Lecture One: Feminism, Women and the Rev

Term Two: Women and the Working Class in Russia

Last term Annie focused on issues of race, class and gender in contemporary capitalist society

Persistent inequalities in capitalist society are not simply the result of differences in individual abilities but are embedded in the social institutions of capitalist society

Many people through the 20th century believed that socialism or communism promised a different kind of society in which institutionalised inequality and oppression would be eliminated.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the communist heartlands apparently gave strong support to Margaret Thatcher’s famous cry ‘There is no alternative’.

This term we will look at what happened in Russia, focusing particularly on class and gender inequality in Soviet society and its legacy today.

This week I will talk about the ideas which lay behind the proclamation of the liberation of women by the Russian revolutionaries, focusing on Engels, Bebel and Kollontai.

Lecture One: Feminism, Women and the Revolution

Engels’s Origins of the Family

In the earliest times there was a gender division of labour, but if anything women, who were based in the home, were superior to men.

Private property in the means of production arose first in the men’s sphere.

Men wanted to leave their property to their sons. This meant that they had to impose monogamy and patrilineal descent on women, to be assured of the identity of their own sons. Engels describes this as `the world historic defeat of the female sex’, the victory of men over women and private property over common ownership. But he also believed that it responded to women’s longing for chastity and for marriage with one man as they found free sexual relations `the more degrading and oppressive’ as society developed.

This preoccupation with property and inheritance remains the basis of the bourgeois family. In the bourgeois family patriarchy remains firmly established, whatever the legal position, because of male property and female dependence. The bourgeois wife is enslaved, a prostitute to man, his private domestic servant.

Women will only be freed with the abolition of private property, which is the basis of the family, so that marriage will be based on `free sex love’.

Capitalism is destroying the family in the working class and the basis of patriarchy has been destroyed. As women go out to work the last remnants of male domination lose all foundation,

‘except perhaps, for some of that brutality towards women which became firmly rooted with the establishment of monogamy’

But there is still a contradiction between the woman’s domestic responsibility in the private sphere and her public role in society as a worker.

Only with the full entry of women into public industry and the abolition of the family as an economic unit of society will real equality between men and women be ensured.

Engels implies socialisation of child care and domestic labour, but has no programme and very little discussion of the future.

In practice Marx and Engels paid little attention to the issue.

In later life Engels was deeply suspicious of 'bourgeois' feminist movement.

Women's liberation was seen as part of the struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

Orthodox Marxism at the turn of the century : Bebel

Bebel was a leading theorist of the German Social Democratic Party at the turn of the last century. His Women Under Socialism was the bible of the Socialist Second International. It presented in popular form the ideas of Marx and Engels with a mass of empirical illustrations.

For Bebel women suffered doubly through:

economic and social dependence on men.
And, like working class men, through wage slavery.

So working class women have an interest in working together with working class men to change society completely, not just to work for equal rights within capitalism.

The main part of the book is about women in the present. Bebel argues that:

The sexual impulse is ‘natural’, and marriage is thus beneficial to women.
Monogamous marriage is one of the cornerstones of capitalist society.
But modern society failed to meet the demands for a ‘natural life’ because marriage is not based on love
in capitalist society it is basically marriage by compulsion because
it is based on economic considerations and property relations - for women it is a means of support and for men a purely business relationship.

However, Bebel argues that modern marriage is already in a process of dissolution as demonstrated by the falling birth and marriage rates and the rise in the divorce rate. Most divorces were initiated by women despite the fact that they suffered the most and Bebel condemns the double standard of morality that operates in capitalist society.

Bebel argues more clearly than Engels that proletarian marriages are different.

workers marry out of inclination but
such marriages are damaged by poverty, exhaustion, sickness and by lack of work.
More favourable relations can be found in proletarian marriages because both husband and wife realise that they have the same aim, i.e. a radical transformation of society.

But the only way that the marriage ideal could be achieved was through the establishment of a new social order.

So for Bebel the key to women’s liberation rested on economic self-determination which involved:

the struggle for protective legislation and for legal and political equality
entry into the labour market for all women
liberation from domestic work
marriage based on free sex love

Women’s real liberation could only be achieved with

the abolition of private property, and
the liberation of both men and women from the monogamous family.

