We Seek Full Equality for Women
Editorial Note
Journalist, editor, intellectual-activist, communist theorist, militant political leader and human rights advocate Claudia Vera Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad and Tobago. "Claudia Jones (1915–1964) was a journalist, editor, intellectual, communist theorist, and militant from Trinidad and Tobago. She was the only Black woman on the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA and Secretary of the Women's Commission in 1947. She authored the women's rights column "Half the World" for The Daily Worker, and was arrested and imprisoned for being a communist after giving a speech on "International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace " in 1950. Arriving in England in 1955 as a deportee, she founded the first Black newspaper in London, the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News (WIG). Her work was grounded in a "world politics of decolonization."[1]
In “We Seek Full Equality for Women”—linked below—Jones not only affirms the anti-imperialist and communist consensus that women’s participation is essential to the success of any revolutionary struggle. She also insists that to organize masses of women to commit to participating in any struggle for peace or an end to political repression, the Party must also organize programs and campaigns that address the specific needs of women.
Claudia Jones also wrote several articles that argued that the triple oppression of Black women was shaped by the imperial system. She concluded therefore, “the status of Negro women is a barometer of the status of all women, and that the fight for the full, economic, political and social equality of the Negro woman is in the vital self-interest of white workers, in the vital interest of the fight to realize equality for all women.”[2]
In the following decades, many anti-imperialist women and organizations have adapted and updated these ideas: the Third World Women’s Alliance, Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, other women in the Black Panther Party and to name a few.[3]
We Seek Full Equality for Women
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[1] This biography is adapted from Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones , Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008.
[2] Louise Thompson first urged the Communist Party to recognize “Negro women’s triple exploitation” in 1936 in “Toward a Brighter Dawn”, reprinted in Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, eds., Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing (London: Verso, 2022), 70–73. Claudia Jones, the leading post World War II theoretician and member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA was a prolific writer. Writings by and about her are readily available on the internet. This quote comes from, Claudia Jones, "We Seek Full Equality for Women" (1949), introduction by Carole Boyce Davies, in Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment, ed. Carole Boyce Davies (Banbury, UK: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd., 2011), reprinted in Viewpoint Magazine, February 21, 2015, https://viewpointmag.com/2015/02/21/we-seek-full-equality-for-women/ .
[3] For more on Third World Women’s Alliance, see: Patricia Romney, We Were There: The Third World Women's Alliance and the Second Wave (New York: Feminist Press, 2021). Most of Kathleen Cleaver’s speeches are scattered on the internet and are also in KPFA’s Archive. Many of Assata Shakur’s interviews are digitized at Freedom Archives and her website. Her autobiography was first published in London by Zed in 1987. More interviews and conversations with Assata Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver and others are in Thandisizwe Chimurenga, ed., Some of Us Are Brave, 2 vols. (Quebec: Daraja Press, 2024); Combahee River Collective, "The Combahee River Collective Statement," accessed April 1, 2026, https://www.lgbtqhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Combahee_River_Collective_Statement.pdf ; Assata Shakur, "The Interview," May 2003, 10, Freedom Archives, https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Assata_Shakur/513.Assata.TheInterview.May.2003.pdf .