THE POLITICAL ACTIVISTS

The surge of political activism by women began in the 1890s and continued, with ebbs and flows, right up to the women’s march that set off the Russian Revolution. It was centered in the European region of the empire and was part of the unrest rising across the society. Tens of thousands of women, poor as well as privileged ones, became involved. They were united in their desire to improve the lives of women and the poor, but divided over whether to work in women’s groups or join ones led by men, whether to concentrate on women’s issues or pursue multiple agendas, whether to seek incremental changes or revolution. So their activism was multifarious and their arguments with one another heated.

FEMINISTS AND SOCIAL DEMOCRATS, 1890–1904

The 1890s were an encouraging decade for feminists across the European world. Particularly in the United States and Britain, female philanthropists and professionals from a variety of organizations worked with male allies to persuade governments to institute child‑welfare agencies, improve education for girls and women, provide pension plans for widows, and issue protective labor laws and public‑health regulations. The feminists among these activists built large organizations that campaigned for women’s suffrage.

These successes encouraged two veteran Russian feminists, Anna Filosofova and Nadezhda Stasova, to join with pediatrician Anna Shabanova to establish the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society in 1895. Sophia Panina was an early board member as well. The society’s charter was modeled on those of the women’s clubs then springing up in the United States, which were dedicated to educating their upper‑class members and to philanthropy. Many of the American clubwomen were also feminists who supported the suffrage movement. The Russian society’s members, several thousand women in the capitals and in provincial cities, could not pursue the vote in Russia, for the government would not permit it, so they contented themselves with charities–clothing banks, daycare centers, housing for single women, job training programs, medical clinics–and with expanding higher education for women. This agenda was similar to that of the 1860s, and their accomplishments were comparable to those of that period as well. Their work among the poor helped the small number of people it reached; their greatest successes came in improving higher education.

Another, much smaller group of female activists were also organizing in the 1890s. They were the Social Democrats, Marxists dedicated to leading the workers to revolution. Early in the decade, female Social Democrats in St. Petersburg attempted to spread their message about capitalist and tsarist injustices to working‑class women. One of the most energetic of these Social Democrats was Vera Karelina, a textile worker; the presence of women like Karelina was a new development in the socialist movement, which had hitherto attracted women from the middling ranks and the nobility. Karelina and a few like‑minded comrades argued that working‑class women could become radicalized. Most Social Democrats were skeptical. Women, they believed, were far less likely than men to listen to the revolutionaries, because women were more ignorant and conservative. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that women were usually more reluctant than men to join strikes. Karelina argued that properly trained propagandists could get women to listen. Her argument was strengthened when, in 1895 and 1896, female factory workers did go on strike in St. Petersburg. The government broke up the protests, but the groundwork had been laid among female workers and Social Democrats for future engagements with their bosses and the autocracy.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1905

The political temperature rose at the turn of the century. Worker unrest boiled up in a new round of strikes in 1901, in which women participated. In 1902 and 1903, thousands of university students, male and female, demonstrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, and the liberal press, professional societies, and zemstvo organizations began publicly criticizing the regime. The government attempted to curry favor by letting the liberals talk and by setting up trade unions for the workers, run by the police but permitted to represent the workers to their employers. It also decided to stir up patriotism by going to war with Japan in 1904.

The war went badly, and then the experiment in government‑controlled unions blew up. In the fall of 1904, one of these unions, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg, headed by a priest named Georgi Gapon and an executive committee of workers that included Vera Karelina, had thousands of members. A thousand or so were women, organized into chapters based in working‑class neighborhoods. As the winter came on, the assembly was growing increasingly critical of the regime’s ineptitude and intransigence.

In December, when strikes spread again through the factories, Gapon drafted a petition calling for improved working conditions, higher wages, the eight‑hour day, an end to the war, and universal suffrage. On January 9, 1905, a sunny, cold Sunday, the priest led a huge crowd to the Winter Palace to present the petition to the emperor. “Many male and female workers thought then that the tsar would listen to them and not let the factory owners harm them,” wrote Anna Matveeva, a servant who set out for the palace that morning. But the emperor did not receive them; he was not even there. Instead the marchers were met by soldiers who opened fire. Terrified people fled the Winter Palace Square into the crowded streets beyond, where they were charged by mounted Cossacks and shot at by snipers. Matveeva ran with the rest, forgetting afterward how she got away, but remembering the carnage. “For a long time,” she wrote twenty years later, “the cries and moans stayed in my ears, the horror of death in my eyes, especially the cries of the children, the shots, and the curses.” Hundreds were killed, many more wounded, and the government followed up by arresting demonstrators.¹³

