Five demands for rebuilding NUS Women’s Campaign

Posted on February 13, 2009
Filed Under ENS Women

Activists involved in ENS Women have drafted these five action points for transforming NUS Women’s Campaign. We put them forward as a basis for discussion among student women’s movement activists, call on those involved in the Campaign to endorse them and/or write responses, and hope they will inspire ideas for student socialist feminist campaigning outside NUS as well.

1. A Campaign that actually… campaigns

The Women’s Campaign used to be the most active part of NUS. In 1997, we were able to organise a march of more than 1,000 women through the streets of London, and our conferences were attended by hundreds of delegates. The difference today, after four years of almost total inactivity, speaks for itself. The last year has been particularly shocking. While shoe-string feministcampaigns, such as Feminist Fightback, as well as individual SU women’s officers, have organised big conferences and all sorts of action, the Women’s Campaign, with its full time officer, staff support and budget of thousands, has done pretty much literally nothing and been practically invisible. This is just embarrassing. At a time when feminist activism is reviving, it is particularly unacceptable. We need to turn the campaign outwards to campaign on the issues that matter to women: abortion rights, equal pay, sexism in the workplace and on campus, free education, international solidarity and many more.

2. Stop trailing after the NUS leadership

We need to end Labour Students’ stifling grip on the Women’s Campaign, which until recently was a centre of resistance to the Blairites running our national union. We should not accept our campaign being annexed to the giant training ground for careerists that NUS is becoming more and more. In particular, that means strong opposition to NUS’s new, undemocratic constitution. The Women’s Campaign must fight to reverse the changes, and work with student unions that reject NUS’s current trajectory and want to fight, inside and outside it, for a radical, campaigning national student union.

3. Fight for a women’s officer and women’s group on every campus

There are now hardly any sabbatical women’s officers, and fewer and fewer women’s officers at all; yet the campaign to defend women’s officers exists only on paper. We need a serious campaign which doesn’t only defend existing women’s officers, but starts a massive row in our student unions about why a student women’s movement is necessary, standing up to sexist sabbaticals and bureaucrats without fear. We must demand a women’s officer in every union and a sabbatical in at least every HE union. Perhaps even more importantly, we need a real campaign to help activists relaunch campaigning, political women’s groups where feminists can discuss ideas and take action in every university and college.

4. Socialist feminism

Bourgeois career feminism which sees the glass ceiling for female executives as more important than the low-paid women cleaners they exploit, and which doesn’t care if working-class women can’t get an abortion as long as it’s formally legal, may fit in well with those who want to be the next Harriet Harman, but it’s a dead end for our movement. We need to develop ideas and demands aimed at winning real equality and liberation for all women, not just formal legal equality for a privileged few – in other words, to base our campaign on the principles of socialist feminism. That means seeking to build links with women workers in the labour movement – not just through relationships with union women’s sections, though that would be a start, but by linking up student activists with women workers’ actually engaged in struggle for their rights. Aiming to become a Labour MP does not equal solidarity with the labour movement!

5. Liberation for all women everywhere

Equality for all women, as long as they’re not Muslim; support for abortion rights, unless it’s Hugo Chavez banning them; support for women workers trying to organise unions, unless they’re sex workers. This is the kind of pseudo-progressive cultural relativism which is making huge inroads into our movement - and which has to stop. To take one very live example, defending Muslim women’s freedom to choose how they dress and opposing racism doesn’t mean abandoning feminist criticisms of the hijab! Or another: when people tell us we can’t criticise state-enforced sexual apartheid in Iran because the US might invade, that’s exactly as stupid as people who say opposing war by the US means supporting the Iranian regime. If our feminism is going to mean anything, we need to apply our principles everywhere consistently – supporting women’s and men’s struggles for freedom and equality wherever they are in the world, and no matter who’s doing the oppressing.

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