For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

March 8, International Women’s Day, which originated in 1908 in a march by women garment workers in New York City, was first celebrated in Russia in 1913. In a special edition of Pravda marking the occasion, Alexandra Kollontai, a leader in the Bolshevik Party, polemicized against bourgeois feminism and stressed that the emancipation of women is the task of the entire proletariat, whose historic role is the overthrow of the capitalist order through socialist revolution.

There was a time when working men thought that they alone must bear on their shoulders the brunt of the struggle against capital, that they alone must deal with the “old world” without the help of their womenfolk. However, as working-class women entered the ranks of those who sell their labour, forced onto the labour market by need, by the fact that husband or father is unemployed, working men became aware that to leave women behind in the ranks of the “non-class-conscious” was to damage their cause and hold it back. The greater the number of conscious fighters, the greater the chances of success. What level of consciousness is possessed by a woman who sits by the stove, who has no rights in society, the state or the family? She has no “ideas” of her own! Everything is done as ordered by the father or husband.…

On “Women’s Day” the organised women workers demonstrate against their lack of rights.

But, some will say, why this singling out of women workers? Why special “Women’s Days,” special leaflets for working women, meetings and conferences of working-class women? Is this not, in the final analysis, a concession to the feminists and bourgeois suffragettes?

Only those who do not understand the radical difference between the movement of socialist women and bourgeois suffragettes can think this way.

What is the aim of the feminists? Their aim is to achieve the same advantages, the same power, the same rights within capitalist society as those possessed now by their husbands, fathers and brothers. What is the aim of the women workers? Their aim is to abolish all privileges deriving from birth or wealth. For the woman worker it is a matter of indifference who is the “master”—a man or a woman. Together with the whole of her class, she can ease her position as a worker….

For bourgeois women, political rights are simply a means allowing them to make their way more conveniently and more securely in a world founded on the exploitation of the working people. For women workers, political rights are a step along the rocky and difficult path that leads to the desired kingdom of labour.

—Alexandra Kollontai, “Women’s Day” (February 1913)