Reflections on International Women’s Day, March 12, 2022

Join scholar-activists Barbara Foley, Hester Eisenstein, and Zhongjin Li for a discussion of what International Women’s Day means today, and what the challenges and opportunities are in 2022 for thinking and linking women’s oppression and women’s liberation to struggles for a radically better world. The conversation will be hosted by S&S producer Lena Durkin.

Barbara Foley is Emerita Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. Her scholarship has ranged over the fields of Marxist literary criticism, literary radicalism, and African American literature. A communist, feminist, and antiracist, she came of age politically in SDS during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Long-time former president of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association and current vice president of the Marxist journal Science & Society, Foley has stressed the importance of antiracist and anti-sexist proletarian internationalism. For two decades she served as the chair of the Combating Racism task force of NOW-NJ.

Hester Eisenstein retired (with very mixed feelings!) from Queens College in August 2020. She was a Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, from 1996. From then until 2001 she served as the Director of Women’s Studies at Queens. She also served as the founding director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center from 2015 to 2017. Her most recent book is Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Taylor and Francis, 2009). Her previous books include Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State (1994), Gender Shock: Practicing Feminism on Two Continents (1991) and Contemporary Feminist Thought (1984). She serves on the board of the journal Socialism and Democracy and is a frequent contributor to the annual Historical Materialism conference in London.

Zhongjin Li is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. Her research fields include political economy, development economics, comparative economic systems, and East Asian economies. She has published papers on the political economy of development and labor in a variety of academic journals in English and in Chinese, also writes for Dollar & Sense, Jacobin magazine, etc.  She is the coeditor of China on Strike published by the Haymarket Books in 2016.