Radical Women Return to the Barricades of the Left : Ideology: Socialist feminist group demands free child care, draft for women, abortions.

Their message was simple: We told you so.

Stalinism is dead, socialism is the future, they said.

Only days earlier, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela had been freed. Communist governments had been toppling throughout Eastern Europe.

And not by coincidence had Radical Women, a 23-year-old socialist feminist group, chosen Presidents’ Day weekend 1990--or, as they prefer, “Anti- Presidents’ Day weekend”--to come together, about 200 strong, to plot strategy to overthrow “the global, capitalist imperialistic class.”

In Santa Monica for their first national conference in 12 years, Radical Women met to discuss the New American Revolution. At the podium, Gloria Martin, a feisty septuagenarian who has been at the barricades for the left for 50 years, watched the rain drip through the ceiling tiles in the group’s meeting room. Just further proof, she observed, that “capitalism is quickly crumbling.”

Radical Women chose as the theme “The Third Wave of Feminism: A Candidly Revolutionary Approach.” First, there was the suffragist movement. Then there was the second wave, born in the ‘60s, along with the National Organization for Women.

Now, as Radical Women see it, after two decades of being “red-baited,” brushed aside by the mainstream feminist movement--which they view as classist and elitist--their time has come. Respectable people no longer whisper the word “socialism.”

But aren’t they really communists? And don’t recent world events point to the demise of the political ideology they had come here to celebrate?

Monica Hill, 47, a Los Angeles legal secretary who helped found Los Angeles Radical Women, said, “We’re thrilled with what’s happening in Eastern Europe.” Radical Women do not not equate Democracy with capitalism, she explained; rather, they believe that true socialism is “intrinsically democratic.”

Hill, who describes herself as “a full-time revolutionary, after 5 o’clock,” and her radical sisters aren’t buying the idea that the people of Eastern Europe are yearning for capitalism, American-style: “They don’t want to come to America any more than I want to go to Russia.”

Guerry Hoddersen, a delegate from Seattle, put it this way: “They’re fighting to make socialism live up to what it should be. We’re fighting to achieve socialism.”

What’s happening in Europe, Martin explained, is “the overthrow of Stalinist governments.” And, as Radical Women, they smile on that development. They are Trotskyists, modern-day disciples of Leon Trotsky, whose dream of a worldwide workers’ revolution was crushed after Josef Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union.

At this juncture, said Hoddersen, “we feel like we’re right in the swim of history.”

The West is smiling upon Gorbachev and glasnost . Not Radical Women. As a “reformist Stalinist,” Hoddersen said, Gorbachev is seeking only those reforms absolutely necessary “to preserve the privileges of the bureaucratic caste.” She calls it “life styles of the rich and Communist.”

But Radical Women had not come to Santa Monica just to to discuss European politics. The comrades, as they call themselves, had an agenda.

One order of business was to update their manifesto, which now calls for:

* Complete overhaul of marriage and divorce laws to allow for legal cohabitation.

* Free 24-hour government-funded child-care centers.

* Free abortion on demand for all women.

* Legalization of all drugs.

* Overturning of laws that limit immigration of people of color.

* Guaranteed income for all at livable union wage levels.

* Government-paid wages for housework.

* Abolishment of the death penalty.

* Legalization of prostitution.

* Inclusion of women in any military draft.

Merle Woo, 48, a lesbian from San Francisco who recently announced her candidacy for governor on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket and a conference keynoter, is a Radical Women’s hero. For eight years, she has fought her firing as a UC-Berkeley lecturer, an action she contends was based solely on her outspoken radical views.

Woo mentioned that, as governor, she would become an ex officio member of the UC regents and would then “go in with a broom.”

The conference roared its approval.

Radical Women are socialists, and they are democratic. Anyone attending the four-day session was allowed to speak from the floor, never mind the relevance to the business at hand. This made for long sessions and interesting repartee:

* There was an impromptu appeal for an end to malathion spraying (a petition was available for signing).

* There was an impassioned reading, in Spanish, of an original poem by a guest from El Salvador, who had written of a mother’s search in vain for her dead son.

* Leon Goodman--a New York member of the Freedom Socialist Party (Radical Women’s brother group) and one of about a dozen men at the conference--protested the absence of male speakers on the program and urged all to see “Glory,” a film about a black regiment in the Civil War.

Over and over, Radical Women called for revolution.

The how and when were not spelled out.

One doesn’t just throw a revolution and hope everyone comes. So how is Radical Women actually going to start this revolution?

Clara Fraser, another of Radical Women’s heroes, a 66-year-old Jewish socialist firebrand who with Martin was a co-founder of the group, smiled and said: “We already have. The insurrection is just the climax.”

She mentioned that the Bolshevik Revolution began when women marched in the streets demanding bread. Radical Women point to America’s hungry and homeless and hopeless and talk of the inevitability of “a great societal explosion.”

Fraser, who lives in Seattle, grew up in Boyle Heights, was a student radical at UCLA in the ‘40s, and relishes a good fight, said of Radical Women, “We’re always involved in controversy. We’re the feminists in the radical movement and the radicals in the feminist movement.”

Woo smiled and added, “And we’re pushy.”

They also have a sense of humor. After a group of delegates had filed, sheep-like, off the elevator one floor above their destination, Fraser deadpanned, “We’re going to make a revolution? We can’t even find the right floor.”

Radical Women are not feminists of the National Organization for Women stripe; indeed, they indulge in a little NOW-bashing. To NOW, Woo said, “separation from men is the answer,” and that adds up to nothing more than “capitalism for women.”

Radical Women is, by and large, a group of working-class women, many of them members of trade unions. There are clericals, library workers, secretaries, waitresses.

With chapters in Los Angeles, San Francisco (headquarters), Lodi and in Oregon, Washington, New York and Australia, Radical Women is not yet a national organization in the broad sense.

But Martha Cotera, 52, a venerable activist from Texas, and a conference keynoter, suggested that the time is ripe to recruit, that immigrant women are “gaining awareness” politically as a result of the violence in Central America.

In her address, Constance Scott--a San Francisco phone company clerical who serves as the group’s national coordinator--also emphasized that internationalism is integral to the Third Wave of feminism.

Members voted to send a fact-finding mission of two to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union this year “to find out the role of women in the dramatic, cyclonic upheavals in these countries” and to connect with them, Scott said.

But these are not grandstanding revolutionaries. Radical Women see their primary mission here at home.

It’s not good enough, said Nancy Kato, of San Francisco, to go running off to Nicaragua “because that’s where all the action is. We have a revolution here.”

Lesbians are a dominant factor in Radical Women, in part because other leftist groups traditionally have not welcomed lesbians and gays. And, one woman explained, “The people who are the most oppressed are inclined to be the most radical.”

Comrades of color also were well represented in Radical Women, as were their concerns--including racism, exploitation in the workplace, homelessness, joblessness, high infant mortality rates, inferior education, gangs and drugs.

Heidi Durham and Megan Cornish, utility company employees in Seattle, told the group that women and people of color can lead the rebirth of the trade-union movement. They cited statistics showing that, in the face of dwindling trade-union membership, women are joining in numbers--140,000 in 1988 alone.

Together, women, gays and people of color are the majority of today’s work force, they noted. But, they pointed out, white women make only 70 cents on the dollar compared to white men (“pale males,” as one delegate called them). Black women make only 54 cents.

But, Durham said, the capitalist system has an “Achilles’ heel.” It’s the ubiquitous computer without whose data business nationwide would come to a halt.

And who’s at the keyboards of those computers?

Women, in overwhelming numbers.

She smiled.