Lessons from the Women's Movement in Europe

Abstract

[This is a talk that Frigga Haug gave in the opening session of the European Forum of Socialist-Feminists in Madrid in November 1987. The first forum, organized jointly by feminists in the Psychology Department of the University of Copenhagen and the autonomous women's group of the editorial collective of the West German Marxist theoretical journal Das Argument and its publishers Argument-Verlag, had been held in Copenhagen in October 1985. The second forum was in Hamburg in November 1986. There are accounts of these meetings in Feminist Review Nos 23 and 26. The Madrid meeting was the third, and a fourth was held near Manchester in England in November 1988. The editorial collective of Feminist Review has been represented at each forum and we shall keep our readers informed about plans in the future. Frigga Haug has been a leading spirit in the forum and this talk represents her thoughts about what it can achieve and also about the problems and future directions for socialist-feminist politics in Europe. One of the issues that she refers to in her talk is the demand for quotas, which has been discussed a good deal in the forum. In the Federal Republic of Germany and the Scandinavian countries in particular, feminists have succeeded in getting some political parties and other organizations to establish minimum proportions of women to be selected for electoral lists (where these form part of a proportional representation system), or elected to executive committees and so on. There has been much debate about whether simply getting women into these positions represents an advance for feminism: is it just tokenism? do the women become honorary men? 'Entering the structures changing the structures' was the theme of the 1988 forum and it took up many of the issues that Frigga Haug raises here about the demand for quotas.]