“WOMAN, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights. … Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind?”

This was Olympe de Gouges speaking at the height of the French Revolution. The quotation is from her Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791), a rejoinder to the Constituent Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted earlier. The very next year would see the publication of the epoch-making A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. de Gouges and Wollstonecraft were certainly not the first in fighting for the women’s cause — early figures like Mary Astell (author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694)) easily come to mind – and certainly not the last. Many of them were magnificent visionaries. Wollstonecraft for example argued convincingly for equal suffrage for women and criticised the male prejudices of stalwarts like J J Rousseau who was against this. What these valiant fighters lacked was a scientific understanding of the actual causes of woman’s bondage and the real conditions for her emancipation. But this was no fault of theirs. Such an understanding could evolve only in the middle of the 19th century when, thanks to developments like the advent of the modern proletariat, great breakthroughs in natural and social sciences and so on, dialectical materialism, materialist interpretation of history and scientific socialism emerged. Marxism and its organisational embodiment, the communist party, now began to add a new revolutionary dimension to the centuries-old struggle for women’s enlightenment and emancipation — not by supplying a novel and special ‘theory’ or floating a new banner, but by connecting it, more closely than ever before and both on the planes of consciousness and organisation, with the united movement of all the downtrodden for revolutionary transformation of the entire oppressive social order. Parallel to this communist movement, the autonomous women’s movement also forged ahead, both streams benefiting from a cordial relation of unity and struggle.