Soviet Power and Women’s Emancipation

(Quote of the Week)

In honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, which originated in the struggles of women garment workers in New York City in 1908, we print an excerpt from a work by leading Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai. In this 1921 lecture at Sverdlov University, Kollontai explains the measures taken by the young Soviet workers state, although limited by material scarcity, to begin to free working women from the burdens of child-rearing and the institution of the family, the central source of women’s oppression. With the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union beginning in 1923-24, many of these liberating aims were eventually abandoned and the nuclear family was rehabilitated.

The labour republic does not take children away from their mothers by force as the bourgeois countries have made out in tales about the horrors of the “Bolshevik régime”; on the contrary, the labour republic tries to create institutions which would give all women, and not just the rich, the opportunity to have their children brought up in a healthy, joyful atmosphere. Instead of the mother anxiously thrusting her child into the care of a hired nanny, Soviet Russia wants the working or peasant woman to be able to go to work, calm in the knowledge that her child is safe in the expert hands of a creche, a kindergarten or a children’s home....

The task of Soviet power is thus to provide conditions for the woman where her labour will not be spent on non-productive work about the home and looking after children but on the creation of new wealth for the state, for the labour collective. At the same time, it is important to preserve not only the interests of the woman but also the life of the child, and this is to be done by giving the woman the opportunity to combine labour and maternity. Soviet power tries to create a situation where a woman does not have to cling to a man she has grown to loathe only because she has nowhere else to go with her children, and where a woman alone does not have to fear her life and the life of her child. In the labour republic it is not the philanthropists with their humiliating charity but the workers and peasants, fellow-creators of the new society, who hasten to help the working woman and strive to lighten the burden of motherhood. The woman who bears the trials and tribulations of reconstructing the economy on an equal footing with the man, and who participated in the civil war, has a right to demand that in this most important hour of her life, at the moment when she presents society with a new member, the labour republic, the collective, should take upon itself the job of caring for the future of the new citizen....

In bourgeois society, where housework complements the system of capitalist economy and private property creates a stable basis for the isolated form of the family, there is no way out for the working woman. The emancipation of women can only be completed when a fundamental transformation of living is effected; and life-styles will change only with the fundamental transformation of all production and the establishment of a communist economy. The revolution in everyday life is unfolding before our very eyes, and in this process the liberation of women is being introduced in practice.

—Alexandra Kollontai, “The Labour of Women in the Evolution of the Economy” (1921) from Selected Writings (Lawrence Hill and Co., 1977)