Given the power of the live experience, MIK SABIERS recommends Jon Spencer’s new album
From Liberal To Labour With Women’s Suffrage: The Story of Catherine Marshall
by Jo Vellacott
(Spokesman Books, £17.99)
AT THE turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the newly formed Labour Party led by Keir Hardie and Ramsay McDonald was in an uneasy coalition with Herbert Asquith’s Liberal Party, although there were strong moves to seperate from it and fight elections on a more left-wing agenda.
Internationally, the rise of working-class struggle and women’s and colonial emancipation demands were taking place alongside competition between old and new imperialisms for a share of the resources and spoils of the world demanded by capitalist industrialisation.
Professor MARY DAVIS argues that feminism has been hollowed out by liberal co-option – and only a revival of socialist, class-based politics can restore International Working Women’s Day’s original, radical purpose
Held at a last-minute undisclosed venue amid fear of disruption, a Women’s Rights Network event brought together authors and activists, offering a day of debate on feminism’s past, present and future. JADE MIDDLETON reports
Maggie Bowden was a trailblazing campaigning lawyer at Birnberg and Thompsons, women’s organiser of the Communist Party, and general secretary of Liberation
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators


