Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.' >
Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.' >
Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.'>
Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.' />
Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.' />
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Порталус

Women's Rights in the Early Soviet Republic

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) DEMOGRAPHICS →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190296770


The meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution for Russian women has long been a disputed question. Coming to power promising full sexual equality and an end to oppressive gender-biased social institutions, the Bolsheviks stood at least in theory for women's liberation.
Many scholars see fruit born of this promise. Divorce, abortion, equal employment opportunities, and several other "modern" demands from women quickly allowed for greater female participation in government and society. Yet, despite the rhetoric and legislation, many observers do not see great meaning for women in the Bolshevik Revolution. Old sexual prejudices remained intact. Professions that became female-dominated, such as medicine, quickly dropped in status. Women continued to suffer discrimination, limits on traditional roles, and other problems that made them disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. Most Russian feminists, adhering to liberal views, fled Soviet Russia, while others bemoaned continuing abuse and denounced the lack of improvement in their gender's status.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

The Russian Revolution was undoubtedly a great leap forward for female Russian citizens. Although the Bolshevik government was more fundamentally committed to a program of liberating the working class, women's rights enjoyed an unprecedented place in the new regime's political program and philosophy. Women were seen as critical to Soviet success during the revolution, Civil War, and drive toward industrialization. Although women played less of a role in the Bolshevik political leadership, they received new freedoms that the authorities either implemented immediately or were committed to implementing within a realistic time frame. Soviet governance also created valuable new space for women's participation in politics and society at large.

Historians have universally acknowledged the Soviets' almost immediate passage of key legislation aimed at improving the Russian women's social plight. The establishment of rights to maternity leave, the eight-hour workday, legalized abortion, state-supported day care, higher education, and easy divorce offered at least in principle to establish a near parity between the genders. While the translation of these intentions into reality took many years, if not decades, the delays are largely excusable. The Bolsheviks' struggle to survive in the Civil War that immediately followed their seizure of power forced them to put military and other immediate needs before living up to their long-term political program. Nevertheless, they were fully cognizant of women as a key human resource in their struggles. Women broadly participated in the Revolution and Civil War as militants, soldiers, police officials, and workers. This participation has been noted by Alexandra Kollontai, the major feminist leader among the Bolsheviks, who stated in 1920 that "the future historian will undoubtedly note that the one of the characteristics of our revolution was that women workers and peasants played not--as in the French Revolution--a passive role, but an active, important role." Indeed, women participants in the Russian Civil War numbered approximately seventy-four thousand; nearly two thousand were killed, and fifty-five were awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Women also were almost immediately allowed full and free access to the new regime's educational opportunities. This change resulted in the rapid erasure of the literacy gap between the sexes and in a vast increase in women's participation in top academic programs, including medical schools and programs of study in the hard sciences and engineering. Women numbered half of medical students by 1926 and half of Soviet doctors within a decade thereafter, an achievement that would have been quite impossible before 1917. The access to education that this first generation received endured throughout the next seventy years of the regime's history and continues in post-Soviet Russia today.

Assessing the degree of women's participation at a political level is a complicated issue. Historians have rightfully pointed out that women were a small minority among the party's upper echelons at the time of the revolution and remained a minority of party members throughout the history of the Soviet Union. For example, only three women had been members of the highest committees within the party before the revolution, and afterward women were outnumbered fifty to one in the ranks of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. No woman entered the Politburo, the Soviet Union's highest administrative body, until 1956. Only one major political leader, Kollontai, was unhesitatingly devoted to women's issues. Although she was appointed to the high post of commissar of public welfare in the first Bolshevik government, her later association with the Workers' Opposition group, whose syndicalism challenged the unity and discipline of the party, caused her demotion to ambassador to Sweden and Norway. Other prominent female figures within the party, including Vladimir Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, played down women's issues in favor of the Bolsheviks' immediate needs.

One may qualify these factors, however, by noting that before 1917 few governments had granted women full rights of political participation. Lenin, moreover, allowed Kollontai to establish a separate women's section of the party (zhenotdel) to mobilize efforts to resolve outstanding grievances during the first thirteen years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, as Richard Stites has noted, the zhenotdel, as part of the ruling party, was uniquely successful in implementing reform. Its work was carried out not only by a permanently staffed institutional headquarters in Moscow and regular publications, including Rabotnitsa (The Female Worker), but also by propaganda campaigns throughout the Soviet Union. They were noted in particular for their work in liberating Muslim women under Soviet rule from the discrimination and social problems they encountered in their traditional societies.

