For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

At a time when women in the most “democratic” capitalist countries were denied even the right to vote, the October Revolution of 1917 brought unheard-of gains for women in all areas of public and private life. Despite economic backwardness and poverty, the young Soviet Republic sought to overcome the material foundations of women’s oppression, rooted in the institution of the family. But the Bolsheviks understood that complete social equality would only be attained with the abolition of classes in a world socialist society, requiring the extension of proletarian revolution internationally. Addressing a meeting of working women in 1918, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed that the struggle for women’s liberation is integral to the emancipation of labor itself.

There can be no socialist revolution unless very many working women take a big part in it.

In all civilised countries, even the most advanced, women are actually no more than domestic slaves. Women do not enjoy full equality in any capitalist state, not even in the freest of republics.

One of the primary tasks of the Soviet Republic is to abolish all restrictions on women’s rights. The Soviet government has completely abolished divorce proceedings, that source of bourgeois degradation, repression and humiliation.

It will soon be a year now since complete freedom of divorce was legislated. We have passed a decree annulling all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children and removing political restrictions. Nowhere else in the world have equality and freedom for working women been so fully established.

We know that it is the working-class woman who has to bear the full brunt of antiquated codes.

For the first time in history, our law has removed everything that denied women rights. But the important thing is not the law. In the cities and industrial areas this law on complete freedom of marriage is doing all right, but in the countryside it all too frequently remains a dead letter. There the religious marriage still predominates. This is due to the influence of the priests, an evil that is harder to combat than the old legislation....

The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land. That is a difficult task. But now that Poor Peasants’ Committees are being formed, the time has come when the socialist revolution is being consolidated....

The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work.

—V.I. Lenin, “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women” (November 1918)