Anti-woman scheme fails

It's the same approach the slicker money-grubbing corporations have. Hire a few women executives and PR spokespeople at fancy salaries and then you can better put over rapacious policies that hurt, underpay and degrade women and workers in general. The tobacco companies did it. The drug companies followed suit. Women, it seems, are more believable, even when they're just reading the scripts of the sexist ruling class.

The Bush administration thought it could do it, too. Big mistake. When the UN Commission on the Status of Women set up meetings in New York 10 years after the Beijing Women's Conference, Washington aggressively tried to put over its thoroughly reactionary agenda on women's issues. Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey, who says that most women's groups in the U.S. are in a liberal conspiracy to destroy the family, headed a team of conservatives who demanded language be added to the 1995 Beijing agreement to explicitly exclude abortion from the definition of women's rights.

It was an attempt to hijack the conference on women's equality, which wanted to discuss implementing programs to ameliorate poverty and poor health among women. When the U.S. delegates tried to insert an anti-abortion section into the one-page statement that re-asserted the Beijing Conference's final declaration, however, they struck a rock. Women from all over the world spoke out forcefully against the U.S. position. No one supported it. Finally, the arrogant imperialists pulled back and the world's women celebrated their victory.

It's a sign of the times. The momentum toward U.S. imperialist world domination that seemed so strong after the collapse of the USSR has been broken by the heroic Iraqi resistance. The Pentagon's efforts to crush that resistance are alienating a whole new generation here and abroad, just as during the Vietnam War.

Liberation struggles are once again on the rise, most notably in Latin America and the Middle East. A similar political climate spurred on the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and it can happen again. This time, women and people of color are much more prominent as leaders of the anti-war and social justice movements.

Nevertheless, women in this country are facing new attacks on reproductive rights as well as an anti-worker offensive. They'll bear the brunt of social service cuts mandated by the military-industrial-banking complex so the war machine can be expanded.

It's encouraging to know that the women of the world are unanimously in solidarity with our struggles to beat back this right-wing attack.