Early Communist Work Among Women: The Bolsheviks
From Women and Revolution issues
Nos. 10 and 11, Winter 1975-76 and Spring 1976.
The Soviet Union provides the classic
illustration of Fourier's observation that the progress of any society can be gauged
by the social position of the women within it. To the extent that the Bolshevik
Revolution was victorious, Soviet women were liberated from their traditional,
subservient social positions; to the extent that the Revolution degenerated,
the position of the women degenerated. The fact that this degeneration has been
incomplete—that Soviet women continue to enjoy advantages and opportunities
unknown in the West—is precisely because the degeneration of the Soviet workers
state has also been incomplete, i.e., capitalism has not been restored.
The Old Order:
"I Thought I Saw Two People Coming, But It Was Only a Man and His
Wife"
Russian folklore testifies to the fact that women in pre-revolutionary
Russian society were commonly considered generically defective to the point of
being subhuman. But such attitudes had not prevailed in Russia
But the centuries which witnessed the growth of the patriarchal family,
the rise of Byzantine Christianity with its doctrine of the debased nature of
women, the brutal Tatar invasion and the consolidation of dynastic power, also
witnessed the obliteration of these ancient privileges.
During these centuries Russian women were progressively excluded from
politics, education and social life in general. Those of the lower classes
became beasts of burden who might be driven with a stick if it pleased their
husbands. Those of the upper classes were physically removed from society and
imprisoned in the terem or "tower room"—an upper chamber of
the house built expressly for the lifelong seclusion of women. Peter the Great
(1672-1725), in his determination to transform Russia into a modern commercial
and industrial state, holds the distinction of releasing women from the terem
and compelling them to mingle with men at public social functions, as they
did in the West.
The Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great (1729-1796) continued to
encourage more progressive attitudes toward women, and they constructed
academies for their education. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, women constituted
30,000, or almost one quarter, of the 125,000 students enrolled in Russian
universities.
Despite these reform measures, however, women continued to be severely
oppressed in pre-revolutionary Russia
Peasant women grew old early from overwork and maltreatment. Even when
elementary education was available to girls, it remained customary for them to
stay at home to care for the younger children until they were old enough to
work in the fields. Husbands were generally chosen by the fathers, who sold
their daughters to the highest bidder. Tradition decreed that the father of the
bride present the bridegroom with a whip, the symbol of the groom's authority
over his new wife.
Those peasant women who sought to escape to the cities found that they
were paid lower wages than their male co-workers and that all skilled trades
were closed to them. Outside of domestic service and the textile industry,
marriage constituted grounds for immediate discharge.
Life was somewhat more comfortable, of course, for women of the middle
and upper classes, but not much more fulfilling. While educational
opportunities were more accessible to them, the kind of education deemed
appropriate for women was limited. Husbands, as among the lower classes, were
chosen by the fathers, and the law bound women to obey their husbands in all
things.
Equal Rights for
Women
The radical notion of equal rights for women was originally introduced
into Russia by army officers who had been stationed in France after the defeat
of Napoleon and who brought back to Russia many of the new liberal, republican
and democratic ideas to which they had been exposed.
Male intellectuals continued to participate in this movement for the
next hundred years. They championed higher education for women and entered into
fictitious marriages with them in order to provide them with the passports they
needed to study abroad. Well-known authors such as Belinsky, Herzen,
Dobroliubov and Chernyshevsky encouraged women in their struggle for equal
rights.
The active participation of men in the struggle for women's liberation
and the fact that prior to 1906 the masses of Russian men and women did possess
equal political rights—that is, no rights at all—meant that at a time when
women's suffrage organizations were on the rise in the West, Russian women and men continued to
engage in united political struggle.
Equality of political oppression broke down only after the Revolution of
1905. On 17 October of that year Tsar Nicholas II issued a manifesto which
provided for the summoning of a state duma based on male suffrage only. A group
of the newly-enfranchised men immediately appealed to the author of the
manifesto, Count Witte, for female suffrage, but this was refused. Out of this
defeat arose the first feminist organizations in Russia
Like all feminist organizations, these groups sought to achieve their
goals through reforming the social system. At the first meeting of the League
of Equal Rights for Women, which was held in St. Petersburg (later renamed
Petrograd and presently Leningrad) in 1905, a number of working women put
forward a resolution demanding measures to meet their needs and the needs of
peasant women, such as equal pay for equal work and welfare for mothers and
children, but the bourgeois women who constituted the majority of the
membership rejected this proposal in favor of one which called only for the
unity of all women in the struggle for a republican form of government and for
universal suffrage.
One of the League's first actions was
the presentation to the First State Duma of a petition for female suffrage signed by
5,000 women. This petition was presented three times between 1906 and 1912 but
was never accepted. Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov commented:
"Careful observation of reality shows that there is a danger of
women being attracted by the ideals of the revolutionaries, and this
circumstance, in my opinion, obliges us to regard with extreme care the
question of encouraging women to take up political activity.
