The Freedom Socialist Party is a left-wing socialist political party with a revolutionary feminist philosophy based in the United States. It views the struggles of women and minorities as part of the struggle of the working class. It emerged from a split in the United States Socialist Workers Party in 1966. The party's Seattle branch, with support from individuals in other cities, split off from the SWP over what it described as the SWP's entrenched opportunism and undemocratic methods. The party has branches and members in the United States, as well as Australia, England, Germany and New Zealand. The current National Secretary of the FSP is Doug Barnes.
Freeway Hall in Seattle's Northlake neighborhood was for many years the FSP headquarters.
New Freeway Hall, Columbia City, Seattle, Washington, party headquarters.
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
Ueno Chizuko, giving a talk at the University of Tokyo, in 2014
Socialist feminist Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg in 1910