The Liberation of Working Women (Quote of the Week) A century ago, leading Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai underscored the commitment of the early Soviet workers state, which issued out of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, to emancipating women.

Workers Vanguard No. 1156	31 May 2019

The Liberation of Working Women

(Quote of the Week)

A century ago, leading Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai underscored the commitment of the early Soviet workers state, which issued out of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, to emancipating women. Addressing the leadership of the Third International, newly founded as the party of world revolution, she pointed to the need to free working women from their enslavement in the family, the main source of women’s oppression, through the socialization of its functions. While the Bolsheviks did everything possible with the resources at hand in backward, impoverished Russia, the liberation of women required a qualitative leap in economic development that depended on the extension of proletarian power to the wealthy industrialized countries. Beginning in 1923-24, a bureaucratic caste under J.V. Stalin usurped political power from the Soviet proletariat, promoting “socialism in one country,” and later rehabilitated the institution of the family.

The great Russian proletarian revolution solved the problem of political rights for women with one stroke. Working women and peasant women have now become full-fledged citizens of Soviet Russia. The goal of Working Women’s Day has been fulfilled.

Yet it is now, in the heat of sharp battle with the old, obsolete bourgeois world, that life presents the international proletariat with many new, mature, and urgent challenges in the fight for women’s emancipation.

Women workers and peasant women enjoy the right to vote on a par with men. Nevertheless, despite this formal recognition, this right is nothing more than a means, a weapon for the fight against the conditions of life, the relics of capitalism, that oppress women.

Women workers and peasant women are still very much domestic slaves, still chained to the bourgeois family, still objects of shameful commerce as unwilling prostitutes.

Among the large number of extremely important tasks facing the Third International is the task of women’s thoroughgoing emancipation. Today this question is no longer merely abstract and theoretical. Real life calls for action. Over the last half century women’s labor acquired enormous weight in production. The further planned development of the national economy and its productive capacity has become inconceivable without the assistance of women’s labor power. To use this power expediently in the communist economy, women must be relieved of their burdens and spared unnecessary, unproductive, and wasteful labor in housework and child rearing. Building the new society demands that the living, fresh energy of women must be directed toward constructing life on new principles.

Instead of doing unproductive housework, women can play an enormous role in organizing the new economic order; instead of educating the family, women can contribute greatly to strengthening and developing the beginnings of socialist public education. The new, Third, Communist International needs only to set itself the task of utilizing the female proletariat, of developing the entire breadth of its initiative in order to draw the women workers into the cause of struggling for and building a new way of life and developing a new ethic, a new relationship between the sexes.

—Alexandra Kollontai, “Working Women’s Day and the Third International” (March 1919), reprinted in John Riddell (ed.), Founding the Communist International (1987)