These are major excerpts from Ruthann Miller’s speech at the Aug. 26, 1970, Women’s Strike for Equality march and rally in New York City. Miller, 22 years old at the time, chaired the rally and was coordinator of the NY Aug. 26 Strike Committee, which organized the demonstration.
The 50,000-strong action was the largest of the Women’s Strike for Equality protests that took place across the United States that day. They marked a qualitative new stage in the women’s liberation struggle.
In August 1970, campaigners for women’s liberation mounted an extraordinary demonstration in New York, the largest of similar actions across the United States, which propelled the struggle for women’s equality to a new stage. Ruthann Miller, the protest coordinator in New York, was also a young socialist activist. The interview below, conducted by Nancy Rosenstock, first appeared in the Nov. 1, 2020, issue of Jacobin. World-Outlook.com is re-publishing it here by permission in celebration of Women’s History Month.
Feb. 3, 2021—In the article titled “Radicalism, Bonapartism, and the Aftermath of the 2020 U.S. Elections,” we described the Jan. 6 rightist mob attack on the U.S. capitol as the culminating step in a series of developments that posed serious dangers to civil liberties and the working class. Enough evidence is now established to detail further the extent of financial support from some sections of big business for former U.S. president Donald Trump. That backing, widespread and essential to his re-election campaign, did not end after Trump’s defeat at the polls. It diminished when Trump and his closest allies over-reached with the failed violent assault on U.S. Congress. Between Nov. 3 and Jan. 6, plenty of bankers, merchants, industrialists, and other capitalists kept up their donations to Trump as he peddled outlandish and conspiratorial claims of a “fraudulent vote” and instigated street actions aimed at overturning the popular vote and holding on to power.
Jan. 28, 2021—Following the Jan. 6 rightist mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies shut down former U.S. president Donald Trump’s accounts on their platforms. Trump had encouraged the assault on U.S. Congress at a Washington D.C. rally earlier that day in a culminating step to a two-month-long campaign to overturn the results of the November election.
This article by Abel Prieto, director of Casa de las Americas in Cuba, responds to accusations leveled against the Cuban government for allegedly censoring artists and limiting free speech in the aftermath of the detention of members of the San Isidro Movement, a small and loose association of individuals claiming to speak for censored artists. The group burst into international notoriety in late 2020 thanks to backing by the U.S. government and savvy use of digital technology and social media.
CINCINNATI, OHIO, Jan. 24, 2021—The political stance and demands put forward by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) national organization, following the Jan. 6, 2021, rightist assault on the U.S. Capitol, highlight why dozens of women and men in Cincinnati, Ohio, changed our organization’s name from Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati to Mass Action for Black Liberation in 2018.
Jan. 13, 2021—In a culminating step to a series of developments unprecedented in U.S. politics in more than a century, outgoing U.S. president Donald Trump and his supporters engaged in a riot aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election. While Congress certified the outcome of the November vote next day, on Jan. 7, it is notable that more than 25% of members of the House and Senate, all Republicans, joined Trump’s challenge to his defeat at the polls, even after the rightist mob attack on the U.S. Capitol had been dispersed.