This massacre, soon christened Bloody Sunday, infuriated and emboldened liberals and radicals alike, and the year that followed was marked by strikes, demonstrations, and violent confrontations between police, soldiers, and angry crowds. Trade unions and political parties organized and the press broke free of censorship. Peasants attacked noble landowners. The fury at the government was fed by humiliating news from the war, which the Japanese were winning. In October, a general strike shut down the major cities. Nicholas II was forced to issue the October Manifesto, promising most of the reforms the Bloody Sunday marchers had called for. Protests then abated, as the nation awaited the establishment of a more democratic government and the government cracked down on revolutionaries.

Working‑class women participated in the 1905 revolution by demonstrating and striking. They joined newly formed unions of metalworkers, printers, railroad white‑collar workers, shop assistants, textile workers, and tobacco workers. They also organized all‑female unions of laundresses in the capital and servants’ unions in Kiev, Nizhni‑Novgorod, Rostov‑na‑Donu, St. Petersburg, and Tbilisi. In the fall, working‑class women elected female representatives to the soviets, committees representing workers, in Ivanovo‑Voznesensk and St. Petersburg.¹⁴ The women who became union members and soviet delegates were few in number, but they and the many female strikers showed that some poor women were far less docile than the government, the factory owners, and the revolutionaries had assumed.

When peasant women joined the turmoil of 1905, their activism was more traditional than that of urban women. Peasants across Russia rose up against their landlords, demanding the renegotiation of leases on the land they farmed and attacking people they perceived as exploiters. Women were in the crowds that marched on landlords’ houses and merchants’ shops, as they had been in peasant uprisings in the past. Indeed, there was a long tradition across Europe of peasant women joining men in such rebellions. Female activists in Russia’s cities were cheered by the willingness of peasant women to protest; conservatives considered it a sign of the end of civilization.

Feminists rose up too in 1905. The Philanthropic Society redoubled its petitioning for improvements in women’s education and employment, but now their methods seemed too cautious to many feminists. Some of these women came together in Moscow in late winter to form the Union of Equal Rights. The leaders included doctor of laws Anna Evreinova, historians Anna Miliukova and Ekaterina Shepkina, journalist Liubov Gurevich, teacher Maria Chekhova, and writer Zinaida Mirovich. Quickly the union set up a national board of directors based in Moscow and St. Petersburg and promoted the establishment of chapters in other cities. By the end of 1905 the organization had eight thousand members, most of them professionals in their twenties and thirties.¹⁵

At the founding convention of the Union of Equal Rights in April, delegates approved a platform that declared their general objective to be “the attainment by all women of political and civil rights identical with the rights of Russian male citizens, with the goal of improving the legal and economic situation of women.”¹⁶ Specifically, the platform called for universal suffrage, equal opportunities for females in education and employment, equal treatment of women in reform of the peasant commune, protective labor regulations, and an end to government regulation of prostitution. The platform also advocated constitutional monarchy, civil liberties, the right to organize and bargain collectively, improved working conditions, self‑government for ethnic minorities, and the abolition of all laws discriminating on the basis of religion or nationality. By including these reforms in its platform, the Union of Equal Rights affiliated itself with the liberal movement, and more particularly with the Union of Unions, a coalition of professional and trade‑union organizations. Some feminists doubted the wisdom of working closely with mostly male political groups. They believed that the Union of Equal Rights would be more effective if it maintained its independence. The majority of its members disagreed, arguing that it was both prudent and principled to ally with others.

The politics of 1905 put that argument to the test. Union feminists made the vote a primary objective, as suffragists in Western Europe and the United States were doing. They got support from the socialists and sought the endorsement of liberals as well. To that end they lobbied the zemstva and their municipal counterparts, the dumy (the singular is duma). Although individual members of these organizations were receptive, national conferences of zemstva representatives reacted with indifference or hostility. Some delegates argued that women should stay home and take care of their families. Others accepted the justice of women having the vote, but said that advocating it now was dangerous politically. The countryside was awash in peasant rioting, these men argued; no need to stir up the villages further with talk of women’s rights. Feminists denounced the hypocrisy of espousing Russia’s liberation, then limiting it to one‑half of the population.