— Vera Bilshai, The Status of Women in the Soviet
Union Feminism or Bolshevism?
Side by side with the burgeoning feminist movement, the
pre-revolutionary years witnessed the development of work among women by the
Bolsheviks and other avowed socialists—work which was greatly accelerated by
the entrance of masses of women into industrial production.
The programs and strategies of feminism and Bolshevism were counterposed
from the outset. The feminists declared that women's most pressing need was
political equality with men, including participation at every level of
government. Only when women were in a position to influence all governmental
policies, they said, would cultural and economic equality be possible. To
achieve their political goal, the feminists created multi-class organizations
of women united around the struggle for equal rights.
Socialist organizations also struggled for equal rights for all women.
"We hate and want to obliterate," said V. I. Lenin, "everything
that oppresses and harasses the working woman, the wife of the working man, the
peasant woman, the wife of the little man, and even in many respects the women
from the wealthy classes." But socialist organizations from the beginning
rejected the feminist reform strategy and insisted that full sexual equality
could not be achieved short of a socialist society. Far from leading them to
abandon special work among women under capitalism, however, this position encouraged
them to pursue it more ardently in the knowledge that "the success of the
revolution depends upon how many women take part in it" (Lenin).
As early as 1899 Lenin insisted that Clause 9 of the first draft program
of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) contain the words:
"establishment of complete equality of rights between men and women."
The program adopted by the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 included this
demand as well as the following special provisions:
"With a view to safeguarding the working class from physical and
moral degeneration, and also with the view to promoting its capacity for waging
a struggle for liberation, women should not be employed in industries harmful
to the female organism, they should receive four weeks' paid pre-natal and six
weeks' post-natal
leave; all enterprises employing women should have nurseries for babies and
small children, nursing mothers should be allowed to leave their work for at
least half an hour at intervals of not longer than three hours, and male
factory inspectors should be replaced by women in industries with a female
labor force."
— VKP(b) v
rezoliutsiiakh, quoted in William M. Mandel, "Soviet Women and Their
Self-Image"
Throughout the entire pre-revolutionary period the Bolsheviks pressed
their demands for complete sexual equality as they carried out educational and
organizational work among women through every possible vehicle—cultural and
educational organizations, evening schools, trade unions. Centers of Bolshevik
agitation and propaganda also took the form of women's clubs. In 1907, such a
club was opened in St. Petersburg under the name
"The Working Women's Mutual Aid Society," while in Moscow
Through this special work the Bolsheviks were able to recruit many
working women to communist politics. One of these recruits, Alexandra
Artiukhina, later recalled:
"When we began to attend the Sunday and evening schools, we began
to make use of books from the library and we learned of the great Russian
democrat, Chernyshevsky. Secretly, we read his book, What Is to Be Done? and
we found the image of the woman of the future, Vera Pavlovna, very attractive.
"The foremost democratic intelligentsia of our time played a
considerable role in our enlightenment, in the growth of revolutionary attitudes and in
women's realization of their human dignity and their role in public. They
acquainted us with the names of Russian revolutionary women, like Sofia
Perovskaya and Vera Figner.
"Later, in underground political circles, we read the works of
Marx, Engels and Lenin. We understood that the enslavement of women occurred
together with the establishment of private ownership of the means of production
and the beginning of exploitation of man by man and that real equality and real
freedom for women would be found only in socialism, where there would be no
exploitation of man by man. Therefore, the most reliable path for the
liberation of women was the path of political struggle against capitalism
in the ranks of the proletariat."
— A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi put," in A. Artiukhina et al.
(eds.), Zhenshchina v revoliutsii Women and the War
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 precipitated a
dramatic transformation in the lives of Russian women, ripping them away from
their private family roles and throwing them into entirely new social roles in
factories, hospitals, at the front and in the streets.
During the very first months of the war, military
mobilizations took approximately 40 percent of Russian working
men out of industrial jobs, many of which had to be filled by women. Between
1913 and 1917 the percentage of women working in the metal trades in Petrograd rose from 3.2 percent to 20.3 percent. In the
woodworking industries, the number of women increased sevenfold. In
papermaking, printing and the preparation of animal products and foodstuffs
their number doubled.
This entrance of large numbers of Russian women
into industrial production was a profoundly progressive step because it laid
the basis for their economic and political organization. By the time of the
October Revolution, women constituted about ten percent of the membership of
the Bolshevik Party and were represented at every level of the party
organization.
While many female comrades took a special interest
in party work among women, it was always clear that this important arena of
work was the responsibility of the party as a whole and not solely of the women
within it. This Bolshevik refusal to differentiate political functioning on the
basis of sex is also illustrated by the fact that neither in the party nor in
its youth section did women ever constitute a male exclusionist faction or
caucus. There were, at times, women's commissions and departments to oversee
special work among women, but these always remained under the control of higher
party bodies composed of comrades of both sexes.
