Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future

Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolutions Reaching for the Future is the last completed major work of Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, the first edition having been published only two years before her sudden death in 1987. In her 1986 review of this work for the Women's Review of Books, the poet and theorist Adrienne Rich described Dunayevskaya as one of the longest continuously active woman revolutionaries of the 20th century whose thought and activity "matters to our understanding of what and where the movement for women's liberation has been and might go." Hers is not the prose of a disembodied intellectual. She argues; she challenges; she urges on; she expostulates; her essays have the spontaneity of an extemporaneous speech . . . you can hear her thinking aloud. She has a prevailing sense of ideas as flesh and blood, of the individual thinking, limited by her or his individuality yet carrying on a conversation in the world. The thought of the philosopher is a product of what she or he has lived through. This collection of 35 years of Dunayevskaya's essays on women reveals how she saw the dialectics of revolution worked out in one single dimension-"Woman as Reason and Revolutionary Force"-globally and throughout history. That this book is even more important to a new generation of feminists in the 1990s than when this book first appeared a decade ago is due to the deepening of the retrogression the Women's Liberation Movement has suffered over this decade-not only from the forces of reaction outside the movement, but from the contradictions within the movement. What had first drawn Adrienne Rich to Dunayevskaya's work and a rethinking of the relationship of Women's Liberation to Marxism was the need to confront those contradictions. Similarly, the Black feminist writer and theorist Gloria Joseph has welcomed Dunayevskaya's discussion of the contradictions confronting feminists today. In a sharp "critique of all those leading feminist scholars" who "have excluded working-class women and Black women from their elite 'private enclave,'" what Joseph singled out was Dunayevskaya's powerful discussion of Sojourner Truth's phrase ashortminded," which she invented to criticize the great Black Abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, for not including women in the struggle for enfranchisement after the Civil War. What Dunayevskaya saw in Sojourner Truth's phrase, Joseph stressed, was a concept, one that had become a new language of thought against any who would impose a limitation to freedom." Any who today, she concluded, "put limitations on who the movement is for and (ignore) who remains exploited in the process of others being liberated," is similarly "short-minded." Her 1992 book, Gathering Rage: The Failure of 20th Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda, is especially illuminating in finding in Dunayevskaya's work the "point of departure for those of us who seek answe