Lobbying political parties was one element in the union’s strategy for the revolutionary year. Members also reached out to peasant and proletarian women, encouraging them to draft petitions, write letters to newspapers, and hold meetings on the woman question. They helped organize a union for domestic servants in Moscow. During the general strike in October, Union of Equal Rights members collected donations for the strikers and held their banners aloft at protest meetings. All this activity built support among other political groups. By early 1906, Rochelle Ruthchild writes, “as a result of feminist lobbying, representatives of the rural and urban local governments, the professional, trade and peasants unions had included women’s suffrage planks in their platforms.”¹⁷

The political fortunes of the feminists waned in 1906. Delegates to the new national legislature, the Duma, refused to endorse women’s suffrage, which, in the end, mattered little, because the government soon reasserted its power. It dismissed the legislature, then rewrote the election law to ensure that future ones would be compliant and powerless. It also arrested opposition leaders. The Union of Equal Rights was one of many organizations that saw its membership shrink dramatically; it disbanded in 1908.

FEMINISM AND TEMPERANCE

Even as feminists struggled to keep going after 1905, the Russian temperance movement flourished. Across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the crusade against alcohol was a major cause for activist women and men. Temperance advocates bemoaned drinking’s negative effects on men’s health, on their work performance, and on their families, who were often abused and impoverished. They also linked drunkenness among women to that other social evil, prostitution, and more generally to what many saw as the moral depravity of the slums. To remedy the situation, proponents of temperance advocated limitations on the sale of alcohol and educational programs to teach the poor about its evils. And they mobilized to promote their agenda. Some female temperance advocates worked with men; others set up all‑female groups. In 1910, the largest of these, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in the United States, enrolled 235,000 members in its home country, 157,000 in Britain, and many more in chapters across Europe, South America, and Japan.¹⁸

Russia’s temperance societies claimed 100,000 members at the same time, but they contained smaller proportions of women, and very few of them were all‑female. The greatest activism was in Finland and the Baltic states, where Protestant women held conferences and conducted petitioning campaigns. There also was activism among peasant women, groups of whom petitioned local, provincial, and national government leaders to shut down liquor stores and taverns in their villages. When they got no satisfactory response, some of these women marched to the offending establishments, drove out the staff, and padlocked the doors.¹⁹

Largely absent from the temperance movement in Russia were feminists and other female activists from the intelligentsia. Patricia Herlihy argues that these women stayed away because they chose to concentrate on what they saw as the economic and political causes of excessive drinking. Maria Pokrovskaia, a leading feminist and frequent participant in discussions of alcoholism, was typical. More important than limiting alcohol sales or persuading men to take abstinence oaths, in her view, were improving poor women’s working and living conditions and getting all women political and economic equality.²⁰ This was a common position among Western European and American feminists too, but the alliance formed in the West between feminists and temperance advocates, although uneasy, was effective in promoting the interests of both groups. Russian feminism might have been stronger had it been able to make such an alliance.

FEMINISTS AND SOCIALISTS DEBATE THE WOMAN QUESTION, 1906–11

Feminist organizations labored on after 1906. The Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society continued its work, and in 1908 a new group, the League for Women’s Equal Rights, was organized. There was a small feminist press, and popular magazines ran stories on women’s rights. Meanwhile, professionals and philanthropists applied feminist arguments to deliberations on a range of social issues. In discussions of prostitution, reformers argued that equality for women in education and employment would reduce the poverty that drove girls into the brothels. In debates over abortion, physicians and criminologists made the truly radical argument that women should be able to choose whether or not to have children.

In 1908, Anna Filosofova and Anna Shabanova of the Philanthropic Society won permission to hold the First All‑Russian Congress of Women in St. Petersburg. Their goal was to bring feminists and other social activists together to develop a consensus on what needed to be done. One thousand and fifty‑three delegates, most of them well‑educated women from feminist organizations, philanthropies, professional societies, and women’s clubs, attended. The majority were ethnic Russians; the other Slavic peoples and the Jews were represented. The delegates met for six days, holding sessions on education, philanthropy, the situation of peasant and working‑class women, and women’s participation in politics. The meeting generated networking between the activists as well as useful analyses of the topics discussed.

