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The story of the womens movement in Russia demonstrates clearly how the sharpening class struggle polarizes women into two antagonistic womens movements: working-class and bourgeois. The greater the polarization of women was, the stronger the bonds between working-class women and men became. This conclusion was central for the Bolsheviks, who were intransigent in their opposition to the bourgeois feminists. Against this, the Mensheviks, who advocated a political alliance with the liberals, were also for conciliation between working- class women and bourgeois feminists.
The Bolsheviks understood the difficulty of organizing working- class women, who are held back as victims of a double oppression as wage slaves and household slaves. The conclusions they drew from this were fundamentally different from those of the feminist separatists. The Bolsheviks argued that women and men workers face the same bosses, the same capitalist state. It is in the workplace that women can overcome their passivity and their isolation from each other (which is imposed largely by the family structure of society), gaining confidence in their capacity to act collectively. As workers too, the needs of men and women are identical. Because of these things, any separatism between men and women workers will damage both, and will damage women more than men.
Likewise, because the role of the party is to lead the struggle of the working class, the structure of the party including any of its organizations relating to women must fit the constituencies of the workers struggle, not the political constituencies of bourgeois society. This again means focusing on the workplaces, where the interests of women and men stand together. Conclusive proof of the correctness of the Bolshevik stand on the woman question was the revolution itself. It was women workers, who, together with men, inaugurated the festival of the oppressed and the October revolution opened up the grandest chapter of womens liberation. To communicate to women the new values embodied in the new legal and civil code, which proclaimed the equality of women in economic, political and family life, the Bolsheviks launched a major campaign for the political mobilization of women. In September 1919, Lenin declared, the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves. (Roth child-Goldberg, p. 89) In similar vein, Inessa Armand wrote, If the emancipation of women is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without the full emancipation of women. (States, p. 199. ) The first conference of women convened by the Bolsheviks after the October revolution took place on 19 November 1917.
Five hundred delegates representing 80, 000 women from factories, workshops, trade unions and party organizations attended. The conference was called specifically for mobilizing support for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. A year later, on 16 November 1918, the Bolshevik Party convened the first all-Russian Congress of Working Women. It was organized by a commission which included Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, Klavdiia Nikolaeva and Yaakov Sverdlov (secretary of the Bolshevik Party), who sent agitators to the provinces to arrange for the local election of delegates. In the Kremlin Hall of Unions there gathered 1, 147 women, including workers and peasant women from distant regions of the country. The program presented to the congress was impressive: to win the support of women for Soviet power; to involve women in the party, government and trade unions; to combat domestic slavery and a double standard of morality; to establish communal living accommodation in order to release women from household drudgery; to protect women s labor and maternity; to end prostitution; to refashion women as members of the future communist society.
Nikolaeva chaired the congress. Sverdlov welcomed the delegates. The main speeches were delivered by Kollontai and Inessa Armand. Lenin addressed the congress on its fourth day.
After outlining the measures already taken by the Soviet government to improve womens conditions, he called on women to play a more active political role. The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.
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