HALL OF INFAMY
Madeleine Albright: Enemy of women's liberation
By Deirdre Griswold
Can it bring any gain to the women's movement
that the Women's Hall of Fame will induct Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright into its roster of members this month?
It's true she's the first woman secretary of state in this
country's history. But so was Margaret Thatcher Britain's first
woman prime minister. A lot of good that did for women.
Thatcher and Albright are cut of the same political cloth.
They come from the right wing of the capitalist political
establishment and find it convenient that their sex helps
disarm criticism on the left. They are both the antithesis of
women's liberation.
Under Thatcher, the British ruling class was able to set in
motion a slew of anti-worker measures, many of them
horrendously anti-woman. The prime minister's success in
reducing the power of the labor movement and instituting cuts
in social services helped inspire similar measures by the
Reagan administration here. She was the first to launch a broad
crusade on both ideological and practical levels against
government-funded measures like child care and education-and
get away with it.
Albright's specialty is foreign policy, of course. What has
she done for women in her field? While U.S. ambassador to the
UN, she never challenged the reactionary U.S. policy that
withheld funds from UN agencies that provided family
planning.
She participated in the charade by which the CIA, in the
name of democracy, spent billions putting the most reactionary,
woman-hating elements into power in Afghanistan-because they
were staunch anti-communists. It had absolutely no effect on
Albright that the progressive regime drowned in blood by the
U.S.-backed Taliban had freed women from feudal bondage.
Albright is a champion of all the merciless profiteers who
have grabbed the ring of power in Eastern Europe and the former
USSR. As the entire socialist edifice that protected working
women from super exploitation has come crashing to the
ground-daycare centers, paid maternity leaves, guaranteed
employment, early retirement-she has exulted. If newly poor
women must now survive as prostitutes or sell their belongings
on the street, what's that to this jet-setting diplomat who
hobnobs with kings and corporate titans?
If the Women's Hall of Fame weren't such a bastion of
bourgeois acceptability, it would bestow its award this year on
one of the courageous women trying to survive while fighting
the welfare/workfare system, or on a woman union organizer, or
on a woman like Assata Shakur who has fought for the dignity of
Black women and been treated by New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd
Whitman like a fugitive slave to be run down by bounty
hunters.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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