WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
FOLLOWING THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA 100 YEARS AGO, THE COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT BEGAN EXPERIMENTS WITH THE AIM TO LIBERATE WOMEN. SO WHAT HAPPENED?
“The women were in a very militant mood – not only the women workers but the masses of women queuing for bread and kerosene. They held political meetings, they predominated in the streets, they moved to the city duma with a demand for bread, they stopped trams,” reported the communist newspaper Pravda about events taking place on International Women’s Day, 8 March 1917 (or 23 February in the Julian calendar) in Petrograd*. Their conclusion that it “gave rise to the revolutionary spirit” was correct – it was the first of several days of what became the February Revolution. By the 15 March, the Tsar had abdicated, ending the monarchy in Russia.
Women continued to protest, even after a provisional government was appointed, with over 40,000 women marching in Petrograd in March. Their agitations won them the right to vote – the first such reform made by a major political power (it wasn’t until 1918 that women in Britain could vote – and then only if over 30).
This increased visibility of women meant that the Bolshevik party, led by Lenin, began addressing the “women’s question”. The February Revolution showed that engaging women would be key to getting power.
Such protests paved the way for the October Revolution on 7 and 8 November (25 and 26 October): leading to the overthrow of the provisional government and the formation of the world’s first Communist state.
EQUALITY FOR WORKERS
There were two main reasons behind the women’s protests; the main one being the First World War. At home, its impact was a scarcity of food in urban areas, coupled with high inflation and fuel shortages. The women had marched for “bread and peace” and the Bolsheviks withdrew Russia from the war in March 1918. However, that wasn’t the end to conflict, with the Civil War continuing for a further four years. About 50,000 to 70,000 women fought in the pro-Bolshevik Red Army, 2% of the overall armed forces.
Another underlying source of discontent was women’s poor working conditions. At the beginning of the century, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, researched the lives of workers and discovered that women had too much work, too little pay, too little time and no security. Her resulting pamphlet, ‘The Woman Worker’, was circulated illegally. On taking power, the Bolsheviks’ swiftly made new laws based on the principle, ‘Equal pay for equal work’, allowing women equal rights to sick pay, paid holiday leave and a minimum wage. The latter two were forward thinking for workers of both genders. In Britain, for example, paid holiday was only introduced in 1938, and the minimum wage was restricted to certain industries. Meanwhile, women workers had to wait until 1975 for The Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Act…
Russia’s First Family Code of 1918 included legislation to promote gender equality – abortion and divorce laws were liberalised ( both happened in the 1960s in Britain); co-habitation was permitted, and the following year saw the creation of a Women’s Bureau, ‘Zhenotdel’, led by Alexandra Kollontai: thought to be the first female minister in the world. Zhenotdel activities included education for working-class and peasant women, with a particular focus on the ‘oppressed’ women in the Muslim Central Asian area of Russia. Prior to the revolution, Kollontai had worked to engage women in socialist issues, giving pro-Communist lectures under the guise of educational classes. Although her views were more extreme than the majority, many did become part of Bolshevik law. Her 1915 work ‘Society and Maternity’ demanded 16 weeks’ fully paid maternity leave, free birth clinics and on-site nursing facilities. While clinics and nurseries did come to be built, maternity leave was brought in at eight weeks. Even this was »
“The Bolsheviks swiftly made new laws giving women equal rights to sick pay, paid holiday and a minimum wage”
better than what was offered in Britain. From 1911, UK mothers were given a one-off ‘maternity’ grant, and maternity leave legislation didn’t come in until the 1970s.
However, it wasn’t philanthropy or feminism behind these ideas – rather that those in power needed women to contribute economically, through work, to the new Russia. Women were encouraged to move to urban areas for employment, while their traditional role in the home was questioned. As Lenin voiced, “Petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades [the woman], chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty… stultifying and crushing drudgery.”
Communal apartments were constructed in urban areas, for two to seven families, with communal kitchens, bathrooms and hallways, while canteens or ‘kitchen-factories’ and nurseries were built to serve workers. The result was that more women did enter the workforce: the number more than doubling from 1923 to 885,000 in 1930.
Although government ministers such as Nikolay Kuzmin declared that, “The proletariat must destroy the family as a prime device of oppression and exploitation,” not everything went to plan. Legalising cohabitation made it easier for men to walk out on their family and led to an increase in homeless children, until a revised law in 1926. With more control over fertility, the birth rate declined dramatically – seen by some as a threat to Russia’s military
“It wasn’t feminism behind these ideas…those in power needed women to work”
might. And in Asian Russia, the women’s party focus on Muslim women was hugely unpopular, helping to build anti-Soviet feeling.
FAMILY MATTERS
In 1930, the Women’s Bureau was abolished. Stalin’s leadership saw a reversing of many of the early Bolshevik laws. Women were recast in a supporting role, charged with creating a home life that would “increase productivity and improve quality of work.” They were, however, still expected to work. A story by the novelist and single parent Natalya Baranskaya, ‘A Week Like Any Other’, illustrates the daily difficulties in juggling family and work: “I’ve lost 78 working days…in sick days and certificates. And all because of the children,” says the character Olga. “I don’t understand why I feel so awkward, even ashamed.”
The aim of those first ten years of Bolshevik rule of women’s liberation was never fully realised, although many of the laws were re-introduced in the 1950s, after Stalin’s death. But the pace of change over that first decade shows the direct impact government policy can have. Today, with about 11 million more women than men in Russia, it’s fascinating to speculate on what the next 100 years may hold.