Neil C. Rafeek's Communist Women in Scotland: A Review

Abstract

Recent discussions of the role and significance of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) have tended towards the dismissive. The late Neil Rafeek's book Communist Women in Scotland helps redress the balance through the methods of oral history, focussing mainly on the period since the Second World War. His work reminds us of disproportionate influence the CPGB in the Scottish labour movement, relative to its size, and provides a memorial to the female activists whose testimony forms the basis of his material. Yet despite the book's undoubted usefulness as a documentary record, the fundamental organising concepts around which Rafeek structured his book—the distinctiveness of being Scottish, the specific experience of women and the politics of Communism—all reveal problems with his approach. Rafeek does not address the unevenness of the Communist experience within Scotland or that between Scotland and England; above all, he ignores the deleterious impact of the CPGB's soft nationalism on its industrial strategy during the 1970s and 1980s in the unions where it had influence. Rafeek notes that, before the emergence of the women's liberation movement in the 1970s, female party members tended to subordinate the question of their oppression to the achievement of socialism, while afterwards, it came to be seen as an issue which would have to be addressed separately. His adherence to the Stalinist politics of the CPGB, however, means that in the cases of both nationalism and women's liberation, Rafeek lacks the critical distance from his subject to explain developments in these areas, or the parallel emergence of organisations and movements to the left of the party. Nevertheless, the sheer quantity and intrinsic interest of the material Rafeek has gathered from his interviewees make his work an important contribution to the history of the left in Scotland.