Historians have also been critical of the Soviet commitment to women's rights during the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP). They have pointed to the inability of the zhenotdel to secure gender equality at a time when the Bolsheviks sought support from hitherto unsympathetic segments of Soviet society, which to a degree included traditionally minded women. Admittedly, discrimination and harassment in the workplace and at home continued under Soviet government. Yet, one might properly wonder at the degree to which these attitudes were left over from the pervasive paternalism of prerevolutionary society. One also may call attention to women's suffering from new social crises during the NEP era, caused in part by ambiguities in the new law code. Prostitution, which remained semilegal, flourished in urban areas, permitting a great degree of exploitation. However, having the rights to divorce their spouses easily, use birth control, have resort to legal abortion, collect alimony payments and other forms of social support, and pursue higher education on a mass scale dramatically improved compared to prerevolutionary conditions, which allowed for virtually none of these. Indeed, the divorce rate in early Soviet Russia was fully 26 times higher than in prerevolutionary Russia.

Stalin's first Five Year Plan, the ambitious program of industrial development launched in 1928, further helped ameliorate gender inequity by employing women as a critical human resource. Women again were mobilized to revitalize the urban economy, becoming a substantial proportion of the large-scale industrial workforce, a sector hitherto reserved for males. The total portion of working women increased from 28.6 to 35.5 percent between 1928 and 1933. In most light industries, including printing, textiles, and shoe production, women came to make up a majority of workers. Greater employment prospects increased their financial, social, and professional independence.

Women's rights improved greatly after the Bolshevik Revolution. There may have been problems in terms of equal political participation within the party, and some social ills and stigmas persisted. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that women played an increasingly active role in society. With the help of the zhenotdel and a first generation of liberated women, the female half of the population was able to enter both the higher professions and the industrial workforce. This accomplishment compares favorably with that of many highly developed economies of that time, which were still reluctant to employ or enfranchise half of their critical human resources.

-- York Norman, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.

The initial flurry of decrees emanating from the nascent Bolshevik government made Soviet women not simply the most emancipated but, moreover, those endowed with the most far- reaching political rights of any nation in the world. Several powerful women, including Vladimir Lenin's own wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, were respected members of the Bolshevik Party. In 1919 the regime went so far as to organize a separate Women's Department of the Central Committee Secretariat (zhenotdel), which included local branches within party committees throughout the country. Yet, the party itself, because it held the primacy of class over that of sex as a social category, failed to understand that many of its directives contained fundamental gender biases because they refused to distinguish on paper between the two sexes, in direct contrast with what was happening in practice.

Tsarist Russia had a rich tradition of female participation in its radical revolutionary movement, but a weak feminist movement. Feminism, because it emphasized female suffrage at the turn of the century--in Russia and everywhere else--was deemed "bourgeois" in Russia, and its articulate, politicized women were far more likely to be socialists than suffragettes. Their primary source for theorizing about the distinctive needs of women was Friedrich Engels's writings, which stressed the need to liberate women from domestic confinement. The emancipation of women was subsumed under the greater goal of bringing the working class to power, as evidenced by the first Bolshevik publication for a specifically female audience, Rabotnitsa (The Female Worker), which appeared in 1913. Its editor, Inessa Armand, who would also be the first head of the zhenotdel, commented in the first issue that "women workers do not have special demands separate from general proletarian demands." Yet, they did. Driven into the labor force in unprecedented numbers during World War I, women were also likely to have less education and fewer skills than their male counterparts. Moreover, they were met with suspicion for this cultural backwardness, which included a greater tendency than men to remain followers of the Orthodox Church and culturally conservative. However, Lenin, who repeated on many occasions that women were "a brake in all previous revolutions," also reiterated that the success of the revolution depended upon the conversion of women to communism.

