The following report was given to the CPUSA National Committee on July 13, 2025 given by Lisa Armstrong on behalf of the party’s Women’s Commission. More NC reports here.

The National Women’s Commission work primarily has been about understanding our role in the party, our analysis of women’s conditions today, and developing our plan of work.

Women’s conditions today

We have begun with tasks we need to consider:

1. We need to ground our understanding in a Marxist analysis of women’s conditions under capitalism to better fight for working class unity. We will need to develop an analysis of our current political moment at local, national, and international levels.
2. We need to understand how white supremacy and male supremacy as forces of derision and disrespect attempt to divide the women’s movement at large and to push women of color from the movement and from its leadership.
3. In our current moment, we need to understand how misogyny, transmisogyny, masculinity, and manhood are being shaped online — particularly in social media, but also in our schools and workplaces — to serve the extreme right agenda.
4. We need to develop our work as Marxist-Leninists in the party to strengthen our commitment to building a culture free from vestiges of sexism and misogyny and that builds women’s participation in our leadership and our movement.

We have begun reviewing the party sexual harassment policy for any necessary updates. Among those mentioned are:

• Dominance of men speaking in party meetings
• Women’s ideas being ignored — and when they do drive the topics on meetings, the credit is given to someone else, a male comrade.
• Tasks becoming gendered: the “housekeeping” tasks reserved predominantly for women; speaking and writing and representing the club at an event reserved predominantly for men.
• Cis- and heterosexual men consider “women’s issues,” “trans issues,” and “LGBTQIA+ issues,” as issues that are not for them to address, support, or participate in.
• Sexual/gender harassment: be mindful when calling a new member that it’s only for party work, not to ask them out.

Some solutions:

1. The following is a good example of cross-gender respect: at a broad-based union meeting, a union comrade transitioned from a point by a woman comrade at the meeting by saying, “I don’t want to diminish the importance of what this comrade just said,” and then stated his points. It allowed the previous comment to stay relevant even though he changed the subject a little with his point.
2. Leadership has a huge role to play: they can make sure clubs have educationals on these topics; they can develop role-playing exercises; they can carefully facilitate meetings for maximum participation, with a focus on all people speaking and respect for people of color and women; they can make sure our composition for events and committees is fully inclusive in membership and leadership tasks; they can actively create a culture for the rotation of tasks so that everyone can develop speaking and writing as well as organizational skills.
3. Validation is also important to address the confidence gap. Leadership can build all members’ confidence actively, with conscious focus on those who face marginalization in wider society by their race, their sexuality, and/or their gender location.
4. Create a club-based diagnostic that begins with the question, “Is our club healthy?” to ask what does the club believe it does well and where can the club still develop.
5. Emphasize in all of our party materials that women’s issues and LGBTQIA+ issues are working class issues. Currently, there is relatively little engagement in these movements — our involvement is much stronger in labor, peace, and community grassroots movements. We need to build up our networks and political work in this area.
6. To strengthen our gender-diverse recruitment in the party, ask for all of our events, “How can we make this event important to and welcoming of women and LGBTQIA+ people?”
7. Transphobic slurs need to be addressed explicitly. We need to consider: when is misgendering not a mistake? We need to develop a baseline of understanding among all comrades. We need to educate ourselves about that baseline of trans inclusion in our interactions among comrades. For example, every meeting should begin with members stating their gender pronouns before getting to business. After a year, misgendering becomes problematic. Intentionally misgendering people is never acceptable. We have various genders and sexualities in the working class. We also have many members who don’t know these concepts well. Both facets of the working class are true.

Our plan of work

1. We have discussed positive outreach efforts on issues of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy.
2. Another area of focus will be the role of misogyny in the U.S. right wing agenda.
3. We have representatives at the planning meetings for the peace conference this fall.
4. We developed a list of potential articles for People’s World for women’s history month — but these articles are relevant for every month of the year, not just in March.
5. Ensure the party’s sexual harassment policy is reviewed and discussed in all clubs by asking for it to be put on the agenda of each club.
6. Share a process to change the dominance of men speaking in clubs. For example, the progressive stack method.
7. Develop a 50–50 method for actions ensuring all tasks — including those that are more about housekeeping and those representing the party — are shared between members. Men, women, and gender non-binary members should be distributed among these tasks with an eye to parity — this includes parity across racial, national, and ethnic lines among members who are women and non-binary.
8. Mentorship: develop more careful mentorship between women comrades across the country. Share guidance for men in leadership who are providing mentorship to new members who are women or non-binary. This should include consciously working on non-condescending methods of communication.
9. Collect positive examples for these cultural changes in how we do our work. For example, Iowa has a good plan for this work, and has developed a training on mentoring that has an emphasis on mentoring women.
10. Work to ensure conscious validation is used to address the confidence gap, as noted above. Work to ensure equal respect is given to all comrades and build a culture where everyone is included in small jokes, references, praise, and other ways of building inclusion.
11. Develop a baseline of understanding among all comrades, and educate ourselves, such that trans inclusion is present in all our interactions. Transphobic slurs and misgendering need to be addressed explicitly in our collectives. Every meeting should begin with comrades stating their gender pronouns. We need to recognize our working class and party include various genders and sexualities, as well as those who don’t know these concepts well.

Image: photo from UN Women’s Gender Equality, 2018 Year in Review (unwomen.org)