Bebel argues that this has to take place within a system devoid of profit, based on:

common ownership of the means of production
socialisation of reproduction.
Motherhood as a public service.
the obligation of all to work to their capacity.

In this new world women would become like men, productive and useful members of society, developing their mental and physical capacities to the full.

For Bebel women’s role in this transformation had to be an active one. Women had to mobilise themselves. The working class were women’s natural allies in this struggle because it was the ‘class state’ which also upheld the oppression of one sex by the other.

Bebel also argued that men had to rid themselves of their prejudices. But he:

a)insisted that the women's movement was an integral part of the labour movement, thus should have no contact with bourgeois feminists.

b)downplayed legal and political rights as a concern of bourgeois feminists, leading to formal equality but contributing little to substantive equality

c)regarded the emancipation of women as the automatic consequence of the liberation of the proletariat.

d) Bebel did not envisage any identity of roles between men and women. The reproductive realm is still women’s work and some sort of ‘natural sexual division of labour’ will survive.

Thus women were simply regarded as the most exploited part of the proletariat, and the organisation of women was subordinate to class organisation.

Despite the work of Engels and Bebel, the revolutionary parties paid little practical attention to the issue. Women were organised, but primarily as workers, and ‘bourgeois feminism’ was frowned on. Relatively few women were active in the leadership, and they were no feminists.

Rosa Luxemburg regarded the `woman question' as a diversion from the central priority of class organisation and class struggle.

Clara Zetkin stressed women's emancipation, but as part of proletarian emancipation and subordinate to it.

The Russian revolution: Kollontai

there was a relatively advanced middle class feminist movement in Russia at the end of the 19th century
women workers were very active in the revolutionary movement - set off the February 1917 revolution
but both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks shared the Second International orthodoxy.

Lenin wrote little on the woman question but was aware of the importance of women’s support for the success of the revolution.

He argued that there was a two fold task regarding women:

full legal equality of women

this was a prerequisite for women’s equality but not sufficient.

the entry of women into production, a socialised economy, and the participation of women in general productive labour (in women’s jobs)

But he saw this issue as a secondary issue: solely a women’s problem. It was ‘the women primarily who must undertake the work of building all these institutions’

After the revolution the issue of women's emancipation immediately came to the fore.

The most radical viewpoints within the Bolshevik movement were those of Inessa Armand and AlexandraKollontai.

Alexandra Kollontai followed Engels and Bebel

in her historical account of the family and
in arguing that the liberation of women would come from their entry into social production,

but went beyond them in

emphasising the importance of emotions and sexuality
stressing the need for organisation of women

Kollontai’s work covers a number of themes. The basic themes in her work are:

the organisation of women.
the abolition of private property.
the entry of women into production.
the socialisation of domestic labour
and, a new proletarian sexual morality.

Kollontai recognised that the socialist state needed women both

for a large labour force and
to mother a new generation of workers.

Thus, she also lay a greater stress on the need to reconcile women’s roles as producers and reproducers as well as women’s own aspirations for independence.

Kollontai also made an important step in separating

domestic labour from mothering and
mothering from sexual relations.

But she still rejected the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of the day. The struggle for women’s liberation is an integral part of the struggle for socialism.

For bourgeois feminists the main enemy was men, but for proletarian women men were their comrades who shared the same social conditions, which oppressed both the women and their male comrades:

Emancipation of the proletarian woman could only be accomplished by the common effort of the entire proletariat without distinction of sex, and there could be no single united women’s movement.

Women under capitalism

In bourgeois society the family and marriage are grounded in:

material and financial considerations.
economic dependence of women on the male breadwinner, and
the need to care for children.
The family exists as an independent, individual economic unit within capitalism.

But under capitalism there was a progressive destruction of the family, which ceases ‘to be a necessity for its members as well as for thestate’ because, according to Kollontai, the tasks that remained within the family (cleaning, cooking, and washing and mending linen) did not create any surplus value. The main cause of this change was the universal spread of wage labour on the part of woman.