It also bought to the fore ideological and strategic disagreements between liberals and socialists that had existed as early as the 1870s and had caused dissension within the Union of Equal Rights in 1905. The conferees generally agreed on what women’s equality should consist of, but differed sharply on the causes of their inequality and the ways to end it. Socialist delegates to the congress, some of them factory workers, believed that women should work with men to achieve political change, which meant, although they could not say so openly, women should join socialist parties. Feminists argued for an independent feminist movement, while agreeing that the situation of working‑class women cried out for redress. The result was a good deal of acrimonious discussion, culminating on the last day of the congress in an argument over a suffrage resolution that provoked a walk‑out by some of the socialist delegates.²¹

One of the most irreconcilable of the socialists was Alexandra Kollontai, a noblewoman who had studied at the Bestuzhev Courses, then become a journalist and a Social Democrat. Kollontai had recruited the worker delegates and helped them put together their speeches. She herself could not appear at the congress, because the police were after her. Instead she fled to Germany, and there, shortly after the congress, published a four‑hundred‑page polemic, The Social Bases of the Woman Question, that laid out the socialist indictment of feminism and subjected Russian feminism to scathing criticism. This book marked Kollontai’s debut as one of international Marxism’s most important commentators on the woman question.²²

At the heart of the Marxist critique of feminism lay a dispute over the origins of women’s inequality. Feminists saw patriarchy as a fundamental evil; Marxists and other socialists considered it to derive from the economic organization of society. Women’s subordination to men, they argued, had begun in the distant past when a male elite had established control over private property. That control enabled the propertied to oppress those who did not own property, which in turn led to the development of patriarchy. Capitalism, by pulling women out of the family and into the paid‑labor force, was inadvertently breaking down their subordination, but the process could only be completed after the power of all patriarchs–kings, nobles, priests, capitalists–had been broken and a socialized economy had been constructed. People would then organize a society based on perfect equality and cleansed of all discrimination. To get to this new world, women had to work with men in socialist parties, not pursue their own separate, divisive agendas.

When feminism developed into a mass movement in the late nineteenth century, Marxists began to consider ways to counter its influence among working‑class women and progressive intellectuals. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest Marxist party in Europe, took the lead in 1891 by endorsing a sweeping agenda of reforms for women, borrowed from the feminists and from the social‑welfare policies of the conservative German government. They included the vote, civil and legal equality, publicly funded maternity care and childcare, and regulations mandating working conditions to protect women’s health. The last are commonly referred to as “protective labor laws.” The German Social Democrats also set up a women’s auxiliary, led by Clara Zetkin, the goal of which was to spread the socialist message among working‑class women. Zetkin was an ardent propagandist of the socialist critique of feminism, because she believed it, because she wanted to persuade working‑class women to reject feminism, and because she wanted to prove her bona fides to the men of her party.

Kollontai had been inspired by the activism of working women in 1905, and she had seen the feminists’ outreach to poor women as a threat. So she had gone to Germany in 1906 to consult with Zetkin and had returned to Russia convinced of the rightness of the German strategy and tactics. The fact that there were more than ten thousand women in the Social Democratic and Socialist Revolutionary parties in 1907 and perhaps three thousand in the feminist organizations suggests that many political activists shared her doubts about feminism.²³

After the Women’s Congress, the League for Women’s Equal Rights and the Philanthropic Society soldiered on. In 1910 they persuaded the Duma to pass a revision of the inheritance law that granted women equal rights to inherit moveable and urban property; they were only permitted a one‑seventh share of rural land. Reform in the marriage law, initially requested in a Philanthropic Society petition of 1912, finally emerged from the Duma in 1914. The new law broadened the grounds on which wives could obtain legal separations and permitted them to seek education and employment without first obtaining their husbands’ consent. The law also granted married women the right to carry their own passports, if their husbands agreed. It took four years of lobbying to get these modest reforms out of the Duma, which testifies to the patience, dedication, and energy of the feminists and explains the revolutionaries’ conviction that the obstructionist regime had to be overthrown.

FEMINISTS IN THE BORDERLANDS

Even as feminists in the Russian heartland struggled for minor victories, women in Finland became the first in Europe to gain the vote in national and local elections. Finnish feminists won their suffrage campaign because of the unique political situation of their small country. The Finns had come under the rule of the tsars during the Napoleonic Wars but had never suffered the intrusive oversight imposed upon other borderland peoples. Instead, Alexander I granted them a constitution that permitted considerable political and cultural autonomy. A well‑educated people with close ties to Sweden and a strong desire to differentiate themselves from their Russian masters, the Finns developed a very progressive intelligentsia. In 1870, Helsingfors University granted full admission to women; coeducational schools followed in the 1880s. That decade also saw the formation of the first Finnish feminist organization and the extension of the right to vote in municipal elections to women. Finland’s liberal politics raised the hackles of Nicholas II, and in 1899 he abolished the Finnish constitution.