The absence of
women's caucuses was not, of course, an indication that the party was entirely
free of sexist attitudes; only that the struggle against such attitudes
was carried out by the party as a whole on the basis of communist
consciousness, which was expected to transcend sexual distinctions.
One of the foremost Bolshevik leaders in the
struggle against reactionary attitudes toward women within the party was V.I.
Lenin. In an interview with Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party,
he said: "...Unfortunately it is still true to say of many
of our comrades 'scratch a Communist and find a Philistine.' Of course you must
scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women. Could there be a more damning
proof of this than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow worn out
in petty, monotonous household work, their strength and time dissipated and
wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly,
their will weakened? Of course, I am not speaking of the ladies of the
bourgeoisie who shove onto servants the responsibilities for all household
work, including the care of children. What I am saying applies to the overwhelming
majority of women, to the wives of workers and to those who stand all day in a
factory.
"So few men—even among the proletariat—realize how much effort and
trouble they could save women, even quite do away with, if they were to lend a
hand in 'women's work.' But no, that is contrary to the 'right and dignity of a
man.' They want their peace and comfort. The home life of the woman is a daily
sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. The old master-right of the
man still lives
in secret. His slave takes her revenge, also secretly. The backwardness of
women, their lack of understanding for the revolutionary ideals of the man,
decrease his joy and determination in fighting. They are like little worms
which, unseen, slowly but surely rot and corrode. I know the life of the worker
and not only from books. Our Communist work among the women, our political
work, embraces a great deal of educational work among men. We must root out the old
'master' idea to its last and smallest trace. In the Party and among the masses. That
is one of our political tasks, just as it is the urgently necessary task of
forming a staff of men and women well trained in theory and practice, to carry
on Party activity among working women."
— Klara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin International Women's
Day
A great deal of radical agitation and propaganda among working women
centered around the observance of International Women's Day, a proletarian women's
holiday which had originated in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in
Manhattan's Lower East Side and which was later officially adopted by the
Second International.
The holiday was first celebrated in Russia
The first International Women's Day in Russia
drew tremendous attention in St. Petersburg and Moscow
Bolshevik work among women was so successful in fact that by the winter
of 1913 Pravda was receiving more correspondence than it could handle on
the special problems facing working women. The solution, Lenin urged, was
another journal aimed specifically at proletarian women. It was entitled Rabotnitsa
(The Working Woman). Rabotnitsa played a crucial role in organizing
women and rallying them to the Bolshevik Party. (For a detailed account of its
development, see "How the Bolsheviks Organized Working Women: History of
the Journal Rabotnitsa," Women and Revolution No. 4, Fall 1973.)
The Bolsheviks' major political competitors, the Mensheviks, attempted
to counter the influence of Rabotnitsa with a women's journal of their
own called Golos Rabotnitsi (Voice of the Working Woman), but it
appeared only twice and failed to win much support.
Menshevik attempts to organize women through mass meetings seem to have
fared badly also. Klavdia Nikolaevna, who later became an editor of
Rabotnitsa, described one such meeting as follows:
"At the meeting there were many women and frontline soldiers.
Suddenly, a group of Bolshevik working women burst into the hall and pushed their way
to the speakers' platform. The first and second to reach the platform collided with
it, but the third was able to gain a foothold on it, and she made such a fiery
speech about the aims of the revolution, that all the women and soldiers left
the meeting singing the 'International' and only one Menshevik was left in
the auditorium."
— K. Nikolaevna, "Slovo k molodim rabotnitsam," A. Artiukhina
et al. (eds.), Zhenshchina v revoliutsii "The First Day
of the Revolution—That Is the Women's Day"
As the war dragged on, the daily life of the Russian working class grew
steadily worse. By 1916, bread lines in Petrograd
were often over a mile long with the women, who constituted the great majority
of them, standing four abreast. In this situation of massive social unrest, the
intervention of the Bolsheviks, who placed the blame for the war and the high
cost of living squarely on the shoulders of the autocracy, evoked a deep
response from the war-weary masses. The Bolshevik slogan, "Bring back our
men!" was frequently found scrawled across factory walls, and Bolshevik
proclamations, such as the following, appeared in underground newspapers and
were posted on walls:
"The black scourge of war has destroyed... our workers' organizations....
The government has dealt treacherously with our deputies—class-conscious
working women and working men—and our sons, husbands and brothers are bleeding
profusely on foreign fields, paying with their lives to procure new markets,
new lands for triumphant capital....
"Thus is it possible not to raise our voices in protest, the voices
of hundreds of thousands of unfortunate mothers, wives and sisters, is it
possible that we will shed only inaudible tears, sigh only secret sighs for the
pain of the men? This cannot be, comrade working women. In all countries
workers are rising up against their oppression by capital; we rise up and our
voices demonstrate that we are also able to defend our children, husbands and
brothers....
