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Genderquake: socialist women and the Paris Commune
Women in our history
Monday 8 March 2021, by Judy Cox
On 11 April 1871, three weeks into the life of the Paris Commune, a poster appeared on the walls of France’s capital: Citizenesses, we know that the present social order bears within itself the seeds of poverty and of the death of all liberty and justice… At this hour, when danger is imminent and the enemy is at the gates of Paris, the entire population must unite to defend the Commune, which stands for the annihilation of all privilege and all inequality.
All women who were prepared to die for the Commune were urged to attend a meeting at 8pm at the Salle Larched, Grand Café des Nations, 74 Rue de Temple. Laundresses, seamstresses, bookbinders and milliners attended and there they established a new organisation, the Union of Women. This Union was a part of the socialist First International, which had been established by Karl Marx and other socialists and trade unioni