The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Emancipation

(Quote of the Week)

In a speech just before the second anniversary of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin highlighted the measures the young Soviet workers state had taken to wipe out legal inequality and strike at the material foundations of women’s oppression. The Bolsheviks understood that complete social equality would only be attained with the abolition of classes in a world socialist order, requiring the extension of proletarian rule internationally. A bureaucratic caste under J.V. Stalin, which usurped political power beginning in 1923-24, abandoned that internationalist perspective, promoting “socialism in one country” and later resurrecting the cult of the family, the central institution for the subjugation of women.

Soviet power has implemented democracy to a greater degree than any of the other, most advanced countries because it has not left in its laws any trace of the inequality of women. Again I say that no other state and no other legislation has ever done for women a half of what Soviet power did in the first months of its existence….

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.

In pursuance of the socialist ideal we want to struggle for the full implementation of socialism, and here an extensive field of labour opens up before women. We are now making serious preparations to clear the ground for the building of socialism, but the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women and when we undertake the new work together with women who have been emancipated from that petty, stultifying, unproductive work. This is a job that will take us many, many years.

This work cannot show any rapid results and will not produce a scintillating effect.

We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework. And the work of organising all these institutions will fall mainly to women. It has to be admitted that in Russia today there are very few institutions that would help woman out of her state of household slavery. There is an insignificant number of them, and the conditions now obtaining in the Soviet Republic—the war and food situation about which comrades have already given you the details—hinder us in this work. Still, it must be said that these institutions that liberate women from their position as household slaves are springing up wherever it is in any way possible.

—V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic” (September 1919)