"Enough
bloodshed! Down with the war! A people's court for the criminal autocratic
government."
— Bolshevik International Women's Day proclamation (23 February 1915),
quoted in A. P. Konstantinov and E. P. Serebrovskaia (eds.), Zhenshchiny
Goroda Lenina
Pitirim Sorokin, who
was an eyewitness to the February Revolution, has written:
"If future historians look for the group that began the Russian
Revolution, let him [sic] not create any involved theory. The Russian
Revolution was begun by hungry women and children demanding bread and herrings."
—Pitirim Sorokin, Leaves
from a Russian Diary
Sorokin is correct in pointing out the importance of the women in the
streets in the series of events which led to the downfall of the autocracy, but
this is only half the story.
Street demonstrations by women had been occurring in the major cities
for several months, but they had generally been no more than local disturbances
leading at most to the looting of one or two shops. The demonstrations of 23
February—International Women's Day—1917 were of another order. These were
massive city-wide actions involving thousands of people who struck their
factories, raised political banners, turned over railroad cars and attacked the
police who attempted to restrain them.
All radical parties had intended to celebrate International Women's Day
in the customary manner—that is, with rallies, speeches and the distribution of
leaflets. Not a single organization had called for labor strikes. When on the
eve of the holiday a group of working women met with a representative of the Bolshevik Party, V.
Kayurov, to discuss the next day's activities, he specifically cautioned them
to refrain
from isolated actions and to follow the instructions of the party.
Despite his advice, however, a few hundred women textile workers
assembled in their factories early on the morning of the 23rd and resolved to
call a one-day political strike. They elected delegates and sent them around to
neighboring factories with appeals for support. Kayurov happened to be engaged
in an emergency conference with four workers in the corridor of the Erikson
Works when the women delegates came through that plant. It was only by this
chance encounter that the Bolshevik representative learned of the forthcoming
strike action. He was furious:
"I was extremely indignant about the behavior of the strikers, both
because they had blatantly ignored the decision of the District Committee of
the Party, and also because they had gone on strike after I had appealed to
them only the night before to keep cool and disciplined. There appeared to be
no reason for their action, if one discounted the ever-increasing bread queues,
which had indeed touched off the strike."
— V. Kayurov, Proletarskaia Revoliutsia No. 1, 1923, quoted in
George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution
The strike was thus unauthorized by any political group. It was, as
Trotsky said, "a revolution begun from below, overcoming the resistance of
its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken of their own
accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat—the women
textile workers,
among them no doubt, many soldiers' wives."
By noon of the 23rd an estimated 90,000 workers had followed the working
women out on strike. "With reluctance," writes Kayurov, "the
Bolsheviks agreed to this."
As the striking workers, who came mostly from the Viborg District on the
north side of the city, began their march into the center, they were joined by
thousands of women who had been standing all morning in the bread lines, only
to be informed that there was to be no bread in the shops on that day. Together
they made their way to the Municipal Duma to demand bread.
For the remainder of the day the streets swarmed with people.
Spontaneous meetings were held everywhere, and here and there hastily
improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher
wages. Other demands were scrawled on the sides of streetcars: "Give us
bread!" and "No bread, no work!" One woman streetcar conductor
later recalled: "...When we conductors turned in our money for the night,
we saw soldiers with rifles standing to one side of the gate, and on the following day
they were still in the conductors' room and walking about the yard. Leonov [a
Bolshevik who had been one of the leaders of a successful streetcar conductors'
strike the previous year] quietly said to us: 'This is all for us; you see
today in Petrograd 200,000 workers are on
strike!'
"We began to leave the yard to embark in the municipal streetcars
when suddenly we saw a crowd of workers coming at us, snouting: 'Open the
gate to the yard!' There were 700 people. They stood on the rails and on the
steps of the Gornyi
Museum
"The strikers swept over the city. A demonstration of workers from
the Putilov Factory marched to the center of the city and into it, like a
flood, merged again and again the crowds of workers...."
— K. lakovlevoi in Vsegda s Vami:
Sbornikposviashchennyi 50-letiiu zhurnala "Rabotnitsa "
All in all, the day passed with relatively little violence. A few troops
were called out to assist the police, but it was determined that they were
unnecessary, and they were returned to their barracks. In the evening the audience
at the long-awaited premiere of Meyerhold's production of "Lermontov's Masquerade"
heard some gunshots through the red and gold drapes of the Alexandrinskii
Theater, but there were no casualties and no one suspected that anything
especially out of the ordinary was taking place.
They were mistaken. During the days which followed, the general
agitation not only continued but assumed an ever more violent character until
the hollow shell of the once-powerful Romanov dynasty crumbled.
