2. The ‘Woman Question’: Early Years in Russia¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 2. The ‘Woman Question’: Early Years in Russia¶
This chapter traces the Bolsheviks’ evolving engagement with the ‘woman question’ from the late nineteenth century through to the February Revolution of 1917. It argues that the Party’s practical work among women workers, though initially hesitant and contested, proved decisive both for building the revolutionary movement and for the overthrow of tsarism. The core claim is that women’s double oppression—as workers and as women—required specific organisational forms and demands within the broader class struggle, a position that had to be fought for against male indifference and accusations of bourgeois separatism.
From 1878, upper-class Russian women entered higher education and formed study circles to overcome their subordination. The Narodniks organised the first political groups, but their repeated failures drove many young female idealists to suicide. Rose Glickman’s study showed that patriarchal structures made women diffident in mixed meetings, necessitating all-women gatherings to develop trade union cadres. Peasant women brought a legacy of subordination to the factories; marriage added housework to waged labour. By 1912, three-quarters of pregnant women worked until labour, resuming days after birth, with up to two-thirds of factory workers’ infants dying in their first year.
The Social Democrats organised women-only study circles for factory workers and domestics, teaching literacy using illegal literature. Nadezhda Krupskaya’s The Woman Worker, the first socialist text on Russian women’s oppression, argued women had a double interest in the workers’ cause. She and Lenin secured women’s equality in the 1903 RSDLP programme, including demands for universal suffrage, state provision for children, and protective labour laws, though equal pay was omitted. Many women revolutionaries married young and bore children, limiting party work; about one-fifth of Bolshevik women chose not to have children.
The tsarist state defended reactionary marriage and family structures. Kollontai argued that liberation required motherhood and childcare to become collective social responsibilities, not individual burdens. She insisted socialism must be determined equally by both sexes, necessitating an ideological struggle within the party for women’s equal position in the class war, and separate preparatory meetings to recruit women.
From 1910, Russian women increasingly participated in economic struggles, leading strikes that demanded an end to sexual harassment and equal pay. The Bolsheviks established a women’s column in Pravda in 1913, coordinated by Samoilova, who collected data on women’s conditions. International Women’s Day was celebrated in Russia from 1913, despite party suspicions of separatism. Samoilova rejected accusations of bourgeois feminism, citing Kollontai, and argued that male comrades’ insensitivity explained low female party membership. In 1914, the Bolshevik Central Committee approved a women’s paper, Rabotnitsa, launched on IWD. It was the party’s first official long-term effort for women, funded largely by working women. The paper articulated women’s dual oppression and demanded inclusion, with Armand emphasising that socialism could not progress without encouraging women’s struggles.
The February 1917 Revolution began on IWD, when women textile workers struck for ‘Bread and Peace’ against Bolshevik, Menshevik and SR opposition. Their action sparked a mass movement that ousted the tsarist regime within a week. Trotsky described the February Revolution as led by workers educated by Lenin’s party, and argued that the women’s action on 23 February broke the passivity of the Petrograd garrison. The Bolsheviks’ prior work among women meant they could channel this spontaneous uprising into organised revolutionary struggle. By 1917, the party had a cadre of experienced women organisers and a clear programme linking women’s emancipation to the overthrow of capitalism. The Bolshevik leadership recognised that women’s double oppression required specific demands and organisational autonomy within the party, maintaining that women’s liberation required socialist revolution and vice versa.