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PROPOSED STATEMENT OF POLITICAL PRINCIPLES
Preamble..... (1969)
(Editors Note:This proposed statement of political principles with
accompanying preamble was circulated as the CWLU was first being organized.)
I. [As radical women] we demand the right of all women to control all
aspects of their lives.
- Women must have control over their own bodies, and therefore over
childbearing and medical care and research affecting them.
- Women must no longer bear the major burden of child-rearing and
domestic tasks. These should be clearly the public responsibility
of the total community.
- Women must have full participation in the control of an educational
system that will guarantee the realization of their fullest human
potentials.
- Women must have full access to all meaningful and satisfying work
and, like all workers, must control the profits and administration
of their own labor.
II. Our commitment to self-determination and people's control demands
that we work towards a society in which priorities are determined by
genuine human needs as defined by the people themselves. We will therefore
work to end capitalism and all forms of exploitation and corruption
growing out of the capitalist system; we will struggle for the establishment
of a socialist society.
- We support the struggles for self-determination of all sectors of
the population.
- We demand workers' control of the means of production.
- We demand people's control of the institutions which serve them.
- We demand the establishment of a scientific and technological system
which uses the resources of nature to the greatest benefit of humankind
while at the same time reestablishing and maintaining the balance
of nature.
- We are committed to building a movement that embodies within it
the humane values of the non-exploitative and non-manipulative society
for which we are fighting.
III. As radical women we demand an end to all forms of oppression in
American society.
- We will work to eliminate all forms of class oppression.
- We are committed to ending all forms of caste oppression, in particular
to the desperate struggles of the black a brown communities for self
determination and we will work to end white racism.
IV. As radical women we unequivocally condemn and will organize against
all forms of imperialism; we will devote special effort to the destruction
of American imperialism and its oppression of peoples abroad.
- As women fighting for self-determination, we will do all in our
power to support the struggles of women throughout the world for freedom
and self-determination. We support liberation struggles of people
throughout the world for control over the destinies of their own countries.
- We violently condemn the role of American imperialism in all third
world countries and in particular in Vietnam. We support and salute
the struggles for independence and freedom of the Vietnamese National
Liberation Front and of the Vietnamese Women's Liberation Union.
To these ends we join together to form the Chicago Women's Liberation
Union.
Proposed Preamble TO The Statement Of Political
Principles
The oppression
of "women is the oldest and most widespread form of caste oppression."
By caste oppression, we mean a social system which divides the population
into groups on the basis of characteristics over which the individual
has no control -- e.g. sex, race, age, intelligence -and then distributes
power and privilege among those groups; further, a caste system delimits
the behavior of all castes, and, through an ideology justifying those
delimitations, teaches the members of the lower castes to acquiesce
to the authority of the upper castes. Women are played off against each
other by divisive factors such as ago, race, class, marital status "intelligence"
and "beauty." We are unified however by the common victimization
of sex oppression.
America
is a class society. One of the major functions of caste and other structured
inequalities of power is to support the domination of the corporate
elite over the majority of the people.
As radical
women we demand the identification and elimination of all forms of oppression
-- class, caste, and colonial -- and to the formation of a socialist
society in which all individuals have equal access to the material and
experiential wealth of their world.
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