One week after the
strike which had setoff this chain of events Pravda editorialized:
"The first day of the revolution—that is the women's day, the day
of the Women Workers' International. All honour to the International! The women
were the fist to tread the streets of Petrograd
on their day."
— Fanina W. Halle, Women in Soviet Russia
"The Tasks of the Proletariat In Our Revolution: Draft Program for
the Proletarian Party," written immediately upon Lenin's return to Russia
"Unless women are brought to take an independent part not only in
political life generally, but also in daily and universal public service, it is
no use talking about full and stable democracy; let alone socialism. And such
'police' functions as care of the sick and of homeless children, food
inspection, etc., will never be satisfactorily discharged until women are on an equal
footing with men, not merely nominally but in reality."
— V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 24
Throughout the spring and summer of 1917 the Bolsheviks intensified
their work among women. The first working women's conference, which took place at
Lenin's suggestion and which was attended by Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and
feminists as well as Bolsheviks, demonstrated the influence which the Bolsheviks
had gained among working women.
In her address to the conference, Konkordiia Samoilova, a leading member
of the Bolshevik Party, proposed that all political work among women in
industry be carried out henceforth under the guidance of Bolshevik
organizations. Naturally, this proposal met with the fierce resistance of the
representatives of other radical organizations. A Menshevik, Bakasheva, argued
that the women's movement was independent and must not be subordinated to the
influence of any political party. But although three or four women expressed
solidarity with the Menshevik resolution affirming the non-partisan character
of the
women's movement, it was defeated, while Samoilova's proposal for Bolshevik
leadership was accepted.
Under the mounting pressure of events in the months preceding October,
animosities on the left became more intense than ever. In July an abortive
uprising took place. Although the Bolsheviks had counseled against such a move
at this time, when the class lines were drawn they took their places in the
front ranks of the proletariat. A Russian working woman recalls:
"I remember how we went to the July demonstration. Our organized
working men and working women arose under the Bolshevik signs. Loudly and
mightily our voices resounded: 'We who were nothing and have become everything
shall construct a new and better world.'
"As the demonstration approached the corner of Nevsky and Sadova,
machine-gun fire was heard. People ran to the sidewalks, but, since the doormen
all along the Nevsky had closed the gates, there was nowhere to escape, and the
shooting continued. The Nevsky was strewn with the bodies of the demonstrators.
At a corner of the Nevsky, a store was located on the basement level. When the
machine-gun fire began, we descended a short flight of stairs to the door of
the shop, which was closed. Working women disassembled the window pane and,
helping each other, got into the shop and ran out through a dark passage into a
yard and from there through an alley back a gain to the Nevsky.
"The streets of Petrograd were
running with the blood of workers and soldiers....we buried them in a communal grave.
"When on the morning of July 5, 1917 we returned to our plant,
'Novi Promet,' it was as if we did not know our coworkers. During the course of our
two-day absence, the Mensheviks and SRs had spread the foul slander that the
Bolsheviks were fully responsible for the shooting down of the workers. The
atmosphere was tense. When we entered the shop, many working women jumped up and
began to throw aluminum nuts with very sharp edges at us. I was taken by
surprise and covered my face with my hands, and my attackers kept repeating:
'"Take that,
Bolshevik spy!'
'"What are you doing? The Bolsheviks gave their lives for the
working class and you listen to the Mensheviks and SRS, the murderers of the
working class....'
"The working women, seeing my face running with blood, became
frightened. Someone brought water, iodine, a towel. The girls from my brigade
were in a flood of tears. They told me how the Menshevik Bakasheva and others
had set them against the Bolsheviks.
"The wavering of working women became apparent not only in our
plant but also in other Petrograd enterprises
during the July Days, when counterrevolutionary scum together with the
Mensheviks and SRs carried on their filthy persecution of the Bolsheviks. The
Mensheviks and SRs had started down the path of open counterrevolution."
— E. Tarasova,
"Pod znamenem Bolshevikov," in A. Artiukhina et al. (eds.), Zhenshchiny
v revoliutsii
In the final weeks before October, the Bolshevik Party made an all-out
effort to consolidate the support of the working women and enlist them in the
imminent struggle. Party committees held working women's conferences at which they
explained the problems of the party, dispelled the wild rumors which abounded,
attacked counterrevolutionary positions and generally tried to raise
class-consciousness among the women and draw them into revolutionary activity.
Coinciding with the October Revolution itself was the First All-City
Conference of Petrograd Working Women, which was organized by Rabotnitsa and
attended by 500 delegates elected by 80,000 working women. A major goal of the
conference was to prepare non-party women for the coming uprising and to
acquaint them with the program which the new Soviet government would pursue
after victory. The women discussed various questions of government and worked
out plans for the welfare of mothers.