In 1918, even before the outbreak of full-scale civil war, the nascent Bolshevik regime increased the rights of women dramatically by guaranteeing their equality with men in everything from property ownership to pay. Moreover, the early legislation addressed critical issues of the family that had worked more against wives than husbands in the past, facilitating the process for divorce and allowing either spouse to move separately. Women were also singled out for their unique responsibilities of childbearing; they were guaranteed paid maternity leave and in 1920 became the first women in the world to have access to legal abortions. Peasant women could not only work the land alongside men, but they could also participate in decision- making processes of the village assemblies according to the Land Code of 1922.

The party hoped that legislating sexual equality would raise the political consciousness of the female population and make it an active participant in the arduous struggle to build the state. Female members were often pressed into service, though, for qualities that were considered intrinsically female. For example, they were recruited into antiprofiteering detachments during the Civil War because of their "tender hearts and sharp eyes." As Elizabeth Wood has illustrated, women were perpetually recruited through patriarchal images in which the party or state replaced the male authorities to which they had been subservient in the prerevolutionary era. In addition, the kinds of jobs into which they were being placed reflected the sexism of old: inspecting kindergartens rather than factories, for instance. The first glass ceiling was being put in place.

The end of the Civil War in 1921 resulted in the demobilization of approximately three million soldiers, and, as in other societies demobilizing from the era of World War I, brought with it the obvious need to reintegrate these men into the workforce. A country devastated by seven years of war and revolution, moreover, required radical measures to reorganize its economy for peacetime production. Lenin's response to this situation was to implement the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which called for a return to limited market forces to stimulate recovery and produce an economic equilibrium. Therefore, when factory managers were told to make productivity paramount, they were implicitly given the authority to jettison more idealistic social practices. When delegates to the Tenth Party Congress, which approved NEP in March 1921, proposed that the women's departments be subsumed within the party's agitation sections, they inspired many local committee bosses to liquidate their women's sections, over protests from some Soviet leaders. According to Bolshevik philosophy, genuine liberation would be realized through female participation in both the labor force and the public sphere. NEP, though, was forcing the closure of both of these avenues to women. The paper legislation did not undermine the structural realities that prevented women from achieving any truly functional equality.

NEP was sometimes known in workers' circles as the "new exploitation of the proletariat." Women may have thought of it as the "(re)newed exploitation of the pregnant." Their rights to paid maternity leave dissuaded managers from hiring them, citing the costs of both the necessary health care and the lost time at the job. As employment rose among men, it declined among women, despite legislation in 1922 against job discrimination on the basis of sex. The prominent Bolshevik women's leader Alexandra Kollontai, who had replaced the deceased Armand at the Union-level zhenotdel, joined leaders of the Central Council of Trade Unions to protest aspects of NEP that undermined proletarian democracy. She found herself accused of engaging in "feminist deviation" and, after being forced to recant her views, was exiled to Norway as a member of a nonessential trade delegation. Her replacement from 1922, Sofiia Smidovich, was not only a political moderate but also a cultural conservative. An Old Bolshevik, Smidovich was also old-fashioned. Not only did she wish to keep women subsumed under the proletariat as a general concept, but she also gave voice to those who objected to what they saw as excessive liberalism in family policies. Zhenotdel lost so much influence that its disbandment in 1930 was merely a formality. Female membership in the party never surpassed 10 percent, and the masculinist culture embraced by Joseph Stalin and those he enrolled as head of the Organization Bureau excluded women from higher positions in the party and state apparatuses.

Long before Western feminists championed the idea that "the personal is the political," Soviet women learned that individual freedom was best pursued in private life. Perhaps the most poignant example of the cultural distance between emancipation by decree and by individual choice can be seen in the movie Bed and Sofa, produced in 1926, before socialist realism began to restrict the agenda expressed though popular culture. The heroine begins as the prototype of the new woman, sharing her bed with her husband while his friend sleeps on the sofa in their overcrowded Moscow apartment. Then, she reverses the sleeping arrangements. When she finds herself pregnant, not knowing which of her partners is the father, the two men insist that she have an abortion. She goes to the clinic, the existence of which was portrayed as an indicator of social progress. Ultimately, though, the heroine cannot go through with the procedure and returns to her village to have her baby without the prospective fathers. It was not the Soviet government that gave her meaningful equality, because she still found herself pressured by men to make decisions convenient for themselves. As centuries of women before her had done, she recovered what personal freedoms she could for herself by evading the state and its male emissaries.