Finns responded with a resistance movement in which significant numbers of women participated. They claimed a place by arguing that women, as mothers, were guardians of the national culture. Polish and Ukrainian nationalists used this proposition to justify women’s staying home; among the Finns and the substantial Swedish minority in Finland it became an argument for women’s participation in politics. Alexandra Gripenberg, a leading feminist, made the case succinctly in a speech to the Finnish legislature in 1897: “Femininity is motherhood in the deepest meaning of the word. That this be given its true value in that greatest of all homes, society, is the primary task of women’s rights work.”²⁴

By 1904 an energetic Finnish Union of Women’s Rights was working closely with Social Democratic and liberal groups to push for the return of Finnish autonomy. The movement grew still stronger in 1905. A successful general strike in October persuaded the tsar to permit Finns more self‑rule, and during the politicking that followed, feminists pressed their case for women’s suffrage. In the spring of 1906, a newly elected Finnish assembly drafted a constitution, accepted by Nicholas II in July, which called for the establishment of a unicameral legislature chosen by all citizens over the age of twenty‑four.

The tsar accepted the constitution, Rochelle Ruthchild argues, because he wanted to mollify Finland while he worked on suppressing opposition in the imperial heartland. Once the political climate cooled, he tried to bring the new parliament under his sway. He did not repeal the constitution, perhaps because he feared stirring up more trouble. And so Alexandra Gripenberg was elected a delegate to the new legislature. In 1909 that body passed sweeping improvements in women’s property rights and access to education and employment.²⁵

Nationalism also fostered women’s engagement in the public world elsewhere in the borderlands in 1905 and thereafter. In Lithuania, the Lithuanian Women’s Organization took as its goal “equal rights for women and men in an autonomous Lithuania.” This activism caught the attention of the Catholic Church and in 1907 it established the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s League, from which the most liberal feminists were excluded. The editors of the league’s journal advocated improvements in women’s education and employment, as well as legal and civil rights. Ukrainian and Baltic German women’s organizations adopted similar programs. The endorsement of women’s rights by male religious and nationalist leaders indicated how far public opinion in the Baltics had moved on that issue in the early twentieth century.²⁶

The democratic spirit of 1905 had no such outcome in Polish lands. There nationalists and the church responded to feminists’ call for women’s rights by insisting that women’s highest duty was to rear patriotic children. They also denounced feminists as separatists who undermined the cause of Polish independence. In 1907 a group of Polish feminists led by Paulina Kuczalska‑Reinschmit broke with the nationalists and formed a Union for Women’s Equality modeled on the Russian Union for Equal Rights. This union held a women’s congress, published a journal, and publicized a suffrage movement in the southern Polish lands that lay within the more democratic Austro‑Hungarian Empire. The Polish press was also full of articles on the woman question between 1905 and 1912. This activism appears to have had an effect on public opinion, for in 1918, when Poland won its independence, women’s suffrage was included in the new constitution.²⁷

MUSLIMS DISCUSS THE WOMAN QUESTION

There was also an energetic discussion of the woman question going on among the Muslim intelligentsia of the Russian Empire, which was centered in Baku in Azerbaijan and in the Tatar communities of the Crimea and of Kazan, a city southeast of Moscow. By the turn of the century, many of these people had accepted the idea that modernity required easing traditional restrictions on women, particularly those regarding education, marriage choice, and social life.

The intellectuals who led this discussion of the woman question called themselves Jadidists, a name taken from the Turkish word for “new.” They were inspired by the efforts of Turkish thinkers to reconcile democratic political ideals and nationalist conceptions of women’s roles in cultural preservation with Islamic law and teaching. Foremost among the Jadidists was a Crimean Tatar named Ismail Ben Gasprali, who called for Muslim women to play an enlightening role in their families and societies. To do so, he argued, they had to be formally educated. His daughter, Shefika Hanim, edited a bimonthly magazine for women, Alem‑I‑Nisvan (Women’s World), which publicized the philanthropic activities of Muslim women’s organizations and informed its readers about progressive developments among Muslim women elsewhere.