The conference was temporarily interrupted by the outbreak of the armed
uprising which had been under discussion. The delegates recessed in order to
participate in the revolutionary struggle along with many other women who bore
arms, dug entrenchments, stood guard and nursed the wounded. Afterward Lenin
was to say of them:
"In Petrograd, here in Moscow
— V. I. Lenin, quoted
in Fanina W. Halle, Women in Soviet Russia
Few people today, even among those who take a special interest in the
history of women, have ever heard of the Russian League of Equal Rights for
Women. Yet in the days following the February revolution it was this organization,
a branch of Carrie Chapman Catt's International Suffrage Alliance, to which
feminists in Russia
From its headquarters at 20
Znamenskaia Street Petrograd
the League waged an ardent struggle for women's rights—principally suffrage—through
rallies, leaflets, newspaper articles and earnest petitions such as the
following:
"Defending the interests of women and maintaining that the
realization of peace among the people will be incomplete without the full
equality of women and men, the Russian League of Equal Rights for Women appeals
to all women of all professions and calls upon them to join the League in order
to quickly realize in practice the great idea of complete equality of the sexes
before the law.
"In Unity there
is Strength."
—Den', 9
March 1917
On 15 April 1917 the League witnessed the realization of its long-sought
goal as the Provisional Government granted all women over the age of 20 the
right to participate in Duma elections. Over the next four months additional
legislation enabled women to practice law, elect delegates to the forthcoming
Constituent Assembly, run for election themselves, hold government posts and
vote in all provincial and municipal elections. Social Revolutionary leader
Catherine Breshkovskaia (later to be dubbed by Trotsky the "Godmother of
the Russian Counterrevolution") wrote in exultation to the National
American Woman Suffrage Association:
"I am happy to say that the 'Women's Journal' can be sure we
Russian women have already the rights (over all our country) belonging to all
citizens, and the elections which are taking place now, over all our provinces,
are performed together by men and women. Neither our government nor our people
have a word to say against the woman suffrage."
— Catherine Breshkovskaia, letter to the National American Woman
Suffrage Association, 20 May 1917
It is notable, then, that the victorious Russian League has been
relegated to historical near-oblivion, while the Bolshevik Party is universally
acknowledged—even by staunch anti-communists—as the instrument by means of
which Russian women achieved an unparalleled degree of social equality. And this is as it should
be, for in fact the League's paper victory had virtually no practical
significance for the masses of Russian women. Not only did the new equal
rights statutes leave untouched the most urgent problems of daily life—such as
widespread starvation—but such reforms as were guaranteed were implemented, as
in the West, in a purely tokenistic fashion. American newspaper reporter Bessie
Beatty, who attended a Provisional Government political convention in Petrograd during this period, noted that of the 1,600
delegates in attendance only 23 were women. Not that women were absent from the
proceedings; far from it. Numerous women served tea, caviar and sandwiches,
ushered men to their seats, took stenographic notes and counted ballots.
"It was so natural," said Beatty, "that it almost made me
homesick."
Bolshevik Pledge:
Full Social Equality for Women
Lenin had pledged that "the first dictatorship of the proletariat
will be the pioneer in full social equality for women. It will radically
destroy more prejudices than volumes of women's rights." With the Soviet seizure of state
power and in the very teeth of the bitter struggle against counterrevolution
and imperialist intervention the Bolsheviks proved their determination to honor
this pledge.
The very first pieces of legislation enacted by the new Soviet government
were directed at the emancipation of women in a way which far exceeded the
reformist demands of the suffragists. The aim of this legislation was the
replacement of the nuclear family as a social/economic unit through the
socialization of household labor and the equalization of educational and
vocational opportunities. These two goals were key to the undermining of the
capitalist social order and to the construction of the new society.
In December 1917 illegitimacy was abolished in law, making fathers,
whether married or not, coresponsible for their children and freeing mothers
from the burden of a double standard which had punished them for the
consequences of shared "mistakes." Subsequent legislation declared
marriage to be a contract between free and equal individuals which could be
dissolved at the request of either partner, established hundreds of
institutions devoted to the care of mothers and children, legalized abortions,
assured equal pay for equal work and opened up unheard of opportunities for
women in industry, the professions, the party and government. And this
legislation was backed by government action. Thus when Soviet working women,
like working women in other countries, began to lose their jobs to soldiers
returning from the front, the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions addressed the
following appeal to all workers and factory committees:
"The question of how to combat unemployment has come sharply before
the unions. In many factories and shops the question is being solved very
simply...fire the women and put men in their places. With the transfer of power
to the Soviets, the working class is given a chance to reorganize our national
economy on a new basis. Does such action correspond with this new basis?... The
only effective measure against unemployment is the restoration of the
productive powers of the country, reorganization on a socialist basis. During
the time of crisis, with the cutting down of workers in factories and shops, we
must approach the question of dismissal with the greatest care. We must decide
each case individually. There can be no question of whether the worker is a man
or a woman, but simply of the degree of need.... Only such an attitude will
make it possible for us to retain women in our organization, and prevent a
split in the army of workers...."
