A woman's place is her own home, and not her husband's countinghouse.
The New Sporting Magazine, Volume 3 – 1832
This is the beginning of what I hope to be a series of diaries about women who have dedicated their lives to the notion that a woman’s place is not just in the home. A woman’s place is a man’s place. A woman can be a worker, an organizer, and a revolutionary. Tonight my first subject is Clara Fraser, co-founder of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.
Clara Goodman Fraser was born in 1923 into a world that was ripe for future activism. Her parents were Jewish immigrants living in Los Angeles. Her father was a Teamster and her mother a seamstress and a member of the International Garment Workers’ Union. She entered university at the age of 16, eventually earning a degree in literature and education. During this time, she became a recruit to the ideas of Trotskyism and joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) the year she graduated from university.
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class. His politics differed sharply from those of Stalinism, most prominently in opposing Socialism in One Country, which he argued was a break with proletarian internationalism, and in his belief in what he argued was a more authentic dictatorship of the proletariat based on working-class self-emancipation and mass democracy, rather than the unaccountable bureaucracy he saw as having developed after Lenin's death.
After graduating in 1944 she left Los Angeles and moved to Chicago to work at a department store writing advertising copy. While there she took part in a union-organizing drive. In 1945 she moved to Seattle to organize a SWP branch. Certainly one could say that adhering to the ideas of Trotsky and being an active organizer for SWP were radical actions in and of themselves, but it was after she moved to Seattle that her real activism began.
She took a job at Boeing as an assembly line electrician (this was war time after all and many women were working in the factories during this time). She pushed hard for more union involvement and better jobs for women and minorities. She played a huge part in the Boeing strike of 1948, which was called by the Aeronautic Machinists Union to preserve seniority roles and a demand for a .10 an hour raise for all labor employees. In response to the union being slapped with an anti-picketing injunction she organized a group of mothers to walk the picket line pushing baby strollers. Due to her involvement in the strike Boeing fired her and the FBI began a decade long pursuit of her.
After leaving Boeing she spent the 50’s and 60’s advocating for many causes, including desegregation, advocacy for women, and opposition to the Vietnam War. During this time she developed the theory of Revolutionary Integrationsim with her second husband Richard Fraser. This theory ties the struggle for Socialism and the struggle of the African-American community together, and highlighted the importance of Black leadership within the working class. This theory was central in what eventually led to the Seattle SWP Branch’s break from the national party.
Revolutionary Integrationists argue that equality rather than national liberation should be advocated by revolutionary socialists, that this equality can be accomplished through a class struggle of black and white workers and that such a revolution can be led by members of both races. It was most strongly opposed during the 1960s to the ideas of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and other Black Nationalist organizations.
In 1966 the Seattle branch of the SWP formally split from the national party due to what they perceived to be an abandonment of the ideas of Trotskyism. Fraser felt that the SWP had become too closely allied with the privileged sectors of labor and had contradictory and unpredictable responses to the Black movement, women’s rights, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The Seattle SWP became the Freedom Socialist Party, which is the first and only feminist Trotskyist party. The focus of FSP became a commitment to welding the struggles of women, people of color, workers, gays and lesbians, and the disabled into one single political movement. These groups became the vanguard for this party, which differentiated this movement from traditional Socialist groups. The group also adheres to Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution.
Trotsky put forward his conception of 'permanent revolution' as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism. Part of his theory is the impossibility of 'socialism in one country' - a view also held by Marx, but not integrated into his conception of permanent revolution. Trotsky's theory also argues, first, that the bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries are incapable of developing the productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism which will fully develop an industrial proletariat. Second, that the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic and political power, leading an alliance with the peasantry.
The newly formed organization soon faced its first challenge as a Socialist Feminist entity when Clara decided to divorce her husband and fellow FSP leader Richard. In court he depicted her as an unfit mother due to her political activism and attempted to deprive her of her custodial rights to their son. She won this battle, both in court and within the FSP, and retained custody of her son and her role as a leader of the party. This experience most certainly led her to become involved in scripting Washington State's first divorce reform bill.
