Combined with anti-abortion reports in the right-wing papers, the scene is being set for yet more restrictions on women's rights. It is the right of the mother which is the key. Every child should be wanted and loved. The state forcing a woman to have a child it does not want is hardly the best thing for either mother or child. It is an attack on the autonomy of women, designed to ensure they play the social role assigned them by a patriarchal system. Anarchists should be at the forefront of resisting any such attack.
The pay gap between sexes is still wide, a sure sign that sexual equality is still far away. Women make up the great majority of the poor. The need for a new women's movement is clear. Yet feminism is not enough. As anarchist women like Emma Goldman and Louise Michel have argued, mainstream feminism is blind to class. Feminism needs to be more than an equal chance to be a boss or being equally treated when a wage slave. It needs to be aware that sexism is a subset of a whole series of hierarchical social relationships and that all are interrelated. That class oppression, for example, is just as important to working class women as patriarchy. As long as feminism is simply a means by which middle-class women can get a decent job, it will fail to inspire the kind of movement required to combat the forthcoming attacks on women's rights.