maillists constitute a sampling of the leadership pool for left movements. Important collateral point here: In political organizations in general, but particularly in resistance movements, _all_ leaders are self-nominated though _not_, of course, self-elected or self-appointed. There is no other way for them to be nominated. Further selection depends on the concrete features of the movement as a whole. Now any maillist has a considerable variety of subscribers, but clearly on left lists you can perceive that a core of them are writing from experience in local (or regional/national) organizing; i.e. they are self-nominated for leadership, and usually have had that nomination affirmed by others at some level. If this (or some more carefully formulated version of it) is roughly true, then maillist membership (including the three at issue here) should be compared not to entire movements but to the portion of those movements from which the leadership emerges. And then what we have to focus on is expanding the number of women not just in leadership positions but the number of women in what I'm calling the leadership pool. Carrol
