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Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves, eds. Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe Between the Two World Wars. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998. xvi + 591 pp. $85.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2001
Abstract
This excellent collection of articles on interwar socialism shows the bottom line of socialist political theory: The vast majority of party leaders utterly refused to surrender the male bonus of political and economic privilege—even if it meant losing political wars. Under the banner of class solidarity, the various European parties generally refused to bring in women on equal terms to men, to address economic issues that would have benefited women workers, or to concern themselves with what they saw as women's insignificant problems. The situation became even worse as these parties bureaucratized in the interwar years and devoted themselves to guarding entrenched positions for well-paid functionaries. Parties with the potential to become massive and majoritarian gave up the goal of victory by keeping out an electoral clientele of working-class women and perhaps male sympathizers who saw that domination—whether economic or gender—was domination no matter what the form.
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- © 1999 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society