The following year she formed the group Radical Women with other women from the Students for a Democratic Society. This group’s purpose was to teach women leadership skills and class consciousness. This group became radicalized around the idea of abortion rights (the first group to do so in Washington State), aiding draft resisters, organizing with anti-poverty groups, and organized some of the city’s earliest gay and lesbian pride marches. Radical Women organized with Black female anti-poverty activists and launched a campaign that made abortion legal in Washington State three years prior to Roe v Wade.
In 1973 Fraser went to work for Seattle City Lights as a Training and Education Coordinator, with an emphasis on implanting a program to hire and train female electrical workers. Soon after she began working there a strike broke out and she led a walk out of female office staff and women of color. She drew further fire from management by participating in a campaign by workers to recall the mayor for his support of the utility company’s superintendent. She was fired in 1974 and immediately filed a discrimination lawsuit based on the pervasive sexism that exists at the company. After a very contentious eight year battle she won the lawsuit, a ruling that affirmed the right of workers to organize and speak out against management. After winning her lawsuit she returned to her former job and continued to battle against sexism in the company, eventually forming a new organization to combat sex and race discrimination named the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL).
"I am a socialist feminist. I believe we live in a corrupt, ugly, vicious and doomed society, a society that cannot last in its present form because it will go up in nuclear holocaust, if not in annihilation of people in some other horrendous form."
"And I believe that the source of sexism, racism, despair, and the wanton destruction of the earth is to be found in the nature of the system, which is based on the production of goods and services for profit and not human needs."
'I believe we need a socialist system to replace capitalism - we need an economic and a political democracy." – Testimony by Fraser from the Seattle City Lights discrimination case
In 1976, the 10 year anniversary of the FSP, the party expanded beyond Seattle to New York and Los Angeles, with branches in Portland and San Francisco following shortly after. A branch was formed in Australia in 1983.
In 1984 Fraser faced yet another challenge when a former member filed a harassment lawsuit against her, other party leaders, and the organization as a whole. This became known as the Freeway Hall Case. The former member had asked to take back a donation made to the party to find a new headquarters after the party had been evicted from their office at Freeway Hall. As part of this suit he demanded confidential membership and donor records. FSP refused to hand over these documents, and at one point both the attorneys and Fraser herself were sentenced to jail for refusing to comply although their sentences were ultimately stayed and overturned. The case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was argued that privacy rights are essential to the freedom of expression. FSP was finally vindicated in 1992.
Clara Fraser was the editor of the Freedom Socialist Newspaper and wrote a column for the paper for 20 years. She authored studies, including "The Emancipation of Women: Female Leadership in the Southern Civil Rights Struggle" which focused on the dynamic of the Black woman and the interconnections of race and sex oppression, "Woman as Leader: Double Jeopardy on Account of Sex" which focused on the role of women as leaders, and "Which Road towards Women's Liberation: A Radical Vanguard or a Single-Issue Coalition?" which focused on the multi-issue, anti-capitalist women's movement and its importance in the struggle for equality. These documents were recently republished by Red Letter Press. In 1998, the year of her death, a collection of her columns from the Freedom Socialist newspaper along with other speeches and writings were published in a book titled Revolution, She Wrote.
…I learned that the act of fighting injustice is full of hope
and joy when it is voiced and properly so, as a slice of innate
historical condition, an ancient reaching out for universal
human fulfillment. ~ from Revolution, She Wrote
After retiring from Seattle City Lights 1986 she focused solely on the FSP. As a committed Marxist and an internationalist, she organized delegations to travel to the former Soviet Union, China, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Northern Ireland. Radical Women also organized the first-ever International Feminist Brigade to Cuba, along with the Federation of Cuban Women, in 1997.
Clara Fraser clearly faced many challenges throughout her life, but she never wavered in her quest to further the cause of Socialism and the rights of the working class. This diary was not intended to spark a discussion about the politics of the FSP, although a discussion in the comments is surely welcome and I will try to engage as much as I can without appearing to be a spokesperson for the group (which I am not). I’ve met some of their members and I know about their politics and history as it pertains to activism. But I wanted to write this diary about Clara Fraser and not the party itself because I think it is important to study and learn about how women have built and shaped the anti-capitalist movement overall. My intention is to pay homage to some of these women in the hopes that reading about their struggle to fight for equality for all will inspire women to assume leadership roles in the movement itself, and also inspire younger women to take up the fight for us and with us in the future.