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As a young man in 1944 he joined the Communist Party, both in anger at the indulgence shown by Western democracies to Franco and Salazar and on the grounds that it was the only organisation actively opposing the dictatorship, but six years later he broke with it because of its lies. He began to read Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, and later to travel to Western Europe and the USA to denounce the fascist state. As the wars in Africa began to wear down the regime, he took the opportunity to voice greater criticism.

While important differences exist, there are similarities between the workers’ and the women’s movements: in the ways in which a commitment to women’s equality and fulfilment has eroded, strong opposition to this commitment has emerged, and the movement has lost the unity of purpose and vision and the clarity of ambition that sustained it in earlier times. If fewer people today, in politics or everyday life, call themselves socialist, it would appear that even fewer proclaim a commitment to feminism.

In the United States, the Supreme Court ruling that legalised abortion, Roe vs Wade (1973), is now under serious attack, and the abortion issue has become a major dividing line in US politics. In Europe, the Catholic Church – now led by the conservative Pope Benedict XVI – is openly calling for more church intervention in social and political life and a return to ‘traditional’ values on marriage, sex, women and homosexuality. The argument that the church’s policies – such as its prohibition against the use of condoms – are responsible for endangering the lives of millions of people through AIDS has received relatively little attention.