In Baku the husband‑and‑wife team of Jirza‑Jalil Mammed‑Qulizadeh and Hamideh Javanshir pushed the argument further by criticizing Muslim patriarchal customs. In their journal Molla Nasreddin, they called for women to be liberated from veiling, seclusion in their homes, polygyny, and physical abuse by the men of their families. More cautious voices spoke up in a journal called Ishigh (Light), published by Mustafa Bey Alioglu and Hadija Hanim Subhankulova‑Alibeova. The male and female contributors to this publication muted their criticism of patriarchy, while urging women to organize. Their discretion did not mollify all the Islamic authorities. When he heard about Ishigh, Mullah Muhammad Amin, a prominent Baghdad cleric, declared ominously, “The end [is] truly near, since women not only read newspapers but contribute to them.”²⁸

The mullah might have thought the end had already come if he had flipped through the pages of Suyumbike, the most feminist Muslim periodical in the late imperial period. Suyumbike was published in Kazan, a city with a major university, higher women’s courses, and a lively community of Muslim feminists. Its editors called for women to participate in public life and criticized Islamic patriarchalism. In 1914, a few Muslim women from Kazan who were students in St. Petersburg took their calls for reform to the Muslim delegates to the Duma. They were rebuffed, but the very existence of Muslim feminism in 1914 attested to how far the woman question had come since Vernadskaia wrote her articles in the 1850s.²⁹

FEMINIST ACHIEVEMENTS

Across the empire, feminists scored successes in the last decades of the tsarist regime. They expanded women’s education and improved their legal rights. They re‑energized the discussion of the woman question by publicizing the international feminist agenda–suffrage, legal and civil equality, educational and employment opportunities, improvements in maternity care and childcare, protective labor legislation–and by developing their own analysis of the situation of women in Russia. Feminists also spread the call for women’s rights to working‑class and peasant women. In all these efforts they worked closely with other progressive people from the intelligentsia, thus continuing the alliance forged in the 1860s. That alliance strengthened after 1905, when governmental intransigence on reforms for women enhanced the appeal of those reforms to progressives.³⁰

The grandest goals–suffrage and civil and legal equality–could only be achieved in tiny Finland, because the government was resolutely opposed to such major change and because feminism remained a small movement that enjoyed limited support. That said, it should be noted that the huge suffrage societies of Great Britain, despite their base in a powerful middle class and their much greater freedom to advocate for their cause, also failed to get the vote in these years, because the resistance to woman’s suffrage was powerful even in democracies. Russia’s feminists kept the woman question at the forefront of reform discussions in the early twentieth century and managed to win some of their battles. They also survived the demoralization that set in after 1905, and when the Revolution came, they would expand their movement with a rapidity that would surprise even themselves.

WORKING‑CLASS ACTIVISM AND THE SOCIALIST RESPONSE, 1912–14

After 1905, protests subsided and women workers, along with their menfolk, went back to the daily grind. The newly legalized trade unions admitted, and some even recruited, female members. Most women stayed away, as they were doing across Europe. They did so for long‑standing reasons: they were afraid of the price of activism; they could not afford the dues; they were occupied with their children; they thought women did not belong in unions; they did not want to brave hostility from men. Rose Glickman has estimated that this kept female membership in the trade unions at 10 percent, even though women were 30 percent of the industrial labor force. But that 10 percent was important. Female union members got a political education, built their self‑confidence, and became leaders among the women with whom they worked. A few also got involved in the revolutionary movement, supporting the socialists by going to meetings and circulating pamphlets. In these years, working‑class women among the Social Democrats increased from less than 10 percent of the female membership to roughly one‑quarter.³¹

Some Social Democratic women in Russia and abroad, where many had fled to avoid arrest, were paying close attention to working women’s activism. They noticed that women were once again striking during worker unrest in 1912–14. Some of these strikes were huge: eleven thousand women walked out of a St. Petersburg rubber factory in March 1914 to protest the fact that the toxic chemicals with which they worked were poisoning them.³² This resurgence inspired Social Democratic women, particularly several dozen in the Bolshevik faction of the party, to reach out to working women through organizing clubs for them and publishing articles about their lives. In 1912 Konkordia Samoilova, an editor of the newspaper Pravda, ran a column called “The Life and Labor of Women Workers.” In 1913, she held Russia’s first celebration of International Women’s Day. It was well attended. In 1914, she and several dozen other female Social Democrats, including Kollontai, launched two magazines aimed at working‑class women. All these projects reached few women and were shut down quickly by the police. Their greatest significance is that they brought together the people who would formulate and lead the Bolshevik party’s program of women’s emancipation after 1917.