Presented by Lisa Armstrong on behalf of the CPUSA Women’s Commission to the National Committee meeting, January 31, 2026.

The national women’s movement formations in this country, including the Women’s March coalition and CODEPINK, continue to militate against imperialist wars and fight the illegal murders, abductions and carceral policies of the Trump administration.

Public demonstrations have been held around the country against the abduction of the Maduros that contravenes international law and the strangling of the Cuban people through ever more inhumane policies of starvation by embargo.

The open targeting of Black women in public positions of leadership has not ebbed since the beginning days of the Trump administration. Activists such as Nekima Levy Armstrong, a leader in the Target Boycott campaign has been arrested for drawing attention to the collusion between the corporate billionaires, ICE raids, and sham pastors as integral to the movement to dismantle vital civil rights gains of the last seventy-five years.

What these highly public harassment campaigns reveal is a wider attack that targets Black women in the workforce who are a key constituency in public service, health, and teachers’ unions leading the working-class refusal of the Trump administration’s anti-people agenda.

The Women’s Commission takes seriously the need to increase the party’s membership among women and its own leadership of women inside the party. To this end, we believe our party’s attention to issues that affect multi-generational and multi-national working-class women — Black, Brown and white — is an essential component. We are continuing to write articles for the CPUSA website and for the People’s World.

Most recently, a Women’s Commission member completed an article on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and their changing policies that detrimentally affect contaminants in infant formula. We have created a list of potential articles for the People’s World for women’s history month in March. We have developed a panel for the Marxist School in May on the history of LGBTQ+ Communist women in the U.S. movement. We plan to write book reviews of two new edited volumes being released by International Publishers in March, one that gathers together Claudia Jones’ extensive writings in the Communist press, and the other on the CPUSA’s working class women’s journals. In time for women’s history month, we are also finalizing a pamphlet about women’s and queer struggles in the United States.

The Women’s Commission is also paying attention to the form of struggles that emerged in the fight against ICE’s combat-level assault against residents of Minneapolis. As a party that builds neighborhood and workplace clubs, the neighborhood-led work across Minnesota during these last violent months to protect schools, hospitals, and religious buildings strengthens social network bonds in working class neighborhoods and communities. Alongside the more public and deadly demonstrations to demand ICE out now, powerful networks of women and men, young and old, Black, Latino/a and Asian have drawn together all community members who share the goal of a safe, dignified, and healthy social fabric.

Many people do not feel protected by basic institutions, like the courts, our laws, the police, mainstream political parties and nation-level leaders. To combat widespread social instability and violence, we are drawing on the strength of our unions, our local school committees and the community ties we have forged with each other.

We know that historically movements like the “ICE out now” movement in Minneapolis bring women who are still the primary caregivers for children and elderly family members into the heart of meaningful organizing. As the pandemic revealed in the difficult years beginning in 2020, the most truly ‘essential workers’ are often performing unpaid labor of daily care work. These same women must also work for pay, often in the service jobs that capitalism allots the smallest pay and benefits to, in an attempt to minimize our shared respect for the valuable repair work of caring for the sick, teaching the young, hauling the trash, day in and day out.

We believe the party can grow and in many areas of the country has grown its membership as well as its community connections through taking an active part of this work in Minnesota and the many cities and regions where immigrants and people of color challenge MAGA-led violence across the country. As we build the resistance, we build the alternatives to lives of fear and division!

Image: SEIU member demonstrate for women’s healthcare rights. SEIU on Flickr/Creative Commons.