The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (294 page)

(
c
.1609–60)
The leader of the Diggers, a group who saw the earth as a ‘common treasury’ for all mankind. They consequently rejected the exclusion of anyone from the land. They believed this exclusion historically had been a consequence of illegitimate conquest, and incompatible with God's will. They advocated taking communal possession of existing commons and of land that was uncultivated, although Winstanley was pacific in argument and behaviour. They questioned the legitimacy of the authority that protected existing private property. Winstanley's ideas evolved, becoming rather more authoritarian at the end of his known writings. He has been claimed for both the anarchist and the socialist traditions. The Diggers set up a short-lived community on St George's Hill in Surrey.
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Name given to events in Britain during the winter of 1978/9, when as a result of industrial action taken by several public sector unions in protest at the centrally negotiated incomes policy, a number of key services were severely disrupted, many (e.g. hospitals, refuse collection) being brought to a virtual standstill. The term is a misquotation from Shakespeare's
Richard III
.
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The term describes how, during the transition to communism, the state loses its bureaucratic and coercive functions and is replaced by collective and decentralized administration of society. It was coined by Engels but conceived in essence by Marx in the phrase ‘the state is not abolished, it withers away’.
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See
oriental despotism
.

 
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(1759–97)
Mary Wollstonecraft is known as the first British feminist theorist. Her
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1789) examines women's subordination in society in the light of the principles of rationality and equality that were so important to the Enlightenment. She argued that Reason—which she defined as the capacity of acquiring knowledge, making judgements, and forming moral frameworks of our own—is equal in both men and women. It is the denial of equal opportunities for education to women on the one hand, and stereotyping women in their ‘motherly’ roles on the other, that makes women behave differently to men. In her other influential book
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
, Wollstonecraft argues for equal access to education for women. Her ideas about education and equality have been the inspiration for much equal opportunities legislation for women.
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Or the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), which has had multiple agenda for women, comprising: equal opportunities in education, employment, and pay, self-determination on issues such as contraception, and abortion, improved public facilities for child care, tightening of legal sanctions against violence against women whether in the public or the private sphere, and an end to discrimination on grounds of sexuality, race, religion, and ethnicity. The title of the movement consciously adopted in the 1960s to move away from the objectification of women in political discourse as was represented by the construction of ‘the woman question’. WLM drew its inspiration from the American New Left movement and represented a general shift in the radical political discourse of the time from a rights-based political language to one based on concepts of ‘oppression’ and ‘liberation’ and of activism. WLM depended on pooling women's lived experiences, and politicizing them through consciousness-raising programmes of meetings, demonstrations, exhibitions, and so forth. WLM, while challenging the frameworks of power within which women are oppressed in different contexts, also emphasized working within the system. This position led many radical feminists to disassociate themselves from WLM.
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