Battleaxe: The New Labour Movement Paper for Women (1986-?)

"We are a group of women in the Labour Movement fighting for Womens Liberation and Socialism. We see the two as inseparable. Women are not going to be liberated by an act of parliament, although this does not mean we do not fight to elect a Labour government committed to equal rights for women. But we do not think this is the way women will have true liberation, nor do we believe that the working class is white, heterosexual and male.

We cannot expect male members of parliament nor for that matter male revolutionaries to give us liberation.

WHATS IT ALL ABOUT?

We can only achieve our own liberation by fighting for it. There are none so fit to break the chains as those who wear them.

Working class women both black and white cannot be bought off by reformism. Promises of equal pay for women who earn less than the proposed minimum wage are useless.

We don't want to have equal rights to poverty wages, to oppressive conditions, to poor education, to substandard houses or to a lousy health service.

We want the right to define our sexuality and to have children if and when we want to, whether as lesbian or heterosexual mothers, and also the right not to have children.

We fight in the labour movement alongside black and white working class men in order to bring about the common goal of socialism but this does not mean we will not defend our own interests and fight our own oppression.

Not being stupid, we know that with the last eight years of Tory rule, the defeat of the miners strike, the draconian anti-union laws, the build up of police powers, the use of the right wing courts to opress [sic] us, all this added to the demise of the womens liberation movement, the prospects of building a working class mass womens movement is not exactly rosy.

We are however committed to building such a movement and this magazine is an attempt to keep alive the idea among those socialist womens liberationists women. Until the inevitable class struggle awakens new forces."

- Written by Kath Crosby and Gerry Byrne (editors), Issue 1.