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Guest Speaker: Drucilla Cornell, Emerita Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

Title: ‘The Contemporary Significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s Socialist Feminism’

Chair: Alan Norrie

Synopsis: The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg has often been critiqued for some harsh words about bourgeois women. As a result she has been written off as a feminist. But this is far from the case. Luxemburg supported the big feminist issues of her time including universal suffrage for women which was rejected by male leaders of the Social Democratic Party of the Germany. But her feminism is much more contemporary. She is what I call an ethical feminist rejecting any form of organizing that pushes some humans below the bar of humanity. Her critique of all forms of elitism including the vanguard party, her insistence that socialism must challenge all forms of conventional heterosexuality and indeed her commitment to the rewriting of the human relationship to nature should all be considered not only feminist but crucial to thinking about the centrality of feminism to the politics of our time.