Kollontai argued that women had a triple burden;

paid work,
housework and
child care.

Women in the Revolution

After the revolution the family remained as a legacy of the past, but communist society would break the ‘domestic yoke of woman in order to render her life richer, completer, happier and freer’ with public services.

Even after the revolution the legacy of the capitalist order had still not been eradicated.

Kolontai argued that

specialised work amongst proletarian women was a vital task so that
the setting up of separate women’sbureaux within the Party was essential

due to the particular conditions of women workers.

While there had been an enormous growth in female wage labour, nevertheless the family seemed unshakeable and the Party had to fight against these traditions every time it wanted to bring woman workers into the class struggle. Women particularly felt the inequality in their pay and their lack of voting rights, and this led to a psychological division between men and women workers.

The socialists also argued that women’s responsibilities to society would always be different to men’s. Women were not only independent workers and citizens - at the same time they were mothers, bearers of the future generations.

However, Kollontai insisted that the way in which women will fulfil these two roles will change in communist society.

To become really free, women had to throw off the chains of the current forms of the family, which oppressed women of all classes, and women needed to look to the state for support rather than, as in the past, to men.

A further task that remained within the family was the care of children but even here society would gradually take over the responsibilities of parents.

The care of children involved three distinct tasks;

the care of very young babies,
the upbringing of children, and
the instruction of the child

Education of children was already the duty of the state while the care of small babies remained, but even here the state has the duty to assure a livelihood to every mother, in order to permit the woman to serve the state in a useful manner and simultaneously to be a mother.

The family unit and domestic labour is therefore seen as uneconomic and involving the expenditure of unproductive labour, especially on the part of women. It was thus in conflict with the aims and interests of communist society for a single economic plan and the expedient use of the labour force, which included the use of women’s labour.

So under communism the family unit shrinks to a union of two people based on mutual agreement. It will not be necessary to abolish the family because it will simply ‘wither away’ once it loses its functions.

The state is no longer concerned with the family as an economic unit, but with

the ‘changing forms of marital relations’: relations between the sexes, and
the care of children, which is a social-state concern.

Maternityis protected and provided for

not only in the interests of the woman herself, but
still more in the interests of state and
the needs of the economy in the transition to a socialist system

Under socialism women are seen first and foremost as a member of the labour force;

maternity is important, but is a supplementary task: a social matter not a private family matter.

Thus Kollontai argues that abortion would disappear when institutions for protecting mothers were fully in place and when women realised that motherhood was a social obligation.

Thus Kollontai argues for public restaurants and kitchens, laundries, cleaning ladies, repair shops, creches, nurseries, kindergartens and income support which would:

remove the burden of motherhood and privatised parenthood
abolish the family as it has been known
leave Engels's marriage based on individual sex-love

Sexuality and Communist Morality

Kollontai also recognised the importance of sexuality for politics and it is in this area that her arguments go beyond most other Bolsheviks and indeed of Engels and Bebel. Her interest in morality and emotions however, is continually linked with the philosophy of class struggle.

In bourgeois society the family came first but for workers class interests must come first. This is one reason why it is essential for women to take part in productive labour outside the home. If women are tied to the kitchen they shut their eyes to the social struggle and this is in contradiction with the aims of a working class ideology of ‘comradely solidarity’.

Many socialists argued that sexual problems could only ‘be settled when the basic re-organisation of the social and economic structure of society has been tackled’. Kollontai, on the other hand, argued that ideology, and a new sexual morality had to be worked out in the process of the struggle with hostile forces.

For Kollontai the bourgeois ideal of marriage and love is directed towards the accumulation of capital, and thus it has no relevance for the working class. And one of the constant features of social struggle has been the attempt to change relationships between the sexes.

Within the capitalist system there are three types of relationships;

legal marriage,
prostitution and
‘free union’.

But all three types block and distort the human soul. Without a change of the human psyche and an increase in ‘man’s potential for loving’ there can be no way out of the sexual crisis that characterises society. Bourgeois marriage is extremely individualistic but also leads to the idea that one person within the marriage possesses the other and is based on a double morality.