From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Letter to Adrienne Rich–Women’s liberation, Gay liberation & dialectic

September 13, 2022

This letter expands on the reason for writing Philosophy and Revolution, and on the concepts of “woman as revolutionary reason as well as force” and “new forces and new passions” of revolution. It illuminates Dunayevskaya’s view of multilinearity in Marx’s late writings as a dimension of his concept of revolution in permanence concerning not only class but all social relations, and speaks to the question of method in today’s debates about sexuality, women’s liberation and new subjects of revolution.

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Woman as Reason: Their target: women’s freedom

July 9, 2022

The overturning of abortion rights is worse than before it was legal because of the hatred of women for creating a movement that challenged men’s ownership of our bodies, lives and minds, and many are determined to get that power and control back no matter what the body count.

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Editorial: Abortion bans show need for new society

July 5, 2022

With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.

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Abortion bans upheld: Our task–a new human society

June 24, 2022

With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.

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Freedom vs. the war against women

April 27, 2022

The Republican attack against women won’t stop with trashing our right to control our bodies. Hate has worked so well for them that they will also come down harder on LGBTQ+ people, especially Trans people who trample every notion the Right has of “how things are supposed to be.”

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Woman as Reason: The abortion pill is not magic

January 29, 2022

While the U.S. Supreme Court is set to either gut or overturn Roe V. Wade, women cannot depend on the abortion pill alone. The fight for women to control our own bodies is a fight for freedom and should be waged as such. It is time to make that luminously clear.

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Woman as Reason: Violence against women on the rise

November 16, 2021

After over 50 years of a Women’s Liberation Movement unthinkable numbers of women continue to be brutally raped and murdered worldwide—with the COVID-19 pandemic spiking that number even higher. What can help us gain that needed confidence is to understand the meaning of our own actions and thoughts which is the role of a philosophy of human liberation.

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Woman as Reason: Afghan women pay price for U.S. hubris

August 31, 2021

In Afghanistan the Taliban are murdering men who helped the U.S., UK, and other forces who fought them; and murdering and beating women and girls who have made even marginally independent lives for themselves. Yet, despite the terror, Afghans, especially women, continue to demonstrate against Taliban rule.

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Woman as Reason: Abortion rights at crossroads

July 1, 2021

Paxton Smith’s valedictorian speech against a new extremist anti-abortion bill signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott illuminates how this assault on women’s freedom can open the gates for women–especially young women–to flood the streets and demonstrate that control of one’s own body is something so fundamental to being human that they are willing to overthrow a government to create it.

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Woman as Reason: U.S. in Afghanistan: 20 years of betrayal

May 8, 2021

After the 2001 U.S. invasion Afghanistan had a chance of becoming a place where its citizens could enjoy some freedoms, but at every opportunity the U.S. stopped it. What’s going to happen next is not because the U.S. is leaving, it is because they are leaving after damaging the country and the people’s aspirations in unfathomable and hugely destructive ways.

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Polish women’s revolutionary moment

October 30, 2020

While what is happening in Poland may not be a revolution, it is revolutionary. Women are leading a movement protesting the Church’s inhuman attack on women’s freedom, and mounting a deep challenge to the fascist-leaning Polish government.

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Woman as reason: Black women speak a new humanism

July 1, 2020

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, Nina Pop, of legions more, have put American civilization on trial. Black women—many of them very young—have been at the heart of many of the rallies and marches. Here, some voices from the movement.

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Woman as Reason: The torture of abortion bans

April 29, 2020

Abortion bans during the COVID-19 pandemic are cruel, based on lies, and constitute torture against women, causing not only more deaths, but also revealing the contempt with which women are held and the danger in forcing women to give birth against their will at this time.

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Woman as Reason: Abortion in the time of COVID-19

April 15, 2020

Abortion bans during the COVID-19 pandemic are cruel, based on lies, and constitute torture against women, causing not only more deaths, but also revealing the contempt with which women are held and the danger in forcing women to give birth against their will at this time.

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Woman as Reason: Church abuses nuns

March 10, 2019

The rape, forced abortion, and sexual abuse of nuns is the newest scandal to plague the Catholic Church. The do-nothing attitude of the Church on this abuse has continued for centuries. Will anything change now?

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Woman as Reason: Iranian women embody revolt

March 8, 2018

On Dec. 28, 2017, demonstrations broke out in the city of Mashhad, Iran, the first of many that swept across Iran for weeks. Women were a vital part of the events, including strikes as well as protests against veiling, drawing on a long radical history.

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#MeToo, Women’s Marches show the resistance deepens

Women have changed the world through an incredible and sustained activism based on a humanism that runs like a revolutionary red thread through an amazing array of actions, demonstrations and statements. This development is based on over 50 years of a movement that the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, characterized as “Woman as Revolutionary Force and Reason.” .

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Woman as Reason: The humanism of #MeToo

February 1, 2018

The #MeToo movement, with roots in the 1960s, is part of a humanist revolutionary red thread that shows in a visceral way that revolution must deepen at every point in order to finally make the relationships we have with each other into actually human relationships.

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Woman as Reason: Afghan women demand justice

April 30, 2015

Is the March 19 murder of Farkhunda by a mob of men who beat her to death with stones and sticks, ran her over with a car, threw her body on the banks of the Kabul River and lit it on fire, a turning point for women in Afghanistan? Some are saying it is.

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Condoms & corruption

February 20, 2011

Woman as Reason
by Terry Moon

The Pope made quite a splash a few months ago with his comments in Peter Seewald’s book Light of the World, where he grudgingly accepted the use of condoms in extremely limited situations: “there may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a [=>]

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Woman as Reason: Congo, capitalism and rape

November 10, 2010

From the Nov.-Dec. 2010 issue of News & Letters:

by Terry Moon

The latest tragedy in Congo was so horrific that it actually made a few headlines in the U.S. bourgeois press: for three days at the end of July and into August, well over 200 women including over 50 girls, in the village of [=>]

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Fighting 50 years after the pill / ella approved

August 17, 2010

The FDA has officially approved the morning-after contraceptive ella.

(See pdf of National Women’s Health Network testimony for more background.)

In the article below, from the July-August 2010 issue of News & Letters, Terry Moon examines the fundamental questions raised by the politics of contraceptives and of the medical establishment’s relationship to women.

Woman as Reason
Fighting [=>]

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