From the beginning, the new upsurge of women's struggles was strongly affected by the international youth radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the increased challenge to bourgeois values and institutions that accompanied it. Young people-both male and female-began to question religion, to reject patriotism, to challenge authoritarian hierarchies from family, to school, to factory, to army, and to reject the inevitability of a lifetime of alienated labor.
Women's awareness of their reproductive functions and their physical and health needs flowed on into struggles for women to control their reproductive choices as well as special women's health and abortion clinics. Women's support and counseling services grew to provide alternative information and services to mainstream medicine where research and general practice reinforced women's traditional role in the family.
The sexual revolution opened up a climate in which female sexuality and sexuality in general came under intense scrutiny and debate. This led to splits in the women's movement as a growing number of feminists made sexuality the focal issue of their concerns. But the sexual revolution also enabled a massive rethinking and questioning about the extremely restricting gender roles of masculinity and femininity and the human misery suffered by the majority of individuals who are forced to try to fit these idealised norms under class society.
Although lesbian sexuality has rarely been legislated against, lesbians face a number of specific denials of their democratic rights. There is no social or legal recognition of the validity of a relationship between two women. There are numerous cases of women being denied access to their partner by the partner's family against the express wishes of the partner following injury or disability; of women being denied access to accommodation and personal belongings such as photos and joint possessions, following the death of one partner. Lesbians who are mothers are often not viewed as ``fit and proper'' guardians of their children by the courts and even their own families.
But lesbians are not just discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality, they are also oppressed as women. Many radicalised as women first and felt the discrimination they suffered because of their sexual orientation was only one element of the social and economic limitations women face in trying to determine the course of their lives. Thus many lesbians were in the forefront of the feminist movement from the very beginning. They have been part of every political current within the women's liberation movement, from lesbian separatists to revolutionary Marxists, and they have helped to make the entire movement more conscious of the specific ways in which lesbians are oppressed.
Because of the lesbian movement's insistence on the right of women to live independent of men, they often become the special target of attacks by reaction. From hate propaganda to violent physical assaults, the attacks on lesbians and the lesbian movement are really aimed against the women's movement as a whole.
As the feminist movement has developed in the advanced capitalist countries, women of the oppressed nationalities and racial groups have begun to play an increasingly prominent role. As members of oppressed nationalities or racial groups, as women, and frequently as superexploited workers, these women suffer a double and often triple oppression.
Immigrant women too face many similar aspects of oppression. In Australia, they are exploited as workers in the lowest paid jobs with the worst conditions, excluded from an understanding of unionisation and their rights by their lack of English and the disregard of unions for their conditions, and they also suffer racist and sexist oppression.
But there has generally been a lag in the pace with which women of oppressed racial groups and immigrant women have become conscious of their specific oppression as women. There are several reasons for this:
*For many, the depth of their racial oppression initially overshadows their oppression as women. Many radical anti-racist movements have refused to take up the demands of women, calling them divisive to the struggle against racism.
*The organised women's movement has often failed to address itself to the needs of the most oppressed and exploited layers of women and understand the special difficulties they face.
*The hold of the family is often particularly strong among non-Anglophone immigrant women and among women of oppressed racial groups since the family provides a partial buffer against the devastating pressures of racism and cultural annihilation.
Nevertheless, experience has already shown that once the radicalisation of these women begins it takes on an explosive character, propelling them into the leadership of many social and political struggles, including struggles on the job, in the unions, on campuses and in the communities, as well as the feminist movement. They rapidly come to understand that the struggle against their oppression as women does not weaken but strengthens the struggle against their ethnic or racial oppression.
Christianity and Judaism, which mark the cultures of the advanced capitalist countries, have always upheld the inequality of women and denied them the right to separate sexuality from reproduction. As these have weakened, there has been a rapid growth and organisation of Christian fundamentalism in imperialist countries which has been exported to the Third World as part of imperialism's efforts to bolster right-wing forces. This effort has been aimed at countering many of the gains of the women's movement in particular, and more generally, anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World which have radicalised sections of the Catholic Church through liberation theology.
The upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment and struggles in many parts of the Muslim world has had a contradictory impact on the situation of women. Because of the economic backwardness of many of these countries, which has been maintained by imperialist domination, religion has a powerful influence among the poor and oppressed. Their struggles against imperialist domination have thus tended to find ideological expression in religious terms. While such anti-imperialist struggles have mobilised broad masses of women, as was the case with the 1979 revolution in Iran, the religious garb in which these struggles have been cloaked has helped the Islamic clergy to reinforce reactionary anti-women attitudes and practices.
Women's role in the fight against erosions of democratic rights has been major and women's resistance to the economic, political, and ideological offensive of the ruling class has been stiffened by the heightened feminist awareness. Their struggles have been a powerful motor force of social protest and political radicalisation and their participation in the forefront of other progressive social struggles has increased.