-- Louise McReynolds, University of Hawai'i, Manoa


OUR TASKS

The female Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollantai wrote the following essay in 1917 on the need for women to help build a new Russia:

A serious task of great responsibility now faces the working men and women of our country. We must build the new Russia, a Russia in which the working people, office workers, servants, day workers, needlewomen and those who are simply the wives of working men, will have a better and brighter life than they had during the accursed reign of bloody Nicholas.

However, the task of winning and consolidating state power for the proletariat and the small peasant, of introducing and implementing such legislation as will limit the appetites of capitalist exploiters and defend the interests of workers, is not the only task now facing the working men and women of Russia. The proletariat of Russia now occupies a special position vis-a-vis the working men and women of other countries.

The great Russian revolution has placed us, Russian working men and women, in the front ranks of those fighting for the world-wide workers' cause, for the interests of all workers.

We are able to speak, write and act more freely than the working women and men of other countries.

How, then, can we not use this freedom, won for us by the blood of our comrades, to concentrate our forces, the forces of the women of the working class, without delay in order to conduct a tireless, insistent mass struggle to achieve the quickest possible end to world war?

Our women comrades, the working women of other countries, are waiting for us to take this step.

War is now the most dreadful evil hanging over us. While the war continues we cannot build the new Russia, cannot resolve the problem of bread, of food, cannot halt the rising cost of living. While, with every hour that passes, the war continues to kill and cripple our children and husbands, we, the women of the working class, cannot know peace! . . .

If our first task is to help our comrades build the new, democratic Russia, our second task, no less urgent, and closer to our hearts, is to rouse working women to declare war on war.

And this means: firstly, not only to ourselves understand that this is not our war, that it is being waged in the name of the pecuniary interests of the wealthy bosses, bankers and manufacturers, but also to constantly explain this to our working comrades both women and men.

Secondly, it means uniting the forces of working women and men around that party which not only defends the interests of the Russian proletariat, but is also fighting to ensure that proletarian blood is not shed for the glory of capitalists.

Comrade women workers! We can no longer resign ourselves to war and rising prices! We must fight. Join our ranks, the ranks of the Social-Democratic Labor Party! However, it is not enough to join the party. If we really want to hasten peace, then working men and women must fight to ensure that state power is transferred from the hands of big capitalists--the ones really responsible for all our woes, all the blood being shed on battlefields--to the hands of our representatives, the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

In the struggle against war and rising prices, in the struggle to secure power in Russia for the dispossessed, for the working people, in the struggle for a new order and new laws, much depends on us, the women workers. The days are passed when the success of the workers' cause depended only on the organization of the men. Now, as a result of this war, there has been a sharp change in the position of working-class women. Female labor can now be found everywhere. War has forced women to take jobs that before they would never have thought of. Whereas in 1912 there were only 45 women for every 100 men working in factories, now it is not uncommon to find 100 women for every 75 men.

The success of the workers cause, the success of the workers' struggle for a better life--for a shorter working day, for higher pay, for health insurance, unemployment pay, old-age pensions, etc.--the success of their struggle to defend the work of our children, to obtain better schools, now depends not only on the consciousness and organization of the men, but also on the number of women workers entering the ranks of the organized working class. The more of us enter the ranks of the organized fighters for our common workers' cause and needs, the sooner we will win concessions from the capitalist extortionists.

All our strength, all our hope, lies in organization!

Now our slogan must be: comrade women workers! Do not stand in isolation. Isolated, we are but straws that any boss can bend to his will, but organized we are a mighty force that no one can break.

We, the women workers, were the first to raise the Red Banner in the days of the Russian revolution, the first to go out onto the streets on Women's Day. Let us now hasten to join the leading ranks of the fighters for the workers' cause, let us join trade unions, the Social-Democratic Party, the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies!

Our ranks united, we will aim at rapidly putting an end to bloody war among the nations; we will oppose all who have forgotten the great working-class precept of unity, of solidarity among the workers of every country.

It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future--the socialist brotherhood of the workers.

Source: Alexandra Kollontai, "Our Tasks," Rabotnitsa (The Female Worker), Petrograd, 1917, Nos. 1-2, pp. 3-4, in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, translated by Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977).

FURTHER READINGS


References


Dorothy Atkinson and others, eds., Women in Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1977).

Wendy Z. Goldman, Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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