Work Among Women¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Bolsheviks’ systematic work among women workers during the First World War was not a marginal or philanthropic effort but a strategic necessity, rooted in the material transformation of the Russian working class. As men were mobilised for the front, women were drawn into industry in vast numbers: by January 1917, women made up 34.2 per cent of manufacturing workers, up from 27.4 per cent in 1914, and in engineering their share leapt from 1.1 per cent to 14.3 per cent. The chapter draws on data from the Special Council for Defence, which found that among 700,000 war workers, 17 per cent were women and 12.5 per cent adolescents. These new layers were raw, inexperienced, and often politically backward, but the brutal conditions of wartime — long hours, falling real wages, rising prices, and the collapse of family life — rapidly radicalised them. The chapter quotes a 1915 Bolshevik leaflet, ‘To the Working Women of Kiev’, which explicitly links the oppression of women to the exploitation of male workers and insists that their liberation can only come through united struggle in the Social Democratic Party, trade unions, and cooperatives.
The Bolsheviks’ approach is sharply distinguished from bourgeois or petty-bourgeois feminism. The party took up demands of special interest to women — maternity benefits, full civil and family equality — but subordinated them to the general class struggle and the perspective of socialist revolution. To reach women workers, the party launched the newspaper Rabotnitsa in 1914, financed by factory collections, and had already organised the first International Women’s Day meeting in Russia in 1913. The Mensheviks also produced a women’s newspaper, but the chapter implies this was a pale imitation, lacking the Bolsheviks’ implacable revolutionary spirit. The war itself is presented as the great educator: women textile workers in Kostroma distributed a leaflet to troops, provoking a bloody crackdown in which 12 were killed and 45 wounded. By 1915, 20 per cent of all strikes were political, up from 11 per cent in the first months of the war. The chapter concludes with a polemical flourish: it is no accident that the February Revolution began on International Women’s Day, and that the first initiative came from women workers who had received their ‘baptism of fire’ during the war. The implicit target is any conception of women’s emancipation that separates it from the revolutionary struggle of the working class as a whole.