— Petrograd Council
of Trade Unions, April 1918, quoted in Jessica Smith, Women in Soviet Russia
This petition was supported by other unions and government
organizations, and mass dismissals of women from Soviet industry were in fact
checked. Three years later, during another period of widespread layoffs, the
government issued a decree providing that in cases where male and female
workers were equally qualified they were to be given equal consideration in
retaining their jobs, with the exception that single women with children under
one year of age were to be given preference. In the event that such women had
to be laid off, their children had the right to continue to attend the factory
nursery or kindergarten. It was further stipulated that neither pregnancy nor
the fact that a woman was nursing a baby could serve as cause for dismissal,
nor was it permitted to dismiss a woman worker during a leave of absence for
childbirth.
Surveying the Soviet government's work among women during its first two
years Lenin was able to conclude that:
"A complete Revolution in the legislation affecting women was
brought about by the government of the workers in the first months of its
existence. The Soviet government has not left a stone unturned of those laws
which held women in complete subjection. I speak particularly of the laws which
took advantage of the weaker position of woman, leaving her in an unequal and
often even degrading position—that is, the laws on divorce and children born out
of wedlock, and the right of women to sue the father for the support of the
child.... And we may now say with pride and without any exaggeration that
outside of Soviet Russia there is not a country in the world where women have
been given full equal rights, where women are not in a humiliating position
which is felt especially in everyday family life. This was one of our first and most
important tasks....
"Certainly laws alone are not enough, and we will not for a minute
be satisfied just with decrees. But in the legal field we have done everything
required to put women on an equal basis with men, and we have a right to be
proud of that. The legal position of women in Soviet Russia is ideal from the
point of view of the foremost countries. But we tell ourselves plainly that
this is only the beginning."
— V. I. Lenin, quoted
in Jessica Smith, Women in Soviet Russia Zhenotdel
The transition was not an easy one for women (or for men), particularly
in rural areas and in the Muslim East. Appreciating the difficulties which
women had to overcome in breaking from reactionary traditions, the Central
Committee of the Bolshevik Party, although it was caught up in the turmoil of
civil war, gave additional impetus to its work among women by calling for an
Ail-Russian Conference of Working Women and Peasant Women to take place in
Moscow in November 1918. This conference was preceded by the establishment of a
bureau of convocation which sent agitators throughout the country, including
frontline regions, to inform women about the forthcoming conference and to
facilitate the election of delegates. Given the desperate conditions which
prevailed, it was estimated that approximately 300 delegates would attend, but
at the opening of the first session on November 16, 1,147 women delegates were
seated.
Conference discussions addressed a variety of questions, including the
problems of working women in Soviet Russia, the family, welfare, the role of
women in the international revolution, organizational problems, the struggle
against prostitution in Soviet Russia, the struggle against child labor and the
housing
question.
While affirming in principle that the struggle for communism and women's
emancipation could succeed only through the united struggle of all sections of
the working class and peasantry, and not through the building of an autonomous
women's movement, the delegates also noted that women were often the least
conscious elements in these sections and the most in need of special attention.
In the light of this approach to special work among women, which had been
developed by the German Social Democratic Party and carried forward by the
Bolsheviks in the prerevolutionary period, delegates to the conference affirmed
the proposal by Bolshevik leaders Inessa Armand and Konkordiia Samoilova that
the conference appeal to the party "to organize from among the most active
working women of the party special groups for propaganda and agitation among
women in order to put the idea of communism into practice." The Bolsheviks'
response was the creation of a Central Committee commission headed by Armand for work among
women. It was succeeded the following year by the Department of Working Women and Peasant
Women—Zhenotdel.
Zhenotdel was to become a major vehicle for the recruitment of women to
the Bolshevik Party; but its primary purpose was not recruitment but the
instruction of non-party women in the utilization of their newly-won rights,
the deepening of their political awareness and the winning of their cooperation
for the construction of the proletarian state.
While special work among women was carried out by many agencies,
Zhenotdel was unique in that it offered women practical political experience.
In annual elections women chose their delegates—one for every ten working women
or for every hundred peasant women or housewives. These delegates attended classes in reading
and writing, government, women's rights and social welfare, and they took part
in the organization
of conferences, meetings and interviews designed to arouse the interest of
their constituents and draw them into political activity. They were entitled to
representation on the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and those who
were elected to represent Zhenotdel pursued a special program of political
education which included reviewing the reports of district committees, co-ops,
trade unions and factory directors. Some Zhenotdel delegates became full-time
paid functionaries in government institutions or trade unions where they
participated directly in the administration of the government.
Zhenotdel carried out extensive propaganda
campaigns through its publications. By 1921, it was publishing a special page
devoted to women in 74 weekly newspapers. In addition, it published its own
weekly bulletin and the monthly journal Kommunistka (The Communist
Woman), which had a circulation of 30,000. In addition, Zhenotdel's literary
commission supervised the publication of leaflets and pamphlets dealing
with party work among women—over 400,000 pieces of literature during the first six months of 1921
alone.
