World: The Women’s Club (Marxist Model)

The belles and battle-axes of Communism gathered last week at the Kremlin for the World Women’s Congress. There were 2,000 delegates from more than a hundred lands. Buxom Russian comrades in flowered prints mingled with Bantus in striped robes. Cute young chicks from Rome and Bologna sat next to iron-jawed veterans who had stuck hatpins in policemen’s horses in long-ago street riots in Berlin and Buenos Aires, Melbourne and Madrid.

Some seemed to have gentled with age. Dolores Ibarruri, 68, the firebrand who was known as La Pasionaria in the Spanish Civil War, now looks like someone’s kind old grandmother. Others have made the change, at least outwardly, from Red Amazons to reasonably fashionable women: slim, tousle-haired Jeannette Vermeersch, wife of France’s Red Boss Maurice Thorez, could have stepped out of the Galeries Lafayette, if not Dior. Once-dowdy Lotte Ulbricht, married to East Germany’s lackluster President, could pass as a well-to-do provincial Hausfrau, and India’s Aruna Asaf Ali looked striking in silk, making it hard to believe that as a dedicated saboteur she once moved the British to put a price of 10,000 rupees on her head. “Our Congress is a manifestation of charming womanhood, motherly warmth, moral and physical beauty!” gushed La Pasionaria, quite a little off the mark.

Above all, the Congress was a manifestation of the ever-widening Sino-Soviet split.

Italian Flight. As usual, the dispute was between the Khrushchev line, which holds that to avoid nuclear disaster capitalism must be fought through peaceful means, and the Mao Tse-tung line, which demands an aggressive policy. Coming on in the first session at the Kremlin’s modern Hall of Congresses, Japan’s kimono-clad Fuki Kushida demanded the withdrawal of U.S. “aggressive forces” from South Viet Nam, Formosa, Okinawa, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. In a simpler period of Communist history, this might have passed almost unnoticed as the standard line, East or West. But now there was a sudden movement on the floor, and out of the hall stalked 50 of the finest, most peace-loving Italian females ever gathered in one bunch at the Kremlin. What was bothering them? A trim Roman blonde explained: “We are here as women to work for peace and not to engage in cold war polemics.” More to the point, Japan’s Communist Party is one of those aligned with Red China, and Italy’s Red ladies were unmistakably showing their solidarity with Comrade Nikita.

Red China’s Yang Yun-yu returned the ball to the Soviets by lashing the U.S. for using nuclear blackmail “to enslave the world,” attacking John Kennedy for his cunning “strategy” to divide China and the Soviet Union, and insisting that the foremost problem was not peaceful coexistence but maintaining the active struggle against imperialism. “How,” she demanded, “can the oppressed coexist with their oppressors?” Lotte Ulbricht replied that Madame Yang was way off base. No one was demanding that oppressed nations live happily with their oppressors, she said, and added that Russia was, as always, “wholeheartedly behind the revolutionary struggles of colonial peoples.”

On the third day, India’s Aruna Asaf Ali charged China with blocking all efforts to settle the Himalayan war with India. Out of their seats bounced two diminutive Chinese delegates who legged it to the platform in slit skirts to demand time for rebuttal, their heated words duly translated by an interpreter. A Russian official frantically wrapped her hands around the microphone; British Chairman Dr. Joan Carritt vainly jangled a bell; pro-Soviet delegates added to the uproar by shouting that the Chinese should stand down.

Male Wall. The only people paying attention to the bitter Chinese complaints were a group of Western newsmen. The sight of outsiders overhearing the family quarrel brought fiery Jeannette Vermeersch to her feet and, pointing an accusing finger, she cried to the Chinese delegates: “You are talking in front of the imperialist press—and yet you say that you are fighting imperialism!” Strong-armed Russian males formed a human wall between the reporters and the Chinese as the exasperated chairman adjourned the meeting. The role of peacemaker fell to Guinea’s Jeanne Martin, president of the Pan-African Women’s Conference, who got the Chinese ladies off the platform by promising them a later chance to speak.

Despite all those ideological differences, a non-Communist male who has ever had anything to do with a women’s organization could not escape the uncomfortable feeling that the Red ladies were acting somewhat like organization women. At week’s end the mood grew beyond even predictable feminine excitement. The congress went into secret session, hoping to hammer out its differences behind closed doors. The attempt failed. When the majority agreed on an appeal for peace and against the arms race, but failed to denounce the U.S. or NATO, the Chinese delegates and their Albanian allies voted against, and remained stubbornly seated while the crowd of 5,000 jumped to their feet, waved handkerchiefs and clapped rhythmically in a 50-minute demonstration. China’s Madame Yang then mounted the podium to explain her vote, but was drowned out by angry shouts and finally ruled out of order.