THE BEGINNING OF SOVIET REFORMS FOR WOMEN

Both the Menshevik and the Bolshevik factions of the Social Democratic party endorsed the German Social Democrats’ program for women’s emancipation. In 1917 the Bolsheviks were its more energetic promoters, due to the presence within their ranks of hundreds of Bolshevik feminists. These women rejected the title “feminist” because they condemned feminists as propertied women interested only in their own class, but feminists they were, if by “feminists” we mean activists seeking women’s emancipation. The Bolshevichki (the feminine plural form of “Bolshevik”) also had much in common with self‑identified feminists. Most came from the middling and upper social classes and had completed high school. Many were teachers, librarians, and doctors. About one‑quarter were working‑class women from the factories of the major cities. All these women were better educated than most women of their class and better educated as well than the majority of male members of the party. Education had empowered them, as it did the feminists and all the other activist women of the pre‑revolutionary generation, enabling them to work outside the home and develop their social confidence and consciousness.⁴⁷

After the Bolsheviks seized power, they moved quickly to enact their program of women’s emancipation and thereby launched an assault on patriarchy. The Bolsheviks were, after all, revolutionaries. They sought to destroy all the old institutions–patriarchy, monarchy, church–and in their place construct a society in which the people as a whole owned and managed economic resources and shared the products of their labor. The economic equality of socialism would then make political equality possible, Bolsheviks believed, and would end prejudice, superstition, and all the other malign consequences of private property.

They began by issuing laws that established the principle of women’s economic, educational, legal, and political equality with men, and by designing social services. In January 1918, Kollontai, the commissar of social welfare, drafted plans for providing publicly funded maternity care and stipends to new mothers. The same month, a government decree, “On the Socialization of the Land,” asserted that women had equal rights with men to own and lease land. In the summer of 1918 the government issued a constitution that declared women’s political equality with men. The Family Law Code of the fall of 1918 made marriage a civil procedure, thus removing it from the Church’s jurisdiction, declared wives and husbands equal in the eyes of the law, legalized divorce, and granted children born out of wedlock the right to economic support by their parents. The Commissariat of Labor wrote regulations abolishing gender discrimination in hiring and mandating paid maternity leave. The Commissariat of Education reaffirmed the Provisional Government’s decree of April 1917 that had declared all public education coeducational.

While Bolshevik officials were drafting the new laws, Russia fell into civil war. From 1918 to 1920, the Whites, a loose coalition of anti‑Bolshevik generals leading rag‑tag armies, battled the equally rag‑tag Bolshevik‑commanded Red Army across Siberia and into European Russia. The Reds won, because they were more unified and popular than the Whites. They emerged from this trial by fire determined to achieve their socialist objectives by using all the power they could amass. And so the revolutionaries who had overthrown tsarist dictatorship built one of their own. The Communist Party (the Bolsheviks adopted this name in 1918) and the Soviet government, consisting mostly of tsarist ministries now headed by communists, were formally independent of one another, but the party dominated. Organized into a hierarchy that extended from the Politburo and Central Committee down through regional and local committees and administrators, the party set policy and oversaw the functioning of government departments.

The Bolshevik feminists responded to the civil war by arguing that the party should cultivate the support of working‑class and peasant women. They pointed to working women’s activism since 1905 as evidence that they could be persuaded to support the Red side and to do volunteer work such as cleaning streets or assisting at hospitals. Party leaders agreed, and in 1919 authorized the creation of the Zhenotdel (Women’s Department) within the party. Inessa Armand, a veteran Bolshevik and close friend of Lenin’s, was its first head. When she died of cholera in the fall of 1920, Kollontai succeeded her. These women and the thousands who worked for them quickly built the Zhenotdel into an organization that publicized Marxist ideas of women’s emancipation, cultivated the support of poor women, and advocated for women within the party.