Finding themselves confronted at every step by the enormous barrier of
illiteracy among women, Zhenotdel delegates threw themselves into the work of
organizing over 25,000 literacy schools in which they themselves were often the
majority of the students. They also set up co-operative workshops for women,
organized women who had been laid off from factories and established orphanages
and colonies for homeless children.
Within a few years Zhenotdel had
succeeded in creating out of the most backward sector of the working class and
peasantry an organized, active, politically conscious stratum of women citizens
devoted to the Soviet republic. Of these astonishing women delegates the
Russian poet Mayakovsky wrote:
"They come
From the machines
From the land and washtubs
Under red kerchiefs
Tucking in the strands,
Hundreds of thousands
Of women-delegates
To build and govern."
— Quoted in V. Lebedeva, "Zabota o materiakh i detiakh," in A.
Artiukhina et al. (eds. Zhenshchina v revoliutsii)
Women Rally to Soviet State
While the Soviet regime had its detractors, even among working women in
the major cities, all evidence indicates that the great majority of working
women, for whom there could be no going back to the life they had known under
the old regime, remained loyal to the government through famine, epidemic and
Civil War. Wearing red head bands, women marched through the streets of Petrograd , during its darkest days, singing that although
typhus and counterrevolution were everywhere, the world revolution was bound to
save them. One woman who spoke for many wrote:
"I am the wife of a Petrograd
worker. Earlier I was in no way useful to the working class. I could not work.
"I sat at home, suffocating in the cellar and preparing dinner from
garbage which the bourgeoisie had not found fit to eat.
"When working class rule began, 1 heard the call for us ourselves
to rule and build our lives. Well, I thought, how can the generals and their
daughters have yielded their places to us? I began to listen....
"They chose me
for a Kalachinska District conference. I learned a great deal there. A literacy
instructor was assigned to me....
"If life is difficult for us now, all of us will bear it and not
one will give the bourgeoisie reason to celebrate that they can again keep all
the people in chains. We may suffer for a while, but to our children we will
leave an inheritance which neither moth will eat nor rust will corrode. And we
shall all support strong soviet rule and the Communist Party."
—V. Tsurik, Bednota
But the clearest indication of support for the Soviet government was the
enthusiasm with which women took up arms against the counterrevolution. Soviet
women were members of Red Guard units from the first days of the October
Revolution, and they fought side by side with men on every front during the
Civil War. Like women in bourgeois countries, they initially volunteered as
nurses, with the difference—as Alexandra Kollontai points out—that they
regarded the soldiers not merely as "our poor soldier boys," but as
comrades in struggle. Soon, however, they became scouts, engineers of armored
trains, cavalry soldiers, communications specialists, machine-gunners and
guerrillas. They also took the initiative in forming "stopping
detachments," which captured deserters and persuaded them, whenever
possible, to return to their positions. Lenin praised these detachments,
saying: "Smash the traitors ruthlessly and put them to shame: Eighty
thousand women—this is no trifling military force. Be steadfast in the revolutionary
struggle."
When the fighting ended, an estimated 1,854 women soldiers had been
killed or wounded and many more taken prisoner. Sixty-three women were awarded
the Order of the Red Banner for military heroism.
The Work Goes Forward
By 1921 it appeared as if a wholly new type of woman was about to make
her appearance in Soviet Russia. According to Alexandra Kollontai's personal
ideal, this woman would be self-supporting and would live alone; she would take part
in social and political work and would engage freely in sexual love; her meals
would be eaten in a communal restaurant; her children would be happy in a state
nursery and her home would be cleaned, her laundry done and her clothes mended
by state workers. Other communists cherished other visions of the fully
emancipated socialist woman, but for all of them the future was full of
promise—so much had been accomplished already.
It was too early to know that just ahead lay bitter defeats for Soviet
women, for the Soviet working class as a whole and for the international
proletarian revolution. The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state,
which arose in the first instance out of the backwardness, isolation and
poverty of post-revolutionary Russia
and out of the failure of proletarian revolutions in the technologically
advanced countries of Western Europe ,
constitutes another chapter. The privileged, conservative bureaucratic caste
which emerged out of these conditions reversed at will many of the gains which
women had achieved
through the Revolution: abortion was illegalized; the women's section of the
party was liquidated;
coeducation was abolished; divorce was made less accessible; and women were
once again encouraged to assume their "natural" tasks of domestic
labor and child rearing within the confines of the oppressive family:
But despite these defeats, the lessons of
Bolshevik work among women have not been lost to succeeding generations of
revolutionists, and the work goes forward. Just as Kollontai pointed out to
Bessie Beatty during the first flush of the Soviet victory: "Even if we
are conquered, we have done great things. We are breaking the way...."
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